Today we have some comments on my post Friday by Alan. There's a NYT article by Robert Worth
The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror which I'd also like to juxtapose to Alan's reply.

Comments

Alan replies to yesterday's post! At last, dialogue! I'll make a comment on this comment later. I've also included some further links at the end.

Roger,

I think you missed the boat on this one.

"It also seems to be true . . . the putting down of Pure Land
Buddhism."

--Yes, but these aren't religions of the Book. They do have
their sacred texts -- scads of them -- but those texts aren't
nearly as central to those religious traditions as their
respective scriptures are to the Big Three monotheisms.
-- The religious traditions of East Asia that you mention do have
blood on their hands, but much less of it than do the religions
of Europe/North Africa/Central Asia.
-- You haven't shown that such violence as they have committed is
in any way tied to the content of their sacred texts, which is
RDC's charge against Islam; to my knowledge their is no such
relationship (and very little violence in those texts).

"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to
religious scripture . . . Wow. The man seems to have misplaced
1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like
the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook[.]"

RDC's case here would be stronger if he elaborated on the
extension of the term fundamentalism as he defines it here.
Nonetheless, he's basically on the mark: fundamentalism, as
scholars use the term, is a phenomenon that began in the late
19th century. A "nonhistoric approach to religious scripture"
can only be formulated after fully historical approaches to
religious scripture have been developed -- source criticism and
form criticism and that sort of thing. Fundamentalism was and
is, among other things, a reaction to these trends. You may
consider this too narrow a definition of fundamentalism, and
certainly there were fundamentalist-like tendencies earlier in
church history. However, it was not and could not have been
there from the beginning. It requires, for example, fairly
widespread lay literacy. When you extend the notion of
fundamentalism to Islam, the picture is complicated further; but
the point is that fundamentalism is not simply a synonym for
primitive or dogmatic religion, or for religious bigotry.

So yes, I think the fundamentalism thing does get 1400-1800 years
of Western history off on a techicality, only it's a more
important technicality than you realize.

"And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a
program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout
its history with multitudinous reference to scripture, was a mere
flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely."

The conquistadores were not reading their marching orders
straight out of the Old Testament. As you know, the theological
justification for the Roman Catholic part in the
conquista/conversion/genocide came from a complex mix of
scholastic theology, canon law, and whatnot; and at times there
were interventions on the side of the indigenous peoples (cf.
Bartolome de Las Casas.) Fundamentalism that wasn't. The term
is, arguably, more applicable to, e.g., our genocidal antepasados
here in Texas; but I'll deal with that point after I've discussed
the nature of the Qur'an as divine revelation.

". . . perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the
"quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will
be from selected old Testament books. "

A pedantic quibble here: The Age of the Patriarchs extends only
to the time of the Covenant with Moses at Sinai, recounted in the
Book of Exodus, and hence none of the texts you cite are,
strictly speaking, from the Age of the Patriarchs.

But more important: One thing that immediately strikes the
Western reader (i.e., me) about the Qur'an is that, unlike the
Christian Bible, it's all of a piece. What happened is that
Mohammed would go out into the desert to meditate. One day he
started hearing voices. He came back into Mecca and told people
what he was hearing. They said, "It's the voice of God." He
kept on listening, and telling people what he heard. They
remembered it, and wrote it down. God was pretty direct and to
the point. This is the way things are. Do this, and you'll be
happy. Don't do this, or you'll be sorry.

And that's the Qur'an. It's not a miscellany of every
conceivable kind of document produced over a thousand-year
period. No archaic histories emerging out of oral tradition. No
long passages of "Jehosaphat begat Jedadiah". No Songs of
Solomon that snuck in past the censors to embarrass future
generations of prudes. No
we-can't-decide-which-version-of-the-story-to-use-so-let's-include-all-four.
None of the ravings of a John of Patmos.

RDC is correct when he says (in the complete article), "The Quran
is a notoriously difficult text to understand in some ways. For
one thing, it lacks almost any sense of context: Verses are
addressed to mysterious Yous and Theys from an equally mysterious
We." This remark highlights one of its differences from the Old
Testament, where the context within a historical narrative is
generally very clear. Now, I suggest that when an utterance is
made in the second person directed to a nonspecific You, when the
content of that utterance makes it possible to take the utterance
to be of universal applicability, (applicable to all people in
all places and at all times, or at all times subsequent to the
time of the utterance), that is a natural way to interpret the
utterance. And so those utterances have been interpreted in the
Islamic tradition. On the other hand, when an utterance is
reported in the third person, in the course of a narrative of
events quite remote in time and space, it takes a good bit of
contortion to interpret that utterance as of universal
applicability.

The relevance of all this to our discussion? Two things. First,
when you ask,

"I mean, who takes Judges literally?"

Let's consider again the hypothetical Anglo in Texas in the
1800's opening his Bible and reading "Now go and smite Amalek,
and spare them not; but slay both men and women," and deciding
that Jehovah's instructions to the Israelites a few millenia ago
were directly applicable his own relations with his Kiowa
neighbors. How someone can read it that way, as I suppose has
been done all too frequently, is beyond my imagination; but you
can't call it a "literal" reading. Even if you ignore the
context in a historical narrative, there's that pesky word
"Amalek," which is a proper noun, denoting a particular group of
persons who ain't around any more. It takes quite a bit of
sophisticated hermeneutics to conclude that anything that God may
have said about them should be applied to the Kiowas. (Unless,
of course, you already know what conclusion you want to come
to.)

But the Qur'an isn't like that. Not only does the context-free,
second-person form of its injunctions give them every appearance
of being intended as universal commandments, but there are no
bothersome questions about whether the Kiowas ought to be treated
like the Amalekites were treated. The word is "infidels", which
clearly includes you and me, and all those who reject God's
revelation to his Prophet Mohammed.

Second, and more important: I suggest that your attempt to refute
RDC's claim about the centrality of war in the Qur'an with these
citations from the Old Testament fails, because, given the nature
of the Qur'anic revelation, the entire Qur'an is central to Islam
in a way that (no one in her right mind thinks that) everything
in the Bible is central to Christianity. Imagine a Christian
being handed a Bible asked, "OK, where's the meat? If I've only
got time to read a small part of this thing to get the most
important ideas, what should I read?" The Christian might
recommend the Sermon on the Mount, the Passion of Christ, perhaps
some of the letters of Paul; but no one, I venture to say, would
point to Judges 21 or 1st Samuel. Whereas it's quite plausible
for the Muslim to say, "All of the Qur'an is equally important;
it's all the Word of God." So matching quotation for quotation
misses the point.

"This development of the religious community outside of the halls
of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the
flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of
church and state[.]"

I agree that RDC is on very shaky ground here. In the Christian
case, I'd attribute the alleged flexibility (although there's
probably a better word) more to the fact that neither of the men
you might call the founders of the religion, Jesus and St. Paul,
founded political states, whereas Mohammed did.

Re Judaism, about which neither of us have said very much (in my
case because I don't know very much): I think RDC is right about
the nonpolitical nature of Diaspora (rabbinical) Judaism. Temple
Judaism is another matter, and to the extend that certain
Orthodox sects may be attempting to reinstate it in Jerusalem,
they're clearly a destructive force in contemporary Palestine.
But I don't know what I'm talking about here.

BTW, apparently James Carroll makes the counterargument to RDC's
in Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: " Carroll
proceeds according to a straightforward thesis: In the aftermath
of Constantine's conversion (AD 312), the church became an organ
of the Roman state, and as a consequence, its integrity was
irreversibly compromised." (Erik Tarloff, writing in Slate last
January.)

" Briefly, the question of how tolerance . . . Christianity as a
political force."

The question will depend to a degree on how you define
"tolerance": I would argue that there are important differences
between, say, the view currently hegemonic in the West that
religious beliefs are entirely a matter of private conviction,
and the quite different view, found at many times in European
history, that belief cannot be compelled. The former is, as you
indicate, the aftermath of Europe's exhaustion from its
fratricidal religious wars. But the point is that, after
Protestants and Catholics had killed each other in sufficient
numbers for enough centuries that they got good and sick of it,
there was enough doctrinal room in Christianity for them to work
out a modus vivendi, a new understanding of the relationship
between secular and religious authority, between the public and
the private, so that they no longer felt a need to kill each
other, and yet they still considered themselves believers. By
extension, this new-found tolerance caused them to lose the urge
to kill, or ( in many, but still too few, cases) even to convert
nonChristians. It's not the place of a nonMuslim to say whether
or not similar room exists in the Islamic tradition, but I take
RDC's point to be (and I say this in the light of my own
preliminary and uninformed reading) it's hard to see where it
could be found.

"There is an . . . ignorance armed with a diploma."

