Bollettino

PS – we urge readers to peruse this James Surowiecki article about Big Pharma, and then compare it to the LI criticism of a former Surowiecki piece on big pharma. We reproduce our piece, all the way back from 2001, here. Has Surowiecki been sneaking glances at our humble blog? The suggestion that he makes – that smaller R&D firms represent the coming wave of research, while the Pharma dinosaurs should either learn to market efficiently or die in their own stupors, is exactly the point we were making about the way monopoly has practically driven efficiency out of the big Pharma culture. Here’s our humble little piece:

In the November 5th New Yorker there is a column by the astute but limited James Surowiecki, who makes the standard case against breaking the Bayer patent on Cipro. The case goes like this: to come up with an antibiotic takes years of R & D, and R & D costs beaucoup millions; so if in the end, the anti-biotic isn't a moneymaker, then R & D into other anti-biotics will be inhibited. Thus it is socially advantageous not to bust Bayer's balls, so to speak.

Unfortunately, as Surowiecki sleepwalks through his econ 101 lecture, he adds a number of facts that contradict his larger point, and support the idea that monopoly actually has an inhibiting effect on medically important R & D. He averts to the slowdown in antibiotic research after 1967, a generally agreed upon high point in the war against infectious diseases. That slowdown, he contends, was market driven:

"Besides, given the choice between making an anti-biotic that a person might take for two weeks once in a lifetime or developing an anti-depressant that a person would take every day for the rest of his life, drug companies naturally opted for the latter." If S. could be shaken out of his dogmatic slumbers for a bit and made to read back his own sentence, he might notice that monopoly, here, does the opposite of what he claims it does. It levels the field so that it makes it more profitable to de-emphasize exploring anti-biotic pharmaceuticals as compared to the more lucrative anti-depressives. In other words, bad research drives out good. And the penalty for that is minimal, given that anti-biotics are being held in a sixteen year bondage according to federal law, and the patent time frame is easily extendable. S. even is hip to the result of this: "that's why in the past twenty-five years they {big Pharma] have developed just one new class of anti-biotic." Well, let's look at correlations. We have an increasingly sophisticated sphere of intellectual property laws, and we have an increasingly debauched drug research system, more interested in those nifty sex-drive-n'-hair enhancers than in coming up with cures for multiple drug resistant tb. Now if the state were sensitive to this, it would not hand out monopoly power like candy. If there was a smaller time frame, the sex-drive-n-hair enhancers would have to be marketed more efficiently, as generic drug companies can come up with amazing copies quickly. In this atmosphere, the profitability of anti-biotic drugs as compared to others would go up, since there is less likely to be a major profit in copying them, and there is more reason to emphasize them for their developers. They would be mid-list drugs, steady sellers. Moreover, breaking up the monopoly power of big Pharma would recognize the R & D real world - which is networked through a university system largely subsidized by the good old Gov. Perhaps smaller companies can't compete with giant companies that dragoon, or tempt, researchers into more frivolous but lucrative research. But if there were more starters, there might just be more incentive to do that major research. In other words, more competition, lower entry costs, is what we should be aiming at.

Of course, Surowiecki's idea that tech comes when you lay out money as automatically as an old pooch trots to the dogfood bowl when you put out the Gainesburgers is pretty naive. It shows zero feeling for the history of the golden age of medicine, which was driven, pre-1967, much more by an ethos of public healthcare than by the numbers pharmaceutical giants are used to now. And another hint: the fons et origo of that era is clearly the biggest of all state endeavors of the 20th century -- as with most of our technology, the modern medical era can be tracked back to WWII. War is the mother of invention.
6:54 PM

Bollettino

LI is finishing up the 13th chapter of our novel – hurray! And so, at such a solemn moment, we’ve been contemplating the spirit of comedy. Yes, we know there are giants’ footsteps, here, and we tread, comparatively, with a munchkin’s size 7. Still, when you are working on a fictional, comic account of an attempted rape, you think, why am I trying to make this funny, as well as, why is this, or not, funny?

When in need of help, I always go to an expert. Or so I’ve been instructed by the Reader’s Digest and the Poison warning label on insecticide cans. So I decided to look up the current research on comedy. This took me, bien sûr, to recent issues of Humor: the international journal of research in humor. I am just catching up with the 2002 issues. As the readers of HIJRH are well aware, literary comedy is not where your average humor researcher majorly focuses, especially when there are all those holes in the correspondence between threatening facial expressions of chimpanzees (barring teeth) and ritualistic smiling ceremonies of the Ainu. Or the like. I reluctantly scrolled through articles that would instruct me, with statistics, about the compatibility or incompatibility of husbands and wives reflected in a humor metric, and an article about the function of jokes in a medical context, to give my undivided attention to Salvatore Attardo’s reading of Wilde’s texts in Humorous Texts: a Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Or, at least, the cheat sheet, Christie Davies’ fine review. Any man who is willing to go mano a mano with Oscar, as Jr. Bush said to his Dad one humid Georgetown night, is all right with us. Davies begins his review by summing up Attardo’s achievement:

Perhaps the most significant innovation to be found in Attardo’s work
is the introduction of the idea of the ‘jab line’, and his use of it to discuss
texts in terms of particular con.gurations of jab and punch lines. In a
joke, an entity that must end with an uproarious punch line in which
the unexpected is suddenly revealed, the humorous jab lines thrown out
en route to the punch line are of secondary interest but in a longer
narrative it is essential to consider both the nature of each jab and the
pattern and sequence of jabs that make up the humorous text. Attardo
applies his method to a number of well-known humorous texts including
Voltaire’s Candide, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Lord
Arthur Saville’s Crime by Oscar Wilde in an innovative and illuminating
way.

It turns out that he not only applies his method, but uses it to quantify. Quantifying the density of the jab lines in Oscar Wilde is a perversity that even Wilde never dreamed of – but seriously, ladies and germs, we are interested io the ways and wherefores of this mapping of laughs. As we had already learned from the sociobi articles in the HIJSH, the evolutionary theory of laughter right now couples it to tickling. And tickling is something like jabbing. So we had a vague sense that we were being carried smoothly down the currents of the finest scholarship. Here is Davies to elucidate:

“Let us take for example a line from Wilde’s description
of the people attending Lady Windermere’s reception in which ‘‘a perfect
bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima donna from room to room’’.
Attardo notes the humorous script oppositions of bishops/prima donna,
normal/abnormal, shows that they are in proximity and that the bishops
are being targeted and wonders whether there are further jabs here based
on alliteration and whether in addition stout is opposed to beautiful. Yet
to this reviewer the humorous thrust of the passage appears quite different
with the key opposition being between spiritual and carnal. The
bishops are in a bevy a collective term more usually applied to birds or
animals than to clergymen (who are not beauties either) and are in keen
sexual pursuit of the prima donna whom they follow eagerly from room
to room presumably in the hope that there will be an episcopal score.
The stout prima donna far from being a stereotypically fat and repulsive
opera singer is for them buxom and zaftig, a Junoesque beauty with all
the allure of the stage. What did the bishops say to the actress? Yet if
Salvatore Attardo and I see different jabs in different places and interpret
the jabs differently, how is the problem of the observer to be resolved?”

Indeed, Davies’s question does intrude, rather, the bothersome subjective. The image of these bishops, with their Episcopal skirts, one presumes, flying about, following a prima donna of a certain rotund and orotund quality – dare one dare the sexual proclivities on display, here? -- seems, to us, indicative of some dysfunction at the heart of the world. Nietzsche asked if there were any scientific truths that could only be apprehended through laughter – a profound question. Perhaps the whole evolution of sex is one. In Darwinian terms, could there be a more severe failure in the signals of sexual ornamentation that, presumably, play in the background of every animal pursuit?

Attardo, at least, is happy with his own analysis; not least because, given the distribution of jab lines, he can then plot their density. There’s a small glitch here – as Davies points out, the thinning of jab lines in the text corresponds to his sense of where the text is funniest, when one might expect a thickening of jab lines. Surely there is a Zen koan lurking here about clapping at a jab line with one hand or something. Like someone who thinks the funniest jokes are those that nobody laughs at, Davies is obviously a party pooper.

But I share Davies sense of humor, which is why I am such an unsuccessful player on the world stage.

Anyway, this got me thinking that I’d like to share one of Thurber’s letters to E.B. White. It concerns E.M Foster’s Abinger Harvest. Thurber particularly liked the essay on Howard Overing Sturges, a minor belle-lettrist now best known for being Henry James’ friend. Thurber writes:

Writes Foster, in all seriousness: Stugis… wrote to please his friends, and deterred by his failure to do so he gave up the practice of literature and devoted himself instead to embroidery, of which he had always been fond.’ It’s a way out, all right.

Then, further on: “I once went to Sturgis’ house myself – years ago… My host led me up to the fireplace, to show me a finished specimen of his embroidery. Unluckily there were two fabrics near the fireplace, and my eye hesitated for an instant between them. There was a demi-semi-quaver of a pause. Then graciously did he indicate which his embroidery was, and then did I see that the rival fabric was a cloth kettle-holder, which could only have been mistaken for embroidery by a lout. Simultaneously I received the impression that my novels contained me rather than I them. He was very kind and courteous, but we did not meet again.’”

Now, in my opinion, Thurber underestimates Foster, whose whole oeuvre is devoted to undermining seriousness and the deathly pall it casts on life. On the other hand, notice how Thurber reading Foster creates the Thurber in Foster -- the embroidery surely would fit not only fit into a Thurber story, but existed, perhaps, only to be put, later, into a Thurber story. At least, that is what Mallarme would have said, if he'd been born in Columbus Ohio, too. But we have to ask, how would our inestimable Professor Attardo explain Foster’s letter? Who let the jab lines in?

