Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels

 I have run into a persistant, and probably PR driven meme on social media that being against AI is "being against "art'" - like banning pianos or something.

The response to this is simple. Being against AI is being for preserving the internet tools we have that support art. AI is destroying the personal search, as well as creating pervasive counter-measures that we are now used to and should not be - like all those idiot popups making sure we are not robots - that in the glory days of this technology just didn't exist. The robots now do exist and they steal.

The recent comments of Olga Tokarczuk about how she used AI to find songs that her characters would dance to two decades ago shows either O.T. has never gone onto Youtube (ask for dance hits from the 80s or 90s - get a hundred to a thousand hits) or that she was really using it to write a scene about dancing and has smoothed out the features, here. The improvement in speed is negligible - unless of course the prompt was a bit more specific than this, a bit more about using AI to write the character.

She has denied this in a statement published on Lit Hub. It is a weirdly stated denial-snark thing that looks like she used AI to write it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can find, everywhere, vast banks of information. You can find all of the issues of the Partisan Review at Boston University, or all the issues of Dwight McDonalds Politics magazine with its brief run at Unz. I use the Internet Archive to trace, with unbelievable accuracy, such things as the career of the graphologist/psychic Rafael Scherman, for which I also used the French newspaper and magazine collection on Retronews, the various german colllections of newspapers Zefys, the Hamburger Zeitungen Digita, and the Austrian collection at https://anno.onb.ac.at/. I used Google Books, which is increasingly declining as a resource due to AI, to find hints and quotes - it is in this way I discovered the relationship between Scherman and the wife of Adolf Loos, the famous hater of ornament in architecture. At no point in this search did I need AI. AI's big negative, besides its tendency to fraud, is that it erases that margin of fun that makes searching a matter of discovery. For a writer of fiction, that margin is everything.

I should say that, as well, I use data platforms that are hooked up to academic institutions, like JSTOR, that are simply beautiful. But all this access is precisely what AI is aiming at. The end of the personal search is the goal of the AI tech lords, and with the end of the personal search comes the end of the democratic commons of the internet, period. It is not just that the search is speeded up and under the control of the machine instead of the person - it is that the ability to make a search, to use these resources, is under the gun as AI lords get richer and aim to monetize this freedom. Every AI prompt is another bullet shot at the personal search. It can only take so many hits.

I like Tokarczuk. I loved Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. Which has a strong love of nature behind it. That she now wants to drive her plow over the remaining forests of the world, accelerate climate change, and destroy our glorious research systems to use AI makes me suspect that she is - going down a dark path.

Spending my life reading

 1. At some point between my 11th and 13th years on this planet, a global equator of sorts was passed: globally, the population that was literate passed the 50 percent point. This was one of the great events of the 1960s, although at the time it was not celebrated with jubilees and fireworks. Rather it was simply a plodding little point on a graph.

Still, this was the Enlightenment in action. Even as, in the sixties, what literacy meant – what distinguished the oral from the textual – became a much more philosophically ambiguous matter, the certainties of the classroom locked into place writing systems and reading for boys and girls. The latter is especially noteworthy. I am taking this statistic from Unesco, which made retrospective estimates of literacy in this narrow sense going back to the 1820s, when 20 percent of the world was literate. As we know from studies made of literacy by various French historians like Roger Chartier, literacy was not the doublehanded writing and reading instrument we assume it be back in the day: for instance, in France, teaching girls to read was not complemented with teaching them to write: just as one can have piano practice and learn to read a score without necessarily learning to write a score.

My son has learned in his history class in middle school that there was something called the industrial “revolution”, but his textbooks don’t mention the equally important media revolution. The two are bound together – I take it as a world historical event that on November 29, 1814, the Times of London installed a Koenig press, which attached steam power to to the old manually driven iron printing press, with the result that it could print 1,100 one sided sheets per hour. If ever we want to celebrate a Modernization day, November 29th would be a good pick. It was the steam driven printing press that drove literacy.

2. Which is my queer introduction to praising Simon During’s recent Face Book post, which gave us a variation from the old “what books would you take to be marooned with on an island” motif.

“So, in response to the 100 best novels nonsense we are doing a “ten novels I’d like to reread one more time in the last year of my life” list.”

I am not so much a lister, but I am a reader. And I am fascinated by reading media – and by media tout court. To me, this joining of reading and mortality flashes a light on the context of reading within a species that is now largely trained, from a young age, to see lines and curves and dots and translate them into words and sentences and paragraphs. And for some who spends a lot of time, in fact the majority of the working day, looking at these lines and curves and dots (formerly on paper, and now of this background lit … thing we call a screen), mortality is not measured out with coffee spoons, but with this eye-to-shapes activity, which is enfolded in the other ongoing activity: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, and as we get older whatever ache is chasing another in hands, feet, arms, neck, head, et fucking cetera.

