Remora

Limited Inc, predictably, is a fan of Naomi Klein -- or at least is a fan of the idea of Naomi Klein. Sometimes, though, we feel that Ms. Klein allows the writerly ocassion, as Henry James might have put it, to pass her by. This is what we felt about her column, for the LA Times, on Charlotte Beers, America's official Image-meister:

"As undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Charlotte Beers' assignment was not to improve relations with other countries but rather to perform an overhaul of the U.S. image abroad. Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she's built brands for everything from dog food to power drills."

Unsurprisingly, Charlotte Beers task, orientation, and administration are not to Klein's liking.

"So why, only five months in, does the campaign for a new and improved Brand USA seem in disarray? Several of its public service announcements have been exposed for playing fast and loose with the facts. And when Beers went on a mission to Egypt in January to improve the image of the U.S. among Arab "opinion-makers," it didn't go well. Muhammad Abdel Hadi, an editor at the newspaper Al Ahram, left his meeting with Beers frustrated that she seemed more interested in talking about vague American values than about specific U.S. policies. "No matter how hard you try to make them understand," he said, "they don't."

"The misunderstanding likely stemmed from the fact that Beers views the United States' tattered international image as little more than a communications problem. Somehow, despite all the global culture pouring out of New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, despite the fact that you can watch CNN in Cairo and Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, America still hasn't managed, in Beers' words, to "get out there and tell our story." In fact, the problem is just the opposite: America's marketing of itself has been too effective."

And the drums go drum drum drum. The discrepancy between the American reality, which is a pretty consistently pursued imperialism, and American rhetoric, is hauled out, and we fade Charlotte Beers to black. All honorable stuff. Yet Limited Inc feels a distinct sense of the cobbled together, the held back, in Klein's piece. When Charlotte Beers went before the senate during her nomination, Time magazine's Richard Stengel wrote:

"It would be easy � too easy � to make light of Charlotte Beers, the former big-time advertising exec recently named undersecretary of state for public affairs. The so-called "queen of branding" who helped promote Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben's Rice has now been assigned the job of helping to boost the U.S. image in the Muslim world."

Because a thing is easy does not mean it is not worth doing. Surely we should ask ourselves, were does this woman, this woman flying around the Middle East alienating Egyptian journalists,. come from, and why is she working for us, and why can't we make fun of her? According to an Economist piece, she once impressed a dog food client by eating dog food; she once impressed Sears execs by taking apart and putting together a power drill (she is apparently a woman of endless resources). She puts sweaters on her toy poodles and lounges around, apparently, with Martha Stewart, when Stewart is prepared to lounge.
This is the standard media identikit re Charlotte Beers.

Alan Rosenshine, in Advertising age, has risen to Stengel's call to seriousness, and delivers several solemnities about Beers' onerous task. He makes the point that we aren't selling our brand to terrorists. No, we aren't. We just aren't a-going to do that:

"Audience segmentation is a primary principle of branding. Terrorists and those who have turned hatred into violent fanaticism are not our audience. Their psyches are warped beyond any possibility of communication. Terrorists are criminals and enemies of civilization who deserve destruction in the name of justice and self-defense. The message of America must instead reach the many millions still in the process of being taught to hate us."


I'm glad that Rosenshine got that off his chest, but the interested by-stander has to disagree. Surely it would be cheaper to send Beers deep into the mountains of Afghanistan with an Uzi and letting her demonstrate to puzzled Al Quaeda execs stripping it and putting it back together again. She could also sample their simple fare, and get them rolling with her imitation of Martha confronting a badly done coq au vin. Instead, we waste her talents on Egyptian journalists. Even Beers seems to know that there's something hopelessly porkbarrel about her Nile tete-a-tetes. According to the NY Metro,

"Beers, for her part, seems to be busy managing expectations. Testifying before Congress, she recently characterized the propaganda war's goal as reaching young people. "It's the battle for the 11-year-old mind," she said, sounding ominously like someone who has decided that the 12-and-over demographic may already be a lost cause."

Actually, it isn't that the over 12 demographic is enfolded in the process of cult hatred. No, as any Piagetian psychologist can tell you, between the age of 11 and 12 the world begins to take on a cause and effect density. Bushiepoo, whose very ascension to the throne was in defiance of cause and effect, loses his aura of plausibility to the well tempered sixth grade mind. Best appeal to em while they are still in nappies.

Dope

Limited Inc was raised in the suburbs, but escaped those wastelands at the end of our larval stage. Still, sometimes there is a thing that calls us, a beckon in the sweet air, and we must go back to haunt those teen tedious reaches, those bloated wood and brick tents each on its own independent half to one acre� Well, really there isn�t, but for anthropological reasons we took off with a friend to explore Round Rock, Austin�s bedroom community, yesterday. The friend had romantic visions of Penny Lane, or at least the Cal-friendly colors of the Truman show, but we knew better. We knew that this is the South, after all, and that suburbs are where Yankees have traditionally coped with the South � by voting Republican, adopting Northern racism � a primness about language combined with a ferocity about money and who (and what color of who) it goes to � to Southern norms, and exuding around them, like the shell of some strange crustacean, that outlying reef of oddly monotonous shopping centers, among which old Southern remnants � the visibly unhygienic barbecue place, the commercially dubious shacks, usually sprinkled over with some disgusting grayish sludge of oil and rubber, somehow connected with the auto trade, the bakery outlets (white bread discounted) � exist in an uneasy symbiosis.

My friend, a product of Europe, had never taken a close and loving look at suburbia. Well, to the unaccustomed sensibility, it does come somewhat as a shock. She kept looking for waterfalls and greenery � Limited Inc never did find out where these inviting, though wavering, images came from. Alas, the only waterfalls to be found in the Round Rock area are artificially constructed, and usually involve railroad ties and some sprayer on an automatic timer. As for greenery, it has been a brown winter.

Paradise is getting everything you want � hell is the necessity of living with having gotten everything you want. Any teenager can tell you that. What makes America perpetually different is the p-to-h ratio � it is just at a different multiple from everywhere else. For three hundred years there�s been a bull market in paradise; but also, inexplicably, hell never disappears -- just take the next exit off the interstate if you want a taste of it. We Americans have produced the first real blackmail empire in world history � we have the weapons to end it all, and that armament has penetrated the pores of our very dreams. Assyrian lust for power, and the British conviction of our essential righteousness, this is a heady mixture. We like to think we are giants. But oh my friends, why, why, does all that power seems to leak away in the bungalows, at the end of the day? Why can one drive down the streets of Round Rock and feel something deadly, a tedium that seems to visibly weigh on the Dell Baseball Stadium, the HEB Grocery store, the Gatti�s Pizza Delivery place?

Remora

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.


That was, indeed, a curious incident, for those who have ears to hear (that there is nothing to hear) and eyes to see (that there is nothing to see). Well, campers, consider the curious incidents that await us in today's newspaper. One headline says, The surprise recovery is here. America is in great shape, happy days are here again, and Bushiepoo has avoided the curse of the house of Bush, which, before, has always gloomily exuded recession around its slimy walls. But what is this, Watson? Chap says Japan in deep recession, make that depression, with an incredible 4.5 percent drop in GDP. Curious. The stats the Financial Times packs into its first graf are heart stoppers:


"Japan's economy shrank in the fourth quarter of last year on falling exports and a plunge in capital spending, nudging the country into its longest recession since 1993, official data showed on Friday. Gross domestic product contracted 1.2 per cent in real terms between October and December compared with the previous quarter, and 4.5 per cent on an annualised basis. A 12 per cent drop in business investment undermined the benefits of an increase in consumer spending. "

On to today's mystery theater: why don't Japan's numbers bug us?

