Love in the ruins

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? – Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins.

Have I lived through the Golden age?

This question has been rushing at me, like a savage with an upraised asagai posed to strike my very heart, as one of the major American cities dies and three levels of government murders (oh, but in the second degree, and with the best intentions) as many African-Americans as it can get away with.

America has definitely changed. That the country would screw its bottom 30 percent is dog bites man news. That it would screw the middle and the top should make us sit up, indeed.

The artist in me appreciates the fine aesthetic sensibility of the muse of history, anointing a man as trivial as George Bush as the symbol of the zeitgeist. George Bush is an empty man – he makes Warren G. Harding seem like J.P. Sartre. But LI, ever the liberal, estimated the evil of that vacuum. Evil in the secular sense – the power of destruction linked to the blindness of vanity. It never occurred to me that the Bush administration would treat his Red States as it has treated Baghdad.

Anyway, the headlines today bring some hope that this phase of the ‘accidental” lynching of the urban poor is seguing into a more comfortable next phase. Perhaps we will get to see some judicial lynching of a selected looting gangbanger – such exemplary punishments are always good for the gonads – followed by some patting on the back of those whose actions in the past couple of days have cost hundreds of lives. The media hasn’t yet picked its hero yet, for this urbicide, but we are all on edge – that’s merely a matter of time and photo ops at the White House.

Meanwhile, I am working on my own extinction. I am a relic of an earlier era, dead meat for the knacker shop, in which “this is America” wasn’t the equivalent of grinning plutocrats on Murdoch’s channel defending our right to loot globally and shoot looters locally. A Dylan line sums up my non-necessity in the New Era: “it’s a wonder that we still know how to breath.”

A link to one aspect of this collapse: Read about the plan for evacuating the poor. Then weep. Weep. Weep

from 2000

I wrote this article in 2000. On my computer, it looks like an edited draft from a mag or newspaper, but I don't remember publishing it anywhere. Here it is.

MISSISSIPPI CHURNING?
Deeper issues lurk behind the populist rhetoric.
Roger Gathman is a freelance writer based in Austin.


MISSISSIPPI CHURNING?
There are issues in this issue-less campaign, but who wants to talk about them?
Roger Gathman is a freelance writer based in Austin.

When Al Gore launched his official campaign on a Mississippi Steamboat, the media dutifully cited Mark Twain. But the locus classicus for the events that have shaped the Mississippi River valley, and by implication the place of the Federal Government in the national economy, might better be sought in William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, a novel set in ‘the great flood year, 1927.’

As John M. Barry showed in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How it Changed America, the consequences of the flood were manifold and national. For instance, by directing flood relief, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, gained enough notice that was able to ride it to nomination at the Republican convention in 1928, even though Coolidge himself, appraising Hoover, said to friends, "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad."

What did Hoover exactly do? It wasn’t simply the relief effort. It was Hoover’s organization of support for the Jadwin Plan, which legalized the largest extension of Federal authority into the sphere of what had previously been left to states and localities since the Civil War. The plan put the Federal Government in charge of maintaining control of the Mississippi. More crucially, the Federal Government also assumed responsibility for financing the levee system, while the states and localities supplied pitched in merely token matching funds. Thus began the great hyrdo-engineering projects which began with flood control and soon evolved into a whole system of river control projects to promote the agricultural and industrial use of the river. That initial assumption of responsibility, and the outlay of Federal revenues it entailed ("the greatest expenditure the government has undertaken except in the World War,’ the New York Times said) (1) soon operated as a precedent for other interventions, as Coolidge probably suspected it would.

All of which contravened, on the deepest level, the conservative principal enunciated by Walter Bagehot in the nineteenth century: "... nothing can be more surely established by a larger experience than that a Government which interferes with trade injures trade." The question, even then, was what counted as interference. Bagehot himself, skeptical of all varieties of utopian theory, knew he was dealing in ideal terms here; the very idea of a "natural economy," to which the classical economists referred, encompasses the whole system of exchanges, upon which the government, if it functions at all, must impinge to some degree. But Hoover’s advocacy of the Jadwin plan established a prototype for the scale and kind of economic interference sanctioned thereafter by twentieth century conservatives: if the state, of whatever level or branch, intervened, it should intervene to give some advantage to the owning class. Conservative economists Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt have labeled the interlocking structures which bound together businesses and the Federal Government the “Corporate Commonwealth”, seeing it as the specifically different mode of capitalism practiced in twentieth century America. The Mississippi flood plan is a perfect instance of the Corporate Commonwealth in action. The Jadwin plan, while extending Federal protection to the life and property of all who lived in the Mississippi flood plan, practically advanced the interests of the large scale farmers of Mississippi’s Delta country, who no longer had to depend on their own resources for flood control. Theoretically, this should also have advanced tenant farmers, and small scale farmer. Actually, the advantage gained by larger farmers ate up the small advantage reaped by the sharecropper, since advantage has an unequal effect on large and small enterprises, tending to give larger ones a competitive advantage. In addition, the change in the economic environment aggravated the rooted racism of the culture. The Federal government’s interventions, on the local level, gave a distinct preference to whites - so that it isn’t surprising that in the immediate period following the flood relief plan, black immigration from the Delta region increased.

In the thirties, the New Deal, while not negating the government’s tilt towards the owning class, balanced it with interventions that favored the working class, such as labor laws, minimum wage laws, social security, and the commencement of a vast regulatory structure which would, in the post-World War II period, grow ever more active in governing corporate behavior.

A default was thus set in place to which the two dominant factions in America responded. Liberals allowed a number of policies that favored the wealthiest, while Conservatives conceded the limited legitimacy of social security and other forms of redistributing wealth downward. Not that practical concession entailed rhetorical recognition - the two sides would unload, during elections, their obsolete battery of slogans and promises, without ever seriously intending to dismantle or radically change the infrastructure that both sides had, through compromise and self-interest, created. This is why, weirdly enough, the great engineering projects of this century - from the dams to the highway system - were rarely contraverted enough to be issues in elections. They were, instead, relegated to the status of the “non-partisan.”

Galambos and Pratt confine themselves to the dynamic between the Federal Government and the oligopolies. The essence of the system, however, was realized on the state and local level. It is on this level, in fact, that the system transmorgified as the New Deal and Great Society programs began to fall apart. Bill Adler, in his recent book, Mollie’s Job, gives a good account of the realization of this mechanism on a grassroots level. The state of Mississippi in the thirties began a program named BAWI, Balance Agriculture with Industry. Under BAWI, a local community can raise money from a bond issue to purchase plant for the private sector. In Adler’s book, Simpson County used this authority to build a plant for a Universal Industries, a ballast making company. Under the terms of the law, the county leased the corporation the building, on very reasonable terms. In this particular case, the lease eventually lead to sale, but in other cases Mississippi counties have retained the costs and duties of ownership for actually housing the plants of national and multi-national corporations, which is by far the most radical form of rent control in the country. Ironically, the State of Mississippi touted its program to industries in the North by pointing to conditions favorable to "free enterprise" in the state, code words to imply that union activity was impeded to the constitutional limit by state law. Mississippi’s example soon inspired other programs throughout the South. From the South, it spread nationwide, developing into an unorganized but distinct national market as localities try to lure private businesses with ‘incentives" which include tax exemptions or rebates, relaxation of environmental regulations, and other ‘sweeteners." If a private financial entity made the loans and deals that state and local governments make, they would no doubt condition them on terms which hedged the loaning institution's risk. This, however, is often not the case in the flea market of local and state incentives, where the immediate goal, couched in terms of employment, eclipses discussion of its future costs. It is a practice that is so common that when Honda, in a recent new release, bragged that, for locating a factory in Alabama, it negotiated with the Governor’s office to come up with “incentives worth more than $158 million ... [including] $102.7 million to get the site ready for construction and to train workers, and another $55.6 million in tax breaks,” no one even questioned the deal. After all, as is noted in the same release, Alabama is handing out even bigger plums: “Mercedes-Benz received commitments of $253 million for its plant, which employs about 1,700 following an expansion last year.” (a) The Alabama government essentially subsidized Honda and Mercedes Benz. The justification is that this will generate employment, which will generate income tax and other tax revenue, so that the state will more than make up for the money. But this justification tacitly concedes the State’s function in creating wealth inequality, by taking from the workers to pay for the owners. This is formally close to a protection racket - in a same way that a gang earns its money by protecting small businesses from the violence it would otherwise inflict, the corporation earns its tax deferments and subsidies by employing people who generate its profits. The company is subsidized, in other words, for being a company, just as the gang subsidizes itself for being a gang.

Originally, progressives saw, in this system, a cheap way to secure employment for areas that were often racked by poverty. The question of whether other infrastructural investments would be more profitable was, most of the time, not even bruited. After all, unemployment had a tangible cost to the taxpayer, as the unemployed depended on the state for a variety of sustaining services. Of course, by raising bonds, or putting together tax incentives, the corporations were still costing the taxpayer, but in theory there would be a net economic benefit to the community which would counterbalance that cost.

