Bollettino
Yesterday, in Britain, GlaxoSmithKline shareholders actually voted down the compensation package for
its directors. The package was rather notorious even before the vote. Here's a BBC description of it:
"GSK shares, for instance, have lost about one-third of their value in the three and a half years since chief executive Jean Pierre Garnier took over, amid concerns that the firm has failed to develop new best-selling drugs. This poor track record steeled investor opposition to a pay deal which would have given Mr Garnier a pay-off of up to �22m ($35.7m) if he was dismissed."
The Guardian has a fuller story and the background.
"The stage had been set for a rebellion at GSK after the Association of British Insurers (ABI), which represents the big insurance companies and which controls about 25% of the stock market, marked the company's remuneration policy as a so-called "red top" - a rarely used indicator intended to show serious concern to its members. The National Association of Pension Funds had advised its members to abstain."
Garnier, of course, is a privileged loser, one of those new generation of CEO-Pigs who use corporations as convenient troughs to root in:
"The row was not so much about the �5m Mr Garnier earned last year but more about the �22m he stands to receive if he loses his job. The French-born chief executive told the meeting he hoped never to receive the pay-off. He repeatedly defended his decision to live in Philadelphia rather than the UK, where GSK is based."
In a more colorful Guardian report about the meeting, it appears that Garnier's ordeal was personal and devestating. Shareholder after shareholder stood up and denounced the board, and the pay committee (made up as they all are of wheezing, greased CEOs of other companies, always willing to help each other out). We particularly liked this episode:
"One referred to a comment Mr Garnier once made that "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," waving a bag of peanuts and accusing the chief executive of not deserving his salary.
Mr Garnier opened the meeting by giving an upbeat slide presentation of Glaxo's corporate performance, showing pharmaceutical sales up 9% and trading profits up 23% in the first quarter; but much of the discussion in the hall was focused on the terms of his contract, instead of the performance of the company."
Over at BusinessWeek, there is another article about union activism to attack CEO pay packages:
"Delta Air Lines (DAL ) pilot Michael H. Messmore was incensed at the $28 million golden parachute handed to former Delta Chief Executive Ronald W. Allen when he resigned in 1997. To stop such excesses, Messmore, with the backing of the Air Line Pilots Assn., submitted a proxy resolution in 2000 demanding shareholder approval of such deals. The initiative was rejected three years in a row. But at Delta's annual meeting on Apr. 25, widespread shareholder anger over revelations of bankruptcy-proof retirement packages for current executives put Messmore's resolution over the top, with a 54% majority. Another pilot-sponsored proposal calling for the cost of stock options to be deducted from earnings racked up a 60% majority. "Executive compensation is out of whack," says Messmore."
Of course, BW asks the 22 million pound question:
"But will companies get the message? Shareholder resolutions, after all, aren't binding, leaving management free to ignore them. Still, the current spate of shareholder votes is likely to spur a fair amount of reform. For example, both companies that lost proxy battles over executive pay last year, Bank of America (BAC ) and Norfolk Southern (NSC ) Corp., eventually adopted the measures. "Everyone's a lot more sensitive to majority votes now," says Rosanna Landis Weaver, an analyst at the Investor Responsibility Research Center in Washington."
The use of shareholders, here, reminds us of the early days of the consumer movement, when acquiring stock in a company was preliminary, for consumer advocates, to attending shareholder meetings and criticizing the company. This often worked. However, with repeated use, companies built up an immunity to criticism. Right now, this is the best weapon to cut CEO pay down to a reasonable size, but the real answer is making top executive positions competitive. Contrary to Garnier, there are probably thousands of executives of his calibre who would even be willing to live in Britain to take the reins of GSK. The first step in making a competitive environment is ceasing to disguise the effect of outrageous compensation packages on companies. A nice instance is coming up: the union pension fund holding shares of PeopleSoft have introduced a resolution to expense stock options. The CEO of PeopleSoft, Craig Conway, is your standard issue pay porker. Here's what he said:
"Employee stock options have no economic impact on a company," PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway said in his letter to shareholders, filed Monday as an amendment to the company's proxy."
Later on in the article, we get another, gentle reminder that economic impact, for Craig Conway, is a strange thing indeed:
"PeopleSoft, one of Silicon Valley's heavier users of employee stock options, said in a recent filing that it would have had a 2002 loss of $403,000 rather than its reported profit of $38.5 million, if it had used the fair-market method to expense employee share options."
And of course the inevitable piano drops on our head:
"Stock options make up a large portion of PeopleSoft's compensation to top executives, AFSCME said in PeopleSoft's proxy filed April 28. In 2001, Conway's cash compensation totaled $3.3 million, while the value of options he was awarded was between $13.2 million and $33.4 million, depending on the return assumption used."
So, what do we have here? We have a man who is in charge of a national company who has the balls to tell us that the cost of paying for employees has no economic effect on the company. This is a little bit like an airplane executive who doesn't understand gravity. Here's a brief from TheStreet about the oily Conway:
"Then there was PeopleSoft (PSFT:Nasdaq - news - commentary - research - analysis) CEO Craig Conway. While stock in his company dropped 53% in 2002, his compensation soared, largely on the strength of a $14.6 million restricted stock award. Conway's salary stayed flat at $1 million, his bonus dropped from $2.32 million to $1.92 million and he was granted 4.1 million options, compared to 1 million options the year before. I"In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, PeopleSoft's compensation committee praised Conway's "outstanding" performance as a leader, cited the company's overall performance and said it considered equity grants made to CEOs of other similarly sized companies. Asked about Conway's compensation, the company said it had nothing to add to the information contained in the filing."
The outstanding independence of the compensation committee -- can't you just feel it? Which consists, by the way, of the CEO of Rite-Read, who paid himself a million six in 2001, the CEO of AskJeeves, and the CEO of Symyx Technologies, who paid himself only 478 K in 2002, when company revenues and earnings dropped precipitantly, but who supplemented his meager income by exercizing options for an equal amount last year.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Monday, May 19, 2003
Bollettino
Ah, the weekend. Suicide bombing is the new bungee cord jumping sport throughout the Middle East, the dollar is quietly plummetting in the background as the Bush administration, which argues that its tax cut will raise stock prices, shows that it could care less, and the Private Jessica Lynch rescue turns out to have been a little less dangerous than your average frat party.
Where to begin?
LI talked to D. -- okay, I talked to my brother yesterday, and he was full of outrage about the faking of the taking of Jessica Lynch, pfc. Since the networks were full of her story two weeks ago and she has been figuring heavily in the national press, we expected a story about the BBC report in the NYT or the Washington Post. So far, we haven't seen one. Since much of the rightwing blog community, leaking into much of the rightwing communitiy, is always on guard against media manipulation, we decided to visit spots we usually touch on very gingerly. There is a general blogger indignation that the BBC is putting out anti-American propaganda, since 1. The BBC claim blanks were used for the filming, and soldiers wouldn't have agreed to use blanks; and 2. blank ammunition has a different profile than real ammunition, and usually requires a modified weapon to fire it -- and, to quote a source I've avoided on this site,
So how do blank rounds work in the movies? Well, the weapons used are not real. They are specially produced replicas, often based on the mechanism of a real weapon, with the barrel partially sealed. They cannot fire live ammunition under any circumstances whatsoever. This is how film makers create realistic scenes of automatic firing without attaching a BFA to the end of the weapon.Clearly, no one will be carrying that sort of a �weapon� into a combat area.
The tone, here, is very interesting. It assumes that the American Military is always honest; would never risk troops for a stunt, and that the only reason a story claiming it was a stunt could possibly be aired is that any deviation from the Gospel version of the War must be motivated by malice.
This shows a certain shift in the way the Military is considered, at least in this sub-culture. It is a shift that is, perhaps, facilitated by the evident lack of acquaintance with the military. Having a volunteer army, which I think is a mark of civilization (rather like abolishing the death penalty) comes with its disadvantages, one of which is that military matters become subject to romantic illusion. The Military has not been particularly reticent to express its view that the truth is merely one strategy in the process of achieving victory. Stunts are pretty much the m.o. of American intelligence. Who would dare to broadcast entirely fake news of a mercenary army on the march to the capital in order to unseat a government? The CIA, in Guatamala, in 1956. This became a standard trope in CIA lore, and one bragged about, discretely, by the Company. In fact, if you hypothosize that the Lynch rescue was faked, would it have military value? Of course. It did. It was a morale builder. It is interesting that the war cannot, however, have fake moments in it for its most ardent fans. It is as if a bunch of wrestling aficianados were appalled to learn that some of the jumps from the ropes were practiced.
It is surprising how little is being made of the Lynch assertions, but we think that the NYT and the Washington Post are being particularly careful not to offend their thin-skinned American readers about their cherished stories. As Jack N. says, however, the Truth? You can't take the truth!
The military motto of our time.
Ah, the weekend. Suicide bombing is the new bungee cord jumping sport throughout the Middle East, the dollar is quietly plummetting in the background as the Bush administration, which argues that its tax cut will raise stock prices, shows that it could care less, and the Private Jessica Lynch rescue turns out to have been a little less dangerous than your average frat party.
Where to begin?
LI talked to D. -- okay, I talked to my brother yesterday, and he was full of outrage about the faking of the taking of Jessica Lynch, pfc. Since the networks were full of her story two weeks ago and she has been figuring heavily in the national press, we expected a story about the BBC report in the NYT or the Washington Post. So far, we haven't seen one. Since much of the rightwing blog community, leaking into much of the rightwing communitiy, is always on guard against media manipulation, we decided to visit spots we usually touch on very gingerly. There is a general blogger indignation that the BBC is putting out anti-American propaganda, since 1. The BBC claim blanks were used for the filming, and soldiers wouldn't have agreed to use blanks; and 2. blank ammunition has a different profile than real ammunition, and usually requires a modified weapon to fire it -- and, to quote a source I've avoided on this site,
So how do blank rounds work in the movies? Well, the weapons used are not real. They are specially produced replicas, often based on the mechanism of a real weapon, with the barrel partially sealed. They cannot fire live ammunition under any circumstances whatsoever. This is how film makers create realistic scenes of automatic firing without attaching a BFA to the end of the weapon.Clearly, no one will be carrying that sort of a �weapon� into a combat area.
The tone, here, is very interesting. It assumes that the American Military is always honest; would never risk troops for a stunt, and that the only reason a story claiming it was a stunt could possibly be aired is that any deviation from the Gospel version of the War must be motivated by malice.
This shows a certain shift in the way the Military is considered, at least in this sub-culture. It is a shift that is, perhaps, facilitated by the evident lack of acquaintance with the military. Having a volunteer army, which I think is a mark of civilization (rather like abolishing the death penalty) comes with its disadvantages, one of which is that military matters become subject to romantic illusion. The Military has not been particularly reticent to express its view that the truth is merely one strategy in the process of achieving victory. Stunts are pretty much the m.o. of American intelligence. Who would dare to broadcast entirely fake news of a mercenary army on the march to the capital in order to unseat a government? The CIA, in Guatamala, in 1956. This became a standard trope in CIA lore, and one bragged about, discretely, by the Company. In fact, if you hypothosize that the Lynch rescue was faked, would it have military value? Of course. It did. It was a morale builder. It is interesting that the war cannot, however, have fake moments in it for its most ardent fans. It is as if a bunch of wrestling aficianados were appalled to learn that some of the jumps from the ropes were practiced.
It is surprising how little is being made of the Lynch assertions, but we think that the NYT and the Washington Post are being particularly careful not to offend their thin-skinned American readers about their cherished stories. As Jack N. says, however, the Truth? You can't take the truth!
The military motto of our time.
Friday, May 16, 2003
Bollettino
Why is it that we don't like James Wood?
He is to fiction criticism in America what Danto is to art criticism, and what Anthony Lane is becoming to film criticism. One knows that he will be wise about contexts, and his dips into the novel he is reviewing will be, if not typical of the book, at least well chosen enough to make his version of the book plausible. But his grand enthusiasm for Saul Bellow seems, frankly, incredible -- he has never written about Bellow in such a way that I would want to read Bellow -- and his grand aversion for Don Delillo seems incredible -- he has never conveyed his allergy to Delillo in such a way that I would want to avoid Delillo -- and on the greats he seems to aim at that tone mixing just a hint of pop memory and desire -- of that great child's desire to go through the book, to eat it up -- that Trilling could sometimes bring off so that his reading actually haunts the writer. It takes some time to read Babel, for instance, after Trilling, because Trilling has interposed his own Babel so strongly, so carnally, between oneself and the stories.
Wood does a reading of James' high period novels -- The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age -- for the Atlantic. Of these, he only finds What Maisie Knew great. He says little about the Awkward Age. We think he is right about Maise, but very wrong about the Spoils. Awkward Age is not great, but it is very fast, and very enjoyable.
Wood does bring out how much What Maisie Knew depends upon knowing -- and how knowing attaches in unexpected ways to the knower. And he also sees how James is dealing the scene painter -- the laborious Zolas, immersed in the rotten fruit of Les Halles -- a deadly blow by doing much with a minimum of brushwork. For Wood, this is a grievous thing -- he's often expressed his nostalgia for the great 19th century novels, and he still believes that the Tolstoyan standard is the right one for fiction, underneath it all. This isn't an impossible belief -- James was the engineer of the too ready conciliation between fiction and its medium, reading, where you don't really see what you see, but we all know this can have terrible consequences, just like the too visual penchant of film that abuts in the dumb action movie, where all contradictions of character are resolved by contemptuously speeding past them, as though the viewer who expects intelligence to pervade the spectacle were being a gull, an utterly pre-MTV anachronism. This is just stripping our narrative sense, and it doesn't take Adorno to figure out just how compliant such an aesthetic must be with the most reactionary politics.
But we digress. Spoils of Poynton is a little gem in the James oeuvre.
Here is what Wood thinks: "The Spoils of Poynton, a work of real penetration, is marred, I think, by an inadequate sense of the motivations of its heroine, Fleda Vetch."
Wood spells out what he means by this, after canningly canning the plot:
"Fleda, a young woman of considerable insight and intellect, is the new friend of Mrs. Gereth, the owner of Poynton. James got the idea for this novel�what he habitually called the donn�e�at a dinner party; he dined out frequently and used these evenings to truffle for rich stories. His neighbor at the table had told him about a "small and ugly matter" in which a Scottish widow was suing her son over the fine furniture he had inherited, which she would not let him have. Mrs. Gereth, like the Scottish widow, has become embroiled in a struggle with her son, Owen, who is about to marry the vulgar, nouveau riche Mona Brigstock. Under English law, once Owen marries, he and his wife will become master and mistress of Poynton."
"In general, James's characters divide into gentle but weak men; formidable and finally monstrous manipulators (mostly women, but sometimes men); and those whose innocence needs to be protected (sometimes young women, sometimes young men, sometimes children). Mrs. Gereth is one of the manipulators, like Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady and Aunt Maud in The Wings of the Dove. She cannot bear the idea of the brash Mona in charge of her beautiful objets, and determines to act. Her weapon�at first unwitting, and then unwilling�will be young Fleda, whom she takes under her wing. Mrs. Gereth becomes excited when she hears that Owen and Mona have not yet agreed on a date for the wedding, and assumes that something is amiss with this detestable union. She sees that Fleda is attracted to her son, and soon hears that Owen returns the attraction. She decides to use Fleda as a wedge..."
Now, at this point a New Historicist would remember that women in England had only recently had their property rights given equal, or at least less equal, parity with men. Wood can't see why Fleda would find Mrs. Gereth ultimately a person whose fight for her place was worth, if not sympathy, at least pity; and then he cannot see why she would betray her.
We think that Fleda's resolutions are coherent. Fleda is overwhelmed at first by Mrs. Gereth, who, while being a manipulator, is not like Madame Merle. Merle is in love with a man, Mrs. Gereth in love with a position and a life. Her own life. Manipulation arises, in both cases, out of what both characters want, but Mrs. Gereth is a much less evil character. She does not operate against what she thinks would be Fleda's interests; she simply thinks those interests are a tepid version of her own.
Here is Mrs. Gereth getting down to brass tacks with Fleda:
Why, Fleda, it isn�t a crime, don�t you know that?� cried the delighted woman. �When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such nice people as Owen. I didn�t behave as well as you; compared with you I think I must have been odious. But if you�re proud and reserved it�s your own affair; I�m proud too, though I�m not reserved � that�s what spoils it."