The list, restored to mortal time, takes on an urgency which in some ways disguises the real question here, the question that all literacy invites us to take up: how do we spend our life times? Spend, here, should take on a lot of weight. Etymologically, from the old Germanic forspendan, use up, and from the Latin, expendare, pay out – to consume. An existential consumption, the consumer consuming itself. Use, here, plunges us back to the Hobbesian root of utilitarianism: a war against the elements, a war in which the self becomes a kind of front, autogenerates, a biology primed for picking up signs on the way to eating, excreting, copulating, reproducing, and dying. In the parenthesis of the latter, in that final year – which of course is very hard to predict, in contrast to the familiar movie/tv scenario in our heads where the doctor announces the bad news (cancer, usually) of the one year left – we have books. Novels, for Simon D. We are out of the classroom for good, here – that sponsor of our first reading and for many people, surprisingly many people, the only context in which reading the “great books” happens.

3. The recourse to the Enlightenment program of literacy, which all the 19th century European savants (and their pendant correspondents in North America) noticed, was a kind of scriptural anxiety. For the steam engine driven press had the potential to print anything, against the readers pence. From porn to shockers. The question was, and the question still is, how to fit this reading life (or listening or viewing life, given the audio-visual technology) with the hard fact that the users all die. I find this a terrifying as well as fascinating topic: reading accumulates to what end?

Not that I have an answer

UGLY STORIES

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from Under the Floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe one.

The story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about the nephew of Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In The Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. This is the game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and the nephew of Rameau. There is something about this one of Diderot’s works that gives it a certain clandestine feel. It wasn’t published in his lifetime. In fact, it first appeared in a German translation many years after his death. It was read with interest by Hegel, and referenced in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that great prose poem.

This is the story. It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Classless society my ass. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office, in any tech company. The tv series Silicon Valley dramatized any number of ugly stories, following in the recently popular vein of “cringe comedy” – cringe being the American variant of the ugly story, ameliorating existential shame into entertaining social embarrassment.

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui [Rameau’s nephew]: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the latter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here . For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing, of true self-degradation, is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and the nephew at the Palais Royale, where the dialogue is taking place. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense, or any member of Trump’s cabinet – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most deserving, the most masculine grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing, to kill fishermen and schoolage girls by merely flexing! The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour of overgrown bullies. In another century, Bouret is Dr. Oz, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

Only, only the ugly story really captures that. The contribution of story to human reality is something we underestimate at our peril.

The "I am" and the 'Happen to be" - a cultural semantics

 

Culture shows its hand molecular bits and bytes, the way the Id shows itself in dreams, a self-directed movie starring IT itself. Look for the conjunctions, look for the negations, the excuses, the condensations.

Look for, for instance at “happens to be”.

“Happens to be” is all around us. I was reading a book about an artist the other day, and I came across the phrase: “A painting by a young artist, who happens to be African American and gay…” Happens, here, sends us back to chance itself. He could “happen to be” unhyphenated American and straight, couldn’t he? In which case he would, presumably, not happen to be at all, but would be. There he’d be, an “I am”, pure as Jehovah in the burning bush. Our pre-birth identities wait, like slips of paper in a box, to be selected blindly. Like, say, the slips of paper in the box in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Somebody has to be stoned. Those are the rules of the routine. But who, that is the variable. That is what is written on the slip. Who will “happen to be”?

Such, as our tongue knows, is the lightly exerted pressure on that “happens to be.” It looks like an ontological statement of fact, and it sounds like an apologetic.

Trust the sound.

“Happens to be” joins together the otherwise sociologically separate strands of neo-liberalism: on the one hand, the lessons of the civil rights era – non-discrimination/diversity; and on the other hand, the master of hap, Fortuna and her wheel, the free market with its invisible hand up your rectum, jumping the puppets, who all say “I am”. Not, mind you, the government – the era of big government is always over, in neo-liberal culture, even if it exerts itself muscularly now and then to save the big banks and the one percent and becomes wildly aggressive and polices the world, all of course in the name of Freedom. In what other name can you reduce schools and hospitals to rubble?

The leftist critique of neo-liberalism can’t be simply, as it was under classical liberalism, that it is all a class act – with Capital v. Labor as the fighters in the ring. Because the spectrum of injustices and differences are not engrossed by Capital v. Labor. That lesson of the civil rights (and de-colonial) era has to ring in our ears, if that is one “happens to be” a leftist.

“Happens to be” is an overdetermined phrase. It is apologetic in that odd way in which one apologizes to a bigot for his or her bigotry. “I happen to be x” – Jewish, black, trans-sexual, whatever – is a way to deflect a certain meanness, a certain threat in the conversation, with one’s counterpart who is, for instance, talking trash about Jews, blacks, gays, or whatever. In this conversation, the “I am” is always on the side of insisting. “The Great I am” – this is what Sam Pollitt’s wife,  Henny, calls her American New Dealer husband, Sam, that bully and humanitarian.  It happens that you, my counterpart – my comrade, my brother or sister – are standing here with an x. A “happen to be” x. An all natural x.

 

“Happens to be” was forced aboard the slave ships, and driven out of the territories. “I am” built the log cabin, the Georgian mansion (now available for weddings) and, if it didn’t build the railroads, profited mightily from railroad stock. The “I am” earns his billions – the “Happens to be” is the parasite on welfare who also happens to have physically built the railroads, clerked at the convenience store, flipped the burgers, nursed the patient, and all that low grade stuff they do.

