perestroika in the Cold Warrior set

The National Interest is as central to neoconservatism as the Starship Enterprise is to Star Trek – so the readers of the winter issue might well have wondered if the Borg had invaded the captain’s quarters. In an article entitled, Jihad, Unintended, Dmitri Simes, the president of the Nixon Center, gave a brief, unvarnished account of our “heroic” intervention in Afghanistan in the 80s that could have appeared in Counterpunch. In fact, his notion that the U.S. lured the Soviet’s into Afghanistan has appeared in Counterpunch. It is on short list of fun facts to know and tell that no Chomskyite can leave home without:

“ACCORDING TO former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, now one of
the most acerbic critics of President Bush's handling of both Iraq and radical Islam, the Carter Administration authorized a covert CIA operation, notwithstanding an expectation that it would provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski said that clandestine U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began months before the Soviet
invasion; in fact, he added, he wrote a note to President Carter predicting that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." As Brzezinski put it, "we didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." And even in hindsight, Brzezinski thought "that secret operation was an excellent idea", because "it had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap" and exploited "the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War."

Of course, this is not what the Carter Administration told Congress or the American people at the time.””

Or, for that matter, the Afghanis – the million or so that died so that Americans and the Soviets could play out their power games.

But Simes has more:

“More recently, Brzezinski has acknowledged that one of his motives in entangling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was promoting the liberation of Central Europe by diverting Soviet attention from responding more forcefully to Solidarity's challenge. Yet, desirable as this end might have been, one may question whether it justified using means that would provoke an almost decade-long war in Afghanistan that both devastated the country and jump-started a global Islamic jihad against America.

Nevertheless, the Carter Administration was not alone in making mistakes in Afghanistan. The Reagan Administration's decision to "outsource" responsibility for arming and organizing the resistance to Pakistan's intelligence service and Saudi-funded foreign mujaheddin was
insufficiently thought out. Though no one could reasonably have been expected to predict that the same groups would attack New York twenty-some years later, stronger reservations were appropriate in the wake of the Iranian revolution, which showed very clearly how easily Muslim
extremists could turn against the United States. It was also no secret that some of the mujaheddin commanders in Afghanistan were, even during the 1980s, already talking about establishing an Islamic caliphate and about the United States being next on the receiving end of their righteous
zeal.

This lack of sober evaluation explains why, when the United States had an opportunity to try to put the Islamist genie back into the bottle, we failed to take it.””

Simes even engages in the blame America first game (a favorite here at LI, since, in fact, ot turns out in mulititudinous situations that America is culpable. But, as any parole officer knows, your hard core recidivist has an iron clad excuse: everybody always blames me). He shows, briefly and accurately, how U.S. blindness as the Soviet’s withdrew, combined with the sclerotic idiocy of the Cold Warrior mindset, resulted in Afghanistan being ripe for a Taliban takeover managed by the Pakistanis – the good friends who, even now, are swarming with Al Qaeda friendly political parties and groups, as well as the living dead themselves – those cute and cuddly terrorists who, in the world view of the Bushites, have already been killed so many times that they hardly exist. Save for the fact that they are as large as ever, that Osama bin Laden, their leader, now makes more videos than Michael Jackson, and that Pakistan is a pretty good bet to go Islamicist in the next five years and provide even more aid to the only terrorists who really do threaten the U.S. You know, the blind spot in the war on terrorism – the terrorists.

Simes gets all Richard Clarke-ish about American foreign policy of the 90s:

“One would have thought that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000, among other incidents, would have alerted policymakers that a new major challenge to American interests and American lives was in the making. However, instead of combating this threat, the United States focused on "wars of choice" and haphazard attempts to "nation-build" in the Balkans.”

If I am reading this correctly, Simes is putting in the boot in these lines, comparing our Rebel in Chief with the antichrist himself, Clinton.

However, Simes ends his piece, depressingly, with standard Rumsfelding brummagem. Once again, an old instinct for finding enemies that are proportional to the U.S. – big enemies – blinds this Cold Warrior to the real but pretty minor threat posed by terrorists. So he pulls out the Churchillian stops, the comparison to WWII, and like some blind oracle, seems to have uttered his prophecy in a bout of enthusiasm which even he does not understand.

Simes article is, nevertheless, a small sign. As in the Soviet Union in the 80s, in which some obscure article in one of the official journals seems to obliquely hint that all is not well with the glorious Marxist Leninist machine, so, too, one looks for small hints in the American establishment that the era of delusion is over. Of course, it isn’t. One doesn’t expect the National Interest to come out for complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in the next six months, the firing of Rumsfeld and the complete purging of the Pentagon of anyone tainted with his views, the firing of Bolton, a review of the failure of the Bush administration, from August 2001 up until now, to either successfully fight terrorists or even to understand who they are, the immediate cut of about 200 billion dollars from the Pentagon’s budget, to be followed by other cuts next year, etc., etc. Common sense stuff. The dismantling of the Patriot act, the dismantling of the department of Homeland Security (a boondoggle waiting for a disaster). That’s partly because – who wants to risk an uprising of the technostructure welfare recipients? that vast constituency of engineers, economists, think tankers and others who inhabit the structures that have been nourished by trillions of dollars in state funds since 1945. Here, addiction to the largest Keynesian multiplier in history has created character. In one sense, truly comedic character. Probe anywhere among the American engineering set and you will find a firm belief that they are raging individualists, Randians run amuck, opponents of big government of the don’t tread on me variety. Perhaps every kingdom generates needs to generate some group delirium to survive – but the delirium of this group is killing us.

a pygmy speaks

Foreign policy is one of those areas in which pygmies are treated as giants. This, LI thinks, is the reason “Frank” Fukuyama has such an outsized reputation. I might be unfair – I am judging him on the basis of the only one of his books I have read: The Great Disruption. Fukuyama's theme is a cockamamie attempt to cast the postwar period, the West’s Magic time (les trentes glorieuses, as the French say) as a time of Hobbesian insecurity. To distort history like this, you have to go to ridiculous extremes – and I remarked on one of them on my review of the book in the Austin Chronicle. It should be remarked that the distortion of history by the right, here, is consistent with their effort to distort the EU economy as it works now -- both are ways of embedding a corporationist conservatism as a sort of utopian template. That in fact the European health systems work so much better than the American that the comparison is laughable (same with workers rights, pensions, etc.), and that the real problem with the EU is that Europeans save too much (the one thing the American right is actually right about is that there is that fear inflation is not a macro-economic policy) has to be obscured by an ideological filter that gives us a no alternative past and future. Ronald Reagan's grinning features are the end of history for this group -- imagine them set in plastic, twenty feet high, the mouth open, and all of world history going for a ride in a boat between those teeth.

(By the way, looking at this article again, my figures for the number of killed in war and by mass murder, 1919-1945 (in Europe only) are way too conservative):

“The argument, briefly, is that, starting in 1950, about, and going all the way until the mid-Nineties (say 1994), the West experienced a prolonged moral disruption. Violent crime rose, marriages eroded, civil life became more precarious, and drugs became widespread. Fukuyama pegs this argument to several graphs, showing rises in bad behavior all over the place, from Sweden to California.

What to say about this argument? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that it must be wrong.

Consider, for instance, violent crime. Fukuyama considers whether his statistics account for all crimes, or just reported crimes. What he never considers is the status of crime itself. You would never understand the moral climate of Germany, 1933-1945, by looking at the police reports. Why? The police were committing the crimes. To consider violence and violent crimes to be one entity is to strain at a mugging and swallow a massacre. Really, between World War I and the end of World War II, there was a grand disruption, which resulted in the massacre of perhaps 25 million people, the forced emigration of perhaps another 20 million, and the death toll, from wars, of at least 10 million. If we project backward with those figures in mind, we find that the Grand Disruption is characterized by one thing: The West was much, much more peaceful than at any time since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Fukuyama is a suburban Toynbee. His world view has the restricted scope of the confirmed philistine.”


All of which is by way of intro to the article in the NYT Magazine, which is Fukuyama’s farewell to neoconservatism. Or, rather, it is the most visible moment in the extended party of Fukuyama’s farewell to conservatism, which has been rumbling along in Commentary and the National Interest for some time.

The neocon response to Fukuyama, in short form, is given by Roger Simon in a post entitle Fukuyama opts out. Simon has pared the zombie ideology to an economy of words that is impressive, sort of like a hypnotists mantra:

“Fukuyama seems to be a man in a hurry. The Iraq War here he declares to be a failure after only three years. Nostradamus? [Don't say "Well, maybe" again-ed. Okay, I won't.] In my own way, I sympathize with Fukuyama. The opinion game is ruthless. You have no time to wait for history and must make pronouncements based on thin and fleeting evidence. Still, it seems very early to close the book on Iraq. I suspect there are many twists and turns yet to come. Even Germany and Japan took a while to settle down after WWII - and that wasn't the Middle East. Sometimes I think people like Fukuyama (I'm being mean here) write these things to get their New York Times cards back, to be welcomed home into the fold and not to have to spend the rest of their lives writing for the Weekly Standard.”

Analogy, which once played a weak intellectual role in helping to interpret events in Iraq in the summer of 2003, now plays precisely the same role in interpreting those events as dreams do in helping you decide your lucky number in a lottery. Which is, perhaps, why the zombie followers of our Rebel in Chief, arms outstretched, are still solidly behind the vanity project in Iraq. After all, how many millions, week after week, buy lottery tickets on the off chance that their number will come up? On tv they can see people whose numbers came up – why not me? The only difference is that the U.S. has bought 500 billion dollars + in lottery tickets, disguised in supplementals, and there is no prize at the end of it. The lottery office was blown up long ago, and the only prize left is the prize for closest country to the Khomenei revolution in a supporting role. Eventually, of course, the zombies will notice that a lot of money has drifted out of the savings account, and they will have to blame someone. Who knows who the lucky victim will be? And frankly, who gives a fuck?