First, I agree that "Why do they hate us?" is a stupid question.
There are a whole lot of "they"s who hate us for a whole lot of
different reasons (not to mention the problems with the referent
of the "us"). But to the point: RDC teaches history of
religion. I suggest that your gripe is not with him or with the
way he teaches his subject, as with the discipline itself; you
think that he would present a more accurate picture of history if
he taught not History of Religion but History of Everything Ever
Justified in the Name of Religion. The conquistadores, Cromwell,
and the Croatian bishops were all mass murderers, but if you
think that their crimes deserve a central place in the history of
the particular human phenomenon known as "religion" -- well,
let's just say I think the burden of the argument is on you.

Love & peace,

Alan


For a modern justification of those Judge's quotes, see the Rationalchristianity site.


A good link to a Net argument about the posting of John Chrysostom Homilies Against the Jews (or Judaizers), in which the conversation twists around the context of apparently anti-semitic language. There's a website devoted to the golden tongued John - .

A good link to a Southern Baptist dissenter from the Southern Baptist Convention's most recent pronouncement on the cosmic place of women.


Here's a nice link to the relationship of the Ottomans and the Jews, from the 14th century up to the 1881, when the Sultan officially pronounced against the blood libel story -- that Jews killed little Christian boys and used their blood in some satanic ceremony. A story, by the way, that the Russian Czar believed and the Pope, at that time, was unwilling to condemn.
.

Finally, here's a link to a book by Bat Ye'or on Islam and non-Islamic people. . There is also a preface to the book, online, from Jacques Ellul. I haven't read the book, but the intro makes it pretty evident that this book is going to deal harshly with Islam. Bat Ye'or interprets dhimmi, or the Islamic pact with non-Islamic people, in the light of the obligation to fight -- jihad. Also, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict is obviously in the background of Ellul's essay.

Dope

A friend sent me this article from Salon. Since I don't pay for the premium articles, I was unaware of it. But reading it has made me feel, for a moment, positively Voltarian:


Islam: Religion of the sword?
Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam's religious history is inseparable from its conquests -- which is why the concept of holy war lives on today.


A certain Richard D. Connerney wrote it. He is credited with teaching religion at Iona College. What can one say? His students are obviously being fed a mixture of bigotry and error, poor guys. Connerney has an at best vague acquaintance with the history of religion. But he is eager to show it off, nonetheless.


The point of his article seems to be that Islam, being a religion of the book, is tied to the violent message within that book. That seems fair enough. It also seems to be true of almost all religions that have achieved political status. I don't know enough about the internicene disputes between the Daoists and the Buddhists in Imperial China, but I have no doubt I would find monks and advisors to one emperor or the other legitimating persecution, torture, expropriation of property, and murder. You can find this, also, in Japanese history, especially in the putting down of Pure Land Buddhism.
But this doesn't worry Mister Connerney. In fact, after pointing out how often the Qu'ran uses the word war, he gives us this astonishing piece of information:


"Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to religious scripture, exists in every tradition, but only in Islam does it go hand in hand with widespread violence. Yes, Southern preachers occassionally get carried away, and yes, Hindu fundamentalists cause intermittent communal violence in the Deccan subcontinent. Neither of these two fundamentalisms, however, has produced the same types of problems as Islam. It is not Hindu fundamentalists or Southern Baptists that generally become international terrorists. What is the difference then between Islam and other wo! rld faiths? Is there something inherent in the history and texts of the religion that lead to this behavior? I think that there is."


Wow. The man seems to have misplaced 1400-1800 some years of Western history. I guess he feels like the fundamentalism thing gets him off the hook -- after all, if the Croatian bishopry, in World War II, felt it could bless the extermination of some 500,000 Serbians because they were Eastern Orthodox, that isn't exactly Southern Baptist fundamentalism. That Southern Baptists are "Southern" because of a certain unpleasant racial thing (you know, slavery and all) seems also to have escaped his attention. And surely the extermination of almost all native peoples, as a program of the European-Native encounter, justified throughout its history with multitudinous ireference to scripture, was a mere flyspeck on the vision of the Weltgeist, surely. I mean, who takes Judges literally?


People who have inherited the gains of past generations have an understandable temptation to blur the process by which those gains were made. But one thinks that a professor of religion would have poked around, perhaps, in the history of the religion. Connerney's potted history is really quite amusing to read:

"This [Islamic bellicosity] is in distinction from Judaism and Christianity, in which the religious community both predates and postdates the existence of a Jewish or Christian political state. Judaism already exists as a faith in the quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs (circa 2000-1300 B.C.) before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel, and Judaism continues to exist and develop as a religious community after the Babylonian Captivity, the Roman occupation, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and throughout the Diaspora up to the year 1948. In a similar way Christianity, self-consciously apolitical in its origin, exists for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment, and to embrace ideas of modernity and sec! ular civil society. Put simply, neither faith requires the existence of a theocratic state to function fully as a religion because both their origins and endpoints exist above and beyond concerns of statehood. Not so with Islam."


Since Connerney devotes some part of his article to explicating the centrality of war in the Qu'ran, perhaps we should look at the gentle texts from the "quasihistorical Age of the Patriarchs". Our reading today will be from selected old Testament books.

The tone is set in Joshua, but I'm not going to be tedious. Here's a typical bit of the Lord's advice in Judges 21.

"For the people were numbered, and, behold, there were none of the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad there.

10 And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Ja'besh�gil'e-ad with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children.

11 And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

And here the Lord is, again, in 1 Samuel:
2. "Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Am'alek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Ex. 17.8-14 � Deut. 25.17-19

3 Now go and smite Am'alek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
Now the Lord's advice here - which is reminiscent, is it not, of Eichmann? Or your average Einsatzkommando unit commander - folds into an interesting story. For the Lord here is talking to Saul. Saul, unfortunately, fails the Lord. He fails, that is, to commit genocide.


9. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.

10 � Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying,

11 It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the LORD all night.


The Lord's complaint has echoed down the centuries. How many soldiers have been commanded to utterly destroy a people and a place and have been miserably bought off with the best of the sheep, so to speak? This is known as not looking at the mission as a whole. This is known as not having focus. Because the mission is to extinguish a people. This was pretty clear to the quasi-historical Samuel, the Lord's prophet. And guess what? As this book shed its benificent influence through the Christian world, the message was taken up by many a Christian captain. Need I mention the Lord's work Cromwell did in Ireland? Or the Lord's broom, sweeping away the Tasmanian natives -- there's a very interesting chapter on this in David Quammen's Song of the Dodo. There good Christians, inspired by this most beautiful of religions, in contradistinction from nasty, nasty Islam, actually formed a small army and proposed, rather like beaters in a hunt, to spread from one end of the island to the other and advance, killing "every man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." They nearly succeeded -- a nice, jolly English slaughter, that. Their descendents, of course, prosperous New Agers and so on, can then make up simulacrum of native 'spirituality' and enjoy the healthiness of these past creatures, er, people, without the muss and fuss of actually having to confront them in the flesh.

But I'm forgetting! The WTC attack! It changed everything! -- apparently even history. Ah, the retrospective glow one feels over the West's benignant behavior, inspired by that coexistence "for centuries in a Roman/pagan context until the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. This development of the religious community outside of the halls of political power gives both Judaism and Christianity the flexibility to adapt to the secular concept of the separation of church and state that come out of the Enlightenment." What though the Enlightenment comes 1400 years afterwards? And notice that we sort of skip, oh, skip lightly, over the effect of Christianity's adoption as the religion of the empire. Notice that the Roman/pagan context sort of, well, vanished? Think this was due to the sweet fluting of Bishop Athanasius? Or perhaps the dreams of Augustine, laid out in the City of God, that manual for ghettoizing the non-Christian?
This is an issue that deserves more than one post. Briefly, the question of how tolerance happens is one that is ill understood, and is, perhaps, connected to different causes in different societies. I'd argue, though, that Western tolerance did not arise from some proto-type in Christian organizations, but rather arose out of the exhaustion experienced by Europeans in the 17th and 18th century for Christianity as a political force. Or, to be fully dialectical about it - TOLERANCE AROSE OUT OF CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE. I'll make that argument in another post.

Anyway, let's sum up this exercise in Ecrasez l'infame. There is an explanation for the commonly posed question, Why do they hate us? (although, as I have explained in an earlier post, I think this question is fundamentally stupid). It is because we are not only not taught history, we have such as Connerney teaching history. A man who can lightly skip over most of history in his pursuit of it, and who conveys an abbreviated and nonsensical melange of half fact to his students, can only be thought of as that worst of menaces, ignorance armed with a diploma.

Remora

I know -- the few readers I have, my friends, do they want another post about boring economics? How about some fun stuff? I was thinking of doing a post about Buffon's proto-pragmatism, knowing that there is overwhelming interest, right now, second only to that in Bond's home run record, in the first book of Buffon's Histoire naturelle and its aggressively anti-Cartesian stance -- but noooooooo - I think I will do this instead.

