birthday greetings

It is LI’s birthday today. I am going out to some Gwinnett county restaurant to celebrate. The telegrams, of course, have been pouring in: “Little Father of the Revolutionary Movement! We pledge to die for you!” is typical. Others (Comrade Commandante!” and “Our Lady of the Sacred Heart that waters all Living Beings” also seem to be popular salutations) have been highly complimentary. What can we say? We’ve already written several poems to ourselves, comparing ourselves to the Sun, the demiurge, the snake with no name, and Br’er Rabbit.

Presents, too, abound. Last week, the White House gave us a special present by revealing that Bush’s current Iraq speeches are being penned by a man named Feaver. And then there was this NYT story that Weicker just might challenge Lieberman. Oh bliss indeed, to see Joe Lieberman forcibly retire to some million plus a year job pushing accounting “reform” for some major lobbying group of business thugs! Weicker, however, is an old man and predicts that he would lose his bout – but says something important:

Mr. Weicker, who discussed his willingness to run against Mr. Lieberman in response to questions from reporters after he spoke to the Hartford Rotary Club on Monday, emphasized in an interview later that he was not making plans to run. If he did run, however, he said he would run as an independent and oppose Mr. Lieberman solely on the war.
"Out!" he said, summarizing his position on what the United States strategy should be in Iraq. "We'd get out of Iraq. I'm not going to tell you it should be on Feb. 16 or something, but six months to a year, we're out. Otherwise you get all these mealy statements."
Mr. Weicker, noting that he had lost to Mr. Lieberman once, said his prospects in a rematch were "probably pretty poor."
"I'm not somebody who wants to put his track record on the line for some quixotic pursuit," he said, "but how do you bring the issue of the war to the country otherwise?"

And then, to put icing on my cake, the Business section of the Times had a beautifully brief report on Mr. Scrushy. Scrushy is the the excrutiating crook from Health South who finagled his way into an innocent verdict (a case that, heavens, didn’t cause the white riot that ensued after the OJ Simpson case, even though Scrushy essentially used the same racial tactics, palling up, suddenly, to black churches and the like to influence a black dominated jury – but somehow white millionaires getting off from charges of murder, fraud, or whathaveyou never really sends white America into a froth – hell, Tom Delay is using a lawyer who essentially freed a white millionaire who cut his next door neighbor into little pieces, and who really gives a shit?). And these words make us melt into a sort of masochistic glee, a (dangerous) bittersweet butter, so indicative are they of the moral blindness of those figures generated by the business culture:

“But Scrushy, who has talked about returning to HealthSouth and regularly criticizes the current management, also conceded he will not return to the Birmingham-based medical services company, which he often refers to as one of his children.

''I recognize that I will not be part of the board or the management team of HealthSouth,'' he said. ''Still, I built the company and remain a major shareholder of the company and regardless of what anyone says, I want the best for HealthSouth.''

Scrushy said he also wants the company to pay his legal bills, a claim the company said amounts to some $25 million.

HealthSouth spokesman Andy Brimmer called Scrushy's resignation from the board ''long overdue.''

Ah, to expect the company you defrauded to pay for your legal expenses – it is too delicious! It is Bush culture in overdrive! Give this man a job in the Pentagon. And on my b-day, too.

Betting is on, by the way, on whether Scrushy gets his 25 million or not, with the odds being, I would imagine, in favor of a more limited, negotiated 10 million dollar deal.

leaving south carolina

As I was leaving the Charleston area, the headline of the Sunday Courier and Post proclaimed 110, 000, which it turns out is the number of new housing starts projected in the area for 2006. Now, I have no sympathy with Southern Gentry and Dixie leaves me cold, but that headline gave me a distinctly Gentry shock. From Charleston to Beaufort, you see an area that is irrevocably changing, as it hasn’t changed since the end of the Civil War – a massive act of Schumpeterian creative destruction. That dogeared phrase disguises the creativity in what is being destroyed, of course, the human face beneath the Gucci heel. A liberal such as myself has to make a rather complicated distinction, here, since it is so easy to be invaded by a reactionary nostalgia in these dire days of the Bush disorder. There is the desire for a past system, on the one hand, and a desire to reawaken past opportunities that opposed that system, on the other. The conservative element in my makeup consists of taking seriously those old, busted opportunities, and doesn't countenance some hazy longing for a system of scarcity in which, somehow, I’d be in the upper tier. That the Gullah people are now memorialized in Gullah tours for the PC educated instead of being genuinely oppressed, hemmed in by the full force of Dixie apartheid, is a good thing – far better tackiness than rickets, and Adorno be damned. On the other hand, the imposition of a savage order of inequality that scatters the Gullah community across the landscape to worse residences while providing the glittering few with vacuous, homogenized high end shops and enormous copycat houses on private beach fronts – an economy in which the mass of us can serve the upper twenty percent its carefully blackened foods and wipe its babies’ asses – is a lesser creative choice.

Charleston did trouble my opinions about the present state of things. While I know, as a general rule, that we are getting richer and richer, being brought up against just how rich in a place of South Carolina is scarifyingly edifyin’. I remembered the place from childhood as a hopeless backwater. Now, my prejudice is that this wealth creation is fucked at the source – that a society that persists in creating a huge debt, de-industrializing, creating paper wealth from real estate exchanges, and shortchanging its infrastructure while pumping up its military, is a society bearing the classic marks of decline and fall. This has happened to other empires. But America has no center, and it isn’t clear to me that any lessons of the past apply blindly. And let’s admit it – Americans have generated a labor intensive, consumerist lifestyle that, while utterly repulsive to me, seems to meet their economic difficulties, even if it fails their cultural ones. Going through Charleston’s ornate Customs House is a lesson in how hard it is to make predictions about big systems. The place has the many columned, marble look of Early Republican virtue (though it was built in 1870) and it is completely useless. Surely its builders would have been astonished to see Charleston export more cars than cotton one hundred years later – even more astonished that more cotton is grown in California than in South Carolina. To separate your preference for what happens from your awareness of the trend of what is happening is difficult.

