Two stories in the last two days shed little pinpricks of light on the wholly, deeply, astonishingly disastrous reign of Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld has earned for himself a rare niche, as far as cabinet officers go. Usually, the worst ones are venal. The worst ones pocket money for selling federal mineral rights, or authorize bribes to quiet blown illegal operatives working for the White House. Rumsfeld is a different variety of cat. His mission has been to destroy the Department of War, and to do it while ensuring America’s defeat in Iraq against the insurgency. He came in with plans that would perfect the technostructure for our battle with Soviet forces on the plains of Poland, and has stuck to that task with all the vigor of the monomaniac in Dracula who collects flies. Apparently in the five long, long years he has been there, nobody told him that we aren’t endangered by Soviet forces any more. In an administration composed of Confederate re-enactors, I suppose it isn’t that odd that we have a Cold War reenactor as Secretary of War. It is sad, though.
The NYT today reported on a North Carolina felon who rehabilitated himself, at least financially, thanks to the Pentagon/Cheney plan for making spending in Iraq an excuse to directly route money to the network of pustular American war profiteers. If Haliburton gets its billions, why should we deny Robert Stein his paltry $82 million?
Unlike others who get out of prison and go through a period of uncertain employment, Stein got out of prison and made a beeline to where work was an unnecessary complement to Christmas. That is, he started working for the CPA in Iraq. Since the CPA was a pirate organization set up basically to steal Iraq’s resources and impose a thousand year neo-liberal Reich on the place (which lasted all of eighteen months), naturally they looked on pirates favorably.
As the NYT puts it:
“Along with a web of other conspirators who have not yet been named, Mr. Stein and his wife received "bribes, kickbacks and gratuities amounting to at least $200,000 per month" to steer lucrative construction contracts to companies run by another American, Philip H. Bloom, an affidavit outlining the criminal complaint says. Mr. Stein's wife, who was not named, has not been charged with wrongdoing in the case; Mr. Bloom was charged with a range of crimes on Wednesday.
In the staccato language of the affidavit, filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, Mr. Stein, 50, was charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, interstate transportation of stolen property and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
But the list of charges does little justice to the astonishing brazenness of the accusations described in the complaint, including a wire transfer of a $140,000 bribe, arranged by Mr. Bloom, to buy real estate for Mr. Stein in North Carolina. The affidavit also says that $65,762.63 was spent to buy cars for Mr. Stein and his wife (he bought a Chevrolet; she a Toyota), $44,471 for home improvements and $48,073 for jewelry, out of $258,000 sent directly to the Bragg Mutual Federal Credit Union into accounts controlled by the Steins.
Mr. Stein's wife even used $7,151.58 of the money for a "towing service," the complaint says. Much of this money was intended for Iraqi construction projects like building a new police academy in the ancient city of Babylon and rehabilitating the library in Karbala, the southern city that is among the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims.”
Stein obviously was inspired by Wolfowitz’s soaring rhetoric before the war, when the NYT reported on his testimony to the senate on February 28,2003:
Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.
Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.”
It would be just wrong to lavish that money on Iraqis, when Americans need their towing and jewelry looked after. And this is true even though – miraculously, who’d have thought it? We went past Wolfowitz’s high end estimate in eight months. But in the Bush administration, price is no object when you can stuff the pockets of your buddies with cash and you have the government to do it.
Well, wars are mostly about theft, and the U.S. policy of stealing greatly certainly didn’t begin with the Pentagon pumphouse gang under Rumsfeld. However, our biggest successes usually consist of getting some Central American caudillo to massacre peasants for us. Operating directly, with a black mask tied over our face, always gets us into Vietnam like situations.
Our second story, from the WSJ, is on a more technical matter. Having decided to occupy Iraq, in the first place, with far too few men, the Americans are now supposedly taking proactive measures. Every other day they launch much heralded offenses in Anbar province, or sweep through towns on Iraqi border with Syria, shooting people in great numbers and calling them insurgents – which is Pentagon speak for any Iraqi they have killed. In fact, D.C.’s pro-war clique has been chomping on the bit to attack Syria this year. Meanwhile, according to the WSJ, the Pentagon is withdrawing “foreign-area officers” from Iraq. They can’t afford em, it appears – not and go buying pieces of real estate in North Carolina, too.
What are foreign-area officers? In Iraq, they are officers trained to speak Arabic, and educated in Middle Eastern culture. The WSJ article concentrates on one “David,” who is deployed near the Syrian border:
“As they had done in the past, the Rangers took positions around each village and Bedouin encampment. At one village, an officer named David, accompanied by a small security team, strode into the center looking for someone who would talk. Unlike the clean-shaven, camouflage-clad Rangers, David wore a thick goatee and civilian clothes. The Rangers carried long, black M-4 carbine rifles. David walked with a small 9mm pistol strapped to his leg. The Rangers spoke English. He spoke Arabic tinged with a Yemeni accent.
As he recounts the day, David met a woman with facial tattoos that marked her as her husband's property. As they chatted, the pale-skinned, sandy-haired North Carolina native imitated her dry, throaty way of speaking. "You are Bedu, too," she exclaimed with delight, he recalls.
From her and the other Bedouins, the 37-year-old officer learned that most of the cross-border smuggling was carried out by Shamar tribesmen who peddle cigarettes, sheep and gasoline. Radical Islamists were using the same routes to move people, guns and money. Many of the paths were marked with small piles of bleached rocks that were identical to those David had seen a year earlier while serving in Yemen.”
As you can plainly see, having someone like David around doesn’t fit in with hiring mercenaries from GOP contributing “security” companies, so naturally they are taking him out.
“David is part of a small cadre of cultural experts in the Army known as foreign-area officers. The military would only allow him to be interviewed on the grounds that his last name and rank be withheld. U.S. officials say he'll be spending the rest of his career in the Middle East, often operating alone in potentially hostile territory. Naming him, they say, would make him more vulnerable to attack.
His colleagues in Iraq say his presence has been invaluable. "We ought to have one of these guys assigned to every [regional] commander in Iraq," says Col. John Bayer, chief of staff for Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, the commander of U.S. forces in the northern third of the country. "I'd love to say `assign me 100 of these guys.' "
That's not happening. Instead, the military is pulling David out of Iraq later this month along with seven other officers who make up his unit. Before the end of the year, David will resume his previous post in Yemen.”
And so it goes as we stay the course in Iraq. I wonder ‘stay the course” was what Bush used to say instead of chug-a-lug at the keg parties?
...
Notes:
Belated congrats to William Vollman for winning the national book award. I interviewed him this spring about Europe Central for Publishers Weekly, and found him a very genial sort of guy. He was surprised that I was such an ardent fan of Argall. I have very nice memories of reading Europe Central in a hammock, drinking a tequilla, in a garden in Mexico -- an oddly idyllic context within which to read about twentieth century butcheries.
Other note. I'm going on vacation next Tuesday. I'll be back the eighth of December. Those of you who have contributed to LI during the last couple of weeks - our official total was something like 450 dollars by November 15th, which wasn't bad -- should be sending me mailing addresses for your dopamine cowboy stuff, and telling me exactly what you want.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
the U.S. and the people without history
Years ago, Eric Wolf wrote a book with the catchy title, Europe and the People without History. The book was about a pattern in the early modern mindset that became a template for the colonialist ideology. Europe, in this perspective, or the West, had a history – there was a definite progressive pattern to the changes in the West over time. But the Other did not have a history. The other lived in eternal cycles – the Asiatic despots – or had no history at all worth speaking of – the noble savage.
Over at Crooked Timber, there’s a post about the Jane Fonda myth that has aroused a lot of hot comments, some by LI. And the comments about the Vietnam war are oddly consonant with that old White Mythology, to use J.D.’s phrase. The war on the American side is considered to be full of dynamic changes. The students, the soldiers, the media all producing changes in the way the Americans felt and acted during the war. But on the other side, there are only monolithic, intemporal blocks. There are the South Vietnamese. There are the Vietnamese Communists. And though one can find, in fact must find, events that happened to these two blocks (reluctantly, Americans sometimes even concede that the Vietnamese war was about the Vietnamese), they remain unchanged players in an American folk drama.
I think this denial of time is an essential part of the American military mindset. By means of it, America has developed an onslaught strategy that attacks as though the enemy were an unchanging block. Dependent on this view of the unchanging block is the American fascination with counting enemy casualties. What do you do with a block? You atomize it.
That the enemy might not be a block – that it might be a shapeshifter, that it might have a history – is excluded from the picture. For instance: in Vietnam, the casualties that the U.S. inflicted undoubtedly impacted some parts of the guerilla structure more than others. In particular, by instituting village Einsatzgruppe-like warfare (the Phoenix program), the U.S. undoubtedly decimated the cadre of fighters who were native to the southern Vietnamese provinces. This gave a distinct advantage to the fighters from the North, in terms of organization. The war that the Americans fought was producing this kind of change in the “Vietnamese communists”, but the Americans couldn’t see it. That decimation of the village cadre had another effect on the “South Vietnamese.” As the war went on, a genuine, anti-communist, anti-american nationalism emerged in South Vietnam, undoubtedly filling a space left empty by the NLF’s decimation. This, too, happened under the radar.
The blindness in Iraq is even greater. We seriously doubt that most Americans know anything about the Iraqi government for which American soldiers are fighting. The American penchant for creating timeless blocks plays out, in the media, in terms of the ‘democratically elected” government versus the “terrorists.” That the democratically elected government consists of people once labeled terrorists by the Americans, for the very good reason that they devoted much organizational energy, in the eighties, to blowing up Americans has certainly gone under the radar. It simply doesn’t fit the atemporal story. It makes the blocks go wobbly. Wobbliness is a thing for which we all have a Thatcherite disdain, n’est-ce pas?
The real clash of civilizations is here: a civilization has grown up, has ideologically constructed itself, around the idea that no other civilization has a history. That ideology operates like a denial mechanism, allowing the West to simply forget its long, intricate history of dealings with the other. Those who have no history contaminate, with a sort of oblivion, those who do have history. Because the pattern of those dealings – the dealings of conqueror to conquered – don’t exactly reveal a progress, this story is best told as a magic act, in which the conquered ‘vanish.’ That’s, after all, what happened to the Indians – they vanished. They pulled a magic act.
That’s the Ur-story. Those dealings all happen in the heart of darkness, so to speak.
But the return of the vanished is now the story of our own era. The images of this story, although utterly unreal, operated, in the past, as an advantage to the West. But as the US stumbles and falls in slow motion in Mesopotamia, we can see the old Leatherstocking tale is on its last legs.
ps -- LI readers are urged to visit Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque. Floyd has been gathering a lot of materials about the war crimes being committed in Iraq by the Americans and their allies, and he has a nice synopsis of the accusation that the Americans used chemical warfare in Falluja -- that is, they used phosphorus bombs for their napalm like effects, and not as a means of "illuminating' the battle scene. Those WMDs just keep coming back to haunt this war.
Over at Crooked Timber, there’s a post about the Jane Fonda myth that has aroused a lot of hot comments, some by LI. And the comments about the Vietnam war are oddly consonant with that old White Mythology, to use J.D.’s phrase. The war on the American side is considered to be full of dynamic changes. The students, the soldiers, the media all producing changes in the way the Americans felt and acted during the war. But on the other side, there are only monolithic, intemporal blocks. There are the South Vietnamese. There are the Vietnamese Communists. And though one can find, in fact must find, events that happened to these two blocks (reluctantly, Americans sometimes even concede that the Vietnamese war was about the Vietnamese), they remain unchanged players in an American folk drama.
I think this denial of time is an essential part of the American military mindset. By means of it, America has developed an onslaught strategy that attacks as though the enemy were an unchanging block. Dependent on this view of the unchanging block is the American fascination with counting enemy casualties. What do you do with a block? You atomize it.
That the enemy might not be a block – that it might be a shapeshifter, that it might have a history – is excluded from the picture. For instance: in Vietnam, the casualties that the U.S. inflicted undoubtedly impacted some parts of the guerilla structure more than others. In particular, by instituting village Einsatzgruppe-like warfare (the Phoenix program), the U.S. undoubtedly decimated the cadre of fighters who were native to the southern Vietnamese provinces. This gave a distinct advantage to the fighters from the North, in terms of organization. The war that the Americans fought was producing this kind of change in the “Vietnamese communists”, but the Americans couldn’t see it. That decimation of the village cadre had another effect on the “South Vietnamese.” As the war went on, a genuine, anti-communist, anti-american nationalism emerged in South Vietnam, undoubtedly filling a space left empty by the NLF’s decimation. This, too, happened under the radar.
The blindness in Iraq is even greater. We seriously doubt that most Americans know anything about the Iraqi government for which American soldiers are fighting. The American penchant for creating timeless blocks plays out, in the media, in terms of the ‘democratically elected” government versus the “terrorists.” That the democratically elected government consists of people once labeled terrorists by the Americans, for the very good reason that they devoted much organizational energy, in the eighties, to blowing up Americans has certainly gone under the radar. It simply doesn’t fit the atemporal story. It makes the blocks go wobbly. Wobbliness is a thing for which we all have a Thatcherite disdain, n’est-ce pas?
The real clash of civilizations is here: a civilization has grown up, has ideologically constructed itself, around the idea that no other civilization has a history. That ideology operates like a denial mechanism, allowing the West to simply forget its long, intricate history of dealings with the other. Those who have no history contaminate, with a sort of oblivion, those who do have history. Because the pattern of those dealings – the dealings of conqueror to conquered – don’t exactly reveal a progress, this story is best told as a magic act, in which the conquered ‘vanish.’ That’s, after all, what happened to the Indians – they vanished. They pulled a magic act.
That’s the Ur-story. Those dealings all happen in the heart of darkness, so to speak.
But the return of the vanished is now the story of our own era. The images of this story, although utterly unreal, operated, in the past, as an advantage to the West. But as the US stumbles and falls in slow motion in Mesopotamia, we can see the old Leatherstocking tale is on its last legs.
ps -- LI readers are urged to visit Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque. Floyd has been gathering a lot of materials about the war crimes being committed in Iraq by the Americans and their allies, and he has a nice synopsis of the accusation that the Americans used chemical warfare in Falluja -- that is, they used phosphorus bombs for their napalm like effects, and not as a means of "illuminating' the battle scene. Those WMDs just keep coming back to haunt this war.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
lies of intention and lies of fact
Although I’ve pretty much stopped reading Christopher Hitchens on Iraq, curiosity made me peek at his last Slate column. After two years, I wonder how he would stand up for his friend, Chalabi, whose speech he attended last week.
Although the column is written in Hitchen’s now normal tendentious tone, a mix of scorn and insult that gives the effect of Captain Bligh giving his last speech to the crew of the Bounty, and though, of course, Hitchens is simply a lunatic about Iraq, he does have a valid central point about the Democratic claim to being mislead about Iraq.
Hitchens simply points to a long line of legislation, going back to 1998, as well as Clinton’s own actions, to make the point that the Dems were on board the regime change ship (hey, having thrown in Captain Bligh, I’m sticking with this metaphor, sailor!). I think this is fairly accurate. The rush to war was a peculiarly D.C. moment. The DLC wing of the Democratic party – from Lieberman to Clinton – let Bush carry the message; nor did they scream or yell when it became obvious, in the countdown to the invasion, that other means of settling the question of the weapons of mass destruction – letting the inspectors do their job, for instance – were counterproductive not to Saddam, but to Bush’s policy. This is what Daschle said on October 7, 2002, quoting from the Houston Chronicle:
“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.
"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.
But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."
The root lie, the one Hitchens doesn’t talk about for all his quoting of previous resolutions, was the lie that Bush did not want war. This is a sore point. Since the war’s supporters did, visibly, want war in that period, defending the truthfulness of Bush’s claim that he didn’t means discussing why he didn’t. And those supporters have long claimed that the WMD was merely the mask thrown over the complex of reasons we went to war, which definitely leaves the impression that Bush’s gang was playing the American people for suckers. In fact, on October 7, 2002, Bush, in his key speech in Cincinnati, made it clear that the resolution of Congress did not necessarily mean war:
"Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable," Bush said. "The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and it is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something."
That, of course, was the lie. Bush did everything he could to make military action both imminent and unavoidable. What, one wonders, would it have taken to avoid war? Bush’s answer was that it would have taken complete disarmament by Iraq – but that simply isn’t true. It would have taken Iraq’s complete surrender to Bush, Saddam’s removal and the removal of the Ba’ath party leadership. In other words, the conditions that Bush claimed to be setting for the American audience would always be set a little higher for the Iraqi audience, so we would have our war. The pro-war crowd – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. – found nothing wrong with this. And the D.C. consensus viewed it, at the time, as the necessary buildup to a necessary war. The Dems under Daschle admitted that they were voting for a unilateral military action on intelligence that consisted of “might be”s – Iraq might possess this, and it might possess that. The talk about what might be is such that it baffles our notion of direct truths – rather, we have to talk about what is plausible and implausible. When, in the same speech, Bush said "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he was distorting the evidence – a minor lie, since it was by no means clear – but he wasn’t lying about it in the traditional sense if he was saying that, in his judgment, it was clear. In September, 2002, the dossier on Iraq compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies was published. That study concluded, as it turned out correctly, that nuclear weapons “seem the furthest from Iraq’s grasp,” and that Iraq possessed, at best, residual WMD capabilities in chemical and biological arms.
The point, then, is that if we are to go back (again and again and again) to how we got into Iraq, the question of intelligence is subordinate to the question of intention. And all of these questions are academic if they don’t lead us to get out of Iraq, now. To create excuses for our failure in Iraq while remaining as a failing force in Iraq is the kind of malign joke that we do not want to see played on American soldiers or Iraqis.
Although the column is written in Hitchen’s now normal tendentious tone, a mix of scorn and insult that gives the effect of Captain Bligh giving his last speech to the crew of the Bounty, and though, of course, Hitchens is simply a lunatic about Iraq, he does have a valid central point about the Democratic claim to being mislead about Iraq.
Hitchens simply points to a long line of legislation, going back to 1998, as well as Clinton’s own actions, to make the point that the Dems were on board the regime change ship (hey, having thrown in Captain Bligh, I’m sticking with this metaphor, sailor!). I think this is fairly accurate. The rush to war was a peculiarly D.C. moment. The DLC wing of the Democratic party – from Lieberman to Clinton – let Bush carry the message; nor did they scream or yell when it became obvious, in the countdown to the invasion, that other means of settling the question of the weapons of mass destruction – letting the inspectors do their job, for instance – were counterproductive not to Saddam, but to Bush’s policy. This is what Daschle said on October 7, 2002, quoting from the Houston Chronicle:
“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.