There's a NYT story today, and a Nation article by the always elegant William Greider, which should be read in conjunction. So that those among us who are opposed to the rule by economist - the decisions of a bunch of pointy headed bureaucrats in the WTO and other assorted international organizations - get a sense of the extent of that rule, right now.

First, the NYT article:
U.S. Will Appeal Tax Ruling After Talks With Europe Fail
essential graf:
The office of the United States trade representative said today that it would appeal a World Trade Organization decision against a tax law that permits American multinational companies to avoid taxes on foreign profits. The law saves companies like Boeing (news/quote) and Microsoft (news/quote) a total of about $4 billion a year.

Then the Nation article The Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century
which takes a look at the unfortunately little known school of Takings theory slithering out of that noxious pit of intellectual error, the University of Chicago, like a snake out of a snake charmer's basket in some old b grade horror movie. The theory, in short, says that government regulation is a form of seizing property, and as such, must be compensated. This is from the same school that encourages limiting liability claims individuals can make on corporations. In other words, it is the school that would allow corporations to make unlimited transfers of cost to third parties. That regulation is justified by social cost is denied completely by this school. It is libertarian theory run mad.

These people, you probably think, are harmless nuts. Unfortunately, as Greider points out, they have quietly influenced the wording of the NAFTA agreement so that it actually embodies takings theory. Why not, since you could never do this democratically. And now, Bush wants to expand his power to make similarly invidious trade agreements. Will the Dems roll over for this? Hard to tell. If anti-WTO organizers are smart, they will definitely try to get the California case Greider mentions - Methanex v. United States - into the spotlight, like in some nice hyped 60 minutes segment. Otherwise, the quiet reaction will proceed apace.

Remora
I'm a little sick today. Sore throat, feverish, and all day I've been trying and failing to complete a review that I should have done, I really should have done as a good person and upright citizen, two weeks ago. I'm having trouble framing it -- I'm having trouble restraining myself from inelegantly ladling the tons of research I did, all the things I found out about the Ottoman empire, about Persian miniaturists, and about Vasari, all over the thing (some more gravy, dear?).
Also, Johanna, who I thought was coming to visit from Denmark, e-mailed me that it's a no-go.

So, you're expecting the same old same old rant about the war. But no - no, today the Nobel Prize went to three economists, one of whom, Joseph Stiglitz, is rather famous. He's famous for having resigned from the World Bank as a dissenter from the World Bank IMF approach to global economic policy. He is, by a fluke of history, on the side of the kids, or some of the kids, in the anti-WTO rank and file. So of course I'm happy for about the prize. The prize usually goes to prize stinkers -- it is has become a smoke signal from the Swedish upper class that they want lower taxes and the luxuries of other of the world's upper classes. But lately they have taken out their teeth, voting squishy -- last year for Sen, now for Stiglitz. Who knows, maybe Galbraith (fils) has a chance.
I wonder how the Times is going to handle old Stiglitz getting the prize. Seeing how they have a faith in neo-liberalism much bigger than a mustard seed -- in fact, so big they have no room for any other dissenting opinion.
On Stiglitz, well, you have to read his piece,

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE WORLD ECONOMIC CRISIS.
The Insider
by Joseph Stiglitz

Two really really nice grafs -- but read the article:

"The IMF likes to go about its business without outsiders asking too many questions. In theory, the fund supports democratic institutions in the nations it assists. In practice, it undermines the democratic process by imposing policies. Officially, of course, the IMF doesn't "impose" anything. It "negotiates" the conditions for receiving aid. But all the power in the negotiations is on one side--the IMF's--and the fund rarely allows sufficient time for broad consensus-building or even widespread consultations with either parliaments or civil society. Sometimes the IMF dispenses with the pretense of openness altogether and negotiates secret covenants.

"When the IMF decides to assist a country, it dispatches a "mission" of economists. These economists frequently lack extensive experience in the country; they are more likely to have firsthand knowledge of its five-star hotels than of the villages that dot its countryside. They work hard, poring over numbers deep into the night. But their task is impossible. ... The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they're right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country's report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the "search and replace" function on the word processor didn't work properly, leaving the original country's name in a few places. Oops."

I shouldn't give the impression Stiglitz is a radical. He has the same fondness for trade agreements of most mainstream economists. He thinks NAFTA is nifty. I don't. But he actually has a sense that economics is embodied in the Lebenswelt, a truly unusual perspective. Most economists have a way of thinking of culture, of manners, of extra-economic values, as being so much dead zone, a set of collateral and irrelevant information. It is the singing of the numbers they sit and listen to, those siren models.

Also on the World Bank contretemps, this article from Salon.

Remora
The War on Terrorism spawns curtailment of rights by paniced legislators should be the headline. We are lucky that the kooky right has an unwavering committment to at least one of the first ten amendments. And Russ Feingold gets high marks (he had, in Limited Inc's book, low, low marks for his Ashcroft vote) for standing up to the madness.
Time's story, and two grafs
Not So Fast, Senator Says, as Terror Bill Gains Ground
"Both the House and the Senate are expected to consider legislation this week that would expand the powers of law enforcement agencies to investigate and punish suspected terrorists and those who support them. Leaders in both chambers are trying to push the legislation through with expedited procedures but face several hurdles.

The legislation in the House differs significantly from the bill pending in the Senate, most notably because it puts a two-year limit, known as a sunset provision, on some of the new powers. There is no such provision in the Senate version. Leaders are talking of a potential compromise, perhaps a three- or five-year sunset provision."
Barney Frank is right - without the sunset provision, this legislation is poison.

Blank entry. Read below.

Dope

About twenty years ago, when I was an emotional young man - mine was a generation of emotional young men, the seventies guys, always breaking down and retiring to mental hospitals or moving back home -- I resolved to toughen up, to become a much less emotional man. There is a french word I love - desinvolture - which has the sense of lucid, disinterested, and leans towards cynical. I was attracted to writers and thinkers who valued the disinvolte above everything else -- the Tallyrandian ideal, above the fray and participating on one side or the other with the private proviso that such alliances were temporary.

Well, sometimes I think desinvolture comes close to callousness. Yesterday's post is a case in point. Discussing war as if casualties were mere logs on the pyre is a bad thing to do, especially when it is my bombs and cruise missiles that, right now, are hurting and killing real people. And of course real people in those airplanes are themselves targets, although targets of a regime that is ill equipped and incapable of supplying itself with weapons of its own manufacture.

But my point was not callous. In this century, there has been a dominant theory of war. One of the thinkers of this theory, Ernst Junger, called it totale Mobilmachung -- total mobilization. He wrote in the thirties, and in some ways he, along with Schumpeter (to whom I devoted a post a couple of days ago) and other conservatives, tried to come to terms with two historical events: World War I and modern industry. In World War I, the usual feedbacks failed. That is, when both sides started experiencing outrageous casualties, they did not sit down and negotiate -- instead, they extended the theater of conflict, and they applied technology to it. In the end, all sides were, in Junger's term, totally mobilized.

Well, this idea has an intuitive appeal, and a lot of theoreticians of war took it as the model of what 20th century war was all about. But if we look at Junger's model and we apply it to the second World War, we'll find a discrepency between theory and practice.

What, after all, happened at the end of World War I? The powers that were completely mobilized in the West -- France and Russia -- suffered a near revolution and a real revolution. Germany also suffered an internal collapse. The information provided by the casualty count was undisguisable, and eventually a saturation point was reached among the civilian population.
What happened at the end of World War II? Something a little odd, really. There was no internal revolt in either Germany or Japan against the war to the very end. If the populations were really totally mobilized, you would think that the World War I scenario would happen again.

I think it didn't because the partisans of total mobilisation missed something. When you read Speer about Hitler, or general histories of the war, one of the striking things about his leadership of the war was that he tried to cushion total mobilisation. Again and again he refuses to ration a product or do something to disturb the domestic German population even though, theoretically, this is the most logical military thing to do.
Why?
Perhaps the reason is the Nazi leadership did not want to make the mistake the German high command made in World War I - they did not want to totally mobilize the masses. Instead, they wanted to preserve a buffer zone of everydayness, so that majority of the population could live at some plausible disconnect from the war. Of course, the population really couldn't, not with the bombardment of the cities, but Hitler's gesture, here, should not be dismissed. The history of the West since World War II shows, if anything, a tendency to segmented mobilization. This is, of course, partly because of the parameters of the Cold War -- the two sides were defined by their production of nation-destroying armaments . But it is also because the legitimacy of any nation that conducts war under conditions of total mobilisation, or risks appearing to the population as willing to pursue that course, is placed in hazard. The Vietnam war, with its draft and its increasingly visible effect on the US economy, is a case in point.
We have, at the beginning of the 21st century, achieved a convergence of technological distance and segmented mobilisation that has brought about this situtation: the US, and other modern economic powers -- France, Britain -- can conduct wars without even disturbing domestic everydayness. Although nineteenth century powers experimented with this kind of war -- it was, in fact, the heart of the colonial adventure -- the World War I example has weighed so heavily in the mindset of military thinkers that the regime of segmented mobilisation -- the ability of a nation to seem perfectly at peace, to preserve its Alltaglichkeit without flaw - while making war - has grown up pretty much theoretically unperceived.