In the eighties, the bi-polar nature of government intervention gave way to interventions that increasingly favored one side: the side of ownership. While the socialization of business costs such as are effected under BAWI and like minded programs grew, the willingness of governments to continue social services came to an end. The end was not uniform, and especially with regard to environmental, health and safety regulatory structures, the cuts were never completely devastating. What should interest us, however, is how, within the mode of what continued to be acceptable government intervention, the price of plant, pollution control, training and a host of other costs were increasingly assumed by mostly middle income or low income taxpayers. This is a story which goes beyond talking about the formal advantages accrued to the wealthiest by tax cuts, the most often looked to cause of increasing income inequality, to the positive disbursement of government revenue - the cost, in tax dollars, going towards shore up the source of income for the wealthiest one percentile of Americans. Inequality of wealth is often regarded statically, as a fact about the American political economy, instead of as a dynamic property of that economy, one which sets up a positive feedback. In other words, it produces the conditions for ever greater income inequality. The most extreme and colorful example of this is the state that has been most effected by the changes upon the Mississippi wrought by that floodplan way back in 1928: Louisiana.


THE VANISHING STATE

If you look at the map of Louisiana’s coast published in the 1999 International Petroleum Encyclopedia, it is graphically obvious that Louisiana is one of the most important sources of petroleum and natural gas in the nation. The map is dense with pink lines radiating out all along the coast to offshore Gulf wells, as well as wells in the wetlands. The pink lines represent pipe, and the pipes radiate in to refining plants. 70 percent of the oil and 90 percent of the gas from U.S. coastal water comes from the Louisiana Coastal zone.

Resource extraction is not the only thing Louisiana has going for it. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Louisiana contains about 40 percent of the coastal marshes in the coterminous United States. The bayous contributed 28 percent to the total volume of U.S. fisheries in the eighties, although that percentage has been going down.

It is, then, a state peculiarly rich in natural resources, which makes the contrast with its human impoverishment all the more startling. Katherine Isaac, of the Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group, sums it up this way:

“The state ranks: last in the nation in workplace health and safety and in high school graduation rates; 49th for the gap between rich and poor; 49th in poverty (with 25 percent of residents considered poor); 47th in surface water discharges, heart disease and adult illiteracy; 46th in hazardous waste generation and teen pregnancy; and 45th in long-term unemployment, unemployment duration and health coverage.”

What is wrong with the human economy is tied up with what is increasingly wrong with the environment.

Take, for instance, the fish.

Lately, ominously, there is a “Kill Zone” which forms, every year, off the coast. It has doubled in size, to around 7,000 square miles, since the Midwest floods of 1993. Journalist Colin Woodard, in his book Ocean’s End, describes the process that makes for “hypoxia,” or an abnormal diminishment of oxygen content from the water. Nutrients, mainly nitrogen fertilizers, are drained into the Mississippi from farms in the Midwest. Download by the Mississippi into the Gulf, they cause an explosion of algae growth. That in itself doesn’t sap the oxygen. It is the decay of algae, produced by bacteria, which completes the cycle of strangulation. Woodard compares the process to wrapping Saran Wrap around a piece of the Gulf about the size of New Jersey - the animals in the affected area flee or die or both - Woodard reports that in 1996, for example, the zone drove as much as half a million fish into shore, where they could be scooped up by the residents in hand nets, or found, dead on the shore, by seagulls and eaten, or simply rot.

If the origins of the Kill Zone can be located a thousand miles up the Mississippi river, the massive dumping of toxic waste is becoming a Louisiana specialty. Last year, attention was focused on “Cancer Alley,” the stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is home to some 120 petro-chemical plants. The attention wasn’t focused so much on the effect of these plants on the local residents as on the feud between the Governor of the State, Mike Foster, and the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University. As Oliver Houck, its founder, says, “we have a different attitude towards the environment down here and it's all bad. The environment is the enemy.” When ELC successfully discouraged the building of a PVC plant in Convent, Louisiana - claiming that the plans for the plant didn’t meet existing EPA standards - the Governor and the state’s Chamber of Commerce went to the State Supreme Court, which obligingly interpreted a state constitutional provision, Rule XX, as disallowing student practitioners from representing any individual, unless the income of the potential client is low enough to meet a rigid standard of indigency set by the Louisiana State Supreme Court and any organization which could not demonstrate that the incomes of 51 percent of its members meet the same standard of indigency.
.
Even Cancer Alley is eclipsed, however, by an even bigger problem. Louisiana is, quite simply, falling into the sea. Since 1930, it is conservatively estimated that the state has lost 1, 200,000 acres since 1930 - an area about the size of Rhode Island. And the loss is continuing, at a rate of about 25 square miles a year.

An natural occurrence of this magnitude has, of course, many causes, and all of the causes have adherents. A geologist, Sherwood "Woody" Gagliano, claims that the land sits on huge mud fault “blocks,” and that the faults are coming apart and sliding the land into the sea. A more common view is that the flood plan which has blocked the Mississippi with a system of levees has inadvertently ceased the flow of renewing sediment with which the Mississippi originally built the Delta. Ivor van Heerden from the Louisiana Geological Survey, claims that the birdfoot Delta is falling apart because the Corps of Engineers, in accordance with a Congressional Act passed in 1954, must rig the River so that it passes through Baton Rouge and New Orleans on its way to the Gulf. The Congressional mandate has been followed so far, but nobody has yet figured out how to do geology by fiat. The river doesn’t like being rigged. In particular, since the 1927 flood channeled out a deeper passage to the sea through one of the river’s tributaries, the Atchafalaya, the River, most geologists think, has been trying to shift its bed. That shift would leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans on a finger of the sea (which is what the River below the Atchafalaya would become), while the Mississippi would empty into the Gulf at Morgan City, about 140 miles west of New Orleans. In recent years, mysteriously, a Delta has been forming at the mouth of the Atchafalaya, evidence, perhaps, that the Mississippi won’t be forever tamed. So far, the Corps of Engineers has kept the Mississippi flowing on its way past New Orleans with the Old River Control Structure, which seals off the flow between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya. The dam, built in 1963, is officially designed to handle a maximum flow of 3,030,000 cubic feet per second. As Barry has pointed out, however, by some accounts that figure was equaled by the 1927 flood. If, as some climatologists claim, we are in currently in a regime of “extreme weather,” there’s a strong possibility that that much flow could happen in another flood.

'The system at its bleakest is at work in Louisiana. Here we can see how all three legs of the government work to distribute income upward by socializing corporate cost and shifting its burden to the working class. The executive and legislative powers exempt the petroleum and gas industries from regulations forcing them to dispose of waste, thus leaving dumps to be cleaned up, latter, at taxpayer expense. The taxpayer also pays for wetland restoration, which is needed partly because of channels that have been dredged to oil wells on the coast - channels which the oil well owners can deduce in an accounting maneuver known as 'expensing" before they figure their gross revenue. In this way, unprofitable wells and operations can be hedged in a portfolio against profitable ones, making the wetlands the passive victim of one more tasty tax scheme. When the oil and gas is carried in to refineries and plants, another group of state incentives kick in, making it the tax and regulatory situation advantageous for "dirty" industries to build their plants in obscure hamlets between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The inhabitants of these hamlets are the most disposable members of the Louisiana, and indeed, the American, commonwealth - poor rural blacks. The companies are entrusted with the real, practical power to regulate themselves, which they use to dispose of pollution as they see fit. At this point, we reach the furthest extend to which the executive and legislative branches intervene in the economy - an abdication of their responsibilities to protect in any way the well-being and liberties of their poorest citizens. Still, those citizens could have recourse to the courts. Now it is the turn of the judicial branch to kick in. Laws and rules hem in the ability of the effected residences and small business to sue by, for instance, forbidding agencies which commonly represent the poor to operate in environmental class action suits. And if, nevertheless, a suit is levied by some stubborn citizen, there are liability caps in the offing which would preserve the cost - benefit calculations of the corporations. Why, for instance, not dump the heavy metals and pay out $15,000 in a penalty? On the one side, the happy citizen can purchase a coffin and a fairly decent funeral service with that amount of money, and on the other side, the company can continue to diffuse its waste products, to the greater glory of its balance sheet. According to the EPA, this is exactly what is happening. In 1995 alone, some 57 million pounds of wastes were released in East Baton Rouge Parish. By stymying attempts, either legislatively or by judicial penalty, to stem the flow of waste, the incentive to pollute less, and to produce less wastefully, is deadened.

To trace all the lines and movements of the mechanism is to question the bounty government is so quick to shower upon corporations. But the necessary preliminary is, of course, to expose the mechanism, and this is where the two party system comes in. By battling on the high rhetorical plain of laissez faire vs. the welfare state, they divert attention from the realities of the system, and the tacit consensus which makes both parties collude at socializing business costs. This is the hope held out by Nader's campaign: that consumerism, with its accountant's ethic, and the Green's environmentalism, which coalesces around sustainable economics, might actually address the issues which traditionally invigorate populist movements: the abuse of power and the entrenchment of inequality."

Rule by the worst just got worse

Can these things be? Is this madness? Is there no way to rise up and break the neck of the monsters, the true monsters, of this administration that is crushing us into the ground? We are ruled by something fantastically biblical, some combination of brainless Behemoths. And they are murdering us. And we do nothing. This is Bush's Chernobyl moment. And we watch it, and people die and die and die.