"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.
But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."
The root lie, the one Hitchens doesn’t talk about for all his quoting of previous resolutions, was the lie that Bush did not want war. This is a sore point. Since the war’s supporters did, visibly, want war in that period, defending the truthfulness of Bush’s claim that he didn’t means discussing why he didn’t. And those supporters have long claimed that the WMD was merely the mask thrown over the complex of reasons we went to war, which definitely leaves the impression that Bush’s gang was playing the American people for suckers. In fact, on October 7, 2002, Bush, in his key speech in Cincinnati, made it clear that the resolution of Congress did not necessarily mean war:
"Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable," Bush said. "The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and it is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something."
That, of course, was the lie. Bush did everything he could to make military action both imminent and unavoidable. What, one wonders, would it have taken to avoid war? Bush’s answer was that it would have taken complete disarmament by Iraq – but that simply isn’t true. It would have taken Iraq’s complete surrender to Bush, Saddam’s removal and the removal of the Ba’ath party leadership. In other words, the conditions that Bush claimed to be setting for the American audience would always be set a little higher for the Iraqi audience, so we would have our war. The pro-war crowd – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. – found nothing wrong with this. And the D.C. consensus viewed it, at the time, as the necessary buildup to a necessary war. The Dems under Daschle admitted that they were voting for a unilateral military action on intelligence that consisted of “might be”s – Iraq might possess this, and it might possess that. The talk about what might be is such that it baffles our notion of direct truths – rather, we have to talk about what is plausible and implausible. When, in the same speech, Bush said "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he was distorting the evidence – a minor lie, since it was by no means clear – but he wasn’t lying about it in the traditional sense if he was saying that, in his judgment, it was clear. In September, 2002, the dossier on Iraq compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies was published. That study concluded, as it turned out correctly, that nuclear weapons “seem the furthest from Iraq’s grasp,” and that Iraq possessed, at best, residual WMD capabilities in chemical and biological arms.
The point, then, is that if we are to go back (again and again and again) to how we got into Iraq, the question of intelligence is subordinate to the question of intention. And all of these questions are academic if they don’t lead us to get out of Iraq, now. To create excuses for our failure in Iraq while remaining as a failing force in Iraq is the kind of malign joke that we do not want to see played on American soldiers or Iraqis.
Monday, November 14, 2005
to bring the neo-liberal hero to life
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
- Robert Graves, “To Bring the Dead to Life”
Graves biographical method of going from the outside in is useful in bringing the neo-liberal hero to life. It is no great magic to imagine any European politician receiving the undiluted affection of American journalists. Given an X in, say, Spain, let him proclaim the need to reform the labor market; let him speak of tax cuts; set him up before audiences of working men, where he can frankly tell them he means to attack their standards of living – and they will applaud him fiercely, of course. Let him say that we have a few things to learn from America. And let him praise the free market, and let him be frank. Among the journalists who write of Spain, then, the story will soon form itself: of how our X is gaining popularity; of how our X is going to effect a revolution; of his humble origins and of his great future. If X is a woman, she may be Spain’s Maggie Thatcher; if a man, Spain’s Tony Blair.
In “Waiting for Sarko”, the Atlantic Magazine’s September love letter to France’s interior minister, Sarkozy, the elements are laid out precisely as with the mythical X. It is important that the neo-liberal hero be a kind of outsider – Merkel being a woman from East Germany was perfect for that part. Sarkozy is “The middle son of a bourgeois Hungarian immigrant in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.” If the X is from a powerful, insider family, like Chalabi, well emphasize that the family was exiled, dispersed, broken up, impoverished. This is important, because the Neo-liberal hero’s act is to take money from the working class and give that money to the rich. As countless fairy tales have taught us, such people are villains – Sheriffs of Nottingham and the like. If we are going to reverse the moral brunt of the fairy tale with our new, reformed fairy tale, it is best to view the working class as a special interest – and the institutions that have grown up around the social welfare model as insiders, while the corps of upper management, in this tale, becomes a band of Merry Men. This is a sort of hard switch to make, so it is best to make it all at once.
And then there is Sarkozy’s proclaimed affection for the American model. A courageous politician to proclaim such a thing in “an anti-American” country like France – but our neo-liberal hero, having read his Ayn Rand, is an individualist:
“"Where do we get off looking down our noses at countries that have half the unemployment rate we do?" he said matter-of-factly to an audience of students at the Dauphine campus of the University of Paris in May. "Don't we have an interest in looking for models elsewhere? We don't know how to do everything. Voila. I've said it. We might have something to learn."
The students burst into hurrahs. "I said it," Sarkozy pressed on through the clamor, "and if I say it, it is because I believe it profoundly. A little benchmarking, as you say here at Dauphine, wouldn't hurt.”
Yes, indeed, French students, radical lefties all, applauded the man like mad. But wait, what is this about benchmarking? Oh, the Dauphine campus is the University’s Business school. So, business students applauded him like mad about – increasing their chances for wealth and power.
The neo-liberal hero cannot, however, look entirely like Reagan or Thatcher in the American press, since the audience might be composed of some few who don’t regard Reagan and Thatcher as the highest elevations of the human spirit in its struggle to the stars. So he is most safely seen as that most approved of all the animals on Noah’s ark, the Centrist Democrat:
“Like Godot, Sarko is what you want him to be, and there are plenty who are skeptical that he is any different, or holds any different convictions, from the rest of the French political class. By French standards he is a man of the right, which would place him on the middle-left in the United States. Where Chirac is an ardent Gaullist, Sarkozy is described as an "Atlanticist." He talks a modestly free-market line and is often savage about the cuckooland of French labor law and even the sorry state of the French work ethic. These views may explain why, according to the rumor mills here, Sarkozy is beloved of the Bush administration--the kiss of death, of course, for a French politician.”
That a rightwing leader would savage French labor law – a cuckooland compared to the cool American alternative, which is a race for the minimum wage and the bankruptcy court in which the corporation can purge itself of those cuckoo contractual promises of pensions and health care – is presented, of course, as a rare thing. This tickles the American fancy, which, when not ardently believing that France and Germany are collectively poorer countries than the state of Mississippi – a rightwing meme with an astonishing vigor – is convinced that France is the new Soviet Union.
And so onto the cuckooland of the new, pensionless corporation. Today’s business paragon is Delphi corporation, which has bravely decided to throw its pension obligations at the foot of the American taxpayer. The wondrous Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday article in the NYT, “Oohs and Ahs At Delphi's Circus,” should be read by anyone who can get their hands on it – it is behind the NYT payment barrier, but those with library access should be able to get it for free. Delphi, remember, is the spin off from General Motors that is being lead by the most quoted man in America at the moment, Robert S. Miller. Morgenson puts the story in a nutshell thusly:
“Delphi, which has 185,000 employees, argues that its woes are a result of high union wages, a fiercely competitive industry and rising commodity prices. The company plans to turn itself around, according to its lawyers, by improving its manufacturing and ''eliminating noncompetitive legacy liabilities and burdensome restrictions under current labor agreements.'' Put in plain English, that means dumping its pension liabilities on American taxpayers and cutting its workers' wages and retirees' health and life insurance.”
Here’s a case for a neo-liberal hero, and they are delivering. But the ultimate plan is, of course, to deliver the company from bankruptcy. And the management must get paid for that, n’est-ce pas? So Morgenson reports on the compensation plan for upper management submitted to the court by a “compensation expert,” Watson Wyatt. It is a hoot. Rarely do you get such a gorgeous glimpse of the CEO ethic in action. Even Al Capone didn’t propose to rob quite so openly, and to use the court to do it. Here are some highlights:
“Interestingly, nowhere in the plan filings does Delphi concede that mismanagement in the executive suite had anything to do with its problems. In fact, the documents draw a picture of a company that has been managed splendidly over the years. Never mind that Delphi accounting practices are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission or that the company has recorded losses of $6.3 billion in the last seven quarters.”
The loss of money on that scale, to Watson Wyatt, shows management skills of a high order. And they must be compensated in a competitive way – one doesn’t want a group that can lose 6.3 billion in two years to be taken away by some greeneyed other company! To keep the top four execs, we are talking about $3.1 million a year in salary. Peanuts of course. What we really want, to keep them running the company like the model MBAs they are, are the little extras:
“The incentive bonus program, to be divided among an unspecified number of Delphi executives, has an estimated cost of $21.5 million for the first six months, Watson Wyatt said. That amount equals the entire compensation paid for all of last year to Toyota's 33 top executives, a group that oversees a highly profitable company in the automotive business.”
Why, of course! This is America, not some place with a cuckooland full of lousy labor laws. Neo-liberal heroes everywhere realize that this is a sort of, well, benchmarking. We are benchmarking just how servile the American spirit is.
And then – ah, you thought that Delphi was going to be chintzy, didn’t you? You thought that the 21.5 million per half year was the most that could be squeezed out of a company that can’t afford to pay its retired workers their health benefits. That is why you, reader, are not in upper management. One must learn to think big.
“But wait, there's more. An additional $88 million in cash would go to Delphi's top 500 employees when it emerged from bankruptcy proceedings or if the company's assets were sold. The top four executives -- again, excluding Mr. Miller -- would receive a total of $8.9 million of this, or 10.1 percent.”
Graves poem about bringing the dead to life ends like this:
“So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.”
Which, god help us, seems to happen not only to the biographer, but to those countries that conjure up the neo-liberal hero, and end up lying in a grave of an ersatz America, the banks re-financed from the public till, the currency collapsing, the frenzy of consumerism turned into a frenzy of unemployment. Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, New Zealand… so it goes.
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
- Robert Graves, “To Bring the Dead to Life”
Graves biographical method of going from the outside in is useful in bringing the neo-liberal hero to life. It is no great magic to imagine any European politician receiving the undiluted affection of American journalists. Given an X in, say, Spain, let him proclaim the need to reform the labor market; let him speak of tax cuts; set him up before audiences of working men, where he can frankly tell them he means to attack their standards of living – and they will applaud him fiercely, of course. Let him say that we have a few things to learn from America. And let him praise the free market, and let him be frank. Among the journalists who write of Spain, then, the story will soon form itself: of how our X is gaining popularity; of how our X is going to effect a revolution; of his humble origins and of his great future. If X is a woman, she may be Spain’s Maggie Thatcher; if a man, Spain’s Tony Blair.
In “Waiting for Sarko”, the Atlantic Magazine’s September love letter to France’s interior minister, Sarkozy, the elements are laid out precisely as with the mythical X. It is important that the neo-liberal hero be a kind of outsider – Merkel being a woman from East Germany was perfect for that part. Sarkozy is “The middle son of a bourgeois Hungarian immigrant in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.” If the X is from a powerful, insider family, like Chalabi, well emphasize that the family was exiled, dispersed, broken up, impoverished. This is important, because the Neo-liberal hero’s act is to take money from the working class and give that money to the rich. As countless fairy tales have taught us, such people are villains – Sheriffs of Nottingham and the like. If we are going to reverse the moral brunt of the fairy tale with our new, reformed fairy tale, it is best to view the working class as a special interest – and the institutions that have grown up around the social welfare model as insiders, while the corps of upper management, in this tale, becomes a band of Merry Men. This is a sort of hard switch to make, so it is best to make it all at once.
And then there is Sarkozy’s proclaimed affection for the American model. A courageous politician to proclaim such a thing in “an anti-American” country like France – but our neo-liberal hero, having read his Ayn Rand, is an individualist:
“"Where do we get off looking down our noses at countries that have half the unemployment rate we do?" he said matter-of-factly to an audience of students at the Dauphine campus of the University of Paris in May. "Don't we have an interest in looking for models elsewhere? We don't know how to do everything. Voila. I've said it. We might have something to learn."
The students burst into hurrahs. "I said it," Sarkozy pressed on through the clamor, "and if I say it, it is because I believe it profoundly. A little benchmarking, as you say here at Dauphine, wouldn't hurt.”
Yes, indeed, French students, radical lefties all, applauded the man like mad. But wait, what is this about benchmarking? Oh, the Dauphine campus is the University’s Business school. So, business students applauded him like mad about – increasing their chances for wealth and power.
The neo-liberal hero cannot, however, look entirely like Reagan or Thatcher in the American press, since the audience might be composed of some few who don’t regard Reagan and Thatcher as the highest elevations of the human spirit in its struggle to the stars. So he is most safely seen as that most approved of all the animals on Noah’s ark, the Centrist Democrat:
“Like Godot, Sarko is what you want him to be, and there are plenty who are skeptical that he is any different, or holds any different convictions, from the rest of the French political class. By French standards he is a man of the right, which would place him on the middle-left in the United States. Where Chirac is an ardent Gaullist, Sarkozy is described as an "Atlanticist." He talks a modestly free-market line and is often savage about the cuckooland of French labor law and even the sorry state of the French work ethic. These views may explain why, according to the rumor mills here, Sarkozy is beloved of the Bush administration--the kiss of death, of course, for a French politician.”
That a rightwing leader would savage French labor law – a cuckooland compared to the cool American alternative, which is a race for the minimum wage and the bankruptcy court in which the corporation can purge itself of those cuckoo contractual promises of pensions and health care – is presented, of course, as a rare thing. This tickles the American fancy, which, when not ardently believing that France and Germany are collectively poorer countries than the state of Mississippi – a rightwing meme with an astonishing vigor – is convinced that France is the new Soviet Union.
And so onto the cuckooland of the new, pensionless corporation. Today’s business paragon is Delphi corporation, which has bravely decided to throw its pension obligations at the foot of the American taxpayer. The wondrous Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday article in the NYT, “Oohs and Ahs At Delphi's Circus,” should be read by anyone who can get their hands on it – it is behind the NYT payment barrier, but those with library access should be able to get it for free. Delphi, remember, is the spin off from General Motors that is being lead by the most quoted man in America at the moment, Robert S. Miller. Morgenson puts the story in a nutshell thusly:
“Delphi, which has 185,000 employees, argues that its woes are a result of high union wages, a fiercely competitive industry and rising commodity prices. The company plans to turn itself around, according to its lawyers, by improving its manufacturing and ''eliminating noncompetitive legacy liabilities and burdensome restrictions under current labor agreements.'' Put in plain English, that means dumping its pension liabilities on American taxpayers and cutting its workers' wages and retirees' health and life insurance.”
Here’s a case for a neo-liberal hero, and they are delivering. But the ultimate plan is, of course, to deliver the company from bankruptcy. And the management must get paid for that, n’est-ce pas? So Morgenson reports on the compensation plan for upper management submitted to the court by a “compensation expert,” Watson Wyatt. It is a hoot. Rarely do you get such a gorgeous glimpse of the CEO ethic in action. Even Al Capone didn’t propose to rob quite so openly, and to use the court to do it. Here are some highlights:
“Interestingly, nowhere in the plan filings does Delphi concede that mismanagement in the executive suite had anything to do with its problems. In fact, the documents draw a picture of a company that has been managed splendidly over the years. Never mind that Delphi accounting practices are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission or that the company has recorded losses of $6.3 billion in the last seven quarters.”
The loss of money on that scale, to Watson Wyatt, shows management skills of a high order. And they must be compensated in a competitive way – one doesn’t want a group that can lose 6.3 billion in two years to be taken away by some greeneyed other company! To keep the top four execs, we are talking about $3.1 million a year in salary. Peanuts of course. What we really want, to keep them running the company like the model MBAs they are, are the little extras:
“The incentive bonus program, to be divided among an unspecified number of Delphi executives, has an estimated cost of $21.5 million for the first six months, Watson Wyatt said. That amount equals the entire compensation paid for all of last year to Toyota's 33 top executives, a group that oversees a highly profitable company in the automotive business.”
Why, of course! This is America, not some place with a cuckooland full of lousy labor laws. Neo-liberal heroes everywhere realize that this is a sort of, well, benchmarking. We are benchmarking just how servile the American spirit is.
And then – ah, you thought that Delphi was going to be chintzy, didn’t you? You thought that the 21.5 million per half year was the most that could be squeezed out of a company that can’t afford to pay its retired workers their health benefits. That is why you, reader, are not in upper management. One must learn to think big.
“But wait, there's more. An additional $88 million in cash would go to Delphi's top 500 employees when it emerged from bankruptcy proceedings or if the company's assets were sold. The top four executives -- again, excluding Mr. Miller -- would receive a total of $8.9 million of this, or 10.1 percent.”
Graves poem about bringing the dead to life ends like this:
“So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.”
Which, god help us, seems to happen not only to the biographer, but to those countries that conjure up the neo-liberal hero, and end up lying in a grave of an ersatz America, the banks re-financed from the public till, the currency collapsing, the frenzy of consumerism turned into a frenzy of unemployment. Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, New Zealand… so it goes.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
heroes on parade
A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who teaches at Berkeley. I was complaining, for some reason, about the ineffectuality of lefty political movements. My pet peeve – for instance, the way the anti-war movement gets continually diverted to supporting factional and hopelessly unlikely projects, thus foreclosing on allies to the right that could seal the closure of this occupation. And he told me that sometimes he gets tired of his radical students playing the ultra game, with their seeming program of getting guns and going to the hills to fight capitalism. And, although he didn’t add this, their probable real future in business, entertainment, law and medicine.
I said that this is just the kind of romantic lefty shit I hated. Especially the projection of a heroic ideal embodied by some revolutionary leader, Castro or Che or, as is the case right now, Chavez. Chavez, who has quite correctly begun diverting revenue from petroleum exports to human capital projects (just like Kuwait has done since 1964), while at the same time quietly continuing to pay the premium for those massive Venezuelan debts accrued over the past thirty years in such a manner that, in the business world, there would definitely be huge and winnable suits over the manner of their composition and delivery. No bolivarian revolution is required – just re-tooling international corporate law. The problem is the symbiosis between lender and emerging market debtor, with their neo-liberalism guaranteed by cyclical and cynical socialism for the wealthy, robbing the public till to sustain a con man’s dream of unneeded infrastructural projects. But both the left and the right, in the Latin American context, still loves those infrastructural projects, as though this was still the golden era of damming.
In fact, my opinion about the bad gas emanating from the neurotic projection of white boogey kids is itself an old clich̩ from the cold war Рsee any essay by Naipaul, circa 1970-1980.