Bollettino

After the first few months of WWI, according to Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, the German general staff knew that their one major hope (to knock out a stronger, more numerous enemy quickly) had been dashed. At this point, the Chief of Staff uttered the immortal words that sum up the incorrigible stupidity of the military mindset: “even if we are ruined by it, it was still beautiful.” One wonders if any Russian general feels the same this week, the fifteenth anniversary of the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan.

It is funny. I went through the eighties as a very active protestor. I talked every day with various leftist friends. We all talked about Nicaragua. None of us talked about Afghanistan. Even when the place was invaded, in 1979, the event was overshadowed, to the average American mind, by what was happening in Iran. Who knew that it was all about the leakage, the leakage? It never penetrated that there was some meaning in the fact that the largest CIA outpost in the world, after Langley, was located in Islamabad. About which we still know next to nothing.

Well, here was a small war (merely a million or so dead and wounded) with big consequences. It struck a fatal blow to one of the great empires of the post WWII world, and its aftermath kidneypunched the other. Just think: the demoralization of the Soviet army – in a country that devoted 15 percent of its GDP to the army, a country in which the army was, supposedly, the only thing that worked – materially deteriorated Soviet morale. Gorbachev, Chernobyl – yes, there were many small stages on the way to the final Soviet rust-out, but Afghanistan was definitely the music in the background, just as Vietnam was the music in the background in the seventies.

And then, the other empire, America the Good. America blindly and blithely arming happy Islamicists with Stinger missiles. Afghanistan was photo op number one for the up and coming right winger in the 80s. How could we not have known? When a group that has an unerring sixth sense for unlucky decisions, not to mention dirty, inhuman ones, was so involved in resisting the Russians in the mountains, we should have paid more attention. The allies are always dirty – Laotian generals neckdeep in opium money, Contra torturers, etc., etc. But since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, it seemed like an easy call to support whoever opposed them. The whole tangle of that history is still tangled, and we doubt we are going to be handed the thread by the 9/11 commission. But we know it is there – just look at the first WTC bombing, look at who facilitated it and how they got here. For instance, look at this Atlantic article, written in 96, which traces the the Cia’s development of the radical Islamic network through the exemplary life of Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the man who was financed and nurtured by the CIA almost to the day he was arrested, in New Jersey, for planning the blowing up of the World Trade Center.


“WHEN Sheikh Omar entered the United States, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Peshawar, and Sudan on a much-disputed tourist visa issued by an undercover agent of the CIA, his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt's militant Islamic groups -- an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest in 1993.”

Those are the larger toxic spills. But I think, even more than the macro and visible events, what happened in Afghanistan set off a chain of small wars that are still going, and that will just get worse if the causes of them aren't made clear, and resistance to those causes doesn't coalesce around a progressive standard. Chechnya is the worst of them at the present time. The U.S., for its own reasons, abetted Yeltsin, one of the great thieves of our time, and – as is the case when you deal with the devil – was forced, by circumstances, to abet Putin. We’ve previously posted about the ‘terrorism of mirrors” that inflected Putin’s campaign for president – terrorist acts in 99 that were attributed to Chechens, even as all indications point to a dirty operation by Putin’s own national police department.

So what happens in the last two weeks? More of the collateral c. from Afghanistan, by way of Chechnya. One of Putin’s strident critics is Boris Berezovsky. We have no time for Boris’ moral character – he hasn’t got any. But that made him a perfect in between man to plan things between Moscow and Chechnya in 99, that oddest of years. When Yeltsin melted in his pilfered fats off the throne, leaving space for Putin, the former head of the secret police started operating like former heads of secret police operate: getting rid of his enemies, and wacking former associates. Boris Berezovsky was among the casualties. When Berezovsky fled to London, he started ratting out the whole dirty deal that had used the death of thousands of Chechnians as a prop to keep the electorate voting for Putin, and implicitly voting to protect Yeltsen’s family from jail time. Ivan Rybkin, the presidential candidate who disappeared, reappeared in a disoriented state, then hightailed it for London himself, was another loud critic of the Chechnyan policy. He was, supposedly, being funded by Berezovsky. Both of these are not harmless critics, in Putin’s view, since both know where the bodies were buried – and I don’t mean that figuratively.

A regime founded on a classic totalitarian big lie – the attack by the Chechens – exists only by means of small lies, the shattered fragments that reflect the original lie to the point of maximum distortion, renews its energies by periodical reinvigorating the causes of violence -- even if it has to counterfeit those causes, produce them in the secret police hq. So no one should be surprised that, as it is an election season, here comes the subway bombing. There are multiple levels in the terrorism that haunts Moscow at election time. Inexplicably, the system keeps failing in elementary ways, all the gates between Grozny and Moscow keep opening up, inexplicably the gross tolls of violence always seem to favor Putin’s ever more nationalistic stances. Yulia Latynina has a scathing column about that subway bombing. Here are few grafs:

“Terrorist acts will continue to happen in Russia for two reasons.
First, because it is in the very nature of the system in place in Chechnya. Chechen field commanders produce terrorist acts, just as the Ostankino meat plant produces sausages. It's their business, just as is the case in Palestine. In both Chechnya and Palestine, there are people with power, influence and money who would not have power, influence and money if there were no terrorist acts.
It is not easy to fight terrorism even in a normal country, just as it is not easy to deal with gangrene even in a clean operating theater.
If, however, the operating theater is located in a pigsty, the nurses have pinched all the lightbulbs and the surgeon is not thinking about how to do the operation right, but about how he can cut off the patient's hand with his gold watch -- then it's a very different matter. And that is the second reason why terrorist acts will continue to occur.”

The problem with taking sides, in Russia, is that the sides are so filthy. It is like a fight in a locked toilet stall where the toilet has overflowed. Latynina properly attacks Putin’s populism, his war on the oligarchs – but this isn’t to defend the owners of Yukos, who basically stole the company from the state. This is a turf war in Shark land, and one’s challenge has to be promoting those sharks who, for their own sharkish reasons, are using the ultimate shock tactic of truth. The truth, at the moment, doesn’t matter – a situation bound to drive a writer mad. A parallel exists in this country, but let’s not go there right now. Barthes used the word “effect” to signify the aura, the premium, that surrounds certain writers, celebrities, objects. In Russia’s situation, the opposite is happening – call it effectlessness. Truth is ripped from its pragmatic coordinates – it is, contra William James, what doesn’t work.

Chechnya goes on. That's the saddest, sickest monument to what the cold war oligarchs, on both sides, did to us.
¶ 4:04 PM

Bollettino

Lately, all the news from Iraq has been gloomy. So why do I feel like Iraq’s situation is the best it has been in decades?

It comes, I suppose, from my screwy take on this war. I recently looked at two media forums. In Open Democracy, there is a report on the debate at the New School between Hitchens, Danner, Powers , and Frum. Hitchens and Frum represented the right wing pro-war side, Danner and Powers representing the responsible anti-war side. Hitchens was the only optimist in the bunch. Danner and Powers think Iraq is spinning out of control, and Frum, representing the muted panic of the Bushies, thinks we all have to work together, ie stop criticizing Bush.

Then, in the Guardian, there is an article, writers on the war, which polls prominent writers about their own pro or con-ness about the conflict. I was happy to see that the majority were anti-war, but unhappy to see that the instinct to distrust Bush had not extended to any very deep thought about Iraq at present.

Summarizing the LI position, it would go something like this: Bush’s argument for war disguised an all to familiar American imperial adventure. As in Latin America, the administration was trying to take out a hostile dictator and replace him with a compliant puppet, under whose benevolent gaze the U.S. could spread its fine mesh of corporate interest, engulfing the resources and wealth of a conquered protectorate.

What Iraq demonstrated is that intervention on this scale, and at this distance, is not going to happen. The Empire has limits. More, the unintended consequence of the intervention was the removal of a truly horrendous regime, and the opening to an at least tentatively democratic one. Good news.

This happened as the result of two happy accidents. The first accident was the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of the Americans in advancing towards their goal. The idea of stuffing a swindler like Chalabi down the throat of the population was quickly abandoned as impractical. The ‘liberated’ population didn’t follow the script. The looting destroyed vital infrastructure, while the infrastructure itself, after eleven years of sanctions, was incredibly decayed. Misstep after misstep was made by the imperialists, who were most successful, apparently, at building concrete berms to keep out the dangerous wogs.

Meanwhile, happy accident number two was happening. The resistance turned out to be dogged and disruptive. Like the Bush administration, the resistors were guided by a bad intention – a pure power grab – and a much worse history, that of mass murderers. They squared off against the occupiers, and as they did so, they relieved the Iraqi population from the consequences that would have ensued from a successful Bush plan – puppet status, nationwide respectable looting to the advantage of corporations and exiles. This more subtle looting, it turns out, has been forced to prey only on the American taxpayer, who is pumping money on the grand scale into keeping Cheney's retirement benefits very, very real.

The tide turned, we think, with the capture of Saddam H. This capture, in one blow, operated against the Americans and the resistance. The utter bankruptcy of the resistance, and its futility, was finally and conclusively exposed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the last excuse not to resist the Americans was blown away. The Iraqi masses could now operate without fearing the return of Saddam. And their first action was to counter the occupation.