This puts other less advanced powers in a quandary. A state like Libya, for example, that challenges the United States can be so disabled that it will not be able to sustain its challenge, and might be reduced in the way it sustains its everydayness. A state like Afghanistan is really in the same position.

But... state's like Afghanistan, that are run more like criminal enterprises than like states -- with an adhoc collection of armed bands -- have one paradoxical advantage. They can hook up with those organizations that can risk attacking the everydayness of the great powers. They can even melt into them. This happened in Somalia. The attack on the WTC, whatever else it was, felt, and was perceived to be, warlike. There are those that argue that it was criminal, but perhaps Mary Kaldor is correct to suppose that the line between criminality and war has to be re-drawn in the era of New Wars.

Anyway, I should have taken off the mask of desinvolture yesterday. Sorry.

Remora

Lag time.

Let history show that while the bombs and cruise missiles were falling on Kabul, I, Roger Gathman, was doing the two step with a friend to the music of B.B. King at the Ausin Blues Festival.


The crowd at the festival, when we got there in the afternoon, was subdued. I hadn't listened to the radio or read the newspapers that morning, deciding, in a fit of absent minded good will, to make a lemon pound cake instead. Lemon pound cake, alas, was verboten - the fascists at the entrance sniffed it out like I was smuggling in cocaine, and quickly scotched my gesture as the shabby anti-capitalist ploy it was. The order of the day was, get your food at the booths for a considerable markup, or else. Who was I to think that somehow, at a blues concert, we could have a brief glimmer of coolness? So the whole cake had to go briskly into the trash. The musicians -- including Stevie Ray Vaughn's old group, Double Trouble - played to a field that was weirdly divided between seats and blankets -- with the seats a higher price. Although this probably paid for the lineup, it had the disadvantage of collecting the most geriatric and mute section of the audience in the key position right before the stage. It was as if the music had to traverse an acre of vacuum before hitting the groovers in the blanket section. By nightfall, however, we had all agluttinated into one throbbing mass, and even the geriatrics made a show of rushing the stage for Buddy Guy, throwing caution to the wind.

I heard about the attack from one of our party, but our discussion of it was truncated. Who wanted to discuss it?

And I still find myself in an odd position, at least for me: I have nothing to say.

This isn't just emotional exhaustion. I have nothing to say, partly, because we really dont know what the engagement in Afghanistan is like. If this war is anything like our two previous military outings, in Kosovo and Iraq, what we have to say now will form around erroneous perceptions and half understood information. After all, can any of my readers really envision Kabul? There's a lag time in modern war - while the weapons have become technically much more real time, benefiting tremendously from computer systems that have revolutionized the dart game between the world, always a vast target, and the shooters, the long distant manipulation of war means that, in a real political sense, we - and I include here Washington decision-makers - know less about what is going on than we did before. When damage is a relationship between the oh too weak and yielding flesh and the de-humanized system of delivery, a vital feedback is cut out of the system. That vital feedback is -- traditional military casualties. It is hard to imagine that this war will not be fought by infantry, in the end, rather than navy cannon tenders and bombadiers, so this might not be true. But we are learning that old style war, with its piles of battlefield bodies, evolved a feedback system that is lacking in newstyle war. Those bodies were markers of committment by both sides, and the feedback was about just how strong the committment was. Old style war contained, in other words, a system of internal limits. Newstyle war contains different limits. The lag time I am talking about is more intense. Those decisions that limit and shape aggression, when concentrated utterly on targetting rather than mobilization, make us spectators instead of participants. That this war might have its greatest effect in Indonesia, as the Washington Post reported this morning, is something that, as spectators and decision-makers, we don't expect or understand. In other words, the limits of war, on one side, have been pushed out, but on the other side, the side of the less technologically advanced recievers of our glorious weaponry, the response has been to make war viral -- to spread it by low tech means in many places.

All of which means -- I have nothing to say.

Check out, however, what John Lloyd has to say about Berlusconi's famous remark about Western Civilization being superior to Islam. Ah, Western civilization is such a good idea that we should try it some time, as Oscar Wilde or Mohatma Gandhi said. I'll say more about the Italian Prez, the current Orlando Furioso of Western Civ later.

New Statesman - Focus

Remora

Gretchen Morgenstern, how do I love thee?

In the nineties, I used to read Tom Byron's articles in the New York Observer as my guide to what was going on in the world of Money. He was wry, he was sardonic, he was on top of bullshit, he was having a great time, as the bubble inflated, pecking away at some of the peculiar intellectual corruption that creeps into eras of enthusiasm.

Let me count the ways...

And then, for a while, I was writing for Ken Kurson's Green magazine on business. Reviewing books that were, broadly, business oriented. So I immersed myself in business journalism, and I discovered -- not shockingly -- that business journalism is mostly bad. On a daily basis, the most erroneous news and views can be found on your local business section. The reaason is simple. Whereas reporters covering politicians are allowed to have a healthy dislike for politicians, no such critical distance is allowed between biz reporters and your neighborhood confidence men. So biz reporting becomes mainly rolling out the conventional wisdom.

I love thee to the heights, and depths...

Looking around for models, I was struck by the much higher quality of British reporting and reporters. My favorite book during this time was Devil Take The Hindmost, by Edward Chancellor, the Financial Times journalist -- still a scorching look at the Efficient Markets Theory which is behind most legislation on banking and investment. I also fell in love with Frozen Desire, John Buchan's extended meditation on money. Unfortunately, as a columnist and reporter, Buchan isn't as good. I know -- several biz books I reviewed, he also reviewed. And my reviews were deeper. It isn't that I'm an egotist -- actually, I found that surprising. Buchan knows a lot more than me about how markets work. He is just not willing to go all out on an occasional piece.

.... and breadths my soul can reach....

Now, the reporter to read, oh, not just read, to fall head over heels for, is Gretchen Morgenstern. She is the NYT's shining star -- although I wonder how many people have noticed that? She's been consistently on the money for the past two years. Her Sunday pieces are so fine, so fine -- the bleak vision in the background, but never too bleak, never black on black, the contrarian mistake of such as James Grant, and, surpremely, with the consciousness, the full knowledge, of who she is quoting in the foreground. Most biz reporting goes wrong by going to all the usual suspects -- quoting the hot guru or the available analyst of the moment. And these people have an agenda, mes freres. With Gretchen, you know that she knows. She is so SMART.

Another thing -- biz reporters are encouraged to be lazy -- the positive spin has no downside, I guess that's the management idea. So they often put together information like a committee of the blind weaving a quilt --patches go in no particular pattern. But oh my brothers and sisters, read today's column by G.M. and watch how beautifully she does numbers. Numbers are the bane and wonder of biz reporting. If you don't know how to put them together, it is like listening toa child play chopsticks -- a painful experience. But G.M, the beauteous G.M., knows that the numbers aren't bullshit -- a too hasty nominalistic view. Rather, you have to know something about your categories, and your context, before the numbers start to sing. Some people simply figure that out. God bless the old crook, it was Michael Milken's genius, in the seventies, to figure out the numbers on high risk bonds. He was right, although this doesn't mean he didn't abuse his power, and that he got off easy for what he did to the economy.

So, this is my song of love -- which shows those skeptics out there that I do have a heart. And Gretchen rules it.
.

Remora

There's an outstandingly dumb op-ed piece in the nyt today The 40-Year War Someone named Bill Keller has grabbed the wrong analogy and rides it to its frothing conclusion.

The analogy is that we are in the New Cold War. He gets rid of the inconvenient fact that, really, we aren't this way "There is, of course, no Soviet Union of terrorism, but as John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of cold-war historians, has been telling his classes at Yale since Sept. 11, there are striking parallels."