However, we don’t live in a time warp. The projections that endanger us don’t come from the infantile left, but from the infantile CEO set. Oddly enough, nobody, to my knowledge, has tracked down the characteristic tropes of the neo-liberal hero, that comic counterpart to the Berkeley vision of the Motorcycle Diaries. And yet they are all around us: the Merkels, the Chalabis, the Sarkozys, succeeding the Fujimoras and the Pinochets and Salinases of yesteryear.
This struck me as I read the NYT’s report about Merkel on Thursday. The NYT has been very disappointed in Germany since the election. Here is how the election was supposed to go: the Germans, realizing that the political economy of America was superior in every way, was supposed to flock to Merkel’s standard. An orange, or a red white and blue revolution, if you will. Soon union membership would decline, and high tech service jobs would flourish. German CEOs would soon be raking in the chips. And the whole thing would be baptized: the entrepreneurial society. Or how about: the ownership society.
But this is the way the election went: the entrepreneurial society lost. The Germans flocked to the slow the ‘reform’ or ‘stop the reform’ parties, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left. Between them these accrued 51 percent of the vote. And this wasn’t an Ohio or a Ninevah province vote, either.
This leaves Mark Landler, the NYT reporter, with a heavy hearted task. What if you gave a party for morning in Deutschland and nobody comes? Here’s how you report it:
“Germany’s two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor.
But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.”
That “many” which obtrudes itself in the second graf is the many-headed minority to which the whole story is keyed. It is the many who think of Tom Friedman as God’s own son. It is the many who compose the editorial board of the Times. It is the many who see past the fog of unsustainable worker’s rights and pensions and health care a little something else, a little lexus and the olive tree, chugging away. Everything, in this vision, can become America, and America can become everything! We have it in our hands to distribute a universal solvent, melting away bad old socialism, and creating a new economy in which the GDP grows by leaps and bounds, and most of the wealth of it is captured by the upper ten percent, or the exciting success class. And that class, like the engine of a train, will pull behind it the investments of the working class. Nirvana and Dow 36,000 are just around the corner.
The NYT view, of course, papers over the reality of the meaning of “reformist zeal.” Reform unleashes reform in a chain reaction. There's the tax “reform” and labor market “reform.” There's the pension reform and the reform on corporate holdings. There are reform going all the way out to the horizon. What this view really means is this: a politics that would essentially junk the social welfare state. The way in which Europeans ask the question: to what extent can we preserve a system that guarantees health and retirement and worker’s rights? is of course ignored with the pretense that that system is far too expensive – on the principle of the richer we are, the poorer we are. No, in the new, competitive world, the only viable option is a politics of growth that skews wealth wildly to the wealthiest and creates mindboggling personal and public debt, as well as mindboggling inequality. Growth, here, becomes the enemy of social welfare, not its ally. Keynesian economics is turned on its head.
This return to the politics of an old capitalist elite, circa 1890, with the new twist that the state becomes a player for the corporations, requires a myth. The myth is that the business cycle is dead. With growth becoming a linear and predictable thing, everybody becomes an owner, and nobody needs those antiquated benefits.
So who wants this? Heroes do. Heroism is coupled with myth, requires it. Just as every myth generates heroes, every hero defines him or herself in terms of myth. Especially when the myth obscures a sharp and cruel desire, and when that desire can only succeed by means of sacrifice, heroes come to the fore to make that sacrifice seem virtuous.
Our current crop of neo-liberal heroes are all little Reagans and Thatchers. Their bios are oddly similar. They start out as outsiders. They talk tough, and directly to their enemies – who are portrayed as the insider elites. That tough talk appeals to the street.
Merkel has proven to be a big disappointment on the hero level. She came from East Germany, and that was good. Her outsider credentials were burnished. She was a woman, hence the Thatcher image. And she brought in a flat taxer to talk tough. Instead of campaigning like a neo-liberal hero, however, she campaigned like a wall flower. This was not at all good. She did not plug into the secret desire on the street to junk the system of social welfare and plunge into the ownership society. Hence, the melancholy of Landler’s story:
“She would emerge from that vote with half her cabinet - including the foreign, finance, and labor ministries - in the hands of her former political opponents, the Social Democrats.
Even more important, Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers.
Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries.”
Like Kurz dying in his dark canoe, one can only imagine this NYT-er gasping out the immortal words: the horror! the horror!
For a look at neo-liberal mythography in action, LI’s readers should get ahold of the Atlantic magazine in September and read Charles Trueheart’s Waiting For Sarko. We’re going to put on our Barthes glasses and analyze that tomorrow.
I said that this is just the kind of romantic lefty shit I hated. Especially the projection of a heroic ideal embodied by some revolutionary leader, Castro or Che or, as is the case right now, Chavez. Chavez, who has quite correctly begun diverting revenue from petroleum exports to human capital projects (just like Kuwait has done since 1964), while at the same time quietly continuing to pay the premium for those massive Venezuelan debts accrued over the past thirty years in such a manner that, in the business world, there would definitely be huge and winnable suits over the manner of their composition and delivery. No bolivarian revolution is required – just re-tooling international corporate law. The problem is the symbiosis between lender and emerging market debtor, with their neo-liberalism guaranteed by cyclical and cynical socialism for the wealthy, robbing the public till to sustain a con man’s dream of unneeded infrastructural projects. But both the left and the right, in the Latin American context, still loves those infrastructural projects, as though this was still the golden era of damming.
In fact, my opinion about the bad gas emanating from the neurotic projection of white boogey kids is itself an old clich̩ from the cold war Рsee any essay by Naipaul, circa 1970-1980.
However, we don’t live in a time warp. The projections that endanger us don’t come from the infantile left, but from the infantile CEO set. Oddly enough, nobody, to my knowledge, has tracked down the characteristic tropes of the neo-liberal hero, that comic counterpart to the Berkeley vision of the Motorcycle Diaries. And yet they are all around us: the Merkels, the Chalabis, the Sarkozys, succeeding the Fujimoras and the Pinochets and Salinases of yesteryear.
This struck me as I read the NYT’s report about Merkel on Thursday. The NYT has been very disappointed in Germany since the election. Here is how the election was supposed to go: the Germans, realizing that the political economy of America was superior in every way, was supposed to flock to Merkel’s standard. An orange, or a red white and blue revolution, if you will. Soon union membership would decline, and high tech service jobs would flourish. German CEOs would soon be raking in the chips. And the whole thing would be baptized: the entrepreneurial society. Or how about: the ownership society.
But this is the way the election went: the entrepreneurial society lost. The Germans flocked to the slow the ‘reform’ or ‘stop the reform’ parties, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left. Between them these accrued 51 percent of the vote. And this wasn’t an Ohio or a Ninevah province vote, either.
This leaves Mark Landler, the NYT reporter, with a heavy hearted task. What if you gave a party for morning in Deutschland and nobody comes? Here’s how you report it:
“Germany’s two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor.
But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.”
That “many” which obtrudes itself in the second graf is the many-headed minority to which the whole story is keyed. It is the many who think of Tom Friedman as God’s own son. It is the many who compose the editorial board of the Times. It is the many who see past the fog of unsustainable worker’s rights and pensions and health care a little something else, a little lexus and the olive tree, chugging away. Everything, in this vision, can become America, and America can become everything! We have it in our hands to distribute a universal solvent, melting away bad old socialism, and creating a new economy in which the GDP grows by leaps and bounds, and most of the wealth of it is captured by the upper ten percent, or the exciting success class. And that class, like the engine of a train, will pull behind it the investments of the working class. Nirvana and Dow 36,000 are just around the corner.
The NYT view, of course, papers over the reality of the meaning of “reformist zeal.” Reform unleashes reform in a chain reaction. There's the tax “reform” and labor market “reform.” There's the pension reform and the reform on corporate holdings. There are reform going all the way out to the horizon. What this view really means is this: a politics that would essentially junk the social welfare state. The way in which Europeans ask the question: to what extent can we preserve a system that guarantees health and retirement and worker’s rights? is of course ignored with the pretense that that system is far too expensive – on the principle of the richer we are, the poorer we are. No, in the new, competitive world, the only viable option is a politics of growth that skews wealth wildly to the wealthiest and creates mindboggling personal and public debt, as well as mindboggling inequality. Growth, here, becomes the enemy of social welfare, not its ally. Keynesian economics is turned on its head.
This return to the politics of an old capitalist elite, circa 1890, with the new twist that the state becomes a player for the corporations, requires a myth. The myth is that the business cycle is dead. With growth becoming a linear and predictable thing, everybody becomes an owner, and nobody needs those antiquated benefits.
So who wants this? Heroes do. Heroism is coupled with myth, requires it. Just as every myth generates heroes, every hero defines him or herself in terms of myth. Especially when the myth obscures a sharp and cruel desire, and when that desire can only succeed by means of sacrifice, heroes come to the fore to make that sacrifice seem virtuous.
Our current crop of neo-liberal heroes are all little Reagans and Thatchers. Their bios are oddly similar. They start out as outsiders. They talk tough, and directly to their enemies – who are portrayed as the insider elites. That tough talk appeals to the street.
Merkel has proven to be a big disappointment on the hero level. She came from East Germany, and that was good. Her outsider credentials were burnished. She was a woman, hence the Thatcher image. And she brought in a flat taxer to talk tough. Instead of campaigning like a neo-liberal hero, however, she campaigned like a wall flower. This was not at all good. She did not plug into the secret desire on the street to junk the system of social welfare and plunge into the ownership society. Hence, the melancholy of Landler’s story:
“She would emerge from that vote with half her cabinet - including the foreign, finance, and labor ministries - in the hands of her former political opponents, the Social Democrats.
Even more important, Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers.
Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries.”
Like Kurz dying in his dark canoe, one can only imagine this NYT-er gasping out the immortal words: the horror! the horror!
For a look at neo-liberal mythography in action, LI’s readers should get ahold of the Atlantic magazine in September and read Charles Trueheart’s Waiting For Sarko. We’re going to put on our Barthes glasses and analyze that tomorrow.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
oompa loompa liberalism
Funding note: this week LI’s funding drive netted one hundred dollars. This is excellent. When we started this drive, our goal was one thousand dollars. Now our goal is a more reasonable six hundred dollars. We are only two hundred dollars away from the goal. Is that cool or what? Please think about contributing to LI, check out the shirts and stuff via the handy Dopamine Cowboy button, and take the bread out of the mouths of orphans and widows and instead send it to LI. What did those orphans and widows ever do for you, anyway?????
…
Easeful sleep is not easy for LI. Somehow, our consciousness has transformed, over the years, from the good and faithful servant of the body to a tenacious monster out of some James Whale flick, a combination Igor and Old man of the Sea, clutching at our neck and turning the volume up in our brain with breathy chuckles as the night grinds on. For some people, three o’clock in the morning is an abstraction. For us, it is a stage in the journey to despair. Yesterday, as you might have noticed, our post was not, shall we say, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. That’s because we were falling asleep as we wrote it. Just as we were falling asleep doing almost everything we did yesterday: pissing, eating breakfast, riding the bike.
Today I am a product of, if not a great deal of sleep, at least a concentrated dose of it. For which, I will sacrifice a goat to Morpheus in good time.
…
The mighty, mighty Nurses of California – a group that has reconciled me to Nurse Ratchet – enjoyed the fruits of victory yesterday as Schwarzenegger dropped his “I kick their butt” objection to the law mandating a ratio of one nurse to every five patients at hospitals. Schwarzenegger had objected because his bottom was pinched by the medical industry, but lo and behold! now that the ratio is taking effect, turns out the medical industry has become all lamblike and amenable:
“Jim Lott, executive vice president at the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, said the governor's action in ending his appeal of the staffing rules "will have no impact on what hospitals do because they are already attempting to staff at the more stringent levels."
Last March, Lott had warned that the rules might lead to the closure of hospitals "on the cusp of closing because of financial burdens."
Kaiser Permanente and University of California hospitals have stated they have adopted the new ratios. Lockhart said Catholic Healthcare West, the state's largest nonprofit chain, recently agreed to comply.”
It would be nice if the Mighty Mighty nurses next knocked down the anti-capitalistic guild provisions that restrict the labor market in medical care – that’s right, I’m talking about the State-Doctor nexus that both limits the powers of medical care-givers who aren’t doctors and that culls the number of doctors who are put into the system each year – all, of course, in the name of quality. Medical technology has long made it the case that qualified nurses could take over much of the powers invested in your average GP – and at a much cheaper cost. Home visits by doctors are actually common in France – imagine that. In the U.S., home visits by doctors went out with the fifties sit com. But home visits are an economical way of cutting down health care costs, since they are a mighty mighty preventive weapon. A whole class of medical technician could easily fill that role if it were subvented by the state.
Such a proposal would, of course, lead to an uproar among doctors. They have a very keen sense of the role artificial scarcity plays in maintaining high medical costs. And they are very big contributors to political campaigns. Hence, the buffoonery of knocking down “frivolous lawsuits”, on the one hand, and of doing nothing to make medical care provision more efficient, on the other. If medical malpractice suits were more difficult to mount because medical care was being vastly expanded at a cheaper rate, that would make some sense. But medical malpractice suits are being attacked at the same time medical care is being tied every more closely to inefficiencies in the guild tradition of monopoly – which is a variant of the P.T. Barnum version of Capitalism preferred by the political establishment.
The Mighty Mighty nurses goals for next year? Oh, I love these people!
“The fight with Schwarzenegger has politicized the 65,000-member nurses union, which previously had not been one of Sacramento's major players. The nurses said they plan to continue to pressure the state's leaders by lobbying next year for a single-payer healthcare system that would abolish private insurers and for comprehensive campaign finance reform.”
…
Easeful sleep is not easy for LI. Somehow, our consciousness has transformed, over the years, from the good and faithful servant of the body to a tenacious monster out of some James Whale flick, a combination Igor and Old man of the Sea, clutching at our neck and turning the volume up in our brain with breathy chuckles as the night grinds on. For some people, three o’clock in the morning is an abstraction. For us, it is a stage in the journey to despair. Yesterday, as you might have noticed, our post was not, shall we say, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. That’s because we were falling asleep as we wrote it. Just as we were falling asleep doing almost everything we did yesterday: pissing, eating breakfast, riding the bike.
Today I am a product of, if not a great deal of sleep, at least a concentrated dose of it. For which, I will sacrifice a goat to Morpheus in good time.
…
The mighty, mighty Nurses of California – a group that has reconciled me to Nurse Ratchet – enjoyed the fruits of victory yesterday as Schwarzenegger dropped his “I kick their butt” objection to the law mandating a ratio of one nurse to every five patients at hospitals. Schwarzenegger had objected because his bottom was pinched by the medical industry, but lo and behold! now that the ratio is taking effect, turns out the medical industry has become all lamblike and amenable:
“Jim Lott, executive vice president at the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, said the governor's action in ending his appeal of the staffing rules "will have no impact on what hospitals do because they are already attempting to staff at the more stringent levels."
Last March, Lott had warned that the rules might lead to the closure of hospitals "on the cusp of closing because of financial burdens."
Kaiser Permanente and University of California hospitals have stated they have adopted the new ratios. Lockhart said Catholic Healthcare West, the state's largest nonprofit chain, recently agreed to comply.”
It would be nice if the Mighty Mighty nurses next knocked down the anti-capitalistic guild provisions that restrict the labor market in medical care – that’s right, I’m talking about the State-Doctor nexus that both limits the powers of medical care-givers who aren’t doctors and that culls the number of doctors who are put into the system each year – all, of course, in the name of quality. Medical technology has long made it the case that qualified nurses could take over much of the powers invested in your average GP – and at a much cheaper cost. Home visits by doctors are actually common in France – imagine that. In the U.S., home visits by doctors went out with the fifties sit com. But home visits are an economical way of cutting down health care costs, since they are a mighty mighty preventive weapon. A whole class of medical technician could easily fill that role if it were subvented by the state.
Such a proposal would, of course, lead to an uproar among doctors. They have a very keen sense of the role artificial scarcity plays in maintaining high medical costs. And they are very big contributors to political campaigns. Hence, the buffoonery of knocking down “frivolous lawsuits”, on the one hand, and of doing nothing to make medical care provision more efficient, on the other. If medical malpractice suits were more difficult to mount because medical care was being vastly expanded at a cheaper rate, that would make some sense. But medical malpractice suits are being attacked at the same time medical care is being tied every more closely to inefficiencies in the guild tradition of monopoly – which is a variant of the P.T. Barnum version of Capitalism preferred by the political establishment.
The Mighty Mighty nurses goals for next year? Oh, I love these people!
“The fight with Schwarzenegger has politicized the 65,000-member nurses union, which previously had not been one of Sacramento's major players. The nurses said they plan to continue to pressure the state's leaders by lobbying next year for a single-payer healthcare system that would abolish private insurers and for comprehensive campaign finance reform.”
Friday, November 11, 2005
Scorcese made the brilliant decision, in Goodfellas, to impose the action of the movie against the signs of the sixties and seventies, using the music, the décor, the sex, the clothes, the drugs, everything, and simply eliminating the politics. Not one mention of the Vietnam war, for instance. This gives the viewer two feelings. One is the feeling that this Mafia enclave is truly living in its own world, even as it receives its inputs from the outside. And the second is that the American imperium is truly vast, because the Mafia is living like average Americans.
So: I go out to breakfast, typical Austin joint, migas for me, tables around buzzing, here’s two guys talking about their kids and the marvels of speech their kids are inventing out of the stitching of neurons and the world, here’s a table around which construction chiefs have gathered as the GC lays out the plans for building a number of restaurants in Texas, from bonding agent to the architectural drawing to the specs, and over here two women are having an animated discussion about the passage of Amendment 2 this Tuesday, and how one of them voted against it, and the people who are against it are going to wake up. Etc. Another day in America.
One gets the feeling that nobody there is particularly eager to bath in Iraqi blood.
So: Condeleeza Rice feels she must meet with Chalabi, the embezzler who is also the target of an FBI investigation who is also the great Iraqi patriot feted by the same AEI that proclaimed, in its journal last May, that the war was over and we won – news of course that keeps on being new to corpse after Iraqi and American corpse. The Rice flies to Iraq in a surprise visit to Mosul to tell us that our strategy against the insurgents is working. It is working like gangbusters. And the NYT files its report saying, first graf:
“MOSUL, Iraq, Friday, Nov. 11 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise stop on Friday in this violent, Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq , declaring that it had recently become a success story for the strategy of using Iraqi forces to quell the insurgency.”