Perhaps, and here I am flying blind, it has to do with our decades long failure to pierce the Japanese market. This long deplored situation, in which the Japanese craftily avoid our meaty, beaty American products, stimulates periodic choler among our politicos, and the news story about some fantastically expensive thing in Japan that is cheap as water in Omaha and that we could be providing them with if only they didn't protect their farmers, retailers, industry, whatever. And this is a continuing scandal and a stumbling block to free traders. What free traders don't say, however, is that when the global economy is inter-connected, economic contagion is necessarily provided with routes to spread faster than if the global economy is, well, less inter-connected. Clearly, if the US economy depended on exporting to Japan, we would be in deep trouble. And we might well be in trouble with this recovery anyway. And -- to continue backpedalling - if we simulate an economy in which trade barriers with Japan had fallen, and the US was happily trading away with the Japanese, perhaps this kind of activity would re-compose our economy in such a way that its present state would be so different from its current state as to be unpredictible. All clever hypotheses, Watson. But the fact remains, Japan's troubles, so far, have left the U.S. relatively untouched. Given the extent of Japanese investment in this country, and given the size of the Japanese economy, the fact that Japan is doing a Titanic without sucking us into its wake is a mystery. I don't see any of the free traders out there, or the globalists, explaining it.

Remora

The Enlightenment was a great age for sympathy. The whole Scottish school, from Hume to Adam Smith, had spotted sympathy floating about in the culture and gone -- aha! Because the cultural sea, according to the best authorities, consisted of self interest -- wave after wave of the stuff -- so the question was, why was there morality at all? Sympathy was a respectable escape from self interest, without wholly being an escape. Besides, there is, in this idea, an agreeable dependence on some kind of narration. In fact, this moral elevation of sympathy surely fed into the later nineteenth century fascination with stories. First comes the moralist, then the novelist.

Hume, for instance, in his treatise on Human Nature, has this to say:

"We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is convey�d to the effects, and is actuated with a like emotion. Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, �tis certain, that even before it begun, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patient and assistants, wou�d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects. From these we infer the passions: And consequently these give rise to our sympathy."


Well, the NYT reports today on the terrible operations of modeling, and it is a nice little parable of the arousal of passion followed by its diminishment -- the limits of sympathy are the limits of my bank account, might be the moral. This week, as my trendy readers will surely know, is a great week for fashion in Milan -- one of the supreme rites, one of the ceremonies that holds together the universe. Guy Trebay, the NYT reporter, filed this account of an incident they should teach in intro to ethics:

"Midway through the Gucci show on Saturday, a young British model, Michelle DeSwarte, made her first exit, as entrances at fashion shows are called. She got about two-thirds of the way down the runway and staggered dramatically on a pair of four-inch heels before her ankles gave way."

The stumble created Humean gasps in the audience. We presume that a lot of mass infering was going on. It was the infering of an inference, if embarrassment be considered not a first level pain, but a second level pain -- a sort of sympathy with oneself. So it was already an intellectual effort, rather like reading a postmodern novel.

Hume was a man of abridged expectations. He did not expect the best from the human beast, and he was rarely disappointed. The effort of sympathy, its prolongation, is rather like reading to the end of a tedious story -- something we might do with some effort, once we have begun, but that very few will do if the tedium mounts too high (excepting us poor reviewers, who then attack -- our sympathy beyond eroded, actually transformed into malignancy). Well, our stumbling model stumbled again:

"Bret Easton Ellis pointed out in his novel "Glamorama" that, in objective terms, a model's job is not all that complicated. You have to look good and have the capacity to walk. Slick floors, fur rugs and weird and ill-fitting shoes are standard occupational hazards. All the same, people understand that things can go wrong. The reaction when Ms. DeSwarte fell the first time was mainly sympathetic. When she made a second exit and again crumpled to the runway, there was a widespread assumption among the spectators that they were watching a professional suicide."

Don't let it happen to you twice. The general sentiment from an audience a good third of whom have surely been treated, somewhere along the way, for addiction to one or another of our favorite candies. Isn't this, isn't this ... beautiful? The state of play of class relations emblematized in the stumble of a model in four inch heels. That is a lot of heel. Limited Inc is moved.

Remora

WP does the "on the one hand, on the other hand" kinda story (the tergiversations of moderation, as the late Barry Goldwater might have said) about the proposed drilling of the Arctic Refuge. The environmentalists and the Oil Reich, the message is, are both pulling fast ones. Under the headline, Some Facts Clear In the War of Spin Over Arctic Refuge,

Michael Grunwald plays the honest referee, whistle a-blowin'. But the article turns out to be spin for that most dangerous of media vices -- Middle-ism. The media loves to think the truth is in the middle. Sometimes, as with donuts, this is a big mistake -- since the middle is approximately nothing. A big zip. And the more you stand for the big zip, the further from reality you are.

Here's the truth. It is simple. The Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, has spent her whole life working to moderate, or decimate, environmental laws and regulations. She has never shown any park management skills. She has never demonstrated even an aesthetic appreciation for Nature. The spirit of the Interior department is foreign to her. There was no strong opposition to her because the Clinton era had a fatal, relaxing effect upon Democratic spine. Since she was appointed, she has dedicated her time to shilling for the Oil Reich. This is what you get when you have a man who was was appointed to his post - GWB, the Supreme Court President -- appointing career environmental hoodlums to environmentally sensitive posts. But this isn't the way the WP frames the issue:

"Ultimately, most Americans don't know the details of this intricate debate; they've just seen a few pretty pictures of the refuge. And even those pictures, as Klee suggested last spring, can be misleading. They often show ANWR's majestic Brooks Range, which will be preserved as wilderness regardless of the Senate's decision. They often show the refuge in springtime, when the landscape is lush but drilling would be forbidden.

So last Wednesday, Norton mailed the nation's network and cable news anchors a videotape � supplied by Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobbying group in Alaska � showing the coastal plain in wintertime, with no polar bears or caribou running around.It looks white. It looks blustery. It looks flat.It looks kind of ugly."

One gets the feeling that "most Americans" doesn't include the ever sly Michael Grunwald. So why is it that we aren't treated to his personal experience of the Alaska coast? Well, for a reporter who is slicing and dicing the spin baloney, nothing in the piece indicates that his own two eyes have been laid, like in temps vecu, upon the controversial shores. His piece rightly accords to the greens a correct estimate of the amount of oil to be gotten from the Refuge -- not the 10.3 billion barrels estimated by the Oil R.'s minions, but 3.6 -- and points out that that is 60 billion dollars worth of oil. So what? The enviro point is that 3.6 billion gallons aren't going to make the U.S. energy independent, the justification for drilling in the Arctic Refuge -- and on that point there's no spin. The "facts' are clear. Grunwald doesn't go for the point, doing a little spin himself about the modern, efficient oil biz, not at all like that clunky infrastructure at Prudhoe Bay. And then there comes this wee kicker:

"Still, there will be impacts. Oil infrastructure damages tundra and vegetation even when it doesn't spill; and at Prudhoe Bay, there has been an average of a spill a day, mostly small, but totaling 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials since 1995. In the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Anchorage, the Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether 350 toxic spills from oil fields have contributed to an abnormal number of deformed frogs."

Limited Inc likes the diminuendo at the end of the graf. The deformed frogs. Because here we have another issue entirely, we have another eco-system entirely, and the Enviro point is about the entire system. So Grunwald's graf is itself spinning for the Middle, until it spins right over the facts that are clear in the case. Instead of asking the obvious question: where does that 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials in 6 years go?

Michael Grunwald won a prize last year from a conservation outfit. Maybe his rather misleading spin article (his point about the environmentalists boil down to, they are telling the truth, but they are interpreting the truth environmentally -- that's spin?) is D.C. payback.

Remora

"The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things."

This is from one of Plutarch's letters. We're thinking about Plutarch this morning. The consolatory vision expressed in that letter casts a different light on biography as a genre. If one soul can exist, serially, in a number of bodies, life's accidents among the troubles of this world becomes representative of something behind the life, some one prolonged thing. The biographical seismograph charts, within its variations and seeming contingencies, the wanderings of a spirit for whom variations and contingencies are distinctly secondary, through a comic throng of masks. By producing parallel lives of the Greeks and the Romans, Plutarch is looking for hints, cries and whispers, the secret joke, the code of that rare stuff, that metaphysical Puck, the Great One and Oneness, in its two main falls into history.