And so it is that we wrestle manfully with the reality principle here at LI.

patriot's point

We went to Patriot’s point and toured a sub and the U.S.S. Yorktown yesterday. And today, I read the revealing column by Robert Kagan in the WP, which probably reflects the type of tough bar talk that gets up on its hind legs and presents itself as foreign policymaking in D.C., where any idiot with a belligerent enough world view can rise to the top of somebody’s vanity project for massacring the natives and inflicting unnecessary injuries and death upon America’s military men.

This is our favorite part of Kagan’s column. Rather like an epicurean cannibal explaining the delicate tints of his favorite repast, Kagan simply oozes disdain about lesser meats in his poetic evocation of years and years of war crimes in Mesopotamia, thinly disguised with a peek-a-boo rhetoric of democratization, his like, botched and boiled in think tanks, eternally pulling the strings:

“Talk of reductions and withdrawal is as unhelpful as it almost certainly is ephemeral. For 2 1/2 years, despite the endless promise of reductions, despite election battles, scandals and shifting political fortunes, the United States has maintained a steady force of 130,000 to 150,000 troops in Iraq. You can bet that the numbers will not be dramatically smaller a year from now or even two years from now. Wouldn't we be better off, wouldn't our prospects for success be greater, if we just admitted it? Better still, the administration could explain why it is so important to keep these troops in place so that the public understands the long road ahead. It could start taking steps to increase the overall size of the U.S. military so that the sustained deployment doesn't "break" the Army. And it could stop making false promises of reductions that cannot and should not occur until Iraq is indeed secure and stable.”

That graf stands for itself, the internal, ulcerous chatter of the D.C. clique, with its illusions as to its own powers, both intellectual and political, and its ability to inflict these illusions on an international scale. Touring the Yorktown is a reminder of where that delusive mindset came from, as today’s epigones imitate yesterday’s giants. The Yorktown I toured was the second Yorktown – the first went down at Midway. The second was online in less than a year – which is an example of what happens when you attack a country with the largest manufacturing base in the world, as Japan (with something like ¼ the American economic reach) did in 1941. Yorktown’s history tracks the history of Pax Americana since, and one gets a 900 foot slice of it, from the radar room to the hospital quarters, when one tours the ship – sending a ping of military pride through even such an unlikely tourist as yours truly. And sixty odd years later, the healthy part of that American manufacturing base is oriented to the production of military wares for cheap imperialist visionaries, a sort of deathgrip of the death industries, while the unhealthy part dies in the Rustbelt or is sent to cheaper labor markets elsewhere.

charleston

The guard at Fort Sumter told the story of the construction of the fort, its occupation by the Federals under major Anderson, the siege mounted by the irate Charlestonian secessionists, Anderson's surrender, the Confederate defense of it from Union sortees and ironclads, and the formal ceremony of its re-surrender once more to the Union on the same day that Lincoln was assassinated in a voice exactly like that of the chief character in South Park, pitched to the level of a drill sergeant cussing out recalcitrants on a parade ground.

On the boatride back, a man told us that houses with seafront views on Sullivan island were bringing one million five. He said that in Puerto Vallarta, if you stand in the streets for thirty minutes someone will come up to you and try to sell you a time share. He made me feel very up to the moment, and yet I kept thinking of Edmund Wilson's American Jitters, and Dos Passos' U.S.A. Still later, we went to Charleston's postal museum. I would rank that museum slightly under the museum dedicated to fire fighting in Mexico City. There were old letters from the 19th century which posed the question, why weren't these letters delivered? There were pictures of 19th century Charleston postmasters, there were various puzzling machines with sharp edged parts that looked like they were designed for mangling and tearing postage, and there was a mannequin dressed up in the uniform of a turn of the century facteur. Oh, and there was a history of the post office box.

A splendid sunset on the beach. Many dead jellyfish.

A LITTLE BAR POLITICS

So we find out that the groovy place to find girls on the island is the Whale Bar from the man who tells us, in a voice that runs through its syllables at the same rate that a blender on medium shreds a banana, how to get to the public dock to launch our kayaks. This was after we'd followed his advice about going down the river with the low tide and found out that the man was one of those souls who confuses right with left: a critical defect in a man who routinely gives directions. On the other hand, it is a defect I share as well. In any case, after the dolphins and the weird bird and the oar manipulation that is surely going to reverberate tomorrow -- although I need that upper body exercise -- and we are driving away after putting the boat back uptop the car and listening to the radio and we hear what the SOB president has to say about Iraq. This is after I am thinking of who to compare that combination of ignorance and incapacity to -- Admiral Horthy? Claudius? James II? So we elbow into the Whale bar and find a very diminished crew, and not a very female one there, but what the hell. The bartender turns out to be a live wire, matching us drink for drink even though it turns out that in South Carolina by some bizarre state law drinks can only be served from those tiny two ounce bottles of liquor that you get on airplanes. Anyway, this gray haired guy with that expression of a man of fifty who still loves the Beasty Boys starts to do a bit of a rap about Iraq, and I am pleasently surprised that - here in the heart of Bush zombiedom -- it seems to be over even for the believers. The rap begins with Murtha, god bless that bloodthirsty pol, and ends with a display of an ashtray in the shape of the state of Texas and the bartender putting his cigarette out in it and saying, and so fuck him. Meaning, of course, our idiot president, a man who has mistaken his own impotence for a Churchillian stance.

setting sail, or something

LI is leaving for an unnamed South Carolina island tomorrow. Probably we will be without a keyboard to hammer on. Instead, we are going to concentrate on the time honored tradition of manfully downing tequila shots while still managing to stay supine in a hammock – not so easy once you are past the first two, let me assure you. There are more dangerous sports, but surely this is a very televisable one. At least as televisable as poker, I would imagine. Still, the cables still haven’t got back to my agent on this.