Truly, from the “I am’s point of view, what is more natural than chance? The happens to be should be happy that they are allowed even to be.  And chance is what provides us with our “diversity” – we can’t all be white straight men, cause somebody has to clean the toilets, am I right? And yet, when we tease out this “happens to be”, we begin to wonder why the heteronormative hick never happens to be – he just is. Does anybody ever say, I happen to be white? Does our egg, our Humpty Dumpty, our man whose words mean what he wants them to mean, ever happen to be?

This is just a little flicker in the national, in the international conversation between the ’I am’ and the ‘happen to be’. Neo-liberal culture is so obviously exhausted, is so obviously tied in knots by its own self-contradictions, that one thinks surely it is at an end. It isn’t, though. Happens to be still creeps through our conversations, our second thoughts, our apologies. The way we confront, and the way, at the last moment, we deflect. Happens to be is the deeper character, the more sophisticated character, the rascal and the sage, but the political advantage seems to be all with the I am.

And yet: who among us, in the end, wants to be the I am? The great loud I am. As the glaciers go down and hedonics turns out to measure unhappiness, after all. 

The great depression, my friends, my dearest friends, has been internalized. We are left to drift. 

A Modest Proposal: Let AI replace CEOs!

 The Dumb New Yorker post - Will AI Replace College or some dumbfuck thing, I'm refusing to check - is another in the media corps cult of AI. Lets face it, AI is a minor tool for lab work and heavy industry, and it isn't going to "replace College."

The bosses are heavy invested in tech, and if the stock crumbles, they crack and crumble next.

So...

Funny how the headline is never: Will AI replace the CEO. Cause there you have a case. What does AI do best? Make up factoids and use them to support other factoids. It "hallucinates." It comes up with the dumbest advice possible. Etc. And what do CEO's do? They rarely known the industry or enterprise they head. Mostly, they make up factoids to support other factoids to massage stock valuations. BINGO! I don't think Grok could replace a single Teaching Assistant, but Tesla would save about 40 billion dollars if it replaced Musk with Grok. Same stupidity - the self-driving yellow cab market is worth a trillion! We are going to mars! Etc. But with less compensation. Grok ought to cost a coupla million to run, maybe in the tens of millions, but it is much cheapter than Musk.

However, not once in the AI goldrush, not once in the infinite amount of AI stories suggesting all middle management and creative jobs are kaput with AI on the watch, has there been any suggestion that top management could be replaced. Gee, I wonder why? I wonder why there is no audience for that in the business pages?

The media can suck my dick.

A translation of Pierre Herbart's story Miraflores

 

“Herbart has made his life into a blank sheet, but it has taken everything he had. He will die seated in front of his blank sheet.” Indeed, according to Jean-Luc Moreau, from which I take this quote about Pierre Herbart, he did die a pauper, and a sick man as well. So poor he was buried in a common grave. Not the ending one would have predicted for a man who was Gide’s secretary in the 1930s, an editor of a famous communist magazine in Moscow for a time, an agitator in the colony of Vietnam, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a resistor in occupied France.

He’s not well known. I came across this story from the late twenties, when Marxism was becoming Sur-marxism, and I thought that it was a rather wonderful enigma. A tale torn from a dream. So I translated it.

 

Miriflores

One evening in a little village in Hungary I witness a strange show put on by a showman with a donkey in the village square. He beat a drum. I easily recognized in this scene one of the images in Madame de Segur’s “Memoires of a donkey”, which showed Miriflore, the intelligent ass, his master and the latter’s family. I couldn’t be mistaken. The son had exactly the stupid air that Madame de Segur lent to our village obscurities. The little slattern girls were clothed in hoop skirts and the boys wore baggy pants and close fitting shirts The papas and mamas were walking up and down, ignoring the donkey man, and Cadichan – Segur’s donkey – absorbed the whole thing through its evil eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, as I expected some show of this kind this evening.. I following the doing with a certain curiosity, then retired back to my room in the inn, although not without a certain trepidation brought on by my reading the news of an innkeeper who had recently been arrested for killing foreign tourists in order to make a paté much appreciated by his customers. Nevertheless, I fell asleep, only to wake myself up in the middle of the night murmuring: “I’m in Hungary.” Upon which I became sad. What to do? I decided that the next day I would find the donkey man and attach myself to his destiny. “He would certainly let me if I gave him a little money”, I thought. “And besides, I can do a few card tricks to follow the end of his routine.” This project returned to my mind when the servant brought me my cup of coffee in the morning. I decided not to argue with it. In the dining room I asked for the innkeeper and then asked him how I could find the place where I could meet up with the donkey man.

- What donkey man? The man asked.

- The one who was there yesterday. In the square.

The innkeeper took a long look at me and , without replying, went across the room to consult with his wife. Sometimes he glanced over at me and I understood that he had decided I was crazy. That could be dangerous. Thus I decided to get out of there with a feigned indifference. I haled a passing carriage.

- I will give you a one hundred franc tip if you get me to Cassal in half an hour.