This is why we think the elections Sistani wants are so important. Both the Bushies and the liberals are opposed to them, because they both share a managerial ideology. They both talk about democracy, but they want it organized to the point where their side retains power.

Well, we’d love to see secular democratic socialists retain or return to power in Iraq, but we believe process can't be separated from content; that top down implementation of a secular state evolves top down governance, usually by the military. If you think that insulating a progressive group against real politics works, look around you in the world. It is a fatal and stupid thing to do. It creates a malignant alliance between progressives in the country and their sponsors out of the country. This, in turn, attenuates the rooting of the progressive wing within the country until it represents, to the people at large, one more aspect of a colonialist ethos.

The consequence of a direct election might well be a triumph for a reactionary, theocratic party. But we think that if that party is going to triumph, it is going to triumph no matter how much the NGOs think they can manage the country into their various versions of liberal democracy. Far better to strengthen the parties that oppose theocracy within the country from the beginning, far better to take up the election challenge, have them begin to understand the mechanism of electoral politics, than to try to manage a detour around "petty politics". Which is why we are rather disappointed that people who truly do want to see the triumph of a secular state that measures its surrenders to neo-liberalism against an ideal of social welfare are locked into the scared mode. Sure, Iraq teeters on a blood bath of factional struggle – but, as nobody seems to remember, the Kurds went through the same struggle in the 90s, and seem to have not only survived it, but become much more secular, democratic, etc., etc. Not that we think the two Kurdish warlord parties are the last word in secularism .. however, the opportunity exists, there. Given that the Americans are blindly working towards freeing Iraq of debt and repairing the infrastructure, whoever wins the elections will have a better position than Iraq has had since 1979.

This isn't to underestimate the body count. Actually, it is hard to even estimate the body count in this country -- nobody counts it. However, the alternative body count was worse -- the attrition from sanctions, the hopelessness of Saddam, the blighting of all promise.

Of course, we are probably wrong about much of this, re the real situation in Iraq. But we have a lively distrust the prejudices of Danner, Hitchens, Powers and Frum, who are also probably wrong about much of the real situation in Iraq. In neither forum, you’ll notice, is there … an Iraqi.

Bollettino


It was bound to happen eventually…



The George Bush who won the electoral college in 2000 had run as a rather wealthy, rather conservative suburban dad. While he wasn’t exactly approving of gays and feminists, he was tolerant. He had African-American buddies – not in the neighborhood, but at work. Sure, like any suburban dad, he harbored a few crackpot theories – his were about evolution and economics – but these seemed harmless. With his Texas accent and Crawford ranch, Bush seemed not so much like John Wayne as like a guy who had purchased the complete John Wayne video library and stacked them up on the video shelf, there to accumulate the dust of non-use.



9/11 changed that. Three years later, 9/11 doesn’t seem like the Battle of Hastings or Stalingrad – a historical turning point. It is a much referred to event, but that reference is a substitute for memory, since real memory is still too painful. Read Gail Sheehy’s remarkable report on the evidence that has accumulated for what happened that day, and the visceral panic pain comes back.


9/11 might not have changed everything, but it did change Bush, in two stages. Sheehy’s article reminds us of the first stage. For a crucial twelve hours, Bush pretty much lost control.



This isn’t to disparage him in particular. Karl Weick, a well known psychologist, has made a study of disasters. In a famous paper about a fire that killed several firefighters in Montana, he tracked the unfolding disarray that led to their deaths, and gave it a name: the collapse of sensemaking. Those routines by which we usually organize and manage events (the official procedures, the instruments, the tacit knowledge, the interpersonal trust) all seem to fall apart simultaneously. When Atta’s group took over the plane in the first twenty minutes out of Boston, the effect of that information seems to have produced a rapidly transmitted and magnified shock all along the system that connects the power establishment with the instruments of control. One has only to notice Bush’s response to the first crash, registered by Sheehy through one of her witnesses, the wife of one of the pilots: "I can’t get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: ‘That’s some bad pilot.’" Like any other mook that day, Bush didn't know what to make of the information.



The response to the infliction of such trauma on a system of power can move in several ways. It can produce surrender, resistance, regroupment, etc. etc. In Bush’s case, it became of crucial importance to overcome the initial evidence of panic. He did that, in the next week, by acting with a fortified coolness. The power system regrouped. The attack, while symbolically painful, actually changed nothing about the real balance of power. In order to overcome that moment of weakness we all saw on 9/11, Bush and his constituency – the whole nation, at the time – colluded in a little pretence that it hadn’t happened. We re-edited the past. Bush, in the meantime, reached some compact with his inner John Wayne to get himself – and us – over the hump.



This worked all too well to satisfy two desires – the public’s, for a narrative that included a hero to get us out of this horrible situation, and Bush’s, to measure up to the man he wanted to be. As Bush metamorphosed into John Wayne, he erased his earlier fumbles; as he erased those fumbles, he gained popularity; as he gained popularity, he armed himself against those – the press, the opposition – who might have a motive to point to those fumbles. And, as importantly, the D.C. court system began to exert its influence on him, stroking his vanity with the flattery he obviously craved -- that he actually was some avatar of the Duke.



In 2000, nobody, including Bush, would have bought that story. There has always been a vagueness in Bush’s background, and it has always been connected to the sometimes inappropriate fervor with which he publicly embraces Jesus. Sophisticates who think of that as political gesturing are not sophisticated enough – Bush’s need for salvation is palpably real. William James called it the Will to Believe. George Bush would certainly have gone down the road so shoddily essayed by his brother Neal, of Silverado S and L fame, if he hadn’t, as A.A. puts it, accepted a higher power. The need to do so wasn’t held against him by the electorate in 2000. Who among us, after all, hasn’t felt that need? And who can really make a virtue out of resisting it? Rather, the resistance turns on finding substitutes for it – higher powers, after all, can be history, can be art, can be all the Godheads in the pantheon. Atheistic monkeys haven’t yet evolved.



Unfortunately for Bush and his political advisors, they have forgotten this. They have sold themselves on the John Wayne persona. The Bush who once needed Jesus has reversed that formula : now Jesus needs him. Even discounting as exaggerated reports that Bush has talked about himself as some important figure in God’s plan for the world, something did click in his head after 9/11 that corresponds with that kind of arrogance. Why? Let me suggest that the weakness he showed on 9/11 was all too reminiscent, to Bush himself, of certain inglorious episodes in his past. His subsequent arrogance fills in the blanks that Bush has willed into his own biography.



I think we can date exactly when the John Wayne schtick started to fall apart: May 1, 2003. The famous, or infamous, Mission Accomplished speech marked, I think, a fatal moment for Bush, when image began to diverge too far from reality to be recuperable. To understand that, one has to understand how the John Wayne persona acted to legitimate the War against Iraq.



That Bush lied and hyped about the threat Saddam presented is, I think, undeniable. However, I think that Bush’s defenders are right to point out that we didn’t go to war to counter an imminent threat. Rather, we went to war because we trusted the John Wayne persona. We went to war on faith. And, I think, so did Bush. He was gulled by his advisors, who wanted this war, he used the build-up to it for political ends against the Dems. But, ultimately, there has always been something a little irrational about this war. It isn’t that there aren’t motives for it a-plenty – it is that none of those motives quite fit the reason we went to war – or even the reason that Bush wanted to go to war. That is because the reason was, in a way, the change in Bush wrought by 9/11. We went to war because Bush decided to trust his instincts. The irony is that those instincts are implants, Bush’s own psychological Botox. We saw the naked man on 9/11. We saw the instincts in action. Stripped down to fight or flight, Bush flew and flew until the fight came reassuringly back. His new instincts were virtual ones – the instincts of the movie Wayne. But the old instincts were still there – the old Bush was still lurking.



Reality has a way of undoing confidence men, even confidence men who trick themselves. When Bush announced Mission Accomplished on May 1, you could see his John Wayne persona being sucked back into the old Bush. This is always the way Bush did business – from Harkin to the tax cuts. Once you’ve won one or two small bets, bet everything.



And always, in these cases, Bush has misread the data. Always he has misplaced the Will to Believe from where it works – as a personal remedy for overcoming bad habits – to where it doesn’t – which is the dimension of reality itself, that big resistant Other that will always, sooner or later, undermine our fondest wish, which is that we not die. The wish that the iron laws of probability will, this one time, yield to our libido.



Think, for a moment, of the Mission that was accomplished:

The war wasn’t paid for;
The enemy we ostensibly fought (Saddam) was unaccounted for;
The territory we occupied was much bigger, and more populous, than the strength of the forces we had to occupy it could manage on anybody's account;
The man we had favored to head Iraq – Chalabi – had gained no traction since we injected him into the area;
The weapons with which to attack American forces were not even partially in our control;


In the John Wayne narrative, the fadeout comes before civilization arrives. The town might be cleansed of bad men, but then comes the work of paying for the police and building the jail. The best Wayne pictures don’t show him as a leader, but as an outlier – an unaccountable force, as in the Searchers. Wayne doesn’t play the Commander in Chief for good reasons – he has no talent for the patient building, dickering and dealing that goes with maintaining leadership.