This turns out to be a lie, as the story goes on to report that she did not make a stop in the city at all:
“But the visit also reflected the delicate situation in Mosul as Ms. Rice - making her second trip to Iraq as secretary of state and her first trip to a Sunni-dominated area outside Baghdad - flew from Bahrain directly to a heavily fortified military base north of the Tigris River, surrounding an old palace of Saddam Hussein's on the city's northern outskirts. The area is now known as Camp Courage.
A month ago, four State Department security officers were killed in Mosul by a roadside bomb, and the city, Iraq's third largest, was not deemed safe enough for her to visit.”
The Bush strategy and the NYT strategy on the whole truth vs. lie thing are, as so often, in tandem. As a measure of the trendline for Mosul and our great adventure there, the story gives us a canned history – the invasion, the relative peacefulness of the first year of the occupation, the explosion as the U.S. committed atrocities on a Chechnyan scale in Falluja, the impossibility since for any American unaccompanied by armed guard to hustle down the Mosul streets. Your usual win win situation.
So: The same Washington Post story that gingerly prodded the return of Iraq’s odd choice of a convicted criminal for minister of oil mentioned the meeting between another of America’s Iraqi sweethearts, Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld, conferring over the ever denied and now undeniable desire of the U.S. to put a big fat military presence in Iraq forever:
“In an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, the economist said a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave a "very dangerous" vacuum. In talks with Rumsfeld, Mahdi said he had made clear he is "not averse" to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.”
Bob Dreyfus at Tom Paine, whose reporting about Iraq should be taken with a big dose of salt, mentions something interesting about this week’s spate of Chalabi redux: a lot of money seems to be going into Chalabi’s campaign for the December 15th election. To find out the sources of Chalabi money always requires a spelunking expedition down a rathole: did he get his pockets stuffed by the Americans or the Iranian or is this money he stole from the Oil Ministry, from the CIA, from the bank in Jordan, or from kidnapping and burglary in Iraq itself?
No doubt a big reason Chalabi is in D.C. and Rice is/isn’t in Mosul is that the Arab League is inviting all sides to a conference in Egypt. The U.S. has a great fear of all sides reaching some agreement behind our back, one that might well be “averse” to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.
So: The spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, Fareed Sabri, gives an interview in the Asian Times. The IIP, as the Asian Times reporter explains, is essentially an offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood. Since the Moslem Brotherhood and the Ba’athists have been blood enemies for decades, the IIP is in the strange position in this insurgency of cooperating with its enemy, insofar as Ba’athists are involved in the resistance to the occupation, or cooperating with its Shi’ite enemies, DAWA and SCIRI. The IIP solution to the first horn of the dilemma is to indignantly deny it is happening. That is, that Ba’ath members are at all involved in the resistance. As for the future:
“MA [the Asian Times reporter]: Is the insurgency creating a new form of political identity, namely an Iraqi nationalist-Islamic identity?
FS: Yes, and this predates the occupation. It goes back to the early 1990s when the former Iraqi government launched Hamla Imaniyah, or Faith Campaign. But the resistance is adding flesh to that legacy and in the process is not only creating a new political identity, but a new Iraq as well. I can tell you that many people in the resistance are looking beyond the occupation and are anxious to implement true Islam in Iraq.
MA: Do you think this new ideology can be a suitable replacement for Ba'athism, insofar as ensuring Iraqi unity is concerned?
FS: It is difficult to say at the moment. But as far as the Iraqi Islamic Party is concerned, we call people to Islam through dialogue. And at this point in time we strive to promote democracy and an atmosphere of toleration inside the country. It is too early to be talking about an Islamic state. We need to gradually prepare the people for this.”
Right.
Interestingly, the IIP is looking beyond the occupation. But they are not seeing, as Chalabi is, American oil companies as far as the eye can see, and the infinite chances for graft therein. They are seeing an economic community, like the Europeans, between Turkey and Iraq and Iran.
So: the manic investigation of how we got into Iraq seems to have taken the air out of the question, what is our goal in Iraq? The short answer is that we still hope to treat Iraq as we once treated, say, Guatamala, finding figureheads that would cover massive American pilfering. This is what stay the course is about. Or as Powell's aide de camp, Wilkerson, put it:
“The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.
While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.
“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”
Now that is a planning session whose minutes should be leaked.
So: I go out to breakfast, typical Austin joint, migas for me, tables around buzzing, here’s two guys talking about their kids and the marvels of speech their kids are inventing out of the stitching of neurons and the world, here’s a table around which construction chiefs have gathered as the GC lays out the plans for building a number of restaurants in Texas, from bonding agent to the architectural drawing to the specs, and over here two women are having an animated discussion about the passage of Amendment 2 this Tuesday, and how one of them voted against it, and the people who are against it are going to wake up. Etc. Another day in America.
One gets the feeling that nobody there is particularly eager to bath in Iraqi blood.
So: Condeleeza Rice feels she must meet with Chalabi, the embezzler who is also the target of an FBI investigation who is also the great Iraqi patriot feted by the same AEI that proclaimed, in its journal last May, that the war was over and we won – news of course that keeps on being new to corpse after Iraqi and American corpse. The Rice flies to Iraq in a surprise visit to Mosul to tell us that our strategy against the insurgents is working. It is working like gangbusters. And the NYT files its report saying, first graf:
“MOSUL, Iraq, Friday, Nov. 11 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise stop on Friday in this violent, Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq , declaring that it had recently become a success story for the strategy of using Iraqi forces to quell the insurgency.”
This turns out to be a lie, as the story goes on to report that she did not make a stop in the city at all:
“But the visit also reflected the delicate situation in Mosul as Ms. Rice - making her second trip to Iraq as secretary of state and her first trip to a Sunni-dominated area outside Baghdad - flew from Bahrain directly to a heavily fortified military base north of the Tigris River, surrounding an old palace of Saddam Hussein's on the city's northern outskirts. The area is now known as Camp Courage.
A month ago, four State Department security officers were killed in Mosul by a roadside bomb, and the city, Iraq's third largest, was not deemed safe enough for her to visit.”
The Bush strategy and the NYT strategy on the whole truth vs. lie thing are, as so often, in tandem. As a measure of the trendline for Mosul and our great adventure there, the story gives us a canned history – the invasion, the relative peacefulness of the first year of the occupation, the explosion as the U.S. committed atrocities on a Chechnyan scale in Falluja, the impossibility since for any American unaccompanied by armed guard to hustle down the Mosul streets. Your usual win win situation.
So: The same Washington Post story that gingerly prodded the return of Iraq’s odd choice of a convicted criminal for minister of oil mentioned the meeting between another of America’s Iraqi sweethearts, Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld, conferring over the ever denied and now undeniable desire of the U.S. to put a big fat military presence in Iraq forever:
“In an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, the economist said a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave a "very dangerous" vacuum. In talks with Rumsfeld, Mahdi said he had made clear he is "not averse" to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.”
Bob Dreyfus at Tom Paine, whose reporting about Iraq should be taken with a big dose of salt, mentions something interesting about this week’s spate of Chalabi redux: a lot of money seems to be going into Chalabi’s campaign for the December 15th election. To find out the sources of Chalabi money always requires a spelunking expedition down a rathole: did he get his pockets stuffed by the Americans or the Iranian or is this money he stole from the Oil Ministry, from the CIA, from the bank in Jordan, or from kidnapping and burglary in Iraq itself?
No doubt a big reason Chalabi is in D.C. and Rice is/isn’t in Mosul is that the Arab League is inviting all sides to a conference in Egypt. The U.S. has a great fear of all sides reaching some agreement behind our back, one that might well be “averse” to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.
So: The spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, Fareed Sabri, gives an interview in the Asian Times. The IIP, as the Asian Times reporter explains, is essentially an offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood. Since the Moslem Brotherhood and the Ba’athists have been blood enemies for decades, the IIP is in the strange position in this insurgency of cooperating with its enemy, insofar as Ba’athists are involved in the resistance to the occupation, or cooperating with its Shi’ite enemies, DAWA and SCIRI. The IIP solution to the first horn of the dilemma is to indignantly deny it is happening. That is, that Ba’ath members are at all involved in the resistance. As for the future:
“MA [the Asian Times reporter]: Is the insurgency creating a new form of political identity, namely an Iraqi nationalist-Islamic identity?
FS: Yes, and this predates the occupation. It goes back to the early 1990s when the former Iraqi government launched Hamla Imaniyah, or Faith Campaign. But the resistance is adding flesh to that legacy and in the process is not only creating a new political identity, but a new Iraq as well. I can tell you that many people in the resistance are looking beyond the occupation and are anxious to implement true Islam in Iraq.
MA: Do you think this new ideology can be a suitable replacement for Ba'athism, insofar as ensuring Iraqi unity is concerned?
FS: It is difficult to say at the moment. But as far as the Iraqi Islamic Party is concerned, we call people to Islam through dialogue. And at this point in time we strive to promote democracy and an atmosphere of toleration inside the country. It is too early to be talking about an Islamic state. We need to gradually prepare the people for this.”
Right.
Interestingly, the IIP is looking beyond the occupation. But they are not seeing, as Chalabi is, American oil companies as far as the eye can see, and the infinite chances for graft therein. They are seeing an economic community, like the Europeans, between Turkey and Iraq and Iran.
So: the manic investigation of how we got into Iraq seems to have taken the air out of the question, what is our goal in Iraq? The short answer is that we still hope to treat Iraq as we once treated, say, Guatamala, finding figureheads that would cover massive American pilfering. This is what stay the course is about. Or as Powell's aide de camp, Wilkerson, put it:
“The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.
While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.
“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”
Now that is a planning session whose minutes should be leaked.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Off to prison she must go
LI opposes the death penalty. But LI also believes that Saddam Hussein should have been shot on the day he was captured.
We reconcile these two positions dialectically – which is a fancy word for weaseling around seemingly irreconcilable positions.
Clive Foss has produced a nice overview of the dispatching of tyrants in November’s History Today.
Foss does a very English job of maintaining an armed innocence about the whole issue of violence and the state. That is the crux issue for us, and the reason we believe that a gap opens up in the very notion of law itself when a tyrant is overthrown.
Foss’s article ends with the current decorous human rights point of view:
“In modern times, a consensus has emerged that tyrants should not get way with their crimes against humanity but must face a fair trial, not so much for revenge as for catharsis, to bring closure to the survivors of their actions, and as a warning to future would-be tyrants. Yet fairness can itself bring problems. If Saddam's tribunal decides to exercise due legal process, the case could drag on for years and could prove embarrassing for the powers who supported him in the past. Delayed justice brings real dangers: Tyrants can start to look better in retrospect, especially if the succeeding regime fails to offer security or prosperity; the population might get exasperated waiting for closure; and the ex-tyrant could serve as a rallying point for opposition. On the other hand, swift or arbitrary justice could undermine the rule of law that a country like Iraq is so determined to achieve. Much will be heard about these precedents and the complications they evoke.”
The rule of law that Iraq is so determined to achieve is a little neocon poppycock. The rule of law is, on the contrary, what the government has been running over roughshod, tearing up the rules, for instance, on making its constitution in order to produce a document to fit the American schedule. Etc.
But ignoring that, Foss’ introduction of the notion of deterrence is a way of normalizing the trial of the tyrant. Like any other trial, it points to its predecessors, and it points to that whole strain of mimicry which exerts a concentrating force on the social whole. In this way, Foss papers over the uniqueness of the founding situation. If Foss is correct, revolution has no status whatsoever in politics.
This is why Foss is evidently embarrassed by the trial of King Charles I:
“The first trial of modern times, in England, illustrates problems that still challenge equitable solution. King Charles I, not everyone's idea of a tyrant, had fought and lost a civil war, and wound up the prisoner of enemies who were determined to punish him. By then, the government was in the hands of a small minority of a House of Commons purged of any who might be sympathetic to the king. What remained of the Lords refused to cooperate, so the trial was conducted by a 'High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Smart', claiming to represent the will of the people of England. From the beginning, the verdict was never in doubt: the trial was a cover to justify executing the 'tyrant'. The indictment stated that Charles had conspired to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, had levied war against parliament and was guilty of all treasons, murders, burnings and damages committed in the wars. He was accused of being a tyrant, a public and implacable enemy of the commonwealth of England.
The King, who was allowed no counsel, faced his accusers alone. To their chagrin, he ran circles around them. Instead of replying to the charges, he attacked the authority of the court. He claimed that the tribunal was illegitimate, unrepresentative of the people or parliament, and that it had no right to try him. To accept the legality of the court, he claimed, would in itself be a violation of the laws. Charles turned the table on his accusers by maintaining that he was himself defending the liberties of the English people by resisting arbitrary power. Although the judges had no ready answers, the king was found guilty and executed, all in the course of ten days in January 1649.”
The execution of the king was the root out of which the liberal order in England formed, with all its contradictions, cruelties, and advantages. It is rather like the nursery rhyme, London Bridge is falling down.
London Bridge has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down,
London Bridge has fallen down, my fair lady!
Build it up with lime and stone ...
Stone and lime would wash away ...
Build it up with iron bars ...
Iron bars would bend and break ...
Get a watch to watch all night ...
Suppose the watch should fall asleep? ...
Get a dog to bark all night ...
Suppose the dog should get a bone? ...
Get a cock to crow all night ...
Suppose the cock should fly away? ...
What has this poor prisoner done? ...
Off to prison she must go.
My fair lady!
As many an excavation of old bridges have shown (and as Frazier made a point of in The Golden Bough) a victim – a poor prisoner – was often entombed in the bridge’s foundation to appease the river god. That’s as good an image as any for the state. In the revolutionary moment, there is, properly, no state, a fact that has been pointed out by every tyrant ever tried, from good Charles I to bad Nicolas Ceausescu. Was it Deleuze who speaks of the making of the state as a lightning like act? The state begins with a dazzling suddenness. And its post-revolutionary structural stability depends upon having sacrificed the right victims to the people: those tyrannical bodies entombed in the foundation. This is why a trial should be swift, if trial there is to be. Foss’ mention of trials that linger on and on – he uses the example of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian dictator who eventually escaped his trial.
What does it mean when the lightning like moment doesn’t happen? Foss’ model, which would make the trial of the tyrant like any other, would make this situation like any other in which a murder is unsolved. But if the state’s legitimacy is bound up in the death of the tyrant, then it is not simply a question of precedent – it is a question of the state’s own history. In essence, the moment of the non-trial is the moment in which the state embraces its earlier form. At that moment, the regime of abuse begins to contaminate the state’s own claimed renewal. There’s nothing inevitable about this. Chile may well continue to exist as a democracy without putting Pinochet to death. But there is something extremely hazardous about this. The collapse of Argentina in 2000 is linked not only to the incautious embrace of the bogus dictates of neo-liberalism, but the thousand uncut ties to the military regime that preceded Menem.
Now, LI does try to avoid the bloodless bloody rhetoric that comes up wherever politics is talked about – the glee in jailing people, cutting off their heads, raping them, which fills the comments of blogs on both the left and the right. Politics is and always will be partly entertainment – and glee is one of the emotions that part of it is supposed to arouse. But glee is a dangerous, lynch-y thing, and I am as afraid of it as any person with common sense. So I am not quite comfortable about the ideas I’ve traced above. Yet I do not think that the revolutionary moment is merely a figment of the overheated student libido. It has a real historical existence. That the American Revolution did not require George III’s head was a matter of contingency – the spatial separation of America and England – rather than any principle. In principle, the founding fathers would no doubt have had to execute him, if George III had incautiously ensconced himself on these shores.
We reconcile these two positions dialectically – which is a fancy word for weaseling around seemingly irreconcilable positions.
Clive Foss has produced a nice overview of the dispatching of tyrants in November’s History Today.
Foss does a very English job of maintaining an armed innocence about the whole issue of violence and the state. That is the crux issue for us, and the reason we believe that a gap opens up in the very notion of law itself when a tyrant is overthrown.
Foss’s article ends with the current decorous human rights point of view:
“In modern times, a consensus has emerged that tyrants should not get way with their crimes against humanity but must face a fair trial, not so much for revenge as for catharsis, to bring closure to the survivors of their actions, and as a warning to future would-be tyrants. Yet fairness can itself bring problems. If Saddam's tribunal decides to exercise due legal process, the case could drag on for years and could prove embarrassing for the powers who supported him in the past. Delayed justice brings real dangers: Tyrants can start to look better in retrospect, especially if the succeeding regime fails to offer security or prosperity; the population might get exasperated waiting for closure; and the ex-tyrant could serve as a rallying point for opposition. On the other hand, swift or arbitrary justice could undermine the rule of law that a country like Iraq is so determined to achieve. Much will be heard about these precedents and the complications they evoke.”
The rule of law that Iraq is so determined to achieve is a little neocon poppycock. The rule of law is, on the contrary, what the government has been running over roughshod, tearing up the rules, for instance, on making its constitution in order to produce a document to fit the American schedule. Etc.
But ignoring that, Foss’ introduction of the notion of deterrence is a way of normalizing the trial of the tyrant. Like any other trial, it points to its predecessors, and it points to that whole strain of mimicry which exerts a concentrating force on the social whole. In this way, Foss papers over the uniqueness of the founding situation. If Foss is correct, revolution has no status whatsoever in politics.
This is why Foss is evidently embarrassed by the trial of King Charles I:
“The first trial of modern times, in England, illustrates problems that still challenge equitable solution. King Charles I, not everyone's idea of a tyrant, had fought and lost a civil war, and wound up the prisoner of enemies who were determined to punish him. By then, the government was in the hands of a small minority of a House of Commons purged of any who might be sympathetic to the king. What remained of the Lords refused to cooperate, so the trial was conducted by a 'High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Smart', claiming to represent the will of the people of England. From the beginning, the verdict was never in doubt: the trial was a cover to justify executing the 'tyrant'. The indictment stated that Charles had conspired to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, had levied war against parliament and was guilty of all treasons, murders, burnings and damages committed in the wars. He was accused of being a tyrant, a public and implacable enemy of the commonwealth of England.
The King, who was allowed no counsel, faced his accusers alone. To their chagrin, he ran circles around them. Instead of replying to the charges, he attacked the authority of the court. He claimed that the tribunal was illegitimate, unrepresentative of the people or parliament, and that it had no right to try him. To accept the legality of the court, he claimed, would in itself be a violation of the laws. Charles turned the table on his accusers by maintaining that he was himself defending the liberties of the English people by resisting arbitrary power. Although the judges had no ready answers, the king was found guilty and executed, all in the course of ten days in January 1649.”