Striking parallels between a world wide clash between two nuclear armed nations and a disparate group of terrorists scattered about the Middle East with, at most, maybe 10 to 15,000 agents? Right. The striking parallel is between the thirst for some grand, unified thing like a Cold War among deans of cold war history and Georgetown cocktail diplomats. Actually, there is a parallel with an earlier 'war' in American history. That war, against the Barbary Pirates, was an easy victory. America's confrontation with terrorists is, similarly, a confrontation with a loosely organized group that relies on a context of sympathizers to retreat, and the low tech advantages of ambush to attack. The war against the pirates, in the Western Hemisphere, lasted two hundred years. It was never completely won, but piracy diminished because it became inconvenient for the states that had once sponsored it -- England and France -- and the object of piracy -- mainly the Spanish gold fleet -- became more of a cost to attack.The Barbary Pirates fell because they were easily located and routed.
Of course, piracy is ultimately driven by economics. Terrorism is driven by ideology. In that sense, only, one can find a Cold War parallel. As for the current salivating over the 'coming security state' -- I'll believe it when I see it. So far, we haven't even agreed to secure, at a minimum level, airports, although we were quick to secure the finances of airlines. I do sometimes wonder at the hysteria of intellectuals, who so much want there to be a moment beyond which 'everything is changed,' whether to satisfy their libertarian nightmares or their authoritarian daydreams. Those moments happen, no doubt. So far, though, the indicators are that the WCT attack wasn't one of them. Compare it to, say, the war on drugs, which kicked into high gear in the 80s after the death of basketball star Len Bias. You might think this is a grossly distorting comparison -- the WCT attack is certainly one of the great atrocities of our time. Alas, the shadows thrown by historic events can't be predicted by their gross emotional weight. While Bias' death kicked-started a disasterous set of laws punishing drug use, which in turn had a massive effect on American society, giving us proportionately one of the highest percentages of incarcerated people on earth, what has the WCT assault done? I see no comparable change in the domestic political landscape. TThere is a great desire for some great change, that is true. We want, somehow, to do something tthat is appropriately monumental as a sign of respect for the 6000 who died. But desire, here, has not yet found an object. As for the international landscape, Afghanistan can not long stay at the center of the world. All bets are off if Ben Laden is not captured or killed, but I'd certainly be cautious about predicting a forty year "Cold War."

Skip this post, it was an accident.

Remora

In these days of shadow war and shadow recession, the Bush administration is suddenly turning on a Keynsian dime -- or is it 120 billion dollars? with a vengeance. Question is: does this mean that the reign of Schumpeter, of creative destruction, was all a big mistake?

The Web, in its wisdom, offers up a digital festschrift in honor of Peter Drucker that contains Drucker's essay, Modern Prophets: Schumpeter and Keynes?

It's a brilliant piece. I disagree with Drucker's summary dismissal of Keynsian economics, which makes especial use of two time periods and, at least as he glides over the 81-82 period, is magisterially unfair; on the other hand, Drucker draws a mean geneology. He does net the connections between Keynes and the whole classical school, and unlike other conservative economists, gives the devil (aka Marx) his due as an economist. But since Drucker's heart is in Schumpeter's differance; the meat of the piece is laying out, with maximum compression, what Schumpeter's work is all about.

Here's two grafs about Schumpeter that are worth reading even if you don't follow my link to the piece (but do -- it is the weekend, right? And there's a 120 billion dollar economics proposal floating around D.C. And, like, that's a chunk of change. It makes, what, four Gates. Which I do believe should be some kind of official metric).

"Classical economics considered innovation to be outside the system, as Keynes did, too. Innovation belonged in the category of "outside catastrophies" like earthquakes, climate, or war, which, everybody knew, have profound influence on the economy but are not part of economics. Schumpeter insisted that, on the contrary, innovation - that is, entrepeneurship that moves resources from old and obsolescent to new and more productive employments - is the very essence of economics and most certainly of a modern economy.


He derived this notion, as he was the first to admit, from Marx. But he used it to disprove Marx. Schumpeter's Economic Development does what neither the classical economists nor Marx nor Keynes was able to do: It makes profit fulfill an economic function. In the economy of change and innovation, profit, in contrast to Marx and his theory, is not a Mehrwert, a "surplus value" stolen from the workers. On the contrary, it is the only source of jobs for workers and of labor income. The theory of economic development shows that no one except the innovator makes a genuine "profit"; and the innovator's profit is always quite short-lived. But innovation in Schumpeter's famous phrase is also "creative destruction." It makes obsolete yesterday's capital equipment and capital investment. The more an economy progresses, the more capital formation will it therefore need. Thus what the classical economists - or the accountant or the stock exchange - considers "profit" is a genuine cost, the cost of staying in business, the cost of a future in which nothing is predictable except that today's profitable business will become tomorrow's white elephant. Thus, capital formation and productivity are needed to maintain the wealth-producing capacity of the economy and, above all, to maintain today's jobs and to create tomnorrow's jobs."

This is the shit. But it's implications for understanding business unfold when one understands that innovation can be tied to multifarious forms of profit-making -- including using the power of the State in various ways, from promoting regulation to using the judicial power, to make money. This simple fact of business life is systematically overlooked by the right and most of the left, who define themselves with regard to a false picture of state-private enterprise interactins.

Drucker goes on to talk about how WWI monetized economies. Read the essay. When the Web offers you stuff like this for free, you have to admit, it is pretty cool.

Remora
Sometimes you come upon a fact that you know has an essayistic depth to it, if you only had the time, or the mental capacity, to write the essay. For instance: last night I read this anecdote about Hans Christian Andersen. Since he lived in fear of awakening in a coffin, "he always carried a card with him saying, "I am not really dead," which he put on the dressing table whenever he stayed at a hotel abroad, to prevent some careless doctor from wrongly declaring him dead." -- Buried Alive, by Jan Bondeson.
Now the Walter Benjamin in me takes that as an image applicable to every modernist artist -- didn't they all carry with them, at least metaphorically, some card saying 'I'm not really dead?' And what kind of sentence is that, anyway? Who, after all, is the speaker? What kind of truth claims can the dead make? There's a good reason that wills begin with a declaration of health -- we only trust the living.

Remora
Did you know that war reporters have their own association? Well, now you do. This link is to an article by Michael Griffin laying out the depressing Afghan specs: a famished country, bickering warlords with onerous pasts, and the Taliban, a far from medieval creation -- as everybody likes to call it. It is, instead, an ultra-modern creation, a faith based militia wrung from the despair of the poor.
Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Griffin's assessment of the Northern alliance sounds alarmingly like those groups that the US propped up to resist Saddam H. in Iraq. They are simply without a vision, or any support beyond the money they can get from somebody to pass around. . Rabanni, one would think, would have learned a few things by being dumped by the Taliban army. Last graf, and one hopes that the US is taking this to heart:

"And they are far from unanimous in supporting Zahir Shah, the former king, as the UN-recognised president, Rabbani, has bluntly dismissed any suggestion that the monarchy should be restored, while the Uzbek, Tajik and Shia have little loyalty to a Pashtun king who has spent the toughest years of the war in an Italian villa."

Dope.
Let's talk about airport security.
Not a hot issue for yours truly, until recent unpleasant events sort of put it right under my nose. And yours. We all got a deep whiff of it.

I interviewed Adam Gopnick yesterday, for a Chronicle profile. In the course of the interview, we agreed that one of the ironies of the WTC assault was that it might signal the end of privatization. The irony, here, is that will to privatize is reaching its limit, and perhaps retreating, under a president who is more committed to privatizing the commons than any president we have ever had. Or at least any president since Herbert Hoover.

Economists are peculiarly prone to hubris. The Keynsian school in the sixties were vocal in their claim that they could micro-manage the national economy with little more than a slide rule (remember slide rules?) and up until 1969 this looked to be the case. The neo-liberal school of the nineties were making the same claim of mastery. This time the idea was confining political intervention in the economy to whatever Alan Greenspan decided was the case. And privatize electricity, water, transport, prisons, and just, hell, all government services. In both cases, what broke the back of the claim was the neglected political side of political economies. As the stock market slips away from the New Economy dream of Dow 30,000! - ah, James Glassman's bestseller, a true nineties monument! -- we have two great events in the field -- the California Power Crisis and the hijacking of four planes -- which seem to mark a moment.

But the politics of each event is confusing. In the case of the hijackings, the kneejerk reaction of the Bush Whitehouse -- the plan to shuffle money to the airlines -- is starting to have, I think, a subliminal political effect, because it is an extension of the 90s exception to the party line that free markets are self-regulating, in line with Greenspan's doctrine of "too big to fail." While the airlines throw their employees out the window without parachutes (reserving the golden parachutes for their management), Washington has been throwing public money at the airlines. So what does the public get in return? Does it get safety, at least?

No. The short answer is no. The long answer is that the security at airports and on airlines is still in the hands of the cheapest solution -- the temp guards, and the absurd proposition that pilots not only do the flying, but operate as tackles for any passenger problem as well.

Here's the NYT story:
Bush Differs With Bill Over U.S. Role in Screening

Two grafs that limn the politics of the thing:
"The federalization bill was drafted by Senators Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and John McCain of Arizona, the committee's senior Republican. Mr. Hollings said today that he was not likely to back down.
"When the president privatizes the Border Patrol, air traffic controllers and the F.B.I.," the senator said, "then I will privatize screeners."

But in its draft, the administration argues that federalizing all or most passenger and baggage screeners would require the government to create a "new federal entity, in excess of 20,000 employees." The Senate legislation "would create insurmountable transitional difficulties that would further threaten and possibly ground the aviation system," the proposal says."