In the meantime, we recommend highly the story about treasure hunting in last week’s New Yorker. Cynthia Zarin’s story of the emeralds that were dredged from mysterious depths by unknown hands – although covered by a story that specifies both depths and hands – is all about the most romantic of subjects, unearned wealth. To edenically find, rather than to toil and labor outside the garden – even if it is the Octopus’ garden, and the treasure one is digging up was long ago taken from the bloodied populations dying in various mines in Latin America in order to produce wonderful baubles. Here’s Zarin’s backgrounder:
“The Galeones de Tierra Firme fleet had set sail for Colombia, to pick up jewels from the Muzo and Chivor emerald mines, in the dense jungle region north of Bogotá. By 1567, the Spanish had wrested control of the mines from the Muzo Indians, who had kept their location secret for centuries. They forced captive Indians to work the mines until, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, harsh labor conditions and disease had decimated the population. "Muzo and Chivor produced the finest emeralds in the world," Rebecca Selva told me when I visited Fred Leighton. "The mines are fabled. These beautiful things come out of a very dark period of Latin-American history."

In September, 1714, the Galeones fleet sailed to Havana, and waited there for the New Spain Flota, which had left for Mexico in 1712 with orders for textiles and porcelain from the Far East (sent overland through Veracruz), as well as for gold, silver, and jewels. The boats also carried newly minted currency, cocoa, vanilla, paper, brazilwood, and animal hides. The official manifests, sent ahead to Spain, did not account for all of the goods on board: twenty per cent--the "Royal Fifth"-would be claimed as taxes, and many merchants bribed officials to underestimate their cargo. According to the ships' manifests, General Don Juan Estéban de Ubilla, the captain of the New Spain Flota, carried treasure for the Queen on the lead ship, La Capitana.

On July 24, 1715, the combined fleet, eleven boats in all, plus the Grifon, a French ship, which was sailing with the heavily armed fleet for protection from pirates, set off into the Straits of Florida. It was hurricane season. The three-masted galleons were up to a hundred and sixty feet long and forty-five feet wide, and held several hundred passengers and crew. A storm hit on July 30th. By early the next morning, all eleven boats in the fleet had been lost, propelled shoreward onto the jagged worm-rock reefs that edge the coast of southeast Florida. More than a thousand men drowned. According to the manifests, fourteen million pesos (the modern equivalent of about two hundred million dollars) in treasure was lost. Only the Grifon escaped.”
.

atlanta notes 3

The aquarium proved to contain fish. Many, many fish, in scenic locales, and with background music to make your average ticket holder feel vaguely heroic, as though he was not visiting the Atlanta aquarium but shouldering through Jurassic Park.

I am not one to diss fish. I like them, I like them large, I like quantities of them swimming above my head or held in by auditorium wall sized glass. I liked them so much that at the end of my tour, I craved fish and chips. But LI’s major interest was not in the fish, but in the fish and people combo – people looking at fish.

The weather when we go to the aquarium was, for this Austinite (where the golfers are used to wearing their checked shorts under December skies, and the ac is always an option) astonishingly cold. But it was probably only in the forties. There was a milling crowd before the giant, well, ark shaped structure – what did you expect? – and we were all eager to see the wonders. Myself, I had not been instructed in the scandalous and sad lives of the beluga whales (“given to the aquarium by the owners of a Mexican Amusement Park because they knew the aquarium would take better care of them,” according to one helpful sign – but the news is these were abused belugas with the sores of Job when they arrived), or the supposed tantrums of the founder of Home Depot, whose money created the place, when news of his precious purchases, the surprises he apparently wanted to unveil before the awestruck town, was leaked to the paper. I had not seen the reporter with the Penguins, or with the sea lions, or with the sea dragon, or petting the skate. I was sorely lacking in background.

But I did what I could. I immediately bolted for the restaurant, having had no breakfast and it being five in the afternoon and all, and found the food unpalatable and expensive – which I expected. I even thought about getting a Coke. Coke is an unbearably sweet beverage which I cannot believe I relished as a kid. That adults drink it down – that my brothers finish cans of it without blinking – sorta astonishes me. I didn’t get the Coke. Then I proceeded to the ocean room, and was pleased as punch to watch kids watch fish float above them in the tunnel, and kids pile up at various places of advantage, held in place by their adoring and often aggressive parents. I don’t know what was made of the strangely macabre faces pulled by the sawtooth shark – if I was a four year old, I’d be a little leery. In fact, I always avoided certain animal photographs when I was a kid, close-ups of tarantulas and the like. But I was a whimpy kid. Still, I’d rather like some of the old gut fears kicking in when little humans, and big humans, confront those creatures with mouths and appetites big enough to swallow us down. My, what sharp teeth you have, granny. “The better to eat you with my dear” – perhaps this one sentence is the whole of the prophets and the commandments.

Actually, though, there was no creature like that. The whale shark, the star of this aquarium, is, I believe, a dedicated vegan – and I’m not googling to see if that is correct, for I’m in no mood to correct my impressions.

Getting back to the people-fish nexus: I did wonder, as people watched the large ocean aquarium for long intervals, about what it is that fills space in such a way that people are interested in it. What filled that space was an intense blue, a visible thickness of glass, various motions in the blueness, and odd shapes with eyes and prongs and cruciform tails. It is the life that brings this otherwise highly abstract (and beautiful) tableau into the aesthetic ken of a crowd that probably would be less patient of a painting or a video that eliminated the living parts but combined the same colors and the same motions. What they wanted, it seemed to me, was something to search for. I do too. Searching in crowds – being in a searching crowd – is, for me, a little hard to deal with. I get irritated. This is because I like searching to be a relatively private thing, something I do with a limited number of others. But I can’t really get very far with that irritation. Far better to forget it. I root around here between the urge to be snobbish and the urge to surrender all that pickiness and think of all the popular entertainments, all of the Coney islands, all of the ways of spending Sunday with the kids, and to not care really what I think about it at all.