Between the Mission Accomplished speech and the Bring It on speech, the persona that Bush had crafted in 2002 came unglued. Surely the last year must seem, to Bush, uncannily like other bad years in his life. Like the year that he and his Harkin friends tried to exploit the opportunities supposedly opened up after the Gulf War I. Or the year his father lost the presidency. All those times in which Bush, who is a terrible businessman, refused to hedge his bets – only to have to hedge them hastily and unprofitably at the last moment. This is always the moment when someone else has to help him out. Bush has a talent for not, immediately, being humiliated by this. Baker, for instance, getting him out of a jam in Florida must have, must have made Bush feel small. And there must have been some satisfaction to lending his ear, in the fall of 2002, to those people who talked his Dad’s men down. 2002 was the election W. won on his own. However, it couldn’t last. Bizarrely, the cowboy persona that Bush and his advisors have crafted out of sheer rhetoric is the one that his political operatives are banking on to get him re-elected. For this reason, we think the capture of Osama now looms as Bush’s great chance in this election. It is a chance to reconnect with his own Will to Believe – which has, on the evidence of the MTP interview, degenerated into longwinded, and exculpatory, clichés. This in itself must be a little humiliating. Bush is just not the Ahab type – he’d rather forget the Great White Whale. We don’t really believe that Bush took Saddam so personally that the war was a get even crusade – after all, the one person with whom the war really got even was Bush’s dad. And he has rubbed that in, with talk about lost opportunities and democracy, ever since. But now that Saddam is captured, he has to go out there and manage to get Osama, who he would just as soon forget. Bush hates to be reminded of the past like this, just hates it. The past is so hard to shape to the way he'd like it to be.



Wayne, of course, is always forced, at a certain moment in his movies, to pardon himself – usually to some woman. Bush differs from a lot of conservatives in being quite comfortable with women, just because (in the one trait he actually does share with Wayne) he trusts women to forgive him. This, by the way, is a little but real victory of Bush over his circumstances, if stories of Barbara Bush are true, since one would think that the upbringing by such a harridan would have exactly the opposite effect. But here there are no forgiving women, no Laura's, to bring him home. It is symbolic in more than one way that Bush, at the moment, is calling on his ex girlfriends to remember that he really did go to Guard training in Alabama. After all, he said so...



The public and private images that have been at play over the past three years have a dream logic. No psychoanalyst would be surprised that Bush is now being hit simultaneously with two things: the Kay report and the AWOL charges. Both operate as factors in one complex, one delusion. And both are dangerous to Bush because both are about who he really is. If we went to war on John Wayne’s sayso, Wayne can’t, as the going gets tough, dissolve into a wealthy suburban dad. The superhero’s agon must go on, and on, until we understand what we have always already understood -- there really aren’t any superheros. Caught in the toils of the image that he had to assume in order to go on, we are watching the mask come off, and the skin come with it. The Guard service is a trivial issue, but it resonates not so much because of Kerry’s medals – although those help – but because of the central weakness of trying to run a man on a character that has been fabricated out of an historical instance’s need. We’d still lay odds that Bush, the incumbent, will win this election, but the Democrats have a secret weapon that just might do the trick for them: the real George Bush. If the voters remember the man they didn’t elect in 2000, Bush will be the victim of an odd backlash, based on a deceit that he has talked himself and a great part of the nation into believing. While he richly deserves to fall there is something classically pitiful in the way he has, like a flawed hero in a Thomas Hardy novel, so amply and thoughtlessly contrived the means of his own downfall.

Bollettino

The Next Klondike

“George Sigalos, a Halliburton executive, recently gave a speech at a conference in Washington for businesspeople who hoped to obtain government contracts in Iraq. Many in the crowd had paid nearly four hundred dollars to attend, drawn by descriptions of Iraq as “the next Klondike,” as James Clad, an official with the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency, put it.”

LI urges readers to link on over to Jane Meyer’s article about Halliburton in the New Yorker. As any anti-war obsessive knows, the old American strictures against war profiteering have entirely vanished under the beneficent regard of the Bush administration, which seems to have rediscovered the old time-y virtues of Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome. However, one is a little surprised by the gleeful rubbing of hands among the mafia of corrupt players. They all find the very idea of contributing to Republican causes in order to ensnare government contracts to be a normal, and even a patriotic, method for transforming war into profit. At one time, the decencies were adhered to – the State was not considered a rube to be duped in public at least; the gentlemen from Morgan and Dupont would, when hauled before committees, usually make some statements indicating one’s patriotic duty and the like. That was before the Rand-ian revolution in D.C., where the selfish interests of the millionaire are considered justification in itself for any action, from mindless tax cutting to bombing Middle Eastern countries and stealing their oil. We live in the age of bald faced robbers, and none is balder, or has more face, than Cheney. Mayer traces his present behavior back in his career – from his time as Defense Secretary, where he targeted Defense cuts that would solely effect Democratic districts, to his free and easy days under Donald Rumsfeld under Nixon, where he dispensed with the bureaucracy at the Office of Economic Opportunity and outsourced business to his cronies. Ah, and before that, he was a little spy on campuses, working for some anti-communist nut – a delightful tidbit in a wholly despicable resume. One funny note – quail hunting seems to have been very very good to Cheney. He was elevated to the lucrative CEO post at Halliburton after going quail hunting with the directors. Currently, he has a suit pending before a Supreme Court that includes Anthony Scalia, with whom – you guessed it – he recently went quail hunting. The suit is to decide whether the documents relating to Cheney’s energy policy task force – basically, a pollute and profit venture – should be made available to the public.

There is some justification for engaging private companies in taking over services previously done by the government. That justification rests on the idea that competition, which is the vehicle through which the private sector theoretically operates, will bring down costs and create efficiencies.

Yet somewhere along the way, this justification gets lost. Halliburton has won the majority of its very, very profitable contracts because, the Pentagon claims, nobody else can do what Halliburton does. Even the Army Corps of Engineering – which claimed to have made its decision to reward Halliburton with contracts that are misleadingly said to be worth 1.2 billion dollars, since the contracts will ramify into other contracts – has lately backtracked:

“WASHINGTON — Faced with price-gouging allegations involving Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, the Army Corps of Engineers now acknowledges it acted alone in awarding Halliburton new business.
The corps initially suggested that experts from other U.S. agencies played an important role.
The Army Corps of Engineers told The Associated Press that the corps — not an evaluation team cited on its Internet site — chose Halliburton for a contract worth up to $1.2 billion. The corps is refusing to release records showing on what merits it made the decision.”

So the justification for outsourcing matters that used to be done by the Pentagon to private firms is that, being competitive, these firms will be more efficient; and the justification for selecting certain specific firms – like Halliburton – is that there is no competition for what they do. Wonderful. This, in a nutshell, is a new branch of logic in the field of justification – Bush logic. In other words, this is outsourcing without competition. Another word for this is developing a machinery to reward those in power now with the profits of the decisions they make, supposedly for the public, by ensuring their future recycling in private ventures – which will use their connected status to continue the parasitizing of Government monies. One of Mayer’s sources aptly sums up what is going on. After detailing the (sad, to me) profiteering done by Jack Kemp (a man who LI used to think was, at least, a morally decent sort) by creating a jack off company to consult about Iraq and oil – as if Jack Kemp knows jack all about either subject – and showing how former General Franks is now profiting from having headed U.S. forces in Iraq in April (apparently, Franks thinks of war as a sport –with himself, now, as an athlete out for commercial endorsements), Mayer writes:
“Franks’s lawyer, Marty Edelman, confirmed his client’s participation: “That is correct. But it is my understanding that he won’t be dealing with Iraq or the military for a year” (to comply with government ethics rules). Asked how Kemp and Franks had joined forces, Edelman said, “It seems like everyone on that level knows each other.” Edelman himself is now on the advisory board of Free Market Global.
Kemp’s second project, in which he said he would play an advisory role, is something called al-Ruba’yia. He describes it as a two-hundred-million-dollar fund to be invested in various ventures in Iraq, from energy to education. He is trying to attract American investors. Kemp is well positioned for this task: his political organization, Empower America, counts among its supporters some of the current Bush Administration’s top figures. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, is a former board member. “It’s like Russia,” the businessman said. “This is how corruption is done these days. It’s not about bribes. You just help your friends to get access. Cheney doesn’t call the Defense Department and tell them, ‘Pick Halliburton.’ It’s just having dinner with the right people.”

These people are so, so depressingly obvious that LI runs out of words to deal with them. The hand faulters -- the letters dissolve into their individual and irreducible sounds . How to build the right word, the one that will rid us of this beast?

PS -- also see the WP story about Cheney and Scalia's hunting expedition. It does contain one truly hilarious graf. After giving space to Scalia's reasons for not recusing himself from the case in which Cheney is asking the court to shut down requests to see what happened at the Energy policy group he formed, the paper says:

"Scalia's view may have described ethical norms in a clubbier Washington. But in today's climate, his off-court activities with Cheney were denounced by legal ethicists and editorial writers. "

A clubbier Washington? And when, pray tell, was that? The present era is about as clubby as D.C. has ever been.

Bollettino

“But though the nation be exempt from real evils, it is not more happy on this account than others. The people are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence; but there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange, the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well known to foreign physicians by the appellation of Epidemic Terror.”

According to the sociologists, Stanley Cohen coined the phrase “moral panic” to talk about the sweeping fears that will suddenly go through all levels of a society. Cohen studied Mods and Rockers to find out, among other things, why sensational stories about Mod violence and deviance became, briefly, a staple of the British media. Cohen examined the mechanism of this sensation, from incident to report to response. In a sense, what he was doing, with a different vocabulary, was what Oliver Goldsmith had done two hundred years before, in his essay on Mad Dogs. Since I don’t believe Goldsmith’s essay has ever been referred to by those who have written about the history of moral panic, I thought I’d compare Goldsmith’s Epidemic Terror with Cohen’s moral panic – and in particular, the way in which Goldsmith used the epidemic image to medicalize an older image of rumor.