The horses raced like the wind. We passed the last house in the village when a man came out of the stable and took off in pursuit of us. I recognized the donkey man. He ran as fast as he could, signalling to us. I watched him from a little porthole cut into the roof of the cart. He was manifestly losing ground. At a road crossing he went down the wrong path and continued running in the opposite direction. I was saved.

The coachman turned to me.  “We never show that we see him”, he said.

The door of the past

 In an essay on Henry James’s autobiographies, Richard Poirier claimed that the first volume – A small boy and others – which is ostensibly a memoir of William James, who had recently died – deserves a place among the two other great books about the boyhood of artists that appeared in the 1910s: Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Joyce’s A portrait of an artist as a young man. Perhaps we should include Freud’s Aus Der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose from 1918 in this company.

As it happens: I’ve never read James’s autobiographies. But Poirier’s enthusiasm for A small boy – which was not so much about the picture of William James that it intends, in a cultic gesture, to offer, but about Henry James’s own impression of a bringing up that followed the rather inimitable lines of his father’s whims and his sensibility’s grasp, even then, of the opportunity afforded.

Late James is my favorite James, in spite of the verbosity and the his use of catchphrase and cliché – much as Charlie Chaplin or Gene Kelly would use some ordinary commodity as a partner in some gorgeous cinematic dance sequence. I like that. I live for that.

This is H.J. dancing:

“To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide – to see the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”

The door of memory is thus the door to a wake, and this act of loyalty one long toast; while somehow the copious notes work towards that preservative end. H.J.’s music does not exclude the occasional wheezing, or the tuning of the instrument when it is out of tune, and it is in these moments especially that the fans get their ticket’s worth: the odd combo of raggedness and dignity – O O O that Jamesian rag - elevates the mundane tune.

It is, at least formally, the only James tale of a philosopher – for that is what William James turned out to be. I imagine, though, that to Henry, the mere disciplinary difference was all epiphenomenon, for underneath it all was the solid substratum of the writer.

On Movies

 When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did and what theatre was. These ideas were passed onto film, as if film were merely the extension of theatre. It did not occur to Edison, or to others in the first period of moviemaking, to do more than let the camera record a basically theatrical experience. It was as if one were just taking a big extended photograph of a play.

Now, the play is certainly not a spontaneous experience, but it soon became evident that the theatre and the movie operate in different dimensions. The actor in a play may rehearse the part, certainly has to memorize the lines, appears in a stage setting, interacts with others who have also memorized lines, etc. – but all within the defining and unitary experience of the performance. The actor’s experience of the play and the audiences is equivalent, by which I mean that the actor’s part in the play, in real time, concords with the audience’s real-time observation of the play.

This radically changed with film. It was blown to hell. The idea that the film would mimic the play – photograph it - could not long ignore the technical nature of film making, which allows one to create a performance out of an ensemble of many cuts. And that is key – at that moment, the experience of the audience is fatally and finally cut adrift from the experience of the actor. It is, of course, still possible to film a play, but movies generally are built on the ruin of the old regime, in which the actor experiences the unity of his part in something that occurs from beginning to end at one time. This rarely if ever happens in movies.

Of course, this became, very early, a trope in film. Since the silent films, movies have loved to show – to gleefully demystify – their making. They love to focus the camera on the camera focusing on the actor, they love to show the fakery of it all, they love to show the director, sitting in a director’s chair, saying cut. The cliché quickly and thoroughly penetrated the culture.

However, even as the difference made by the movie was exposed again and again, we retained old, theatrical ways of looking at what was happening. We still called the figures mouthing the lines and pretending to be detectives or kings ‘actors’. And though auteur theory wasn’t really codified until the fifties, the characteristics of it in movie appreciation appeared early on – as though the director was an author.

And so, newpaper and magazine movie critics will write about the performance of the ‘actor’ in the film as something that occurs like the performance of an actor in a play – they will ignore what they know, and what every movie abundantly references – that this is very much a synthesis, rather than a spontaneous unity. The movie references this in its camera work, its transitions, its ‘special effects’, etc., and we know after we have finished it that our experience of it as a performance was an illusion. Even the dimmest movie goer sees through the illusion. The ironic entailment of the reality affect offered by movies is that they become less ‘real’ – they reveal themselves as process the realer they are.

So what are these figures? Are they actors?

There’s a story told on the DVD of Ni Toit ni Loi (Vagabond). In one of the last scenes in the film, Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress who plays Mona – the film’s central figure – wanders into a small French village where the grapes have just been harvested. The village celebrates by allowing a sort of carnival – men dressed up like wine demons capture whoever wanders by – civilians – and dunks them in a vat of wine, or throws grapes at them. According to the interview, when Bonnaire played in this scene, she was not expecting these grape demons – and she was really terrified by them as they chased her around, and eventually into a phone booth. It is an excellent scene – but it would never work in theatre. In the unity of the experience of audience and actors that makes up theatrical performance, and actor who doesn’t know what is happening destroys the code of the performance. He or she isn’t better or worse at that point, but becomes a non-actor. However, this rule simply doesn’t apply in film. This is why film actors often speak of acting a role in terms of the way they physically throw themselves into it – rather than, as theatre actors do, the way they throw themselves into it psychologically. Bonnaire lets her hair go, doesn’t wash it, or herself – DeNiro pumps himself up to 250 pounds for Raging Bull – etc. Now, it isn’t the case that the film actor doesn’t try to assume psychological characteristics, or the theatre actor is not concerned with the body as an instrument – it is a matter of what is subordinate to what. In a sense, the actor in movies, cut off from the entirety of the film by the process of making the film, is doing something very different than what we call acting. A movie is a riposte to methodological individualism – the fundamental level at which the movie works is not reduceable to the separate and individual contributions of the people involved in it. We understand it that way for giving prizes, and because the myth of the individual is something that, at least in America, we pay lip service to. In making movies, the West invented an art form that it did not have the conceptual structure to understand.