In the end, though, it is a give us this day, our daily people-n-fish moment, as the Good Lord would have said if he had visited Atlanta’s museum today, no doubt.

Atlanta notes 2

Like certain plants which, removed from their native soil, have a tendency to lose their leaves, LI has an odd tendency to develop sore throats and skin rashes once removed from his apartment. Last spring, while skiing with my brothers, I suffered a faux heart attack that proved to be a pulled muscle in, of all places, my chest, caused by dragging piles of logs around for the cabin fireplace. This trip, I have endured a cold and, after a nice jaunt through a nature preserve in Gainesville, a nasty and inexplicable poison ivy rash. I’d like to think this is all some manifestation of proustian sensitivity, but more likely it is just that I am tempted to overexert myself stupidly around my family.

The Atlanta area in November is oddly bleak. November scours off the leaves, and the grass withers on lawn after lawn, and the sky lowers, tingeing the whole area in melancholic sepias. If all American suburban landscapes strive to be that Currier and Ives picture in the bathroom, this is the Currier and Ives reproduction that was left behind by the former inhabitants of the house, who are currently in prison for manufacturing meth. To keep your spirits up in such a landscape requires fireplaces and the flow of liquid spirits, or it requires massive shopping in massive malls. Coincidentally, there are massive malls all over the place in Gwinnett County. Myself, I went to a Fry’s store, a consumer electronics emporium determined to outdazzle Best Buy, and to fling open to the consumer the whole range of electronic gadgets that will make the consumer’s life a binging A/V paradise. In Fry’s, the clerks are so knowledgeable about the latest computer accessories that they rather disdain discussing the topic with customers, who are yahoos and insistent on buying accessories for ancient computers – computers that are two years old, for instance. The clerks will reluctantly point to various shabby boxes containing archaic things you can plug in your computer, but then they go back to their little conventicles and discuss everything in terms of acronyms and slashes – the SSA slash five, the ADA slash A. The glass bead game is gaining on me, and I grow old. I will keep the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Or something like that.

The latest Atlanta craze is the aquarium. We are going to see the aquarium this afternoon. If it is actually there, my theory will be proven wrong. My theory derives from the surprising difficulty in getting tickets to see the aquarium. It used to be that one lined up at a spectacle and bought tickets. No more. Now one has to be a season ticket holder. To be a season ticket holder, you buy your tickets over the internet. Those people who buy their tickets over the internet are preferred to those who merely show up and buy their tickets at the window. But buying tickets over the internet requires calling the aquarium people and being put on hold for hours at a time. Meanwhile, everybody claims that the aquarium is sold out solid for the next two weeks. This combination of difficulties makes me think that the building supposedly holding the aquarium is empty, that they ran out of money for fishes after putting it up, and that they now surround their mistake with the impenetrable shield of a ticket system designed to ward off anybody who desires a ticket.

Since we did get tickets, or at least receipts for tickets, my theory might not be true. We will see.

notes about atlanta: 1

Revisiting Atlanta, for LI, has an oddly metaphysical impact on the old system: I automatically start feeling like a haunt, except of course that I am not revisiting the scene of any crime greater than adolescence. The stuff I used to know when long ago I lived here is so long past in Atlanta time that the only remaining landmarks in the place that the returning native can be sure of are the strip clubs, monuments to Atlanta’s deepest cultural instincts: the Tops n Tails, the Cheetah Lounge, the Pink Pony. It is an oddity among cities in that it is a great Black metropolis surrounded by perhaps the most conservative white suburbs in the country (although I should say that great black suburbs now span Dekalb county and are reaching into Gwinnett – a county that years ago voted down the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit system out of the oldest segregationist fears ever advanced by a Southern politician. Which is a lesson for me: progress always has the same ragged line as defeat, advances chaotically and partially and with many intervals of retreat and stagnation). It is no surprise that both TLC and Newt Gingrich emerged from the great debris field of this highway system in search of buildings to knock down, or that high tech companies are busily engineering software in counties that are tireless in trying to sneak prayer and creationism into the schools.

stupification or prevarication?

LI is an easily bored fella. So, looking for angles to freshen up the perpetual debate about whether Bush lied and people died or whether Bush was merely stupefied and people died, it has occurred to us that the roots of the debate might not lie solely in the low character of Executive Branch personages, who act, admittedly, like the substandard issue of some horrible merger between Animal House and the Cosa Nostra. Perhaps the root of the crisis that has crept upon this fine little war lies in the very notion of preemptive war.

That doctrine had its fifteen minutes post 9/11, but it isn’t much discussed any more. Yet it still seems to be the undead heart of the Bush doctrine, pulsing the dark blood through creatures of the night, such as Cheney. Like most such foreign policy doctrines, the one thing that is not discussed when it is discussed is how it is embedded in American domestic politics. That’s because D.C. has the ignorant idea that it conducts wars on its own. War, however, is a matter of domestic politics. Wars are dependent on the spirit of legitimacy – the political aspect of morale. When the legitimacy of a war falls apart, the war itself will fall apart. Given American military power, the military machine can keep running long after the legitimacy of its mission has been called into question. That of course has happened.

The chance for a war losing its legitimacy is significantly raised by the doctrine of preemption. Why? Because it gives the President two partly contradictory roles. On the one hand, the President traditionally has the role of an honest broker in relation to foreign policy. Foreign policy, unlike domestic policy, has a much smaller constituency. How many people really know about France, or Canada, or Sri Lanka? And how many people care? The President is theoretically the best informed person in the U.S. with regard to the military and political status of foreign countries vis-à-vis U.S. interests. Or, to put this less risibly, he represents the ideal point of maximum information. Of course, this is a modern role that has become more significant as America has become more imperial.