Why is it that we don't like James Wood?
He is to fiction criticism in America what Danto is to art criticism, and what Anthony Lane is becoming to film criticism. One knows that he will be wise about contexts, and his dips into the novel he is reviewing will be, if not typical of the book, at least well chosen enough to make his version of the book plausible. But his grand enthusiasm for Saul Bellow seems, frankly, incredible -- he has never written about Bellow in such a way that I would want to read Bellow -- and his grand aversion for Don Delillo seems incredible -- he has never conveyed his allergy to Delillo in such a way that I would want to avoid Delillo -- and on the greats he seems to aim at that tone mixing just a hint of pop memory and desire -- of that great child's desire to go through the book, to eat it up -- that Trilling could sometimes bring off so that his reading actually haunts the writer. It takes some time to read Babel, for instance, after Trilling, because Trilling has interposed his own Babel so strongly, so carnally, between oneself and the stories.
Wood does a reading of James' high period novels -- The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age -- for the Atlantic. Of these, he only finds What Maisie Knew great. He says little about the Awkward Age. We think he is right about Maise, but very wrong about the Spoils. Awkward Age is not great, but it is very fast, and very enjoyable.
Wood does bring out how much What Maisie Knew depends upon knowing -- and how knowing attaches in unexpected ways to the knower. And he also sees how James is dealing the scene painter -- the laborious Zolas, immersed in the rotten fruit of Les Halles -- a deadly blow by doing much with a minimum of brushwork. For Wood, this is a grievous thing -- he's often expressed his nostalgia for the great 19th century novels, and he still believes that the Tolstoyan standard is the right one for fiction, underneath it all. This isn't an impossible belief -- James was the engineer of the too ready conciliation between fiction and its medium, reading, where you don't really see what you see, but we all know this can have terrible consequences, just like the too visual penchant of film that abuts in the dumb action movie, where all contradictions of character are resolved by contemptuously speeding past them, as though the viewer who expects intelligence to pervade the spectacle were being a gull, an utterly pre-MTV anachronism. This is just stripping our narrative sense, and it doesn't take Adorno to figure out just how compliant such an aesthetic must be with the most reactionary politics.
But we digress. Spoils of Poynton is a little gem in the James oeuvre.
Here is what Wood thinks: "The Spoils of Poynton, a work of real penetration, is marred, I think, by an inadequate sense of the motivations of its heroine, Fleda Vetch."
Wood spells out what he means by this, after canningly canning the plot:
"Fleda, a young woman of considerable insight and intellect, is the new friend of Mrs. Gereth, the owner of Poynton. James got the idea for this novel�what he habitually called the donn�e�at a dinner party; he dined out frequently and used these evenings to truffle for rich stories. His neighbor at the table had told him about a "small and ugly matter" in which a Scottish widow was suing her son over the fine furniture he had inherited, which she would not let him have. Mrs. Gereth, like the Scottish widow, has become embroiled in a struggle with her son, Owen, who is about to marry the vulgar, nouveau riche Mona Brigstock. Under English law, once Owen marries, he and his wife will become master and mistress of Poynton."
"In general, James's characters divide into gentle but weak men; formidable and finally monstrous manipulators (mostly women, but sometimes men); and those whose innocence needs to be protected (sometimes young women, sometimes young men, sometimes children). Mrs. Gereth is one of the manipulators, like Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady and Aunt Maud in The Wings of the Dove. She cannot bear the idea of the brash Mona in charge of her beautiful objets, and determines to act. Her weapon�at first unwitting, and then unwilling�will be young Fleda, whom she takes under her wing. Mrs. Gereth becomes excited when she hears that Owen and Mona have not yet agreed on a date for the wedding, and assumes that something is amiss with this detestable union. She sees that Fleda is attracted to her son, and soon hears that Owen returns the attraction. She decides to use Fleda as a wedge..."
Now, at this point a New Historicist would remember that women in England had only recently had their property rights given equal, or at least less equal, parity with men. Wood can't see why Fleda would find Mrs. Gereth ultimately a person whose fight for her place was worth, if not sympathy, at least pity; and then he cannot see why she would betray her.
We think that Fleda's resolutions are coherent. Fleda is overwhelmed at first by Mrs. Gereth, who, while being a manipulator, is not like Madame Merle. Merle is in love with a man, Mrs. Gereth in love with a position and a life. Her own life. Manipulation arises, in both cases, out of what both characters want, but Mrs. Gereth is a much less evil character. She does not operate against what she thinks would be Fleda's interests; she simply thinks those interests are a tepid version of her own.
Here is Mrs. Gereth getting down to brass tacks with Fleda:
Why, Fleda, it isn�t a crime, don�t you know that?� cried the delighted woman. �When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such nice people as Owen. I didn�t behave as well as you; compared with you I think I must have been odious. But if you�re proud and reserved it�s your own affair; I�m proud too, though I�m not reserved � that�s what spoils it."
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Bollettino
We recently expressed a wish to see to what baroque tergiversations Hitchens would be forced in justifying the usurpation of power in Iraq by one of Henry the K's minions -- since Hitchens credibility is wrapped up in being anti Henry the K. This isn't mere ideology, it is his bread and butter -- it allows a news organization to present him as a man of the left as he spouts reactionary slogans, making it seem as if we are getting that magic thing, balance, and making Hitchens an irresistable sell. Well, he hasn't gotten to it yet, but he does have a hilarious column about Chalabi, his bud, in Slate. He goes to the very bottom of the barrel in this one: in supporting his friend, he even becomes (gasp!) modest about his own abilities. Those abilities have to do with understanding bank fraud. Pauvre H. apparently finds it a matter of some difficulty, not just for himself but for all of humanity (hence, the modesty is transitory). This is truly creamy stuff:
"Yet every journalist feels compelled to state, as a matter of record, that Ahmad Chalabi was once convicted (by a very bizarre special court in the kingdom of Jordan) of embezzling money from a bank that was partly controlled by Iraq. I am not an accountant, and I admit that I don't know what happened at the Bank of Petra in 1972. I am not sure, after exhaustive inquiries, that I know anybody who really does know. But I do know what happened at the Iraqi Central Bank a few weeks ago, and I don't have to be an accountant or auditor to understand it. As with everything else, it is the sheer ruthless criminality of the ancien r�gime that staggers the mind and makes some people flinch and change the subject."
Welll, if he knows what happened there, do tell -- there are at least a dozen versions of the story, some of which have Uday piling billions of dollars into trucks, and some of which don't.
We do like the phrase, "exhaustive inquiries." Ah, he searched the Net one night. As always, when Hitchens practices to deceive, he is so clumsy that one feels he might as well not. Apparently his exhaustive inquiries never took him in the direction of the LA Times for May 10th, where he could have found partial solace for his learned ignorance in re: Chalabi.
The man is a hoot.
We recently expressed a wish to see to what baroque tergiversations Hitchens would be forced in justifying the usurpation of power in Iraq by one of Henry the K's minions -- since Hitchens credibility is wrapped up in being anti Henry the K. This isn't mere ideology, it is his bread and butter -- it allows a news organization to present him as a man of the left as he spouts reactionary slogans, making it seem as if we are getting that magic thing, balance, and making Hitchens an irresistable sell. Well, he hasn't gotten to it yet, but he does have a hilarious column about Chalabi, his bud, in Slate. He goes to the very bottom of the barrel in this one: in supporting his friend, he even becomes (gasp!) modest about his own abilities. Those abilities have to do with understanding bank fraud. Pauvre H. apparently finds it a matter of some difficulty, not just for himself but for all of humanity (hence, the modesty is transitory). This is truly creamy stuff:
"Yet every journalist feels compelled to state, as a matter of record, that Ahmad Chalabi was once convicted (by a very bizarre special court in the kingdom of Jordan) of embezzling money from a bank that was partly controlled by Iraq. I am not an accountant, and I admit that I don't know what happened at the Bank of Petra in 1972. I am not sure, after exhaustive inquiries, that I know anybody who really does know. But I do know what happened at the Iraqi Central Bank a few weeks ago, and I don't have to be an accountant or auditor to understand it. As with everything else, it is the sheer ruthless criminality of the ancien r�gime that staggers the mind and makes some people flinch and change the subject."
Welll, if he knows what happened there, do tell -- there are at least a dozen versions of the story, some of which have Uday piling billions of dollars into trucks, and some of which don't.
We do like the phrase, "exhaustive inquiries." Ah, he searched the Net one night. As always, when Hitchens practices to deceive, he is so clumsy that one feels he might as well not. Apparently his exhaustive inquiries never took him in the direction of the LA Times for May 10th, where he could have found partial solace for his learned ignorance in re: Chalabi.
The man is a hoot.
Bollettino
In a previous post, I recommended checking out the New Yorker profile of Zizek. In this season's Critical Inquiry there's a heated joust between Zizeck and Harpham. I must admit, as is often the case, I only read one side: Zizek's defense of himself as, to quote Harpham, a "symptom." In the course of doing so, he quotes this beautiful line from Deleuze, which is especially apropos at this moment:
�There�s no democratic state that�s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.�
We would almost like to make that a motto, but it would be unfair to the serpentine weight of the phrase -- serpentine because the weight of it is redistributed in unexpected ways as one repeats it.
However, in keeping with one version of the phrase, let's talk kingship.
It seems that the Pentagon mini-Metterniches are lusting to do for the rightful heir to the Peacock throne -- that's right, his solemnity, Prince Reza Pahlavi -- what they have done, so abundantly, for Ahmad Chalabi -- provide him with a little uniform, a little stipend, and a cohort of blackshirts.
Well, since we are lusting to restore ancient kingdoms, why don't we act on an abuse that we can cure right here at home? I mean the unlawful annexation of Hawaii, of course. LI is presently engaged in writing a review of Van Tilburg's biography of Katherine Routledge, the Easter Island anthropologist, so we've been interested in all things 19th century and Polynesian. There's a nice article about the downfall of the Hawaiian kingdom in Counter Punch.
And there is an Hawaiian independence movement. It has a nice collection of articles about the abuse to which Hawaii has been subject since the wily Yankees illegally annexed the place, way back in the 1890s. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it long ago, in the South Sea Letters, speaking of a native Hawaiian who was marooned by his captain in the Marquesas (back in the old whaling days, Captains often marooned crew members in order not to pay them), and had petered out in Samoa, longing for home: "I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their unifroms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the whtie so many; and this father's land sold fro planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai. So simply, even in the South Sea islands, and so sadly, the changes come."
In a previous post, I recommended checking out the New Yorker profile of Zizek. In this season's Critical Inquiry there's a heated joust between Zizeck and Harpham. I must admit, as is often the case, I only read one side: Zizek's defense of himself as, to quote Harpham, a "symptom." In the course of doing so, he quotes this beautiful line from Deleuze, which is especially apropos at this moment:
�There�s no democratic state that�s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.�
We would almost like to make that a motto, but it would be unfair to the serpentine weight of the phrase -- serpentine because the weight of it is redistributed in unexpected ways as one repeats it.
However, in keeping with one version of the phrase, let's talk kingship.
It seems that the Pentagon mini-Metterniches are lusting to do for the rightful heir to the Peacock throne -- that's right, his solemnity, Prince Reza Pahlavi -- what they have done, so abundantly, for Ahmad Chalabi -- provide him with a little uniform, a little stipend, and a cohort of blackshirts.
Well, since we are lusting to restore ancient kingdoms, why don't we act on an abuse that we can cure right here at home? I mean the unlawful annexation of Hawaii, of course. LI is presently engaged in writing a review of Van Tilburg's biography of Katherine Routledge, the Easter Island anthropologist, so we've been interested in all things 19th century and Polynesian. There's a nice article about the downfall of the Hawaiian kingdom in Counter Punch.
And there is an Hawaiian independence movement. It has a nice collection of articles about the abuse to which Hawaii has been subject since the wily Yankees illegally annexed the place, way back in the 1890s. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it long ago, in the South Sea Letters, speaking of a native Hawaiian who was marooned by his captain in the Marquesas (back in the old whaling days, Captains often marooned crew members in order not to pay them), and had petered out in Samoa, longing for home: "I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their unifroms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the whtie so many; and this father's land sold fro planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai. So simply, even in the South Sea islands, and so sadly, the changes come."
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Bollettino
Interestingly enough, this is the second week of non-news about why, exactly, the Pentagon has to rent its Iraqi exile group from SAIC. The lack of curiosity in the media is understandable -- after all, a NYT reporter might have plagiarized a story about the DC sniper and even made up some details while sipping lattes on the East Side, and a fertilizer salesman might have cut up and eaten his wife in California -- or something like that. Much more riveting...
However, indefatiguable LI has managed to sift out some interesting SAIC stuff -- most notably the notorious and now extinguished partnership between SAIC and Venezuala's state owned Petroleum company -- which, as you will remember, was the leader in the strike/coup/whatever it was against Chavez last year. There are a lot of Venezualan commentators who believe that the synergy between PDVSA and SAIC was like that between Lucifer and others of the fallen angel hosts. SAIC no longer features their partnership with PDVSA on their website. However, Americas magazine does mention SAIC in an article about the strike that concludes:
"The Uruguayan weekly Brecha reports that PDVSA�s computer systems are under the control of a joint venture that includes a U.S.-based multinational with strong ties to the U.S. military and the CIA. Intesa, which handles PDVSA�s data processing, is a joint venture set up in 1999 between PDVSA and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), whose $2 billion annual income comes mostly from contracts with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. SAIC�s directors and administrators include former defense secretaries William Perry and Melvin Laird; former central intelligence directors John Deutch and Robert Gates; and former National Security Agency (NSA) director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman."
However, those touchy Latin Americans are always so suspicious of American can-do. Why should Iraqis hold any such suspicions about our evident good intentions?
Interestingly enough, this is the second week of non-news about why, exactly, the Pentagon has to rent its Iraqi exile group from SAIC. The lack of curiosity in the media is understandable -- after all, a NYT reporter might have plagiarized a story about the DC sniper and even made up some details while sipping lattes on the East Side, and a fertilizer salesman might have cut up and eaten his wife in California -- or something like that. Much more riveting...
However, indefatiguable LI has managed to sift out some interesting SAIC stuff -- most notably the notorious and now extinguished partnership between SAIC and Venezuala's state owned Petroleum company -- which, as you will remember, was the leader in the strike/coup/whatever it was against Chavez last year. There are a lot of Venezualan commentators who believe that the synergy between PDVSA and SAIC was like that between Lucifer and others of the fallen angel hosts. SAIC no longer features their partnership with PDVSA on their website. However, Americas magazine does mention SAIC in an article about the strike that concludes:
"The Uruguayan weekly Brecha reports that PDVSA�s computer systems are under the control of a joint venture that includes a U.S.-based multinational with strong ties to the U.S. military and the CIA. Intesa, which handles PDVSA�s data processing, is a joint venture set up in 1999 between PDVSA and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), whose $2 billion annual income comes mostly from contracts with U.S. military and intelligence agencies. SAIC�s directors and administrators include former defense secretaries William Perry and Melvin Laird; former central intelligence directors John Deutch and Robert Gates; and former National Security Agency (NSA) director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman."
However, those touchy Latin Americans are always so suspicious of American can-do. Why should Iraqis hold any such suspicions about our evident good intentions?
Notes from former colonial ventures
There's a delightful anecdote in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians concerning 'Chinese" Gordon. Gordon was named governor of the Sudan by the Egypt's ruler, who had become so enmeshed in English debts and advice that he was slowly ceding the country to English rule. Now Gordon, like many a good Defense Department undersecretary in our own time, was a pious man. In fact, he was an eccentrically pious man, who read the Bible constantly, looking a little too aggressively for God's personal messages to him to be quite compos mentis in the opinion of his colleagues. Piety and narcissism are so often mirror images of one another. In any case, here's Strachey's account of Gordon's first intimation of the lay of the land in Sudan:
"He took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long
before he had a first hint of disillusionment. On his way up the
Nile, he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian
Governor-- General of the Sudan, his immediate official superior.
The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed
ballet of soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced
in a circle, beat time with their feet, and accompanied their
gestures with a curious sound of clucking. At last the Austrian
Consul, overcome by the exhilaration of the scene, flung himself
in a frenzy among the dancers; the Governor-General, shouting
with delight, seemed about to follow suit, when Gordon abruptly
left the room, and the party broke up in confusion."