“100 said dead in Chalmette
Thursday, 9:46 p.m.

About 100 people have died at the Chalmette Slip after
being pulled off their rooftops, waiting to be ferried
up the river to the West Bank and bused out of the
flood ravaged area, U.S. Rep. Charles Melancon,
D-Napoleonville, said Thursday.

About 1,500 people were at the slip on Thursday
afternoon, where critical supplies like food and water
are scarce, he said. Melancon expressed serious
frustration with the slow pace of getting these items
to the people waiting to finish their journey to
safety.

Many of those at the slip were evacuated from a shelter set up at Chalmette High School that suffered massive flooding as the waters rose during Hurricane Katrina.

Melancon said people are being plucked out of their water-surrounded
houses, but the effort to get them out of Chalmette
and provide them with sufficient sustenance is the
problem.

While he did not directly criticize the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Melancon said they are
ultimately responsible for making sure that people are
taken care of. “That is where the buck stops,” said
Melancon at a briefing at the state Office of
Emergency Preparedness.

People at the slip indicated that 100 people had died
since they arrived, although Melancon said he did not
know how they perished.”

My brother, who has been in four major hurricane clean up operations (including Hugo) as a volunteer, thinks that the big mistake in NOLA is to rely on the military, instead of letting people back into the city to self organize and get their things. In some ways, he's right. It is unlikely that the Chalmette one hundred would have died if there were ... well, a lot of people around. The nightmare is that the government has cut off the region and shuttled people to points where they are abandoned. The looting occupies the press, and not the mass slaughter. But the mass slaughter is infinitely more dangerous. The Chertoffs of this world are killing off more than the gangbangers.

And this is our American civilization. Beautiful, ain't it?

ps -- 11 a.m, Friday: more evidence that my brother is right. The blood of how many hundreds is now on the hands of the state -- at every level. This is from a Nola account that, as is the fashion of the Times - Pic, weighs the life of the black human being at a four to one rate with the life of white human beings. Thus, more print and blame is bestowed on the wounding of one national guardsman than the deaths -- due directly to malign neglect by the Federal Government -- of those souls in the Civic Center:

"A cluster of refugees attempted to leave the city by way of the Crescent City Connection, only to be blocked on grounds that the crossing was unsafe for pedestrians. At the suggestion of officials, they retreated to the Superdome, where they learned that the bus convoy to Texas was closed to new arrivals."

Anarchy, we are told, can't work. The Bush culture is offering an alternative that is succeeding in devaluing any action by the state. Far better to abolish the thing than to have this.

I’ve heard and read disturbing things today. Here’s three:

- Touro hospital is without a/c, electricity, food, water. There are patients on the roof. Touro being attacked is a sign – the riot is moving Uptown. This doesn’t happen. This is happening.
- Kenner Hospital also suffered an attack.
- Finally, I heard perhaps the single worst interview I’ve ever heard a government official give. Michael Chertoff’s interview with NPR consisted of anchoring himself to a happy talking point – that the Superdome was being relieved – even as he was asked about the Civic Center. Unbelievably, when conditions were described there, he said that the reports were rumors, and that he had heard nothing of this.

Nobody, unfortunately, is going to fire Chertoff. That’s a fact of life. But if you want to know why people are firing on the helicopters, a good place to start is Chertoff’s remarks. People in New Orleans, or many people, think they are being abandoned to die. Doubtless with the state of the electricity, few people heard him – but the attitude spoke volumes. Chertoff might as well have put in skywriting: “we will let you die in the Civic Center.” Which makes going to a government designated transfer point a sucker’s game.

This is so simple. There is a need for a national leader – like Clinton – to set up in Baton Rouge and announce, we are not going to let you die in the Civic Center. Or at any transfer point. Now that we “know” that you are in there, we are going to make the trip from the superdome in three hours and put in safety officers, send in food, get you out. That Chertoff left the interview without bothering to get ‘informed’ by the reporter is so sickening I can’t really express my horror.

Clinton might be a buffoon, but he is a trusted man in New Orleans, or more trusted than most politicians. I could care less about the politics – disarming New Orleans is impossible, so it is time to THINK about what you are saying, if you are an official, and it is time to find some way to communicate with disparate groups of distrustful people. That means loud speakers, that means using media with generators to convey the simple message: “going to a transfer point will not mean being abandoned.” They can show the Rolling Stones forty foot high at a stadium show – they can’t show the rescue of refugees so that people downtown can see it? If I were there at the moment, knowing what I know, I’d do anything to avoid falling into the government’s hands at the moment. Why is this difficult to understand? If I were in New Orleans at the moment, I would not look at the helicopters with a very friendly eye myself. The question emerges: are they going to take those able to pay, and leave us to die? So far, it looks much like the latter. This is a city built on invisible levies of class. Get real.

Sometimes, I do wish writing this thing actually mattered.

11:30
ps -- just read some good news -- Touro patients have been largely evacuated.

Jericho

And it shall be, whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him. -- Joshua, chapter 2
--

The shotgun I lived in on Willow near the Carrollton Cemetery, which always seemed to have kids flying kites from it when I lived there, is probably flooded. The house on Prytania might actually be flooded up to the roof, hard as that is for me to even conceptualize. The house on Audubon is on higher ground. The Tulane Library, where I worked on a project in which a group processed the purchase of a couple million dollars worth of books, is no doubt flooded down in the basement. The Tulane site is down. Apparently, the students and faculty have been evacuated, many of the students to Jackson Mississippi.

I’ve seen one dead city on the Gulf: Galveston, Texas. Galveston gave up the ghost after a terrific storm in about 1911. The place still boasts 50 000 people, but its opportunities shriveled after that storm. Houston became Texas’ big port. Galveston became a fief of the Moody’s, the insurance clan. Walk down the streets of Galveston and marvel at the architecture, the like of which has no parallel in Texas. But it is like a royal robe on a shivering leper.

I’m in shock, awe, anger, disbelief. In the Cleveland airport, I drank beer and watched CNN with the subtitles rolling across it. I nearly sobbed, but didn’t – I’ve learned enough about the world to know that sobbing over disasters that are too big for you simply leaves you raw and confused. A new legend was born, I’ve noticed: Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Bush strummed a guitar while New Orleans sank. Bush is a lesson in the servile reflex: I instinctively expect him to operate like a leader. He instinctively operates like a class clown dumped on the island in the Lord of the Flies. He’s good for me, insofar as he has destroyed the remnant of my respect for leadership itself. America is not special; the stupid Caesars are definitely upon us.

I fell in love a dozen times in New Orleans; I learned politics there, and I learned to distrust the cops. I learned how to listen to opera, and how to snort coke. My first experience with acid was with my friend A. and her maniac Chilean boyfriend, who inhabited a shadowy room in a demi-whorehouse in the quarter. I can still feel the lack of vitamin C as I stumbled down Magazine street in the morning after, passing by a poster advertising a Kung Fu movie in Spanish. The poster sometimes still pops up in my dreams.

If I were living in NOLA – and six years ago, when I moved back South, that was my plan – I’d be in the Civic Center or the Superdome. Evacuation at a moment’s notice is not in my economic cards – I have no car, I have no cell phone, and I have no desire to leave my possessions (a computer, a tv, a stereo) to the winds, or to a passing looter. Although I very much understand taking bacon and beer (which, by the way, is a good thing to drink when the water becomes polluted – that is, after all, why beer was invented). I very much don’t understand evacuating New Orleans without any regard for the stuff left in the stores, especially the weapons. I don’t understand not impounding that stuff the first day. This is New Orleans, after all, where every native has a funny story about some naïf tourist venturing out to some area which is not to be visited without an armed escort. We toyed with these stories, when I was there, because there was a certain resentment of tourists, who were in search of easy vices but hadn’t earned the right to them – didn’t even understand that vices come in bundles, and some of them you might not like at one in the morning. New Orleans isn’t just like a banana republic, it is one. There is no real police force in New Orleans. There is a praetorian guard that protects the garden district, and Jefferson Parish middle class folk, and enforces the rule of the jungle on the Ninth ward. Over the decades, both sides of this equation were educated to believe in a very direct view of the regulation of social relations. When I hear calls to shoot to kill the looters, that is the Garden District expressing what it has always thought. I once saw a policeman beat the shit out of man in the French Quarter. I wasn’t stupid enough to interfere.

I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone…

I first saw New Orleans a long time ago. I was taken there by my Uncle Harry. And I resolved to go there after high school, which I endured in suburban Atlanta. I went to Tulane the year the Meters played for the incoming freshman party. Back in the day, it was really a party – the university sprang for the kegs. That has probably fallen victim to our current Puritanism. My first year there, I worked on the Figaro, which was run by James Glassman. Glassman went on to become a crackpot conservative (author of Dow 1 million two hundred and ten), but back then he was cool. One of my duties at the Figaro was to keep him from dealing with the assorted weirdos from the sex industry that would come in and bug us – pin striped escort service guys, weeping fat ticketsellers at various adult theaters, etc., etc. They advertised with us, they were hit by the cops, they came to us. My immediate boss was more interested in being a dance instructor. The writers (this was back when Bunny Matthews worked for the paper) lounged around in the back in their pyjamas. I’ve seen the bohos, or the last of em…

It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone…

For a long time I’ve felt extinct myself. And it didn’t take a genius to know that New Orleans time was limited. I wrote a piece in 2000 about this, which I’ll publish in my next post. This post is just a puddle of piss and tears. And I don’t give a shit.

the respectable left

The new myth floating about is that the liberal hawks are in a self-questioning mood: how could they have been so wrong? The answer is that they trusted the Bush administration to do the right thing but the Bush administration let them down.