Now, Senator Hollings is being rather hypocritical, since he was the New Democrat's new democrat, and has never before made a fuss about, say, privatizing prisons -- which is at least as dangerous as privatizing "the FBI" (and the record of the FBI is such that I wouldn't hold it up as a shining example of a successful government organization). But the emotion, which had never before been injected into the issue, except by the Free Marketeers, is now present on the other side.
For the best article on the shabby state of airport security, see this New York magazine piece, by Robert Kolker.

Remora
Interesting article about the fall of SwissAir from a Swiss point of view:
Largeur.com [ Article - ATTACK ON SWITZERLAND - Les banques et la fin de Swissair ]

Last graf, explaining that Swiss banks, even though profitable, decided to pull the plug on their nation's airline, sounds an interesting premonitory note:

A la place des banques (grandes et petites, al�maniques ou genevoises), je ne me r�jouirais pas trop. Le flinguage de Swissair �tait pratiquement achev� quand est intervenue la catastrophe du 11 septembre. On sait qu'elle a d�clench� chez les Am�ricains une crise de phobie du secret bancaire. On a vu vendredi le Conseil de s�curit� de l'ONU voter au pas de course et � l'unanimit� une r�solution demandant la transparence des op�rations bancaires pour lutter contre le terrorisme. Si cette fureur inquisitoriale ne retombe pas comme un souffl� � ce qui est possible �, la banque suisse sera appel�e � vivre des heures tr�s sombres.

If I were in the banks' place (the small ones and the great ones, german or genevan), I wouldn't be celebrating. The wasting of Swissaire had practically been achieved when the catastrophe of the 11th September happened. As we all know, that launched, among the Americans, a veritable phobic reaction to banking secrecy. Friday the UN Security council voted as an agreed upon item, unanimously, a resolution demanding transparency in banking operations for fighting against terrorism. If this inquisitorial furor doesn't pass like a breath of air -- which is possible -- the swiss banking establishment will be called upon to lives some pretty dark hours.

Remora

Lately my friend Don has been driving me mildly crazy by praising some articles I've written. Why would this drive me crazy? Because the more he praises them, the more I seem to hear him saying, I stink as a writer, but these articles he likes are an exception. Probably paranoia on my part, but Don likes to refer to the habit I have of multifariously referring -- which the implication here, folks, is that I cultivate an arcane set of names and facts that nobody knows. And why don't they know them? because, really, they are unimportant.

Now, I'm a belles lettres type of guy, I admit. And I like to think my writing is in communication with the great works of the past. It is what Breton meant by vases communicants, right? Oh oh, I'm doing it again, aren't I? Maybe I just don't get out enough. Anyway, I was raised in late eighties academe, where intertextuality was groovy, and that stuck with me. Actually, I like to think that I write the way Joseph Cornell did his boxes -- out of his intense loneliness, out of the garbageheap of Western culture, he produced these odd little worlds of pingponging signifiers. In any case, Don has emphasized that he liked my article on terrorism in the Statesman because it was very clear. He emphasized clear. The usual Gathman murkiness, thick as squid ink, was absent.

Talking about esoteric references -- there is a big storm around the Net about the W3C, the governing body (somehow) for the www, changing its rules on standards. I've read several articles on this topic, and have not the faintest idea what they are talking about. That doesn't mean have no opinion; of course I have an opinion. Ignorance has never stopped me from sticking my nose in other people's business. The issue is, apparently, that the big guns like Microsoft are after the W3C to allow the standards to subserve patent law. What that means, concretely, I can't imagine. But I know that if Microsoft is for it, and it means extending our rotten intellectual property laws in another domain, IT MUST BE A BAD IDEA.

Remora

While all eyes are clapped on the Persian Gulf region right now, there are events brewing in the Caspian Region. Olivier Roy claims that the Caspian is set to become the world's second largest supplier of petroleum. I recommend Crude Maneuvers, his (pre-WCT) article detailing the strategies at play in getting the oil out of the Caspian region. There is one bit I found particularly piquant: the importance of the semantics of the term, Sea.

"Russia and Iran have some interests in common. The first concerns the legal status of the Caspian. For Moscow and Tehran, it is a lake while Azerbaijan, strongly supported by the USA and more discreetly by Turkmenistan, regards it is an inland sea. The stakes are clear: if the Caspian is a lake, then its resources would have to be divided equally among the surrounding states, whatever the extent of their territorial waters. If it is a sea, its resources would be divided according to a state's territorial waters, which are determined by projecting the length of a nation's littoral out into the Caspian.

For obvious reasons Russia and Iran, which occupy the two narrow ends of the great rectangle which is the Caspian, argue in favour of a lake; Azerbaijan is for marine status, which would give it the bulk of the offshore reserves. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are instinctively pro-sea but, for political reasons, have been forced into the pro-lake camp. On 12 November 1996 Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan signed a protocol in Ashgabat affirming that the territorial waters of the Caspian states extended only 45 miles into the Caspian waters, the remainder of which would be exploited in a consortium. Azerbaijan has refused to sign. "

Ah, regional ontology meets geography in a Smackdown of epic proportions! Here's a game for you analytic philosophers out there -- analyze 'sea' as an intensional object. The winner gets a couple trillion dollars.

The objection to relativism, and its near cousin, nominalism, is that there are facts beyond our conventions upon which those conventions are ultimately based. I think that must be true in one sense; but in another sense, the "beyond" in which the facts are located is obscure, and spelling it out has always deepened, rather than clarified, that obscurity. To paraphrase Hegel, it has painted gray in black. Perhaps a better way of looking at the duality between 'fact/event' and description is to acknowledge that facts are weak things. They don't impinge on us so clearly as to exclude the possibility of dispute about any single fact. At the same time, disputes can't do without a lot of facts -- a whole pattern of them. Which implies, does it not, that there might not be any single fact, but that facts come in patterns.

I wonder if this is ever going to come before some International Court. And I wonder how I can volunteer to be an expert witness.

Leon Wieselthier, the book editor at TNY, fancies himself a sort of denunciatory prophet, but when I read him I think less of Ezekial than of some apoplectic clubman pounding his fork and knife on the table to get more dessert. His prose exudes the indignation of the stuffed at the slowness of the service. He's a man in search of someone to fire- ergo, he must be important.




His latest is on a topic that has been perennially hot with right wing types since the death of outrage killed the fellatio impeachment: irony as a sign of social degeneration.



"The man who edits Vanity Fair has ruled that the age of cynicism is over. He would know. I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz....The on dit has moved beyond the apple martini. It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. "



Yes, Wieselthier and his homeboys (linemen of the county, hard working waitresses in Wichita Falls, and insurance men from Salt Lake City -- Wieselthier keeps in touch! He might read Isaiah Berlin in his working hours, but he's not above slapping the big shoulders of large swathes of the American populace and buying them a Bud!) are gonna be deep for us. And we are going to like it. It is going to be fashionable. Although wasn't the point that fashionable is bad? One of those paradoxes, I guess. A sign of depth if there ever was one.



Wieselthier, doing a fair imitation of Abe Rosenthal (who himself used to do a fair imitation of those crazier characters in Saul Bellow novels -- except that you never got the feeling that Rosenthal was making a reference -- he owned that seriousness, so pleasing to Wieselthier, of the mildly deranged), goes on to pick apart the latest New Yorker. He's especially incensed at Adam Gopnick for saying the smell, the famous smell of the Towers, is reminiscent of smoked mozzarrella. God knows why this was a red flag to Wieselthier's charging bull, but he focused in on that mozzarella. For Wieselthier, that smoked cheese was the sign of just this horrible cynicism that even the great Satan of the Vanity Fair is backing off from, now that that mag's discovered evil. Evil's important, of course. Gotta have evil. It's an anchoring thing. Bring me a good honest piece of cheddar cheese, you can almost hear Wieselthier saying. Or Swiss, but none of that damn gruyere, if you please. The French, as a fellow anti-ironist, Michael Kelly, has previously pointed out in one of his Washington Post columns , are as prone to irony and cynicism as a junkie is to hepatitis C.



So, let's talk a little about seriousness, shall we? A long time ago, when I was a philosophy graduate student, I actually wrote a whole master's report on seriousness. I took the against it position.



. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, makes an interesting distinction, a social distinction, between irony and buffoonery:



"As to jests. These are supposed to be of some service in controversy. Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents' earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in which he was right. Jests have been classified in the Poetics. Some are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people. '



I think seriousness (deep seriousness, of course) is also a matter of social coordinates, but coordinates so sunk into the pattern of everyday life that we don't see them. Why, do you think, is there no one word to cover the semantic field of seriousness? Besides seriousness, which is one of those non-words, those terms that attach to a -ness out of linguistic despair. Sincerity doesn't do it. The existentialists preferred authenticity, but that doesn't do it either.