Well, Limited Inc is not the Platonist Plutarch was. However, we do like the idea that lives give us points of orientation for the spirit of the age. We were reminded of this today when reading an interview with Dr. Callum Roberts in the NYT (No, really, incredulous reader, we were. Plutarch is always on our mind, just like Georgia's on Ray Charles' mind. We don't know why).

Roberts is a marine biologist who has become, as he says, the kind of scientist that didn't exist when he was a young man: a conservation biologist. As such, he works to conserve fish and the environment of fish. Well, that's hard work, especially given the attitude of fish em all and let God sort em out that prevailed in the 90s. He makes that point in the interview:

"The history of the problem is this: in the 1970's and 1980's as shallow- water fish got into trouble from overexploitation, the fishing industry worldwide began looking to the deep sea as virgin territory to work. By going to sea mounts (undersea elevations) and canyons that had never been trawled before, people were able to take huge catches � thousands of pounds in only a few minutes.Then, in the 1990's, after the cold war ended, military technology developed for underwater spying and sea floor imaging became available for civilian use. Thanks to multibeam sonars, sea floor mapping, and positioning systems, fishermen could suddenly exploit deep underwater terrains that previously had been unknown."

Robert has helped create fish sanctuaries, and has recently made the claim that virtue is not only its own reward, but rewards unworthy others, as far as fish are concerned:


"The research [Robert's research] into this controversial area is published in the journal Science (today, 30 November 2001), and examines the evidence that marine reserves, in which fish species are conserved, improve fish stocks in neighbouring areas. The research, centred on marine reserves in St Lucia and Florida, suggests not only that more fish appear in reserves following protection, but that they are also larger. They produce more offspring than exploited populations, and those offspring are exported to fishing grounds by ocean currents. There is also a spillover of adult fish migrating from the reserves as protected stocks build.
"

Robert's interview in the NYT won't change the minds of many regarding the cuter qualities of fish -- he seems to find the critters adorable -- since to experience fish as Robert experiences fish, you have to don your wetsuit and dive miles and miles from shore.

Our parallel to Roberts is an oily pseudo-conservationist, one Thor Lassen. Mr. Lassen has become the Whole Food's favorite conservationist, because Mr. Lassen's group eases Whole Food's conscience about shrimp, salmon, and the dripping edibles that Whole Food would like to purvey to your upper middle class consumer. Mr. Lassen is the alpha and omega of an organization called Ocean Trust. According to an admiring portrait of the man in Sea Food Business, Ocean Trust arose from some loose change flung at Lassen by the seafood companies:

"Ocean Trust�s annual budget in 1999 was $253,000, raised through donations from seafood companies, grants and marketing partnerships. In the day-to-day work of running a business, it�s difficult to keep on top of scientific reports about where the problems are and what should be done about them. That�s what Lassen does. "

Before becoming a conservationist as a result of such munificence, Lassen was a lobbyist. Lassen's character became, briefly, the focus of a fire fight between Whole Foods and Earth Island Institute in 1999. That year, the CEO of Whole Foods talked down EII because he claimed that Earth Island Instititute was guilty of negativism regarding shrimp. Yes, the folks at EII had the gall to consider boycotting shrimp harvests that endangered the habitats of the Sea Turtle in the Caribbean. So Whole Foods shopped around for a more compliant conservation group that would label its shrimp eco-friendly. Here's a rather hostile portrait of the Lassen, Whole Food's eventual choice for eco-friendly arbiteur, from Earth Island Journal:

"NFI [National Fisheries Institute] also founded Ocean Trust, a faux-green group run by Thor Lassen, a former NFI lobbyist. The group's stated mission is to "enhance the productivity of the marine environment as a source of food." Its biggest donor is the Long John Silver's seafood chain.Most frontline environmental workers have never worked with Ocean Trust, yet the group representing itself as having expertise in sea turtle conservation. Ocean Trust distributes expensive educational materials and videos that shift blame for sea turtle deaths away from the shrimp industry (although the US National Academy of Sciences identifies the industry is the primary human-related cause of these deaths). Ocean Trust's website links directly to NFI's web page and many NFI press releases quote Lassen.Ocean Trust is focusing on US/Mexican efforts to save the critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico near Rancho Nuevo. Based on a very recent infusion of aid - a minute fraction of industry profits - the seafood industry is taking credit for more than 30 years of conservation work."

Ocean Trust's website is a "rich and strange" product of the sea. Its banners proclaim a happy green message about protecting the Sea Turtle, but it wastes no time getting to the main subject: nasty enviro exaggeration about the world state of fisheries. To make its points, it employs the pitiful jargon of the industry, along with industry statistics. Lassen's prose brings back the Vietnam era, in which the Military in Saigon was always proclaiming victory through better body counts. Here's the man on Sea floor damage:

"Much of the recent reports from environmental groups have focused on the impacts of fishing on the environment. The continued productivity productivity of sea clams and scallops harvested with dredges and shrimp, flatfish and other bottom species caught with trawls casts legitimate concern of the highly inflamed claims of ocean floor damage from fishing. We are just starting to learn whether gear has harmful or beneficial impacts like nutrient resuspension."

Ah, we are just starting to learn about the wonderful effects of littering the ocean with those one hundred yard trawler nets! Nutrient resuspension is a term that would turn one of Georgie Porgie Bush's speechwriter's green with envy. Redescribing litter in this way has a poetry, a fairy tale charm, all its own.

This is starting out to be Lassen's decade. Surely it is time to launch the phrase, compassionate environmentalist, meaning compassion should extend to fishery companies and their many employees. Surely we are going to hear that phrase echo from the Bush Administration. Nutrient resuspension will follow, soon after.

Life and rhetoric, folks. That's what we are all about.

Remora
The Colombia business.

Colombia seems especially cursed by fantasy. The Spanish, the English, all its earlier explorers and ravishers, were pressed forward by a crazy vision of El Dorado -- that story came from reports of Indians in Colombia. El Dorado is not defunct. It has simply changed to something you smoke or put up your nose -- our fantasy, their product, and our fantasy of protecting ourself against their product. There are many logics to the drug war, but they are all oddly divorced from the ostensible purpose of it. For thirty years the US has fought against the statistical norm of drug use within a population able to afford its tastes, and every year (surprise!) it loses. However, in war, loss is sometimes gain. The structure that fights the war, now, exerts a considerable economic pull, from the prison industry out there in the hinterlands, employing former dairy farmers, to the exciting world of rent-a-cops.

The war in Colombia is multi-purpose, and the politics of left and right have long ago been hollowed out by bloodlust, revenge, power plays, and fantasies more reminiscent of the night-battles recorded by Italian historian Ginzberg than anything else in modern politics. Ginzberg's book shows how the inquisition took a group of Friulian peasants who thought of themselves as supernatural witch fighters, appointed to leave their sleeping bodies and engage in battles with evil spirits during certain ritually significant times, and slowly cast them in the role of supporters of the devil, until they actually changed the self image of these people - the benandati.

The night battles in Colombia have undergone a similar dialectical alchemy. Every drug-dealer eventually becomes a populist, and every policeman eventually becomes a drug dealer. The government acts like pirates, and the pirates act like the government. This has long ceased to be a country, and become Walpurgisnacht.

So here's a sad piece in the LA Times about it:


"Soldiers and military police were already a part of life here. They inspected bags and purses at bus stations, stood guard at bridges and overpasses and patrolled street corners. Violence, too, was a fact of life. One night late last fall, I arrived at a party where the guests were abuzz. Just before my arrival, the building's night watchman had rushed into the apartment of the party's hostess and started shooting from her window at a suspicious looking man who had just stolen a gun from him. The guests dropped to the floor until the shooting ended, then resumed their conversations. But until last week, the danger and the military presence were part of the background. The culture had learned to live with a constant, low-level hum of violence. Now the volume of the conflict is once again a piercing cry.