On the other hand, with preemptive war, the President is really playing the role of advocate. Because the ability to make war is not an instantaneous power vested with the President, because making war is a highly distributed function of the state, war is usually taken to be an extreme measure that requires the impetus attack. The instant of attack collapses the potential contradiction between presidential roles. It makes it much easier for the honest broker to be an advocate. But in a case in which the U.S. is the aggressor, the stimulus is of a different nature. It being a convention that a nation’s aggressive actions have to be disguised in a certain way – even Nazi Germany staged an attack from Poland before Hitler attacked Poland -- it is hard for the President to come right out say, look, I want the U.S. to act like an international mugger, and to simply take down nation x because we have the power and we want nation x’s wealth. While Cheney often talks like the hoodlums in an action movie, taking sadistic pleasure in the power to maim itself, he is a rare character. Cheney’s are usually found in maximum security cells. This one just happens to be the Vice President.

This sets up the kind of situation that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Bush attempted to act like both the honest broker, who did not want to go to war, and the advocate, who did. In retrospect, it should have been easy to predict that such a war would relatively quickly fall apart, as the gap between the two positions operated like some traumatic incident that the body politic could not get over. Actually, not just in retrospect – LI likes to think that we predicted this in the run up to the war. But our prediction was wholly based on the character of the warmongers. In this, we were intellectually timid.

It is hard enough to manage a war in which the U.S. is attacked – the supposedly attack in the Gulf of Tonkin being a good example of a cause of war that simply did not have the magnitude to justify the U.S. response. George Bush I, whatever one thought of the First Gulf War, did have an aggressive action that justified his advocacy of the war: an attack on an ally. I have no nostalgia for that disgusting old man’s presidency, but he did not suffer from being a dishonest broker.

This isn’t to say that a stake has been put through the preemptive war doctrine. That is the ne plus ultra of D.C. thinking, and it will have a long and sour career, surely, chewing up lives. But, happily the Iraq war has been shedding even the shabby reasons for continuing the American participation in it, and with the call at the end of the Arab League meeting for a timetable of withdrawal (a position behind the overwhelming popularity of withdrawing American troops from Iraq among Iraqis, according to the British military – whose poll on the subject is the most reliable, having been done for no propagandistic purpose), perhaps we will actually see the reluctant dislodgment of the American imperialistS from Mesopotamia.

…
Readers, I am going on vacation for two weeks. Posts will be sporadic. But I will occasionally throw in my two cents worth, although not to the absurd lengths of the usual LI post.

Arcana Imperii

In the early 80s, a popular Scottish historian, Angus Calder, published a marvelous book about the foundation of the British Empire : Revolutionary Empire. What made this book different from the usual procession of imperial icons that storyboard the empire as a series of adventures was Calder's total grasp of the ebbs and flows of the imperial world. For Calder, the colonial models have to be seen in terms of their first instantiation in the British isles themselves –in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Raleigh, for instance, not only founded the first, shortlived colony on the Eastern seaboard, but he was also planning on colonizing Ireland. He drew up a frankly genocidal plan for getting rid of the Irish, which, while not unleashed (at least in that form) upon the Irish, certainly was unleashed, later, on the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Algonquin, etc. Calder's point is that imperialism and the history of England, and by extension the Western countries, is not such that one can segregate the forces at work in the colony from those at work in the mother country. Instead, there was a constant exchange of models between the periphery and the center – the periphery being forged in the center, and vice versa. The experience of the "factory" in Jamaica -- the way in which sugar cane was cultivated, harvested and milled by slaves -- was imported to the factory models in England. The clearing of the Highlands, that fight against a tenacious, clan based mountain people, preludes struggles in India. In my rather floundering posts on the modern construction of liberalism and conservatism, I’ve been calling this the imperial effect.

As I said in those posts, the devaluation of the imperial effect as a driver of politics in the modern West is motivated. The motivation stems from the heart of the cold war controversies over both communism and the adoption of Keynesian economics, which had provoked a rearguard battle associated with conservative economists like Hayek, Friedman and Mises. Put this way, we are talking about a standard Heideggerian trope: forgetting as a social act. Heidegger writes about the forgetting of being, by which he means.. well, I’m not going to go into everything he means, which would get me way off track. My interest is really in the model itself.

Thinking about these matters, LI was pleased to stumble over an article in this Winter’s History and Theory by Anthony Pagden (FELLOW CITIZENS AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS:
CONQUEST AND SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPE’S OVERSEAS EMPIRES) that relates asymptotically, so to speak, to our own view.

Pagden wants to make a claim about a shift in the conception of empire that occurred between 1776 and 1830:

“I would like to suggest that the theoretical history of the modern European overseas empires (which excludes the Carolingian, the Holy Roman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian empires as well as such short-lived imperial projects as the Third Reich, the USSR, Mussolini’s Abyssinian empire, or, the “empire” of the United States) can be divided into two distinct phases. There has long been a disputed division between Europe’s “first” empires—mainly those in the Americas, which all came to an end between 1776 and 1830, and the “second” empires, which began in the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century and continued until the middle of the twentieth.4 Against any such neat periodization, it has been pointed out that the British incursions into Asia and Africa had already begun by the early seventeenth century; that although Spain had lost most of her American possessions by 1830, she retained the Philippines and still clings to outposts of the north-African coast; that as soon as the Treaty of Paris of 1763
had stripped France of most of her possessions in America and India, she began searching for new opportunities, first in the Pacific and then in north Africa. It seems obvious that there was indeed a continuous imperial, expansionist ambition shared by all the major European powers during the whole period from the mid-fifteenth century until the late-nineteenth century. My claim that the early empires in America were significantly different from the empires that overlapped and finally succeeded them is based not on organization, social type, objectives, or economic performance. It is based, instead, on the central conception of sovereignty.