Seriousness is harder to think about then irony because seriousness is the horizon which delineates the space in which irony becomes a possibility. Sartre has an interesting passage on seriousness in Being and Time:
'The serious man is of the world and has no resource in himelf. He does not even imagine any longer the possibility of getting out of the world, for he has given himself the type of existence of the rock, the consistency, the inertia, the opacity of being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. It is obvious that the serious man at bottom is hiding from himself the consciousness of his freedom: he is in bad faith and his bad faith aims at presenting himself to his own eyes as a consequence; everything is a consequence for him, and there is never any beginning. That is why he is concerned with the consequences of his own acts. Marx stated the original dogma of the serious when he asserted the priority of the object over the subject. Man is serious when he takes himself for an object."

Well, I'm not sure Carter Graydon, the editor of Vanity Fair, is quite up to the Marxian task of seriousness, but certainly the magazine has done a splendid job of taking man and woman as objects. Or let me change that -- actually, it has taken them as commodities, which is a whole superstructure above the object, a parody of freedom, in Sartre's sense. For the Vanity Fair Covergirl, responsibility is merely a form of clever contractual scripting, a triumph of one lawyer over another. These are objects that are free to be traded, but real freedom -- the freedom to choose your price - is sytematically denied them. They can only affect their price by effecting the demand for them as objects, or the supply of them as objects, and they know, to the camera flash, the contours of their possibility in that world. It is the parody of freedom, this tension between object and commodity. Wieselthier's call to seriousness is so bogus because it is attached to false and souped up theological terms (evil, for instance) as if these were somehow kept as rarities with the intellectual's Wunderkammer. Are you kidding me? Any reader of Vanity Fair knows that it provides a little bit of evil every month as regularly as a D.C. gourmet store provides bries. The evil murderer is a Vanity Fair special. The mass grave in lower Manhattan is a concentrated form of the serial mass grave provided by what, twenty years of murder stories set among the rich and the famous? Wieselthier does not understand the relationship between seriousness and Man, as Sartre puts it so 40ishly, as an object -- because he wants to jump to Man as a subject right away, evading the dialectical movement that would get him there, perhaps -- and for this reason, one can't really take his seriousness very seriously. It is, rather, self-satisfied outrage that views seriousness as a move in the game of power, and power in the very trivial, courtier's sense. Myself, I object to the moralism with which Sartre has infused the very idea of freedom, but I understand the disenchantment that makes a Covergirl take herself as a consequence. To be serious is to attempt a real valuation of your importance, to see it, finally, as a double relationship, on one hand between self and one's consciousness of self, on the other hand between self and Other. It is, in other words, to have a double consciousness both of one's extreme triviality and one's inability to ever fully emotionally accept that. In fact, in the end, the serious man always ends up ironizing his relationship to the world. Seriousness, as we all know, is a phase one grows out of.

Remora

Judicial Watch, a site whose motto is because no one is above the law! -- by which they mean, we'll smear people who are too famous to sue us for libel -- has aligned the decent impulses in my soul with a man I usually consider indecent ab ovo, George Bush I. But the mccarthyite association of GBI with everybody's archeterrorist, O. bin Laden,
Judicial Watch: Because no one is above the law!, is too ridiculous to stomach. Judicial Watch takes Bush's investment in a company in which bin Laden's family has invested as some absurd complicity with O. bin Laden himself. For those fans of the internicene Clinton wars, Judicial Watch was continually intruding itself into the public notice by dogging Clinton for such crimes as were attributed to him by the paranoid right. Using the same poor logic, they are going after GBI:

"Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker.) The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been �disowned� by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior Bush�s firm." If you read further in the article, you'll find that Judicial Watch, the public interest firm that spreads intellectual corruption like an infected rat spreads plague, has no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden's ties with his family's business haven't been cut. But witchhunting groups racial profiling happily through the Wall Street Journal don't care, really.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me at all if O. bin Laden did have money in the Carlyle group, but it wouldn't surprise me, either, if he had money in Judicial Watch -- the way investment has been freed up from those national agencies that wish to track it is pretty well known among real public interest groups.

Remora.
More about Thieu's passing - here's the first chapter of No Peace, No Honor. Larry Berman's book shows that the previous two schools of thought about the end of the Vietnam war are both wrong. Nixon's version was that Congress lost the war, by stripping him of his power to intervene after the 73 treaty was signed. The "decent interval" theory, of Frank Snepp - whose last book I reviewed here - is that the treaty was forged with the utmost cynicism by Kissinger and Nixon, fully conscious that under the terms of it, South Vietnam was doomed unless the US intervened, long distance, with the utmost brutality -- a futile brutality too, as would seem self-evident to anybody else.
Remember, though, this is the administration whose bombing planners in Cambodia didn't even have current maps of the place. Random bombing didn't bother them -- chances were you'd kill some enemy somewhere if you dropped enough tonnage of explosives.
Berman's interpretation is different:

"No Peace, No Honor draws on recently declassified records to show that the true picture is worse than either of these perspectives suggests. The reality was the opposite of the decent interval hypothesis and far beyond Nixon's and Kissinger's claims. The record shows that the United States expected that the signed treaty would be immediately violated and that this would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at acceptable cost was what Nixon and Kissinger anticipated from the so-called peace agreement. They believed that the only way the American public would accept it was if there was a signed agreement. Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. Just as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a pretext for an American engagement in South Vietnam, the Paris Accords were intended to fulfill a similar role for remaining permanently engaged in Vietnam. Watergate derailed the plan.

The declassified record shows that the South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and the United States disregarded key elements of the treaty because all perceived it was in their interest to do so. No one took the agreement seriously because each party viewed it as a means for securing something unstated. For the United States, as part of the Nixon Doctrine, it was a means of remaining permanently involved in Southeast Asia; for the North Vietnamese, it was the means for eventual conquest and unification of Vietnam; for the South Vietnamese, it was a means for securing continued support from the United States."

Air war. Nixon really was a visionary -- he realized that what America wanted was a war with zero American casualties. It took a while, but Clinton pulled it off in Kosovo. Of course, the question is: how long can you stick to that kind of policy?
Ah, the sickness of it, the sickness unto death.

Remora
Blues for President Thieu

He dead, as they said of Kurz. Except that he was not, like Kurz, a product of
some Western power shipped out to one of the dark places of the earth, as the colonial officers put it pretentiously on their various veranda.

What he was -- an obituary can't tell us that. In fact, in his adopted home town, Boston, the obituarist in the Globe has a surprisingly distant knowledge of where Nguyen Van Thieu came from. Here's an astonishing graf:
Boston Globe Online / Obituaries / Nguyen Van Thieu, 78

"Born April 5, 1923, the youngest child of a struggling farmer, Mr. Thieu worked in rice fields as a boy and went to a French Catholic high school. At 23, he briefly joined Ho Chi Minh's anticolonial struggle, but he left the movement that would become his enemy and joined the army of South Vietnam."
Simple math should have made the Globe deadhead re-read his factsheet. How could he have briefly joined the Viet Minh in 1946, and then joined the army of South Vietnam, a nation which emphatically didn't exist until ten years later? It is, perhaps, appropriate that in his passing, America add one more white lie to the pile we graciously bestowed upon him when he was the "democratically' elected ruler of our protectorate. America suffered from short term memory loss in Vietnam. We kept forgetting the pasts of the leaders we would periodically dredge up to lead our forces against the alien Ho Chi Minh -- we had that problem with Marshal Key, our favorite for a bit, who had the embarrassing habit of praising Hitler in public; and we certainly had that problem with Thieu. Thieu didn't really have a problem with his own place in the world. He had no quarrel with democratic theory, he just didn't see how it applied to him. In another time and place, he might have made a passable dictator. He wasn't overly brutal; I'd put him in the mid-brutal range. If he disappeared political opponents, didn't the PRI, in Mexico, do the same? Hell, didn't even Mayor Daley want to? Certainly among our allies he wasn't even in the league with, say, Sukarno. He simply wasn't the knight to lead our crusade, so the American government lied about it. They lied stenuously, they lied foolishly, and they even came up with prop elections, wonderfully managed even as we were supporting the Phoenix program in the villages. The cognitive disconnect was total. He wasn't lionhearted. He was instinctively anti-communist, and he was uncomfortably allied with some of the shabbiest persons (Nixon and the ever unbearable Kissinger) to ever run an American administration, which in the end undid him.

Remora
Paul Krugman is not my favorite economist. I think of him as the Economist from Glib -- he's absorbed monetary theory into a highly attenuated Keynsianism, resulting in that sweet sleep of reason, Clintonomics.