The execution of the king was the root out of which the liberal order in England formed, with all its contradictions, cruelties, and advantages. It is rather like the nursery rhyme, London Bridge is falling down.
London Bridge has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down,
London Bridge has fallen down, my fair lady!
Build it up with lime and stone ...
Stone and lime would wash away ...
Build it up with iron bars ...
Iron bars would bend and break ...
Get a watch to watch all night ...
Suppose the watch should fall asleep? ...
Get a dog to bark all night ...
Suppose the dog should get a bone? ...
Get a cock to crow all night ...
Suppose the cock should fly away? ...
What has this poor prisoner done? ...
Off to prison she must go.
My fair lady!
As many an excavation of old bridges have shown (and as Frazier made a point of in The Golden Bough) a victim – a poor prisoner – was often entombed in the bridge’s foundation to appease the river god. That’s as good an image as any for the state. In the revolutionary moment, there is, properly, no state, a fact that has been pointed out by every tyrant ever tried, from good Charles I to bad Nicolas Ceausescu. Was it Deleuze who speaks of the making of the state as a lightning like act? The state begins with a dazzling suddenness. And its post-revolutionary structural stability depends upon having sacrificed the right victims to the people: those tyrannical bodies entombed in the foundation. This is why a trial should be swift, if trial there is to be. Foss’ mention of trials that linger on and on – he uses the example of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian dictator who eventually escaped his trial.
What does it mean when the lightning like moment doesn’t happen? Foss’ model, which would make the trial of the tyrant like any other, would make this situation like any other in which a murder is unsolved. But if the state’s legitimacy is bound up in the death of the tyrant, then it is not simply a question of precedent – it is a question of the state’s own history. In essence, the moment of the non-trial is the moment in which the state embraces its earlier form. At that moment, the regime of abuse begins to contaminate the state’s own claimed renewal. There’s nothing inevitable about this. Chile may well continue to exist as a democracy without putting Pinochet to death. But there is something extremely hazardous about this. The collapse of Argentina in 2000 is linked not only to the incautious embrace of the bogus dictates of neo-liberalism, but the thousand uncut ties to the military regime that preceded Menem.
Now, LI does try to avoid the bloodless bloody rhetoric that comes up wherever politics is talked about – the glee in jailing people, cutting off their heads, raping them, which fills the comments of blogs on both the left and the right. Politics is and always will be partly entertainment – and glee is one of the emotions that part of it is supposed to arouse. But glee is a dangerous, lynch-y thing, and I am as afraid of it as any person with common sense. So I am not quite comfortable about the ideas I’ve traced above. Yet I do not think that the revolutionary moment is merely a figment of the overheated student libido. It has a real historical existence. That the American Revolution did not require George III’s head was a matter of contingency – the spatial separation of America and England – rather than any principle. In principle, the founding fathers would no doubt have had to execute him, if George III had incautiously ensconced himself on these shores.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
giddy nurses for us
The moronic inferno won in my state yesterday. The sick breath of bigotry had been condensed into an amendment to the constitution that defined marriage as “between a consenting cock and a consenting pussy.” The amendment also noted, “cocks with other cocks or assholes and pussies among each other are just too God damned scary.” The yahoos, of course, went for it like a prize ticket to a mudwrestling match. Next year we are going to vote on whether dinner is defined as “that meal with a hunk of scorched cow flesh in it and only with the aforesaid flesh.”
This would be merely funny if the anti-gay amendment didn’t include vaguely threatening language that seemed to threaten the finances of gay couples, and their ability to raise kids.
All of my votes – the vote against the prison bond issue, the vote against the road bond issue, etc. – lost. Wait a minute… I think the park bond issue passed. Oh, and supposedly “liberal” Austin went for the fear of cock with cock and pussy with pussy by 60 percent to 40 percent. So much for keep Austin weird. There’s no perversion quite like the perversion of normality – the Einsaetzgruppe of perversions. It was on the rampage last night.
I note, in other elections, that Bloomberg won spectacularly in NYC. If the man would come out against the Iraq war, he’d be my perfect G.O.P. candidate for the presidency. I’d definitely vote for him over Hillary, in spite of the anti-smoking penchant. Unfortunately, as we’ve said and said, liberal Republicans have fallen into a state between hibernation and death, the zombie Bushites form that solid block of unreconstructed fantasists determining the party’s course into ever wilder realms of unreal rhetoric, and liberal Dems piss all over themselves celebrating the election of moderate to conservative Dems. So it goes….
I meant to write an obituary of John Fowles today. But I will put that in another, friendlier post.
PS – my gloominess about Texas was lightened, a little bit, by the story of the defeat of Schwartzenegger’s proposals in California. We loved this little Oompa-Loompa bit:
“On a Beverly Hills stage Tuesday night next to his wife, Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger pledged "to find common ground" with his Democratic adversaries in Sacramento.
"The people of California are sick and tired of all the fighting, and they are sick and tired of all the negative TV ads," he told supporters at the Beverly Hilton. He did not concede, saying instead that "in a couple of days the victories or the losses will be behind us."
Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic's in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger's defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, "We're the mighty, mighty nurses."
That does it. Fuck the party system, it is the mighty mighty nurses for LI! And one question: is Schwartzenegger insane? How long do you have to be in Hollywood before you realize that giddy nurses rhumba-ing is a winner? You want to be with the nurses, not against them. Elementary rule.
This would be merely funny if the anti-gay amendment didn’t include vaguely threatening language that seemed to threaten the finances of gay couples, and their ability to raise kids.
All of my votes – the vote against the prison bond issue, the vote against the road bond issue, etc. – lost. Wait a minute… I think the park bond issue passed. Oh, and supposedly “liberal” Austin went for the fear of cock with cock and pussy with pussy by 60 percent to 40 percent. So much for keep Austin weird. There’s no perversion quite like the perversion of normality – the Einsaetzgruppe of perversions. It was on the rampage last night.
I note, in other elections, that Bloomberg won spectacularly in NYC. If the man would come out against the Iraq war, he’d be my perfect G.O.P. candidate for the presidency. I’d definitely vote for him over Hillary, in spite of the anti-smoking penchant. Unfortunately, as we’ve said and said, liberal Republicans have fallen into a state between hibernation and death, the zombie Bushites form that solid block of unreconstructed fantasists determining the party’s course into ever wilder realms of unreal rhetoric, and liberal Dems piss all over themselves celebrating the election of moderate to conservative Dems. So it goes….
I meant to write an obituary of John Fowles today. But I will put that in another, friendlier post.
PS – my gloominess about Texas was lightened, a little bit, by the story of the defeat of Schwartzenegger’s proposals in California. We loved this little Oompa-Loompa bit:
“On a Beverly Hills stage Tuesday night next to his wife, Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger pledged "to find common ground" with his Democratic adversaries in Sacramento.
"The people of California are sick and tired of all the fighting, and they are sick and tired of all the negative TV ads," he told supporters at the Beverly Hilton. He did not concede, saying instead that "in a couple of days the victories or the losses will be behind us."
Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic's in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger's defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, "We're the mighty, mighty nurses."
That does it. Fuck the party system, it is the mighty mighty nurses for LI! And one question: is Schwartzenegger insane? How long do you have to be in Hollywood before you realize that giddy nurses rhumba-ing is a winner? You want to be with the nurses, not against them. Elementary rule.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
the nobility of parchment goes down
“… il est plus important qu'on ne pense en politique d'extirper cette diversité d'idiomes grossiers qui prolongent l'enfance de la raison et la vieillesse des préjugés.” (... in politics, it is more important than you might imagine to extirpate that diversity of vulgar idioms which prolongs the infancy of reason and the senility of prejudices." – Abbe Gregoire.
When LI was a young lad hitching around France, we once hitched to Brittany. We were hitching with a young lass, which made the hitching a lot more fun. And both of us were associated with CODOFIL, an France-Louisiane friendship society. Well, the town that we hitched to was quiet enough that our appearance there, plus Codofil, got us an invite to dinner with the mayor and a picture in the local newspaper. While some of the local muckety mucks were shaking each others hands and exchanging jokes, the photographer sidled over to us and began to explain that he was a member of an independence group. The group had turned its face against the intolerable oppression of Brittany and its Celtic culture.
Well, there is little chance of Brittany becoming independent in the near future, but I was reminded of that incident in the last couple of days, reading references to 1968 in the stories about the riots in France. A better date, if you ask me, is 1792, the year of the Vendée.
By this I don’t mean to imply that the massive autos de fe, so to speak, is on the same level as the thousands slaughtered in the war between the royalists and the revolutionaries in Brittany. Rather, what is being shaken right now is the historical result of that war: an official France that enforces itself, by a long performative act, on the territory of France. When Abbe Gregoire presented his inquiry into the languages of France to the Commission on Public Safety in 1794, he called it: "On the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the french language.”
A friend from Paris wrote me that I should understand a little verlan to understand the rioters. I had not even heard the term verlan – so far out of the loop am I – but quickly caught on that this is the hip hop street slang, and that this slang is a marker – it is a marker of what needs to be annihilated. But our feeling is that the old and successful system, Gregoire’s France, is on an unsustainable course of confrontation with French reality. That reality is about an enclaved population that is desperate for representation – for power. As well it should be. My friend told me about listening to Jospin on the radio last night. He has written a memoir, and is out on the book trail. He was asked about the rioting and told a story about some immigrant rugby player who made it into the political elite. It was a pointless story, from the point of view of the street. But from the point of view of Gregoire’s France, it made total sense – it was exactly the kind of myth Barthes wrote about.
To draw a practical consequence from these riots, from the point of view of the Greens, communists, and socialists is going to be difficult. My correspondent tells me that Sarkozy’s removal is not only an obsession of Humanité’s, but is demanded by the rioters themselves. Our point is: if Sarkozy disappeared tomorrow, the social motives for rioting would still exist. And the inevitable riot aftermath – the reaction – is not going to be blocked by a politics that can’t reach beyond persons.
To end on a dialectical note: while Abbe Gregoire’s thesis about language might be taken as a sort of ultranationalism, one has to remember that historical categories are contingent and precarious. Actually, Abbe Gregoire was one of the Assembly’s fiercest defenders of the Haitian revolution, a political position beyond the political limits of mere abolitionism. An unpopular position to take. So, in fairness to Abbe Gregoire, two further quotes:
“De toutes parts on y parle de droits, de devoirs, de constitutions, de représentation nationale; partout resplendissent les emblèmes de la liberté, l’esclave les voit; partout se font entendre les chants de la liberté, l’esclave les entend. Croyez-vous que ces étincelles électriques n’atteignent pas son coeur?”( Everywhere one speaks of rights, of duties, of constitutins, of national representation; everywhere the songs of liberty are making themselves heard, the slaves hear them. Do you really believe that these electic sparks will not penetrate their hearts?)
“La noblesse de la peau subira le même sort que celle des parchemins.” (The nobility of skin will submit to the same fate as that of parchment)
When LI was a young lad hitching around France, we once hitched to Brittany. We were hitching with a young lass, which made the hitching a lot more fun. And both of us were associated with CODOFIL, an France-Louisiane friendship society. Well, the town that we hitched to was quiet enough that our appearance there, plus Codofil, got us an invite to dinner with the mayor and a picture in the local newspaper. While some of the local muckety mucks were shaking each others hands and exchanging jokes, the photographer sidled over to us and began to explain that he was a member of an independence group. The group had turned its face against the intolerable oppression of Brittany and its Celtic culture.
Well, there is little chance of Brittany becoming independent in the near future, but I was reminded of that incident in the last couple of days, reading references to 1968 in the stories about the riots in France. A better date, if you ask me, is 1792, the year of the Vendée.
By this I don’t mean to imply that the massive autos de fe, so to speak, is on the same level as the thousands slaughtered in the war between the royalists and the revolutionaries in Brittany. Rather, what is being shaken right now is the historical result of that war: an official France that enforces itself, by a long performative act, on the territory of France. When Abbe Gregoire presented his inquiry into the languages of France to the Commission on Public Safety in 1794, he called it: "On the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the french language.”
A friend from Paris wrote me that I should understand a little verlan to understand the rioters. I had not even heard the term verlan – so far out of the loop am I – but quickly caught on that this is the hip hop street slang, and that this slang is a marker – it is a marker of what needs to be annihilated. But our feeling is that the old and successful system, Gregoire’s France, is on an unsustainable course of confrontation with French reality. That reality is about an enclaved population that is desperate for representation – for power. As well it should be. My friend told me about listening to Jospin on the radio last night. He has written a memoir, and is out on the book trail. He was asked about the rioting and told a story about some immigrant rugby player who made it into the political elite. It was a pointless story, from the point of view of the street. But from the point of view of Gregoire’s France, it made total sense – it was exactly the kind of myth Barthes wrote about.
To draw a practical consequence from these riots, from the point of view of the Greens, communists, and socialists is going to be difficult. My correspondent tells me that Sarkozy’s removal is not only an obsession of Humanité’s, but is demanded by the rioters themselves. Our point is: if Sarkozy disappeared tomorrow, the social motives for rioting would still exist. And the inevitable riot aftermath – the reaction – is not going to be blocked by a politics that can’t reach beyond persons.
To end on a dialectical note: while Abbe Gregoire’s thesis about language might be taken as a sort of ultranationalism, one has to remember that historical categories are contingent and precarious. Actually, Abbe Gregoire was one of the Assembly’s fiercest defenders of the Haitian revolution, a political position beyond the political limits of mere abolitionism. An unpopular position to take. So, in fairness to Abbe Gregoire, two further quotes:
“De toutes parts on y parle de droits, de devoirs, de constitutions, de représentation nationale; partout resplendissent les emblèmes de la liberté, l’esclave les voit; partout se font entendre les chants de la liberté, l’esclave les entend. Croyez-vous que ces étincelles électriques n’atteignent pas son coeur?”( Everywhere one speaks of rights, of duties, of constitutins, of national representation; everywhere the songs of liberty are making themselves heard, the slaves hear them. Do you really believe that these electic sparks will not penetrate their hearts?)
“La noblesse de la peau subira le même sort que celle des parchemins.” (The nobility of skin will submit to the same fate as that of parchment)
notes
Notes
LI apologizes for the length of yesterday’s post. I don’t know what came over me. The fascination of the topic, the two Thai sticks, what... Anyway, I’m not going to go on at such tyrannical lengths again – without breaking it up into two posts.
Also, an email from a reader reminds us that we should have linked to the Colombia Journal site a post or two ago. LI especially recommends Eric Fichtl’s August article, which goes probing into Colombia’s recent history from the odd vector formed by media and grafitti.
LI is hoping that the peak donation period hasn’t passed. The first week of our drive we collected 200 dollars. The second week we collected 100 dollars, I believe. This is the third week. We’d really like to collect seven hundred more dollars, but more realistically, two hundred more is our goal. Please donate to us.
And finally: we are not really puzzled by the news from France. This emeute has been building for some time. In the U.S., there is a sort of laughable view of France – as there is of much of the rest of the world – in which the country exists only in strobic moments in which it interacts with or can be compared to the U.S. It is rather like the old disco days, when the multitudinous flicker of the house's special blacklights would reveal a world of dancers seemingly caught in some film strip of elaborate but obscure martyrdoms, disconnected naked poses bared to eyes that would seek in vain for the old instinctive continuities. All very dramatic, especially if you added coke or poppers to your dance card, but when the beautiful people went home or to the bathrooms or to fuck in the car, they still had to trundle the old daily carcass, that unglittering young thing as material as any mop, enduring all the ersatz hiatuses, with them to do it. So, too – to escape this ungainly metaphor – the French problem with its band of outsiders in the banlieus is not especially understood from the U.S. perspective. Much of the coverage in France has been disappointing, centering around Sarkozy’s Lepennian slip – calling the poor scum, saying he was going to ‘vacuum clean” the suburban slums, etc. Sarkozy is in an uncomfortable position, since his toughness was supposed to make the car burning insurrection impossible. But L’humanite, for instance, concentrating on Sarkozy as a cause of the insurrection is simply political bs.
From the U.S. pov, if we must have one, Sarkozy not only has moved to embody a sort of Nixon/George Wallace position in France, but he also – like Nixon – favors affirmative action. Affirmative action will go against so many French inclinations that it will be interesting to see where, if anywhere, such proposals go.
However, instead of analyzing the riots, we thought it would be more helpful just to translate a news account. Which we will do in an upcoming post – the one we thought we’d translate, we can’t find. It should be noted that the state of emergency declared by Villepen today originated with Le Pen’s party. We aren’t necessarily going to see a drift to the ultra right, but we certainly will see it if the Greens and Communists stick to the chorus that these riots are about Sarkozy. This is the time to really get into who is getting educated, who is getting the jobs, who is getting the health care, who is getting the infrastructure, who is getting the policing in France.
LI apologizes for the length of yesterday’s post. I don’t know what came over me. The fascination of the topic, the two Thai sticks, what... Anyway, I’m not going to go on at such tyrannical lengths again – without breaking it up into two posts.
Also, an email from a reader reminds us that we should have linked to the Colombia Journal site a post or two ago. LI especially recommends Eric Fichtl’s August article, which goes probing into Colombia’s recent history from the odd vector formed by media and grafitti.
LI is hoping that the peak donation period hasn’t passed. The first week of our drive we collected 200 dollars. The second week we collected 100 dollars, I believe. This is the third week. We’d really like to collect seven hundred more dollars, but more realistically, two hundred more is our goal. Please donate to us.
And finally: we are not really puzzled by the news from France. This emeute has been building for some time. In the U.S., there is a sort of laughable view of France – as there is of much of the rest of the world – in which the country exists only in strobic moments in which it interacts with or can be compared to the U.S. It is rather like the old disco days, when the multitudinous flicker of the house's special blacklights would reveal a world of dancers seemingly caught in some film strip of elaborate but obscure martyrdoms, disconnected naked poses bared to eyes that would seek in vain for the old instinctive continuities. All very dramatic, especially if you added coke or poppers to your dance card, but when the beautiful people went home or to the bathrooms or to fuck in the car, they still had to trundle the old daily carcass, that unglittering young thing as material as any mop, enduring all the ersatz hiatuses, with them to do it. So, too – to escape this ungainly metaphor – the French problem with its band of outsiders in the banlieus is not especially understood from the U.S. perspective. Much of the coverage in France has been disappointing, centering around Sarkozy’s Lepennian slip – calling the poor scum, saying he was going to ‘vacuum clean” the suburban slums, etc. Sarkozy is in an uncomfortable position, since his toughness was supposed to make the car burning insurrection impossible. But L’humanite, for instance, concentrating on Sarkozy as a cause of the insurrection is simply political bs.