One feels, here, that there must be some distant spiritual likeness between Gordon and our own Iraqi proconsul. Poor Smilin' Jay never quite got why the Shi'ites were so� intransigent. He obviously rather liked the way Chalabi wore a suit, talked English, and could provide him with a decent drink, after he descended from his heavily guarded car, at the Hunter's Club. But the rest of those people! And the tiresome complaints about electricity, as if they were going to do anything with it when it was turned on except scheme under electric lightbulbs against all the good that America was prepared to do their godforsaken country! No wonder Smilin' Jay hated to forage out from Saddam's palace.
In the meantime, one sees the Gladstonian reflex kick in among American and British liberals. Gladstone, you will remember, was vaguely against the empire, while Disraeli was an ardent imperialist -- but somehow the Empire got much bigger under Gladstone. The opportunity to put a central bureaucracy to work governing people for their own good was simply too irresistable. Gladstone's ghost haunts the suggestion of Hugo Young, in the Guardian, that the American forces remain for the foreseeable future in control of Iraq, and the op-ed in the NYT today by a Suzanne Nossel
"The law of occupation is useful for Iraq mainly because it establishes clear lines of accountability for putting the country back on its feet. The first duty of an occupier is to establish a system of "direct administration" over the occupied population. In doing so, the United States will put itself on the line for success or failure in a way that retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner's ill-defined mandate scrupulously avoided. If Baghdad's citizenry still suffers from spotty electricity, rotten garbage on street corners and poorly equipped hospitals, there will be no doubt where fault lies.
"Rather than a muddy division of responsibilities among the United Nations, local authorities and coalition forces, an official occupation makes clear that the buck stops with the United States and Britain. The proposed division of labor, wherein the United Nations' special representative will fulfill specific roles under a British-American umbrella, protects against what happened in Somalia, where the United Nations was blamed for American misjudgments."
Ah, that muddying of responsibility. Obviously, the Iraqis, who are being represented by ESP by Pentagon undersecretaries and their various defense industry cronies, need to know that they have only one occupier -- it makes the servants so much more pliable. It is a situation parallel to the British-French governance of Egypt, which -- in order to keep the Egyptian people up to snuff about who their masters were -- phased into British governance of Egypt for about eighty years, to the advantage of the Briitsh.
The reluctant assumption of imperial power is again beckoning to the always latent liberal instinct for gaining control of people's lives in order to make them better -- in other words, to boss them around. And, of course, that reluctance leads to profit -- but only, of course, in the name of virtue. So the US is proposing, for Iraq's own good, to seize control of the oil industry and use it, as the US sees fit, to rebuild the country -- paying out the money, of course, to US contractors.
Isn't it wonderful when there's such synergy between good intentions and campaign contributers! It makes us all glow, rosily, here at LI.
There's a delightful anecdote in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians concerning 'Chinese" Gordon. Gordon was named governor of the Sudan by the Egypt's ruler, who had become so enmeshed in English debts and advice that he was slowly ceding the country to English rule. Now Gordon, like many a good Defense Department undersecretary in our own time, was a pious man. In fact, he was an eccentrically pious man, who read the Bible constantly, looking a little too aggressively for God's personal messages to him to be quite compos mentis in the opinion of his colleagues. Piety and narcissism are so often mirror images of one another. In any case, here's Strachey's account of Gordon's first intimation of the lay of the land in Sudan:
"He took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long
before he had a first hint of disillusionment. On his way up the
Nile, he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian
Governor-- General of the Sudan, his immediate official superior.
The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed
ballet of soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced
in a circle, beat time with their feet, and accompanied their
gestures with a curious sound of clucking. At last the Austrian
Consul, overcome by the exhilaration of the scene, flung himself
in a frenzy among the dancers; the Governor-General, shouting
with delight, seemed about to follow suit, when Gordon abruptly
left the room, and the party broke up in confusion."
One feels, here, that there must be some distant spiritual likeness between Gordon and our own Iraqi proconsul. Poor Smilin' Jay never quite got why the Shi'ites were so� intransigent. He obviously rather liked the way Chalabi wore a suit, talked English, and could provide him with a decent drink, after he descended from his heavily guarded car, at the Hunter's Club. But the rest of those people! And the tiresome complaints about electricity, as if they were going to do anything with it when it was turned on except scheme under electric lightbulbs against all the good that America was prepared to do their godforsaken country! No wonder Smilin' Jay hated to forage out from Saddam's palace.
In the meantime, one sees the Gladstonian reflex kick in among American and British liberals. Gladstone, you will remember, was vaguely against the empire, while Disraeli was an ardent imperialist -- but somehow the Empire got much bigger under Gladstone. The opportunity to put a central bureaucracy to work governing people for their own good was simply too irresistable. Gladstone's ghost haunts the suggestion of Hugo Young, in the Guardian, that the American forces remain for the foreseeable future in control of Iraq, and the op-ed in the NYT today by a Suzanne Nossel
"The law of occupation is useful for Iraq mainly because it establishes clear lines of accountability for putting the country back on its feet. The first duty of an occupier is to establish a system of "direct administration" over the occupied population. In doing so, the United States will put itself on the line for success or failure in a way that retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner's ill-defined mandate scrupulously avoided. If Baghdad's citizenry still suffers from spotty electricity, rotten garbage on street corners and poorly equipped hospitals, there will be no doubt where fault lies.
"Rather than a muddy division of responsibilities among the United Nations, local authorities and coalition forces, an official occupation makes clear that the buck stops with the United States and Britain. The proposed division of labor, wherein the United Nations' special representative will fulfill specific roles under a British-American umbrella, protects against what happened in Somalia, where the United Nations was blamed for American misjudgments."
Ah, that muddying of responsibility. Obviously, the Iraqis, who are being represented by ESP by Pentagon undersecretaries and their various defense industry cronies, need to know that they have only one occupier -- it makes the servants so much more pliable. It is a situation parallel to the British-French governance of Egypt, which -- in order to keep the Egyptian people up to snuff about who their masters were -- phased into British governance of Egypt for about eighty years, to the advantage of the Briitsh.
The reluctant assumption of imperial power is again beckoning to the always latent liberal instinct for gaining control of people's lives in order to make them better -- in other words, to boss them around. And, of course, that reluctance leads to profit -- but only, of course, in the name of virtue. So the US is proposing, for Iraq's own good, to seize control of the oil industry and use it, as the US sees fit, to rebuild the country -- paying out the money, of course, to US contractors.
Isn't it wonderful when there's such synergy between good intentions and campaign contributers! It makes us all glow, rosily, here at LI.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Bollettino
There's been some Iraqis restlessness about the switches in their democratic, freely chosen rulers. Imagine! The ingratitude! Massoud Barzani, the Kurd leader, is quoted by the NYT as expressing a wee bit of concern about the apparent US goal of maintaining Iraq as a vaccum into which we inject our intentions. And:
"He also expressed concern about Mr. Bremer's longtime association with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whom the Kurds blame for their betrayal in the intelligence wars between Iran and Iraq three decades ago."
A point that goes right over the massed heads of the American media, who are performing the Mobius maneuver in the wake of the Blair revelations at NYT, trying to see what they ate for breakfast a week ago.
LI says: who cares?
On other fronts: LA Times, which has consistently been more on the mark about Iraq than any other major newspaper, ran a large article about Ahmad Chalabi's wonderful adventure in the Jordanian banking system Sunday. It is definitely worth reading.
The New Yorker ran a profile of Zizek last week. We asked our friend T. about it, who is a big citer of Zizek. He reports:
"...its a rather campy version of the persona that doesn't really bring-out, exactly, the guy's sense of humor and what humor DOES, psycho-socially and rhetorically. Also missed the best example of an aspect of Zizek's "style" - the essay in "Enjoy Your Symptom!" on the films of Roberto Rossilini - Zizek had never seen a film by RR (along the lines of his comment that there are many movies that he hates, but provide a good theory about any one of them and he will assert that he loved it all along). Additionally, I think that there might be a factual error in the article: "...the number of people who are equipped to discuss the works of Jacques Lacan rivals the number of those who are fluent in Slovenian..."
Anyway, read it."
And finally, we are going to comment later this week on the British Imperialism fiesta hosted by Boston U., which is a round-table about Niall Ferguson in which the Great Ferguson himself participated.
There's been some Iraqis restlessness about the switches in their democratic, freely chosen rulers. Imagine! The ingratitude! Massoud Barzani, the Kurd leader, is quoted by the NYT as expressing a wee bit of concern about the apparent US goal of maintaining Iraq as a vaccum into which we inject our intentions. And:
"He also expressed concern about Mr. Bremer's longtime association with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whom the Kurds blame for their betrayal in the intelligence wars between Iran and Iraq three decades ago."
A point that goes right over the massed heads of the American media, who are performing the Mobius maneuver in the wake of the Blair revelations at NYT, trying to see what they ate for breakfast a week ago.
LI says: who cares?
On other fronts: LA Times, which has consistently been more on the mark about Iraq than any other major newspaper, ran a large article about Ahmad Chalabi's wonderful adventure in the Jordanian banking system Sunday. It is definitely worth reading.
The New Yorker ran a profile of Zizek last week. We asked our friend T. about it, who is a big citer of Zizek. He reports:
"...its a rather campy version of the persona that doesn't really bring-out, exactly, the guy's sense of humor and what humor DOES, psycho-socially and rhetorically. Also missed the best example of an aspect of Zizek's "style" - the essay in "Enjoy Your Symptom!" on the films of Roberto Rossilini - Zizek had never seen a film by RR (along the lines of his comment that there are many movies that he hates, but provide a good theory about any one of them and he will assert that he loved it all along). Additionally, I think that there might be a factual error in the article: "...the number of people who are equipped to discuss the works of Jacques Lacan rivals the number of those who are fluent in Slovenian..."
Anyway, read it."
And finally, we are going to comment later this week on the British Imperialism fiesta hosted by Boston U., which is a round-table about Niall Ferguson in which the Great Ferguson himself participated.
Monday, May 12, 2003
Bollettino
The mandate of heaven is a cruel and capricious spirit. Take Smilin' Jay Garner. About a month ago, Iraqis everywhere awoke after a night of bad dreams and thought, collectively, gee we'd like this non-Arab speaking weapons salesman to be the absolute Jefe of our brand spankin' new country! We don't want electricity, garbage pickup, safety from robbery, or those stinkin' museums and libraries -- we want a well protected ministry of oil! we want every exile group, as long as it is led by Ahmad Chalabi, to be supplied with American arms! And we want to give them their choice of residence in the wealthy side of Baghdad! And we want hands off Garner to preside over it all! These messages, ectoplasmically and extrasensorally delivered to the very heartland of Iraq -- Washington D.C. -- were not ignored. Smilin' Jay made a triumphant tour of the country. To reassure the Iraqi people, Smilin' Jay even tried to institute a continuity of style with the previous regime: just like Saddam, he disappeared into the presidential palace and was seen rarely thereafter in public.
But alas. The Iraqi people woke up, liberated and democratic, a week ago after a night of pleasant dreams (oh, the tax cuts that danced like sugar plumbs in their heads!) and decided no, Smilin' Jay wasn't the embodiment of Iraqi history. That honor goes, instead, to Kissinger Associates l. Paul Bremer III!
His Thirdness, being blessed by Henry Kissinger, is preparing us for a delicious treat: the high squeals of Christopher Hitchens, who has to maintain his cred by dissing Kissinger - otherwise, he's just another rightwinger in the rat pack - while tergiversating madly to rationalize our pyrate rule in Iraq. This should be good.
The Washington Post recorded L. Paul's historic maiden speech in Iraq. Here's what he said:
"It's a wonderful challenge to help the Iraqi people basically reclaim their country from a despotic regime," Bremer said in a tarmac interview minutes after his plane landed in Basra.
He spent a short while in the southern city before flying to Baghdad, where the civilian reconstruction agency is headquartered.
Asked whether he was, in effect, directing a U.S. plan to colonize Iraq, Bremer said: "The coalition did not come to colonize Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we have done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny."
A wonderful challenge? Isn't this the neutral language of the over-coached CEO, plotting the downsizing of his company? Whatever else you say about the pirates of yore, at least there was some steel in their yeahs and nays. Here's an anecdote about Blackbeard:
"One night, drinking in his cabin with Hands, the pilot, and another man, Blackbeard, without any provocation, privately draws out a small pair of pistols, and cocks them under the table. Which being perceived by the man, he withdrew and went upon deck, leaving Hands, the pilot, and the Captain together. When the pistols were ready, he blew out the candle and crossing his hands, discharged them at his company. Hands, the master, was shot through the knee and lamed for life; the other pistol did no execution. Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered by damning them, That if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was."
Surely L. Paul should consider Teach's way of disposing of extra associates. It would at least add a colorful anecdote to our colorless pillaging expedition.
The mandate of heaven is a cruel and capricious spirit. Take Smilin' Jay Garner. About a month ago, Iraqis everywhere awoke after a night of bad dreams and thought, collectively, gee we'd like this non-Arab speaking weapons salesman to be the absolute Jefe of our brand spankin' new country! We don't want electricity, garbage pickup, safety from robbery, or those stinkin' museums and libraries -- we want a well protected ministry of oil! we want every exile group, as long as it is led by Ahmad Chalabi, to be supplied with American arms! And we want to give them their choice of residence in the wealthy side of Baghdad! And we want hands off Garner to preside over it all! These messages, ectoplasmically and extrasensorally delivered to the very heartland of Iraq -- Washington D.C. -- were not ignored. Smilin' Jay made a triumphant tour of the country. To reassure the Iraqi people, Smilin' Jay even tried to institute a continuity of style with the previous regime: just like Saddam, he disappeared into the presidential palace and was seen rarely thereafter in public.
But alas. The Iraqi people woke up, liberated and democratic, a week ago after a night of pleasant dreams (oh, the tax cuts that danced like sugar plumbs in their heads!) and decided no, Smilin' Jay wasn't the embodiment of Iraqi history. That honor goes, instead, to Kissinger Associates l. Paul Bremer III!
His Thirdness, being blessed by Henry Kissinger, is preparing us for a delicious treat: the high squeals of Christopher Hitchens, who has to maintain his cred by dissing Kissinger - otherwise, he's just another rightwinger in the rat pack - while tergiversating madly to rationalize our pyrate rule in Iraq. This should be good.
The Washington Post recorded L. Paul's historic maiden speech in Iraq. Here's what he said:
"It's a wonderful challenge to help the Iraqi people basically reclaim their country from a despotic regime," Bremer said in a tarmac interview minutes after his plane landed in Basra.
He spent a short while in the southern city before flying to Baghdad, where the civilian reconstruction agency is headquartered.
Asked whether he was, in effect, directing a U.S. plan to colonize Iraq, Bremer said: "The coalition did not come to colonize Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we have done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny."
A wonderful challenge? Isn't this the neutral language of the over-coached CEO, plotting the downsizing of his company? Whatever else you say about the pirates of yore, at least there was some steel in their yeahs and nays. Here's an anecdote about Blackbeard:
"One night, drinking in his cabin with Hands, the pilot, and another man, Blackbeard, without any provocation, privately draws out a small pair of pistols, and cocks them under the table. Which being perceived by the man, he withdrew and went upon deck, leaving Hands, the pilot, and the Captain together. When the pistols were ready, he blew out the candle and crossing his hands, discharged them at his company. Hands, the master, was shot through the knee and lamed for life; the other pistol did no execution. Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered by damning them, That if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was."
Surely L. Paul should consider Teach's way of disposing of extra associates. It would at least add a colorful anecdote to our colorless pillaging expedition.
Bollettino
LI recommends an essay, Anecdote and History by Lionel Grossman in this spring's History and Theory. Grossman uses the etymology of anecdote to show how the thing's semantic charge changed over time. Anekdoka was, apparently, the title of Procopius's Secret History. As it was translated into European languages, anecdote took on the meaning of unpublished, and the secondary meaning of secret history. Anybody who has read Procopius's history knows how salacious the book is: the vague reputation for tasty salacity became attached to anecdotes. Voltaire, according to Grossman, exhibited extreme contempt for the genre. In particular, the anecdote disturbed Voltaire's notion of what history -- the history of historians -- was all about. Although Grossman doesn't exactly show this outright, Voltaire's agenda, as a historian, was to rescue it from the collectioneering science of the antiquarians. For Voltaire, history's moral bound was defined by scale: history was an account of great events. Of course, Voltaire's perspectivism nuanced his idea of great events. Not every king or noble was great. The social hierarchy did not define greatness, but it did tone it.