In any case, instead of going directly to Fukuyama’s article, I’d rather look at the article by Dmitri Simes, the guy who is the head of the Nixon Center, entitle Jihad, Unintended, published in the National Interest this December. Which I’ll do tomorrow.

Well, here’s a sad confession for you: LI didn’t attend the historians against the war conference. It isn’t because times are tight – an LI reader thoughtfully offered us the ready. It is because the weather is cold, and LI has this thing about biking through 40 degree weather on the off chance that we will be able to see a panel discussion to which we may be barred, for lack of registration. Besides which, the other top ten thing on the list of what we don’t do is we don’t get up early – or at least, we don’t do that well. We did get up and think, okay, time to hit the 8:55 a.m. session, but then our will slumped, and generally we proved that we would never have built the British empire or laid the tracks of the transcontinental railroad by drifting off.

Sorry! I’m more of a big rock candy mountain guy in my heart, a descendent of one of those Brueghel peasants, dreaming of the fruit falling into my mouth. My scythe is rusting in the grass, and I feel the trickle of sand through the hourglass merely as a slight and pleasant tickling sensation as I pursue peasant girls in colorful undress in my dreams…

And so onto other topics…

For instance, Osama bin Laden, our billion dollar man, has decided to really strive for the best MTV video prize this year. He’s out with a new tape, or a director's cut of the old tape, and in this one he promises to live free and die free and compares Bush to … Saddam Hussein.

“Osama bin Laden promised never to be captured and declared that the United States had resorted to the same "repressive" tactics used by Saddam Hussein, according to an audiotape purportedly by Mr. bin Laden posted Monday on a militant Web site.

While there was no immediate way to authenticate the tape, it appeared to be a more complete version of one first broadcast Jan. 19 on Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel. In that broadcast, the first from Mr. bin Laden in more than a year, he offered the United States a long-term truce but also said his Al Qaeda network was planning more attacks on the United States.”

All of which makes me want to laugh hollowly and say, in my best Poe-like voice:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport."

JIF GTMO Op Enduring Freedom

We were recently attracted to an article in the Omaha World-Herald about a small businessman, Tom Hogan. Hogan, according to the paper, designed “a sort of wheelchair, … that people can be strapped into to keep them from harming themselves or others.” Hogan, a sheriff, was inspired to do this by an incident involving an intoxicated man at a jail.

He now makes these chairs and sells them for $1,200 apiece. He doesn’t have a large factory. His clients are institutions, usually. But he did ship 25 of the chairs recently to a client in Norfolk, Virginia – “the orders were marked "JIF GTMO Op Enduring Freedom."

Hogan seems like a decent kind of man:

“Under most situations, Hogan said, he doesn't consider it abuse to force-feed someone.

"If my chair is being used to save somebody's life . . . that's fine by me," he said. What concerns him, he said, is whether the feeding is done in an abusive way. "I don't want my chairs to be used to torture people." “

And so it creeps in – our Homeland decency, and our need to fight the long war. That long, beautiful war in which, what with one twist and another, we have to gradually throw off our freedoms – temporarily of course – and ditch our scruples – for a good purpose, of course – and generally become a more depraved and in every way worse country. It looks like Hogan’s chairs were found by some clever person at the Pentagon, and turned out to be just the addition needed to break a hunger strike at America’s Buchenwald in Guantanamo Bay.

Rupert Cornwall in the Independent has a nice column about Guantanamo in the light of the U.N. condemnation:

“The justifications advanced by the US authorities are now absurd. Four years on, whatever intelligence value these individuals once had has surely long since been exhausted. Many of them, it is known, were caught in the American net by accident in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sometimes handed over by rivals, for reasons that had far more to do with bounty collection than the "war on terror". Lawyers say that only 8 per cent of prisoners have been classified as al-Qa'ida fighters, and that less than half, according to Pentagon documents, have committed a "hostile act" against the US.

But we can't release them, intone Donald Rumsfeld and his minions' once freed, they would revert to doing "bad things against America". As if an extra 490 "bad guys" - assuming they are "bad guys" - would make much difference, when in Iraq alone active insurgents number at least 20,000, and when the very existence of Guantanamo Bay is among the terrorists' most potent recruiting agents.

But, in this White House, no one seems to care about that. No one seems concerned by the unanimous feeling of America's allies - let alone America's enemies - that Guantanamo should be shut down. Even by this administration's standards, Mr McClellan's contempt was remarkable. The UN report was a "discredit" to the organisation. Did it not have better things to do?”

Cornwall should look at where Bush hails from – Texas, the state with the fifth or sixth largest prison system in the world. And a prison system that, as has often been noted, self-organizes by way of rape – it being a way of breaking in those unfortunates who’ve been swept up in the often racist policing we see in Edna, or Tulia. Pliability enforced by the stronger inmates brings about a more peaceful prison, and – it being a private enterprise kind of thing – helps to guarantee recidivism – nothing like sending people out into the world with worse criminal attitudes than they had when they came in to ensure that Wackenhut does not take a hit from falling crime rates. This virtuous circle, this convergence of the public and the private, is the governing philosophy at work in D.C. at the moment.

But another day, another UN condemnation, another channel changer speech by our Secretary of War. There are two monuments to the American paralysis that goes by the name, “the war on terror:” one is the uncaptured status of Osama bin Laden; the other is the continuing employment of Donald Rumsfeld. Between the two, we have the story of the American crackup. Here’s Rumsfeld, making Bush seem, by startling contrast, almost connected to reality:

“U.S. public affairs operations tend to be "reactive rather than proactive," Rumsfeld said, operating slowly during standard working hours while "our enemies are operating 24/7 across every time zone. That is an unacceptably dangerous deficiency."
To remedy this, he called for increased communications training for military public affairs officials by drawing on private-sector expertise, noting that public affairs jobs in the military have not been "career enhancing." He also called for creating 24-hour media operations centers and "multifaceted media campaigns" using the Internet, blogs and satellite television that "will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press."

Rumsfeld criticized the U.S. media for hampering such initiatives, however. He said the press "seems to demand perfection from the government but does not apply the same standard to the enemy or even sometimes to themselves," contrasting the coverage of the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse with that of mass graves in Iraq.”

The endless, endless drivel that comes out of Rumsfeld is, as always, a source of wonder to us all.

Rouze up o young men of the new age!

Lovely. The NYT doesn’t even put the condemnation of the U.S. for torture by the U.N. on the front page. It isn’t as big a deal, apparently, as the non-breakup of Times Warner. No, that the United Nations condemns the torture of the young men who, from every study done of them – the latest by the National Journal – are largely innocents sold to the Americans by villagers with a grudge in Afghanistan and kept in appalling Pit and the Pendulum conditions because the leadership of this country has fallen into the hands of a unique combination of moral idiots and feeble intellects – no, that is not news. For heavens sake, let’s not hear about reality in this world until reality drops on our heads.

Well, as Blake put it: “Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads
against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.”

That about sums up the syncophantic press in the age of the great Rebel-in-Chief.

Speaking of depressing mental war, we are also witness to the spectacle of Britain’s P.M., a man who should quietly have taken the message (adios! leave! go!) from the last election but has instead decided to put the stamp of his claustrophic self righteousness on the decline and fall of the Labour party ramming through a law, rejected in an access of mental clarity last year by the House of Lords, against “glorifying terrorism.” Louise Christian’s article in the Guardian makes the case against it:

“In the original draft of the terrorism bill, glorification of terrorism was a new stand-alone criminal offence. After widespread condemnation and ridicule that it would be unworkable the government did not abandon it, but tacked it on as part of another new offence of indirect encouragement of terrorism. It is part and parcel of the over-the-top government approach to legislation in this area that vague new transgressions which are not viable on their own are being stuck on to other offences to shore them up.”

And further
“We already have offences of incitement to murder, and the Terrorism Act 2000 specifically created a new offence of incitement to terrorism. Abu Hamza was prosecuted under the existing law, and it is to be hoped that the jury trying the case were rigorous about whether there was incitement, as opposed to only encouragement. If indirect encouragement is to be prosecuted as well, it is not going to be used just for those who incite but for the relatively powerless who are not inciting but making remarks which are simply foolish.
The very wide definition of terrorism espoused in legislation since the Terrorism Act 2000 means that an offence of indirect encouragement - with its glorification add on - can attach to support for all kinds of foreign resistance movements and causes, from Hamas, the democratically elected main party in Palestine, to the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe. Many of these movements are part peaceful and part engaged in violence of which one may not approve while still approving the cause.”

All of which reminds me of the quite un-Blakeian conservative, Henry Maine.
Maine is not a well known figure outside of the esoteric precincts of legal anthropology. He was a wizened Tory who, in the 1870s, contributed, along with Fitzjames Stephen, to create the intellectual structure of modern conservatism as a mixture of laissez faire and imperialism. Maine had an almost French reactionary’s distaste for democracy. The many – by which he meant the unwashed, such as moi – struck Maine as a sort of flood, washing away the monuments of civilization. But given that perspective, he was able to see truly on many points. One thing he was quite clear about: much of politics is entertainment. That isn’t a bad thing, or a good thing – it is simply characteristic of politics, and a thing that must be calculated upon when discussing political orders. So – when discussing the democratic order, one must look towards the aspect of popular entertainment in politics. One of the populace’s perennial delights is to give itself a good scare. In political terms, the political entrepreneur should always remember that the horror show, the pumped up moral panic, is one of the easiest ways to gain power, even though the power thereby gained is as precarious as the terror is ephemeral.
Maine made a point about legislation with which LI is in complete agreement: there really isn’t a need for a lot of it. This is one conservative principle that should be evoked any time congress is in session. But it never is.