For one thing that all empires, no matter how distinct they may be in size or type—and there is a bewildering variety—share is that they involve the exercise of a sovereign authority that has usually been acquired, at least in the first instance, by force. Since the occupation of lands to which the occupier could make no prior claim on grounds of autochthony, spurious or no, necessarily involved some kind of violation, empires were inescapably lands of conquest. Moreover, in view of the fact that most European peoples did generally hold that that domination is—or at least should be—a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, conquest presented a considerable challenge to most notions of sovereign authority.”

Pagden’s thesis is consistent with the anomaly of empire that bedeviled the early Victorians. If I am broadly right about the imperial effect, Pagden’s framework would have to accommodate a series of changes within the central European states themselves – changes wrought, in England, by the successive revolutions of the seventeenth century, and in France, by changes that began, as Tocqueville noted, under the Ancien regime and accelerated dramatically under the Revolution. These changes in the system of “acquired property” did have the effect of calling into question sovereignty, using the elements that Pagden highlights – geographic region and population. It is my guess that the imperial effect on the breakup of the brief classical liberal hegemony was such that it created a new division of political modes that, in a sense, drew their lesson from the government of the periphery to the government of the center. On the conservative side, the lesson was one of combining a government of moral coercion with one that incited the transformation of property into acquirable property – a process that still goes on, in, for instance, the privatization of public goods (like ideas, texts, mechanical processes, etc. – all of the IP stuff). On the liberal side, the lesson was of the success of central planning.

The anxiety underneath these lessons remained has long co-existed with imperial power. In fact, in Pagden’s first period, he traces a legal pattern that preludes the manner in which the legitimacy of empire was reformulated in his second period:

“By the early seventeenth century most European governments had resolved the problem by the simple expedient of denying its existence. The French hardly ever employed the term “conquest” in Canada. The Dutch, although happy to speak of conquest when the conquerors in question were the Spanish or the Portuguese, avoided the term when describing their own activities in Asia and America; the English, despite the fact that all their colonies in America were legally held to be “lands of conquest” and had been so ever since Henry VII’s letters patent to John Cabot of 1496, tended to agree with John Locke’s condemnation of conquest as “far from setting up any government, as demolishing an House is from building a new one in the place.”10 “The Sea,” declared the Scottish political theorist and soldier of fortune Andrew Fletcher in 1698, “is the only Empire which can naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our Interest.”11 Even the Spanish, whose American empire was so obviously based on conquest, and who boasted a rich imaginative literature to prove it, banned all official use of the word in 1680.”

Reminiscent of the recent career of the term “occupation,” no?

Anyway, readers are urged to flock to Theory and History and check out Pagden’s provocative, and even brilliant, essay. The passages on Henry Maine are themselves worth the trifling price of a little effort. Maine wrestled with the legal status of principalities in India that had the power to tax and judge, but were denied any power to make foreign policy. And he concluded that liberal ideas of dominion had to cede to a new idea of dominion, or sovereignty. Maine’s discussion could be about Iraq at the present moment. Pagden places Maine’s discussion in conjunction with Burke’s tortured notion of the legitimacy of the British project in India and concludes:

This [position of subservient sovereign states] had been precisely Burke’s complaint, since in the context in which sovereignty was divided between conqueror and conquered the outcome could only be what Maine himself recognized as “the virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people.”

The virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people. Hmm, sounds like the D.C. plan for Iraq.

Bob Woodward, the high government official said

LI has had a wonderful time watching the fall of the tinhorn journalist, Bob Woodward. If the D.C. clique of insiders carried cards, Woodward’s would certainly be platinum. As the much linked to opinion piece by Tim Rutten in the LA Times noted:

“There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.

Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops.”

Rutten’s own paper, on the day they published his article, published several routine articles that are sprinkled with anonymous sources. For instance, Ron Brownstein’s thumbsucker, “Democrats' War Opposition Not a United Front,” includes such winking-leading-the-blind passages as:
Although Democrats may be split on Murtha's specific proposal, his call for a clear break from Bush's policy is likely to strengthen those who want the party to offer concrete alternatives, many observers believe.

Many Republicans also see last week as a turning point. Bush allies believe that Murtha's declaration — following Senate Democrats' call for estimated timetables — will identify Democrats with a policy of "cut and run."

"I don't think the country has any doubt there are two positions: One is to stay and fight and the other is to leave," said one Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking.”

The proliferation of such fictitious cutouts has contributed mightily to the odd war over the truth about Iraq. If one cut out all unnamed sources from the runup to the War in Iraq, we would have had a much more informed debate about the War. It would have been about Iraq, for one thing, rather than about D.C. pocket pool, who said what to whom. Woodward’s style of journalism has lead to disaster after disaster, since it is used mostly for two things: to distort foreign policy choices, about which there is much exploitable ignorance in the American hinterlands (as in any nation -- no nation consists of people who are highly informed about geographic entities that impinge very little on them); and to destroy D.C. reputations. There’s no defense of citing a “Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking” to lay down such a howlingly obvious talking point. Enclosing the source in the heavy armature of description lends the source's words a spurious significance: we are supposed to take this as coming from the horse’s mouth, when it obviously comes from the orifice on the opposite end. If Brownstein’s promise of non-disclosure generates nothing more than political fortune cookie talk, why does he make it? Why does he quote it? What does it do to the credibility of a newspaper that prints these kinds of items day after day?

the geneology of horseback hall

I’ve said a bit about the imperial effect in my last post.