However, his article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday
is definitely worth reading, even if its potted history of How we learned to Make Macroeconomic Policy seems pretty suspect to me. He uses a military/ sports metaphor to adumbrate our two "lines of defense" against a Depression -- which, by the way, he defines wholly in terms of consumer demand. To quote from his article:

"The first line of defense against an economic slump is monetary policy: the ability of the central bank -- the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan -- to cut interest rates. Lower interest rates are supposed to persuade businesses and consumers to borrow and spend, which creates new jobs, which encourages people to spend even more, and so on. And since the 1930's, this strategy has consistently worked. Specifically, interest-rate cuts have pulled the United States out of each of its big recessions over the past 30 years -- in 1975, 1982 and 1991. "

...
"Behind the first line of defense is a second line, fiscal policy. If cutting interest rates isn't enough to support the economy, the government can pump up demand by cutting taxes or increasing its own spending. "

Notice the dates in the first quoted paragraphs. You'll notice that they correspond with the dawning of the age of Friedman (truly the age of acquarius for neo-classical economists)-- and that Krugman is not counting the slowdown of 59-60, or even the slowdown of 73-74. Moreover, it is, to say the least, not evident that interest-rate cuts "pulled" the United States out of these recessions. Interest rate cuts are responses to economic slowdowns, certainly, but the experience of, for instance the stagflation-slowdown that started in 1980 doesn't have the electric switch characteristics Krugman wants to convey. As a corrective to Krugman's views, William Greider's The Temple, which is a journalistic account of Fed decision-making, is recommended. I recommend it the more given Krugman's notorious contempt for Greider.

The problem with his analysis is in what he takes to be the second line of defense. Notice how he confines fiscal policy, in the traditional time-honored fashion of economists, in terms of discretionary spending over a short-term time frame. What is missing, here, are long-term governmental fiscal structures - such as college loans, FHA, on-going infrastructural support for highways, R&D, the environment, and the rest of it -- which are, I would contend, the enduring vector of government intervention in the economy which, as a structure (apart from its yearly budgeting) has generated a stabilizing influence on the economy. It is upon these structures that the American economy has built an internal consumer market fueled by debt. In his whole article, Krugman never mentions consumer debt, but it is crucial to understanding how our present economy differs from the economy of the 30s, and how the dangers of recession differ, too.

However, even if I find Krugman's frame of analysis inadequate, his rehearsal of the woes to which the Japanese economy is presently heir is pretty good, even if his idea that America, unlike Japan, has a much smarter central bank is pretty funny. This idea is widespread among American economists, and it has its roots in vanity. They recognize kindred spirits on the board of the Fed -- hell, they are kindred spirits, coming from the same universities, publishing in the same journals, using the same models. This doesn't really mean they are smarter. This simply means they share the same delusions -- like the Glass family in Salinger's short stories. You can only be so smart in economics, because, pace Krugman, it is not and never will be a positive science.

Remora
Speaking of the bulletin of the atomic scientists, there is a truly brilliant bit of reportage by Jessica Stern, listening to the Muj, from January of this year.

Meeting with the Muj | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Here's two grafs:

"As part of a research project on violent religious extremism, I have been interviewing Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim militants around the world for the last two years. Last June I returned to South Asia to visit the Line of Control, the always tense and often bloody border between Indian-held and Pakistan-held Kashmir. I wanted to meet with mujahideen and to learn more about Pakistan's radical madrisas, which churn out so many of the mujahideen, boys who court death in the name of god.
I also met with families of "martyrs," Pakistani boys who have lost their lives fighting in Kashmir. I had been communicating with a few mujahideen over the past two years, trying to understand what motivates them to become cannon fodder in what appears to be a losing battle."

Remora

Nice article in last month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Surveying the nuclear cities | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It makes more compelling reading, now, for obvious reasons. It is amazing how careless we are about the abandoned coral reefs of the Cold War -- the chemicals, germs, nuclear weapons, the stockpiles of Apocalypse.
Here's the final Graf:

"The results of Tikhonov�s study and the apparent conditions in the cities make it all the more difficult to understand the Bush administration�s move to cut funding for the Nuclear Cities Initiative, a U.S. program designed to help create new jobs in several of Russia�s nuclear cities. The administration favors reducing last year�s already reduced budget of $25 million to a request for only $6.6 million. Experts within the program question whether this sum is sufficient to maintain operations in even one of the cities, let alone expand to new areas. While congressional supporters will try to restore the budget to this year�s level, the lack of political support within the administration could threaten the very survival of the program."

Remora

I like Christopher Hitchens, even if sometimes I think he is batty. His latest blast at the "no-brain" pacifist left has produced some small echo, and it is definitely worth reading, even if I felt it was fueled by temper working on the nerve more than by the painstaking charcuterie of H.'s analytic intelligence at its best.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search

Especially as he lets loose in the penultimate paragraph, he loses his grip on what he usually does very well -- making sure that his invective is undergirded by a strict sense of definition:

"But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings - yes, even in the Pentagon."

Falwell and Robertson have become a rhetorical convenience of the unity crowd -- you invoke them, you invoke some lefty protesting against US policy, and you say, same dif. Well, that's not really true ( - and I have to make a sidenote here: I have a theory that Pat Robertson bullies the roly-poly Falwell, making him say awful things that Falwell wouldn't say otherwise -- it is a playground dynamic widespread among first graders. I remember once being bullied by Jacky Barnhart, when I was six, to swear on a Bible. Now, I'd been told that you couldn't swear on a Bible, or you'd go to hell. Surely I wasn't told this by my mother -- I think it was some schoolkid superstition I picked up somewhere. And I definitely knew, back in those days, that hell was a lurid and awful place. I swore anyway, not because Jacky would beat me up, but in order not to lose face with Jacky and his cohorts.). Two groups can oppose one action for completely different reasons, and one of those reasons can be irrational, and one can be rational. That should be obvious to CH, since his notorious opposition to Clinton put him in the same group as the Newt Gingriches of the world, but the content of his opposition was at the other end of the political spectrum from Newt's.

Similarly, the fascism with an Islamic face line works as a jibe directed against, say, Saddam Hussein, with his oily embrace of Allah in the period of the Gulf War and the consciously fascistic structure of the Ba'athist party, but not against the hijackers. There was nothing really fascistic about their tactics or motives -- the assault upon unarmed civilians, the invocation of God, the alarmingly childish, self-hypnotic memo released by the FBI last week (apparently composed to put steel in the spines of the slackers among them), reveal a mindset that the term 'fascism' simply doesn't describe.

CH thunders about the pacifist Chomsky -- Znet axis. He's been a consistent critic of that line since the Serbian invasion of Bosnia. But Hitchens own view of the extent to which American interventionism is justified has a Wilsonian tone that is annealed against reality by the rhetorical heat of its idealism. Hitchens takes the view, practically, that American soldiers have a historical role similar to Napoleon's soldiers, spreading the enlightenment, by force, over the cobwebbed principalities of Central Europe. To make this case, he has to overlook the reality of American interests, which is a pretty big blind spot. And so every use of American soldiers is sure to produce some disappointed thunder from Hitchens.Reality betrays theory, the oppressed Albanians become the terrorist and drug-running Albanians, the American soldiers show a disconcerting carefulness about their own hides, and enlightenment is stymied once more. To be fair, if Americans consistently pay out of their pockets a premium to sustain a military in gross disproportion to their real needs, it is easy to see someone thinking, why not take that military surplus value and use it to right wrongs? but History has not annointed the Yank as today's crusaders, to be shuffled about the planet when evil rears its head, because a, there is no support for that kind of thing in this country, and b, like the reallife crusaders, the Yank is more interested in the profit motive than liberte, egalite and fraternite. This isn't really to criticize. The bright side of the profit motive is that it operates like a brake against the perils of imperialism, however idealistic. Fighting for money has a way of being a self-limiting enterprise.

Remora

The news that Excite@home filed for bankruptcy should surprise nobody who watched them in the late nineties, taking on debt as if they were a real company. But it struck a nostalgic chord in my heart, so I went back to the ante-diluvian era and dug up this article on VC star John Doerr. Those who rely on biz journalism to tell a straight story should check it out:

Forbes.com: The Best VCs
Especially pause and linger on these two grafs, balancing the usual flattery of the wealthy with, in the next paragraph, that devastating list of companies. Each one either gone belly up or seriously damaged by the way they were initially financed:

"It is no longer possible to write simply about this veteran venture capitalist named John Doerr, so wrapped is he now in the mantle of myth and fable. He has become both the sign and the signifier of high tech venture capitalism, a metaphor for success, the synecdoche of the entire e-commerce era. That's a lot of freight to carry to the office in your PalmPilot each morning. Megalomaniacs are made from a lot less. But it is to Doerr's credit that he hasn't become a grotesque or a hectoring Mother Hubbard (though, with time, all his Democratic political work bears that risk).

The list of Doerr wins is itself a touchstone, like DiMaggio's major league record hitting streak--Compaq, Cypress, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Lotus, Amazon.com, Healtheon, Intuit, Excite@Home. Even Doerr's failures, like pen computing, have an epic, Homeric quality to them."

It's ... it's an Ozymandias moment, folks.