This is, of course, horseshit covered in catsup. Hitchens, Friedman, Berman, Packer, Ignatieff, Marc Cooper (post occ.) and the rest of them are well practiced in the art of emitting herbivorous platitudes about human rights to defend the infamies of American foreign policy. Their share of the war consisted of committing a double act of bad faith: demoralizing the liberal/secular side in Iraq by branding it with the name of various scoundrels (Chalabi, Allawi), while putting up a noxious smokescreen of righteousness on the home front to disguise the quite normal imperialist mechanisms by which Iraq was to be reduced to its proper place in the world system. The movement was from a tyranny run by a mass murderer to a colony run by corporate American shills. Hitchens is merely the most articulate and exemplary of the band of lefty poseurs: in the lead up to the war, his chief argument was that the antiwar side sickened and disgusted him, as though his very innards had been carved out of the Critique of Practical Reason. He now defends the war, as he does in the latest New York Observer, on grounds of honor -- a sort of mafia ethic:

Hitchens clarified what world he’s currently living in. “It’s a matter of solidarity with the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, and trying to turn American policy in their favor,” said Mr. Hitchens. “I’m on their side, win or lose …. I could never publish an article saying, ‘Come to think of it, we never should have done this,’ because I could never look them in the face …. So, no, I don’t have any second thoughts.”


The rest of them are going to remain with us as the unimpeachable voice of the reasonable left, of course. As with a position in the Bush cabinet, the advantage of being a public intellectual is that failure is no bar to success. That these people, none of whom could be trusted to organize a children's birthday party, could intrude into a nation about which they knew neither the language nor the culture and transform it from the top down is a subject for farce and tears. None of these people seem to have the least sense of how projects are done, how agency works in an organization, how producing a set of incompatible goals leads to failure, or even how to map the incompatibilities.

All of this matters not a jot. The Dissent eggheads have always had great success commoditizing their sensitivities in the op ed market. They will continue to do so. But I say, as a mild and moderate liberal:

Fuck em.

oh that liberal political strategy

LI is still on vacation. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of our far flung correspondents, C., to write a post about her first pregnancy – a report from the frontlines. This might still happen, if we turn on the Svengali.

Small topic today: if our readers want to know why the Democratic party is brain dead, go to the Wesley Clark op ed in the Washington Post today. The tone and feel of it – the inanity surmounted by arrogance – the blindness – it is all there, like an indigestible stew served to a dying invalid in a poorhouse. We particularly liked this graf, both for its meaninglessness and as a true gauge of how D.C. thinks about their war, three years after:

“On the political side, the timeline for the agreements on the Constitution is less important than the substance of the document. It is up to American leadership to help engineer, implement and sustain a compromise that will avoid the "red lines" of the respective factions and leave in place a state that both we and Iraq's neighbors can support. So no Kurdish vote on independence, a restricted role for Islam and limited autonomy in the south. And no private militias.”

This is a man pissing in the wind and complaining about rain.

The LI theory is not, pace Harry, to disestablish the Dems – it is that the liberal of today must explore multiple tracks. This means supporting independent movements to strangle the U.S. military’s capacity for continuing in Iraq as well as re-engaging with the… G.O.P. The liberal influence on the G.O.P. is non-existent. That is because liberals, after Vietnam, gave up on the G.O.P. and allowed themselves to be bought by the Dems. Well, that was a silly strategy, and we’ve been paying for it for years. Liberals should start picking Republicans to support, and they should start doing it now. Let’s revive the Bull moose faction of the Repug party.

Let’s… well, we aren’t going to get carried away. Doubtless the power of LI to affect the liberal mindset is less than that of a goose fart in a whirlwind. But the blogger manner is to pretend that one is some crowned Humpty Dumpty reigning over the scene, and who am I to violate the blogger stylebook?

Bush/Ubu

In an essay on Peron’s dictatorship, Borges claimed that recent argentinian history happened on two levels: one, a sordid theatrical farce, and the other, a literature for washerwomen – the paperback romance.
The Bush culture, more straightforwardly, takes its cues from Ubu Roi. Thus the latest sequence from Iraq. In one way, it is heartening. As readers of this blog know, the Iraq that emerged from the election was a theocracy in formation, with the Sunnis operating as the appalled but powerless spectators and the Kurds maneuvering to save their autonomy even at the risk of planting the seeds of a monster to the South. The Kurdish leadership, remember, found it convenient, at one point in the now forgotten civil war between warlords that occurred in 1996, to call in Saddam Hussein. This is the same leadership routinely praised, nowadays, for its commitment to democracy.
The defenders of the war, and even its opponents, have the disturbing habit of ignoring Iraqi reality when it doesn’t fit American rhetoric. For the belligerents, the Iraqi government we are defending is committed to democracy and human rights. Only the jihadists want to create an Islamic state. Of course, this turn away from reality has been occasionally pierced by the media, which, in fits of absent mindedness, sometimes reports on the inconvenient reality settling down in, say, Southern Iraq. This is a part of the country where the insurgents are replaced by the Sadr and Sciri paramilitaries, the lion lies down with the lamb, and coed college gatherings can result in attack, assault and murder at the hands of the guardians of the New Iraq. The neo-cons, who would have delighted Jarry, think that they have lit the fire of freedom in the middle east; they have, of course, acted unconsciously to spread the doctrine of Khomeini.
That being said, there is a certain schizophrenia on the pro-war side that has its counterpart on the anti-war side. On the one hand, the insurgency is in the last throes, or it is confined to merely three provinces, or it is simply something like the unruliness of the Nazis in occupied Germany. On the other hands, the insurgency is so powerful that American withdrawal would lead to Iraq falling into the hands of Zarquawi. Alan Philps, writing a surprisingly pessimistic column in the pro-war Telegraph, plays this tune:
“ feeling is growing in the West that it is time to remove troops from Iraq. Foreign troops, it is argued, are the problem, not the solution. The generals, anxiously watching the opinion polls, want nothing more than an excuse to start reducing troop numbers. So why not now? It is undeniable that the casualties are appalling and that every week Iraq produces more and more insurgents trained and bloodied in battle. The anti-war camp argues rightly that these jihadists did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. But they exist now. If they win, they will spread out to fight Arab regimes and no doubt try to bloody America as well.
So many mistakes have been made that success - the installation of a functioning secular democracy - is out of the question. But we owe it to the Iraqis not to hand them over to the new crop of warlords. What we started we must try to finish. “
The new crop of warlords, contra Philps, is precisely who we are fighting for. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that the Iraqi government would have less of a chance to suppress the insurgency than any other Middle Eastern government at this point.
The question that fascinates us Jarry-philes is how the neo-cons will turn on this dime. The defense of the rightful place of Islam in deciding petty things, like whether women receive an education or not, is going to be interesting. I’d suggest these useful lines of dialogue as a guide. Mere Ubu is trying to persuade Pere Ubu to kill the king of Poland and take his place:
Pere Ubu:
Eh vraiment! et puis après? N'ai-je pas un cul comme les autres?

MERE UBU
A ta place, ce cul, je voudrais l'installer sur un trône. Tu pourrais augmenter indéfiniment tes richesses, manger fort souvent de l'andouille et rouler carrosse par les rues.

PERE UBU
Si j'étais roi, je me ferais construire une grande capeline comme celle que j'avais en Aragon et que ces gredins d'Espagnols m'ont impudemment volée.

MERE UBU
Tu pourrais aussi te procurer un parapluie et un grand caban qui te tomberait sur les talons.

PERE UBU
Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre, merdre de bougre, si jamais je le rencontre au coin d'un bois, il passera un mauvais quart d'heure.

liberation in chelsea

I am in a museum dedicated to Himalayan art in Chelsea. The site was formerly occupied by a Barneys. There are two musicians, arrayed in white, seated at the foot of the staircase, playing trancelike music representative of a certain Pakistani genre. The staircase is a holiday for architects -- a crooked, cubist thing that ascends up six flights. I like the staircase. My friends and I decide to listen to the guide, who appears at 2:30. The guide is a loud, gray haired Brooklyn-ite with the Yogi Bear figure towards which middle aged American avoirdupois seems inevitably to tend. In a barker's voice he points out salient aspects of Buddhist iconography, and gives a compressed version of Gautama Buddha's message to the world: the letting go of craving, fear, anger and attachment.

Later, my friend K. tells me that she is plagued by craving. She wishes she could purify herself, annihilate it.