In this way, Voltaire, far from being the grinning undertaker of the ancien regime, was its great and final ideologue. Grossman quotes, in this respect, an interesting review of Rousseau's Confessions that, while not penned by Voltaire, reflected the Voltairian vision:
Voltaire�s mostly negative judgment of anecdotes was also determined, however, by the same classical, fundamentally conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Ann�e Litt�raire to condemn Rousseau�s Confessions as an act of literary arrogance and presumption. �Where would we be now,� they protested in 1782, �if every one arrogated to himself the right to write and print everything that concerns him personally and that he enjoys recalling?�
We don't believe that Voltaire's position can fairly be called conservative. But otherwise, this is a highly revealing sentence.
According to Grossman, by the end of the eighteenth century the transition from secret history to symptomatic event was being slowly achieved -- felt, in fact, in the etymological sinews of the language. Grossman concentrates on some important figures, and quotes a marvelous anecdote of Chamfort's:
"As early as the last third of
the eighteenth century some of Chamfort�s anecdotes appear to have had such symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance�who,being drunk one night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted with the fact by the horri.ed innkeeper, calmly replied: �Add it to the bill��
seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifference of the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomatic of the personage described, the Duke of Hamilton, and�beyond him perhaps�of the social relations of a particular historical moment, that of the ancien r�gime."
Since the romantics, we have all been imbued with the idea that the essence of history is secret -- that secret histories are the truer ones. Gnosticism is thus revived among us. LI is tempted by that belief himself. Nick Tosches wrote, somewhere, that the history of this country is the history of a number of handshakes between men in dark corners of restaurants and clubs. Or he wrote something like that. Well, we think that the handshakes can be as public as the front page -- that the secret and the overt are usually not so separate, and that the best hiding place is behind the universal indifference to what doesn't disturb one's own repose for the next week.
LI recommends an essay, Anecdote and History by Lionel Grossman in this spring's History and Theory. Grossman uses the etymology of anecdote to show how the thing's semantic charge changed over time. Anekdoka was, apparently, the title of Procopius's Secret History. As it was translated into European languages, anecdote took on the meaning of unpublished, and the secondary meaning of secret history. Anybody who has read Procopius's history knows how salacious the book is: the vague reputation for tasty salacity became attached to anecdotes. Voltaire, according to Grossman, exhibited extreme contempt for the genre. In particular, the anecdote disturbed Voltaire's notion of what history -- the history of historians -- was all about. Although Grossman doesn't exactly show this outright, Voltaire's agenda, as a historian, was to rescue it from the collectioneering science of the antiquarians. For Voltaire, history's moral bound was defined by scale: history was an account of great events. Of course, Voltaire's perspectivism nuanced his idea of great events. Not every king or noble was great. The social hierarchy did not define greatness, but it did tone it.
In this way, Voltaire, far from being the grinning undertaker of the ancien regime, was its great and final ideologue. Grossman quotes, in this respect, an interesting review of Rousseau's Confessions that, while not penned by Voltaire, reflected the Voltairian vision:
Voltaire�s mostly negative judgment of anecdotes was also determined, however, by the same classical, fundamentally conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Ann�e Litt�raire to condemn Rousseau�s Confessions as an act of literary arrogance and presumption. �Where would we be now,� they protested in 1782, �if every one arrogated to himself the right to write and print everything that concerns him personally and that he enjoys recalling?�
We don't believe that Voltaire's position can fairly be called conservative. But otherwise, this is a highly revealing sentence.
According to Grossman, by the end of the eighteenth century the transition from secret history to symptomatic event was being slowly achieved -- felt, in fact, in the etymological sinews of the language. Grossman concentrates on some important figures, and quotes a marvelous anecdote of Chamfort's:
"As early as the last third of
the eighteenth century some of Chamfort�s anecdotes appear to have had such symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance�who,being drunk one night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted with the fact by the horri.ed innkeeper, calmly replied: �Add it to the bill��
seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifference of the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomatic of the personage described, the Duke of Hamilton, and�beyond him perhaps�of the social relations of a particular historical moment, that of the ancien r�gime."
Since the romantics, we have all been imbued with the idea that the essence of history is secret -- that secret histories are the truer ones. Gnosticism is thus revived among us. LI is tempted by that belief himself. Nick Tosches wrote, somewhere, that the history of this country is the history of a number of handshakes between men in dark corners of restaurants and clubs. Or he wrote something like that. Well, we think that the handshakes can be as public as the front page -- that the secret and the overt are usually not so separate, and that the best hiding place is behind the universal indifference to what doesn't disturb one's own repose for the next week.
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Bollettino
Forbes has it right today in its first graf about the distasteful Richard Scrushy:
"NEW YORK - Innocent until proven guilty is still the norm in American justice, unless, of course, you are an accused drug dealer, terrorist, immigrant who looks like a terrorist or someone accused of murder. In those kinds of cases, many have been locked up before trial or have had their assets frozen. Business executives like Richard Scrushy, the fired chief executive of HealthSouth, are not on this list, so a federal judge in Alabama, exercising the default option, said he can have access to all of his assets as he prepares to defend himself against civil and potential accounting fraud charges that have been swirling around the company he founded in 1984."
Ah, yes. The danger posed by illegal immigrants to the average American citizen is immeasurably greater than the danger posed by the pillagers of pensions, the superheros of larceny, the inflators of bubbles... Not.
Let's compare a couple of randomly selected drug crimes:
Here's a story from Deerfield, Illinois. Officers there seize some 106 pounds of "high grade" marijuana. The officers immediately slap a street value on it -- as is customary -- and put five people in prison who were in the business of selling it. "If convicted, the five arrested men could face prison sentences of between six and 30 years. At a March 24 bond hearing, their bonds were set at $10 million, according to a statement released by the Deerfield Police Department."
And here's a drug crime from the Star Ledger in New Jersey:
"Citizen helps cops with arrest Thursday, May 08, 2003 A vigilant resident armed with a cell phone led Bayonne police to arrest a Jersey City man on drug charges, reports said. An unknown resident called police headquarters at about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and said three men had just completed what appeared to be a drug deal on 17th Street and Avenue C, reports said. The resident stayed on a cell phone and told police the men were walking west on Andrew Street toward Kennedy Boulevard, reports said. A patrol car headed to the area, and officers saw Heston Hazelwood, 23, of Fulton Street, who appeared to be unwrapping something in his hands, police said. The officers showed their badges to Hazelwood, who dropped a cigar to the ground and put something in his pocket, reports said. The officers recovered a small bag of suspected marijuana from Hazelwood's pocket, reports said. Police said Hazelwood asked the officers, "Just let me go. It's only trees," using a slang term for marijuana. Hazelwood was arrested and charged with possession of less than 50 grams of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia, reports said."
The bet here is that Hazelwood will serve more time for trees than Scrushy will serve for robbing HealthSouth of about 10 to 100 million dollars.
We searched about in Montesquieu for an appropriate comment on Scrushy. Here's one:
"Les gens des conditions les plus basses ne d�sirent d'en sortir que pour �tre les ma�tres des autres.
Il en est de m�me de la frugalit�. Pour l'aimer, il faut en jouir. Ce ne seront point ceux qui sont corrompus par les d�lices qui aimeront la vie frugale; et, si cela avait �t� naturel ou ordinaire, Alcibiade n'aurait pas fait l'admiration de l'univers. Ce ne seront pas non plus ceux qui envient ou qui admirent le luxe des autres qui aimeront la frugalit� : des gens qui n'ont devant les yeux que des hommes riches, ou des hommes mis�rables comme eux, d�testent leur mis�re, sans aimer ou conna�tre ce qui fait le terme de la mis�re.
C'est donc une maxime tr�s vraie que, pour que l'on aime l'�galit� et la frugalit� dans une r�publique, il faut que les lois les y aient �tablies."
Eventually, a threshold of inequality is crossed. We are crossing that meridien in this country, and we will reap the results, and we will not like it.
Forbes has it right today in its first graf about the distasteful Richard Scrushy:
"NEW YORK - Innocent until proven guilty is still the norm in American justice, unless, of course, you are an accused drug dealer, terrorist, immigrant who looks like a terrorist or someone accused of murder. In those kinds of cases, many have been locked up before trial or have had their assets frozen. Business executives like Richard Scrushy, the fired chief executive of HealthSouth, are not on this list, so a federal judge in Alabama, exercising the default option, said he can have access to all of his assets as he prepares to defend himself against civil and potential accounting fraud charges that have been swirling around the company he founded in 1984."
Ah, yes. The danger posed by illegal immigrants to the average American citizen is immeasurably greater than the danger posed by the pillagers of pensions, the superheros of larceny, the inflators of bubbles... Not.
Let's compare a couple of randomly selected drug crimes:
Here's a story from Deerfield, Illinois. Officers there seize some 106 pounds of "high grade" marijuana. The officers immediately slap a street value on it -- as is customary -- and put five people in prison who were in the business of selling it. "If convicted, the five arrested men could face prison sentences of between six and 30 years. At a March 24 bond hearing, their bonds were set at $10 million, according to a statement released by the Deerfield Police Department."
And here's a drug crime from the Star Ledger in New Jersey:
"Citizen helps cops with arrest Thursday, May 08, 2003 A vigilant resident armed with a cell phone led Bayonne police to arrest a Jersey City man on drug charges, reports said. An unknown resident called police headquarters at about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and said three men had just completed what appeared to be a drug deal on 17th Street and Avenue C, reports said. The resident stayed on a cell phone and told police the men were walking west on Andrew Street toward Kennedy Boulevard, reports said. A patrol car headed to the area, and officers saw Heston Hazelwood, 23, of Fulton Street, who appeared to be unwrapping something in his hands, police said. The officers showed their badges to Hazelwood, who dropped a cigar to the ground and put something in his pocket, reports said. The officers recovered a small bag of suspected marijuana from Hazelwood's pocket, reports said. Police said Hazelwood asked the officers, "Just let me go. It's only trees," using a slang term for marijuana. Hazelwood was arrested and charged with possession of less than 50 grams of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia, reports said."
The bet here is that Hazelwood will serve more time for trees than Scrushy will serve for robbing HealthSouth of about 10 to 100 million dollars.
We searched about in Montesquieu for an appropriate comment on Scrushy. Here's one:
"Les gens des conditions les plus basses ne d�sirent d'en sortir que pour �tre les ma�tres des autres.
Il en est de m�me de la frugalit�. Pour l'aimer, il faut en jouir. Ce ne seront point ceux qui sont corrompus par les d�lices qui aimeront la vie frugale; et, si cela avait �t� naturel ou ordinaire, Alcibiade n'aurait pas fait l'admiration de l'univers. Ce ne seront pas non plus ceux qui envient ou qui admirent le luxe des autres qui aimeront la frugalit� : des gens qui n'ont devant les yeux que des hommes riches, ou des hommes mis�rables comme eux, d�testent leur mis�re, sans aimer ou conna�tre ce qui fait le terme de la mis�re.
C'est donc une maxime tr�s vraie que, pour que l'on aime l'�galit� et la frugalit� dans une r�publique, il faut que les lois les y aient �tablies."
Eventually, a threshold of inequality is crossed. We are crossing that meridien in this country, and we will reap the results, and we will not like it.
Bollettino
Let their way be dark and slippery:
and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.
7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit,
which without cause they have digged for my soul.
8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares;
and let his net that he hath hid catch himself:
into that very destruction let him fall .
-Psalm 35
You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse George Bush, but you can't legally threaten him.
So our question tonight is: what does that mean?
Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, that bunch of stinking losers.
There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:
"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5). On the other hand, our savior enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit, he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse.
Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay about cursing in the Studies in English Literature, winter 03 (unavailable on line, alas), by Mary Steibel, which takes the case of Jane Shore. Jane Shore was King Edward the IV's concubine. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:
"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"
Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.
Steibel tries to infuse a feminist color to her view of cursing:" If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his bo dy, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."
Well, we aren't sure about this. Is the curse really subversive? And is that subversion really tied up with the woman's position -- and is that position most typically that of a witch? This seems an overhasty conclusion, especially when the most powerful sequence of curses in the play come at the end, and they come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"
Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.
Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."
The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.
Let their way be dark and slippery:
and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.
7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit,
which without cause they have digged for my soul.
8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares;
and let his net that he hath hid catch himself:
into that very destruction let him fall .
-Psalm 35
You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse George Bush, but you can't legally threaten him.
So our question tonight is: what does that mean?
Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, that bunch of stinking losers.
There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:
"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5). On the other hand, our savior enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit, he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse.
Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay about cursing in the Studies in English Literature, winter 03 (unavailable on line, alas), by Mary Steibel, which takes the case of Jane Shore. Jane Shore was King Edward the IV's concubine. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:
"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"
Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.
Steibel tries to infuse a feminist color to her view of cursing:" If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his bo dy, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."
Well, we aren't sure about this. Is the curse really subversive? And is that subversion really tied up with the woman's position -- and is that position most typically that of a witch? This seems an overhasty conclusion, especially when the most powerful sequence of curses in the play come at the end, and they come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"
Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.
Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."
The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Miscellanea
Limited Edition is too charming for words -- especially for those of us who grew up reading Victorian novels and mentally immersed in the English countryside. The magazine takes an antiquarian interest in Oxfordfordshire, and sends its reporters out to get the scoop on such hot stories as the latest ancient pots exhibit in the Wallingford Museum. Ourselves, we loved this piece about Anthony a Wood. Here are the first three grafs:
"A conceited, impudent coxcomb, is how a contemporary described Anthony a Wood, a 17th-century historian and antiquary with a genius for alienating people.
Born in 1632 in a house called Postmasters Hall facing Merton College gate, he studied at Merton and lived almost his entire life in Oxford.
Wood occupied two garrets at the top of the family house, making himself a hermit�s cell there where he pored over his books and papers. When he did venture out he managed to feud with just about everyone he knew: scholars, family and friends alike."
Hmm. Sounds like LI. Here's a bit of unexpected confirmatory evidence for Elias' Civilizing process thesis, to which we alluded a few posts ago:
"Through its pages [Wood's journal] we see unruly scholars stealing geese at Wolvercote; the spread of the pox in Oxford; panic in the city as the sky darkens with smoke-clouds from the great fire of London; the disgraceful behaviour of Charles II�s courtiers who, on quitting Oxford, �leave their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless."
We have the same problem with Bush's courtiers.
Woods was a cantakerous fella, but he did like to play a jig now and then. He liked to disguise himself as a poor country musician and, with similarly disguised colleagues, stroll about from country green to country green regaling the interested with various airs. "After playing at Kidlington, however, they were overtaken by a group of soldiers who forced them to play in an open field and then left without giving a penny. �Most of my companion,� wrote Wood, �would afterwards glory in this, but I was ashamed, and could never endure to hear of it.�
And since we are strolling about the magazine scene, shouts out to our friend Lorin Stein for his piece in the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, you have to fork over bucks to read it on-line. Lorin reviews Aleksandar Hemon's novel, Nowhere Man. It is a very pretty review. So check it out at a news stand.
Limited Edition is too charming for words -- especially for those of us who grew up reading Victorian novels and mentally immersed in the English countryside. The magazine takes an antiquarian interest in Oxfordfordshire, and sends its reporters out to get the scoop on such hot stories as the latest ancient pots exhibit in the Wallingford Museum. Ourselves, we loved this piece about Anthony a Wood. Here are the first three grafs:
"A conceited, impudent coxcomb, is how a contemporary described Anthony a Wood, a 17th-century historian and antiquary with a genius for alienating people.
Born in 1632 in a house called Postmasters Hall facing Merton College gate, he studied at Merton and lived almost his entire life in Oxford.
Wood occupied two garrets at the top of the family house, making himself a hermit�s cell there where he pored over his books and papers. When he did venture out he managed to feud with just about everyone he knew: scholars, family and friends alike."
Hmm. Sounds like LI. Here's a bit of unexpected confirmatory evidence for Elias' Civilizing process thesis, to which we alluded a few posts ago:
"Through its pages [Wood's journal] we see unruly scholars stealing geese at Wolvercote; the spread of the pox in Oxford; panic in the city as the sky darkens with smoke-clouds from the great fire of London; the disgraceful behaviour of Charles II�s courtiers who, on quitting Oxford, �leave their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless."