From the U.S. pov, if we must have one, Sarkozy not only has moved to embody a sort of Nixon/George Wallace position in France, but he also – like Nixon – favors affirmative action. Affirmative action will go against so many French inclinations that it will be interesting to see where, if anywhere, such proposals go.
However, instead of analyzing the riots, we thought it would be more helpful just to translate a news account. Which we will do in an upcoming post – the one we thought we’d translate, we can’t find. It should be noted that the state of emergency declared by Villepen today originated with Le Pen’s party. We aren’t necessarily going to see a drift to the ultra right, but we certainly will see it if the Greens and Communists stick to the chorus that these riots are about Sarkozy. This is the time to really get into who is getting educated, who is getting the jobs, who is getting the health care, who is getting the infrastructure, who is getting the policing in France.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
rabbit's politics
Christopher Lehmann’s essay with the provocative title (Why Americans can’t write Political Fiction) in the Washington Monthly, much mentioned this week among the political blogs, has an honorable intention at heart. Like many political junkies, Lehman thinks that The Gay Place, the novel by LBJ’s one time assistant, Billy Lee Brammer, is the great American political novel. Unfortunately, instead of simply sending a valentine, Lehman takes the big picture approach. The short cut Toynbee approach. This involves him, at the outset, in an unequal struggle with language. Language gets the best of it, the way the boa got the best of the Laocoon boys. Here’s Lehman’s second graf:
“In the ever-accelerating information age, journalism has taken on the role of chronicling both the march of political events and the shifting character of the nation's political imagination. But technology and programming demands have made much political journalism far more shrill, instantaneous, and unreflective, and thus brought into still higher relief the literary virtues—reflection and depth of character chief among them—that our political fiction should be delivering.”
William Hazlitt he ain’t. That ever-accelerating information age is powered, we are pretty sure, by the hot air generated by a million New Economy conferences. As for those political events, we wonder if they marched, tubas and baton twirlers and the lot, into the mysterious programming demands, and if it was covered live, on the news at five, and if anybody was hurt. We imagine that Lehman was envisioning, vaguely, programs on tv, point counterpoint stuff, roundtable stuff, and not computer programmers a-coding. But it is hard to know what he was saying: we only know that, whatever it was, this graf didn’t say it. This is pretty bad for your second graf.
Lehmann goes on to make the following argument (we think): a person who is engaged in some political job has a better chance at representing the march of political events, sugarcoated with literary virtues, than a person who is, say, a proctologist. Lehman uses Orwell as an example.
“[1984’s] continued relevance was more than a function of Orwell's imaginative genius; it flowed at least in part from his service as a British propagandist during World War II, which awakened in him both a reverence for the democratic culture he had worked to save, as well as a nuanced understanding of the corruptions of politics and spirit that occur under totalitarian regimes shoring themselves up with propaganda campaigns.”
There you go. There is nothing like being a propagandist for awakening your dormant reverences. It has happened to so many. In actual fact, Orwell worked to propagandize the British colonies in the Far East, which was guaranteed to reawaken his repulsions about the manifold hypocrisy of British imperial culture. But to hell with it, Lehman’s idea of that famous comedy team, cause and effect, is that they must work if you throw enough clichés at them. And that makes arguing with his thesis difficult – you have to help him to find it, first.
…
Since I am writing a novel that uses, among other things, politics, I’ve been thinking about the use of politics in fiction myself. Lehmann thinks that political fiction is fiction with a politician in it, just as a wedding cake is a cake topped with little bride and groom figurines. But that’s a narrow view of politics and cakes. In fact, it is a typically D.C., top down view of politics. A broader view would take in, say, Bellows, or Updike’s Rabbit novels.
Which brings us to what we really want to write about.
There is a wonderful instance of the perils of politics for the novelist in Rabbit Redux, Updike’s reckoning with the sixties. Or, rather, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s reckoning with the sixties. It is interesting to me that the overtly political things in that novel – for instance, Rabbit’s argument with his wife Janice’s lover about Vietnam – are oddly clunky, while the social stuff, the medium in which politics lives, is done in a thousand-fold scatter of brilliant nuances. Here is Harry in typical pro-war mode about Vietnam, arguing with his wife’s lover, Stavros:
“We’d turn it into another Japan if they’d let us. That’s all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. We’re begging them to rig up some election, any elections, and they’d rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We’re trying to give ourselves away, really, that’s all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, ‘Jesus, we’re rotten.’
“I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs.”
“We stopped, we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?” He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. “Not shit.”
Eventually, Stavros pronounces his opinion that Harry is “a good hearted imperialist racist.” Stavros, mind you, is a small town, middle aged car dealer. Updike needs a foil for Harry, and Stavros, such as he is, is it.
Granted, this was a hot decade. We’ve discovered a nice library of books about the politics and drugs of the old counterculture era which we are going to put on our links list. If you scan through them, you find a much different vocabulary in place, a rather astonishing one. Here, for instance, is the beginning of the third "communication" from the Weather underground:
"This is the third communication from the Weatherman underground.
With other revolutionaries all over the planet, Weatherman is celebrating the 11th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Today we attack with rocks, riots and bombs the greatest killer‑pig ever known to man—Amerikan imperialism.
Everywhere we see the growth of revolutionary culture and the ways in which every move of the monster‑state tightens the noose around its own neck."
And this is from Kirkpatrick Sale's book on the SDS,from 1970:
"Nothing if not diverse, and even contradictory, but they went to East Lansing [for the 1969 SDS conference] out of the pervading sense that SDS, coming off a triumphant year (its deficiencies unknown or overlooked after the success of Columbia), was the likely organization to be the cutting edge of the second American revolution.
In the year and a half since Greg Calvert first put forth the tentative notion of "revolutionary consciousness" at that Princeton conference, SDS—and with it much of the white Movement—had been heading inexorably toward thinking of itself, and feeling itself, revolutionary. By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued that "our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America."
By no means a majority of the young shared this attitude, of course, not even all of the politicized young. What is remarkable is that so many did, and many more would come to in the course of the next two years: university students, yes, but dropouts and nonstudents, too, and academics and community organizers, the denizens of the youth ghettos and hippies, kids still in high school and in the community colleges, and Movement alumni and adults along the left as well. The numbers are impossible to reckon, really, though one cautious survey in the fall of 1968 found approximately 368,000 people enrolled in colleges who considered themselves revolutionaries and another in the fall of 1970 counted no fewer than 1,170,000—which suggests, given the character of the left at the time, that there must have been something like twice that many again who thought of themselves as revolutionaries and were to be found not in the colleges but in the Movement organizations, high schools, and the streets."
With 1,170,000 revolutionaries running about on their summer breaks, maybe one ended up a car dealer in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Still, there is a fraudulence about Stavros, a pretence on Updike's part that one makes one feel, beyond the fiction itself, the upsurge of a preemptive need that goes beyond the rules of novel's game. This is not something we feel about his other characters.
Updike is always technically aware of what he is doing. So it is a fair question to ask if the clunkiness of the overt political parts is intentional. In Self-Consciousness, Updike writes about his own obsession with Vietnam (vide this letter, in 1967, to the New York Times, which is echoed in Harry's speeches). The war and the protests against the war made him feel excluded from the club of writers, the majority of whom took an anti-Vietnam war tilt. On Updike’s account, he would go to parties and dominate discussions with defenses of the war. It wasn’t that he planned to dominate the discussion, or knew he was doing it – he simply couldn’t shut up, and he couldn’t sense, while he was speaking, time going by or attention being strained. I’ve known that feeling myself. His wife would point this out to him. Philip Roth once pointed this out to him. But Updike kept doing it.
Updike felt that there was a connection between defending the war and his very language – or rather, the way he spoke. The way he stuttered. The helplessness of knowing he was right and not being able to convince people he was right, not even his wife, reproduced the more intimate feeling of not being able to speak because speech itself is the obstacle. To lie there in the dark coffin, one’s tongue paralyzed, is the writer’s nightmare, maybe the nightmare out of which a certain kind of writer emerges. And we all know that out of this dilemma of being right, of being obviously right, and being surrounded by people who are obviously wrong, and who preen themselves on their erroneous opinions, there arises a familiar pattern: first the feeling of righteousness is coupled with the feeling of impotence, then the feeling that one is being held back, unfairly, generates an image of those enemies all around whose fault it is that one is being unfairly held back, then a politics that is fueled by denunciation of those who are unfairly holding one back becomes wholly shaped by denunciation until denunciation is self-justifying – all of which leads to talk radio politics. Rabbit’s speech about Vietnam, the defensiveness of it, the use of caricatures of the kind of speech he feels is being attributed to him by opponents unknown, those ghost quotes that clog his speech, the talk of the enemy, the snobbishness of the enemy, it eerily echoes the kind of talk radio style that appeared, fifteen years latter. Updike catches a genuine something in the air. The genealogy of this style would take us through Rabbit, through Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, through the thrombosis of that rotten egg laid by the new left, Identity politics, all the way up to the default political blogger style of perpetual mutually armed destruction, nuclear exchanges every day.
There is a way of talking about fiction that assumes that fiction is just about getting a reflection, that it does not intervene on reality, that it exists in an oddly self-erased space. Myself, I like to think of a comment of Proust’s to the effect that Balzac’s nobility, unreal when he created it, was realized after Balzac died – the sum total of his Human Comedy was to create the template upon which the Second Empire’s nobility modeled itself. Style, in other words, has an effect on history. This is why you have to break the mirror writing fiction, shift the joys of mimesis, realize that description is an act. And a particularly prideful act, too – boosting your world upon the world. Updike is famous for rendering and noticing the stuff that surrounds us. He likes to get things right, he likes to know about the light, about the way eyes shift in a face, about the way a man leans on a bar to drink a beer and how the beer comes out of the can and how blunt fingers can peel off the label while the man struggles with the usual territorial barriers to saying something intimate, about what the obsolescence of a technology does to an industry that makes that technology and the people who work in that industry who make the technology – in the case of Rabbit Redux, the technology is printing, and the obsolescence is in the use of the eye to make printing adjustments, something Harry does expertly, as he once played baseball. And something we know Harry won’t be able to do for much longere. Rather, Harry is going to have to move into the talentless economy of service, of auto sales, to switch positions with Stavros. Harry’s resistance to this makes him conservative, although his actual political position is a product of the culture of the New Deal, the hegemony of the Democratic economy of the fifties and sixties; his real conservatism, though he doesn’t exactly know it, has been bypassed by all sides, including the conservative side. There’s a quiet moment in the novel when Harry is talking with his father-in-law. The guy owns a car lot. He sells cars for a living. And Harry thinks: “How timid, really, people who live by people must be. Earl Angstrom was right about that at least: better make your deals with things.”
Don’t trade the alienation you do know for the one you don’t know. Well, it is already too late in 1969. Harry’s fierce, instinctive loyalty is to Earl’s America, but that country is slipping out from under him. That country was entering the phase of making its deals with deals, making the art of the deal the national pastime and obsession. The politics of making deals with things isn’t just conservative; it is the recipe for downward mobility.
Updike’s problems as a novelist with what to do about politics are interesting because he is torn between the most common solution – the author inserts his own politics in the fiction, devises a hero to represent his opinion, and devises villains to represent the opposite – and the more indirect solutions that respond to, well, the history of the novel as a vehicle for intelligence since James. I’ve reviewed enough of the first solution, and generally dread reading it. I usually share the usually lefty opinions of the author, but I usually do not share the idea that a novel is a clumsy megaphone through which to trumpet irredeemably crude opinions, attaching them to laughably virtuous heroes and heroines.. The most dreadful of this kind of novel usually goes back in time on a life guard’s mission to save this or that character from history, showering the chosen object with a bunch of contemporary biases and feelings: ah, the feminist heroine of the Revolutionary war! The gay black scientist working in New Orleans, circa 1865! In order to give their characters potentia – the ability to act – these novels inevitably operate in a reactionary way, by distorting the real system of production. You can’t have lefty politics, history, and a Hollywood happy end without producing utter pap. I once had to reject the offer to review a novel of this. It was a feminist novel called Ahab’s Wife. It committed every sin: that of attaching itself to a much better work – Moby Dick – as if it was doing that work a favor; that of clearcutting a spot in history for the impossibly virtuous heroine, see above sentences; and that of breathing down the reader’s neck about every fucking event as it showed a woman who fed herself well in the bloody-capitalist-and-slavery system rejoicing in her moral superiority to it. It was the type of novel that made me feel closer to Harry Angstrom. Except that really, it was a hoot, just the sort of novel Updike’s Stavros would approve of, a caricature of a caricature by a caricature, a wet dream as a moral parable.
“In the ever-accelerating information age, journalism has taken on the role of chronicling both the march of political events and the shifting character of the nation's political imagination. But technology and programming demands have made much political journalism far more shrill, instantaneous, and unreflective, and thus brought into still higher relief the literary virtues—reflection and depth of character chief among them—that our political fiction should be delivering.”
William Hazlitt he ain’t. That ever-accelerating information age is powered, we are pretty sure, by the hot air generated by a million New Economy conferences. As for those political events, we wonder if they marched, tubas and baton twirlers and the lot, into the mysterious programming demands, and if it was covered live, on the news at five, and if anybody was hurt. We imagine that Lehman was envisioning, vaguely, programs on tv, point counterpoint stuff, roundtable stuff, and not computer programmers a-coding. But it is hard to know what he was saying: we only know that, whatever it was, this graf didn’t say it. This is pretty bad for your second graf.
Lehmann goes on to make the following argument (we think): a person who is engaged in some political job has a better chance at representing the march of political events, sugarcoated with literary virtues, than a person who is, say, a proctologist. Lehman uses Orwell as an example.
“[1984’s] continued relevance was more than a function of Orwell's imaginative genius; it flowed at least in part from his service as a British propagandist during World War II, which awakened in him both a reverence for the democratic culture he had worked to save, as well as a nuanced understanding of the corruptions of politics and spirit that occur under totalitarian regimes shoring themselves up with propaganda campaigns.”
There you go. There is nothing like being a propagandist for awakening your dormant reverences. It has happened to so many. In actual fact, Orwell worked to propagandize the British colonies in the Far East, which was guaranteed to reawaken his repulsions about the manifold hypocrisy of British imperial culture. But to hell with it, Lehman’s idea of that famous comedy team, cause and effect, is that they must work if you throw enough clichés at them. And that makes arguing with his thesis difficult – you have to help him to find it, first.
…
Since I am writing a novel that uses, among other things, politics, I’ve been thinking about the use of politics in fiction myself. Lehmann thinks that political fiction is fiction with a politician in it, just as a wedding cake is a cake topped with little bride and groom figurines. But that’s a narrow view of politics and cakes. In fact, it is a typically D.C., top down view of politics. A broader view would take in, say, Bellows, or Updike’s Rabbit novels.
Which brings us to what we really want to write about.
There is a wonderful instance of the perils of politics for the novelist in Rabbit Redux, Updike’s reckoning with the sixties. Or, rather, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s reckoning with the sixties. It is interesting to me that the overtly political things in that novel – for instance, Rabbit’s argument with his wife Janice’s lover about Vietnam – are oddly clunky, while the social stuff, the medium in which politics lives, is done in a thousand-fold scatter of brilliant nuances. Here is Harry in typical pro-war mode about Vietnam, arguing with his wife’s lover, Stavros:
“We’d turn it into another Japan if they’d let us. That’s all we want to do, make a happy rich country full of highways and gas stations. Poor old LBJ, Jesus with tears in his eyes on television, you must have heard him, he just about offered to make North Vietnam the fifty-first fucking state of the Union if they’d just stop throwing bombs. We’re begging them to rig up some election, any elections, and they’d rather throw bombs. What more can we do? We’re trying to give ourselves away, really, that’s all our foreign policy is, is trying to give ourselves away to make little yellow people happy, and guys like you sit around in restaurants moaning, ‘Jesus, we’re rotten.’
“I thought it was us and not them throwing the bombs.”
“We stopped, we stopped like all you liberals were marching for and what did it get us?” He leans forward to pronounce the answer clearly. “Not shit.”
Eventually, Stavros pronounces his opinion that Harry is “a good hearted imperialist racist.” Stavros, mind you, is a small town, middle aged car dealer. Updike needs a foil for Harry, and Stavros, such as he is, is it.
Granted, this was a hot decade. We’ve discovered a nice library of books about the politics and drugs of the old counterculture era which we are going to put on our links list. If you scan through them, you find a much different vocabulary in place, a rather astonishing one. Here, for instance, is the beginning of the third "communication" from the Weather underground:
"This is the third communication from the Weatherman underground.
With other revolutionaries all over the planet, Weatherman is celebrating the 11th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Today we attack with rocks, riots and bombs the greatest killer‑pig ever known to man—Amerikan imperialism.
Everywhere we see the growth of revolutionary culture and the ways in which every move of the monster‑state tightens the noose around its own neck."
And this is from Kirkpatrick Sale's book on the SDS,from 1970:
"Nothing if not diverse, and even contradictory, but they went to East Lansing [for the 1969 SDS conference] out of the pervading sense that SDS, coming off a triumphant year (its deficiencies unknown or overlooked after the success of Columbia), was the likely organization to be the cutting edge of the second American revolution.
In the year and a half since Greg Calvert first put forth the tentative notion of "revolutionary consciousness" at that Princeton conference, SDS—and with it much of the white Movement—had been heading inexorably toward thinking of itself, and feeling itself, revolutionary. By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued that "our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America."
By no means a majority of the young shared this attitude, of course, not even all of the politicized young. What is remarkable is that so many did, and many more would come to in the course of the next two years: university students, yes, but dropouts and nonstudents, too, and academics and community organizers, the denizens of the youth ghettos and hippies, kids still in high school and in the community colleges, and Movement alumni and adults along the left as well. The numbers are impossible to reckon, really, though one cautious survey in the fall of 1968 found approximately 368,000 people enrolled in colleges who considered themselves revolutionaries and another in the fall of 1970 counted no fewer than 1,170,000—which suggests, given the character of the left at the time, that there must have been something like twice that many again who thought of themselves as revolutionaries and were to be found not in the colleges but in the Movement organizations, high schools, and the streets."
With 1,170,000 revolutionaries running about on their summer breaks, maybe one ended up a car dealer in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Still, there is a fraudulence about Stavros, a pretence on Updike's part that one makes one feel, beyond the fiction itself, the upsurge of a preemptive need that goes beyond the rules of novel's game. This is not something we feel about his other characters.