This is why I am uncomfortable with saying things about movies in the same way I can say things about novels or poems. Of course, the latter two, as well, propose experiences that require a certain cut in the time of their consumption – the praise of a book that “you can’t put down” is foregrounded in the fact that you do, as a reader, put down books, you don’t read continuously from cover to cover. Yet this editorial and utilitarian fact has long been built into our reading experience, whereas the movie experience still carries with it the overtones of the aesthetic experience it overthrew. Perhaps the real end of the 19th century, the century before movies, was signified in Mallarme’s notion of the Book, the one true book, and Wagner’s notion of the Gesammtekunstwerk, impossible products of a saintly devotion to the one good and real thing. Funny how movies, which have gone from products of ultra-modernity to museum goods, have begun to imitate the Wagnerian gesture of being too long, too aggressively long, entirely

The Rise and Fall of Baby in Popular music: some notes

 

1.  “Baby baby where did our love go…?”

“I’ve got you babe…”

“It’s not me babe…|

2. The ductus of baby. Discuss.

3. Someday somebody will write a rich philological-historical study of the rise and fall of babe and baby in popular song in the sixties and seventies. 

Not me, but somebody. Here’s a few notes.

4. It should be said at the outset that I use “honey”  and “darling” a lot, both as endearments and as terms of address – but I have never called anybody babe or baby who was not, in fact, below 16 months of age.

It should also be said that, on another personal note, baby ended for me with Soft Cell, at some point in New Orleans on the dance floor in the Hotel Pontchatrain. It dies while I was dancing with M.P. on the stroke of midnight, although the date and time could be the effect of a blur in my memory.

5. Mostly babe and baby fell into that group of affectionate names for woman (as distinct from the denigrating terms, like bitch or whore – although as we all know, these are mix and match sets and everything depends on the conformation of the tongue and the lips). As well, though, looking over the set of popular songs in my data base (i.e. Youtube and Spotify), baby was also a female term for addressing a male. And applied to the heteronormative male, it has an interestingly dissolving libidinous effect. Who is baby?

7. In 1932, a James Hart wrote an article on Jazz Jargon for American Speech, from which I cull this:

“A new connotation for the once highly respectable nomenclature of the family, ‘mama’, ‘papa’ and ‘baby’ was introduced into the American language by Tin Pan Ally. … Along with the new connotations came along the new signification of the world ‘baby’.” Hunt cites such titles as “I wonder where my baby is tonight” and “yes sir, she’s my baby.”

8. An interesting experiment was conducted on the Ed Sullivan show, once. The Supremes sang a medley of the songs of the Temptations, and the Temptations sang a medley of the songs of the Supremes. Thus we heard David Ruffin sing “Stop In the Name of Love” and could register a certain transformation in the sound of baby: “Baby baby I’m aware of where you go”….

There is, I think, in the very ductus of the words of a song an indication of the fragile autonomy of song against poem. The ductus of the word is why performance is all too quicksilver to be one of those kinds of things that one can hypostatize, rank, and generally treat to the domestic gaze of established literary aesthetics. What we have going on here is a pathic understanding. The seven types of ambiguity are as nothing to the types of ambiguity summoned and released in the word “babe”.

9. Pathic understandings, however, are not a private language. Instead, they emerge in communities and disappear as well. I can’t really say that “baby” disappeared from popular song in the eighties. Anybody can come up with exceptions. Simple minds had a hit, Don’t you (forget about me) where the baby note – the baby as the addressee – was definitely in the mix. However, by then there was something out of date about the word – as out of date as Greenwich Village or the Beats or Motown Detroit.

10. “Baby Baby Baby you’re out of time.”

“Nowhere to run to baby/nowhere to hide.”

Down in the basement at McDonalds, or why equality of opportunity is a bogus goal

 

I've never understood the popularity of the American belief that the intervention of the state in the political economy should be limited to the goal of “levelling the field” to provide opportunity for all at the start, while ignoring the inequality of outcome.  It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.

This is the fatal flaw in the liberal détente with the social democratic ideal:  "equality of opportunity", which presents itself as pragmatism, is actually wildly utopian. The idea that comforts the liberal thinker is that when it succeeds, it will dissolve itself. This is the story behind the goofy, Larry Summers-esque gesture of pretending that those who make it into the Forbes 400 list will fall in the next generation as other movers and shakers from the bottom battle their way forward. This is, in itself, nonsense – the Duponts, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds are still up there in the multimillionaire/billionaire class.  Behind every member of the Forbes list of billionaires you will find plenty of investment from older wealth. But  the larger point is that those who succeed most do so in a system that allows them ample leaway to make sure that we as a collective never go back to zero, where there is equality of opportunity for everyone. Our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power. D’Angelo has it right in The Wire, a famous scene in which he and his crew are eating McNuggets as they sell their drugs:

“Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.