We have the same problem with Bush's courtiers.
Woods was a cantakerous fella, but he did like to play a jig now and then. He liked to disguise himself as a poor country musician and, with similarly disguised colleagues, stroll about from country green to country green regaling the interested with various airs. "After playing at Kidlington, however, they were overtaken by a group of soldiers who forced them to play in an open field and then left without giving a penny. �Most of my companion,� wrote Wood, �would afterwards glory in this, but I was ashamed, and could never endure to hear of it.�
And since we are strolling about the magazine scene, shouts out to our friend Lorin Stein for his piece in the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, you have to fork over bucks to read it on-line. Lorin reviews Aleksandar Hemon's novel, Nowhere Man. It is a very pretty review. So check it out at a news stand.
Monday, May 05, 2003
Bollettino
Michael Kinsley is a puzzle to LI. He could have been a much greater writer than he is -- he definitely has the elements. There are columnists like George Will who write much worse -- Will, in fact, has one of the highest proportions of drivel to memorable graf in the industry --but who have attained disproportionate respect because they are sporadically sesquipedalian. Forget them. There are times that the spirit of Murray Kempton himself seems to hover round Kinsley.
That he has chosen to bank his major time in editing and tv shows that writing isn't the lure for some... Go figure.
His column about Bad Bill Bennett's Gambling prob is a thing of beauty and a joy for a newscycle parasec. Here's the beginning of it.
"Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend�that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit�has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all."
The rest of it styles with as magnificent a swish. Lovely stuff.
Michael Kinsley is a puzzle to LI. He could have been a much greater writer than he is -- he definitely has the elements. There are columnists like George Will who write much worse -- Will, in fact, has one of the highest proportions of drivel to memorable graf in the industry --but who have attained disproportionate respect because they are sporadically sesquipedalian. Forget them. There are times that the spirit of Murray Kempton himself seems to hover round Kinsley.
That he has chosen to bank his major time in editing and tv shows that writing isn't the lure for some... Go figure.
His column about Bad Bill Bennett's Gambling prob is a thing of beauty and a joy for a newscycle parasec. Here's the beginning of it.
"Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend�that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit�has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all."
The rest of it styles with as magnificent a swish. Lovely stuff.
Sunday, May 04, 2003
Bollettino
For those interested in sex, kidnapping, bribery, underaged sex and our good friends over at Dyncorps, the company set to police Iraq(tm), (a wholly owned subsidiary of SIAC), here's a story in the Guardian. We are all happy to see that there's been such a big seachange in the corporate culture that the company has dropped its appeal against Kathryn Bolkovac, the employee who was fired as a killjoy after she complained about company employees visiting brothels in Bosnia to enjoy the charms of a bevy of kidnapped 14 year old Eastern European girls. Bokovac won a judgement of some 100,000 pounds from the now radically changed company.
We'd also recommend, just as a corrective downer, this article about Shiite politics in Ha'aretz. Perhaps LI is just imagining things, but hasn't there been an odd weakness for Shari'a in the left press? We hate to condescend to trafficing in such simplicities, but really, Indymedia, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend. We definitely agree with half and only half of the slogan, America, no, no, Islam, yes yes.
The left tradition in the Middle East has been undermined by the corrupt compromises of its own leadership -- which was forged in the nationalist struggle against colonialism, and deformed utterly by the Cesaerism attendent on the cults of personality crystalizing around petty colonels and by the cold war - so many times that to continue to believe in it almost requires as much faith as the belief in One God. However, all faiths are not equal -- in fact, that derives from the very logic of faith. How about a few slogans like: the American plan to privatize Iraqi oil, no, no, oppression of women, no no, etc. etc?
For those interested in sex, kidnapping, bribery, underaged sex and our good friends over at Dyncorps, the company set to police Iraq(tm), (a wholly owned subsidiary of SIAC), here's a story in the Guardian. We are all happy to see that there's been such a big seachange in the corporate culture that the company has dropped its appeal against Kathryn Bolkovac, the employee who was fired as a killjoy after she complained about company employees visiting brothels in Bosnia to enjoy the charms of a bevy of kidnapped 14 year old Eastern European girls. Bokovac won a judgement of some 100,000 pounds from the now radically changed company.
We'd also recommend, just as a corrective downer, this article about Shiite politics in Ha'aretz. Perhaps LI is just imagining things, but hasn't there been an odd weakness for Shari'a in the left press? We hate to condescend to trafficing in such simplicities, but really, Indymedia, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend. We definitely agree with half and only half of the slogan, America, no, no, Islam, yes yes.
The left tradition in the Middle East has been undermined by the corrupt compromises of its own leadership -- which was forged in the nationalist struggle against colonialism, and deformed utterly by the Cesaerism attendent on the cults of personality crystalizing around petty colonels and by the cold war - so many times that to continue to believe in it almost requires as much faith as the belief in One God. However, all faiths are not equal -- in fact, that derives from the very logic of faith. How about a few slogans like: the American plan to privatize Iraqi oil, no, no, oppression of women, no no, etc. etc?
Saturday, May 03, 2003
Bollettino
Alexander Stille (who wrote a very good book about the mafia in Sicily, Excellent Cadavers), writes about Elias' Civilizing Process in the NYT, and how Elias' theory that it was the civilizing process -- small changes in such things as the visibility one showed in managing one's own dirt, one's mucus, excrement, spit - signaled a larger, invisible change in the fabric of behavioral expectations that spread out over Western civilization tout court -- has been taken up by crime historians. The article is interesting, but it is also symptomatic of a discipline that, at least in the United States, consistently confuses crime and violence.
"Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came up with findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
"Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities."
Murder should be distinguished from war -- but it should not be allowed to engross violence to the exclusion of war. This was a mistake made by Francis Fukuyama in his book on the Great Instauration, in which he produced bogus statistics indicating a violence spike from 1945 to 1990 in the West. The statistics of course ignored war entirely. Crime went down under Hitler; violence didn't. In fact, the peacefulness of the post-war period is the most salient characteristic of the era, not a spike in violence.
Yet, this elementary mistake is repeated in the article:
"The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end up being wrong."Historians have offered various explanations for the unexpected fall in the crime rate. Initially some wondered whether the decline in early modern crime might be a result of industrialization and urbanization themselves. But James A. Sharpe, a historian at the University of York in England, said the big statistical dip in violence preceded industrialization and urbanization by more than a century."
Hmm. As I remember the 17th century, it was the era of one of the bigger spikes in violence: the Thirty years war. Significantly, the stats quoted by Stille come from British sources. Here's an idea: when two or more armies have been sweeping through an area for two or more years, the record of the "crimes" committed by individuals might not be an exact match with the level of violence in the area. Here's the way one historian, Ronald Asch, in German History, a scholarly journal, summed up the losses attendent on a war which took place as violence, supposedly, was collapsing:
"There is little doubt that the Holy Roman Empire suffered demographic losses of at least 30 per cent of its pre-war population, and that the worst affected areas, such as Pomerania or Wurttemberg, were depopulated to an even greater extent."
Asch quotes a contemporary about the way the war was waged:
"Later, in the midst of the war, a treatise on the art of war was published in Straubing by another military expert, Franciscus Bonbra, who considered it self-evident that soldiers would treat their own prince's or his allies' subjects just as badly as those who owed allegiance to the enemy. They would rape any woman who seemed halfway attractive, plunder the houses, destroy the crops and beat and torture the peasants to extort money. In the end they would set the entire village on fire."
Of course, these wouldn't be considered crimes to such as James A. Sharpe -- they were, after all, allowed by law.
Alexander Stille (who wrote a very good book about the mafia in Sicily, Excellent Cadavers), writes about Elias' Civilizing Process in the NYT, and how Elias' theory that it was the civilizing process -- small changes in such things as the visibility one showed in managing one's own dirt, one's mucus, excrement, spit - signaled a larger, invisible change in the fabric of behavioral expectations that spread out over Western civilization tout court -- has been taken up by crime historians. The article is interesting, but it is also symptomatic of a discipline that, at least in the United States, consistently confuses crime and violence.
"Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came up with findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
"Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at least recently crime is higher in cities."
Murder should be distinguished from war -- but it should not be allowed to engross violence to the exclusion of war. This was a mistake made by Francis Fukuyama in his book on the Great Instauration, in which he produced bogus statistics indicating a violence spike from 1945 to 1990 in the West. The statistics of course ignored war entirely. Crime went down under Hitler; violence didn't. In fact, the peacefulness of the post-war period is the most salient characteristic of the era, not a spike in violence.
Yet, this elementary mistake is repeated in the article:
"The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement, by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those theories end up being wrong."Historians have offered various explanations for the unexpected fall in the crime rate. Initially some wondered whether the decline in early modern crime might be a result of industrialization and urbanization themselves. But James A. Sharpe, a historian at the University of York in England, said the big statistical dip in violence preceded industrialization and urbanization by more than a century."
Hmm. As I remember the 17th century, it was the era of one of the bigger spikes in violence: the Thirty years war. Significantly, the stats quoted by Stille come from British sources. Here's an idea: when two or more armies have been sweeping through an area for two or more years, the record of the "crimes" committed by individuals might not be an exact match with the level of violence in the area. Here's the way one historian, Ronald Asch, in German History, a scholarly journal, summed up the losses attendent on a war which took place as violence, supposedly, was collapsing:
"There is little doubt that the Holy Roman Empire suffered demographic losses of at least 30 per cent of its pre-war population, and that the worst affected areas, such as Pomerania or Wurttemberg, were depopulated to an even greater extent."
Asch quotes a contemporary about the way the war was waged:
"Later, in the midst of the war, a treatise on the art of war was published in Straubing by another military expert, Franciscus Bonbra, who considered it self-evident that soldiers would treat their own prince's or his allies' subjects just as badly as those who owed allegiance to the enemy. They would rape any woman who seemed halfway attractive, plunder the houses, destroy the crops and beat and torture the peasants to extort money. In the end they would set the entire village on fire."
Of course, these wouldn't be considered crimes to such as James A. Sharpe -- they were, after all, allowed by law.
Bollettino
A nice report on the Bush administration's plans for getting the fiercely independent Iraqi government, currently subcontracted out to SAIC, to agree to sell Iraqi assets at bargain basement prices to Bush cronies is featured on the Petroleum World site, culled from the WSJ. We are sure that Smilin' Jay Garner will cast a fiery glance with his eagle eye over any plan that he doesn't think is in the best interest of the Spirit of the Iraqi people. Fortunately for American Corporations, Smilin' Jay just might be pursuaded that what is good for Shell Oil is good for Iraq. Whew! So that wondrous privitization just might go through, benefiting the Iraqi people mightily, as it has done in Argentina, the Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and other places around the world!
"On the economic side, the AID plan serves as a detailed road map for achieving that end. The proposals for possible mass privatization of Iraqi industry are likely to be the most controversial. The document -- first drafted in February and circulated among financial consultants -- calls for liquidating some insolvent Iraqi companies, while assessing others for possible sale. Some state companies might be sold through "a broad-based Mass Privatization Program," which could distribute ownership vouchers to ordinary Iraqi citizens, similar to a program used in Russia in the mid-1990s. The document says that the contractors would help support "private sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting industries" that dominate Iraq's business activity.
Any attempt at privatizing Iraq's oil industry, which controls the world's second-
largest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia, would be a gargantuan business deal. It could be contentious, especially if assets wind up in the hands of foreign oil companies. In the Mideast and Europe, there is a widespread belief -- despite White House denials -- that the U.S. invaded Iraq to get control of its oil.
According to the timetable in the documents, officials would spend a year building a
consensus for industry privatization, and then transfer assets over the following three years."
Building consensus -- hmm, now that is the sweetest little term we've heard for mass repression, enforced by bayonet and tank, in a long time. Just as the Russians "built consensus" in post-68 Czechoslovakia. Of course, they were following their 'roadmap" there. You will notice that the Middle East is starting to drown in roadmaps.
LI also recommends the NYT article on Baghdad -- a place name that we can now, with superb confidence, drop into the vast pool of our national amnesia now that our flying ace of a President has declared the war over. It remains only to unleash massacre on a few demonstrations in a few unimportant outposts, set up a puppet regime, and steal the Iraqi oil infrastructure. In any case, the NYT account has a nice quote about Chalabi:
"The scion of a wealthy Shiite family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1958. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud in Jordan over the operations of bank he founded there; he denies those charges, saying they were fostered by the Iraqi government. Since his return to Iraq last month, the behavior of his entourage has outraged many Iraqis, and even some Americans.
"What we have done is import mafias into Baghdad," said one American official, who insisted on anonymity.
We've been reading the Gus Russo's encyclopedic account of the Chicago mob, The Outfit. At one point Russo describes the way two freelance hoods, George Browne and Willie Morris Bioff, shook down movie houses in Chicago. A movie house would open, and eventually Bioff would show up in the office of the owner and ask, "how are we doing?" Then it would start -- the stream of cash towards Bioff and Browne. In return for which, the movie house owner got to retain entrepreneurial control over his vitals, as well as a working pair of legs and arms. This theory generates spontaneously in the heads of the incurably crooked. So it has generated in Chalabi's head. The Times article continues:
"The official was referring to the takeover of many of Baghdad's best houses by groups of men claiming to have formed new political parties. Kurdish parties have taken over a Baath Party headquarters and the engineering building of Mr. Hussein's office. Some have set up roadblocks and established militias, sometimes saying they are operating with the authority of the American military.
An early expropriator was Mr. Chalabi, whose supporters seized the elite Hunting Club, apparently with the permission of American soldiers. Various groups associated with him took over other expensive houses in the same area.Last weekend, General Garner appeared to give tacit approval by dining with Mr. Chalabi at the club. All that, critics here say, has only encouraged other groups to go house-taking."
Smilin' Jay is just obeying the time sanctioned instincts of politicians through the past century. As Bioff, who started out as a pimp, put it: "I never saw a whore who wasn't hungry; and I never saw a politician who wasn't a whore."
And so Bioff articulates the typical businessman's disdain for his work force. Whores have contributed infinitely more to civilization than politicians.
A nice report on the Bush administration's plans for getting the fiercely independent Iraqi government, currently subcontracted out to SAIC, to agree to sell Iraqi assets at bargain basement prices to Bush cronies is featured on the Petroleum World site, culled from the WSJ. We are sure that Smilin' Jay Garner will cast a fiery glance with his eagle eye over any plan that he doesn't think is in the best interest of the Spirit of the Iraqi people. Fortunately for American Corporations, Smilin' Jay just might be pursuaded that what is good for Shell Oil is good for Iraq. Whew! So that wondrous privitization just might go through, benefiting the Iraqi people mightily, as it has done in Argentina, the Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and other places around the world!
"On the economic side, the AID plan serves as a detailed road map for achieving that end. The proposals for possible mass privatization of Iraqi industry are likely to be the most controversial. The document -- first drafted in February and circulated among financial consultants -- calls for liquidating some insolvent Iraqi companies, while assessing others for possible sale. Some state companies might be sold through "a broad-based Mass Privatization Program," which could distribute ownership vouchers to ordinary Iraqi citizens, similar to a program used in Russia in the mid-1990s. The document says that the contractors would help support "private sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting industries" that dominate Iraq's business activity.
Any attempt at privatizing Iraq's oil industry, which controls the world's second-
largest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia, would be a gargantuan business deal. It could be contentious, especially if assets wind up in the hands of foreign oil companies. In the Mideast and Europe, there is a widespread belief -- despite White House denials -- that the U.S. invaded Iraq to get control of its oil.
According to the timetable in the documents, officials would spend a year building a
consensus for industry privatization, and then transfer assets over the following three years."
Building consensus -- hmm, now that is the sweetest little term we've heard for mass repression, enforced by bayonet and tank, in a long time. Just as the Russians "built consensus" in post-68 Czechoslovakia. Of course, they were following their 'roadmap" there. You will notice that the Middle East is starting to drown in roadmaps.