Updike is always technically aware of what he is doing. So it is a fair question to ask if the clunkiness of the overt political parts is intentional. In Self-Consciousness, Updike writes about his own obsession with Vietnam (vide this letter, in 1967, to the New York Times, which is echoed in Harry's speeches). The war and the protests against the war made him feel excluded from the club of writers, the majority of whom took an anti-Vietnam war tilt. On Updike’s account, he would go to parties and dominate discussions with defenses of the war. It wasn’t that he planned to dominate the discussion, or knew he was doing it – he simply couldn’t shut up, and he couldn’t sense, while he was speaking, time going by or attention being strained. I’ve known that feeling myself. His wife would point this out to him. Philip Roth once pointed this out to him. But Updike kept doing it.
Updike felt that there was a connection between defending the war and his very language – or rather, the way he spoke. The way he stuttered. The helplessness of knowing he was right and not being able to convince people he was right, not even his wife, reproduced the more intimate feeling of not being able to speak because speech itself is the obstacle. To lie there in the dark coffin, one’s tongue paralyzed, is the writer’s nightmare, maybe the nightmare out of which a certain kind of writer emerges. And we all know that out of this dilemma of being right, of being obviously right, and being surrounded by people who are obviously wrong, and who preen themselves on their erroneous opinions, there arises a familiar pattern: first the feeling of righteousness is coupled with the feeling of impotence, then the feeling that one is being held back, unfairly, generates an image of those enemies all around whose fault it is that one is being unfairly held back, then a politics that is fueled by denunciation of those who are unfairly holding one back becomes wholly shaped by denunciation until denunciation is self-justifying – all of which leads to talk radio politics. Rabbit’s speech about Vietnam, the defensiveness of it, the use of caricatures of the kind of speech he feels is being attributed to him by opponents unknown, those ghost quotes that clog his speech, the talk of the enemy, the snobbishness of the enemy, it eerily echoes the kind of talk radio style that appeared, fifteen years latter. Updike catches a genuine something in the air. The genealogy of this style would take us through Rabbit, through Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, through the thrombosis of that rotten egg laid by the new left, Identity politics, all the way up to the default political blogger style of perpetual mutually armed destruction, nuclear exchanges every day.
There is a way of talking about fiction that assumes that fiction is just about getting a reflection, that it does not intervene on reality, that it exists in an oddly self-erased space. Myself, I like to think of a comment of Proust’s to the effect that Balzac’s nobility, unreal when he created it, was realized after Balzac died – the sum total of his Human Comedy was to create the template upon which the Second Empire’s nobility modeled itself. Style, in other words, has an effect on history. This is why you have to break the mirror writing fiction, shift the joys of mimesis, realize that description is an act. And a particularly prideful act, too – boosting your world upon the world. Updike is famous for rendering and noticing the stuff that surrounds us. He likes to get things right, he likes to know about the light, about the way eyes shift in a face, about the way a man leans on a bar to drink a beer and how the beer comes out of the can and how blunt fingers can peel off the label while the man struggles with the usual territorial barriers to saying something intimate, about what the obsolescence of a technology does to an industry that makes that technology and the people who work in that industry who make the technology – in the case of Rabbit Redux, the technology is printing, and the obsolescence is in the use of the eye to make printing adjustments, something Harry does expertly, as he once played baseball. And something we know Harry won’t be able to do for much longere. Rather, Harry is going to have to move into the talentless economy of service, of auto sales, to switch positions with Stavros. Harry’s resistance to this makes him conservative, although his actual political position is a product of the culture of the New Deal, the hegemony of the Democratic economy of the fifties and sixties; his real conservatism, though he doesn’t exactly know it, has been bypassed by all sides, including the conservative side. There’s a quiet moment in the novel when Harry is talking with his father-in-law. The guy owns a car lot. He sells cars for a living. And Harry thinks: “How timid, really, people who live by people must be. Earl Angstrom was right about that at least: better make your deals with things.”
Don’t trade the alienation you do know for the one you don’t know. Well, it is already too late in 1969. Harry’s fierce, instinctive loyalty is to Earl’s America, but that country is slipping out from under him. That country was entering the phase of making its deals with deals, making the art of the deal the national pastime and obsession. The politics of making deals with things isn’t just conservative; it is the recipe for downward mobility.
Updike’s problems as a novelist with what to do about politics are interesting because he is torn between the most common solution – the author inserts his own politics in the fiction, devises a hero to represent his opinion, and devises villains to represent the opposite – and the more indirect solutions that respond to, well, the history of the novel as a vehicle for intelligence since James. I’ve reviewed enough of the first solution, and generally dread reading it. I usually share the usually lefty opinions of the author, but I usually do not share the idea that a novel is a clumsy megaphone through which to trumpet irredeemably crude opinions, attaching them to laughably virtuous heroes and heroines.. The most dreadful of this kind of novel usually goes back in time on a life guard’s mission to save this or that character from history, showering the chosen object with a bunch of contemporary biases and feelings: ah, the feminist heroine of the Revolutionary war! The gay black scientist working in New Orleans, circa 1865! In order to give their characters potentia – the ability to act – these novels inevitably operate in a reactionary way, by distorting the real system of production. You can’t have lefty politics, history, and a Hollywood happy end without producing utter pap. I once had to reject the offer to review a novel of this. It was a feminist novel called Ahab’s Wife. It committed every sin: that of attaching itself to a much better work – Moby Dick – as if it was doing that work a favor; that of clearcutting a spot in history for the impossibly virtuous heroine, see above sentences; and that of breathing down the reader’s neck about every fucking event as it showed a woman who fed herself well in the bloody-capitalist-and-slavery system rejoicing in her moral superiority to it. It was the type of novel that made me feel closer to Harry Angstrom. Except that really, it was a hoot, just the sort of novel Updike’s Stavros would approve of, a caricature of a caricature by a caricature, a wet dream as a moral parable.
Friday, November 04, 2005
where does that money go to?
LI didn’t know what story to go for this morning. The one in the Telegraph about the Japanese schoolgirl whose livejournal blog was extra, extra special – it recorded her experiment in poisoning her mother? (best graf in the story: "She is said to have kept severed body parts of animals in her room,including a cat's head. Teachers from her school told the Japanese media that she seemed to be a serious student, intense but otherwise apparently normal.")
Or the story in the Guardian of the French director who discovered Valerie Paradis. He is currently being sued by four actresses. This director’s idea was to rehearse the erotic atmosphere of his upcoming film by inviting actresses to come to his apartment, or to go to restaurants with him, and masturbate. Sometimes, he was so caught up in his art that he masturbated too. This is known in some circles as non-consensual sex. The director, of course, views it as artistic license.
But instead, in honor of the President’s triumphal tour of Argentine beach property, a quiz. In what country is the current president trying to extend his term of office beyond the current limit set by the constitution, and has made suspicious deals with a number of paramilitary groups; has seen presidential candidates critical of the corruption of the system kidnapped; and in which, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, “media outlets and journalists across the country routinely censor themselves in fear of physical retaliation from all sides in the nation's conflict." No, it isn’t the Washington Post’s current bete noire and the Pentagon’s mock opponent in invasion exercises, Venezuela, but our biggest ally and buddy in Latin America, Colombia!
Ah, Colombia. Somehow, Uribe’s drive to succeed himself hasn’t turned up D.C.’s “wants to be a dictator” theme – I wonder why? Could it be that Uribe, as the most ardent proponent of free trade in the continent, just doesn’t count as a dictator? It is the Washington Consensus on Freedom: as long as American corporations can make plenty of money, the country must be free. Free as the wind blows! This Nation article describes the surface of what is happening in Colombia. Uribe substitutes violence by the FARC and the paramilitaries with violence by the state.
FARC is the other side of this bad penny. In the U.S., the type of ferocious lefty who longs for the immediate overthrow of capitalism with maximum ultraviolence is usually a harmless drudge, prone to vegetarian restaurants and high, unintelligible bouts of theorizing. Unfortunately, in Colombia, the type metastasized into FARC, dedicated to mindless, mindboggling violence and a sort of ghastly, Marxy rhetoric wholly detached from reality entirely in line with a strain in Latin American leftism examined by Jorge Casteneda in his book, Utopia disarmed. FARC has imposed its reality – that of the mafia – on the regions that it holds. And in its infinite wisdom it has operated as the infantile left hand of the Colombian establishment by destroying viable critics of that establishment.
One of whom was Ingrid Betancourt. Because Betancourt spent quite a lot of time in Paris, the French are more involved with her case.
On February 23, 2002, Betancourt was campaigning for the presidency. Her campaign theme was directed against the massive tissue of corruption brought into the state by decades of narcotrafficking. This is a theme that cuts across ideological lines – both FARC and the rightwing paramilitaries depend on coca money. On that date, she and her campaign director, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped by FARC. They have not be seen since, except in videos. Two weeks ago, there was a evening dedicated to her support in a Parisian theater, attended, in part, by French journalists who had been held hostage in Iraq.
It goes without saying that Uribe hasn’t lifted a hand to negotiate for Betancourt’s release. The man who arranged for the amnesty of thousands of rightwing paramilitaries, and among some of Colombia’s biggest drugdealers, has declared that he won’t lower himself to negotiating with FARC.
It should be noted that the structure of the elements at play in the Uribe episode are not unique. The American position in this hemisphere is conditioned by paradoxes: on the one hand, the U.S. is the biggest consumer of cocaine; on the other hand, we are the biggest suppressor of it. On the one hand, the U.S. is the biggest advocate of free trade; on the other hand, in those countries with a large illicit drug sector, the biggest beneficiaries of free trade will tend to be in the illicit drug business. Thus it happens that the U.S. spends 3 billion per year in Colombia to wipe out Farc in the name of wiping out the drug trade while the act of wiping out Farc benefits the paramilitaries who largely control the drug trade. Uribe’s position, then, is somewhat like Salinas’ in the early nineties. Salinas’ family had longstanding ties with the Gulf cartels. Salinas was both ideologically committed to neo-liberalism and bound to benefit from it. Mexico was too poor to try to really suppress a trade that, in real terms, brought in more money than Mexico’s no. 1 export, oil. So, Nafta went forward and transfer costs for cocaine – which are perhaps the largest costs to the industry – were cut. The subsequent boom meant a lot of black money from cocaine went to the Mexican elite, Salinas’ allies, and, probably, to the family itself. The American press went along for the ride, touting Salinas as an American kind of Mexican. Similarly, the American press goes along for the ride in Colombia, with little glitches along the way. For instance, it was hard to disguise, even from American eyes, the meaning of the amnesty this summer.
The Nouvelle obs published an interview with a human rights advocate, Miguel Angel Reyes, about Uribe and the paramilitaries this July. Here are some excerpts:
The justice and peace law that is about to be voted on by a parliament 40 controlled by the paramilitaries, will it contribute to bringing peace?
M.A. Reyes: No. The text, which is full of holes, doesn’t respond to even the minimal criteria of justice and reconciliation. It guarantees, practically, immunity to all the authors of the violations of human rights by labeling them crimes of war and giving them a maximum sentence of five years. The paras aren’t even obliged to confess their crimes, and can keep the millions of hectares of land they’ve stolen! Without even speaking of the drug trade, that they can now pursue on a larger scale.
Is it true that the paramilitaries are beginning to occupy certain sections of Bogota?
M. A. Reyes. – Yes. The mayor has denounced their presence in the worst suburbs of the capital, where numerous refugees which have fled combat. You can see armed men controlling people’s papers. The paramilitaries recuit bands of young delinquents who become their killers, their sicarios, charged with liquidating any known opponent. Besides which, they don’t conceal their plan of founding a political party to support Uribe.”
.
Hey, voice in the wilderness time. You are not going to read a bunch of article in the Washington Post about Uribe – not yet. The election, and then the collapse, will come, and – in retrospect – some word will leak out about the fact that the U.S. has spent 3 billion dollars per annum in drug fighting money to protect a narco-aristocracy. So it went in the nineties in Mexico, so it goes today in Colombia. Meanwhile, let’s develop those plans to invade our very scary enemy, Venezuela. And please, more newspaper editorials about the tragic democracy deficit there. We just can’t get enough.
Or the story in the Guardian of the French director who discovered Valerie Paradis. He is currently being sued by four actresses. This director’s idea was to rehearse the erotic atmosphere of his upcoming film by inviting actresses to come to his apartment, or to go to restaurants with him, and masturbate. Sometimes, he was so caught up in his art that he masturbated too. This is known in some circles as non-consensual sex. The director, of course, views it as artistic license.
But instead, in honor of the President’s triumphal tour of Argentine beach property, a quiz. In what country is the current president trying to extend his term of office beyond the current limit set by the constitution, and has made suspicious deals with a number of paramilitary groups; has seen presidential candidates critical of the corruption of the system kidnapped; and in which, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, “media outlets and journalists across the country routinely censor themselves in fear of physical retaliation from all sides in the nation's conflict." No, it isn’t the Washington Post’s current bete noire and the Pentagon’s mock opponent in invasion exercises, Venezuela, but our biggest ally and buddy in Latin America, Colombia!
Ah, Colombia. Somehow, Uribe’s drive to succeed himself hasn’t turned up D.C.’s “wants to be a dictator” theme – I wonder why? Could it be that Uribe, as the most ardent proponent of free trade in the continent, just doesn’t count as a dictator? It is the Washington Consensus on Freedom: as long as American corporations can make plenty of money, the country must be free. Free as the wind blows! This Nation article describes the surface of what is happening in Colombia. Uribe substitutes violence by the FARC and the paramilitaries with violence by the state.
FARC is the other side of this bad penny. In the U.S., the type of ferocious lefty who longs for the immediate overthrow of capitalism with maximum ultraviolence is usually a harmless drudge, prone to vegetarian restaurants and high, unintelligible bouts of theorizing. Unfortunately, in Colombia, the type metastasized into FARC, dedicated to mindless, mindboggling violence and a sort of ghastly, Marxy rhetoric wholly detached from reality entirely in line with a strain in Latin American leftism examined by Jorge Casteneda in his book, Utopia disarmed. FARC has imposed its reality – that of the mafia – on the regions that it holds. And in its infinite wisdom it has operated as the infantile left hand of the Colombian establishment by destroying viable critics of that establishment.
One of whom was Ingrid Betancourt. Because Betancourt spent quite a lot of time in Paris, the French are more involved with her case.
On February 23, 2002, Betancourt was campaigning for the presidency. Her campaign theme was directed against the massive tissue of corruption brought into the state by decades of narcotrafficking. This is a theme that cuts across ideological lines – both FARC and the rightwing paramilitaries depend on coca money. On that date, she and her campaign director, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped by FARC. They have not be seen since, except in videos. Two weeks ago, there was a evening dedicated to her support in a Parisian theater, attended, in part, by French journalists who had been held hostage in Iraq.
It goes without saying that Uribe hasn’t lifted a hand to negotiate for Betancourt’s release. The man who arranged for the amnesty of thousands of rightwing paramilitaries, and among some of Colombia’s biggest drugdealers, has declared that he won’t lower himself to negotiating with FARC.
It should be noted that the structure of the elements at play in the Uribe episode are not unique. The American position in this hemisphere is conditioned by paradoxes: on the one hand, the U.S. is the biggest consumer of cocaine; on the other hand, we are the biggest suppressor of it. On the one hand, the U.S. is the biggest advocate of free trade; on the other hand, in those countries with a large illicit drug sector, the biggest beneficiaries of free trade will tend to be in the illicit drug business. Thus it happens that the U.S. spends 3 billion per year in Colombia to wipe out Farc in the name of wiping out the drug trade while the act of wiping out Farc benefits the paramilitaries who largely control the drug trade. Uribe’s position, then, is somewhat like Salinas’ in the early nineties. Salinas’ family had longstanding ties with the Gulf cartels. Salinas was both ideologically committed to neo-liberalism and bound to benefit from it. Mexico was too poor to try to really suppress a trade that, in real terms, brought in more money than Mexico’s no. 1 export, oil. So, Nafta went forward and transfer costs for cocaine – which are perhaps the largest costs to the industry – were cut. The subsequent boom meant a lot of black money from cocaine went to the Mexican elite, Salinas’ allies, and, probably, to the family itself. The American press went along for the ride, touting Salinas as an American kind of Mexican. Similarly, the American press goes along for the ride in Colombia, with little glitches along the way. For instance, it was hard to disguise, even from American eyes, the meaning of the amnesty this summer.
The Nouvelle obs published an interview with a human rights advocate, Miguel Angel Reyes, about Uribe and the paramilitaries this July. Here are some excerpts:
The justice and peace law that is about to be voted on by a parliament 40 controlled by the paramilitaries, will it contribute to bringing peace?
M.A. Reyes: No. The text, which is full of holes, doesn’t respond to even the minimal criteria of justice and reconciliation. It guarantees, practically, immunity to all the authors of the violations of human rights by labeling them crimes of war and giving them a maximum sentence of five years. The paras aren’t even obliged to confess their crimes, and can keep the millions of hectares of land they’ve stolen! Without even speaking of the drug trade, that they can now pursue on a larger scale.
Is it true that the paramilitaries are beginning to occupy certain sections of Bogota?
M. A. Reyes. – Yes. The mayor has denounced their presence in the worst suburbs of the capital, where numerous refugees which have fled combat. You can see armed men controlling people’s papers. The paramilitaries recuit bands of young delinquents who become their killers, their sicarios, charged with liquidating any known opponent. Besides which, they don’t conceal their plan of founding a political party to support Uribe.”
.
Hey, voice in the wilderness time. You are not going to read a bunch of article in the Washington Post about Uribe – not yet. The election, and then the collapse, will come, and – in retrospect – some word will leak out about the fact that the U.S. has spent 3 billion dollars per annum in drug fighting money to protect a narco-aristocracy. So it went in the nineties in Mexico, so it goes today in Colombia. Meanwhile, let’s develop those plans to invade our very scary enemy, Venezuela. And please, more newspaper editorials about the tragic democracy deficit there. We just can’t get enough.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
the LI curve
Among LI’s most precious trumpeted and sometimes trumpery opinions is our belief that the suppression of the market in drugs – cocaine, methamphetimines, heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, etc – can’t work in any system in which there is something like free enterprise and something like democracy. We’ve gone over and over the reasons that bans on consumer products that are a, easy to supply, and b., have an enduring demand are not only going to be inefficient, but will also create more harms as they become more efficient. Call this the LI curve. Like the Laffer curve, you can draw it on a napkin. Please feel free to do so.