As I sat and watched the tanks and then the truckloads of soldiers pass on the street below early on the morning of Feb. 21, I thought of my father. Fifty years earlier he watched as the very street I was looking at became a battleground. The violence that time around flared up after a charismatic political leader was killed outside his office in downtown Bogota. His murder plunged the country into a bloody war between conservatives and liberals that later became known simply as La Violencia. Some 200,000 died and many of those who remained behind became actors in the wars to come."

Limited Inc's first sympathies are with rebels. But we can apply to the rebels of Colombia a phrase used by da Silva and Gall in an essay on police abuse in Brazil: the rebels suffer from perverse incentives.

"We define perverse incentives as the devices of law and custom rewarding behavior that undermines the stated purpose of institutions. Perverse incentives divert resources and motivation from local police responsibilities for preventing crime into bloated bureaucracies and swollen units of shock troops inflicting unnecessary civilian casualties."

The institutionalization of rebellion in Colombia has turned the liberating impulse into a territorial one. Territory is now defined by terror -- one side or the other wins by terrorizing a significant section of the population.

Point is: down, down, down we go. This is not a country to which we should dispatch a billion dollars in military "aid" without, uh, thinking about it. But of course the U.S. has never allowed the irrationality and sheer cruelty of its programs to impede their implementation in the South.

Remora

We've all seen thieves, in movies, confer, engage, succeed, and then ironically flame out. The Thomas Crown Affair. Sexy Beast.To Catch a Thief. Rikki. We've all seen the movie in which the older, experienced thief engineers the heist of a lifetime, the impossible steal. The maximum flash plan, the camera at his glamorous or weary heel, here he is, coordinating his greedy but colorful crew, their various prison nourished talents. We all know that the heist itself will form around moments of near discovery, the cop who knocks on the door, the non-descript, whistling museum guard making an unexpected round. From Hollywood bandits lets segue to Hollywood banditry, because we can see the movie leap off the screen this week in Washington D.C. The script calls for boosting the commons, as unguarded as any lamely secured art treasure. Like Egyptian grave robbers in the hungrier dynasties, these thieves of the common have already made their depredations into a growth industry, and emptied out many of our monuments. Unlike Egyptian grave robbers, though, the dynamic is just the opposite: take living treasure and steal it for the tomb. The vaults of the record industries, the film industries, the publishing industries. Target is the copy right law. Like all intellectual property laws, copy right law was originally set up to guarantee a monopoly for that length of time necessary to allow the creator of an object -- originally the creator of a book -- to benefit from it. It was not a grant of property. And nothing was to be construed, from copy right, that impeded the fair use of the book for, say, parody. The age of reasonable use is over. Right now, a tedious committee hearing, lead by the Senator from Disney, Ernest Hollings, is showcasing Hollywood's scavenger hunt for spoils from the Net. Here's the NYT story about the latest Mission Impossible: Stealing your brain:

"Senator Ernest F. Hollings, the South Carolina Democrat who is the committee's chairman, called the hearing because of concerns in Congress about the slow adoption of digital television and broadband Internet connections. One reason that has often been cited for the faltering technology is the lack of mainstream entertainment to be found on it.

But until strong anti-piracy measures are in place, Mr. Eisner and others in his business have argued, the movie industry has little incentive to release its library of films in digital form.

In ongoing discussions with the technology and consumer electronics industry, the Hollywood studios have been promoting a project that would embed a "flag," or watermark in every piece of digital video content."

Computers, digital video recorders and other devices would then be designed to play the material only if they detected the presence of the markers."

And what does the ever pliant Hollings propose?

"The senators on the committee appeared quite receptive to that idea. Senator Hollings has circulated a draft of a proposed bill that would require computer and device makers to install anti-copying technology designated by the government if the companies cannot arrive at a standard on their own. "

Is this incredible or what? Yes, in a time when the Heimat is threatened by who knows who, we have to start getting pre-emptive -- so we pre-empt the crime before it happens. Only kidding! They aren't going to be locking Enron execs and politicians in jail before they're caught doing something -- the more's the pity. No, we have to pre-empt anything that threatens Disney Uber Alles. This is the kind of legislation that is cake to Hollings sponsors. Imagine the outcry if this venal crime against the intellect were translated into another venue. Imagine the Guv proposing to put little devises in your car to keep you from speeding. Cardiac arrest would spread from Detroit outward, and we'd see that legislation whisked away in a heartbeat. Hollywood, ah, that is a different story. If Hollywood had had its say, there would be no VCR in your home entertainment center, citoyen. Its usurpation of your rights is in line with its usual greedy mindset. But this time, the environment is much worse.

Limited Inc interviewed Larry Lessig last week. The story is in the Chronicle http://www.auschron.com/. Lessig's last book, The Future of Ideas, should be read by anybody who cares about the Net. In it, Lessig talks about the innovation commons. Let me quote from the Chronicle:

"AC: There's a phrase, "tragedy of the commons," which you discuss in Freedom of Ideas. Could you explain that?

LL: The idea is that if some resource is left open to the public, individuals will maximize their use of it until it is used up. So we have to control our access to it. This isn't true, however, of all commons. Take the English language. Because you speak it doesn't mean you take those words from somebody else. The Internet is an "innovation commons." Everyone is free to modify and adapt things on the Net, and anybody can get access to those innovations, because there isn't a limit to growth. "

Lessig claims (in Future of Ideas -- read that book!), and Limited Inc gives this claim a lot of credit, that the division between the State and Private Enterprise mistakenly categorizes a whole division of network goods, like bandwidth and code. I'd probably add genes and tissues. These goods are open source goods -- they can be exploited by all, modified by all, passively received by all, because it is in the nature of such goods to be indefinitely available.

But these goods are being contractualized, citoyens! even as we sleep. Sleep is easy, given the maunderings of such as Hollings, but sleep is dangerous. Remember the fuss, last year, about embryo stem cell research? The fuss was about whether the government would fund it. The fuss should have been about who owns it -- for, amazingly, stem cell "lines" have been patented. A story in Darwin magazine last summer correctly points out how crazy our bloated patent system has gotten:

"...the University of Wisconsin, which was awarded the patent on the human embryonic stem cell this past March, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having more power than it can handle�or at least handle gracefully.

The human stem cell patent is a hot potato, because while the science described within offers hope, the patent itself grants the power to quash that hope. It doesn�t help matters that the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), an independent not-for-profit corporation that manages patents for the university, has already granted many stem cell rights to Geron, a California biotech company that helped to fund the research. Today, anyone hoping to use the cells for research in this country may also have to come to terms not only with the university, but also with Geron, a for-profit player with a keen incentive to discourage competition."

Limited Inc's faithful readers will remember that back in August, when we started this insane enterprise, we began by attacking the idea that the right/left divide is defined by an attitude towards the state. No, we said, it is defined by an attitude towards contract -- a much different thing. So that the right wants the state to remove itself from, say, allocating resources, but intrude itself into enforcing private monopoly power. When the sphere of everyday life is invaded by state power on behalf of the state, freedom necessarily dwindles to zero. But the same is true when the sphere of everyday life becomes completely contractualized. Private power than uses the state to abridge freedom, heading us to that same zero horizon. Time to wake up, and hang a few patent officials from the streetlamps.

Remora

A group at MIT has come up with a little robot reporter. It is based on the design of one of those nifty machines NASA uses to explore Mars, the kind they always used to diagram in the National Geographics of my youth, except that this little baby has more RAM. And since there is, reportedly, intelligent life on Earth, communication between the robot and its base will be quicker:


"One example of how designing for Intraplanetary exploration is significantly simpler than Interplanetary systems is that information travels much faster from one side of the Earth to another than it does between planets. It can take minutes for radio information to travel from Mars to Earth, which is too long if the message is "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" Lag time in our system is expected to be less than 1000 milliseconds. Likewise, lifting a payload into orbit is incredibly expensive, and serves as perhaps the largest single constraint in the design of space bound vehicles. For instance, the original Space Shuttle had only 36K words of fixed memory, and 2K words of erasable memory! Our system can use a conventional laptop with many gigabytes of storage, able to handle digital video and audio recording, as well as the control and communications programs."