First, though, let’s talk a bit about Cohen’s terms. A good paper applying Cohen and Hall’s work to panics about language is on this site:


I get this quote from the site. Here’s how Cohen defines his term:

“Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A
condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a
threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and
stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by
editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or
(more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten,
except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.(1972:9)

The Epidemic Terror of Goldsmith’s essay is exactly of Cohen’s type-of thing-that-suddenly-becomes-visible, even though it has been in existence a long time: mad dogs.

Goldsmith, of course, is writing in a tradition about rumor and ignorance that goes back to Virgil's goddess of Rumor, who perches on the walls of the city. What is interesting about his essay is the direction he takes. It would be easy to employ the old routines that targeted ignorance and the mob. The term “mob” came into existence in the 18th century – it was a shortened form of mobile vulgarum, common people in movement. And Goldsmith, as well as any 18th century intellectual, wasn’t averse to tossing around a little abuse of the mob. However, he is more interested in mechanism than typology – he is after the dynamic of his “epidemic terror”. And to understand that, you have to pose some non-traditional questions that concern the about-ness of ignorance – questions that latter led Freud and Canetti to their (different) conclusions about crowd behavior.

Goldsmith begins with examples to show that epidemic terrors are both chronic and structurally similar:

“One year it issues from a baker’s shop in the form of a sixpenny loaf; the next, it takes the appearance of a comet with a fiery tail; the third, it threatens like a flatbottomed boat; and the fourth, it carries consternation in the bite of a mad dog.”

In all of the cases, the risk is disproportionate to the terror it spreads. However, the element I want to underline is that Goldsmith isn't showing that the disproportion is irrational -- he is trying to show how it is rationalized. Hence, my reference to Freud. The essay was probably penned sometime in the 1750s or 1760s. Supposedly England was swept with various epidemics of what surgeon John Hunter, who wrote about it in the 1780s, called canine madness. Goldsmith intentionally parallels two forms of madness – one is spread by a mad dog’s bite, while the other’s lines of infection are at first, mysterious. In both cases, though, the contagion model applies. The individual madness of the hyrophobe is paralleled by the collective madness of the crowd.

Goldsmith, as a good doctor, describes the outward symptoms of the ‘disease” of fearing mad dogs – people “sally from their houses with that circumspection which is prudent in such as expect a mad dog at every turning;” “a few of unusual bravery arm themselves with boots and buff gloves, in order to face the enemy…” In short, a city operates as though it were suddenly under imminent threat.

And what of that threat? Goldsmith observes how the discovery of whether a dog is mad or not resembles the old trial of dunking witches – if she floats, she’s a witch, if she drowns, she is innocent. Since the symptoms of being a mad dog are biting, or running away, crowds gather around dogs, jab or stone them, and then are either attacked – proof that the dog is mad – or escaped from – proof, again, that the dog is mad. Out comes the halter and the dog is hung.

“When epidemic terror is once excited, every morning comes loaded with some new disaster.” Goldsmith anticipates Cohen once again. In Cohen’s model, the menace has to be repeated over and over. In the age of the copy machine, tv, and radio (Cohen’s book dealt with the pre-Net age), the vector of transmission runs through these vast news machines. In Goldsmith’s day, the vector of transmission was still as much oral as it was print. What is interesting is that there will suddenly be a wave of information about the menace that runs through oral space – much like today’s “watercooler talk.” ‘As in stories of ghosts, each loves to hear the account, though it only serves to make him uneasy.” Goldsmith imagines a story beginning in some outlying area, where a woman is frightened by a dog. As the story is retold – and as it spreads towards more densely populated areas – the story’s characteristics change, until they assume the shape of the usual terror: a mad dog, a sudden attack, a highly placed woman who is suddenly transformed into a foaming hydrophobic on all fours.

Goldsmith’s epidemic terror includes all three elements of Cohen’s moral panic: exaggeration, the prediction that such things are inevitable, and symbolization. In Cohen’s case, the symbolization congealed around the image of the “Mod;” in Goldsmith’s case, around the image of the dog. The dog isn’t simply diseased, but mad – a disturbance of the rational faculties, a lowering of the censure between the Id and the ego – to use an anachronistic way to describe it.

We especially like the end of Goldsmith’s essay, because he goes to the heart of the terror – to the dog itself – and makes a little plaidoyer for the dog: “in him alone, fawning is not flattery.” “How unkind then to torture this animal that has left the forest to claim the protection of man! How ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for all its services!”

We could find many contemporary applications, n’est-ce pas?

Bollettino

One of the most illuminating and melancholic comments we’ve read in the NYT about our system was buried in this story about the potential Bush strategy in a camaign against Kerry. That strategy is utterly predictable (begin on a rabid note, accelerate from there): what attracted us was this ominous quote from the Kerry side:

“Another Kerry adviser was more blunt. "This is not the Dukakis campaign," the adviser said. "We're not going to take it. And if they're going to come at us with stuff, whatever that stuff may be, if it goes to a place where the '88 campaign did, then everything is on the table. Everything."

Everything that is wrong with the Democrats is in that quotation. “Everything,” presumably, won’t be on the table if the Republicans play nice. Which leads to the question: why? The Democratic party is heading for extinction when, demagraphically, it should be heading for hegemony. That's because it still thinks of itself as the establishment. Establishments have to keep “everything” from being purveyed to the mob, which won’t understand it, or the necessity for it: the million little deals that keep the class composition of this country a predetermined harmony, a chorus of money wending its way upward. So you have the DC. Covenant – we won’t speak of Bush’s military record; we won’t oppose Bush’s rush to war, or question the evidence for it; we won’t attack the obvious whitewashes in the press of everything from the joke of a budget to the joke of our alliance with Pakistan, the one country that not only bristles with the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction but has made selling them part of its economy; we won’t question what happened that made 9/11 happen, etc., etc. This isn’t because the Democrats fear the Republicans – the Republicans will attack the Dems with vim and vigor regardless of how meak and mild they are. It is because the instinctive, protective gesture of the Dem establishment, which is white, male, and millionairish, is to keep the status quo alive – to preserve those conditions in which the white, male, and millionairish can continue to be comfortable.

This is why we are afraid of Dean getting out of the race. Dean being in the race did send some 50,000 volts through the somnolence of the Senatorial candidates. Kerry is looking better against Bush every day. But that aide’s comment bodes ill for this campaign. If Kerry thinks that he can keep anything off of the proverbial table, he will inevitably lose. Dukakis, contrary to media popular legend, didn’t lose because he was a cold fish, or a small chump of change in a tank, but because he swept aside the chief issue of the day, the nationwide looting of the S&Ls. Why? Because he was for the changes that made that looting possible. He and his opponent tacitly talked agreed to talk about anything except the main thing that was happening in America -- the creaking and squeaking in the financial system, due to the gross mal-distribution of money from the financial sector to the LBOs and third world dictators and real estate in New Jersey that was all falling down. Where there's a crisis, there are profiteers -- but if Dukakis had brought that up, it would threaten Democrats as well as Republicans. To look into that would be to look into systematic corruption, and beyond that to the real changes that were taking place in our country, the changes that were systematically sucking money out of the inner city (where it was replaced with the money that came from the market in drugs) and from the working class. Remember, of the Senators who were tarred with leaning on regulators to give obvious fraudulent S & Ls a clean bill of health, most of them were Dems.

That Kerry’s aide could ‘threaten” to put everything on the table is an insult to every citizen and a light cast on the dark, petrified ruin of our system. We shouldn’t have a party system that props up a corrupt compact of little deals about what is and what is not “proper” to put on the table. At least the Republicans, in their relentless attacks, are willing to put everything on the table – everything, that is, that they hate about the Dems. This is what they should be doing.

Let’s hope that Kerry’s campaign seriously considers how arrogant, ignorant and symptomatic it is to menace us with doing what they should be doing in the first place. The Democrats disenfranchise their best hope -- the people who don't vote -- when they compromise in order to retain their little domains of political power The everything that isn't on the table makes the non-voting majority suspect, rightly, that elections are a charade. If Kerry is going to run a campaign against Bush while simultaneously protecting the embedded privileges that Bush and his party represents, he'll lose.

Go after Bush's military record, go after his stewardship pre 9/11, fight him on the shores and fight him on the mountains. Elections aren't about the pols running in them -- they are about us, the poor voters. Everything is on the table for us, every day.

So fire that goon-ish aide, and run like a man, not a patrician mouse.

Bollettino

I talked to D., my best friend, yesterday, and he bitched about the end of this blog. So I told him that I have to spend my time finishing my novel, and he said that he’d been hearing that excuse for 20 years.

Well, score one for D.

However, I didn’t tell D. that the other reason I ended this blog was that it was slowly and surely driving me crazy. Reading the newspapers closely every day is a sure recipe for a quick trip to the rubber room, if you ask me. And not having to read them in order to comment on … well, anything, has made yours truly feel much lighter.

However, there can’t be too much harm in writing a much less concentrated blog. So instead of pulling this thing down, we will do our jumping jacks here occasionally. It can’t do any harm.