The interesting thing about this is that the original ban on narcotics made the elementary mistake of assuming that narcotics was like the feathers of endangered species – the act was specifically modeled on acts forbidding interstate commerce in eagle feathers. The supply of eagles, and hence eagle feathers, is inelastic – making it relatively easy to ban without a significant cost in liberty (contra the libertarian assumption that all liberties attaching to property are of the same type and value). Again – our argument is not that regulating a consumer product (as opposed to a durable) leads to such harms – our argument is that banning does, banning being that degree of regulation that leads to non-regulated black markets. So our argument isn’t that regulating, say, the sale of cigarettes will lead to harms outweighing the benefits of regulation – that question can only be answered by the type of regulation enforced. However, our argument is that as the regulation leads to the banning point, it becomes more harmful. You can just see a sentence like that last one leading to a beautiful curve on a graph on a blackboard, can’t ya?
We found more evidence for the LI curve in an article about the consequences of drug law enforcement in summer’s Social Science Quarterly (class, get out your copies!). The authors of “Drug Enforcement and Crime: Recent Evidence from New York State,” Edward Shepherd and Paul Blackly, studied 62 counties in New York state from 1996-2000. They used a “set of models that evaluate the effects of recent drug arrests on
reported rates of assault, robbery, burglary, and larceny.”
Shepherd and Blackly set up the argument in the following way.
Let it be given that an increase in drug related arrests indicates an intensification of police effort to enforce drug laws. (a premise they argue for in various ways, and which makes sense, given the period they are working in – there’s no report of some suddenly new drug in this period, save perhaps a spike in meth). So – following the broken windows idea – does the increase in drug related arrests lead to a decrease in crime or not? The argument that it does goes like this:
I. Drug use or participation in illegal drug markets may increase crime because (1)
the pharmacological effects of drug use (e.g., an increase in aggressive tendencies or a lessening of inhibitions) may lead individuals to commit crimes; (2) dependency on or addiction to illegal drugs may lead to economic crimes (e.g., robbery or assault) to obtain income to purchase drugs; and (3) participation in illegal markets by buyers or sellers may lead to systemic violence. Goldstein (1985) developed this ‘‘tripartite conceptual framework’’ to evaluate the potential links between illicit drugs and crime that provided the basis for additional research (Goldstein et al., 1989, 1997). Illegal drug markets operate in an elaborate ‘‘underground economy’’ consisting of
importers and manufacturers, transporters, wholesalers and retailers, and small seller networks. There is no recourse to legal mechanisms for dispute resolution, which results in violence or other forms of crime to settle conflicts (Miron, 1999). High prices and profits associated with illegal drugs also provide incentives for others to enter the market, leading to more violence, such as turf wars over control of sales territories.”
On the other side, the argument that it doesn’t goes like this:
II. “In contrast, enforcement of drug laws may lead to increased crime when (1) distribution networks are disrupted, leading to disputes over market share and informal contractual arrangements within these drug markets; (2) disruptions in the market lead drug sellers to switch to other forms of economic crime that are considered substitutes, such as robbery or burglary (Kuziemko and Levitt, 2001); (3) drug users resort to crime as a result of physical or psychological withdrawal, or from behavioral changes resulting from ending their self-treatment of medical conditions; (4) prices and profits increase for remaining sellers, providing more incentive for potential suppliers to engage in crime to obtain a share of the market and leading to more economic crime by users who need to obtain income to support a habit; (5) resources spent
on drug enforcement are diverted from investigations and arrests for other types of crime that may increase as a result (Rasmussen and Benson, 1994; Benson, Leburn, and Rasmussen, 2001); and (6) the imprisonment of drug users and sellers takes prison cells that are in short supply, resulting in the early release of other criminals, prison overcrowding, or new prison construction.
Other crimes can be expected to increase due to lower rates of incarceration and because the resources used to expand prison capacity could have been used for other purposes (Kuziemko and Levitt, 2001).”
Those with a sufficiently dialectical turn of mind can see that this dichotomy doesn’t correspond, point for point, with our own argument about the effects of drug banning. Our argument would predict that black markets would form and reform on a cycle of violence – violence being an ultimately economic regulatory resource precisely because it doesn’t have to remain at a constantly high level. Violence, in other words, seeks an equilibrium too.
However – who cares? On with the show. What will emerge behind curtain no. I or curtain no. II?
Are you puzzled? Are you on the edge of your seat? Has anything this exciting occurred in the Social Science Quarterly in … well, a number of quarters?
The answer, according to Shepherd and Blackly, is no. II! (ohmygods are heard from the astonished throng). Yes, the “evidence favors the view that drug enforcement activities
are associated with increases, not decreases, in nondrug crime.” Or to put it in the more persnickety, social sci terms of the article:
“Turning first to the results for the four drug arrest variables, there is substantial evidence that drug arrests have a significant positive (adverse) impact on the rates of nondrug crimes reported in New York State. Increases in Total Drug Arrests are associated with higher crime rates for all the offenses considered except aggravated assaults.”
By four drug arrest variables, S and B mean:
Total drug arrests measures the number of arrests per 1,000 residents for three types of Part II drug abuse violations as classified by the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1984): Hard Drug Sales, the manufacture and/or sale of nonmarijuana drugs; Hard Drug Possession, the possession of nonmarijuana drugs; and Marijuana Sales, the
manufacture and/or sale of marijuana.
It isn’t that S. and B.’s model is uncriticizable. There is no segregation, for instance, of endogenous and exogenous types of harm – in other words, if robberies between drug dealers increase and robberies between drug dealers and convenient store employees decrease because of increased drug arrests, we’d like to know. But still, once again, the evidence flies in the faith of the firm American faith that we can deal with drugs by banning them (and then, coyly, capturing the market for mood alteration by producing massive prescription drugs).
...
On our funding drive. Well, the local radio station has made fifty thousand some dollars in the last couple of days. LI, however, has had not a single pledge since last week. Such zippo action is driving us to despair. We are even tempted to tear up our copy of the 1000 moneymaking ideas of GREAT entrepreneurs! which we have been keeping under our pillow. Please consider us the next time you are giving quarters to a beggar. We need your support!
The interesting thing about this is that the original ban on narcotics made the elementary mistake of assuming that narcotics was like the feathers of endangered species – the act was specifically modeled on acts forbidding interstate commerce in eagle feathers. The supply of eagles, and hence eagle feathers, is inelastic – making it relatively easy to ban without a significant cost in liberty (contra the libertarian assumption that all liberties attaching to property are of the same type and value). Again – our argument is not that regulating a consumer product (as opposed to a durable) leads to such harms – our argument is that banning does, banning being that degree of regulation that leads to non-regulated black markets. So our argument isn’t that regulating, say, the sale of cigarettes will lead to harms outweighing the benefits of regulation – that question can only be answered by the type of regulation enforced. However, our argument is that as the regulation leads to the banning point, it becomes more harmful. You can just see a sentence like that last one leading to a beautiful curve on a graph on a blackboard, can’t ya?
We found more evidence for the LI curve in an article about the consequences of drug law enforcement in summer’s Social Science Quarterly (class, get out your copies!). The authors of “Drug Enforcement and Crime: Recent Evidence from New York State,” Edward Shepherd and Paul Blackly, studied 62 counties in New York state from 1996-2000. They used a “set of models that evaluate the effects of recent drug arrests on
reported rates of assault, robbery, burglary, and larceny.”
Shepherd and Blackly set up the argument in the following way.
Let it be given that an increase in drug related arrests indicates an intensification of police effort to enforce drug laws. (a premise they argue for in various ways, and which makes sense, given the period they are working in – there’s no report of some suddenly new drug in this period, save perhaps a spike in meth). So – following the broken windows idea – does the increase in drug related arrests lead to a decrease in crime or not? The argument that it does goes like this:
I. Drug use or participation in illegal drug markets may increase crime because (1)
the pharmacological effects of drug use (e.g., an increase in aggressive tendencies or a lessening of inhibitions) may lead individuals to commit crimes; (2) dependency on or addiction to illegal drugs may lead to economic crimes (e.g., robbery or assault) to obtain income to purchase drugs; and (3) participation in illegal markets by buyers or sellers may lead to systemic violence. Goldstein (1985) developed this ‘‘tripartite conceptual framework’’ to evaluate the potential links between illicit drugs and crime that provided the basis for additional research (Goldstein et al., 1989, 1997). Illegal drug markets operate in an elaborate ‘‘underground economy’’ consisting of
importers and manufacturers, transporters, wholesalers and retailers, and small seller networks. There is no recourse to legal mechanisms for dispute resolution, which results in violence or other forms of crime to settle conflicts (Miron, 1999). High prices and profits associated with illegal drugs also provide incentives for others to enter the market, leading to more violence, such as turf wars over control of sales territories.”
On the other side, the argument that it doesn’t goes like this:
II. “In contrast, enforcement of drug laws may lead to increased crime when (1) distribution networks are disrupted, leading to disputes over market share and informal contractual arrangements within these drug markets; (2) disruptions in the market lead drug sellers to switch to other forms of economic crime that are considered substitutes, such as robbery or burglary (Kuziemko and Levitt, 2001); (3) drug users resort to crime as a result of physical or psychological withdrawal, or from behavioral changes resulting from ending their self-treatment of medical conditions; (4) prices and profits increase for remaining sellers, providing more incentive for potential suppliers to engage in crime to obtain a share of the market and leading to more economic crime by users who need to obtain income to support a habit; (5) resources spent
on drug enforcement are diverted from investigations and arrests for other types of crime that may increase as a result (Rasmussen and Benson, 1994; Benson, Leburn, and Rasmussen, 2001); and (6) the imprisonment of drug users and sellers takes prison cells that are in short supply, resulting in the early release of other criminals, prison overcrowding, or new prison construction.
Other crimes can be expected to increase due to lower rates of incarceration and because the resources used to expand prison capacity could have been used for other purposes (Kuziemko and Levitt, 2001).”
Those with a sufficiently dialectical turn of mind can see that this dichotomy doesn’t correspond, point for point, with our own argument about the effects of drug banning. Our argument would predict that black markets would form and reform on a cycle of violence – violence being an ultimately economic regulatory resource precisely because it doesn’t have to remain at a constantly high level. Violence, in other words, seeks an equilibrium too.
However – who cares? On with the show. What will emerge behind curtain no. I or curtain no. II?
Are you puzzled? Are you on the edge of your seat? Has anything this exciting occurred in the Social Science Quarterly in … well, a number of quarters?
The answer, according to Shepherd and Blackly, is no. II! (ohmygods are heard from the astonished throng). Yes, the “evidence favors the view that drug enforcement activities
are associated with increases, not decreases, in nondrug crime.” Or to put it in the more persnickety, social sci terms of the article:
“Turning first to the results for the four drug arrest variables, there is substantial evidence that drug arrests have a significant positive (adverse) impact on the rates of nondrug crimes reported in New York State. Increases in Total Drug Arrests are associated with higher crime rates for all the offenses considered except aggravated assaults.”
By four drug arrest variables, S and B mean:
Total drug arrests measures the number of arrests per 1,000 residents for three types of Part II drug abuse violations as classified by the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1984): Hard Drug Sales, the manufacture and/or sale of nonmarijuana drugs; Hard Drug Possession, the possession of nonmarijuana drugs; and Marijuana Sales, the
manufacture and/or sale of marijuana.
It isn’t that S. and B.’s model is uncriticizable. There is no segregation, for instance, of endogenous and exogenous types of harm – in other words, if robberies between drug dealers increase and robberies between drug dealers and convenient store employees decrease because of increased drug arrests, we’d like to know. But still, once again, the evidence flies in the faith of the firm American faith that we can deal with drugs by banning them (and then, coyly, capturing the market for mood alteration by producing massive prescription drugs).
...
On our funding drive. Well, the local radio station has made fifty thousand some dollars in the last couple of days. LI, however, has had not a single pledge since last week. Such zippo action is driving us to despair. We are even tempted to tear up our copy of the 1000 moneymaking ideas of GREAT entrepreneurs! which we have been keeping under our pillow. Please consider us the next time you are giving quarters to a beggar. We need your support!
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
I voted for a zombie
The Democrat’s collective experiment in suspended animation was interrupted, yesterday, by a bit of Inspector Clouseau-ism. The Senate Democrats seemed to have noticed 92 Americans died in Iraq last month. Not to speak of some 900 Iraqis – because there is a difference between headlinable and non-headlineable mortality. Now, this is six months after Cheney had pronounced the last rites on the dwindling insurgency, and the American Enterprise Institute’s man in Iraq, in a burst of giddiness, had announced that the war was over, and that we won. Which was after the purple revolution had solved all our problems, which was after Allawi had become the most popular leader ever seen in Iraq, which was after the Coalition’s springtime of painting and building schools, which was after all the good news in Iraq wasn’t being reported, which was after Mission Accomplished. Of course, we are heavily editing the incidence of slavish headlines pumped into the bloodstream of the American behemoth by our 4th estate, little signposts leading us towards this minor apocalypse, where we now swim in blood.
As we know, the Democratic party leadership has responded to the greatest disaster in American foreign policy since the Gipper’s happy days of shipping stinger missiles to the proto Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by the time honored tactics of obfuscation and sulking. And as many liberal blogs assure us, this is a masterstroke of astute policy. Americans like nothing better than a political party behaving like a grounded fifteen year old. Hell, didn’t we elect a grounded fifteen year old President last year?
Credit where credit is due. As the U.S. opens a counter-insurgency school (Last Throes High) in Iraq to train soldiers in the does and donts of pissing off Iraq’s population; as the U.S. army, to the almost universal silence of American papers, opens its trial of a staff sgt accused of fragging an officer (the Independent article quote: “A US officer said: 'Fragging has not happened since Vietnam, so this is obviously something which should be considered seriously. In Vietnam, there was a disintegration of discipline as the war went on. That cannot be allowed to happen here.'); and as Cheney’s office stocks up on resold 70s era electronics gear from the Argentina’s military, we are pleased by any small sign of life from the zombie party. Senator Reid showed a pleasing willingness to question the Daschle strategy (“stay the course of having no course”) to which the D.C.-centric Dems fanatically cling. Meanwhile, the “left” shows no sign of deserting the Dems even as that party gears up to run pro-war presidential hopefuls against each other for 2008. The left bloggers like to call themselves the ‘reality based community.’ I’m going to die laughing one of these days.
...
Some random notes. In good conscience, we have to recommend a weblog with the wonderful name, Colonel Chabert, that has been doing a great job of collecting stories of the New Orleans diaspora. Following Balzac's formula that behind every great fortune, there is a great crime, the blog is meticulously tracking a great crime in the making, and the great fortunes that are to be made as the State shovels money to G.O.P. campaign contributors and tries to finish the job that was started in the Superdome -- disappearing the New Orleans working class with extreme prejudice.
Second note: we are still looking for the Department of Education to contact us for fun and bribery. They haven't. So we depend on you to contribute to this site and, in the process, get a nice tshirt. Please click our Dopamine Cowbody Movement button.
As we know, the Democratic party leadership has responded to the greatest disaster in American foreign policy since the Gipper’s happy days of shipping stinger missiles to the proto Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by the time honored tactics of obfuscation and sulking. And as many liberal blogs assure us, this is a masterstroke of astute policy. Americans like nothing better than a political party behaving like a grounded fifteen year old. Hell, didn’t we elect a grounded fifteen year old President last year?
Credit where credit is due. As the U.S. opens a counter-insurgency school (Last Throes High) in Iraq to train soldiers in the does and donts of pissing off Iraq’s population; as the U.S. army, to the almost universal silence of American papers, opens its trial of a staff sgt accused of fragging an officer (the Independent article quote: “A US officer said: 'Fragging has not happened since Vietnam, so this is obviously something which should be considered seriously. In Vietnam, there was a disintegration of discipline as the war went on. That cannot be allowed to happen here.'); and as Cheney’s office stocks up on resold 70s era electronics gear from the Argentina’s military, we are pleased by any small sign of life from the zombie party. Senator Reid showed a pleasing willingness to question the Daschle strategy (“stay the course of having no course”) to which the D.C.-centric Dems fanatically cling. Meanwhile, the “left” shows no sign of deserting the Dems even as that party gears up to run pro-war presidential hopefuls against each other for 2008. The left bloggers like to call themselves the ‘reality based community.’ I’m going to die laughing one of these days.
...
Some random notes. In good conscience, we have to recommend a weblog with the wonderful name, Colonel Chabert, that has been doing a great job of collecting stories of the New Orleans diaspora. Following Balzac's formula that behind every great fortune, there is a great crime, the blog is meticulously tracking a great crime in the making, and the great fortunes that are to be made as the State shovels money to G.O.P. campaign contributors and tries to finish the job that was started in the Superdome -- disappearing the New Orleans working class with extreme prejudice.
Second note: we are still looking for the Department of Education to contact us for fun and bribery. They haven't. So we depend on you to contribute to this site and, in the process, get a nice tshirt. Please click our Dopamine Cowbody Movement button.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
shilling post
Okay, I finally made the Dopamine Cowboy Movement button link to the cafepress.com/limitedinc site. These things aren't easy for LI -since we put up our first webzine, Calumny and Art, a long time ago, the software has proliferated but to do certain, intermediate work cheaply has gotten harder.
Or so it seems to us. So remember, if you enjoy Freshly Released Air, or the Newshour with Atilla the Hun, which you can only get on LI, send us 10 to 50 bucks. And if you are a Department of Education official looking for some shill to push that great leap backwards, the No Child Left Behind act, think about 200,000 bucks. Or if you are a Russian kleptomillionaire with tax problems and you think you need pliable mouthpieces in the West, a small oilfield in Siberia would be nice. Whatever level you can accommodate for whatever corruption we can manufacture, you can trust us at LI to be rooting, tooting, garrulous, and full of controversial p.o.v.
Or so it seems to us. So remember, if you enjoy Freshly Released Air, or the Newshour with Atilla the Hun, which you can only get on LI, send us 10 to 50 bucks. And if you are a Department of Education official looking for some shill to push that great leap backwards, the No Child Left Behind act, think about 200,000 bucks. Or if you are a Russian kleptomillionaire with tax problems and you think you need pliable mouthpieces in the West, a small oilfield in Siberia would be nice. Whatever level you can accommodate for whatever corruption we can manufacture, you can trust us at LI to be rooting, tooting, garrulous, and full of controversial p.o.v.
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