Whoever invented this thing certainly knows how journalism works. How many journalists have silently cried out, "I'm rolling towards the edge of a cliff!" as they skewed their perspective to that freedom friendly, free enterprise friendly, America friendly ideology of the base, aka Megagiant media corporation, for which they work as gravediggers of the truth, merely in order to enjoy the fruits of the earth on a credit card. For instance, take the whole of the Fox News staff. If only someone out there could recieve their little distressed frequencies! But alas, non-robotic reporters, like lemmings, roll off the edges of cliffs with regularity, and have to live with their shameful prosperity in sorrow and ulcers. Perhaps MIT can do something about that, next.

Remora

The mentally unstable bovine has rather slipped from the popular consciousness, now that we have real diseases, like anthrax, to worry about. So was it all simply fun and games, the hecatombs of beef? Shall we crank up the Peggy Lee? Is that all there is?


In Salon, there's a report on a report by the GAO, which says, inevitably, that :

"Mad cow disease could slip into the country and infect cattle herds because of weaknesses in import controls and lax enforcement of animal feed rules, congressional investigators warned Tuesday."

This report is a little screwy. The search for BSE in this country has been, shall we say, lackadaisical. In fact, cows that are down aren't routinely inspected for BSE. We know that American minks and deer have a BSE like disease, and that it is becoming endemic. Nodowners is a good site to start with if you want to get a jump on the next plague. They have a report on down cattle and the incidence of other animal spongiform encephalopathies.

They also have a report about the downed cattle bill:

"UPDATE! For the first time since the Humane Slaughter Act was enacted in the 1950's, farm animal protection legislation has passed both the United States House or Representatives and the United States Senate. This legislation, which prohibits the marketing and dragging of downed animals at stockyards and requires these incapacitated animals to be humanely euthanized, has now been included in both the House and Senate Farm Bills.The Senate Farm Bill was passed on February 13th, 2002 and includes a downed animal provision that was championed by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI). This provision is nearly identical to the downed animal legislation which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 5th, 2001 as part of the House Farm Bill. In the House, the downed animal measure was championed by Representatives Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Amo Houghton (R-NY) in a floor amendment."

So don't say that the house and senate has never done anything for ya. All it took them was four crucial years, since the first reports of BSE in Britain.

Remora

As blood is to the mosquito, the vampire bat, the tick, the tse-tse fly, so is idiocy to Limited Inc. Naturally - yes, obviously, like your most predictable carpers, with the kind of grim satisfaction at all our most cherished, worst prejudices being realized exhibited by some harridan in a suburban subdivision, watching hubby come home from a drunk - we recommend that our readers go to the NYT article reporting the testimony of stockmarket analysts to the US Senate's investigation of Enron. The grafs that put us into a delirium of bloodlust are these:

"Eleven of 16 analysts who followed Enron were still rating it as a ``buy'' or ``strong buy'' as late as Nov. 8, two weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had opened an inquiry into the company's accounting.

"``I did not own Enron stock,'' testified Anatol Feygin, a senior analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. ``I have complete freedom with respect to the recommendations that I make concerning any (stock) and my compensation is not tied to the recommendations that I make. ... I have never received any compensation in any form from any company that I analyze, including Enron.''

The analysts defense is that they are the stupidest people on earth. Because even slightly less stupid people, say some touched boy in a tribe that haven't developed a complete base ten counting system, can tell that an enterprise that goes from 90 to 2, whether the decline is measured in goats and chickens or dollars, is a losing enterprise. But Anatol Feygin, apparently, needs more information to make that kind of decision. Feygin is a veritable scientist.

Ah, but Limited Inc is just being cynical. Surely there is a reason, some reason, that we just don't understand, which justifies the Feygins of the world receiving compensations a thousand fold over your average MacDonald's burger flipper. There must be a class that explains this in some economics department. We don't understand economics, is what it is.

Remora

Limited Inc, like Ronald Reagan, has a repertoire of anecdotes we go back to obsessively. One of them is that penicillin was not patented by Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Edward Abraham, the Oxford scientists who took Alexander Fleming's discovery, purified it, and made it medically useful.

What can and can't be patented is one of the burning questions of our time -- but it burns, admittedly, far beneath the average consciousness, which doesn't know a patent from a property right, and doesn't know the smell of smoke from the fire that produced it. Unfortunately, the conservatives are winning this argument by default -- there are very few voices crying out against the extension of monopoly, which is what a patent is, or the public/private partnerships that routinely rip the public off, for private benefit.

In Tom Paine, Stephen Jones publishes an article that illustrates the rip off. Since the article is about wheat seeds, there will be readers out there who will balk. But wheat seeds are important! (the hysterical man with the red face shouted). Here's the essential two grafs:

"What is wrong with universities working hand in glove with corporations to develop our food crops and getting a return on investment? One of the main issues is the ownership itself. Who owns wheat, for example? The food grain was first domesticated over 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. It is not native to this country and we would not be growing it here if we did not receive the help and genetic materials from farmers and public breeders worldwide.

A second issue is the restricted flow of information. Because of developing ownership issues, most international breeders are no longer willing to share material. This is hurting research. Now, many of the products researched by publicly-funded scientists in public labs are being developed under confidentiality agreements and with strict limitations on publication. Some 50 percent of public breeders said they had been hindered in seeking exchanges of genetic material, according to a 1999 University of Wisconsin poll. Twenty-five percent reported having difficulty in graduate student training and research because of this limited access."

Limited Inc has said this before, and will say it again: the difference between political factions does not have to do with the state. Although the right habitually oozes about the magic of the marketplace, what the right really wants is a completely contractualized world -- which requires an unheard of extension of state granted monopolies. The right wants to squeeze out the commons. The soviet variety of the left wanted the same thing -- wanted to identify the commons with the state. It is this commonality of goals that makes the ideal world of the right look so much like the real world of the soviet left. In both, social cost -- and with it an honest perception of the commons -- is locked in a closet. But social cost is the ideological ghost that will haunt our banquets of gene altered wheat seed -- believe us, reader.

Dope

Reader, go to the WP magazine section and read the very sad story of the "cheating scandal" in Silver Springs, Maryland. Last year, a teacher in the Silver Springs International school, a rather miraculous school in Montgomery County distinguished for using tried and true progressive methods, was 'released' for having used the questions from some inane comprehensive test before giving the test, thus breaching the 'security' of the test. Never mind that the test had no security, that copies of it float around throughout the system. Any excuse to liquidate an alternative. This is the slogan of all sclerotic bureaucracies.

Silver Springs was one of those miracles that prove that all the aims and goals of the progressive agenda are not dead, but come up, spontaneously, scattered about, seeding the future. The principle, Renee Brimfield, was trained at the Sorbonne, and came to the school, which had a considerable ethnic mix, and an income level below the D.C. average, determined to really teach her kids. Classes mixed ability levels. In the cafeteria, students were assigned seats -- "because, Brimfield said, they might segregate themselves by race and class elsewhere, but not in her lunchroom." It was an island, and islands get targetted for bombing practice. Destruction came from the Montgomery Superintendent of Education, who did not appreciate Brimfield not getting with the program -- which program consists of giving children inane tests, teaching to the tests, and in general doing the yeoman's work of distracting children, from the age of seven to the age of eighteen, from anything resembling culture.