Now, I am not a stranger to the purifying impulse. I, too, would like to toss into some ultimate refiner's fire all the dross encumbering my life: the pennyante terrors of my economic life, the irresistable impulse to manufacture opinion that crowds out more valuable contemplative matter in my mindspace, the gnawing, daily sexual lust. But as I told K, I am not so certain that the purifying impulse is the equivalent of life more abundant -- it could well be the hollowing out of life itself. There is a moment in letting go in which liberation crosses over into surrender. In better moods, I believe that the moral point of the secular life is not to get rid of craving, but to get to its very center -- to sink into it until one has unlocked its puzzles. I am disinclined to think that the achievement of some state of gilded hibernation should be called enlightenment. My friend A., at Milinda's Questions, claims that I am a prisoner of my chains. To which my response is: where does that metaphor come from? It seems to me that, if these are chains, human life itself is a chain -- and the symbol of the chain, thus ramified into a world of chains, chains endlessly, loses its edge. I doubt that the Buddha touched earth as a chain touches another chain. In fact, I want to liberate myself from this particular metaphor as my part in freeing myself from the chains...

By the way, the exhibit of the handprints and footprints of the various incarnations of Buddha is extraordinary.

the lamentable state of dangling

According to Dr. Johnson, "whatever busies the mind without corrupting it, has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious." We like the hesitating "will not often" that modifies the sentiment -- however, LI has plunged into as much idleness as saving up for two months can purchase. Instead of attending to Ms. Sheehan, or the bad faith scare, on the left, that Bush is preparing to invade Iran (with, one must ask, what army?); instead of paying attention to the Iranian repression of the Kurds (as our friend Brooding Persian is doing) -- we've been attending Tanglewood concerts and going to lakes and summer movies.

About which -- LI often wonders what they will make, one hundred years from now, of the descent of taste in the latter part of the 20th century. For a long time we simply refused to participate in it -- for instance, by never going to one of the Lucas Space operas. But in the past five years, we have dropped that stance. This means that we have accumulated a certain cache of experience in the twisty logic of action movies; we have sorted the good, the bad, and the ugly; and we have found certain sequences growing stale...

Not, of course, the car chase, the wet dream of a society of traffic jam sitters. There are certain kinds of artistry the quality of which depends on the re-enactment, within some rigid design, of the same thing. In a sense, there is only one car chase, just as there is only one wedding, and one death of the hero. All variants are simulacra of this single and singular event.

We are talking about something else -- the no-thing. This thing can happen as much as it wants, but it never emerges beyond the zero. Such a thing is the "hanging from the cable" scene.

The current Batman movie -- a decent enough flick -- might have signaled the end of this sequence. You know what we mean -- the hero dangles from a wire, a cable, a chain, a rope, that depends from a moving train, a helicopter, even an airplane. Was this sequence invented in the James Bond movies? We dont' know. The suspence, here, is that the fight is waged on two axes. On the horizontal axis, the hero is threatened with annihilation by buildings, railroad bridges, tunnels, and any projecting solidity along that plane; on the vertical axis, the hero is in a sort of tug of war, compounded of bullets, flares, tugs, etc., with the Mr. Big in the vehicle. The current Batman steals, pretty much, the sequence in last year's Spiderman of having its hero ascend a chord attached to a moving train. It struck us that this was the weakest cord sequence we have ever seen. Perhaps audiences will be perpetually moved by the dangers along the two axes, but for us, the danger on both the vertical and horizontal axes has been long exhausted. Dangling is simply too silly -- nor does it have its roots (as the car chase sequence does) in the everyday libido.

Iraq -- the prisoner's dilemma

Crooked Timber pays entirely too much attention ot the ravings of Christopher Hitchens, if only to slag the man. However, a recent post on one of Hitchen's ineffably ignorant Slate columns regarding Iraq (a frequent subject of Hitchen's Slate columns, and proof that you can have a 100 percent failure rate in journalism and still find lucrative work, making it one of those soft industries, like filmmaking and politics, to whose compensation packages we can only aspire), provoking the usual comments pro and anti-war, once again made me think about the way the verb "support" has exerted an odd and malign hegemonic control over the discourse.

In reality, the Iraq war is a sort of prisoner's dilemma in which the rational response is to order one's preferences with reference to the chance of their being realized. "Support" of the war, and opposition to it, contains a disabling germ of confusion, since the vision of the victory that would end the war one way or another has never been clarified since the war started, and the meaning of that victory is impossible to predict. The more prudent course for the war opponent is to elaborate preferences according to the phase of the war.

For instance -- before the war, supporters of the war did their best to obscure the question of preferences. To revert to the prisoner dilemma model, it is as if they were all shouting for the prisoner in cell one to be silent, thus transforming a matter of probabilities and advantages into one of morality. Myself, I ranked my preferences between the coalition not invading at all -- most preferred -- and the American's invading unilaterally -- most disliked -- to range my realistic preferences around either delaying with the inspectors or forcing America to encumber itself with a real international coalition that could block its every move post invasion. On the question of deposing Saddam Hussein, I was all for that, in the absense of every other consideration. However, there were other considerations -- the failure of the Americans to stymie al qaeda, for instance. As to an overthrow that would minimize violence, maximize justice, and depose of Saddam, I didn't realistically see a way in the options on offer -- and certainly, of course, the larcenous Americans were a scary prospect.

Having the preference for a coalition helped me to see that the Bush strategy was to pretend to accede to coalition building while mounting such a campaign of threats and vituperation that any coalition partner would be powerless to stop what the Bushies had in mind. This happened. Nobody raised a finger to stop the Americans from attempting to elevate a convicted criminal to the leadership of Iraq, from dissolving the army, from guarding the oil ministry while the rest of the country was looted, from taking over the government of the country, from putting unpopular native patsies in governing bodies which Gunga Din himself would have had too much self esteem to have served on. Then there was the double plucking of Iraq. On the one hand, the taxpayers were plucked massively, as U.S. money poured into a consortium of the worst American corportations, War department leaches, GOP subsidiaries and the like. This was, of course, in the name of aiding Iraq. On the other hand, the Iraqis were plucked as their national treasury went into obscure gambits that ultimately benefited the same congery of corporate scoundrels.

At about the one year mark, then, my preferences were for world wide resistance to the Americans -- from the Iraqis, from the French, from the Iranians, etc. Again, however, just as wanting Saddam removed from power didn't entail "supporting" unilateral American action, supporting resistance to the Americans didn't mean "supporting" the insurgency.

All well and good, but do my "preferences" have an effect? Many people would say it is all bullshit. I think that is the real unrealism. Sitting in the Behemoth doesn't mean one is paralyzed. The promotion of the sense that American action in Iraq is wrong, unjust, and incompetently carried out was a minority view in May of 2003, but it has spread to achieve near majority status in the polls recently. How? Partly through harsh and unremitting attacks on the war by the left -- in blogs, in newspapers, whereever. There is a lot of curious anti-war worrying over the perception that the left is stabbing America in the back. To which I'd say: of course I'm stabbing America in the back! America, in this instance, is a giant dunderhead, and pricking the nerves is the only way to get his attention. Harshness and extremism have a tactical use. It frees people up by extending the range of their preferences. If people prefer to think America was well intentioned but misguided in this war, that is fine with me -- the misguiding that leads to withdrawal is the goal.

In terms of my preferences for Iraq --well, I do have them. In 2004, I was hopeful that perhaps some secularist middle would emerge -- neither pro-American nor theocratic terrorist. I didn't expect the liberal ideal, but I thought that it was possible that a coalition between Sistani Shi'ites and recovered Ba'athists might just be possible. It wasn't. If in fact a coalition had invaded Iraq, one strong enough to counter the Bush people, I think there would have been a chance for such a thing. But secularism is indelibly stained by the face put on it by the Americans -- the crook and the terrorist being the best patsies America could come up with. In the end, America shot itself in the foot -- without a strong secularist middle party, it was inevitable Iraq would drift into the Iranian orbit. The drift, which I think is inevitable, now has to be disguised in the American press. The press is very obediant to the idea that our withdrawal will be followed by a bloodbath, which ignores that our occupation is a bloodbath. It also ignores the fact that insurgencies in the Middle East are eventually put down with no help from the Yankees -- witness the Kurdish civil war in the nineties. No, below all of that is the suspicion that America's withdrawal will be the final stage in Iran's domination of the northern part of the Gulf. Personally, instead of fearing an American invasion of Iran, what we should be looking for are signals of American dickering with the final deal. That could well happen -- there is no allergy to private enterprise in Shi'ite theocracy. I imagine that the American death count -- and the Iraqi death count -- should be seen as a holding action while the Americans figure out how to deal with the unexpected result of their insane enterprise. Captain Ahab went down with the white whale, but we can always deal with the Whale and get the oil we need -- for a price.

We thought the U.S. should have been practicing detente with Iran since the mid nineties. Alas, it took thirty some thousand Iraqi dead and who knows how many Americans before it is all through to put us on this sensible course.

Blair's imam-catchers

Blair is a nasty piece of work. Even so, we have to stand in a bit of awe at the audacity of his latest pronouncements. They take us back to a distant era in which he would surely have flourished, when the threatened bombing of the Parliament, or the poisoning of the queen, produced a fair share of martyrs – this time not Islamic ones, but Catholic. That supercilious righteousness would have served him well then – and since, apparently, the police are to stage raids on mosques, Blair might really want to read up on the techniques of his spiritual ancestors. He needs what Queen Elizabeth had: a Richard Topcliffe. Talk about a torturer for all seasons – Topcliffe’s techniques have often been imitated – most recently by the American military in Iraq – but never really topped.