LI also recommends the NYT article on Baghdad -- a place name that we can now, with superb confidence, drop into the vast pool of our national amnesia now that our flying ace of a President has declared the war over. It remains only to unleash massacre on a few demonstrations in a few unimportant outposts, set up a puppet regime, and steal the Iraqi oil infrastructure. In any case, the NYT account has a nice quote about Chalabi:
"The scion of a wealthy Shiite family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1958. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud in Jordan over the operations of bank he founded there; he denies those charges, saying they were fostered by the Iraqi government. Since his return to Iraq last month, the behavior of his entourage has outraged many Iraqis, and even some Americans.
"What we have done is import mafias into Baghdad," said one American official, who insisted on anonymity.
We've been reading the Gus Russo's encyclopedic account of the Chicago mob, The Outfit. At one point Russo describes the way two freelance hoods, George Browne and Willie Morris Bioff, shook down movie houses in Chicago. A movie house would open, and eventually Bioff would show up in the office of the owner and ask, "how are we doing?" Then it would start -- the stream of cash towards Bioff and Browne. In return for which, the movie house owner got to retain entrepreneurial control over his vitals, as well as a working pair of legs and arms. This theory generates spontaneously in the heads of the incurably crooked. So it has generated in Chalabi's head. The Times article continues:
"The official was referring to the takeover of many of Baghdad's best houses by groups of men claiming to have formed new political parties. Kurdish parties have taken over a Baath Party headquarters and the engineering building of Mr. Hussein's office. Some have set up roadblocks and established militias, sometimes saying they are operating with the authority of the American military.
An early expropriator was Mr. Chalabi, whose supporters seized the elite Hunting Club, apparently with the permission of American soldiers. Various groups associated with him took over other expensive houses in the same area.Last weekend, General Garner appeared to give tacit approval by dining with Mr. Chalabi at the club. All that, critics here say, has only encouraged other groups to go house-taking."
Smilin' Jay is just obeying the time sanctioned instincts of politicians through the past century. As Bioff, who started out as a pimp, put it: "I never saw a whore who wasn't hungry; and I never saw a politician who wasn't a whore."
And so Bioff articulates the typical businessman's disdain for his work force. Whores have contributed infinitely more to civilization than politicians.
Friday, May 02, 2003
Bollettino
LI has already written one post on Dyncorps. You remember Dyncorps -- the private company America has contracted for policing work in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Dyncorps (unsurprisingly) has its little connection to Enron, as does most of Bush's administration's important cadres. The man who was Dyncorps chairman, "Pug" Winokur, was the head of Enron's board's financial committee -- and approved the setting up of the partnerships for which Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO, is now undergoing the ritual judicial bastinado -- although we are wise enough to know that the bastinado is mostly mock, and that no man who has a few million dollars stuffed into the mattress is ever going to suffer excessively from Bush's Justice Department. Dyncorps has apparently spread its tentacles far and wide, so that the SEC itself depends on its computer expertise. This makes for an interesting, mobius like situation if the SEC ever decided to investigate these corporate cops.
We are particularly concerned with the role of Dyncorps in providing America's friendly police face in Iraq -- which has now been officially pronounced, by our commander in chief, a place where the lion has laid down once and for all with the lamb so that we can get on with those tax cuts, please -- given Dyncorps role in Bosnia. The sex scandals in Bosnia have, for some reason, not aroused the same American press that was ever vigilant in monitoring the tumescence and detumescence of President Clinton's governing organ. Perhaps it is because enslaving, raping, and stealing from a bunch of underaged girls from Eastern Europe is just too depressing for your average American newspaper reader to handle -- far better to feed them the scraps from some California murder. Well, there's an interesting little article on what went down in Bosnia by Cali Ruchala and Emir Kaganovich.
In the meantime, the contracting out of the Iraq operation continues to benefit from a massive lack of media curiosity.
LI has already written one post on Dyncorps. You remember Dyncorps -- the private company America has contracted for policing work in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Dyncorps (unsurprisingly) has its little connection to Enron, as does most of Bush's administration's important cadres. The man who was Dyncorps chairman, "Pug" Winokur, was the head of Enron's board's financial committee -- and approved the setting up of the partnerships for which Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO, is now undergoing the ritual judicial bastinado -- although we are wise enough to know that the bastinado is mostly mock, and that no man who has a few million dollars stuffed into the mattress is ever going to suffer excessively from Bush's Justice Department. Dyncorps has apparently spread its tentacles far and wide, so that the SEC itself depends on its computer expertise. This makes for an interesting, mobius like situation if the SEC ever decided to investigate these corporate cops.
We are particularly concerned with the role of Dyncorps in providing America's friendly police face in Iraq -- which has now been officially pronounced, by our commander in chief, a place where the lion has laid down once and for all with the lamb so that we can get on with those tax cuts, please -- given Dyncorps role in Bosnia. The sex scandals in Bosnia have, for some reason, not aroused the same American press that was ever vigilant in monitoring the tumescence and detumescence of President Clinton's governing organ. Perhaps it is because enslaving, raping, and stealing from a bunch of underaged girls from Eastern Europe is just too depressing for your average American newspaper reader to handle -- far better to feed them the scraps from some California murder. Well, there's an interesting little article on what went down in Bosnia by Cali Ruchala and Emir Kaganovich.
In the meantime, the contracting out of the Iraq operation continues to benefit from a massive lack of media curiosity.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
Bolletino
Not much attention is being paid to the renting out of Iraq to SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)-- which is apparently the plan hatched by Paul Wolfowitz and Smilin' Jay Garner. Iraq has already been graced with a paramilitary group, flown out at Pentagon expense, to surround the eventual proconsul of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi. Now the Pentagon is flying out a group of exiles to take over Smilin' Jay's ministries -- including the ever juicy Oil Ministry -- and they are paying them, for reasons unexpressed in the press releases, through SAIC -- an employee owned defense tech company. SAIC is run by one J. R. Beyster, who has worked, in the past, in Los Alamos. SAIC was last in the spotlight for buying the company that has the privilege of deciding who gets domain names on the Internet. At that time, a lot of paranoia was generated among the true net-cognescenti by the composition of the Board of Directors. Yes, here's a bunch of fun facts to know and tell: that board of directors has included former National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and the former head of research and development for the Pentagon, Donald Hicks, ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense William Perry, and another ex-CIA Director John Deutch
Business 2.0, to its credit, has an article this month that explores the super-secretive SAIC -- although it is explored in the gung-ho spirit of geek patriotism. As long as they use neat technology to curtail our freedom, it is alright with Business 2.0.
Here are a few excerpts to make you confident that we are in good hands -- xray hands, the hands of Donald Rumsfeld and company:
SAIC is now the country's largest privately held infotech company, with 2002 revenues of $6.1 billion. About a third of SAIC's business is systems integration for other companies, such as Pfizer (PFE) and BP (BP), but its heart and soul is spy tech. Intelligence agencies don't list or rank their contractors. Intelligence sources, however, say SAIC was the NSA's top supplier last year and in the top five at the CIA. In addition to the high-powered data-mining software that helped nail Mohammed, SAIC makes undersea thermal imaging sensors for tracking submarines. It produces software that spy satellites use to map the earth and feed target data to precision munitions, including those that have been pounding Iraq. It's also a leader in the booming homeland security business: It builds gear that uses gamma rays to peer inside cargo containers and truck trailers. Adding to SAIC's covert aura, Beyster has hired an unusual number of former spies, law enforcement chiefs, and secret warriors. Some 5,000 employees -- roughly one-seventh of the workforce -- have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest arrays of top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. "We are a stealth company," says Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."
To understand the Iraq war, it is becoming clear, you have to understand other odd aspects of the Bush administration. The energy policy group convened behind closed doors behind Cheney. The tax giveaway to the wealthiest. The using of homeland security to pump ever more money into companies that are not really concerned with defending you and me.
And so, this is the military-crony complex that now has put Iraq in its portfolio. To the betterment, of course, of all Iraqi-kind.
Excuse me if our victories make me a little sick.
Not much attention is being paid to the renting out of Iraq to SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)-- which is apparently the plan hatched by Paul Wolfowitz and Smilin' Jay Garner. Iraq has already been graced with a paramilitary group, flown out at Pentagon expense, to surround the eventual proconsul of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi. Now the Pentagon is flying out a group of exiles to take over Smilin' Jay's ministries -- including the ever juicy Oil Ministry -- and they are paying them, for reasons unexpressed in the press releases, through SAIC -- an employee owned defense tech company. SAIC is run by one J. R. Beyster, who has worked, in the past, in Los Alamos. SAIC was last in the spotlight for buying the company that has the privilege of deciding who gets domain names on the Internet. At that time, a lot of paranoia was generated among the true net-cognescenti by the composition of the Board of Directors. Yes, here's a bunch of fun facts to know and tell: that board of directors has included former National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and the former head of research and development for the Pentagon, Donald Hicks, ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense William Perry, and another ex-CIA Director John Deutch
Business 2.0, to its credit, has an article this month that explores the super-secretive SAIC -- although it is explored in the gung-ho spirit of geek patriotism. As long as they use neat technology to curtail our freedom, it is alright with Business 2.0.
Here are a few excerpts to make you confident that we are in good hands -- xray hands, the hands of Donald Rumsfeld and company:
SAIC is now the country's largest privately held infotech company, with 2002 revenues of $6.1 billion. About a third of SAIC's business is systems integration for other companies, such as Pfizer (PFE) and BP (BP), but its heart and soul is spy tech. Intelligence agencies don't list or rank their contractors. Intelligence sources, however, say SAIC was the NSA's top supplier last year and in the top five at the CIA. In addition to the high-powered data-mining software that helped nail Mohammed, SAIC makes undersea thermal imaging sensors for tracking submarines. It produces software that spy satellites use to map the earth and feed target data to precision munitions, including those that have been pounding Iraq. It's also a leader in the booming homeland security business: It builds gear that uses gamma rays to peer inside cargo containers and truck trailers. Adding to SAIC's covert aura, Beyster has hired an unusual number of former spies, law enforcement chiefs, and secret warriors. Some 5,000 employees -- roughly one-seventh of the workforce -- have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest arrays of top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. "We are a stealth company," says Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."
To understand the Iraq war, it is becoming clear, you have to understand other odd aspects of the Bush administration. The energy policy group convened behind closed doors behind Cheney. The tax giveaway to the wealthiest. The using of homeland security to pump ever more money into companies that are not really concerned with defending you and me.
And so, this is the military-crony complex that now has put Iraq in its portfolio. To the betterment, of course, of all Iraqi-kind.
Excuse me if our victories make me a little sick.
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Bollettino
KUT, the station LI listens to, has been gamely interspersing its usual fare of music and news this month with short bursts of poetry reading. This is in honor of national poetry month. They have ranged through at least thirty contemporary American poets, and LI has grown weary of getting up and turning off the radio when the poetry starts.
One thing has been proven conclusively: contemporary American poetry is worse than you can ever imagine.
It is worse than the personal essay, which is bad enough. Mostly, it is the personal essay chopped up into lines that the readers know enough, from grade school, not to linger at the ends of -- which would be pointless, anyway, as the lines are almost uniformly alien to sound. They have abandoned the theater of the voice, these latter day puritans, and they are very righteous about it. They have even abandoned the sound of the American voice, which is a morass, generally, of vocables, a moving pudding of universal stickiness.
We wish that the station had thought to include some, well, real poems. There is, after all, a lot there -- from Chaucer to Yeats. It is interesting how detached the contemporary poems are from memory -- from offering themselves to being memorized -- in comparison to the program of songs into which they are occassionally snuck. Generally, I can sing along, if I want to, to Dylan, or Joni Mitchell, or Radiohead, or whatever, because I know those songs -- I haven't memorized them so much as they have attached themselves to my memory. The same is true for the poems of Eliot -- or for large sections of Pound, or for Wallace Stevens. The same is true for Rimbaud's prose poems. But has any reader ever memorized the lines of, say, Lisel Muller? Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1997, this is the beginning of When I am asked, which was read on KUT:
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
And so on. Now, compare these lines to a similar use of the divine 'I" in Yeats, in one of his truly minor poems.
On being asked for a War Poem
I THINK it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth, 5
Or an old man upon a winter�s night.
That's all. The Yeats is all trickery, and parades a thought I disagree with in terms of a stereotype that has grown stale in the Oeuvre. He does these themes better in other poems, and the lines are not any less essayistic than Van Mussel's. Yet even as a toss off, you can't read them two or three times, just to read them, without the words settling in your mind. Compare "We have no gift to set the statesman right" to "I talk about the indifference of nature." Muller's line is not only unmemorable, it is vaguely reminiscent of some bad essay written by a mediocre student about Emerson .. or something. It has no sovereignity. Poetry that divests itself of its own power to this extent is poetry well on the way to extinction.
KUT, the station LI listens to, has been gamely interspersing its usual fare of music and news this month with short bursts of poetry reading. This is in honor of national poetry month. They have ranged through at least thirty contemporary American poets, and LI has grown weary of getting up and turning off the radio when the poetry starts.
One thing has been proven conclusively: contemporary American poetry is worse than you can ever imagine.
It is worse than the personal essay, which is bad enough. Mostly, it is the personal essay chopped up into lines that the readers know enough, from grade school, not to linger at the ends of -- which would be pointless, anyway, as the lines are almost uniformly alien to sound. They have abandoned the theater of the voice, these latter day puritans, and they are very righteous about it. They have even abandoned the sound of the American voice, which is a morass, generally, of vocables, a moving pudding of universal stickiness.
We wish that the station had thought to include some, well, real poems. There is, after all, a lot there -- from Chaucer to Yeats. It is interesting how detached the contemporary poems are from memory -- from offering themselves to being memorized -- in comparison to the program of songs into which they are occassionally snuck. Generally, I can sing along, if I want to, to Dylan, or Joni Mitchell, or Radiohead, or whatever, because I know those songs -- I haven't memorized them so much as they have attached themselves to my memory. The same is true for the poems of Eliot -- or for large sections of Pound, or for Wallace Stevens. The same is true for Rimbaud's prose poems. But has any reader ever memorized the lines of, say, Lisel Muller? Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1997, this is the beginning of When I am asked, which was read on KUT:
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
And so on. Now, compare these lines to a similar use of the divine 'I" in Yeats, in one of his truly minor poems.
On being asked for a War Poem
I THINK it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth, 5
Or an old man upon a winter�s night.
That's all. The Yeats is all trickery, and parades a thought I disagree with in terms of a stereotype that has grown stale in the Oeuvre. He does these themes better in other poems, and the lines are not any less essayistic than Van Mussel's. Yet even as a toss off, you can't read them two or three times, just to read them, without the words settling in your mind. Compare "We have no gift to set the statesman right" to "I talk about the indifference of nature." Muller's line is not only unmemorable, it is vaguely reminiscent of some bad essay written by a mediocre student about Emerson .. or something. It has no sovereignity. Poetry that divests itself of its own power to this extent is poetry well on the way to extinction.
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Bollettino
Paul Krugman makes the Quaint case that it matters when the goverment lies to get us into a war.
"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."
Krugman is, of course, talking about the missing WMD. Now, LI was anti-war, just as we are now anti-occupation. But we don't really care that much that the WMD haven't been unconvered. In our humble opinion, the distinction between WMD and W not soMD is bogus - a distinction that is designed to be elastic enough to allow the selling of aircraft designed to deliver nuclear missiles, but shrinks virtuously at the missiles themselves, is conceptually suspect. Krugman's major point is, of course, right: we were duped into this war. But we think the duping was self-administered as much as it was prescribed by the Bush-ites. In this country, the populace can get peculiarly roused to aggression, as long as it can convince itself that it isn't aggression. In this case, the argument moved vaguely from nerve gas and anthrax to 9/11. Of course, that's changed since the fall of Saddam. But if the moment closes in Iraq -- and incidents like Fallaju, where 15 protestors were killed by American troops yesterday , hint at the moment closing in the reddest way -- and the second phase of the war starts, the justification will shift, again, to one of 'defense.'
Paul Krugman makes the Quaint case that it matters when the goverment lies to get us into a war.
"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."
Krugman is, of course, talking about the missing WMD. Now, LI was anti-war, just as we are now anti-occupation. But we don't really care that much that the WMD haven't been unconvered. In our humble opinion, the distinction between WMD and W not soMD is bogus - a distinction that is designed to be elastic enough to allow the selling of aircraft designed to deliver nuclear missiles, but shrinks virtuously at the missiles themselves, is conceptually suspect. Krugman's major point is, of course, right: we were duped into this war. But we think the duping was self-administered as much as it was prescribed by the Bush-ites. In this country, the populace can get peculiarly roused to aggression, as long as it can convince itself that it isn't aggression. In this case, the argument moved vaguely from nerve gas and anthrax to 9/11. Of course, that's changed since the fall of Saddam. But if the moment closes in Iraq -- and incidents like Fallaju, where 15 protestors were killed by American troops yesterday , hint at the moment closing in the reddest way -- and the second phase of the war starts, the justification will shift, again, to one of 'defense.'