The sad thing is, the story of compulsory, obsessive standard testing is dialectically ingenious. Who opposes it? Not the poor. For many poor schools, it is the only plan there is, the only way children are guaranteed some education. WP's Michael Sokolove does an admirable job of complicating our response to the whole testing gestalt. The devil in the testing complex, according to Sokolove, is that the more standardized tests "are used as a single measure to make sweeping judgments -- the more high-stakes they become -- the less reliable they are. Teachers and principals who operate under the threat that their school will be "reconstituted," that their career or some monetary reward hangs in the balance, or even that they will be shamed when their school's test results are disclosed to the public, will find a way to make scores go up. "

But if, like Limited Inc, one longs for the historically annointed proletariat to rise up, workers all, and join the fight against testing -- well, that isn't the vector from which resistance comes. There's a dialectical irony here:

"The public debate over standardized testing is largely an argument about how best to lift up poor children -- and, not far below the surface, an argument over whether efforts on behalf of poor children will slow the progress of higher-achieving, wealthier students. That is why protests against testing have come mainly from parents in affluent communities who fear that testing and test prep will take time away from more enriching, challenging class work. Advocates for poor children, on the other hand, often view standardized tests as a kind of backstop, a guarantee that lower-achieving schools and children won't be invisible. But Rye says no parents at Silver Spring International were calling for greater emphasis on tests. "We had only been there a year and a half," she says. "We were just starting to get scores."
Opposition to Brimfield early on came from some well-to-do parents. Ellie Hamburger, a pediatrician, was among those who initially spoke out against the school's decision to mix students of all abilities except in foreign language and math classes. "I was won over," she says. "The kids had their assumptions challenged."

And so it ends, the Englightenment dream. The idea in the eighteenth century was that affluence would lead to virtue. When, in the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw says that poverty is the only vice, he is summarizing the trend of ideas from Jefferson through Mill to, really, the early twentieth century socialists. As so often in Shaw, one feels he is writing a platitude with a lightning bolt -- but what a lightning bolt!

"In the millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty -- a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed -- is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drumken but amiable," "fraudulent but a good afterdinner speaker," "splendidly criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them.
"

Robert Stone once said that Shaw invented fascism in Major Barbara. It is easy to see that the logic of viewing poverty as a security issue, which is not far from the bourgeois perception of the working class as the dangerous class, can run pretty far to the right. But Shaw did have hold of a basic social fact. The reason for according the monopoly of violence to the state remains that of forcing the poor man to see his children fed on cheap sugars and fats; to see his children arrested and hauled off, in large numbers, for having the entrepeneurial sense of our founding fathers, to wit, making money in intoxicants -- with the caveat that the rum upon which the good New England merchants depended was more criminal, insofar as it was whipped out of the skins of kidnapped Africans, while we know that the narco-peasantry is relatively well paid for their labors; to see all that, without the power of lifting his hand against the system, whilst idle people's children get to learn art appreciation in really good schools, from which they will go on to even better schools, from whence to get jobs in politics and the media that are wholly taken up with debasing the American mind with every possible superstition, fad, and slogan.

Education, as Americans practice it, is a sad sign that the miserable grip of four thousand years of scarcity, with the fear mongering it breeds, has not been loosened, even though the scarcity itself, from food to warmth, has been practically abolished. Matthew Arnold, not my favorite Victorian sage by a long shot, still had it right about that in which culture consists:

"...culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."

We, however, have opted, in Arnold's terminology, for Anarchy... an anarchy of standardized tests. Meanwhile, at that moment in history where we can actually move from the Victorian sentimentality of sweetness and light to a real increase of life and sympathy, what do we do? We give our kids no. 2 pencils and four choices for each question, no talking, you have thirty minutes to complete the test, if you complete the test before thirty minutes do not go to the next test, check your answers and remain quiet, remain quiet, remain quiet...

Remora

There�s a nice review of God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson in TNR last week. Limited Inc prepared for the worst in the intro grafs. Reviewer Jonathan Alter seemed to be heading into traffic in the usual way with the oblique hissing at the supposed �anti-Western� clique in the universities:
�Over the past two decades, with evidently growing vehemence, the critique of Western civilization has become the great preoccupation of the humanities in American institutions of higher learning, especially in departments of literary studies. (Edward Said's Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, was certainly one point of departure for this general trend, though not all the current assaults on the pernicious influence of the West can be traced to Said.) It is Western civilization, we are repeatedly told, that has perpetrated the evils of colonialism on a global scale, and in the postcolonial era it is Western capitalism that continues to exploit and to "immiserate" the masses of the developing world. The legacy of enslavement and murder that is abundantly manifested in colonialism, it is sometimes claimed, was merely brought to its logical fulfillment in the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazis.�

The key that this music is scored to is revealed by the word �pernicious.� It is, by the way, the whole art of reading, this finding of resonances within contexts, this uncovering of the codedness on the surface of the codes. For surely Limited Inc isn�t wrong to suppose that the word carries a value redolent of extravagantly mustachioed villains tying the village beauty to the railroad tracks? If colonialism is merely a matter of gaslight melodrama, surely it is nothing to get too upset about. And then there is the Marquis de Said � red light, red light, evacuate the craft. This is, we know, the New Republic, and Said is in the shooting gallery there. His is the face atop the silhouette of the menacing intifada warrior that Marty Peretz takes matitudinal aim at, with his .45.
But Alter is not going down that path. Leaving the simplicities of vilification behind, he has a genuinely interesting point to make � or at least he claims that Rawson does:
�What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity. He decries the "selective use of evidence to support currently approved indignations (or the earlier ones they replace)," and he goes on to cite a tart characterization by Marjorie Perloff of how intellectual arrangements are now generally made in the groves of academe: "The preferred method is to know what one wants to prove ... and then to collect one's supportive exempla, the game being to ignore all `evidence' that might point in a contrary direction."
Much of Rawson's book is a documentation of Western imaginings of other races, ethnicities, and cultures, from Montaigne's "Des cannibales" to the propaganda of the Third Reich. (To Rawson's credit, in discussing this topic he avoids the pretentiousness of using the capitalized and hypostasized form "the Other," and he also eschews the Gallic barbarity of the abstraction "alterity.") Now, many of the images that he considers, both verbal and visual, are violent and troubling: the ethnic or racial others are imagined with both prurience and clinical condescension as embodiments of sexual license and depravity, as human approximations of the bestial, and hence as fit objects for subjugation, exploitation, and ultimately extermination. Still, as Rawson repeatedly shows, the simple story of racist abomination told by the postcolonial critics often does not correspond to the ambivalences or even the dialectical character of the actual Western images. And the others are often imagined, as Montaigne illustrates, not on a binary model of the good Europeans and the savage non-Europeans, but on a triadic model, a more complicated model that is not designed to provide any ideological satisfaction, in which both benign and brutal varieties of the others are considered as antitheses to the writer's own culture.�

Rawson�s suspicion of the unilateral moralist approach to colonial studies is captured, in a pretty damning way, in his criticism of Sander Gilman:

�Sander Gilman, a scholar who has made an academic career of chronicling racist stereotypes, describes the picture as an "erotic caricature of the Hottentot Venus," with the voyeur flatly defined as "a white, male observer." What Gilman astonishingly overlooks, as Rawson duly notes, is that the most obtrusive caricature in the engraving is the face of the man looking into the telescope. The man's face is depicted as a grotesque cross between the head of a bloated frog and the head of a dewlapped bulldog. The telescope thus becomes a satiric joke about European voyeurism; and, as Rawson suggests, the woman's thrusting posterior figures as a gesture of well-deserved contempt directed at the fat man with the telescope who is ogling her. The image is not an expression of power, it is a criticism of power.�

Even here, though, Limited Inc would like to remark that vulgar Foucaultians have demonized the word power, so that it is almost useless. Since Foucault�s point, following Nietzsche, is that there is no zero degree of power, it is difficult to see how any viewpoint could divest itself of power. Or how it could want to. What is the desire for an au-dela de pouvoir, anyway? In fact, Foucault�s further point was that the promotion of the myth that there is, indeed, some zero degree of power is part of the game of power. An important, and characteristic element of modernity, inherited from both the Platonic and Christian tradition.

Oddly, Limited Incs posts this week seem to return to the topic of the West and the Other. Unlike Alter, I think there�s a point to the capitalization. Since Alter seems to also diss alterity, for reasons that Derrida would have a field day with � find the name encrypted in the name, find the Latin that turns to gall in Gallic - I suppose he just doesn�t appreciate the concept, or its position in Hegel�s dialectic, and, necessarily, ours. Well, it is certainly there, with or without Alter�s approval.

