I find the GOP strategy of alienating the 47 percent who pay
no federal income tax rather puzzling. A family of four, husband/wife/two kids,
now pays about a 5.6 percent efficient rate in income tax. This means that well
over 47 percent pay from 0 to 5 percent. The number is surely well over 50
percent of the American electorate. In essence, the conservative paranoia that
we now face a world of “takers” has already happened. It is not in the interest
of those who pay 5.6 percent to have their taxes raised and their benefits cut.
This is precisely the GOP policy. In fact, it is the end of a long GOP strategy
on taxes that has worked well. The GOP has campaigned against taxes, and the
medium household has been happy to vote for them on that principle. The GOP,
that household has noticed, never really cuts ‘entitlements’ – not to the
medium household. They are prevented by the Dems, to an extent, and by their
own hypocrisy. But finally ideology is overcoming strategy, and the GOP is
actually running on a plank to lower the taxes of the rich and to raise the efficient
tax rate of middle income households. The Democrats, who are looking up their
butt at a mirage deficit, seem to be lagging behind events. Romney’s video tape
might wake them up. The GOP wants to raise your taxes. That should be the Dem
mantra.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Friday, September 21, 2012
Individual and character
Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way
people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by
institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people
who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around
markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center
around markets, if there are any?
This is a question that confronts us as we try to assemble
the lines of descent that went into the making of character in the late
seventeenth century. There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the
character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the
making of individualism – the character that the character writers are
concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain
category of human beings…” Our task is to discover how, from this literary
stylization of the person, we get to the twentieth century, where “there is an
almost self-evident connection between the words ‘character’, ‘individuality’,
and ‘inwardness”.
Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense
of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and
individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for
good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.
But I’d like to harry
the idea that the individual and individualism are what we are all about
in the twentieth and twenty first century, as well as this rather Hegelian
sweep towards the inward. It is not that these are illusions; rather, I think
character is something more than their factotum, and that its assembly and
spread – across fiction and fact, through the spheres of representation, is a
movement containing other movements.
To start off, then, one needs a sense of where individualism
came from – that is, as a sociological category – and a sense of how it has
been used by historians.
The analytic story goes back to the two decades between 1830
and 1850.
In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he
published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:
“Our fathers did not have the word individualism,
which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in
fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider
himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed
French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express
myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true
individualism which which we are acquainted.
And what is the most strange is that all of these men who
hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that
it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”
Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he
was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy
in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an
individualistic country.
Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart, of being alone seems, then, to be part of
what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his
social ties. Yet there are a number of paradoxes here. In the United States, one
of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is
solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The
individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that
individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is,
at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily
conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed
away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as
though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were
synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip
into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is
the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment
in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech.
The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet
they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the
individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone,
even if we project him into corporate headquarters. But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never
get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.
Tocqueville was writing at a time when individualism was
also being discussed in socialist circles. Steven Lukes points out that
individualism became the target against which early socialists, like Blanqui
and Cabet, spoke out. In Germany, Karl Marx in the German Ideology – written in
the 1840s as well - spent much of his time hashing out what the individual was
from a social perspective. It is with Marx that we start getting a sense of the
individual as something linked not to the soul, or even to social distance, but
to production – to the economic system”
“The difference
between the personal individual and the contingent individual is not a
conceptual difference, but instead a historical fact. This difference has, in
different times, different meanings – for instance, rank as something
contingent to the individual in the 18th century, plus ou moins even
the family. It is a difference that we must not make for every epoch, but that
instead every epoch, under the different elements that it finds itself in,
makes for itself, forced, actually, not by concepts, but through material
collisions of life. What appears contingent to later times as its opposite to
earlier, and also among the elements of the earlier that are passed down, is a
form of commerce, which corresponds to a specific development of the forces of
production. The relationship of the forces of production to the form of
commerce is the relationship of the form of commerce to the occupation or
activity of individuals.”