Poot: You think the man got paid?

- Who?

- Man who invented these.

-Shit, he richer than a muthafucka.

D’Angelo: Why? You think he get a percentage?

Wallace: Why not?

D’angelo: N…, please. The man who invented them things? Just some sad-ass down at the basement at McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.

Poot: Naw, man, that ain't right.

D’Angelo: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money.”

This groundlevel view understands money is not right.

My objection here should spell out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is leveled, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it were, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over liberal thinking. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is very much like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.

As we have all abundantly discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and in so doing  dissolve itself – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. The reactionary economists, that is, the vast majority of the tribe, attribute this to an inertia in the machine, i.e. the laziness of the worker.  But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favour. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint.  He is of the same kind as the drug dealer. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.

On Boyle

 

Among the scholars who are doing the history of science outside of the Whiggish framework - the latter referring, of course, to Herbert Butterworth’s famous phase about the framework that sees the history of science as essentially a progress - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s The Leviathan and the Air Pump is one of the most cited texts. It focuses on the New Learning in 17th century England, which was in many ways an extension of the Baconian experimental impulse. Robert Boyle was not only the premier experimenter, but, more than Bacon, the natural philosopher who set the rules for experimentation.

One of Shapin and Schaffer’s ideas is that the experimental method, depending on witnesses for its veracity, evolves a prose style of witness. Shapin and Schaffer point to Thomas Sprat’s injunctions about the proper mode of representation in his history of the Royal Society – which was, in effect, also a polemic on behalf of the society. Sprat enumerates the inveterate injury done by rhetorical ornament, which was at first the “admirable instruments in the hands of Wise Men” but now have turned disgusting – “They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorn’d; they are in open defiance against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that, but with its Slaves, the Passions; they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice.” In fact, as Sprat enumerates the faults of the ornate style, he himself falls into a Passion – “For now I am warmed with this just Anger” – but, apparently, this Slave is true to reason, rather than its betrayer. And although Sprat sees the ornaments of rhetoric as being almost beyond reform, he does make a very Protestant recommendation: “They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.” [Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II,117-118]

Shapin has written a biographical sketch of Boyle that picks at what he was like as a person – and how one would, at this distance, ever find out the facts of what William James might call acquaintance.

Acquaintance is, of course, the very nub of witness.

Born of a rich, rapacious pioneer of the land grab game in Ireland, an ennobled Elizabethan nabob who at one point might have been the richest man in the Kingdom, Boyle’s father despised Ireland – which was the source of his wealth – yet had his children taught Gaelic. Boyle himself certainly retained in his own voice the Irish English intonation, one that his tutors at Eton never could extinguish. More than that, Boyle he was a stutterer. According to his own account, Boyle picked up the stuttering habit when he was a boy from mocking the speech of others. Shapin imagines this might be Boyle mocking the Irish English of others.

While his elder brother was one of the great rakes at Charles II’s court, Boyle was an Anglican of a species now long extinct – an enthusiastic Anglican. Recent work on Boyle has emphasized this aspect of his intellectual character. While maintaining a corpuscular philosophy and advocating for the experimental method, Boyle wrapped these concerns in a general world view that allowed him to attack both Catholics and atheists for a wrongheaded view of God – both, in his opinion, being all too eager to pull God into his creation, and thus fumbling the very root of divinity: God’s exteriority to the world. It is that exteriority that allows God to be a supreme chooser – he can chose the way the world will be because he is not caught within it.

Boyle was an Anglican and directed his Free Enquiry, as well as his other philosophical and theological treatises, against both the Catholics and the ‘atheists” – the latter comprehending all who would make God immanent in nature, instead of standing outside it. But his brothers, as Shapin points out, were notorious Restoration rakes – the very type to be attracted to the libertine philosophy.

While the language of natural philosophy, for Sprat, is going to cast off the Wit’s devious metaphors and the disgusting fancies of the scholar in order to embrace the language of the artisan, Boyle, who was more noble than Merchant, had his own problems with taking the language of the vulgar for the instrument of the wisdom. For where, after all, are the vulgar getting their notions? Are they educated witnesses? Is there any way to escape ambiguity – which is, in its way, as disgusting as metaphor, insofar as it is not the plain way to truth:

“I have often look’d upon it as an unhappy thing, and prejudicial both to philosophy and physic, that the word nature hath been so frequently, and yet so unskillfully employ’d, by all sorts of men. For the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein ‘tis employed, either unintelligible, improper or false. I, therefore, heartily wish, that philosophers,m and other leading me, would, by common consent, introduce some more significant, and less ambiguous terms and expressions, in the room of the licentious word nature; and the forms of speech that depend on it: or at least decline the use of it, as much as conveniently they can…”

Boyle’s observations are of course still current. The weight of the false opposition between the “organic” and the “chemical” moves both the vulgar and the high income crunchy folks. Whenever I encounter this weird notion, I like to point out that the organic is as chemical as the synthetic. I win so many friends this way!