In this series of posts about Stephen, Mill, and the Pilate controversy, my point is both historiographic and current. I think that there has been, since the beginning of the Cold war, a systematic distortion of the real political history of the conservative/liberal split. To my mind, the canonical text in which this distortion is inscribed is The Road to Serfdom. In that book, Hayek attacks socialism as the source of the planned economy, identifies the moment that the planned economy took power as state policy with communism, and identifies the classic liberal era as the golden era of individual liberty. All of these claims are false. Hayek’s notion of the planned economy makes an eccentric exception for law – as though the body that lays down the law code is doing neutral work. It is this exception that allows him to plausibly lay out a case for his historical perspective. Without that exception, the history of central planning looks much different. In fact, laissez faire was not a matter of self organizing, but was highly dependent on the capture of state organizations and the rewriting of law to organize a whole different system of property rights. This central organization of the political economy was a key to bringing about the agricultural revolution in Europe. It was also a key to the famine in Ireland, and the repeated famines in India during the nineteenth century. It is no exaggeration to call these terror famines – around the natural core of a food shortage was woven a political scheme that exacerbated the famine and used it for political ends. One has only to trace the history of central planning in England to see that, far from originating with Marx, it originated with India. A goodly percentage of the Fabian group was connected, either by ties of family or career, to the Indian Civil Service. This was no coincidence – the rewriting of the Indian civil code and the enforcement of an entirely other regime of property upon Indian villages was widely viewed, by the British, as one of the great triumphs of the British Imperium.

That triumph justified an anomaly, as Macaulay called it, in British classical liberalism. The anomaly was the Empire itself. Of course, this is a difficult subject to encompass in a series of posts in a blog. For one thing, to background the Stephen-Mill controversy, one has to know something about the early Victorian synthesis of, as Mill put it, Coleridge and Bentham – that is, how the critique of the French revolution started by Burke and codified by Coleridge was assimilated into the liberalism of Bentham and the intellectual heirs of Adam Smith, who viewed the Revolution, in retrospect, as a progress marred by a few regrettable instances of radicalism. This is the context in which Burke, who in the 1790s still labored under the shadow of being a turncoat and a sell out, became a posthumous member of the British classical tradition. In this process, Burke’s disturbing legacy of showing the history of British encroachment into India as the advance of numerous small frauds was purged, and his crusade against Hastings fell into the category of mistakes that it would be a pity to dwell on. It is hard to legitimize power on the basis of an admitted series of robberies, which is how Burke framed the conquest of India. This isn’t to say that he wanted to give India back. A point we will get back to, perhaps. In any case, nobody was more acutely aware of these contradictions than John Stuart Mill, whose father, after all, wrote the standard history of India, and worked for the East Indian Company most of his life – as did Mill himself.

Okay, enough background. Here is an edited version of my first post.

James Fitzjames Stephen was a Victorian bravo, described in his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, as a man “massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness.” I imagine him as a sort of Mr. Rochester.

Stephen was a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge group, in the 1840s, well before it became the conglomeration of aestheticism and the higher buggery under Keynes and Strachey. This was where he met some of his lifelong friends, like Henry Maine, the legal historian. Stephen’s father was a famous civil servant, whose office was satirized as the Circumlocution office by Dickens in Little Dorrit. Needless to say, Stephen detested Dickens. Probably some strain of that detestation came down the family line – Stephen’s niece was Virginia Woolf.

This is from Leslie Stephen’s biographical entry about his brother in the National Biography, which Leslie Stephen wrote. It gives us some idea of the kind of person James Fitzjames Stephen was in his Cambridge years, and afterwards:

“He speaks of the optimistic views which were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth would slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot say how I personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time, he was aware of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the feelings of the great majority of my age and class, and which have ever since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I feel them now [1887] as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and thinks and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists; feelings of the most bitter contempt and indignation against those who feared them, truckled to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they could and as long as they could: feelings of zeal against all popular aspirations and in favour of all established institutions whatever their various defects and harshnesses (which, however, I wished to alter slowly and moderately): in a word, the feelings of a scandalised policeman toward a mob breaking windows in the cause of humanity. I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which gave me real pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he had been a man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a real sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He cannot, he admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's cowardice; and he never passed the Tuileries in later life without feeling the sentiment about Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid' expressed by Thackeray's drummer, 'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward, that had not the heart to defend it!'

'I have often wondered,' adds Fitzjames, 'at my own vehement feelings on these subjects, and I am not altogether prepared to say that they are not more or less foolish. I have never seen war. I have never heard a shot fired in anger, and I have never had my courage put to any proof worth speaking of. Have I any right to talk of streets running with blood? Is it not more likely that, at a pinch, I might myself run in quite a different direction? It is one of the questions which will probably remain unanswered for ever, whether I am a coward or not. But that has nothing really to do with the question. If I am a coward, I am contemptible: but Louis Philippe was a coward and contemptible whether I am a coward or not; and my feelings on the whole of this subject are, at all events, perfectly sincere, and are the very deepest and most genuine feelings I have.'”

Stephen was known as a not very subtle, but very ardent, debater. He went into law himself, and eventually devoted himself to grafting principles of English common law into the workings of the British Raj in India, completing Macaulay’s work. In actual fact, he did not spend a deal of time in India. But, on his return to England, he became a powerful figure in Indian politics, nonetheless. He became a power behind the throne in things Indian, a person to whose views a Governor of India had to hearken, a person to whom members of parliament went when they desired instruction on some point of colonial policy. Meanwhile, he was on his way to becoming a judge famous for his rather draconian style. Towards the end of his life, he became an embarrassment to the bench, since he was obviously suffering from the onset of senility.

It is said that on the boat back from India, Stephen, reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, devised his rebuttal, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

The book rather sank. Lately, however, it has become the subject of a little Tory cult.