Reading the West�s relationship to the Other through the Yahoos is a marvelous idea. Especially as it can never be said enough that the West, as a monolithic concept, was not the concept with which any intellectual up to the 19th century primarily thought.

Remora

Limited Inc reads the newspapers for much the same reasons that hard shell Baptists listen to hellfire sermons -- to produce a feeling of dys-empathy, an odd combination of melancholy and self satisfaction. Our love for all humanity is tempered by our satisfaction that humanity is being lead into various unbelievable disasters by the most greedy and dimwitted among us. Going to hell in a handbasket kind of thing, you know.
But sometimes, sometimes an item peeks through the gloom like a ray of golden sunshine. The best news in the NYT is in the science section today. No way to say this without a tremor of emotion in the voice: the Ivory Billed Woodpecker may STILL BE ALIVE!

"[] team that spent 30 days in a swampy Louisiana forest looking for a woodpecker long thought to be extinct reported yesterday that members may have heard the bird, but they did not see it."

The ivory billed woodpecker isn't simply a bird, but like the dodo, the great auk, the eskimo curlew, it is a totem, a dream image, an Audubon revery.

Some might call the evidence slim.

"On Jan. 27, at 3:30 p.m., four of the six members of the search team, in an undisclosed spot in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La., heard a series of double raps characteristic of the drumming of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They managed to record the last double- rap of the sequence and some subsequent rapping.On the same day, members of a Cornell Lab of Ornithology research group heard a similar sound in the same area, and two days later, other members of the team heard loud rapping uncharacteristic of other woodpeckers. "

Oddly enough, the NYT doesn't mention that the last sighting of the species in toto was in Cuba.

In 1985, Dr. Lester Short obtained permission to Search for C. principalis in Cuba. That year he, together with George Reynard and Giraldo Alay�n, visited the Cupeyal reserve just west of the area of the 1956 sightings. No woodpeckers were observed but they found fresh marks of a foraging C. principalis and heard of a report from December 1984 in the area (14). Giraldo Alay�n and Alberto Estrada continued the Search in

"October 1985 and March 1986 (15) and followed George Lamb's 1956 route. Although the forest close to the coast, near Moa, appeared long gone, the species was apparently still present in Ojito de Agua, one of the most inland territories described by Lamb. On 13 March Alberta Estrada briefly saw a single C. principalis. Giraldo Alay�n then observed a female being attacked by two Cuban Crows, Corvus nasicus, on 16 March and in April that year an international team including Dr. Lester Short, Dr. Jennifer Horne and George Reynard saw at least one male and one female at the same spot (15). One year later, in the afternoon of 16 March 1987, an observation was made that would appear to be the very last positive record of the species. Giraldo Alay�n and Aim� Pasada saw a female woodpecker flying at a distance of about 200 m. A National Geographic expedition in 1988 which included Ted Parker and Jerome Jackson could not find the species, although an individual might have been glimpsed (7)."

Remora


Policy Review, a true blue, conservative journal, features a review by a Steven Menashi, of Mark Lilla�s new book.


The Lure of Syracuse, the last chapter in Lilla's book, was published in the NYRB in the black month of September. Limited Inc didn't have the heart, at the time, to make with the commentary. Lilla uses the story of Plato's supposed attraction to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus, to make a point. Or a couple of points. One is the point that the story should be about Plato's ultimate resistance to tyranny. The other is that twentieth century thinkers have been attracted to the philosopher slash murder king. The second point is the important one for Lilla.

On the one hand, Lilla�s point is true. A large part of the intelligentsia in every decade has embraced the most obnoxious governors, a crew of murderous and venal men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao. So, for that matter, have carpenters and farmers. The problem with Lilla�s story is that it is based on a falsely foreshortened sense of atrocity.

History is read through a special filter for Lilla -- and for that whole tradition arising out of the fifties merger of liberalism and cold war anti-communism. The murder of a Russian writer, in 1940, counts as a murder for this group. The murder of, say, a Sioux in 1870, or the starving to death of some Congolese family in 1900 doesn't count as an atrocity. In fact, it doesn't count at all. A philosophical overview of history that begins in mourning is fine, it is appropriate, lay on the organ tones and let�s all die; but Lilla�s group ends up mourning very selectively.

The NYRB site has segregated Lilla's essay into the for pay part of the site. But it is still up at this site. Let's start with the first false analogy in Lilla's piece.



"Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceau�sescu and Milosevic�one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived."



Well, the rhetorical flourish is nice. But Dionysis is not our contemporary, or at least he isn't our contemporary in the same way Hitler and Mussolini are. In fact, the collective gesture -- one that puts Hitler and Khomeini in the same set - is infantile, betraying no sense of historical circumstances. The nineteenth century optimism, by which one presumes Lilla means Mill and Comte (although he could mean Goethe and Marx -- the phrase is empty), still had to account for the Napoleons, tyrants of a type much closer to Dionysus than any in Lilla's first list. And of course there is the notion that the nations outside Europe "modernize." Is this a joke? If it isn�t, and we fear it isn�t, then it is more evidence that when the blind lead the blind through world history, they end up like the blind in Brueghel�s painting, headlong in the ditch.. Lilla's evident ignorance of what modernization entails cries out for correction. Before you play the shame game in the NYRB, do some research. Start with, say, the history of coffee growing. As I mentioned before, last week I read Mark Prendergast�s nice, exhaustive look at the coffee industry. Well, why not start there for the quick course in Europe�s heart of darkness complex? Lilla seems to be under the illusion that 19th century intellectuals were either unaware or uninvolved with what happened on the margins: those Iindians of the Yucatan, Guatamala, El Salvador, etc; those Brazilian slaves; those Chinese resisting Britain�s Opium trade. If he wants to find the roots of Hitlerism, it won't do to go to Syracuse -- go, instead, to Hitler's admiration for that eminent nineteenth century institution, the Indian Reservation. America's gift to the world. Or look at the penal practices of the French. The Communards were cast into Dachaus spaced at some distance from the Hexagon: Devil�s Island, French Guyana.

Lilla might claim that this is merely the blame game, death toll politics. But it isn't � it is looking at the context in which intellectuals might or might not have sympathy with forces that would overthrow �liberal democracy.� To mount a philosophical polemic based on a history and have no real comprehension of history is, well, typical of philosophical polemicists.

Still, even putting aside Lilla�s ignorance of the 19th century, his inability to understand how World War I effected the West reaches into the cases he wants to talk about. In fact, here, as elsewhere, the majority of the intelligentsia went along: most were not, like Bertrand Russell, willing to go to jail to oppose the senseless slaughter on both fronts. Not that Lilla is the type to honor Russell � in fact, whenever intellectuals are being knocked by other intellectuals in forums like the NYRB, you can be sure the political sympathies of the knockers is such that they would have favored locking up the Bertrand Russells and throwing away the key.

Still, context is not an excuse. The 20th century is full of philosophers who have favored tyranny of one sort or another. The list is well known, and the model case is Heidegger. But the Stalinism of Aragon, or the sympathy of the New Critics (Allen Tate, for example) for racism is well known. So if Lilla had the integrity to confront this problem in the spirit of real inquiry � why did it happen? Is there a pattern? Who opposed Stalinism, or apartheid, or Naziism, and why? If Lilla was proceeding along this path, I�d have more sympathy with him.

However, Limited Inc�s lack of sympathy is not shared by the Policy reviewer.

�Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, as �a modest companion� to Milosz�s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject a question even more vexing than Milosz�s. We may understand why intellectuals living under tyranny, jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny�s apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes �or, as was more common,� Lilla writes, �to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?� Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectual.�

Menashi makes a curious move in his review to Strauss. Usually Straussians start going cross-eyed, in that Closing of the American Mind way, when they deal with such as Kojeve, but Menashi is actually thoughtful. A nice piece. Here�s the final graf:

�As it happens, during his lifetime Strauss produced studies of only three living thinkers: Heidegger, Schmitt, and Koj�ve � three theorists who had put their formidable talents in the service of tyrants, the first two to Hitler and the last to Stalin. In contrast to their zealotry, Strauss appears (contrary to his popular reputation) resolutely anti-dogmatic. �Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth,� according to Strauss; he exhorts impulsive thinkers not to philosophical certainty, but to the philosopher�s moderate self-control. Against the religious dogmatism of these intellectuals, he juxtaposed the uncertain wisdom of Socrates: The true philosopher knows that he knows nothing.�

The last is a phrase is one philosophers like to use when they are getting sentimental, but like some old cheer intoned by the graduates of the class of 38 on the Yale lawn, they are going through the motions from nostalgia, not because they mean it.