Today, we read Christopher Hitchens column in Slate about the missing WMD. It made us wonder how long they are going to continue to put up with Hitchens. It is one thing to be a contrarian; it is quite another to start writing like William Safire’s senile uncle. The contrast between Fred Kaplan’s shrewd piece and the Hitchens bit of administration puffery was startling. The percentage of bluster, in Hitchens’ writing, has always been high, but the percentage of shrewdness has been high enough to compensate for it. Lately, however, it has been almost completely bluster. Among the highlights of this latest glimpse of mental devastation was Hitchens’ complex put down of Maureen Dowd. According to Hitchens, the anti-war left is carrying water for the CIA. As an instance of this, he triumphantly spots Dowd associating the CIA with Ahmed Chalabi, Hitchens’ Mussolini-lite bud, and bundling these two incompatibles together as the source for the inflation of Saddam the H.’s threat. In his usual new style, Hitchens rushes for the debating point at the expense of the argument. Chalabi supplied intelligence to a wholly other group than the CIA, Hitchens tells us – correctly. Of course, he has to put it another way – that Chalabi was smeared by the CIA. Smearing, apparently, means asking for an accounting of monies received when Chalabi not only failed to deliver an overthrow, in the nineties, but seemed to be using Intelligence money to support his own jet set life style. That, for Hitchens, is a smear. It is like accusing the head of Enron of doing something fishy -- how dare they!

Anyway, score one for Hitchens in the match vs. Dowd. Alas, he makes his point by running down the field the wrong way, towards the wrong goal. His point, of course, is one that the water-carrying CIA lovin’ lefties have been making repeatedly – that the Pentagon took intelligence that it wanted to believe in from Chalabi, while scrutinizing with extreme prejudice any CIA intelligence that went against the A.C. narrative.

Since Hitchens has, in the past, abundantly credited Chalabi and his group with supplying intelligence on Iraq, surely he should, if he has any honesty left, ask his buddy about that. Was the intelligence as misleading as the accounting of various of Chalabi's businesses in the past? Maybe it is time for Hitchens to ask how a known financial crook became the Pentagon's golden boy.

…

On to the budget. Surely, the Dems have enough ammo, now, to run a McCarthyite campaign against Bush. The only logical explanation for Bush’s twin achievements – the destruction of the Atlantic alliance, and the subversion of the American economy – is that he is the Manchurian candidate. Barbara Bush must have been flashing those big playing cards at him a lot, recently. How else can one account for an administration that sorta misses one hundred thirty billion dollars in its estimation of its Medicare “reform” package; one that proposes raising Defense expenditures massively, making tax cuts on the wealthiest permanent, and projects halving the budget deficit by… what’s the year? 2009, by... growing the economy!

Surely the man is a plant. That's why the beady eyes are so cloudy, the voice is so hesitant. It must be the cards every morning. And, as he destroys one thing after another, the press is always there to try to make the evident irrationality seem normal. It is getting harder and harder to make that case.

Adios, LI readers.

This has been immense fun. However, as a habit, blogging has become too expensive for Mr. LI. We received a notice, today, about our electricity. Make the throat slashing gesture -- we have no money to pay it. We have no money to pay rent, etc., etc. And really, it simply takes too muich time, right now, to do this blog.

On the bright side, as one of the "self-employed" of the Bush economy, I have just gotten off the phone with the aid agencies suggested by the City of Austin, and have really understood for the first time what the Bush era means. The City suggested the United way, which suggested St. Mary's, Christian Services, Baptist Community Center. This, of course, surprised us. Asking if there were any more, uh, robust agencies to act as my advocate, if not to offer temporary relief, I was told, No.

This makes complete sense, of course. It is not that the poor in this country are being ruled with indifference -- rather, they evoke unmitigated hostility among the Republican gentry. Losers, whiners, and a reserve army of failure, we are the turds. Having representatives who might look through the bylaws of, say, a power company to discover regulations that protect the poorest payers is just the kind of thing we don't want to encourage. Dependence, you know.

A pity.

So, time for LI to plunge into the bowels of the Temporary Relief for Needy Families. And as any counsellor for the poor knows, the first thing to do is to wean the poor from their bad habits. The poor are always shooting themselves in the foot with their addictions. So it has proven with LI. This habit really has to stop.

So, time to yank the thing. We will leave up the archives and the site for about two weeks, but then, it is coming down. It is too tempting to continue it, and we simply can't afford to. Interesting as it has been to give a worm's eye view of the world, this worm needs a new hole to crawl through, at the very least.

Now for that struggle for food stamps. Wish us well.

Bollettino

Trollopians everywhere, take note: according to the Daily Telegraph, the Church of England might be selling off its most expensive bishop’s palaces:

“THE CHURCH of England is preparing to sell some of its ancient bishops' palaces and houses as part of a cost-cutting review.

The Church Commissioners said yesterday that they would introduce guidelines to maximise the income from properties and those proving too expensive to maintain may be put on the market.”

As we all know, the Bishop’s Palace in Barchester is the center of the world – at least, the world Trollope made. Of course, there are the political novels, the Irish novels, the novels and novels Trollope poured out, but the Barchester series is at the center of this universe. Our Tory impulse is to simply hang down our head when we read that the Church might actually be letting some vulgarian bidder, some Saatchi or other, get his hooks on jewels like these:

“Among the historic houses is Auckland Castle, a 90-room Gothic pile set in six acres, lived in by Bishops of Durham for nearly 900 years. The present bishop occupies a four-bedroom apartment there.

Hartlebury Castle has been home to Bishops of Worcester for even longer and Rose Castle, a fortified manor with listed wallpaper on the Cumbrian border with Scotland, has housed Bishops of Carlisle since the 13th century.

The Bishop of Bath and Wells has a 13th century moated palace whose swans learn to ring a bell when they want to be fed, but this is expected to escape the axe as it makes a profit from tourism and conferences. In a recent reassessment, however, the Bishop of Bristol's eight-bedroom Queen Anne house in Clifton has been sold, and the See House in Wakefield will be put up for sale.”

One remembers the agony of Crawley, the poor curate in the Last Chronicle of Barset, whose suffering increased with his knowledge, and the expense of whose knowledge came out of the happiness of his family. In Chapter IV, Mrs. Crawley has just been to see the lawyer about the matter of a bad check to the butcher. In Trollope’s usually adroit manner, a debt becomes the timer in this novel. The Crawley family is crawling with debts. Debts and cultural capital out the scrawny Crawley behind. The book is, in many ways, like one of those allegorical Victorian pictures – on one side, the Bishop’s Palace, and on the other side, the clergyman’s hovel. Mrs. Crawley comes home to a darkened house, and this is how Trollope lavishes its material weight upon us. When Mrs. Crawley tries to tell her husband what the attorney says, this is his reply:

'But none to crush me as this will crush me. Well; what am I to do? Am I to go to prison--tonight?' At this moment his daughter returned with a candle, and the mother could not make her answer at once. It was a wretched, poverty-stricken room. By degrees the carpet had disappeared, which had been laid down some nine or ten years since, when they had first come to Hogglestock, and which even then had not been new. Now nothing but a poor fragment of it remained in front of the fire-place. In the middle of the room there was a table which had once been large; but one flap of it was gone altogether, and the other flap sloped grievously towards the floor, the weakness of old age having fallen into its legs. There were two or three smaller tables about, but they stood propped against walls, thence obtaining a security which their own strength would not give them. At the further end of the room there was an ancient piece of furniture, which was always called 'papa's secretary', at which Mr Crawley customarily sat and wrote his sermons, and did all work that was done by him within the house. The man who had made it, some time in the last century, had intended it to be a locked guardian for domestic documents, and the receptacle for all that was most private in the house of some paterfamilias. But beneath the hands of Mr Crawley it always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which he wrote, was covered with dog's-eared books, from nearly all of which the covers had disappeared.

There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon. There was half a Horace--the two first books of the Odes at the beginning and the De Arte Poetica at the end having disappeared. There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and there were Caesar's 'Commentaries' in two volumes, so stoutly bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the Crawley family. All these were piled upon the secretary, with many others--odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin lay at the top, and showed signs of frequent use. There was one arm-chair in the room--a Windsor chair, as such used to be called, made soft by an old cushion in the back, in which Mr Crawley sat when both he and his wife were in the room, and Mrs Crawley when he was absent. And there was an old horsehair sofa--now almost denuded of its horsehair--but that, like the tables required the assistance of a friendly wall. Then there was a half a dozen of other chairs--all of different sorts --and they completed the furniture of the room. It was not such a room as one would wish to see inhabited by an beneficed clergyman of the Church of England; but they who know what money will do and what it will not, will understand how easily a man with a family, and with a hundred and thirty pounds a year, may be brought to the need of inhabiting such a chamber. When it is remembered that three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over forty pounds a year, there need be no difficulty in understanding that it may be so. Bread for such a family must cost at least twenty-five pounds. Clothes for five persons of whom one must at any rate wear the raiment of a gentleman, can hardly be found for less than ten pounds a year a head. Then there remains fifteen pounds for tea, sugar, beer, wages, education, amusements and the like. In such circumstances a gentleman can hardly pay much for the renewal of furniture!”

It is truly fascinating how the novel embedded in itself the tracking shot -- for this description of the Crawley chattels is one long tracking shot, from the couple to the child to the carpet to the table to the books to the desk. And like a tracking shot, what is shown is, by being shown, immediately symbolic. It is that instant when the the thing quickens into expression, when collection becomes scene.

The contrast with the gentlemanly circumstances of the Bishop, and his much lesser interest in pagan classics, runs through the book. And the Bishop's problem with his bossy wife. Bishop Proudie is a typical Church of England high official – very good for ceremonial purposes, but no damn backbone. Mrs. Proudie is one of Trollope’s great characters: narrow, proud, petulant, incapable of understanding religion beyond its ceremonial trappings, a conventional figure whom convention cannot satisfy, and (as we know from previous books) susceptible to Enthusiasm. In short, a Victorian Everywoman.