This strongly
anti-conceptual approach to the individual – who emerges first as a social fact
within the forces of production that embody the collisions of life – gives Marx
a sort of history of individualism. Individualism waits on the emergence of the individual, rather than
individualism arising in the educated class and bringing into existence the
individual. Marx’s story, then, leads us firmly away from the solitary – who
emerges in life’s collisions too, but within another set of conditions – and
sets up his attack on Stirner, who in Marx’s view is engaged in rescuing an
archaic social category and conflating it with the individual in a massive act
of bourgeois self-mystification. Whether Stirner’s notion of egotism and the
“Own” is really bourgeois
self-mystification or the expression of a nausea with a modernity that set the
teeth of the children of the bourgeoisie on edge – I will leave to later. In
any case, Marx’s targets shifted in the 1850s to the political economists, and
here I think he was able to put to better use his sense of parody and
bafflement. The Robinsonades of the
economists really do play a strong, self-mystifying role in building up the
codex of capitalism.
Marx set the
terms for economic historians looking at the sociology of capitalism, and its
origins. Those origins would be linked to the individual as a creature of
economics. We should look, in the medieval period, not for what the saints
wrote in their summas, but for what the smallholders wrote in their wills. If
pre-capitalist society went as it was supposed to go according to Marx, we
would find that the properties of the small holders were bound by laws and
customs that would disallow or strongly hedge about the market. The same of course
would be true for the large landholders. Given the largely agricultural nature
of Europe, this meant that any sort of trade would be shaped by the larger
system of production that based the producer on the family, on bloodties.
It was just this
thesis that was challenged by Alan Macfarlane in the 1970s. Macfarlane went
through the records of a small area of Essex, Earls Colne, and he found that in
the midst of the feudal night (or if you will, the humane society of peasant
England), smallholders seemed to be selling their lands left and right, and
disinheriting their children, and in general pursuing their individual
interests like the money mad characers in Balzac’s novels.
For Macfarlane,
the market in land in the sixteenth century discredits the theories – like Karl
Polanyi’s – that periodizes the creation of the system of “fictitious
commodities”, such as land and labor, at a much latter date. Similarly, it
destroys Marx’s thesis about the origins of agricultural capitalism, which does
not start with the large landholders squeezing their tenants, but with the
smallholders creating an active, non-family centered market in land under the
nose of the large landholders.
Macfarlane’s
interpretation of his data has, however, been subject to a number of shocks
since he published his thesis in 1978, in The Origins of English
Individualism. Notably, Govind
Sreenivasan has studied the same corner of the English world and found much
greater family continuity in small landholdings than are accounted for by Macfarlane.
Sreenivasan, whose expertise is in German peasant society of the early modern
period, went over the records for Earls Colne and found that the land-family
bond was much stronger, statistically, than it was represented by Macfarlane.
He drew up an indictment in his article on the matter that went after three
aspects of Macfarlane’s thesis:
“First, the depiction of the weakness of the land-family
bond is exaggerated. Secondly, the description of the causes of the turnover of
property is incomplete and therefore misleading. Thirdly, the reconstructed
concepts of kinship and property are directly contradicted by the sources.”
Pulling back, what we see here is that the dispute about
land tenure is set in the terms Marx lays out in the German Ideology. It is a
materialist approach to individualism. Which, in a neat U-turn, comes back into
an infuses the system of production that makes possible materialist approaches.
But in following this turn, we tend to lose sight of, and normalize, the idea
of the individual, or the easy notion that we live in a liberal order that promotes individualism. Because if the
individual is taken in the Stirner sense – if its materiality is not its place
in the system, but its place as an organism born and bred and having a brain
that does certain things all the time – then we are also talking about a cosmic
vision of the world – how the world is put together, what the limits are on
human beings, and how they live within those limits. These are not reducible,
point by point, to their horizon of possibility – the system of production. This
is, I think, what makes Marx’s notion of alienation so important, and so
intrinsic to revolution – for revolution is the other horizon of possibility
from which the capitalist system can be analyzed.