“It is not often recognised how excessively rare in the world was sustained legislative activity till rather more than fifty years ago [Maine was writing in 1880], and thus sufficient attention has not been given to some characteristics of this particular mode of exercising sovereign
power, which we call Legislation. It has obviously many advantages over Revolution as an instrument of change ; while it has quite as trenchant an edge, it is milder, juster, more equable, and sometimes better considered. But. in one respect, as at present understood, it may prove to be more dangerous than revolution. Political insanity takes many forms,
and there may be some persons in some countries who look forward to " The Revolution " as implying a series of revolutions. But, on the whole, a Revolution is regarded as doing all its work at once. Legislation, however, is contemplated as never-ending. One stage of it is doubtless more or less distinctly conceived. It will not be arrested till the legislative power itself, and all kinds of authority at any time exercised by States, have been vested in the People, the Many, the great majority of the human beings making up each community. The prospect beyond that is dim, and perhaps will prove to be as fertile in disappointment
as is always the morrow of a Revolution. But doubtless the popular expectation is that, after the establishment of a Democracy, there will be as much reforming legislation as ever.”

Many, many are the laws that merely repeat laws already made – and often, in that repetition, glide over prudent restraints in the former laws, extending the power of the state insensibly – and with that spider like creep, the state comes more and more into our private lives.

The moral panic about terrorism has long been about anything but terrorism. While, of course, the terrorist group that we all know about practically has an email address in Pakistan where you can complain about your Osama bin Laden tape if it doesn’t come with the special features, terrorism as the bugbear that can prolong the horrid rule of Tony Blair, and our own Rebel in Chief has become one of the abidingly depressing features of the current political landscape. They are addicts of fright, but my sense is that the population they have successfully frightened is beginning to come out of it – and may even ask, one day, why the real, small core that is frightening is allowed to exist and flourish, while these paragons of national security attack windmills and imprison the innocent.

the historians against the war

I’m definitely planning to attend the Empire, Resistance and War in Iraq symposium sponsored by the Historians against War at U.T. – Austin this weekend. Here’s the schedule. I’m not sure I necessarily want to see the Friday opening talk with Howard Zinn – a fine fellow, but my eye is more on the Saturday panels, especially the one on the U.S. in the Middle East. According to the site,

“As of Wednesday afternoon, February 15, on-line registration is no longer possible. To register for the conference, please come to the registration table in Sid Richardson Hall before the Friday evening event, preferably by 6:30 or earlier. If you aren’t coming to the Friday evening event but want to register for the conference, a registration table will be up in the Thompson Conference Center starting around 7:30 am Saturday. (The first Saturday panel starts at 8:30, and there will be coffee and bagels.) On-site registration is is $45 (or $30 for students or low-income/unemployed), and includes admission to the entire conference, including the Friday and Saturday night plenaries, and all the panels. It also includes a coffee break, lunch, and afternoon cookies on Saturday. (IF you only plan to come to one or both of the evening plenaries, and not attend the rest of the conference, the fee is $5 each evening, payable at the door; there is no need to register in advance.) “

I’m hoping that I can finagle admission to one or two of the panels without spending 45 dollars – a little much for this month’s budget.
Check it out if you are in Austin.

the nyt ... behind LI by merely a year

The NYT reluctantly recognizes reality.

Since the pre-election reporting from Iraq was almost wholly misleading, telling its readers that basically Allawi, Chalabi and Mahdi were the three big contenders for the prime ministerial post, the paper has slowly assumed a more realistic position. In fact, today it is catching up with LI – from January of last year. Before the election in January, 2005, this is what we said:

“The post election situation is going to show how good a games player Muqtada al- Sadr is. Sadr has staked out a position that is both anti-exile (meaning Iranian exiles, as well as American ones) and anti-occupation. If, as seems likely, the crew that comes into power after the election is distinguished by the amount of real estate they own in Southern France or the United States, and if those politicians continue to follow a compliant line with the Americans, we expect that Sadr will have a great window of opportunity. What he does with it is the question. The appeal to poor Shi’ites would seem to be the right appeal in a country with a forty to sixty percent unemployment rate.”

Interestingly, a month after the election in 2005, the NYT published perhaps its most sci fi like article about Iraq ever, even throwing in Judy Miller’s classroom lovenotes to Ahmad, with a piece by James Glanz in which, after talking to numerous upper class Iraqis, he worked himself into a lather about Basra becoming a Singapore like city state, all business and free enterprise and working with American oil companies the way Mickey Mouse worked with Walt Disney. At that time we said:

“What isn’t mentioned in Glanz’s article? Hmm, let’s start with the fact that the South is the stronghold not of a Singapore-ist faction, but of a theocratic faction. There were local elections in the South which somehow didn’t get into Glanz’s article. Pity, that. He has a nice dreamy sentence about an American friendly, free enterprising Southern Iraqi state: “Several different versions of a southern Iraqi republic have been proposed. One would include only the three or four southernmost provinces - Basra, Muthanna, Dhi Gar and Maysan” Funny, not mentioning that Sadr’s political party won the local election in Maysan, and came in second in Muthanna. Well, Sadr of course is one of those problematic characters outside the Narrative, and it is best to ignore him. Especially as he seems to have the weird idea that Americans have come to exploit Iraq instead of liberate it. How much nicer to find people who understand our way of life – so civilized! such dealmakers! Surely these are the kind of people an empire that runs on oil can rely on.

There’s a kind of rule of thumb, here. When the NYT announces something definite about Iraq – say, for instance, the announcements last year that the army had completely destroyed the insurgents in Samarra – one should expect a completely contradictory next announcement - as in, Battles in Samarra, ten dead in Samarra, etc., etc. Glanz’s article is an ill omen for poor Basra.””

Wow. I’m impressed with myself in that last line. A little intuitive leap there.
So, in a way, the NYT seeing that Sadr has played his part so that he has become, in their words, a “kingmaker” does, at least, get the NYT to the point LI was a year ago. Nice work, boys!


“Even on the issue of Iranian influence, Mr. Sadr's position is no worse from an American point of view — and may even be better — than that of his Shiite rivals who have been running the government for the last year. Although Mr. Sadr recently traveled to Tehran and cast himself as a defender of Iran, part of his popular appeal comes from his stance as a homegrown nationalist.
"Sadrists often define themselves as anti-Iranian and accuse Sciri of being Iranian stooges," said Rory Stewart, a former Coalition Provisional Authority official in Amara, a poor southern city where the Mahdi Army holds immense sway. "It's the main reason why people like them."”
Bingo! Something that could have been discovered, oh, two years ago, when the U.S. was chasing the Mahdi army around and its stooges in the U.S. were saying, bizarrely, that Sadr was an Iranian ally.
“Mr. Sadr had decided to back Mr. Jaafari after his followers met with the prime minister and presented him with a 14-point political program, said Bahaa al-Aaraji, a member of Parliament and spokesman for Mr. Sadr's movement.
"We saw that Jaafari was closer to implementing this program," Mr. Aaraji said, than Mr. Mahdi was.

The 14 demands, he said, include a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq; a postponement of any decision about creating autonomous federal regions; more action on releasing innocent detainees from Iraqi and American prisons; and a tough stand against Kurdish demands to repatriate Kurds to Kirkuk, an oil-producing city in the north.”

The question in the Iraqi war really is this: when will the Americans realize just how irrelevant they have become in Iraq, and what will they do about it?

be... all that you can be... in the army!

Surely there should be a word for this. We have kleptocrat. We have mafia. But we need a word honed to the multiple splendors exhibited by a new species of capitalist that has flourished under our Lord the Rebel in chief. These are MBA style go getters who have everything – the networking ability, the ambition, the sense of opportunity. The only thing they don’t have is the ability to contribute a single useful idea or good to the stock of humankind. Even con artists, rightly considered, have an aesthetic status: they are sort of like walking divine judgments, prophetic sarcasms, tropes in Caddies.

But no. The Lincoln Group is something different, is generated by another station in the history of consciousness.

And so this is how the NYT article begins:

“Two years ago, Christian Bailey and Paige Craig were living in a half-renovated Washington group house, with a string of failed startup companies behind them.
Mr. Bailey, a boyish-looking Briton, and Mr. Craig, a chain-smoking former Marine sergeant, then began winning multimillion-dollar contracts with the United States military to produce propaganda in Iraq.

Now their company, Lincoln Group, works out of elegant offices along Pennsylvania Avenue and sponsors polo matches in Virginia horse country. Mr. Bailey recently bought a million-dollar Georgetown row house. Mr. Craig drives a Jaguar and shows up for interviews accompanied by his "director of security," a beefy bodyguard.”

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the fog of MBA rhetoric would eventually produce a creature made entirely of fog. The Lincoln Group is it:

“In collecting government money, Lincoln has followed a blueprint taught to Mr. Bailey by Daniel S. Peña Sr., a retired American businessman who described Mr. Bailey as a protégé.

Federal contracts in Washington can supply easy seed capital for a struggling entrepreneur, Mr. Peña says he advised a youthful Mr. Bailey in the mid-1990's when the two men started a short-lived technology company. "I told him, 'When in trouble, go to D.C.,' and the kid listened," Mr. Peña said.

Mr. Bailey defends his company's record, saying, "Lincoln Group successfully executes challenging assignments." He added that "teams are created from the best available resources."”

Yes, this is a best practices group, a sigma six group that is on time and on line with the best best practices executable in this rapidly globalizing world, using its competitive advantages to compete as its challenging assignments challenge. This is a power point ready, young and hungry company hungry to be even hungrier, helping the wind of freedom lift all boats as we tell our side of the story that is an inspiration to millions.

And then there is this. Oh for a Thackeray. Oh for a Zola. Oh for a Dreiser. Oh, even, for the young Tom Wolfe, before he was covered with fungus.

“Little in Mr. Bailey's background indicated he would end up doing propaganda work in Iraq. Born in Britain as Christian Jozefowicz, he changed his name when he graduated from Oxford University and moved to San Francisco during the late-1990's dot-com boom.

There he founded or advised several companies and plunged into the Silicon Valley social scene, according to Mr. Bailey and several friends and former business associates.

Among the companies were Express Action, a company that planned to develop an Internet service to calculate duties on overseas purchases, and Motion Power, which intended to invent a shoe that would generate its own electrical power to run portable consumer devices.

"You would have been proud had you seen this 23-year-old kid pitching, with no product, no customers, no business plan," Mr. Bailey wrote in a letter to Mr. Peña, describing how he raised $15 million from investors for Express Action.”