Topcliffe had a licence to operate a rack in his own house – an ingenious idea that Blair might consider reviving. I’m sure Blunkett would be just the man to operate a stretching machine.

Here’s a description of Topcliffe excerpted from J. Heath: Torture And English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts. The “Young” here is another, less colorful, rack master. Southwell, of course, is the famous Jesuit. The other names are of Catholics:

…It was also to Topcliffe and Young that, in 1591, the Law Officers were directed to leave Thomas Clinton. if torture seemed necessary: as “butchers’, the two men were linked in Southwell’s letter, of January, 1590, to Aquaviva. According to the Gerard autobiography, after Gerard’s arrest, his second examination—without torture—was before the two of them, at Young’s house. Their relative roles in the Government’s business deserve consideration. The Gerard autobiography seems to regard Young as the key figure in the politico-religious police of the metropolis. He was a justice of the peace, proceeding as such, although with peculiar determination, sometimes upon instructions from the Queen. generally in a special working relationship with the Council. Topcliffe was not a justice of the peace and indeed held no public office. He was, however, fanatically hostile to Roman Catholicism and successful in attaching himself to the highest centers of influence. Sometimes, he received instructions from the Council. and—including the case of Thomas Clinton the Conciliar records show nine instances of his employment where torture might be used. However, he attained to a special working relationship with the Queen herself and came to occupy in the prosecution of Roman Catholics for politico-religious offenses a position de facto resembling that of a justice of the peace, but without territorial limits being placed upon his authority within the realm, and to command from the Judicature more deference than any ordinary prosecuting justice would have received. Moreover, he found the funds to organize a considerable force of agents. He may be regarded, to this extent, as a primeval common ancestor of Pinkerton’s and the FBI.”

Ah, that Topcliffe spirit – just the thing for the current occasion. An imam-catcher, and a volunteer at that. Topcliffe also had a modern way of combining his work and his dick – he impregnated one of the Catholic women he caught, had one of his servants marry her, and used her info to uncover a hiding priest.

Heath’s conclusions concerning Elizabeth’s sanctioning of torture are in the purest spirit of Blairism.

“What may be true is that torture was not used, for whatever result, in an entirely cynical mood: that it was not used without a fairly strong sense that the examinate had brought it upon himself by withholding the truth. Before the present period, several relevant Conciliar records in political or politico-religious cases, and one in a case of ordinary crime, refer to obstinacy of the examinate. During the present period, there are seven more although in only one does the record contemplate an ordinary crime. Of course, such references might have been humbug, but we may recall the case of William Weston who. as above noticed, escaped torture, although there is no reason to suppose that without it he liberally supplied the authorities with means of destroying other Roman Catholics.”

Hear hear for English humanitarianism! This is the stuff. A cynical mood is far from “our way of life,” the Blairist can well say. And if they are going to criticize, out on their ear! The British have always been against foreigners coming into a country and taking things over and kicking the natives around … uh, well with a few exceptions.

it's too gashly...

LI is going to be gone for a month. We might drop by the site and leave a few bits of wisdom, or whatever it is we produce here. But mostly we are going to try to forget the art of writing, the art of reading, the war, the Bush, etc., etc.

We have been thinking of partings ... and especially the parting of Peregrinus, the cynic. He built a pyre in Elia, mounted it, and lit it, thus ascending to the heights of Mount Olympia on wings of fire.

Lucian of Samothrace, a satirist, left a lively account of the scene, and of Peregrinus’ life as a philosophical scoundrel. The English translation omits certain nice, dirty bits you can find (bien sur) in the French translation, like the Cynics habit of masturbating in public. That’s nicely omitted here. Lucien’s account is cast into the form of a letter to a friend:

“ I imagine you’ll laugh yourself to death imaging that old senile piker – I can just hear you saying “what a farce! and really, what misplaced vanity!” and a thousand other similar abjurations. Well, as distant as I am from hearing your indignation, I was that close – at the very foot of the pyre – that I emptied my little sack and said everything I thought of the comedy, right in the heart of a crowd of spectators scandalized by my reaction, all of them open mouthed with admiration before the vaudeville turn of that old idiot.”

Needless to say, LI wants to depart this life in the same way, although we doubt we’ll attract a crowd of spectators. Still, Peregrinus never really died – he was reborn as the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22, and any number of academics and new age mystics and think tank foreign policy analysts and every guest on every current affairs talk show. But we like to think that we embody a purer form of his purely scandalous fraudulence than any of these.

Lucian’s satire would no doubt have been thrown on the flames by some mad monk long ago, except that it contains precious info about the early Christians. Peregrinus spent his life looking for just that intersection of gullibility and metaphysics that so many have made a good living exploiting. He started out in life along classical lines: the seduced girl with a little number in the belly, the flight out the window leaving behind his clothes, the hush money paid by his folks. Well, of course, one good turn deserves another, so Peregrinus helped his poor old dad enter into the afterlife through a strategically placed pillow (the old guy was suffering, and there was the inheritance to think about). Peregrinus was surprised to discover that his native village was filled with hidden anti-euthanasia freaks, so the best part of discretion blew him to other lands – notably Palestine, where he became a Christian among Christians.

He quickly found some followers, disciples, proclaimed himself their prophet, their theasiarch, their head of the synagogue – in brief, he granted himself all the powers, proposed to analyze their holy books, cut them up to his hearts content and added whatever texts struck his fancy. So much so that the Christians began to regard him as their pontiff. He ended up elevating himself to the level of the one these Palestinians adored, who suffered being put on the cross, guilty, according to his peers, of inventing new mysteries for humanity.”

Well, the old rogue, no doubt after penning some of Jesus’ more dubious sentences, got thrown into jail. Luckily, the governor of Syria had a fatal penchant for philosophy, which was Peregrinus’ clef de champs. Going back to his home town, he found that there was some harsh memories of his merciful treatment of the Parent. In the end, he was rather forced to spend the inheritance among the poor just to keep from being lynched. So it was time to go elsewhere, which is how he passed into Egypt, stage left, and became a cynic:

“He enterprised a third pilgrimage, this time to Egypt, where he met Agathobulus who instructed him in the métier, which he exercized up to the day of his death. His skull shaved, his face smeared with mud, he masturbated in public without the least embarrassment, something the Cynics consider completely natural. He whipped himself – or had himself whipped – with a ruler, and executed a thousand silly pranks in the same vein.”

A regular guy, in other words, that any ancient Mediterranean ville would pass by without a glance. But it was the big send off that Lucian wrote about, and that made Peregrinus’ name. Having found followers – the more absurd the doctrine, the more ardent the follower – he built a nice pyre to burn himself up in Elia.

Everybody’s a critic: Lucian has a lot of fault to find with the theater of Peregrinus’ last hours, although he admits he was three sheets to the wind, and a heckler to boot. But give Peregrinus some credit – he invited, seemingly, a funeral orator who laughed himself silly about the whole thing and told the crowd that Peregrinus was a faker, a hoodlum, a cocksman, and a joke.

How can I not identify? As I write this with my right hand, with my left I’m raising a glass of Montepulciano to the old reprobate’s ashes.

"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He's ben shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face -- it's too gashly."

A block party!

We considered making this yet another Iraq post. But we like to think of ourselves as America’s blog. We like to think that we love kids, dogs, and yes, sometimes we like to watch American Idol, like you all do. And we Americans don’t want to have bloody bits of soldiers rubbed in our faces. We are too busy and too caring. The message is: we care. We are a great nation, shopping for great deals at world class malls. In the world, America is famous for our freedom, which is why they hate us. So instead, we are linking to this article about our world class legislators in D.C. God bless em. Some of the hardest working Christians you would ever want to see. But even Christians can let their hair down, occasionally.

The article details the way lobbyists are able to show their appreciation for the service to the country shown by these fine men and women. They are in the line of fire every day. Many of them are making financial sacrifice by serving in Congress, and will only be able to make it up by accepting top flight jobs from the corporations that bribed them to pass those bills that so gaily loot the Treasury after their patriotic service is over. As journalist Carl Hulse notes, the recent scandals around Tom Delay and “Duke” Cunningham was notable only for the notable stupidity displayed by the two outstanding Christians, since getting around ethics rules has been designed to be user friendly, and could be performed, if necessary, by a retarded rabbit.

For those who think that the Democrats aren’t sufficiently Christian – well here’s a nice surprise for you all:

“During the past five years, members of Congress have received $18.3 million worth of travel at the expense of private organizations, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan research service. That includes 628 lawmakers who made 6,242 trips, 57 percent of which were taken by Democrats.

The most popular destinations were vacation spots, according to a study by the Medill News Service and American Public Media, which produces programs for public radio stations. From January 2000 to mid-2004, No. 1 was Florida with more than 500 trips, followed by California with nearly 400 trips and New York with more than 300. West Virginia, home to the Greenbrier resort, was the fourth most popular destination, with more than 200 trips. These were permitted because they were connected to "official duties" -- one of the requirements that the ethics rules impose on privately paid trips.”