Monday, April 28, 2003
Bollettino
So Creative Associates International landed the big job of shipping American made schoolbooks to the schoolkids of Iraq. Just as they had previously landed the contract with Afghanistan. One wonders if Smilin' Jay Garner will be celebrated in the spirit to which Iraq's previous despots have become accustomed. But NO!!! These will be American style textbooks, so they will presumably induce the instant amnesia on all things historical and geographic so endearingly characteristic of American education.
Americans are, apparently, old hands with textbooks. In Afghanistan, in the pre-9/11 days, Americans produced textbooks that even the Taliban approved of. An old Wash Post story about this, on the Emperors-clothes site, begins like this:
"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.
As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence."
Being a turn on a dime nation, we have now decided that history is no good. History now has a new, friendlier face, in which we have always, always been opposed to Islamofascism, man. We wonder who contracted to ship the old, jihadist textbooks to Afghanistan. At least we know who created those books -- the University of Nebraska. Here's a description of what the US taxpayer paid for:
"Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders."
Well, let's just forget that, shall we? If we forget it hard enough, we can deny it ever happened. Of course, the same group that produced textbooks that taught six year olds the adorable and enriching arts of planting land mines have moved on, and are now producing the NEW textbooks.
Apparently about four to nine million books have gone off the presses. But we do wonder -- where do those books end up? The Kabul government, by all accounts, has a difficult enough time sending soldiers out into the provinces -- so do they send school teachers? An article about the problems of reconstruction in the The WashPost today indicates that the school teachers are reading the textbooks, whatever their content, to each other in Kabul, if they are being read at all:
"Afghanistan showed the essential need for security and accountability. Administrators of AID programs in Kabul are barred from leaving their compound without high-level approval and a heavily armed military escort, the inspector general's report noted. Even then, bandits, landmines and fractured roads make travel difficult or impossible.
One consultant recently wrote in a private assessment, obtained by The Washington Post, that security issues have made it "almost impossible" for U.S.-backed education officials to work in 24 of the nation's 34 provinces. An International Red Cross worker was stopped along a roadway March 26 and shot 20 times, becoming the first foreign aid worker killed since the Taliban's fall. Continuing attacks have forced some humanitarian groups to withdraw altogether."
However, for those who worry that the printing presses in Omaha will shut down -- don't: from the point of view of ROI, there's no bad news. Since it is the government, and since the American government has every inducement to enrich its subalterns, the textbook makers will get paid, and get their over-runs paid. Everything's still good in Omaha.
So Creative Associates International landed the big job of shipping American made schoolbooks to the schoolkids of Iraq. Just as they had previously landed the contract with Afghanistan. One wonders if Smilin' Jay Garner will be celebrated in the spirit to which Iraq's previous despots have become accustomed. But NO!!! These will be American style textbooks, so they will presumably induce the instant amnesia on all things historical and geographic so endearingly characteristic of American education.
Americans are, apparently, old hands with textbooks. In Afghanistan, in the pre-9/11 days, Americans produced textbooks that even the Taliban approved of. An old Wash Post story about this, on the Emperors-clothes site, begins like this:
"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.
As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence."
Being a turn on a dime nation, we have now decided that history is no good. History now has a new, friendlier face, in which we have always, always been opposed to Islamofascism, man. We wonder who contracted to ship the old, jihadist textbooks to Afghanistan. At least we know who created those books -- the University of Nebraska. Here's a description of what the US taxpayer paid for:
"Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders."
Well, let's just forget that, shall we? If we forget it hard enough, we can deny it ever happened. Of course, the same group that produced textbooks that taught six year olds the adorable and enriching arts of planting land mines have moved on, and are now producing the NEW textbooks.
Apparently about four to nine million books have gone off the presses. But we do wonder -- where do those books end up? The Kabul government, by all accounts, has a difficult enough time sending soldiers out into the provinces -- so do they send school teachers? An article about the problems of reconstruction in the The WashPost today indicates that the school teachers are reading the textbooks, whatever their content, to each other in Kabul, if they are being read at all:
"Afghanistan showed the essential need for security and accountability. Administrators of AID programs in Kabul are barred from leaving their compound without high-level approval and a heavily armed military escort, the inspector general's report noted. Even then, bandits, landmines and fractured roads make travel difficult or impossible.
One consultant recently wrote in a private assessment, obtained by The Washington Post, that security issues have made it "almost impossible" for U.S.-backed education officials to work in 24 of the nation's 34 provinces. An International Red Cross worker was stopped along a roadway March 26 and shot 20 times, becoming the first foreign aid worker killed since the Taliban's fall. Continuing attacks have forced some humanitarian groups to withdraw altogether."
However, for those who worry that the printing presses in Omaha will shut down -- don't: from the point of view of ROI, there's no bad news. Since it is the government, and since the American government has every inducement to enrich its subalterns, the textbook makers will get paid, and get their over-runs paid. Everything's still good in Omaha.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Bollettino
Du cote de chez Hitchens
Et sans doute, en se rappelant ainsi leurs entretiens, en pensant ainsi a elle quand il etait seul, il faisait seulement jouer son image entre beaucoup d'autres images de femmes dans des reveries romanesques; mais si, grace a une circonstance quelconque (ou meme peut-etre sans que ce fut grace a elle, la circonstance qui sepresente au moment ou un etat, latent jusque-la, se declare, pouvantn'avoir influe en rien sur lui) l'image d'Odette de Crecy venait a absorber toutes ces reveries, si celles-ci n'etaient plus separables de son souvenir, alors l'imperfection de son corps ne garderait plus aucune importance, ni qu'il eut ete, plus ou moins qu'un autre corps,selon le gout de Swann, puisque devenu le corps de celle qu'il aimait,il serait desormais le seul qui fut capable de lui causer des joies et des tourments. -- Proust
The first volume of Proust's novel tells the story (imperfectly nested, as is Proust's habit, among other stories) of the downfall of Swann. Swann, a man of perfect, even painfully perfect taste, falls in love with an ignorant slut, Odette, and sacrifices to her his supreme things -- his social connections, his taste, and finally his honor. While he does this, he tries to enthuse his friends about Odette -- thus further distancing them from him.
The story has an irresistable bearing on the recent embrace, by Christopher Hitchens, of the most brutal and the most venal right wing groups in this country. Those groups operate, of course, under the aegis of the Bush administration. They are in direct line of descent from the groups that helped create the cold war, and directed it, in all its bloody splendor, for almost fifty years, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and whereever a dictator was to be propped up, or a union representative was to be stuffed into the trunk of a black car and unceremoniously dumped on a garbage heap. With that history in mind, it is pretty easy to see what is happening in Iraq, from the multi-year contracts being signed with the usual crew of Republican contributors -- Bechtel, Haliburtan, Fluor -- to the sinister paramilitary group crystallizing around Ahmad Chalabi. The choice narrowed, in the Cold War, between the indigestible petit totalitarianism of kleptocratic generals and the bloodthirsty dreams of Communist party offshoots. The choice is narrowing, in Iraq, to that between the disastrous dream of theocracy, on the one side, and the openly corrupt violence of pro-American groups, on the other side. Comic overtones are supplied by the numerous Americans in Iraq who are warning that third parties -- heavens, imagine third parties -- are subverting the critical path of American-Iraqi amity.
Hitchens, having propagandized for the war from his own peculiar angle -- he simply refused to recognize Bush's war, and replaced it with his own dream of Bush's war -- is now confronted with the fruits of the war that really happened. So he has manfully taken up the task of apologizing for crony capitalists and for Chalabi's Pentagon supported stormtroopers . The defense of crony capitalism is expressed by the usual casuistry of defending the indefensible. First, you break the indefensible down into alternatives -- being careful to exclude the alternative that will upset your case. Next, you invest your analysis with a grave air of necessity -- these are the sides that try men's souls, etc. So those who oppose, for instance, the US contracting with Haliburton in a closed door process that is adjudged by an American agency, pledges an amount of money extending over three years for a project that is supposedly going to be done on foreign soil, and is rewarded to a company that just happens to have gone from a couple of bad years, under Dick Cheney, CEO, to some very good years, with a plethora of fat government contracts, under Dick Cheney, VP -- anyone who criticizes such things is an oleaginous defender of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens arguments seem themselves to be written in polyunsaturated fats, and such other fats as enlarge the liver from the breakdown of alcohol in the bloodstream. However, just when you think he can't top this particular exercize in intellectual corruption, he comes up with a weepy column on Chalabi, in the course of which he gets very mournful over criticisms heaped on Chalabi in the American press. He makes a very big deal out of Chalabi's leadership of a paramilitary group in the nineties in Northern Iraq -- which, according to Hitchens, was the greatest return of a man to his roots since Alex Hailey visited Nigeria. No, this is not a man unconnected with Iraq -- he is a patriot in the line of Napoleon II and, uh, Garibaldi. Hitchens also tells us that his man's paramilitaries were collected in response to the death threats of the Saddamites. Now, we do have to give Chalabi credit for bravery. The man has been tempered, as steel is in the furnace, by the drama of haribreadth escapes -- starting with his unwilling flight from Baghdad at twelve, and going on to the humiliation of being stuffed in the boot of a car to escape being sentenced to prison for embezzlement in Jordan in 1989. The latter incident, Chalabi's partisans have assured us, was all Saddam's fault, too.
We imagine it actually gave him cred with the tough boy D.C. crowd. Imagine, Garibaldi with the soul of a Ken Lay! By that act alone he showed that he was made of the same stuff as the CEOs of Enron, or Halliburton, of General Dynamics -- he was a man willing to go to any length to avoid the penalties attached to peculation. That, of course, is the one consistent theme that unifies our present Bush-ite order. So he does seem peculiarly matched to the hour -- an hour that is marked by the movement of corporate giants into the "humanitarian reconstruction" of Iraq, and an amour of C. Hitchens for the right.
This was not, once, selon le gout de Hitchens -- but now it is indeed capable of causing him the most extreme joys and torments.
Du cote de chez Hitchens
Et sans doute, en se rappelant ainsi leurs entretiens, en pensant ainsi a elle quand il etait seul, il faisait seulement jouer son image entre beaucoup d'autres images de femmes dans des reveries romanesques; mais si, grace a une circonstance quelconque (ou meme peut-etre sans que ce fut grace a elle, la circonstance qui sepresente au moment ou un etat, latent jusque-la, se declare, pouvantn'avoir influe en rien sur lui) l'image d'Odette de Crecy venait a absorber toutes ces reveries, si celles-ci n'etaient plus separables de son souvenir, alors l'imperfection de son corps ne garderait plus aucune importance, ni qu'il eut ete, plus ou moins qu'un autre corps,selon le gout de Swann, puisque devenu le corps de celle qu'il aimait,il serait desormais le seul qui fut capable de lui causer des joies et des tourments. -- Proust
The first volume of Proust's novel tells the story (imperfectly nested, as is Proust's habit, among other stories) of the downfall of Swann. Swann, a man of perfect, even painfully perfect taste, falls in love with an ignorant slut, Odette, and sacrifices to her his supreme things -- his social connections, his taste, and finally his honor. While he does this, he tries to enthuse his friends about Odette -- thus further distancing them from him.
The story has an irresistable bearing on the recent embrace, by Christopher Hitchens, of the most brutal and the most venal right wing groups in this country. Those groups operate, of course, under the aegis of the Bush administration. They are in direct line of descent from the groups that helped create the cold war, and directed it, in all its bloody splendor, for almost fifty years, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and whereever a dictator was to be propped up, or a union representative was to be stuffed into the trunk of a black car and unceremoniously dumped on a garbage heap. With that history in mind, it is pretty easy to see what is happening in Iraq, from the multi-year contracts being signed with the usual crew of Republican contributors -- Bechtel, Haliburtan, Fluor -- to the sinister paramilitary group crystallizing around Ahmad Chalabi. The choice narrowed, in the Cold War, between the indigestible petit totalitarianism of kleptocratic generals and the bloodthirsty dreams of Communist party offshoots. The choice is narrowing, in Iraq, to that between the disastrous dream of theocracy, on the one side, and the openly corrupt violence of pro-American groups, on the other side. Comic overtones are supplied by the numerous Americans in Iraq who are warning that third parties -- heavens, imagine third parties -- are subverting the critical path of American-Iraqi amity.
Hitchens, having propagandized for the war from his own peculiar angle -- he simply refused to recognize Bush's war, and replaced it with his own dream of Bush's war -- is now confronted with the fruits of the war that really happened. So he has manfully taken up the task of apologizing for crony capitalists and for Chalabi's Pentagon supported stormtroopers . The defense of crony capitalism is expressed by the usual casuistry of defending the indefensible. First, you break the indefensible down into alternatives -- being careful to exclude the alternative that will upset your case. Next, you invest your analysis with a grave air of necessity -- these are the sides that try men's souls, etc. So those who oppose, for instance, the US contracting with Haliburton in a closed door process that is adjudged by an American agency, pledges an amount of money extending over three years for a project that is supposedly going to be done on foreign soil, and is rewarded to a company that just happens to have gone from a couple of bad years, under Dick Cheney, CEO, to some very good years, with a plethora of fat government contracts, under Dick Cheney, VP -- anyone who criticizes such things is an oleaginous defender of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens arguments seem themselves to be written in polyunsaturated fats, and such other fats as enlarge the liver from the breakdown of alcohol in the bloodstream. However, just when you think he can't top this particular exercize in intellectual corruption, he comes up with a weepy column on Chalabi, in the course of which he gets very mournful over criticisms heaped on Chalabi in the American press. He makes a very big deal out of Chalabi's leadership of a paramilitary group in the nineties in Northern Iraq -- which, according to Hitchens, was the greatest return of a man to his roots since Alex Hailey visited Nigeria. No, this is not a man unconnected with Iraq -- he is a patriot in the line of Napoleon II and, uh, Garibaldi. Hitchens also tells us that his man's paramilitaries were collected in response to the death threats of the Saddamites. Now, we do have to give Chalabi credit for bravery. The man has been tempered, as steel is in the furnace, by the drama of haribreadth escapes -- starting with his unwilling flight from Baghdad at twelve, and going on to the humiliation of being stuffed in the boot of a car to escape being sentenced to prison for embezzlement in Jordan in 1989. The latter incident, Chalabi's partisans have assured us, was all Saddam's fault, too.
We imagine it actually gave him cred with the tough boy D.C. crowd. Imagine, Garibaldi with the soul of a Ken Lay! By that act alone he showed that he was made of the same stuff as the CEOs of Enron, or Halliburton, of General Dynamics -- he was a man willing to go to any length to avoid the penalties attached to peculation. That, of course, is the one consistent theme that unifies our present Bush-ite order. So he does seem peculiarly matched to the hour -- an hour that is marked by the movement of corporate giants into the "humanitarian reconstruction" of Iraq, and an amour of C. Hitchens for the right.
This was not, once, selon le gout de Hitchens -- but now it is indeed capable of causing him the most extreme joys and torments.
Friday, April 25, 2003
Bollettino
Richard Reeves breathes a little hellfire in an editorial that seems to be exclusive to Yahoo News. He makes the brilliant point that the military coup d'etat, in dollar amounts, already happened in this country. 400 billion dollars is being spent by the defense department, and 25 billion is earmarked for the subversive State. Our parody of the fight between the Pentagon and the State as parallel to the fight between the US and Iraq is, actually, a real parallel in terms of amounts available to the entities sitting in the corners.
A lesser point -- and one that LI was unaware of -- the military paid for the embedded journalists. Iraq, in other words, was a big advertising junket for Bush Imperialism. The funny thing is that this was never mentioned on the radio, or in newspapers, that were very careful to point out that the Iraqi's censored newsbroadcasts from Baghdad.
Well, well. As the US News editor, Brian Duffy, says
"With embeds, you have no costs. They're traveling with military personnel, so there are no traveling costs, and they're eating MREs. We're going to be talking about embedding as a concept for a long time. The fact that costs were so much lower is probably an afterthought. But it's not unwelcome."