Boyle does a rather wonderful thing about the word “nature”, which makes him the founder, as it were, of the linguistic turn in philosophy – for he gives 8 rules for avoiding the word: 1. Use the word God for natura naturans; 2. use the word essence, or quiddity (tho a barbarous term); 3 “If what is meant by the word nature” is what ‘belongs to a living creature at its nativity” – say, “the animal is born so” – or say that a thing has been generated such. 4. for internal motion – say that the body moves spontaneously; 5. use – “the settled course of things”; 6 for the “aggregate of powers belonging to a body” use constitution, temper, mechanism or complex of the essential properties or qualities; 7. when used for universe, use the word world, or universe; and 8. “If, instead of using the word nature, taken for either a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity; we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it.”

This is a text worth going back to.

ON FREE LUNCHES

 

I am  culling  this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them –  the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – leaps off the page at the beginning of the enterprise.  If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs. Defined, of course, as preferences. What you like and what you like better – the Jack and Jill of the economics textbook.

The first and most important of those decisions that background this nursery rhyme story is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone. And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch?

Of course, the neo-c’s have dealt in some vague way with this by calling it all “investment”. So when x is the parent and y is the child, the x is really not giving y a free lunch, but preparing for the distant future when y has to decide whether to pay for the medical bills of x or let x die in the street.

This, it seems to me, however clever it seems to Gary Becker and his followers, is humanly as dumb as possible. Spell it out this way and there will only be a few of the 18 year olds who will nod sagely. These we can safely assign to the libertarian camp.

However, we are certainly not done with the free lunch model. For there are, of course, less benign examples of the free lunch relationship. One could say – if one was a classical, rather than a neo-classical, economist – that the most obvious one comes in the ability of Capital (that devourer of free lunches) to get its free lunches from the performance of Labor (that provider of profit) through exploitation. And if we grant this model, then free lunches abound, and one of their systematic forms is called Capitalism.

It is here that the ideological decision to treat x and y and variables on either side of the free lunch situation shows its genius, and demonstrates the dialectical position of “individualism” in Capitalism. For both y and z, in this model, are individuals – and nothing else. There, individuality is without content, a pure placemarker,  which is all the better for founding a society based on individualism. Because content actually creates solidarity. Content would actually point to differences of all kinds between x and y. If x is the laborer and y is the corporation, for instance – but the corporation, per the Supreme Court, treated as a “person” – than we can ignore all power imbalances, and regard individuals as “earning their worth”, each and every one of them, as they cleverly engage in tradeoffs – for instance, allowing the free lunch set at the top to fire them all and relocate the factory to some other locale of x-s, because in the end that means the corporation can produce goods cheaper, and won’t those fired x-s, now working for Ubereats, be happy with the state of massive tat to which they will now have access? It is almost as if, hmm, it were the laborers living off the free lunches provided by the christ-like bosses!

This is an idea that has boldly occurred to many a neo-classical economist. Because while the billionaire – which in some, well, humanly truer model of the world, are living massively off free lunches piled one on top of the other until we can’t see the summit – is working and working, day and night, labor is inclined, sadly, to laze around, and will only be encouraged if we tax the billionaire to build a system of social insurance for the laborer. That is free world dystopia. During the Great downturn, in the years between 2009-2011, the NYT gave a column to a University of Chicago economists, Casey Mulligan, who invariably sounded this note. The worry expended by Casey Mulligan over some worker, somewhere, slacking because he or she didn’t need to worry about paying the monthly vig to the insurance company to get the terrible $10,000 deductible all fault health insurance policy was enough to make the angels on high weep – with laughter.

In heaven there is no giving or taking – it is free lunches for all. Jesus was the prophet of big rock candy mountain, make no mistake.

To wind this up: the free lunch is what civilization is built on, for good or ill. Limiting the free lunches of Capital is an excellent way to ensure better free lunches for the kids.  

 

We've been doing this forever: U.S., Israel and Iran, 2007

 Back in 2006 and 2007, Israel, with Bush’s blessing, was doing its usual razrez in Lebanon (as Alex in Clockwork Orange might put it), I wrote a bit about that affair in the long perspective of Israel’s’ malign policy of perpetual war.

This is still relevant today.

So here it is:

January 21, 2007:

… Exhibit no. 1, yesterday, was the astonishing Deborah Lipstadt op ed piece about ex President Carter’s rather mild plea for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and the end of the governance mess there and in the Gaza. About which Lipstadt had only to say that Carter has not genuflected with enough fervor to the holocaust, and thus is an anti-semite – but, being a just person in all things, Lipstadt was willing to concede that perhaps he is just an unconscious bigot. Lipstadt, you see, embraces the larger view.

This is almost spookily stupid – especially as you can tell that Lipstadt’s (non) argument is pretty close to the orthodoxy among the muscular liberal-neo con set that so rule the roost in the WAPO op ed pages, and probably does reflect the central bias of the policy set in D.C.