Comments on yesterday's post from Alan:

"Roger,

I don't have access to the London Times article here at work so I'm flying
blind here. But here are a couple of observations.

--Rational self-interest, as conceived by free-market economists, would
never lead anyone to try to be president of the United States. There are a
whole lot less painful ways to get a whole lot richer. Besides, when you
grow up a rich kid like Georgie-poo, I suspect the marginal utility of
additional bucks is pretty much nil. I would think, in the absence of any
more particular motivations, that maximizing utility would consist in
finding ways to avoid boredom.

--We've got two questions here: GWB's character and motivation, and
Luttwak's. From a number of things I've read, I think it very likely that
since 9/11, GWB genuinely regards himself as a Man on a Mission. However,
unlike your version of Luttwak, I do not think that is a Good Thing. It
scares the shit out of me. There are few things in the world more dangerous
than a stupid and easily manipulable Man on a Mission.

It'll take me a while to work out the Venn diagram stuff. Also thinking
about the causes of famine in India, etc."

To which Limited Inc replied

Alan
-- Wow, either my Luttwak piece was good, or you are just in a discursive mood this morning. A spontaneous response!
Anyway,. my reading of maximizing one's advantage is that the particular advantage is an x, a variable. It could be money, it could be power, it could be popularity, it could be orgasms. Since rational agents live in a world of mixed value systems, their pursuit of one advantage theoretically entails not pursuing, with the same vigor, others. But I take it that the decision to pursue political power is the framework within which Bushiepoo is defining self interest. In this case, then, he would alter his behavior if he felt like it was negatively impacting his long term ability to retain political power. So, when he campaigned, he moderated everything that he promised in order to alienate as few voters as possible. What he has done since he attained power is use it for other self-interested ends, which are defined in other value frameworks. But just as we wouldn't confuse a man investing money with a man giving to charity simply because both actions entail an immediate outflow of money, so we shouldn't think of Bush as sacrificing his self interest in one framwork for a disinterested ideal in another just because, potentially, he could become unpopular. Luttwak conceivably could make that argument, but as I say, it would contradict the whole brunt of Bushiepoo's life up to now. The man with a mission is in the happy circumstance that his mission makes him popular, so Luttwak's has to present a hypothetical. He fails to even muster the elements for a hypothetical. Perhaps, like Lyndon Johnson, Bushypoo would pursue this mission even if it started to make him highly unpopular. But I think it is as likely that, having received Pavlovian gratification from being a warm monger, he might hedge the inevitable unpopularity that comes from being Santa Claus to the rich in a recession by sustaining his warmongering role, which does make him popular.
LI

There you have it comrades, actually controversy on this usually sleepy site. I'll be jiggered!

Remora

When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.

Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.

But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.

�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �

When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.

So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?

Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.

Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.

But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.

Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.

So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.

Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.

Remora

How about them corpses? Surely the movie is coming. Surely some b movie producer, some Hollywood scientologist, is on this like white on rice. Psycho is one thing, but Georgia rednecks are a whole other level of grotesque. They were good enough for Flannery O'Connor, so they should be good enough for you. The NYT story about the corpses of Walker County is another sad reminder that these are times that try the non-tv watcher's soul. I mean, camera man's delight. The woods. The voiceover. The faux conversation (Tammy, what is the sherriff saying about the body up in the crook of the pine tree there?). Essential tv. And here's the essential graf:

"After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully examined. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags.Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel.

An infant's body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse.Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years"

And here is the perfect tabloid ending. I mean, can a news story have a better sign off line?

"His wife and son just didn't want to spend the money to fix it up," said Mrs. Horton, who grew up in Noble and now lives in Atlanta. "Lord Jesus, I don't know how they could go to bed at night with all that outside their window."

All that outside their window. An image that reminds us of some impossible rencontre between Walter Benjamin and the National Enquirer at a funeral director's convention in Sarasota Springs.

Remora

Limited Inc is back, and campers, campers, settle down. I know, the overwhelming cards and letters sequence. The concern. The offers of sexual healing, food, socks. But who else out there is gonna give you such quality bitching? Such reports from the stark underground that your ancestors, your great grandfather, maybe, thought he'd left behind in the Old World? Our, our.... ressentiment, to use Max Scheler's term for the terminal condition, the termite ridden condition, of our seedy thoughts, such as they are..

Limited Inc, back in the dreamtime of the race, used to be enamored of Marx. Marxists have a way of knocking that out of you. We still like Mike Davis, the author of Ecology of Fear, and a recent book on the "Late Victorian Holocaust." Davis has focused on the combination of incipient free trade capitalism and bad, bad weather at the end of the 19th century. The death toll from these converging forces, from India to Egypt to Brazil, is pretty startling. Here's the first graf of a Guardian review of that scarifying, and mostly, of course, overlooked book:

"Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?"

Hey, but, do we really care? Indeed, the only famines that register in the Western consciousness are those associated with the failure of Communism. Although Robert Conquest's book on Stalin's de-kulakization has become the standard condemnatory text, where's the companion text, the one about Churchill's engineering of the Bengal famine of 1943? We know that the very fact that one remembers such things is a mark of extremism -- the reasonable man has long ago absorbed the reasons of state that led the heroic Brits to fertilize the Bengal plains with the bones of starving Indians:

"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.

To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.

In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army."

Marxism has now become a mode of memory for those who walked out of the dreamtime. We're a shaken, unreliable crew. Davis is an exemplary Marxman, an unearther of those family secrets bid good riddance by the End of History, which has found its axis of evil in the destruction of the World Trade Centrer, and recognizes no precedent, nor mitigating circumstance, nor any limit to the justice it can extract from the rest of the world. In an article on 9/11 in the New Left Review, Davis starts out with an amazingly prescient throwaway by H.G. Wells, written in his heyday before WW1:



"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt that war in their own land was an impossible thing . . . They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. [2]
When a foreign policy dominated by the Trusts and Monopolies entangles America in a general War of the Powers, New Yorkers, still oblivious to any real danger, rally to flags, confetti and an imperial Presidency.
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner."

Davis takes a tour of the images of the "black utopia" -- the utopia of a capitalism armed and triumphant. It is a phrase he steals from Ernst Bloch. As always, Davis is a coiner of phrases. I can't resist another long quote -- notice how this paragraph patiently rolls towards its reversal in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Davis is discussing "fear studies," which he, of all people, should know about. Watch how he manipulates one reversal with another. Like a man trying to piece together an approximate image of his face in a funhouse mirror, Davis works by patiently angling one half truth with another. At some indeterminate point, one hopes that the image of the real jumps out at one. If you are good, very good, this happens. It happens like this:

...Barry Glassner systematically debunked some of the more common goblins�young Black men, street drugs, terroristic political correctness, and so on�that deliberately spook the path toward public understanding of such social problems as unemployment, bad schools, racism and world hunger. He carefully showed how media-conjured scares were guilty �oblique expressions� of the post-liberal refusal to reform real conditions of inequality. Fear had become the chief ballast of the rightward shift since 1980. Americans, in his view, �were afraid of the wrong things�, and were being hoaxed by the latter-day equivalents of Orson Welles�s notorious �War of the Worlds� broadcast. �The Martians,� he underscored, � aren�t coming.� [8]

But, alas, they have come, brandishing box-cutters."

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Dope
We will be down for a couple of days. Computer went on the blink. Limited Inc has taken to drink. And we feel like pitching this whole thing over the brink. Etc. But don't worry -- our experiment of going without any visible means of support is just getting more interesting, campers.