America! My newfound land! Yes, it is a continent of low rent Prosperos, Calibans who changed their name and attitude after the year abroad and realized that with a dynamically planned, revolutionary shoe breakthrough and growth potential potentiating in every market, with Dow 35,000 in the headlights, impossible is a word we don’t recognize. It is a go for it country, with a real estate deal on line 2 that will break your heart. And if you have to drop your electric powered shoe when you country calls to you – well, we know the mindset of sacrifice and service of the Bush culture. We respect it deeply at LI, as our readers know.

Lincoln started out helping the winds of freedom blow by devising a scheme to export Iraq’s “scrap metal.” That scheme didn’t get off the ground. Then there was the scheme to build a brickbuilding factory in Mosul. Ditto. And then, oh, the magic of the marketplace! Caliban finds the Prospero’s books:

“Eventually, Lincoln began working with the American military, which was spending millions on contractors for a broad range of services.

The firm rented a one-story house inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified government compound in central Baghdad. Furnished with two sofas and a sheet of plywood that served as a desk, the house had a single telephone and an overloaded electrical outlet.

Lincoln formed a partnership with The Rendon Group, a Washington company with close ties to the Bush administration, and won a $5 million Pentagon contract to help inform Iraqis about the American-led effort to defeat the insurgency and form a new government.

One contract requirement was to get Iraqi publications to run articles written by the military, according to several ex-Lincoln employees.”

It is a pity that Iraqis so seem to resent this war. The 30- 100,000 dead, the air sorties that have increased now to what, 160 per week? Bitch bitch bitch. Because there is so much good news that they should be looking at. The inspiring rise of Christian Bailey and Paige Craig brings tears to my eyes, at least, and I think many Iraqis, burying their dead, in lockdown in Baghdad, Falluja, Ramadi, in the ruins of bombed out cities in Western Iraq, in Basra dodging the new religious police, they should ask themselves: haven’t we helped a new generation of Americans be all they can be? Ask not what you can do for your country, as the man said, but ask how much ($$$!) your country can do for you. Talk about idealism to inspire the generations.

“A few years ago, a coalition of 60 corporations -- including Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and Altria -- made an expensive wager. They spent $1.6 million in lobbying fees -- a hefty amount even by recent K Street standards -- to persuade Congress to create a special low tax rate that they could apply to earnings from their foreign operations for one year.
The effort faltered at first, but eventually the bet paid off big. In late 2004, President Bush signed into law a bill that reduced the rate to 5 percent, 30 percentage points below the existing levy. More than $300 billion in foreign earnings has since poured into the United States, saving the companies roughly $100 billion in taxes.”
-- Client’s Rewards Keep K Street Lobbyists Thriving, Jeff Birnbaum, Washington Post

Manners are a political thing. The manners of the Americans in the early part of the nineteenth century were much discussed. Stendhal, in the Red and the Black somewhere, makes a casual remark about the barbarization of the people brought about by Democracy in America. And of course we have the indefatigable Fanny Trollope, who catalogued a veritable Niagara of tobacco juice spitting on her own journey to these States in The Domestic Manners of the Americans. This is her account of a typical American get together:

“The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again. The ladies look at each other's dresses till they know every pin by heart; talk of Parson Somebody's last sermon on the day of judgment, on Dr. T'otherbody's new pills for dyspepsia, till the "tea" is announced, when they all console themselves together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake, by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches, and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung beef, apple sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other coun- try of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.”

And here is Ms. Trollope on a celebration that has fallen into desuetude:

“In noting the various brilliant events which diversified our residence in the western metropolis, I have omitted to mention the Birthday Ball, as it is called, a festivity which, I believe, has place on the 22nd of February, in every town and city throughout the Union. It is the anniversary of the birth of General Washington, and well deserves to be marked by the Americans as a day of jubilee.
I was really astonished at the coup d’oeil on entering, for I saw a large room filled with extremely well-dressed company, among whom were many very beautiful girls. The gentlemen also were exceedingly smart, but I had not yet been long enough in Western America not to feel startled at recognising in almost every full-dressed beau that passed me, the master or shopman that I had been used to see behind the counter, or lolling at the door of every shop in the city. The fairest and finest belles smiled and smirked on them with as much zeal and satisfaction as I ever saw bestowed on an eldest son, and I therefore could feel no doubt of their being considered as of the highest rank. Yet it must not be supposed that there is no distinction of classes: at this same ball I was looking among the many very beautiful girls I saw there for one more beautiful still, with whose lovely face I had been particularly struck at the school examination I have mentioned. I could not find her, and asked a gentleman why the beautiful Miss C. was not there.

“You do not yet understand our aristocracy,” he replied, “the family of Miss C. are mechanics.”

“But the young lady has been educated at the same school as these, whom I see here, and I know her brother has a shop in the town, quite as large, and apparently as prosperous, as those belonging to any of these young men. What is the difference?”
“He is a mechanic; he assists in making the articles he sells; the others call themselves merchants.’”

These travelers, and the Americans themselves, knew that the political system pervades the system of manners – the cultural system.

And so, as democracy has been replaced by plutarchy in the U.S., manners change accordingly. Cheney’s hunting accident on Ms. Armstrong’s ranch was interesting, beyond its humorous aspect, for the door it opens to the aura of entitlement that Cheney and Bush bring not just to the operations of the executive branch, but to their domestic life, as it were, their ecological, stock option padded niche. The same entitlement that would manage, in broad daylight, the theft of one hundred billion dollars (to be paid for by cutting the amount this republic is going to put out for today’s descendents of Trollope’s mechanics), demands every servility in the private sphere from their lessers – the waiters at the restaurants, the factotums that run their errands, the drivers and maids and police, the latter in the cleaning business too -- cleaning up embarrassing messes. Happy to talk to aides sent out to lay down the real law. Plutarchy requires that the plebes take pride in obeying, in eating the VP's shit, in being told at a time and place of Cheney’s convenience what happened to Whittington, as if it was their business; immediately, of course, ending any investigation and going home with that touched by greatness glow. The servility from the press is in line with the usual servility they get from the press.

I was interested, though, in Katharine Armstrong. The woman who owned the ranch.
According to the invaluable Whitehouseforsale site, Armstrong’s parents are deeply connected to the Republican establishment in Texas. Her father, Tobin, is one of the owner’s of the King Ranch (and an ancestor of his captured John Wesley Hardin). Her mother, Anne:

“… served as: a close advisor to President Nixon; President Ford’s British Ambassador; and approved covert actions on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Reagan. A veteran of blue-chip corporate boards, Anne Armstrong was a Halliburton director when that corporation hired Cheney. She is Kay Bailey Hutchison’s best friend, having helped launch the senator’s career as Republican National Committee co-chair in 1971.”

The site’s bio of Katherine is instructive:

“Warren Idsal and Katharine Armstrong both worked for major investment firms at the time of their 1982 wedding, with the Paine Webber (see Joseph Grano) groom marrying a Smith Barney bride. During the 2000 Bush campaign the then-married couple still romantically shared a common Pioneer tracking number. Katharine is the daughter of Pioneer Tobin Armstrong, an heir to the fabled Armstrong and King Ranch fortunes. Her mother, Anne Armstrong, who is Kay Bailey Hutchison’s best friend, helped launch the senator’s career as Republican National Committee co-chair in 1971. As Texas Treasurer in the early 1990s, Kay Bailey Hutchison returned the favor by hiring Armstrong’s son-in-law, Warren Idsal, as a top aide. But Hutchison fired him after a short tenure. Warren Idsal also was an executive at health and life insurer United Insurance Companies (UICI) for several years in the late 1990s. Then-Governor George W. Bush appointed Katharine Idsal to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission in 1999. The Idsals divorced and Katharine reclaimed her maiden name after Bush’s gubernatorial successor appointed Katharine chair of the commission. This heir apparent to the Armstrong Ranch resigned her state post in 2003, citing her need to make a living for her three children. Armstrong cited lobbying as one possible career move.”

And there is her by now famous account of the accident:

“Armstrong said she was sitting in a vehicle and watched as Cheney, Whittington and another hunter spotted a covey of quails. Whittington shot a bird and left to look for it as Cheney and the other hunter located a second covey and walked ahead of Whittington to take their shots.

At that point, Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong told Associated Press in an interview.

"The vice president didn't see him," she said. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by God, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."”

This bio makes me dream of the domestic manners of the rich. In particular, Armstrong reminds me of Alysse, the monster in Susanna Moore’s wonderful novel, The Whiteness of Bones. The heroine in that novel, Mamie, who has been raised in an upper class but eccentric Hawaiian family, flees her last semester of college to go to stay with her aunt Alysse, who she barely knows, in New York. Of Alysse one of the first things we are told is “you might have the saturation bombing of small, neutral countries or made your fortune selling missiles to an African government or, on a less dramatic level, you might enjoy having sexual congress with persons no longer living, but if you could hold your own at one of Alysse’s dinners, and by that is not meant anything so elementary as knowing what fork to use, you became a dear friend.” Mamie becomes a dear niece, and is instructed in the arts of being a rich wife, ex-wife, socialite when Alysse has time and is tipsy enough. The world of the book is the seventies, when Babe Paley was still queen.

There are some nice lunches. Alysse, of course, adores lunches, and at one of them Mamie catches the way Alysse and one of friends (the heiress to all the high heels in Brazil) look around one of their restaurants after a lunch in which the friend had explained all about being raped by her guides in Morocco (“I wasn’t able to screw for weeks afterwards”) and Allyse had explained about Lady Studd, a skinny woman who is eating up her companion’s lunch at a table near them (“Oh, she’ll be home in an hour vomiting”):

“… the two older women, pleased with the world, gazed contentedly around the room. They did everything but lick their paws and velvet muzzles. People were finishing lunch and standing to say goodbye, and there were blown kisses and pantomimed promises to telephone and soon meet. The women held their eyes open very, very wide, which gave them a startled, slightly insane expression, as if they were feigning extreme interest in something that bored them very much, and the men had a benign, sated look, as they took out their cigars for a quiet smoke on the drive downtown, more than delighted to leave all the fuss and exaggeration and exclamation to the animated women. The men were there as angels, as theatrical investors: the show that day simply being “lunch.””