Seeing the awesome, divinely created majesty of the ski slopes, or the beauty of a Las Vegas floor show, is the best way of instilling that respect for Credit Card companies, oil companies, and, most of all, our brave Defense corporations, which naturally results in votes that are good for the country. Those who criticize the Congress show a lack of understanding about what makes this whole faith based mechanism work – which is why we have to try extra hard to spread our way of life around the world. Although they died for so many reasons, among the reasons 1800 Americans have given their lives for the Islamic Republic of Iraq is to make sure that our legislatures can continue to live free, unfettered lives.

I’m not saying that we should take away the sacred right to expression from the critics who will always dog our way of life, bitter deadender leftists, but I am saying that jail time, under the Patriot Act provisions that Justice Roberts will thoughtfully construe in the spirit in which they are intended, might be one answer to anti-American slanderers and fifth columnists in our own country.

“…barely a week passes when at least one out-of-town fundraising event doesn't entice contributors with golf, a boat excursion or skiing. The House Republicans' event list between mid-July and mid-August advertises 12 golf outings, four baseball games, a musical show and a night of "champagne and caviar."
The competition for donors is so intense that lawmakers try to outdo each other with innovative fundraising come-ons. Four members of the House Ways and Means Committee held what they called a "block party" to make it easier for lobbyists to drop off checks. The lawmakers, who live on the same block on Capitol Hill, each offered a different alcoholic beverage to donors as they stopped by on the same evening this spring.

"There are 20 to 40 fundraisers a day that people have a chance to go to, and they can't make them all," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who conceived and benefited from the block party. "You want to make sure yours stands out and that people say, 'That's fun!' "

P.S. LI does like to imitate the small town touches that used to make Paul Harvey's radio broadcasts such a delight. Harvey was always looking for the little, telling story: the one that focused on what was right and good in this country. In that spirit, we couldn't help noticing that the LAT story about the deaths of those marines yesterday was nestled next to a box with today's top emailed stories. Rightfully, Americans rejected pointless bad news from Iraq. Why clutter the mind? No, it take a resilient people to lose 44 soldiers in the past couple days and make this the most popular headline of the day: "20 of the most delicious deals you'll find around town."

Say what you like, this country has its eyes on the prize. No wonder we've been voted most moral 200 years running!

The War is Over, and We Won
(Headline, AEI magazine, April, 2005):

Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq. In 2004, our military fought fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City. Many thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little collateral damage. As examples of the very hardest sorts of urban combat, these will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories.

And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the U.S.) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead.”

August 3, 2005
14 U.S. Marines Killed in Iraq When Vehicle Hits a Huge Bomb
-- Headline, NYT.

American Journalist Is Shot to Death in Iraq -

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 3 - An American journalist writing about the rise of fundamentalist Islam was shot dead overnight after being abducted in the southern port city of Basra, American embassy and Iraqi officials said today. The journalist's translator was also shot and is in serious condition at a Basra hospital.
-- story, NYT, August 3, 2005. The journalist wrote for the National Review.

Address, Counter-recruitment site, youth and the military.

Strike against the vanity war. Let's shrink Rumsfeld’s army to the size of his heart.

expected headlines

The headlines in the Washington Post were expected:

"President Bush sidestepped the U.S. Senate on Monday and installed controversial nominee Scott Peterson as ambassador to the United Nations, saying the post was "too important to leave vacant any longer."
Speaking at the White House, Bush said he was sending Peterson to the United Nations with his "complete confidence." “Peterson has his marching orders. I expect him to deal with the U.N. as he has dealt with the women in his life.”

"The White House move comes over the vociferous protests of Senate Democrats, who had complained that the blunt, combative Peterson lacked credibility, being in prison under sentence of death. The Senate had twice voted to sustain a filibuster against Peterson. But Bush refused to give up on his nominee.

"A majority of U.S. senators agree that he is the right man for the job," Bush said at the White House. "but because of partisan delaying tactics by a handful of senators, Scott was denied the up and down vote he deserves."

Scott, an outspoken conservative who had often criticized the United Nations as reminding him of ‘bitches”, triggered controversy from the moment Bush nominated him March 8. Members of the White House press corps who have watched this administration for years agreed that this is another stand tall moment for a tough talking president who doesn’t mind stretching the envelop. According to Dr. Tom Curtis, of the Unhealed Rabies Victims for Invading Iran, "we will look back on this moment as a turning point. I've worked with Scott. He's determined to bomb as many places as we can on the President's deadline. We have all these bombs, and Canada is so close... and as they say, Jesus was not a Canadian.

Previous ambassadors have kept a small staff in Washington in a modest suite. Peterson told several colleagues he needed more space and a larger staff in Washington because, if confirmed, he intended to spend more time here than his predecessors did. "Peterson isn't going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington," the administration source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the source lacked authorization to discuss this on the record. “After you’ve been in stir for a while, you just don’t want to be pegged down.”

I have seen the future, and it is United

Anyone interested in what Bush’s reformed Social Security would look like should look at the NYT article about United Airline’s pension fund today. It is a fun article. Here's how the movie goes: Wall Street persuades a viable pension fund to redo its safe strategy of investing for a much more groovy strategy of growth growth growth in equities. Big money is made by everybody on the Street as the pension fund shrinks, disappears, goes into a black hole. Everybody is very sorry that the beneficiaries of the fund have nothing left, but everybody also points out – the beneficiaries are scum. Mere workers. Pilots, for god’s sakes. Imagine, some stewardess somewhere is bawling cause her measely 200 thou went to some really nice Manhattan bistros. As if she deserved it. The best and the brightest, in the new Hobbesian Randian world, feast upon such little lambs.

Bush’s plan has those advantages too. By targeting middle America’s vast wealth and accelerating the burgling of it, in a record amount of time the top 10 percent income percentile can capture even more of America’s wealth. This money will be used much more efficiently. For instance, many retiring congressmen will be able to find lobbying jobs that will launch them into the higher regions of financial security when the theft is completed. Meanwhile, in a blow against the French, Americans will work harder. They will have to, as their retirement will be approximately equal, in value, to the price you can get for confetti that’s been cleaned off of streets and sidewalks after the parade is over.

The first three grafs of the article map a strategy that is almost a perfect parallel of the Bush reforms:

“HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."

Wilsman has got to be a traitor, and one hopes he will be roundly denounced on the rightwing media circuit. More voices like his would blow the perfect caper. He obviously wasn’t clued in that DJ 36,000 was just around the corner.

As even the article admits, the result of the Bush-like investment strategy proved highly satisfactory:

“While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.”

Million dollar payouts for high level failure have become America’s secret weapon for achieving true greatness. As for the employees – they merely work for a living. Piss on em, as the old Wall Street saying goes. Also, the federal government has proven that almost any problem can be solved if you have a gigantic enough credit card. Put those pensions on the card and have the Chinese buy more of our dollars, as they say in the corridors of the Treasury department.
Here’s a nice window into what Social Security is gonna look like once we get it all licked into shape:
“United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.”
I, for one, am totally psyched.
Three more irresistible grafs. Your congress at work!

"While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.

"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."

rub raw the sores of social discontent

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on. -- Saul Alinsky


LI recommends this story as the most heartening news of the week. Labor has spent decades as the Democrat’s dog. In return, the Democrats have supported every nasty perk that has puffed upper management to the absurd financial status it now holds, from the awful Lieberman threatening the SEC, in the 90s, not to investigate accounting abuses to the bankruptcy bill that passed this year with crucial Dem support; the Democrats passed Nafta, otherwise known as the spread the impoverishment act; the Dems for a decade left Greenspan, that well known hater of labor, in his place as the most powerful single setter of the economic agenda in America ; and every four years, the Dems tapped union money the way frat boys gang bang a keg to run presidential candidates who ranged on the charisma scale from Mondale (as charismatic as socks) to Kerry (as charismatic as loafers).

We’ve been reading Murray Kempton’s Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties book. It was published in 1955, we believe. At that time, Unions were still gigantic in America, and the politics of the CIO was headline news. Kempton etched an acid picture of Lee Pressman, a communist who became one of the great labor councilors for John L. Lewis. Lewis was a man who breathed the worker cause – Kempton tells a story about how once, in a mine, Lewis had to kill a mule that had become unhinged. He did it with a blow to the head, then covered up the cause of the death, since the mule was company property and Lewis would have been fired for killing it. That it endangered miners was no concern of the company – a dead miner wasn’t a cost. Pressman was, undoubtedly, one of those people who gave their heart to their vision of Stalin’s Russia. The vision was as inaccurate as the vision of Iraq currently promoted by the hawks. But the Commies were excellent organizers, and save for the support for Stalin, mostly right about the issues. The problem, as every witness that came out of the thirties testifies, is that the Communists smashed everything eventually into a Machiavellian framework of politics, the point of which was to drive out other progressive forces. Still, one of the great casualties of the early fifties was a strong, domestic American Communist party. Such a thing would have nicely leavened the American political scene.