Well. And so that’s that. They fight WWI, they fight WWII, they conquer half the planet, and in the end, it comes down to this.

To think that the Bishop of Durham is practically camping like a student in his palace – practically lives there in LI-like squalor – is shaming.

What’s truly worse is that these palaces are going to rack and ruin merely because England is passing through a temporarily ferocious capitalist phase. Of course, the privatizations of today, and the Thatcherism, will eventually be swallowed up by the larger stream of English history. It would be a shame, however, for the damage those things have already done to engulf and drown the bishop’s palaces.

One knows exactly what the Bishop of Barchester would say: oh dear.

Bollettino

Economics is the science of explaining how the totalling of an economic model in its collision with reality is really not as bad as it looks. In fact, in the economist's version, it is reality that is at fault!

In this, it shares a lot with the science of selling used cars. The latest unemployment numbers certainly point to the ruinous nature of the Bush fiscal policy. While pumping into the system 600 billion some dollars that the state has to borrow, plus the money that it has on hand, is going to produce short term growth, that growth won’t necessarily engender employment. This lesson was learned, by left-wing Keynsians, in the inflation haunted seventies. Right wing Keynsians are reproducing the conditions for that fiasco from the other end.

We read, with mounting hilarity, the analysis of unemployment produced by the London Times Business editor, Anatole Koletsky. The numbers do look bleak, according to Koletsky, but that is because you aren’t looking hard enough. If you look under the numbers, and then you look around for other numbers, what you discover is an employment boom in America.

AK starts from the collision:

"Friday's US employment figures were undeniably a shock to economists (including myself) who have been expecting a strong global expansion, led by American growth."

The rest of the article, he talks himself into believing that the collision didn't take place. It is very funny. We especially like this part:

"But were the employment statistics really all that bad? Looking below the surface, the US economic figures still present an extremely positive story - albeit with a nasty sting in the tail.

The most important point -apart from noting that a single month of figures can never have much significance in its own right -is that Friday's stagnant employment figure was inconsistent with every other indicator of the state of the US economy. Figures on GDP, industrial production, layoff announcements, weekly jobless claims and the monthly surveys by the Institute of Purchasing Management (which have a 50-year track record of correctly anticipating cyclical movements in the US economy) have all been pointing unambiguously to strong employment growth.

"In such conditions, it is wise to ignore the rogue statistic..."

Indeed, such is the wisdom of the economists. There is the problem, however, that the rogue number might, after all, be the extraordinary 3rd quarter growth. As AK knows, each of the last two years have witnessed spurts that petered out.

Still, you need some statistic, somewhere, to continue to perform your shamanic function. Luckily AK has one, having been pointed there, no doubt, by the WSJ editorial board, which has lately given up economics in favor of examining the entrails of cows and such. Cow say, Bush, he very very good!

"The survey of payroll employment, conducted by a questionnaire sent to US employers, normally attracts more attention than the survey of households because it is less volatile from month to month. But over longer periods (such as 12 months) the two surveys have always moved closely together. In the past year, how-ever, the usual relationship has broken down (see top chart). According to the payroll survey the US economy lost 74,000 jobs in the year to December, but the household survey shows a healthy increase of 2.02 million jobs. So which should we believe?
To me the answer seems very clear: the household survey is right and the payroll survey is wrong."

This kind of hocus pocus is disappointing. Kaletsky is, in general we think, right to point to the inflationary load that is being generated by the Bush budget and the Fed's enabling of that budget. His problem is that he doesn't want to see what he is seeing -- an inflationary load and a week job economy.

The survey of businesses, it is true, doesn’t pick up small business starts. However, there is another explanation for the divergence. That is the length of this recession. The survey of households distinguishes between unemployed and ‘self-employed” without really asking too many questions. Kolatsky knows as well as anyone else how soft the ‘self-employed’ category is. People routinely describe themselves ‘upward’ to surveyors. That’s why 14% of Americans surveyed describe themselves as being in the upper 1% income bracket.

LI recently answered a survey, and for the first time, we answered unemployed to the question of what we did. It felt extremely uncomfortable. Of course, we could say self employed. Self employment last year grossed us some 8 thousand bucks – a real fortune. We rounded out the pittances we made from reviews by getting some day labor as a house painter, etc. This month, we owe 350 dollars in rent and, as the month comes to its halfway point, we have made zero house painting, zero on our articles, and zero has come in from our plea to LI readers, making a grand total of zero.

That is self employment. The difference between self employment and unemployment, in my case, is that the later is a step upward. We have no doubt that the extra unemployed, having every incentive to describe themselves with optimism, have, over time, either dropped from the rolls of the unemployed, or turned unemployment into a "choice.' It makes you feel better to think that you are self employed. So a former designer waters plants for some connections, earns a third of what she did earn, sends out resumes and gets no reply, and puts herself down as self-employed. This happens over and over. It isn't a pick up -- it is a symptom of a creeping and chronic malady.

There is no talking one’s way out of the employment picture wrought by the extreme of fiscal irresponsibility and the diversion of hundreds of billions to the richest percentiles, a diversion that has purchased an investor boom, but hasn’t trickled down to tighten the labor market in the least. From May of last year to yesterday, LI has sent off approximately 75 responses to job advertisements. We have received one interview. This is over a range of jobs – liquor store clerk, law office receptionist, customer service representative. It is drier than a dead man’s tongue out there.

Surely the investor boom will trickle down this year. There are signs of that in Austin. Up and down fifth street, there are new and very expensive apartment condos. In the past two years, perhaps 40,000 square feet of office space has been added just to downtown Austin. Yet we don’t see any rush to occupy either those condos – which start at 300,000 – or those office spaces. This is speculation of a non-risky kind – usually, after two years of economic doldrums, the American business cycle comes roaring back. But don’t believe the diagnosticians who, not hearing a heartbeat, decide that hearts beating aren’t the main thing. They are. If anything, the unemployment rate is probably understated, by not counting people like me. When Koletsky claims that two million jobs were added to the payrolls last year, I think that this is only evidence that the man is suffering from an almost terminal case of delirium partisans, a disease caused by bending over backwards to defend the Republican economic policy.

Bollettino

Hmm. We don’t know if we can pat ourselves on the back yet, but it does look like our projection about the Shi’ite response to Saddam’s capture is starting to assume the outlines we predicted.

“Officials held a round of urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad in the wake of the rejection on Sunday by a powerful Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of the administration's complex plans to hold caucuses around the country to select an interim legislature and executive in a newly self-governing Iraq. Officials say they are responding to the cleric's objections with a new plan that will open the caucuses to more people and make their inner workings more transparent.
Administration officials also expressed concern about a separate part of Ayatollah Sistani's statement on Sunday that demanded that any agreement for American-led forces to remain in Iraq be approved by directly elected representatives.”
If you will cast your mind back, faithful reader, you’ll remember that we said, a day or two after the capture of Saddam:

“With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play � and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz�s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shi’ite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed …

In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:

The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won’t.

The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They�ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won�t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.

Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam�s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they dont realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shi�a elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shia elite in Iraq is something we don�t know enough about to predict.”

Hey, that looks pretty good at the moment.

So, the comedy of multi-cultural misunderstanding goes on. It is rather amazing that Americans in 2004 are acting the way Americans in 1904 acted in the Philippines – as if they were dealing with an inferior race. But, in fact, that is exactly what they are doing. These grafs are wholly believable, and wholly astonishing:
“Now that Ayatollah Sistani has rejected the system as not democratic enough, administration officials said they were intensifying efforts in all of Iraq's governorates and in cities and towns to hold local meetings to select delegates to the caucuses.
The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental way.”
Right. It’s the beads approach – give those savages beads, and in return they’ll give you Manhattan. Hell, worked four hundred years ago, oughta work today. So much for the much lauded moral politics of the Wolfowitz crowd. It’s democracy without any of that pesky will of the people stuff. And really, how can the people object when we’ve imposed on them a perfectly decent savage, one Chalabi, who even learned the charming American art of swindling – he’s almost as civilized as us!

However, a hopeful point should be made. We originally thought that there might be a lot more violence in Southern Iraq, due to the capture of S. There hasn't been. Really, there is a chance for a peaceful revolution here, after all: one bringing with it the prefiguration of Iraqi democracy without the servility towards the Americans. A good thing, a very good thing.

Bollettino

We went to a story in the Observer about grunt discontents. The story pointed us to a highly commendable site, run by the Veterans for Common Sense.

When Time magazine named the soldier the Man of the Year, there was something about the gesture reminiscent of Uriah Heep rubbing his hands together – an unctuous hypocrisy, if you will. Because, beyond the photo ops, the common soldier of America’s current war is being treated dismally by a government that pinches its pennies, when it comes to family leave for reservists, while throwing its billions away, when it comes to contracting with Halliburtan. It stinks.

The Veterans for Common Sense site has a compilation of articles about the collective dump the Pentagon is taking on Times Man of the year. For instance:

1. The wounded. Has there ever been an American war in which the censorship was so hamfisted, and the response of the press was so pussyfooted? In WWII, the press advocated for the GI; in this war, the press so far has advocated for a total of one GI, Jessica Lynch. The rest of them – the 2,841 wounded by offical count on January 7 – have somehow missed out on the Made for Tv movie, and the million dollar book deal. They are also missing out on their rights, not that this is going to make any headlines:

“Most service members severely wounded in Iraq and returned to the United States are treated at Walter Reed.