This society crowned itself when Reagan became president – or, as I like to think of it, when the locust became king. Not that I would put Katharine Armstrong entirely in Alysse’s category: Texas wealth, especially old Texas ranch wealth, is a distinct culture. It might love Cheney, but he is not of them. And of course there is his wife.

ps - after I wrote this, it occured to me that I was not applying the simplest rule in journalism. When a politician does something weird in his private life, cherchez la femme. Surely some inquisitive reporter should check the guest list -- and, if he can find them, the licence plates -- of Armstrong's little party. There's a great chance of extracting our Elmer Fudd's sugarplum. Not that any paper would publish that.

on the recent snowe

LI received a letter about the great Frosty dump from our correspondent, T., in NYC:

"The snow? Well, it was lovely; Sunday morning in particular - just lovely and quiet under a grey sky; everything moving slowly and fluidly; all the sliding rather than the usual striding. Tonight the streets and sidewalks are clear, but there is a nice ambient light through the window: streetlights reflceted in snow. But for me the charming aspects of the atmosphere are lost once the snow falls from the trees - already gone. Tonight is more about the 'hangover' of the snowstorm: crunching salt under foot and street corners deluged with slush and hardpacked billets of once snow now ice (perhaps the Eskimos have a word for that last awkward construct).

What is that loveliness that transpires in this city during a strike, a blackout, a snowstorm or the blowing-up of buildings? Well, probaly no such loveliness to a garbage strike, but I've never experienced one, so..... Perhaps it is a sudden realization of the scale of this place - perhaps some assurance that IT can be stopped, if only momentarialy; a reassurance that one is not merely grist for the wheel. Perhaps also it is a warm feeling of home, this is where I live. I remember clearly conversations with other transplants like myself in the months after 9/11/01 - those who wanted to "get out", it was all too much. Many of them did leave. Me? My want to stay was stronger: this is my place.

There is a strange formula that is thrown about in the news and in conversation: that it costs the city about $1 mil per inch of snow: so neat, so tidy. There are things to like about Mayor Billionaire, but when he assures the citizenry that Dept of Sanitation workers are pulling 12 hour shifts trying to clear the streets of snow, I think: do I really want to walk the streets when a guy is in the later part of a 12 hour shift, behind the wheel of a three ton truck with a four foot tall plow affixed to the front? No, I look both ways when crossing the street.

You know, I'm a Wisco kid so most of all of that is ado of nothing."

i fought the war, I fought the war but the war won

First, go here. If you have a slow computer, go elsewhere, and wait fifteen minutes while the Quicktime downloads. this little song and the three minute video with the cheap effects says everything I’ve been trying to say on this blog for a year. Better.

2. This, from the NYT business section:
Iraq War’s Virtues May Be Debatable. The Profits Aren’t.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush called for the nation to back the war in Iraq and to "stand behind the American military in this vital mission."

No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers — on both sides. There's the human toll, of course, which Mr. Bush acknowledged. Whether democracy and freedom will, over all, be winners, only history will divulge.

But some indisputable winners are clear now: military contractors. Suppose an investor were endowed with that golden instinct for spotting bargains and bought 100 shares of each of the top six military contractors at their lows of the last six years — lows reached by four of them in March 2000, before the election, before Sept. 11 and before any hint of war. That basket of shares would have cost $12,731.50. On Friday, it would have been worth three and a half times that: $44,417.
In the table the NYT lists the top military companies:

Boeing, 2.6 billion dollars profit, up 37.4% from 2004
Lockheed Martin, 1.8 billion dollars profit, up 44.2 % from 2004
General Dynamics, 1.5 billion, +19.1%
Northrup Grummen, 1.2 billion, +29.2 %
etc.

3. There is a mysterious type of music. It is hard to make, although it seems easy to make. It requires a lot of noise. It sends me into nihilistic rapture. Listening to this music, I both want to commit suicide and want to commit suicide again – which, in an odd way, makes the music life affirming. After all, you have to be alive to enjoy your own suicide.

4. Given my exhaustion with the world at the moment – do I live in some richer version of Idi Amin’s Uganda? Do I live in the Monster hospital? As the world is made visibly worse to feed the insatiable greed of upper class gangbangers, and as we tilt towards the environmental terra incognita of a planet without ice (enjoy these storms, Northeasterners), is there any justification for any of it? The laughable freedom. The on the road and through the ozone layer lifestyle. And the brute fact that a thing, a state, is spending as much money on war every year as was generated by the entire world in 1890. I think this song gets that across. We live both in hell and paradise at the same time. But as hell’s upper echelons direct things, year after year, paradise is disappearing before our eyes. If only… if only I were a genetic engineer, and were able to develop a bacteria that I could slip to the stockholders of the largest military companies. This bacteria wouldn’t hurt them. It would just make everything they smoked, drank and ate taste like human blood. My own little chanson de Maldoror.

5. I used to be in a band. In Santa Fe, in the early nineties. My roommate Melanie and I found a sultry sexpot, S., with a raspy, little girl voice. Mel taught her lover to pound the drums – we all loved pounding the drums. Mel was the only real musician, and had been in several punk bands. Me, I wrote the lyrics and did the styling of the songs with Mel, who played guitar. Our band played in clubs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe until Mel wanted to go to a bigger scene: Chicago. Myself, I didn’t want to commit myself that much. I wanted to go to NYC.

So Mel, if you ever come across this silly blog, check Metric out, man! This is just what we envisioned – as dark as classic NIN (which I wanted back then -- not realizing Trent Reznor was going to become a therapy groupy) with just a hint of that underlying Breeders’ sweetness. Sorry it didn't happen.

Our man Jafari.

Well, with the news that the Shiites are going to re-nominate Ibrahim Jafari as prime minister, the major American media have scored a perfect zero in interpreting the Iraqi elections: first, by telling us that Allawi and Chalabi were major contenders for the office (before the election), then by touting Abdul Mahdi, Sciri’s candidate and incidentally (oh, this flooded love into the hearts of the WAPO and NYT editorialists) a strong advocate of privatizing Iraq’s oil industry.

LI is better at interpreting the American media than outcomes in Iraq, but even we saw that the buildup to the elections, as seen through the prism of American journalism-speak, was so full of false premises that it was laughable. One of the things we laughed about then was a poll commissioned from Oxford Research by the BBC and ABC. That poll showed Allawi as one of the most popular politicians in Iraq. At the time, we remarked that the poll seemed so skewed that it had to have heavily sampled the rather small middle and upper class, and simply ignored the too dangerous to poll Iraqi working class. In the event, that proved correct. But though a poll that predicted, for instance, that Kerry would win with 60 percent of the vote in 2004 would become a laughingstock, the BBC poll will undoubtedly be used over and over again in the states. And there will be no questioning of the policy of writing more about Chalabi than about any other Iraqi politician, despite the fact that he has a constituency of about 0.1 percent in Iraq, largely made up of journalists and stringers for the Times. As for Jafari, the man who will represent the reason that the next two thousand Americans will die, the next 10,000 will be crippled, and the next 20 thousand or so Iraqis will be killed (collateral casualties, that. But sometimes, I do like to remember those freedom loving Iraqis we are doing so much to help), I’d predict a number of rehashing articles that tell little about the man, and then some fastening on some American friendly face. I would imagine that a mere five percent or less of the American population knows about the guy. Many would be surprised that his party not only helped invent suicide bombing in the Middle East, but were involved in setting off explosions in the American embassy in Kuwait and were supportive, and may be involved with, the destruction of the Beirut embassy in 1983. It would immediately occur to Americans, if they knew this, that the governing class in this country is fucked up. So they will never know this.

The media, after all, has a responsibility to keep Americans from knowing that the governing class is fucked up. Isn’t that the motto of the American Society of Journalists or something?

surely thou art the great God...

LI has been reading James Mill’s History of India. James Mill is known to most of us as the Gradgrind who brought up his boy, John Stuart, on a migrainous diet of Greek and Bentham. But of course Mill was a high clerk in the headquarters of the East India Company. His History is famous for its systematic contempt for its subject – to Mill, the whole problem with India was to root out any veneration for its civilization expressed during the 18th century Then one could set about the task of Anglicizing the natives, while rationalizing their laws. Mill’s History is one of the classic moments in the history of the imperial effect.

It’s an audacious book. Mill’s preface is full throated confession that the author had neither seen India nor is conversant with any of its languages. But, he argues – prefiguring the argument that runs through the whole book – it isn’t as if anything important would be gained by assimilating the native’s knowledge of the place, considering the worth of that knowledge and the relatively mean cultural level of even the most glorious native. Everything worth knowing about India can be gained from European books about the place, and in better order too.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Mill’s account of the Hindu religion. It’s rather funny, since he so disapproves. But it has some nice, 18th century features. For instance, Mill accounts for monotheism in terms of the dialectic of flattery. Because the rude mechanical figures that the gods are as he is, he at first showers them with adulation and flattery, just as he’d like to be flattered. But flattery repeated falls short. Other, more violent excitements and endearments have to be added to the mix to move the gods. Eventually, one settles on a god and begins to prune the tree of other deities, as those deities take something away from the splendor of the deity to which you’ve dedicated yourself. Eventually you simply demote the deities wholesale, and presto-chango you have one god and a whole roomful of metaphysics. This is not quite the psychology one would expect from a utilitarian.