I am taking my cues from this tension in Marx. From Marx to surveys of smallholder sales in
the 16th century, we can run the individual into the space he –
always he in the history, a significant and overlooked warp – inhabits and
infer the creation of individualism as a matter of habit and a mental tool –
but we must also not overlook the fact that the individual in the market is a
phenomenon that points to a larger thing – a murderable forked thing, something
that casts a shadow inside himself, a non-planetary shadow, a thinking shade.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
The 47 percent
Romney’s
47 percent remark reminds me of something I wrote before the great
crash of 2008, in September, 2007, to be precise, about the lifestyles
of the high and low as a great cultural fact. I wrote this in Austin,
never dreaming that my future was so close to the radical changes I have
undergone. But it does witness to something larger than my own little
scrambly destiny.
“I read the papers. Everybody reads the
papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that
retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock
market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the
news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a
report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was
enough to send the market up 65 points.
American capitalism is
infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a
maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe.
In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t
supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business
cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a
certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a
downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there
was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also
long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the
1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.
Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At
least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being
succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in
government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the
cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated
purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the
internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on,
churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002
is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two
trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing
market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a
bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention
of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?
In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and
Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the
place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of
the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on
the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the
market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural
resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a
pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx
saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism
to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of
its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were
overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time
Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class
Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort
and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.
Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the
Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into
the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which,
it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the
working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict.
No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the
workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism,
and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing
powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of
actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the
corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations
find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private
enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense
about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the
long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only
assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but
learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing
began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete
sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the
shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final
displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in
– are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final
displacement of Rust belt America.
That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…
The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that
it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the
wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of
Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent,
taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like.
Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in
us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there
seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to
back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about
the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of
equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are
supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize
deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly
deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do
it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism
here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the
alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the
invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we
need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that
Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the
lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in
treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it
doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of
economics.
All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble
to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think
this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since
it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an
economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the
question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest
themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think
of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between
the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has
now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that
bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the
wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any
hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is
some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know
theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.
…So
much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run.
I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the
age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble
periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a
dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the
No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.
As a writer,
it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment
of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the
American economy, the bottom 20 percent. Fuck the money, the problem for
me as a writer is that I seem to be deprived of the tacit knowledge of
how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike
past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of
consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on
which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the
writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I
had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to
my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of
whatever? No.
However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so
much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of
me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the
writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that
made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is
the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards.
Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living,
as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and
the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the
strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in
prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does
haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have
built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us
Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are
walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is
raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly
advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a
Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a
Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up
between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written
the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me,
because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income
strata in the U.S.
Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of
nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the
contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma
with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his
benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second
Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his
bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring
his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will
now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and
even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as
dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the
bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the
street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.
Monday, September 17, 2012
writing: 3 a.m.
It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with
LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house
out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel,
even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond
that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed
space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room,
its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be
carrying the revolution too far.
And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely
as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are
children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis,
a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and
houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic
since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door –
does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto
suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled
king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in
Hollywood – tend to hang around it.
As for me – oh, I’ve written for decades now. I’ve written
since I was sixteen. True, the juvenilia is long trashed; the writing of the
80s is mostly lost, as is that of most of the nineties – my breadcrumbs, in which
I had Hansel’s confidence that I could follow them back to all the projects I
left behind me, have been eaten by indifference, lost boxes, weather, moves,
and broken computers. Oh the world’s indifference – and my own! And yet, when I
gather up the work that’s left, that I can get my hands on, what does it amount
to?
Doors and windows.
In the writer’s world, this is the thing that drives one to
suicide. Oh, besides the contingent things – sickness, poverty, a broken heart,
the dimming of one’s wits. But I am speaking of suicide from vocational reasons
– or perhaps I should say, suicide from within a vocation. Despair is what
happens when one understands, fully, that the door is for the house, and the
window is for the room – and yet one feels all too intensely the boredom of the
room, of putting up the walls, of the work of kitchens and bedrooms. Yes, even
if it is a burrow, the tedium of this jigsawed, continuous space.
That space can make me sick. And soon, very soon, after I embark upon a project, I have to fight the
urge to put in another door or window. Glorious ingress, glorious egress,
glorious panes of glass.