And as Reeve concludes: "Money talks. And what it is saying is that the military is now first among equals in the governing of both Iraq and the United States."
Richard Reeves breathes a little hellfire in an editorial that seems to be exclusive to Yahoo News. He makes the brilliant point that the military coup d'etat, in dollar amounts, already happened in this country. 400 billion dollars is being spent by the defense department, and 25 billion is earmarked for the subversive State. Our parody of the fight between the Pentagon and the State as parallel to the fight between the US and Iraq is, actually, a real parallel in terms of amounts available to the entities sitting in the corners.
A lesser point -- and one that LI was unaware of -- the military paid for the embedded journalists. Iraq, in other words, was a big advertising junket for Bush Imperialism. The funny thing is that this was never mentioned on the radio, or in newspapers, that were very careful to point out that the Iraqi's censored newsbroadcasts from Baghdad.
Well, well. As the US News editor, Brian Duffy, says
"With embeds, you have no costs. They're traveling with military personnel, so there are no traveling costs, and they're eating MREs. We're going to be talking about embedding as a concept for a long time. The fact that costs were so much lower is probably an afterthought. But it's not unwelcome."
And as Reeve concludes: "Money talks. And what it is saying is that the military is now first among equals in the governing of both Iraq and the United States."
Bollettino
Keeping Alan around
Tom Paine's business commentator, Dean Baker, is a grouch. LI likes business grouches -- although you can always tell when the sap is rising to their heads from their shrivelled hearts -- they start calling themselves contrarians and mistake a keen sense of impending disaster for the divine gift of prophecy. Our favorite lefty grouch is Doug Henwood; our favorite bonds grouch is James Grant. Dean Baker is a different kind of grouch. For instance, he regularly punches holes in stories that grow hysterical about impending Social Security deficits -- and we think he is right, there.
At the moment, he is the sole mourner at the Greenspan fiesta. When Bush announced that Greenspan would be re-appointed, there was a general round of Huzzas from all the usual suspects on Wall Street. Baker, however, compared Bush's announcement to keeping the captain of the Titanic around for another cruise. The meet of his Greenspanophobia is that Greenspan, basically, committed himself to a big time moral hazard by helping blow up the late nineties bubble :
"If he had consistently berated the markets with "irrational exuberance" comments and supported his case with charts and graphs, it is unlikely the market would have reached the dizzying heights of 1999 and 2000. If talk proved insufficient, he could have raised the margin requirement (which restricts borrowing to buy stock), and if necessary, he could have raised interest rates. But he didn't do any of that -- and arguably, he even may have promoted expansion of the bubble with his "new economy" rhetoric. The economy will suffer for years to come as a result.
"The bad news is not all behind us. Greenspan continues to ignore a housing bubble, the collapse of which is likely to have even larger repercussions for the economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans. People are currently buying homes in the bubble-infected markets (mostly on the east and west coasts), which could lose 30 to 40 percent of their value in a drop. For most families, their home is their biggest investment. Tens of millions of baby boomers are counting on equity in their home to support them in retirement now that their 401(k) plans have suffered so drastically from the stock market retreat. Instead of warning of a housing bubble, Greenspan testified before Congress last summer that there is no such thing."
Baker is also pretty aghast at the malign neglect of America's current trade account deficit.
Now, we are not sure if we wholly buy the bubble argument. We don't believe, for sure, that Greenspan was responsible for it. We do think it could have been curbed, somewhat, by the timely raising of margin requirements. But we also think Baker neglects the good side of irrational exuberance. Why did income inequality dip for the first time in twenty years after 1996? We think, in part, it was just the big IE - promoting somewhat hazardous economic activity, promoting the irrational allocation of resources -- that did it. And that might be a good thing in a cyclical system over a specific short run. We fault Greenspan less on the bubble than on the aftershock. Surely giving away the surplus to the high end of the wealth scale was a huge mistake. It isn't just that it provided insufficient stimulus to the economy -- it blocked alternatives that would have been possible, and much more constructive. Foir instance, there was a window of opportunity for creating a really viable reform of health care. There was a structure for revamping the complex ways in which states and the federal government both raise and divvy up money. And given that it was rather obvious, by the end of 2001, that the stock market boom was over, there was at least the obvious alternative of doing minor corrective work, so that in 2003 we did not face an overhang of some 100 billion dollars in separate state debts. The reason the latter was never addressed has to do with a dirty little secret of our government -- it is way overweighted to represent less populous, poorer states. California's budget miseries are California's business precisely because California is an economic generator -- unlike, say, Mississippi. But Mississippi, you will notice, and Tennessee, and the rest of them are much more represented on the national level. In tax terms, more money flows into Mississippi from the Federal government than flows out of it -- as is the case with Texas. But the reverse is the case with New York and California. Whenever those two states have financial difficulties, however, the poorer states stick it to them.
There are a host of reasons for this -- the culture of bad faith vis a vis the government in the South being one of the most prominent. It is true that Bush's tax cuts, especially the dividend tax cut, will grossly and inordinately benefit certain citizens of California and New York -- ie, the rich. And the richest one percent tend to settle in the richer states. For every billionaire in Mississippi, there are five in Sillicon Valley.
But the reparative work of the tax cut is most likely to vanish into high yielding investments in such things as derivatives -- which have no home, and bring no benefit to the wealthy states themselves. So the median person in those states, in bad times, has to live with the collateral effects of wealth -- for instance, higher rents and housing prices -- and the skew against those states on the national level -- which has to be made up for by higher state taxes. In a sense, the cause of the income tax in New York State is the lack of one in Texas.
Well, we could go on. But do you really want us to?
Keeping Alan around
Tom Paine's business commentator, Dean Baker, is a grouch. LI likes business grouches -- although you can always tell when the sap is rising to their heads from their shrivelled hearts -- they start calling themselves contrarians and mistake a keen sense of impending disaster for the divine gift of prophecy. Our favorite lefty grouch is Doug Henwood; our favorite bonds grouch is James Grant. Dean Baker is a different kind of grouch. For instance, he regularly punches holes in stories that grow hysterical about impending Social Security deficits -- and we think he is right, there.
At the moment, he is the sole mourner at the Greenspan fiesta. When Bush announced that Greenspan would be re-appointed, there was a general round of Huzzas from all the usual suspects on Wall Street. Baker, however, compared Bush's announcement to keeping the captain of the Titanic around for another cruise. The meet of his Greenspanophobia is that Greenspan, basically, committed himself to a big time moral hazard by helping blow up the late nineties bubble :
"If he had consistently berated the markets with "irrational exuberance" comments and supported his case with charts and graphs, it is unlikely the market would have reached the dizzying heights of 1999 and 2000. If talk proved insufficient, he could have raised the margin requirement (which restricts borrowing to buy stock), and if necessary, he could have raised interest rates. But he didn't do any of that -- and arguably, he even may have promoted expansion of the bubble with his "new economy" rhetoric. The economy will suffer for years to come as a result.
"The bad news is not all behind us. Greenspan continues to ignore a housing bubble, the collapse of which is likely to have even larger repercussions for the economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans. People are currently buying homes in the bubble-infected markets (mostly on the east and west coasts), which could lose 30 to 40 percent of their value in a drop. For most families, their home is their biggest investment. Tens of millions of baby boomers are counting on equity in their home to support them in retirement now that their 401(k) plans have suffered so drastically from the stock market retreat. Instead of warning of a housing bubble, Greenspan testified before Congress last summer that there is no such thing."
Baker is also pretty aghast at the malign neglect of America's current trade account deficit.
Now, we are not sure if we wholly buy the bubble argument. We don't believe, for sure, that Greenspan was responsible for it. We do think it could have been curbed, somewhat, by the timely raising of margin requirements. But we also think Baker neglects the good side of irrational exuberance. Why did income inequality dip for the first time in twenty years after 1996? We think, in part, it was just the big IE - promoting somewhat hazardous economic activity, promoting the irrational allocation of resources -- that did it. And that might be a good thing in a cyclical system over a specific short run. We fault Greenspan less on the bubble than on the aftershock. Surely giving away the surplus to the high end of the wealth scale was a huge mistake. It isn't just that it provided insufficient stimulus to the economy -- it blocked alternatives that would have been possible, and much more constructive. Foir instance, there was a window of opportunity for creating a really viable reform of health care. There was a structure for revamping the complex ways in which states and the federal government both raise and divvy up money. And given that it was rather obvious, by the end of 2001, that the stock market boom was over, there was at least the obvious alternative of doing minor corrective work, so that in 2003 we did not face an overhang of some 100 billion dollars in separate state debts. The reason the latter was never addressed has to do with a dirty little secret of our government -- it is way overweighted to represent less populous, poorer states. California's budget miseries are California's business precisely because California is an economic generator -- unlike, say, Mississippi. But Mississippi, you will notice, and Tennessee, and the rest of them are much more represented on the national level. In tax terms, more money flows into Mississippi from the Federal government than flows out of it -- as is the case with Texas. But the reverse is the case with New York and California. Whenever those two states have financial difficulties, however, the poorer states stick it to them.
There are a host of reasons for this -- the culture of bad faith vis a vis the government in the South being one of the most prominent. It is true that Bush's tax cuts, especially the dividend tax cut, will grossly and inordinately benefit certain citizens of California and New York -- ie, the rich. And the richest one percent tend to settle in the richer states. For every billionaire in Mississippi, there are five in Sillicon Valley.
But the reparative work of the tax cut is most likely to vanish into high yielding investments in such things as derivatives -- which have no home, and bring no benefit to the wealthy states themselves. So the median person in those states, in bad times, has to live with the collateral effects of wealth -- for instance, higher rents and housing prices -- and the skew against those states on the national level -- which has to be made up for by higher state taxes. In a sense, the cause of the income tax in New York State is the lack of one in Texas.
Well, we could go on. But do you really want us to?
Bollettino
The tree of liberty is sprinkled with the blood of bouncers -- this is what Jefferson might have said about the latest news out of NYC. LI was so riveted by the news in Iraq that we ignored the warnings: our friend, T., wrote us a bitter screed about the banning of smoking in NYC bars, but we thought that he was suffering from a mild hallucination -- nothing so uncommon among LI's friends. But it turns out that T. was simply throwing invective on a legal fact.
Here's a CBS report on the latest atrocity to hit Gotham city:
"The worst did happen just two weeks into the ban. A bouncer was killed after asking a smoker to leave a downtown club. That's one reason why Rabin [a bar owner] wants a police presence outside the city's clubs.
"We're trying to follow your law," says Rabin. "We've asked the people to step outside to smoke, now we have a noise problem that's bothering our neighbors. Help us one way or the other."
The critics say everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but aren't bars and clubs where people are supposed to drink, smoke and carry on? Is the city that never sleeps turning in early?
"This is New York, get used to it," says Michael Musto, who covers New York's nightlife.
Musto says there are too many rules.
"New York used to be a place without a lot of rules," he says. "It had a seediness to it, but it also had an edge. Suddenly, you can't smoke in a bar. What's next? You can't eat in a restaurant?"
Only one bouncer? My God, has the spirit of the minutemen, the spirit of Grant's Army, the spirit of Patrick Henry and Patton, been so extinguished that only one, out of the innumerable bouncers of the city, been forced to pay for actually enforcing that insane rule? King James I, who has been quietly retired, in the history books, as a despotic masturbator, condemned smoking and wrote against it: but even he couldn't ban it among the bravos of that time What next indeed -- the imperialism of the lungs apparently rules, with this little man, Bloomberg, triumphant. We can drill holes in our brain and put that crucial fat on our livers, but we can't put an ashy coating on our trachea, eh?
Now, LI witnessed the Disneyfication of Times Square. It was sad. But one felt that really, the plastic and the bright lights will eventually collect dust and sputter sporadically out, slowly strangled by the taxes and the costs of maintenance and the whore and the adult video place will once again take root -- yes, Minnie and Mickie will again do the beast with two backs before a paying, horny audience until four in the morning. Love will grow in the place of excrement, as Swift put it -- disapprovingly. We think, on the contrary, that this is one of the most hopeful of human traits. Times Square's spirit will definitely triumph over the hypocritical Babbitry in evidence at present. But the ban on smoking is an absolutely bad sign -- as is the current lazy custom of suing tobacco companies because they didn't warn one and all, in the past fifty years, that their products caused cancer. This is a little like suing airplane companies because they didn't warn their customers about gravity. Obviously, state governments, having exhausted the lottery gambit, are pitching for other revenue sources -- avoiding tapping the obvious, who are the rich and the undertaxed one percentile.
Now Austin, our city, is considering some insane version of NYC's law. This is the site of the do-gooders, none of whom, I would bet, go to many bars in Austin -- they are probably too busy watching tv in their big Round Rock encomienda, the jerks. . But this is... Texas. We do carry guns here. We will not go gentle into that good night of the servile state. Here's a group dedicated to fighting the poison: Go to the site, sign a petition, don't allow this to happen.
It is one thing to be herded, like sheep, into an illegal war. Or to be herded, like sheep, into accepting an illegal president. But to be herded like sheep into accepting smokeless bars?
The tree of liberty is sprinkled with the blood of bouncers -- this is what Jefferson might have said about the latest news out of NYC. LI was so riveted by the news in Iraq that we ignored the warnings: our friend, T., wrote us a bitter screed about the banning of smoking in NYC bars, but we thought that he was suffering from a mild hallucination -- nothing so uncommon among LI's friends. But it turns out that T. was simply throwing invective on a legal fact.
Here's a CBS report on the latest atrocity to hit Gotham city:
"The worst did happen just two weeks into the ban. A bouncer was killed after asking a smoker to leave a downtown club. That's one reason why Rabin [a bar owner] wants a police presence outside the city's clubs.
"We're trying to follow your law," says Rabin. "We've asked the people to step outside to smoke, now we have a noise problem that's bothering our neighbors. Help us one way or the other."
The critics say everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but aren't bars and clubs where people are supposed to drink, smoke and carry on? Is the city that never sleeps turning in early?
"This is New York, get used to it," says Michael Musto, who covers New York's nightlife.
Musto says there are too many rules.
"New York used to be a place without a lot of rules," he says. "It had a seediness to it, but it also had an edge. Suddenly, you can't smoke in a bar. What's next? You can't eat in a restaurant?"
Only one bouncer? My God, has the spirit of the minutemen, the spirit of Grant's Army, the spirit of Patrick Henry and Patton, been so extinguished that only one, out of the innumerable bouncers of the city, been forced to pay for actually enforcing that insane rule? King James I, who has been quietly retired, in the history books, as a despotic masturbator, condemned smoking and wrote against it: but even he couldn't ban it among the bravos of that time What next indeed -- the imperialism of the lungs apparently rules, with this little man, Bloomberg, triumphant. We can drill holes in our brain and put that crucial fat on our livers, but we can't put an ashy coating on our trachea, eh?
Now, LI witnessed the Disneyfication of Times Square. It was sad. But one felt that really, the plastic and the bright lights will eventually collect dust and sputter sporadically out, slowly strangled by the taxes and the costs of maintenance and the whore and the adult video place will once again take root -- yes, Minnie and Mickie will again do the beast with two backs before a paying, horny audience until four in the morning. Love will grow in the place of excrement, as Swift put it -- disapprovingly. We think, on the contrary, that this is one of the most hopeful of human traits. Times Square's spirit will definitely triumph over the hypocritical Babbitry in evidence at present. But the ban on smoking is an absolutely bad sign -- as is the current lazy custom of suing tobacco companies because they didn't warn one and all, in the past fifty years, that their products caused cancer. This is a little like suing airplane companies because they didn't warn their customers about gravity. Obviously, state governments, having exhausted the lottery gambit, are pitching for other revenue sources -- avoiding tapping the obvious, who are the rich and the undertaxed one percentile.
Now Austin, our city, is considering some insane version of NYC's law. This is the site of the do-gooders, none of whom, I would bet, go to many bars in Austin -- they are probably too busy watching tv in their big Round Rock encomienda, the jerks. . But this is... Texas. We do carry guns here. We will not go gentle into that good night of the servile state. Here's a group dedicated to fighting the poison: Go to the site, sign a petition, don't allow this to happen.
It is one thing to be herded, like sheep, into an illegal war. Or to be herded, like sheep, into accepting an illegal president. But to be herded like sheep into accepting smokeless bars?
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