Among the little band of Fitzjames Stephen's acolytes, none is fiercer than Roger Kimball of the New Criterion. Kimball, who has done his warrior bit in the Kulturkampf of the early nineties, rousting out tenured radicals and exposing them for the dubious souls that they are, has featured Stephen as a sort of Archangel Michael, putting the sword in the breast of that loathsome liberal toady of Satan, John Stuart Mill. Kimball’s loathing of Mill has breathed even in the pages of the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, where all conservative hobby-horses eventually find a home. But there's a problem. Mill is widely revered in Libertarian circles. Kimball represents one crucial side of the untidy conservative front. He is plainly unhappy with his libertarian allies.

In an essay in November, 1998, that served as the centerpiece for a later, book-length attack on liberalism, Kimball poured out the vials of his wrath on Mill. And, as is the way of New Criterion loathings and the mood of the time, he attacks him as a sexual being as well as a thinker. Kimball, like Ken Starr, is a great one for keeping up with the bedroom habits of his enemies. In Mill’s case, the great sin was one of omission, rather than commission. Kimball writes, of Mill's relationship to his wife Harriet, “it is noteworthy that this "lofty minded" relationship was apparently never consummated.” There are, it appears, no sexual depravities to which the liberal mind won’t sink - including chastity.

In this essay, Kimball referred to Stephen’s book, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The book has already been rescued by Richard Posner, and has found its way into the reading list of the Federalist Society. Here’s Kimball’s assessment of it:

”By far the most concentrated and damaging single attack on Mill's liberalism is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, first published serially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872-1873, and then in book form in March 1873 in the last year of Mill's life. It was written by the lawyer, judge, and journalist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894): Leslie Stephen's older brother and hence--such is the irony of history--Virginia Woolf's uncle. Mill himself never responded to Stephen's book beyond observing, as Leslie Stephen reports in his excellent biography of his brother, that he thought the book "more likely to repel than attract." But several of Mill's disciples responded--the most famous of whom was the liberal politician and journalist John Morley (1838-1923). Stephen brought out a second edition of his book the following year, 1874, in which he reproduces and replies to many criticisms raised by Morley and others. Stephen described Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as "mainly controversial and negative." Pugnacious and devastating would be equally appropriate adjectives. As one commentator put it, Stephen made "mincemeat" of Mill.”

One notes that there is nothing worthy, sexually, of noting about Stephen. Thank God.

The confused elements of American conservativism, circa 1998 - the longing for an established religion, the opposition to dissent, and the confused sense that the marketplace is no model for ideas - already form the base of Stephen’s politics. In fact, this is no surprise - Mill might have been an eminent Victorian, but Victorian society, in its imperial flush, was much better represented by Stephen than by Mill. Stephen articulates a type that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Shaw, in Heartbreak House (his best play - the only play of Shaw’s that LI re-reads, as we re-read Shakespeare’s plays), was talking of the Mill/Stephen split when he describes the difference between Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. Heartbreak’s liberalism, of course, was falling down around Shaw’s ears as he wrote. World War I was an unmistakable counter-blast to the genteel Victorian and Edwardian virtues, and seemed, at the time, to put an end to the matter. Shaw’s description of Heartbreak culture in the preface seems, to LI’s mind, alarmingly like contemporary academia, with the substitution of other references for Wells, of course -- try Foucault, or whoever:

”With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.”

Horseback Hall has, of course, few voices, because its texts are woven of such common-places of the governing classes as have, usually, no need for the exposure of literature, being content with the half-grunted affirmations of one's fellow club-men over a nice glass of port. However, Shaw creates a sort of ambassador from Horseback Hall in the play, Lady Utterword, whose husband, Hastings, has been a colonial governor over various tracts of the empire. At one point in the play, the house discovers a burglar, and there is a debate about sending for the police. If they do, of course, their names will be in the paper, which is the kind of publicity to which both Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall are constitutionally averse. Lady Utterword alludes briefly to her husband’s ways of dealing with crime:

”Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
England there is no real protection for any respectable person.”

Hastings Utterword, who never appears, in propria persona, on the stage, is embodied once and for all in that outburst. His type was invented by such as James Fitzjames Stephen.

pilate intro

Years ago, I played around with writing a series of essays – a small book, in fact, about the evolution of modern liberalism and conservatism from classical liberalism. My angle was this: the traditional model of the formation of political ideologies in the 19th and 20th century emphasizes the role of the conflict between labor and capital, with imperialism being derived from that central conflict. My idea was that this didn’t really capture the imperial effect. I thought that these essays could employ Pilate as a legend around which these issues gathered. In the enlightenment, Pilate had become a practical skeptic, a cousin of the enlightened ruler, dealing with religious enthusiasm by asking ‘what is the truth?” But in the 19th century, in Britain, there was a shift in the meaning of this legend. Just as the British empire became the new Rome, Pilate became a quietly heroic colonial officer, much like the officers in India, controlling the native inclination to superstition and riot. There was an exemplary controversy over the meaning of Pilate between John Stuart Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen: Stephen provided a certain template for the Right’s modern, uneasy compound of coercive moralism and libertarian economics against an earlier version of liberalism represented by Mill, for whom empire represented an incoherence in the system – a political entity that liberalism both relied on and could not justify.

In my opinion, the Enlightenment and the late nineteenth century uses of Pilate overlapped. So it rather delighted me that Tony Blair, famously, wrote an encomium of Pilate as a representative of the modern politician. Since the Iraq war has politicized the question, what is the truth, rather than the usual question, what are we to do, it struck me that following Pilate’s image was a way of tracing the ruse of reason in history.

Anyway, all of this is an intro to republishing those Pilate posts this weekend. I want to see what they look like, for one thing. Also, I don’t know if LI’s readers read them, or remember them – and hell, I don’t know if LI’s readers will care one way or the other, but I hope you'all do.

your mission, if you take it, is to destroy the department of War

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 cliché from the cold war – see 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.