The Eichmann made me do it excuse for the West Bank land grab wouldn’t convince a first grader. Lipstadt, a historian, would do well to read a book of history – any book of history – about Israel’s post 67 West Bank policy.

However, I am not going to grapple with a piece that serves, really, only that old and hoary function of injecting a vague hint of anti-semitism into any criticism of Israel. Rather, I’d like to spotlight one of the mythemes in the piece, since it now travels about in the Press like as a convenient warmongering piece of DNA, a little transpone, bringing us visibly nearer to war with Iran. I find the idea that the U.S. is going to war with Iran anytime soon, the idea that Bush is always a week away from it, so prevalent among leftwingers – who have been saying we are a week away from attacking Iran since 2004 – extremely puzzling. Both the left and the right often participate in a shared illusion of American hyper-powerdom, but reality has always put strict limits to the extent and exercise of American power. It is exercised best when America has implanted, in a given country, an endogenous pro-consular class. But usually, America avoids the direct violence route.

Still, in the final instance, we are being run by an essentially criminal collective, which is obviously thinking of winding up its pathetic run by attacking Iran. If the wishes of the executive were obeyed as direct orders – the Fuhrer-prinzip that Cheney has tried to instill in the government over the last six years – than we would be attacking Iran. In lieu of that, the warmongering sockpuppets do try to inject, in any mention of Iran, the idea that the country is on the verge of attacking Israel. And one of the ways they do this is to infinitely fold spindle and mutilate a quote of President Ahmadinejad – in Lipstadt’s piece, that comes out as: “When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them.” I’m not even going into the facile identity between Israel and Jews, here, - an identity that is unrealistic and, in fact, symbolic of the kind of nationalism many of the greatest figures of Jewish culture in the 19th and 20th century fought against like mad – or the idea that the threat to a state, Israel, is of the same order and nature as the threat to the Jewish inhabitants of various countries in Europe. This is to spiral down into Ron Rosenbaum style madness. No, what concerns me is simply that quote. Not whether the quote has been mistranslated – I don’t know enough about Farsi to give you a donkey’s fart worth of wisdom on that issue. What isn’t undisputed is that Ahmadinejad is citing Khomeini. Now, if we are truly to take the quote as a military threat against Israel, then surely it was a military threat when Khomeini uttered it too. Logically, then, Israel should have received it as a threat from Khomeini and acted accordingly.

But if you look back at the 80s, you will notice right away that the quote wasn’t pulled out to justify some attack on Iran by Israel – rather it was ignored as the rightwing government in Israel helped arm Iran and support a closer relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Far from viewing themselves as partisans in the Polish woods, at that time, the Israeli government viewed themselves as maneuvering an alliance against Iraq. They viewed themselves, quite sensibly, as a state.

An article in the summer, 2005 issue of Iranian studies by Trita Parsi, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective,”

sums up the real history of the relationship between Iran and Israel quite well:

"Iran’s foreign policy is believed to have lost much of its ideological zeal after the death of Khomeini. One often cited exception to this general pattern is Iran’s relations with Israel. Tehran’s posture on Israel and the Middle East peace process is often explained as a remnant of its revolutionary and ideological past and contradictory to Iran’s national interest. However, this analysis neglects crucial systemic changes that occurred in the Middle East after 1991, as well as

Israel’s willingness to improve relations with Iran at the height of Iran’s revolutionary fervor in the 1980s and the Islamic regime’s refusal to allow ideological considerations to stand in its way to purchase arms from Israel. Furthermore, it reduces Israel’s role in the equation to that of a non-actor whose destiny is limited to mere reactions to Iran’s ideological designs."

Parsi hauls up a lot of inconvenient, old news from the memory hole:

"The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran."

It is an axiom of punditry that, in pursuing the usual quest to kill people on a large scale, one needs to forget that those same people, years earlier, were allies in another quest to kill another set of people on a large scale. For the Lipstadts of the world, of course, being pro-Iranian in 1987 was resisting the Nazis, and being for war against Iran in 2006 is still resisting the Nazis. We evermore resist the Nazis.

Well, enough of the various bogosities of this subject, and onto another piece of news about the Bush administration which is – in obedience to the law of news governing the way the press has reported the Global war on Terror – 3 years late.

“An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Wilkerson said, Cheney vetoed the deal.”

As faithful readers will remember – well, not really, but as this faithful writer remembers – my position before the invasion was that the U.S. could and should aim at having Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq. It could do this by a., establishing détente with Iran, Hussein’s number one enemy, and b., showering Northern Iraq, separated from Hussein’s Iraq for 5 years, with aid. Sanctions were stupid and killing so long as they were instituted in the framework of the double sanctions on both nations. The neo-cons were right to decry the sanction system as it was under Clinton, but wrong to promote the belligerent approach – and wrong to think that the U.S. policy should be aimed at maintaining American hegemony in the Middle East when the conditions for that hegemony had so dramatically changed in the post Cold War era.

Obviously, myidea was not only rational, but possible. Its rejection has led to the current debacle. Neither party is willing to de-structure the root cause of that debacle – American superpowerdom.

Let the empire turn up its little heels and die is our advice.