Interesting. But this is what I want to excerpt. It is a fable that I like, even though I am reminded of Dr. Seuss’ story of the goldfish, too:

“At the close of the last calpa, there was a general destruction, occasioned by the sleep of Brahma; his creatures in different worlds being drowned in a vast ocean. The strong demon Hagyagriva came near him and stole the Vedas, which had flowed from his lips. When the preserver of the universe discovered this deed, he took the shape of a minute fish, called sap'hari. A holy king named Satyavrata then reigned. One day, as he was making a libation in the river Critamala, the little fish said to him, How canst thou leave me in this river water, when I am too weak to resist the monsters of the stream who fill me with dread? Satyavrata placed it under his protection in a small vase full of water; but in a single night its bulk was so increased, that it could not be contained in the jar, and thus again addressed the prince: I am not pleased with living in this little vase; make me a large mansion where I may dwell in comfort. The king successively placed it in a cistern, in a pool, and in a lake, for each of which it speedily grew too large, and supplicated for a more spacious place of abode; after which he threw it into the sea, when the fish again addressed him: Here the horned sharks and other monsters of great strength will devour me; thou shouldest not, O valiant man, leave me in this ocean. Thus repeatedly deluded by the fish, who had addressed him with gentle words, the king said, Who art thou that beguilest me in that assumed shape. Never before have I seen or heard of so prodigious an inhabitant of the waters, who like thee has filled up, in a single day, a lake 100 leagues in circumference. Surely thou art the great God whose dwelling was on the waves.”

That little fish reminds me of the transformations of my own obsessions. They, too, first appear as little threatened things. And I coddle them. I fish them out of dangerous places and put them in protective places. And they grow. It isn’t their fault they grow – it is what obsession is supposed to do. And I put them in larger containers: I put them in a crush, I put them in a notebook, I put them in the plan for a novel, I put them in a social life, I put them in a move to a new city, I protect them and protect them. And then I look and see and lo: my obsessions have filled up twenty years or more. My so called life.

zombies in love

Iraq, I rack 'em up and I roll,
I'm back and I'm a hi-tech GI Joe.
I pray for peace, prepare for war
and I never will forget ~
there's no price too high for freedom
so be careful where you tread. – Clint Black.

LI is sickly fascinated by the sixth Bush budget. Six years in a row of what some muckety muck’s might call pathological lyin’ by our Rebel in Chief ©, not bein’ as well trained as he is in the big picture. Although there is no price too high for freedom, we have not been putting that exactly square in the budget for the past three years. Our bold Rebel in Chief ©. learned, in the secret years of his training as one of America’s great guerilla warrior (after the big one himself, Sylvester Stallone) to clothe boldness with discretion – hence the song of the supplemental that has tripped shyly through congress, year after year.

Our Rebel in Chief ©. has grown so enamored of fictitious numbers that he could market his budget as a his own personal memoir. Part of the wonder of the thing are his zombie groupies. It is sorta like a cult in which the leader’s failures become tests for the follower’s faith. The more the Rebel in Chief © fucks the pooch, the more you acquire credit in heaven by believing in him. It’s even an incentive to fuck the pooch – I’m pretty sure that the big man sometimes just fails in certain ways to see just how his zombies will figure out how to kiss his ass. Idi Amin used to do the same thing. The ritual of the approach is very important. There’s a wonderful article in the NYT yesterday where the journalists run right into Bush’s lies and lies about Katrina, and the embarrassment of the reporters is visceral – you can feel them suddenly euphemizing up a storm. Because if you say here’s a lie, the zombie will eat you. It is scary out there in the cable show dark, where jowly men in suits, like human gastric ulcers, maunder on threateningly about politics.

So how much more will the war’s supporters go for? How wide the failure, and how often will they tell themselves like battered woman going back to bozo, we just ain’t getting’ the good news yet! And, after all, don’t you want to be a hi-tech GI Joe in the biggest budget flop ever made? It’s like Waterworld on crack. Sure you do, honey. Burn down the studio. Order more sets. 400 billion dollars for F/X, and here’s the good one: we could probably just cut that by 200 billion if we just gave every terrorist 10 million bucks, free and clear. But that would show lack of vision! Those terrorist extras create the ambiance! No expense should be spared!

The reason why is freedom. The reason why is the wind of freedom. Man just gots to be free. It is in his nature. Actually, it is in his left testicle, according to medical science. All that good news is just pent up and waitin’ to flood out. Iraq is gonna look so good any day now that we will all want to move there – and that just might be a good idea, since this fuckin’ country is approachin’ bankruptcy fast! Plus the dozen or so hurricanes that are sure to drown this or that ho hum metropolis this summer, interrupting our Rebel in Chief©’s vacation – what kind of country is that, anyway?

Since the Congressional Budget Office now puts the cost at 500 billion, and they are not including medical costs for wounded vets or other disguised costs which Stiglitz claims raises the cost another four to six hundred billion – well, we are finally realizing Clint Black’s romantic dream. And to think, we coulda paid for that Social Security shortfall and national health care with the money we are spendin’ and have a little left over for carfare.

I guess that the idea is: fuck that. Our country is about freedom and the ownership society, not about fuckin’ dental care for the kiddies, man. So let’s rack up another 600 billion chips and all sing, like zombies in love:

“If everyone would go for peace/
there’d be no need for war/
but we can’t ignore the devil/
he’ll keep coming back for more!”

I’m psyched!

let it all come down

Some days, you read the papers and you think, surely this dirty regime is about to fall.

Item: Vice President Cheney directed his assistant, Scooter Libby, to leak what seems to be classified information.

Item: The CIA officer who coordinated intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the Bush vanity project says that the administration cherry picked the intelligence to make its case.

Item: Bush’s news conference comment that he not only did not know Abramoff, but thought for a long time that he was a brand name of cleaner, like Easy-off, is contradicted by Abramoff’s own memory of good times with George.

Item: old news, but again, the Crawford ranch White House was quite aware that NOLA was drowning as it was drowning. Panicked, Bush went to the West Coast and played a little back stage guitar.

Item: even Republicans agree that this year’s White House Budget has as much chance of being realized as the Aristocrats has of being named the 700 Club Movie of the Year.

But the machine keeps grinding madly on. It becomes more and more obvious that we are trapped in one of the minor moments in history – hemmed in, on one side, by Danish cartoons, and on the other side, by a claymation POTUS, preparing for our obvious problems – global warming, a warming trend in the gulf and the Atlantic that is going to lead to more severe storms, a transportation technology centered around a nineteenth century invention, a serious reckoning with a post-manufacturing economy – by closing our eyes.

Perhaps hibernation is the only good political answer to this moronic inferno. But aesthetically, this is the trifecta. The gold rush. The Klondike of irony. This is the era of yahoos, and there’s no excuse for a writer not to watch it with extreme interest, pad in hand. Watch the yahoos shit on each other. Watch the zombies mouth the slogans. Watch the press make itself into a bodyguard of lies for systematic injustice, and then blandly preen itself on its objectivity. Watch the big pieces drift.

I love the smell of stupidity in the morning.

the machine that eats your brain

As the Muhammed-as-Snuffy-Smith controversy continues, it is interesting to watch the politics become a veritable machine to produce idiocy. I suspect that there is some mystical law that governs these things. But, one wonders, what is this law? Is it something in the nature of opposition itself, some diabolical dialectical germ that is slipped into that moment in the discourse which ends up producing those magnificent retards, the left and the right, the point and the counterpoint, the defenders of civil liberties (with exceptions) and the defenders of the oppressed (no matter what they do)?

If this is so, it would subvert my idea of progress, the good society, the goals of art, the use and purpose of philosophy, the true, the beautiful and the just. It would make my life a mockery and the minimum life style I’ve chosen the door prize of the lowest order of sap. It would make my words no more rational than the foaming of a poisoned rat.

… Well, at least it would be all about me. There’s always a bright side for your true American narcissist.

In this case, on the one side, we have the every brilliant Teheran government paper, with its Auschwitz cartoon contest; on the other side, we have the calls in Britain to jail the demonstrator who dressed up as a suicide bomber. And then there are the guys in Afghanistan who have died for the sake of… uh, what? rushing an army base that represented in their minds a cartoon published by unbelievers in an unbelievers kingdom by the sea.

Myself, I went, via Le Colonel Chabert, today, to Democracy Now and discovered, to my dismay, that the idiocy may be terminal. The conversation between As’ad Abikhalil is and Irshad Manji is enough to make you pull out your hair. Abikhalil should be representing my line: he is a non-believer who nevertheless wants to defend a degree of outrage among the Moslems who are outraged. So far, so good. But he immediately goes into a riff of free association that has little to do with anything. Israel, of course, pops up. And he can’t get over the fact that Manji has appeared on Fox news. This seems to be a mortal sin. Manji, on the other hand, is full of the kind of gotcha tactics that make me turn off the radio.

Yet both could have helped each other a little bit. This is the thing about discourse, and opposition. It is not a zero sum game. The beauty of opposition is to keep it on the highest possible level, not to take advantage of the referee looking away to foul your opponent. Manji makes a good point, and ruins it by making it into a description of Abikhalil’s position, when it isn’t a description of his position at all:

“And speaking of dissent, you know, I find it interesting that your other guest suggests or actually emphasizes that there is a targeting of Islam, but that no other religion, you know, can be mocked. How then does he explain the routinely and viciously anti-Semitic programming that comes out of the Arab world. And I would remind him that we Muslims never protest that kind of atrocity. So, how do we have integrity demanding to the rest of the world that they completely respect our religion, when we ourselves have trouble respecting other faiths?”
And while it is true that you don’t find a lot of Christian fundies protesting about the oppression of Buddhists in Tibet, you do find Christians and non-Christians in Western countries protesting. And it is also true that a repulsive anti-semitism has been emitted as a salve by Arabic countries for the “cause of Palestine.”

Unfortunately, Abikhalil decides, (instead of saying, that doesn’t represent my point, but I think I can connect what you are saying to my suspicion that Islam was selected for mockery for reasons that aren’t being admitted) to attack Manjil for various crimes of political correctness, plus not being an Arab speaker. Nobody asks if there are any Danish speakers in the room. And -- let me guess -- they didn't serve Danishes in the Green Room. Maybe they can rename them Holy Cream Cheese Pastries.