Now we live in an America run by villains, of course. The causes next to their compassionate heart are things like helping companies that have poisoned thousand of people with asbestos and who continue to do so with the use, for instance, of asbestos in brakes, literally get away with murder. LI’s notion is that this state of things has happened partly because the balance of forces between social movements and the parties long ago shifted to the parties. As long as the Unions are adjuncts of the Democratic party, Union positions will be abused by that party – for the leadership of it is basically indistinguishable from the leadership of the Republican party, give or take a belief in evolution or two. Whenever that leadership is forced to do something progressive, distress signals immediately leak out of D.C. in the form of articles decrying “special interests’ in the New Republic. According to the WP article:

“Stern began his insurgency two years ago. His vision was that the demands of a rapidly changing global economy require a consolidation by labor. By this reckoning, the loose affiliation of unions, many of them small, that characterize the AFL-CIO is no match for well-financed international corporations. Stern believes that unions must be forced to merge to create larger units that can dominate economic sectors, and that labor must shift more of its union dues into large-scale organizing campaigns and less distributing money to influence political races.

If his ideas prevail, Stern boasted, "the next decade can be a time of innovation, new strategies, new energy, new growth, and new ideas that will bring to life a new, 21st century American Dream."

Unions have a choice, we think: they can continue to be respectable, and disappear, or they can become disrespectable, they can support large scale actions that defy current laws – how about sit down strikes in selected Walmarts across the country? – and become strong again. Class warfare is another name for everyday life. I’d like to see some better generalship from my side of it.

PS -- on the war resistance front: see this interesting post on Counter-recruitment at the Huffington Blog. The poster even uses "Starve the Beast" to entitle the post -- which happens to be the title we gave our own counter-recruitment post two weeks ago. Since then, we've been busy publicizing counter-recruitment. Oh well, no time to worry about intellectual priority -- the cause is greater than our vanity.

the human rights of the last man

In the South Atlantic Review of last summer there is an interesting essay by Susan Maslan (The Anti-Human: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) that wrestles with the identity of “man” and “citizen” as it was forged in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Maslan’s idea is this: “man” was never a political entity in the same sense as “citizen” before the French revolution. Man could be many things – a creature with ties of blood to other creatures, a soul, a thinker – but as man, he was merely the substratum upon which the political selectively operated. This is a rather natural stance to take for a European society busy enslaving and conquering. Or perhaps I have the causal sequence wrong – it isn’t that the slaving and conquering produced the notion of man – substructure to superstructure – but that both the concept and the activity were held within one large framework, a political episteme.

Maslan finds it surprising that the French Revolutionaries were so quick to identify man and citizen. And she contrasts the result of this – the Declaration – with the American bill of rights:

“The authors of the Declaration understood that they were in the process of elaborating two distinct kinds of rights: rights proper to an individual outside of any constituted political body—that is, in the language
of the eighteenth century, natural rights—and rights proper to a member of an organized political body or state. It would appear, then, that natural rights are those that belong to man and political and civil rights are those at the disposal of the citizen. Asians and Africans, both favorite French examples of oppressed peoples, would be recognized by the Declaration not as citizens of France, of course, but rather in their capacity as men—a title which confers upon them a body of rights that must be acknowledged and recognized by all other human beings, and a title to which the slave, Target [one of the framers of the Declaration] suggests, does not even know he can lay claim. The simple fact of being born—regardless of to whom, where, in what circumstances—endowed the human being with rights. The inclusion of man, as opposed to, say, Frenchman, as a subject of rights within the Declaration is what distinguishes it so radically from the American Bill of Rights, a document that makes no claim to apply beyond the confines of its national authority. It is a wonderful sort of irony, one that demands serious reflection, that the invention of the Rights of Man played and continues to play such a predominant role in the creation and perpetuation of French national identity.”

Maslan’s tends to consider this problem in the light of its object – man – rather than in the light of its enonciation – by men. To track a point in the convergence of man and citizen, Maslan goes back to Horace, Corneille’s 1640 play. Horace is about the liberation of Rome – or its second founding. Horace has the choice of renouncing ties of blood symbolized by his sister’s marriage to Curiaci, of one of the families of Alba – the Curatii – or of loyalty to that blood, and the renunciation of his tie to Rome. The latter is a tie to something that doesn’t quite exist yet – its existence will ensue upon Horace’s action. If Horace defeats the Curatii, Rome will conquer Alba and be set on the road to becoming an empire – a conquest machine. Curiaci pronounces his choice not to duel Horace in a verse that LI wholeheartedly endorses:

“Et si Rome demande une vertu plus haute,/
Je rends grâces aux Dieux de n’être point Romain,/
Pour conserver encor quelque chose d’humain.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, the man modestly remarked. Really, this is our motto vis a vis the American kingdom.

Horace, the Roman, kills Cuiaci and his sister. Of Horace’s unyieldingness, Maslan writes:

“If, however, the criterion for membership in the political order of Rome is the willingness (or, as we shall see in Horace’s case, the eagerness) to exterminate all ties of affection and blood, then not everyone in Rome is fully Roman; indeed, the Roman soldiers described at the end of the first act resemble Curiacemore closely than they doHorace. Like Curiace, these soldiers are both human and citizens: unlike Horace, they persist in recognizing their kin relations and the affective bonds those relations create.”

Such acts of ad hoc resistance (think of the invisible strike against enlistment that is going on, at present, in the U.S.) are marks of the pre-political “man,” separating this entity from the citizen. For Maslan, this means that the pre-Revolutionary troping of “man” makes something about being a citizen “inhuman.” The ties to the state – the mark of the political – are ties of inhumanity.

However, we wonder whether the logic of Horace’s action can be simply projected on the divergence between “man” and “citizen” that, Maslan holds, characterizes those semantic fields in 1640. Notably, Maslan brackets the religious – which is surely a stress upon the use and dynamic of these terms in the seventeenth century. That Rome was pagan was a convenience – it offered a sort of ideal in which to test in dramatic terms the divergence between Maslan’s terms. However, those terms in the purely human world take on a different light in a world in which there is a God of love. Oddly, Maslan’s essay – which begins with a quote from Abbe Gregoire’s pamphlet on the liberation of the Jews – does not take into consideration the religious. We like her resounding final grafs:

“Horace’s project—the creation of citizenship through the destruction of humanity—is a failure because it entails the impossibility of law since law requires the recognition of others as, like oneself, subjects of law andHorace, by placing himself outside the order of humanity, consciously renders himself incapable of recognizing others as ‘‘other selves.’’ Horace is the founding text in what would be a 150-year-long literary-political undertaking to create and to comprehend the categories of and the relation between man and citizen. As in the case of Horace, these imaginings not always but often ended in visions of violence and destruction.When drafters and supporters of the 1789 Declaration announced that the ‘‘truths’’ of the rights of man and of the citizen were not only eternal and immutable but immediately recognizable
to all—‘‘ce que tout le monde sait, ce que tout le monde sent’’ (what everyone knows, what everyone feels)—they, like Rome, were dissimulating, hiding what was in fact an ongoing struggle to form the categories of man and citizen so perfectly that they could end forever not only les malheurs publics but
indeed all unhappiness.

If we tend to think that ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ are or should be corresponding and harmoniously continuous categories it is because we think in the wake of the 1789 Declaration. In the early modern political imagination to be a citizen meant to cease to be human. This is the legacy that the Declaration
tries to overcome and that it conceals. The Declaration sought to reconcile these two forms of existence that had been severed violently. Such an aim, of course, could not be fully realized and so the new Republic turned to—or, better put, invented—the language of universalism to repress and resolve the tensions it could neither dissipate nor acknowledge. It remains today the impossible burden of this language to adjudicate the claims of humanity and the claims of citizenship.”

eating our words in the great culture of Bush

LI is again having to eat its words this morning. We so often complain that the Bush culture has exclusively favored the wealthy. In a story in the WP this morning, there is a great refutation of that thesis in the lifestory of Sunny L. Sims:

“Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.

Now she owns a $1.9 million stucco mansion with lofty ceilings on a hilltop, featuring sun-splashed palm trees and a circular driveway.”

The cool thing is, she owes this upward trajectory entirely to the Bush administration’s decision not to do pesky supervising over private contractors working for Homeland Security. Ms. Sims, in the weeks after 9/11, incorporated a company, Eclipse Events Inc, which subcontracted events planning for another company, NCS Pearson Inc, and went big time on a non-competitive contract “… to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.” There are a few minor accounting matters: “$15 million in expenses submitted by Eclipse could not be substantiated. For example, auditors were able to find supporting documents for only $326,873 of the $5.8 million that Eclipse spent directly on accounting, administration, consulting, management and contract labor.” However, given the outstanding success of the Homeland Security department in doing the job that the Confederate government wants it to do – suck money into Republican and Red State venues to profit an array of defense industry businesses – one has to admire the fact that a program that supposedly was supposed to do things like hardening target sites like nuclear reactors has failed to do that almost all along the line, but has been tremendously successful at valeting and pouring sodas for meet and greets with potential passenger screeners.

And Ms. Sims? “The auditors noted that Sims not only paid herself $5.4 million in compensation as "President/Owner" but also that she gave herself a $270,000 pension.”

We are lead by geniuses.