In a letter sent this week to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dave Gorman, executive director of Disabled American Veterans, complained that the DAV is being blocked from carrying out its congressionally chartered mission.

Gorman questioned measures that require hospital pre-screening and approval of all visits, and full-time escorts during those visits, according to the letter a copy of which CNN obtained. Gorman said because of those escorts there is a lack of privacy over matters the counselors discuss with patients and their families at Walter Reed.”

2. Money. One of the great things about casting the soldier as a hero is that you don’t have to pay for heroes. I mean, Hercules getting a disability pension? Oh, forget it. It’s enough that Tom Cruise plays him in a cheesy Hollywood movie – one of those movies that, for the one millionth time, says NOTHING about the pay structure of the Army and the National Guard. So Times runs its suck piece; the Defense Department tries to “cut fat’ by cutting out the 300 million extra bucks that go to families for combat pay and family leave. And it isn’t an issue. We’d much rather see smiling dudes in camouflage hoisting a flag than think about paying them a decent salary. The gross inequalities that have become a structural part of the American system since the 80s have created a callousness that is most evident here. If you destroy unions and divert as much money as possible to the wealthiest, eventually the soldier – who is, after all the medals are taken off, another worker – is just going to have to take it on the chin. And there’s going to be more chin-taking as the war goes into its second year. Why? Because the deep, pervasive lying that took place as the Bushies organized this war meant that fighting it had to be done at the least political cost. No selective service here. No preparation for long term combat. Rather, we call up the Reserves – units that should, as the name implies, be Reserves. And as this AP article in the Army Times makes clear, that is the Rumsfeld policy. All military operations have to have a great code name: Operation Eagle, or Thunderbolt, or something. For this one I suggest "The Three Stooges come to the Defense Department".

“Back-to-back wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched the Army thin. Nearly two-thirds of its active duty brigade-sized units are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troops currently in Iraq rotate out this spring, the U.S. plans to lean heavily on the National Guard and Reserves for replacements. The Pentagon said Wednesday that the number of U.S. military reservists called to active duty jumped by more than 10,000 in the past week.

“What we’re trying to do is to manage the force now so that we don’t have a falloff in recruitment or retention a year from now, and then have a gap where we have to scramble to rectify that,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.”

Ah, the gibberish just flows and flows from the Donald! He’s the Ed McMahon of bad planning!

3. Meanwhile, back on the home front. The Observer mentioned a Military Families Who Speak Out. The site has some interesting letters. An articulate and impassioned letter from Jessica D. Salamon to President Bush caught our eye. She makes a sensible suggestion: “Please do all of us a favor and don't talk about the sacrifices we are making until you know what they are.”

Pursuant to that request, she enumerates some of her sacrifices. Her husband joined the Ohio National Guard. This turned out to be a bad move, since “he thought being in a local unit would make the most difference in his immediate world. He also thought I would best accept his enlistment because traditionally the National Guard stays home to protect the US, our citizens, and our beloved Constitution.” And it does – normally. But Mr. Salamon wasn't calculating on the political cowardice stalking D.C., where the feel good rodomontade of the belligeranti is paid for by the blood of the citizenry. Ms. Salamon explains what her particular sacrifice is all about:
“When you speak of sacrifices, what do you picture? Do you picture apple-cheeked wives going out to sell war bonds or become Rosie the Riveter? Because that is not the reality of the sacrifices currently being made by military families. I welcome you to spend a day with me. It will be a long day, though, because I am unemployed and have trouble sleeping at night because I am under a lot of stress. I wait all day for my husband to call. I have to have my cell phone with me at all times because I am afraid to miss a call. I won't shop in the grocery store very long, because I don't get a signal in there and I'm afraid that he will call while I am in there. I cry every time I hang up with him because all of the joy and emotion is gone from his voice, he doesn't sound like the husband I married eight months ago, nor the man I have been with for nearly six years.

I spend much of my day writing him letters and printing articles off of the internet for him to read. I try to convince him that things will be better for us when he returns.

We haven't had a very good year, you see. We married in haste in April because we thought his unit was to be deployed then. My husband graduated with a degree in Computer Science and although he is a talented programmer, he was unable to find a job. In August, our home in Columbus was destroyed in a flash flood and we lost everything we owned. Our whole life washed away in one rain storm. We moved to northeastern Ohio to be near our families and try to rebuild our lives. We were both unemployed then. In November, we got the orders for my husband to report on Dec. 6 for mobilization. He was allowed to come home for Christmas, but our holiday was tainted by the fact that everyone had questions about his deployment and the fact that he was only allowed a three day pass. He didn't get to come home for New Year's, he will miss his birthday this month and our first anniversary in April. We may never get to go on a honeymoon. His orders are for eighteen months, so things are not looking up for us in the immediate future.”

Ms. Salamon obviously doesn’t realize what compassionate conservatism is all about – as you make the sacrifices, you store up your joys in heaven, not on earth! On earth, we have to sacrifice to make sure that people in Cheney's income bracket, poor pressed things, and those poor mutual funds investors, and especially those poor, suffering people in the energy industry don’t suffer the untold harm of taxation and regulation. Consequently, we don’t have the money for pesky little things like extending unemployment insurance. And we certainly can't take gravy out of the mouths of the numerous well entrenched military industries (Dyncorps, SIAC, Martin Marietta, Boeing) just to sprinkle some on the families of those who are really doing the fighting, can we? That’s going way too far.

Bollettino

We’ve examined the combinations with regard to Iraq. Let’s examine the combinations with regard to Bush’s re-election.

Most analysis of the election that LI reads in the paper is determined by a very short horizon: what happened this week. Or last week. And what the polls say about it.

But let’s try to take another approach, and look at the bad news and good news possibilities held by this year. If good news is taken to help Bush, what good news can he expect?

It was the orthodoxy – from October to December – that he would be enjoying great economic headlines in 2004. The newest employment figures rather kick that in the head. Plus the figures that aren’t being publicized – the dip dip dip of the value of the dollar. If unemployment doesn’t go down, the money flowing into the market might start seeking to take advantage of the dollar’s currently low status. This would be a double whammy of bad news for Bush.

This is the hardest thing to predict. Economists have never found a way to map their models over the actual working economy, even though certain models do have predictive power in the long run. But what matters, at the moment, is that if there is no change, this will be bad news for Bush. That possibility should hedge any prediction of a Bush landslide, such as those that are being pitched about by the right. Because bad news, here, is either remain the same news, or actual bad news – the return of the recession --

The best news, outside of a boom, for Bush would be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. The timing of Saddam H.’s capture was really fortunate for the Dems – if it had happened in June of this year, for instance, the good news would certainly float Bush into the general election like the Queen of the Rose Bowl.

So, one would expect a stirring up of the troops to bring Bush Osama’s head. Best time for him would be about August. If I were a Democrat, I would be figuring out how to pre-empt that. Bush has rather screwed himself, here, however: there are not enough American troops, we think, to operate against Osama as Americans operated against Saddam. This means relying on the Pakistanis or Afghans to capture the guy. We imagine that there will be some shift of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan this year, but we wonder whether that won’t bring up more questions than it is worth.

I think all the good news has been squeezed out of Iraq. The news from now to November is probably going to be bad. American casualties, recalcitrant Iraqis, blah blah blah. The best option for the administration is closing down discussion of Iraq, but that will be difficult when it defines the administration. Especially given the jingos who want to take a shot at Syria and Iran. The consensus of D.C. people seems to be that Iraq will be a net gain for Bush, but I don’t see how they figure that.

LI thought surely corruption – the culture of corruption in top management, and the complicity of Bush’s people in that corruption – would be a big Bush deficit. It hasn’t worked out that way. Put this down to our class bias. In actuality, even people who were totally screwed by Enron just aren’t interested in seeing Jeff Skilling’s head on a platter.

As for Bad news that could help Bush – the one thing that springs to mind is another attack on the Homeland. LI believes that this possibility should sink the Prez – after all, he’s been in office three years. No way to blame this one on Clinton. But the Republicans have invested years of irrationally aggressive rhetoric with the electorate. We all like to think that the bully is unmasked, in the end, but in reality, the bully can go on for a long time. If there is an attack in September or October, Bush is a shoo-in. Again, this is due to multiple failings – for instance, the failure of the press to investigate why we were vulnerable to four parties of truly amateur hijackers in 2001; whether the Bush administration’s findings about the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in June of that year should have sent up flags; etc. etc. The official story has solidified: a heroic president, making it back in a crisis to D.C., and directing a response that crushed the enemy. The counter-story is confused: should Bush have pre-empted Osama bin? But aren’t we critics of pre-emption? It doesn’t have clarity or momentum. If an attack comes early this year, a lot will depend on the scope .of it. LI doesn’t see how the U.S. can scrape up an extra 400 billion dollars to inject into the economic system to counter the inevitable bad effects of an attack on the scale of 9/11. However, never underestimate the credit limit of Uncle Sam.

That’s the coldest eye we can cast on the possible major good and bad news during the next eleven months. Of course, LI is not a prophet or magician. Low level events – from some personal failing or virtue of Bush, to some celebrity trial, to whatever – can change the value of these factors trememdously. But it is a good start on constructing the salient combinations for this election – and a much better exercise than some exegesis of the polls, which seems to be the only thing journalists know how to do.

In a later post, we will try to properly construct these factors into combinations.