As'ad Abikhalil: “Well, Amy, that’s very easy to respond to. First of all, I am aware of the pontification of the other guest on FOX News, among other outlets that relish the opportunity to have somebody like her –“

I haven’t watched a political show on tv for around fifteen, twenty years, but I imagine this is just how they all operate. I don't get it -- why does anybody watch them?

Then my man Abikhalil gets involved in this discussion:

“AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, would you say this is an overreaction, what is happening?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, first of all, Amy, it’s not up to me to decide. I have my own sensibilities, and for me, I mean, as a secular atheist, you know, I would love to have people who mock and ridicule all religions together, but it is the inconsistency that’s striking, as well as hypocrisy…”

Well, LI has no problem deciding. If ever there was an over-reaction, we are seeing it. If ever there was a predictable over-reaction, we are seeing it. I've considered how I want to die -- whether I want the total package, the pain, the cancer, the death agony going on for days, or the in-and-out package, heart attack, death. But one thing I definitely know: I do not want to die over an insulting cartoon.

I’d quote more of this illuminating discussion (partly because it is, apart from being stupid, genuinely funny), but since I am sick this week (with a cough that starts up and goes in my throat like the howls of somebody's chained and abandoned dog, God damn it) I figure I’ll write about this in another post.

zigzag

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff from Die Zeit penned an op ed in the WAPO about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammed. His account of how this began doesn’t, actually, make much sense:

“It's worth remembering that the controversy started out as a well-meaning attempt to write a children's book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. The book was designed to promote religious tolerance. But the author encountered the consequences of religious hatred when he looked for an illustrator. He could not find one. Denmark's artists seemed to fear for their lives. In turning down the job they mentioned the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist for harshly criticizing fundamentalism.

When this episode percolated to the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the paper's cultural editor commissioned the caricatures. He wanted to see whether cartoonists would self-censor their work for fear of violence from Muslim radicals.”

How, pray tell, do you write a book to promote religious tolerance while at the same time breaking one of the taboos of the religion? It is like writing a children’s book about a tribe that has a taboo against photographs, and sending a photographer down to photograph them. A little honesty would be nice here about the real motives involved.

From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we learn that the children’s book author is Kare Bluitgen, who is described as living in an immigrant’s quarter and having immigrant friends. Three artists refused to draw Muhammed not simply because of Theo van Gogh, but, according to the FAZ, because they didn’t want to break the Islamic rule that forbids the prophet’s image. Since that taboo is fundamental to the whole issue, it is weird that Kleine-Brockhoff skirts around it.

The FAZ reports:

“It is really not an accident that it was the Jyllands-Posten that decided to take this step. For one thing, in its pronounced opinions in its columns and in its reader’s letter column it does not restrain itself. The left liberal Danish paper “Information” doesn’t hestitate to classify the Jyllands-Posten as the “faschist Jyllands-Pest” in which you find islamophobit witchhunts, while other papers in the western world are announcing their solidarity with the press in the name of freedom of opinion.”

And the Guardian reports

“Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.
The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.”

Now that a Danish paper dislikes Islam and deliberates ways of insulting the religion is well within the right of any paper. It is misleading, however, to speak airily of the freedom of opinion and leave the content of the opinion void.
As it happens, Denmark is, on the one hand, one of the Coalition of the Willing which has sent soldiers into Iraq, and on the other hand, going through a period of rejection with regard to immigrants. Now, when a major paper deliberately insults the religion of the country one’s soldier’s are occupying, it would seem prudent for the Prime Minister of that country to offer the kind of soothing pap that comes automatically out of the mouth’s of Bush and Blair’s representatives. And should – when government officials proclaim their horror of offending religious sensibilities, they are applying a convention – they aren’t legally restricting the domain of opinion. But Denmark’s p.m., whose party ran on an anti-immigrant platform, refused to do the conventional repair work. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen declined to meet Muslim foreign ministers in Copenhagen over the issue.

Max Weber draws the contrast between Recht (law) and Convention as a matter of boycotting. The violation of a convention engenders the chance that a boycott of some kind will take place. You lose a friend, or you lose a customer. You do repair work. Etc. Certainly convention concerning Christianity, in most Western countries, requires that ministers pretend to take, say, the Pope seriously. That the force of convention was not even powerful enough to lure Rasmussen, who has put Danish soldiers at risk, to do conventional repair work reveals a certain contempt for Muslims, or at least a weakness. And that contempt is pretty close to the surface in this dispute over freedom of opinion.
...

Of course, this isn’t all there is to the issue. I am obviously bending over backwards, here, to see things as they are seen by a Muslim. But I am not a Muslim. I’m not a Christian either, but I was, at one point, and I’ve spent my entire life in a community dominated by Christianity. I’ve had plenty of atheist, Jewish, and Buddhist friends and acquaintances, but of the people I’ve known who come from dominant Muslim communities, almost all of them have rejected Islam. In fact, the dirtiest joke I ever heard about Muhammed came from a Turk.
Which gets us to the ritual zigzag of these things. For surely there is something admirable in the papers of Europe publishing the cartoons in solidarity with the besieged Danish paper?

Well, there is. I think that the reaction in Europe is a lot more courageous than the reaction to the Satanic Verses back in the 80s, or the reaction to Death of a Princess, the documentary that the Saudi’s pretended was an insult to Islam. But there is something odd about simply reprinting the cartoons, since the majority of the readers of these papers are going to feel the sacrilege involved at second hand, as it were. As an intellectual apprehension. Why did the papers not intersperse the Muhammed series with some cartoons about Jesus, and about Moses – with the same kind of visceral dislike? Since convention, as Weber shrewdly remarks, rests on a sort of Pavlovian visceral response, the newspapers should try to translate that visceral response into terms that really do try the limits of freedom of opinion.

This, I think, is at the root of my tendency to see this issue with much more sympathy for the rioting crowds in Damascus or wherever. There is something hollow about an iconoclasm directed towards a religion one doesn’t believe in, or have any feeling for beyond dislike. And, on another level, towards a people who believe this religion who are, almost invariably, the poor working class in Denmark, Germany, France, etc. Insulting the god of the woman who cleans your toilet doesn’t strike me as one of the great blows for freedom. That you should legally be able to do it, and be guarded from any violent consequences for doing it by the state, I take to be self-evident. But spare me the story of faux martyrdom and the braving of conventions.

P.S. Since the Philadelphia Inquirer has had the courage to publish the Muhammed cartoons, may I humbly suggest testing the freedom of speech limits with another cartoon. In this one, Jesus is shown holding a baby. Jehovah is next to him with a match. A big grill is in front of them. The Jesus character goes, you light the grill, I’ll throw on the unbaptized infants. To make it funnier, Jesus can be grasping one of those big barbecue forks.

apologies

Yes – LI was hasty, yesterday, roundly condemning this administration. Today, we have to eat our words, because the Bush administration released a budget that is obviously a highly literate satire, on the order of Dead Souls or A Modest Proposal. Just as we were attacking Bush for boldness, he comes up with this truly postmodern classic, which can be enjoyed by the whole family.

There is, for instance, the halving of the deficit, which is achieved by pretending hundreds of billions of dollars just aren’t being spent. This in itself is a terrific satiric swipe at Enron’s accounting methods, which, by being adopted wholesale by the government, are exposed in all their ridiculousness.

Then there is the 6 percent increase for the military and the 3 percent decrease for education. Let’s see, the six percent raise is, what – 10 million per terrorist? 30? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as we all know that the war on terrorism is a wink wink job. The real battle is to get as much cash in the pockets of the defense industry as possible. And that education, so funny, so delicious. As somebody said, not long ago, we need to produce the best scientists and mathematicians to meet the challenges of the future – not! This made LI laugh until we had to change our clothes. It’s a bit of Lenny Bruce humor, a fuck you, America, but all in good fun.

Global warming? Addiction to oil? Future hurricanes? What me worry? There are priorities and then there are priorities. In the aftermath of Katrina, cutting the budget of the corps of engineers by some ten percent represents pure genius. The administration has always had a sharp eye for real time TV satire. Their version of it is to throw so much money at the wealthy that they go, literally, hog wild and do the darnedest, most unbelievable things – steal from poor Iraqis, cheat the government on defense ware for those laughable losers, the American soldier, and … and this is crème de la crème – load their own pockets as they ‘stabilize’ wages for their workers. Bye bye pensions is the motto of the kreative krewe known simply to the administration as the Pioneers. Sure, it isn’t pretty, but – just as in real tv – there are lessons to be learned among the laughs. Continuing this comedy feat and fiesta, the budget is loaded with tax breaks for the wealthy that will make your eyes water with laughter. An administration that has played one of the great practical jokes of all times – the medicare bill that forbids the government from dickering with the big pharma for lower prices, thus criminalizing efficiency – isn’t quite up to its old standard, but this budget tries in every way.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder how the locust became king! Like an alternate reality, like the confederacy winning the Civil war and rammng its small bore, pathological ideas down our throat, this budget season looks to be as spicy as anything we’ve ever seen.

The best part is coming up, as “earmarks are good” Boehner and his merry men dig in.

And the way the newspapers report this thing – pulling a face as serious as Buster Keaton’s as they report one lie after another – is also a tickle.

We loved this from the NYT:


“The plan includes $50 billion for covering the cost of military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan into the next fiscal year, although administration officials said last week that requests would be submitted soon for supplemental spending for the current year for the wars and for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The budget office released a new estimate saying that the deficit for the current fiscal year would be $423 billion, a record high, up from its midyear estimate of $341 billion. The new budget projects the deficit to fall to $354 billion in the 2007 fiscal year, and to $183 billion in 2010.”

What was it that the old Cold Warriors used to say about Pravda? I think they said something about it printing government lies, and being an example of totalitarianism, and yada yada yada. My how we used to laugh when the Soviet Union would say something one day and something totally contradictory the next day, and their official newspapers would just put it out there without blinking. My that Soviet Union was a corker.

political advise (caution, totally useless)

This is a waste of time, another useless political fantasia. But what the hell. We look like we are going to plunge into a prolonged contest in all venues between the Dems defending our civil liberties (meaning that they want to pass laws to take them away before the president does it unilaterally) and the Republicans defending our national security (can you look into the video camera, Osama? What’s the message for America again?)