Yes, to punch out a space for a window that is high enough,
commandingly high, so that I can jump out of it into the arms of a cremating eternity.
the symbolic and the utilitarian
There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture
which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this
might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so
simple.
The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian.
The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the
utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain,
and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them
into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking
about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On
the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of
the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of
the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance.To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Best murder of the summer
The best murder of the summer waited until the vacation was almost over. On September 5, an RAF cyclist, Brett Martin, was biking in the Haute-Savoie, near Lake Annecy, when he came upon a car and a cyclist who, he thought at first, had collided with each other. The cyclist was named Sylvain Mollier. He’d been shot with a 7.65mm pistol, as police later established. He was dead. The cyclist then looked in the car, and saw vaguely what the police later discovered in more depth – the three adults in the car had also been shot with the pistol, at point blank range. A girl lay sprawled outside the car, severely beaten. She survived. When the police finally opened the car completely, they discovered another survivor, a four year old girl who hid in the footwell at the foot of her mother’s corpse. The family, it turned out, were emigrés from Iraq to Britain, where they had citizenship. Saad al-Hilli, the driver, “computer-assisted design for the firm Su
rrey Satellites, which is owned by the large defence and engineering contractor EADS”, according to the Guardian. His mother in law, a Swede who also came from Iraq, was also shot.
A compelling story, with all the elements that would make any aficionado of true crime buy papers to read about ongoing developments. All those developments are about the al-Hillis. The papers are full of theories that naturally focus on the spectacular deaths in the car, while the bicyclist, evidently a witness, gets an also ran mention…
All of which has the detective novel gears in my brain turning. It is an interesting fact that the media has already decided, as though a reporter was on the spot, who was the target here. Surely the family of Iraqis, with the father in some funny business.
But why assume this? As Machiavelli and Raymond Chandler have taught us, one crime can cover another. Why do we assume that the cyclist was the on-looker – and not the family? Why do we assume that the focus on the al-Hilli’s, which has turned up the grotesque enigmas that arise whenever one turns a microscope on the private lives of ordinary citizens, is the correct focus? Did Sylvain Mollier have enemies? Was this his regular bicycling route? Simple questions that are utterly lost as the police, arbitrarily, chose to follow the trail of the other victims in this murder.
Myself, I am not fooled. But then again, I’ve always thought Lee Harvey Oswald held some mysterious grudge against Governor John Connolly, but – being a bad shot – actually hit the other guy, an obscure politician who happened to be president of the U.S., except for the miracle bullet. But of course, nobody asked John Connolly any questions in the aftermath.
rrey Satellites, which is owned by the large defence and engineering contractor EADS”, according to the Guardian. His mother in law, a Swede who also came from Iraq, was also shot.
A compelling story, with all the elements that would make any aficionado of true crime buy papers to read about ongoing developments. All those developments are about the al-Hillis. The papers are full of theories that naturally focus on the spectacular deaths in the car, while the bicyclist, evidently a witness, gets an also ran mention…
All of which has the detective novel gears in my brain turning. It is an interesting fact that the media has already decided, as though a reporter was on the spot, who was the target here. Surely the family of Iraqis, with the father in some funny business.
But why assume this? As Machiavelli and Raymond Chandler have taught us, one crime can cover another. Why do we assume that the cyclist was the on-looker – and not the family? Why do we assume that the focus on the al-Hilli’s, which has turned up the grotesque enigmas that arise whenever one turns a microscope on the private lives of ordinary citizens, is the correct focus? Did Sylvain Mollier have enemies? Was this his regular bicycling route? Simple questions that are utterly lost as the police, arbitrarily, chose to follow the trail of the other victims in this murder.
Myself, I am not fooled. But then again, I’ve always thought Lee Harvey Oswald held some mysterious grudge against Governor John Connolly, but – being a bad shot – actually hit the other guy, an obscure politician who happened to be president of the U.S., except for the miracle bullet. But of course, nobody asked John Connolly any questions in the aftermath.
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Damned and Rammed
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