Forgive me, I need some release.

The President’s newest and funniest defense of the NSA wiretappings is this: if we had had those wiretappings before 9/11, everything would have been different.

Now why doesn’t a Dem, one Dem, one little Dem, ask: how would things have been different? Would Bush have pressed the FBI? Directed the secretary of transportation to contact the airports? Done the type of things that, say, you do when you are warned that a terrorist attack is imminent?

Gee. It turns out that we were warned – or at least Bush was – that the chance was extremely high of terrorist attack. I suppose he wanted more info. Mohammed Atta’s address book. A map of New York city. Three years to think about it. After all, this is what Bush actually said about the memo he received on August 6, 2001:

"I read it and obviously was discomforted by the fact that Osama bin Laden hated America," Bush said. "But as I mentioned yesterday, we already knew that."

The farcical image of Bush as a bold leader, propagated by the press ever since we saw the real Bush, on 9/11, freeze and act with characteristic indecisiveness, is not so much political as psychopathological. It seems that the 9/11 attack hurt the country’s narcissism so deeply that we collectively -- or at least the media, on our behalf - decided that we have a bold, maybe even a reckless leader.

We don’t. We have a man with a character flaw as a leader. It isn’t a bad character flaw if, say, you are a bank teller. If you swing on a trapeze or lead a country supplied with 15,000 ICBM missiles, however, it can be deadly.

The flaw is this: Bush freezes up when meeting a crisis. We saw this plainly on 9/11. We saw this plainly with Katrina. And, I think, we saw this in the summer of 2003, when it became evident that Rumsfeld’s Iraq plan had failed and we needed new leadership if even a fifth of what Bush wanted to happen in Iraq was going to happen.

People who freeze up in crises do two things. First they lie. We know about the Katrina lies, Bush’s claim that nobody saw that the levees would bust when he had been informed 48 hours before Katrina that the levees would bust. We know about the 9/11 lies, the fight the Bush administration put up not to release the fact that Bush was informed, basically, that Al Q was ready to go soon. We know all about the lies in Iraq, from Mission Accomplished to the news about the thousand points of light in Iraq, an area in which American power is now pretty much irrelevant.

You'll notice that with Katrina, as with 9/11, Bush specifically flew away from the target area. This is a sad indication of the kind of behavior you would expect from someone who fails in crises. To use the military lingo, he doesn't have the guts to face up to these things.

The second thing people who freeze up in crises do is prolong. Having failed to address a situation at the crisis point, the person who freezes up can, by prolonging the situation, normalize it. A normalized bad situation melts the distinction between the moment of failure and all the failures that came afterward. So, for instance, it is normal for us to see Al Qaeda nesting in Pakistan, dabbling, according to the Bush people, in Iraq, blowing up a train station here, a synagogue there. It is so normal we don’t even think that Tora Bora was, uh, a fuckup, a massive fuckup, followed by the fuckup of not guarding the borders into Pakistan (lack of manpower being Rumsfeld’s m.o.), followed by the fuckup of allowing A.Q. and related Islamist groups to form a second power in Pakistan to the point where they are going to be that much harder to uproot. And of course the fuckup in Iraq, the prolongation of a pointless, pointless struggle. And the fuckup in New Orleans, the months of an emergency response that would have shamed Sri Lanka.

So, where’s the Dem to ask the simple question: okay, what would you have done with those wiretaps, Mr. President? Let’s hear it. Let’s hear the list. This ought to be good – a nice, big list of things that you do when you believe that you are in imminent danger of attack. Love to, love to hear it. Really. Take your time. Go on a vacation, perhaps, to get your bold thinking, freedom loving head around the idea.

Led by a contemptible putz who is opposed by a clueless bunch of political nitwits – America, circa 2006. Makes me feel all Walt Whitmanish inside.

ps -- surely someone will write LI to tell us that they had the famous San Diego apartment bugged -- that Bush's suggestion that they didn't is an error or a lie. Surely pursuing the minor fault relentlessly, dotting every i and beating the bushes for every bit of evidence, while letting the major fault -- the outstanding, public failures of leadership, intelligence, and responsibility -- go unquestioned, has been the whole sad pattern the past five years. I'll grant the President his buggings as a counterfactual. Again and again we swerve away from the obvious to forge our political weapons out of the esoteric. Since this has never, ever, worked, I guess the idea is: why not try the tactic one more time? Let me politely disagree, or more impolitely yell: fuck that. My idea is: hey, why don't we try to forge our weapons out of the obvious? Radical, eh?

does it work?

From Suite venitienne

Sophie Calle is a French conceptual artist. There’s a good article on Sophie Calle in the winter Cultural Geographies (“Sophie Calle’s art of following and seduction” by Janet Hand).

Here are some of Calle’s pieces:

Hotel, 1981

“On Monday, February 16, 1981 I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6 the job came to an end.”

Hand adds this detail: “The hotel, then, takes the form of a photographic and diaristic series describing her intimate encounters with the business and personal possessions of guests whilst working in the hotel.”

In The sleepers (1979) she photographed sleeping people.

In The address book (1983), “Calle used a ‘found’ address book to follow ‘virtually’ the man to whom the book belonged and whom, we are led to believe, she didn’t ‘know’. She visited people whose details were contained in the book, and photographed objects in some way connected to the man she was profiling and with whom she otherwise had no relation. Calle then published her work as ‘an instalment piece’ in the French national newspaper Liberation. It was in this project that Calle came most closely into conflict
with issues of privacy and rights. The man demanded a right of reply in the newspaper, we are told.”

Finally, in “Suite venitienne … she determined to follow a man she hardly knew (Henri B.) to Venice.” This was connected to a set of following pieces, like Twenty years later (2001), in which she asked a gallery owner, Emmanuel
Perrotin, to hire a detective to follow her. In The Shadow, 1981, she’d done the same piece, asking her mother to hire a detective to follow her.

In S.V., she writes:

“For months I followed strangers on the street _/ for the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took notes of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.
At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of the conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.”

Calle followed the man to Venice in a number of ways – for instance, she called all of the hotels in Venice until she found him. And she does eventually attract his attention. Henri B. probably knows about her reputation:


“When Calle encounters Henri B., when he recognizes her and prohibits her from taking his photograph in Venice, even when she follows him back to Paris by train, we are invited to ask what she wants from him. It is to the dramatized issues of consequence and judgement, and to the relation of judgement to aesthetics, that the chase demands our attention. Calle may conjure and preserve the idea of the work in the narrative of Suite ve´nitienne, but just as significantly, the narrative itself is irreducible to a self-referring statement in distinction from an authoring subject.”


Now, I love the descriptions of these pieces. I have immense respect for artists like Calle and Chris Burden, but I know that there is nothing so alienating and infuriating to even literary people than this kind of art. In fact, the first question (and least important) that is asked about such things is, is it art. This question was important in 1920, but just as certain currencies from the 20s have become mere curiosities (Mussolini’s lire, for instance), so, too, certain questions from that time have no exchange-value left. Much more interesting is: does this work? When Burden did a piece he called (as I recall) asshole, where he cuts his hair and buys a suit to look like an FBI agent, goes to a conference to which he has been invited, and answers all questions asked of him like an asshole, does that work?

The problem with conceptual art is the opening it gives to the critic. The art world suffers from the way in which critics have colonized the art world. Someone like Sophie Calle does her act, and collects the relics of it, and might even tell about it, but it is the critic that really conveys the work.

Art critics sometimes do a strange thing. Imagine going to your local club to listen to some band. Imagine a group of people getting out on the dance floor and announcing that you can only dance to this band in the following way, using the following gestures and steps. While that would not go over at a club, it often happens in the art world. Critics who are quite brilliant, like Rosalind Krauss, are also quite adept at doing this. If you read Art Forum, you will find article after article squeezing the work it talks about to death, as the critic fits himself into the art ‘space.’

I have an idea of the kind of demonic impulse to which Calle responds. One of her works is called The Wardrobe:

“I saw him for the first time in December 1985, at a lecture he was giving. I found him attractive, but one thing bothered me: he was wearing an ugly tie. The next day I anonymously sent him a thin brown tie. Later, I saw him at a restaurant and he was wearing it. Unfortunately, it clashed with his shirt. It was then that I decided to take on the task of dressing him from head to toe: I would send him one article of clothing
every year at Christmas.”

I once, as a joke, purchased several babilicous postcards in Florida, and then, as I was passing through a town in Mississippi, I looked up several names in the phonebook and wrote Missing you so much! heart, Candi, and sent them from New Orleans to those addresses. This might have been a cruel thing to do, I’ll grant you, but as a prank it worked extremely well. I strongly doubt I broke up anybody’s marriage, but surely I started a few dinner table conversations. Or perhaps these postcards never arrived, who knows?

Well, I have been pondering these things since my friend, D., sent me the invite to our mutual friend Thomas Glassford’s opening at the MUCA Campus of UNAM this spring. The opening is called Exquisite Corps, and the invite came with a critical epilogue that expounded in highly theoretical terms about the work without, actually, saying anything about the work whatsoever. The invite mentioned other of Thomas’ pieces, like Valley – “an upended ranch cot slit down the middle by a tin gutter” – the description of which I would bet the critical nabob got from Thomas himself. The shame of this is that the critical colonization of Thomas’ pieces really does nothing to help you see them. Quite the contrary. How many artists do I know who have to suffer being pimped out by a critic in order to be seen at all? It is a sad and inverted situation. And the worst of it is, nobody wants to talk about it. The artists can afford to alienate the critics if they are going to have any success – which depends on the critics. This is the sign of a rentier regime about to fall.

And the ones that do bitch are usually the most conservative -- they don't really give a fuck about colonization, they just want attention for another fatiguing go around about figuration a la Jed Perl.



This is the sign of a rentier regime about to fall. This isn't what Duchamp meant at all, at all...