The London Times did a nice thing a week ago that I missed – they published several articles to celebrate Beckett, on his centenary. LI particularly liked Roy Foster’s appreciation, which ends with a very nice anecdote:
“Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year."
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. "The brother?" asked my father-in-law, surprised. "Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself." Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.”
What LI loves about Beckett is the way he pushes the rule: the bleaker, the funnier. One of our own obsessions since dear old college days is the way that one rule in life never seems to be questioned: that the serious and the non-serious are completely separate categories. Or as Mark Twain said, in his rules for funerals: “don’t laugh.” This is common sense, but LI… always laughs. Our taste tends towards the lurid and the bitter because we think of art as seriousness taken non-seriously. (and aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is non-seriousness taken seriously -- remember, it all starts with that prating pietist, Kant, trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle). Our own little aesthetic hierarchy starts with the fact that Lear, in the end, remembers “my poor fool is hang’d.” The fool – which could be Cordelia as well – was both lucky and unlucky in that last act – for after all, one of the bits in his repertoire was to make sexual puns out of legal punishments, and a hanging fool was, of course, the kind of thing he'd zip up. Beckett's work shows just how funny this is, or could be made to be from the fool’s point of view, if he were still around, like Molloy, to enjoy his own hanging.
We liked this graf from Foster’s piece too:
“Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: "Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds." And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned -for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. "Vous etes anglais, M. Beckett" -"Au contraire."”
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
squeeze the army to death
Bush’s press conference made clear what was clear to any thinking person: there will be no pullout of Iraq via establishment politics:
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
post elsewhere
LI has contributed another post to Long Sunday. And today is so jam packed with tasks we have to finish that we can't really fiddle in this space.
Check it out, here.
Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!)
ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful methods to rid the world of the evil that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is why to defeat the US War on us we use peaceful means, education, and our peaceful spirit to show that there is evil in America and it needs to be addressed. Our enemy uses guns, weapons, helicopters, wire tapping, phone surveillance, snitches, informers, German Shepherd attack dogs, gulags and concentration camps. Is there any doubt what should be eradicated from the face of the earth?"
And this:
"Montreal, Quebec: Marc, why should you and the others Michelle and Greg be charged within Canada on a an Canadian warrant and then not be prosecuted under Canadian law??
All the Best to the BC3
Marc Emery: Because the Canadian political establishment that is in governance in Canada (The Liberal-Conservative parties) both want me out of the way for as long as possible, like the enemies of freedom (White House, DEA, Congress) in the USA do.
In 10 years I achieved huge results in Canada and the world. I sent out over 4 million seeds, had people grow those plants out, over 10 years, probably produced 10 to 20 million marijuana plants around the world, forcing the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi police style activities in the USA, Canada and the world. Then with that money, I spent just under $4 million on court cases, lawyers for class action suits, ballot initiatives, politicians, elections, rallies, conferences, political parties, all peaceful, democratic investments, completely transparent, to subvert the US drug war and bring about a legal environment where cannabis can be taxed, regulated in a manner that addresses all social concerns. Ending prohibition, to say it simply.
It was a genius plan. Produce millions of plants to Overgrow the Governments, give the US people what they want (they do want the marijuana, and they'd rather grow it themselves than buy Afghani or foreign pot) and then spend the money they have entrusted to me to achieve what Americans who must hide from their government cannot do, participate in the public process to end prohibition."
What can LI add except -- you will not get a chance to read something this good in the WAPO for a long, long time. Don't miss it!
Check it out, here.
Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!)
ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful methods to rid the world of the evil that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is why to defeat the US War on us we use peaceful means, education, and our peaceful spirit to show that there is evil in America and it needs to be addressed. Our enemy uses guns, weapons, helicopters, wire tapping, phone surveillance, snitches, informers, German Shepherd attack dogs, gulags and concentration camps. Is there any doubt what should be eradicated from the face of the earth?"
And this:
"Montreal, Quebec: Marc, why should you and the others Michelle and Greg be charged within Canada on a an Canadian warrant and then not be prosecuted under Canadian law??
All the Best to the BC3
Marc Emery: Because the Canadian political establishment that is in governance in Canada (The Liberal-Conservative parties) both want me out of the way for as long as possible, like the enemies of freedom (White House, DEA, Congress) in the USA do.
In 10 years I achieved huge results in Canada and the world. I sent out over 4 million seeds, had people grow those plants out, over 10 years, probably produced 10 to 20 million marijuana plants around the world, forcing the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi police style activities in the USA, Canada and the world. Then with that money, I spent just under $4 million on court cases, lawyers for class action suits, ballot initiatives, politicians, elections, rallies, conferences, political parties, all peaceful, democratic investments, completely transparent, to subvert the US drug war and bring about a legal environment where cannabis can be taxed, regulated in a manner that addresses all social concerns. Ending prohibition, to say it simply.
It was a genius plan. Produce millions of plants to Overgrow the Governments, give the US people what they want (they do want the marijuana, and they'd rather grow it themselves than buy Afghani or foreign pot) and then spend the money they have entrusted to me to achieve what Americans who must hide from their government cannot do, participate in the public process to end prohibition."
What can LI add except -- you will not get a chance to read something this good in the WAPO for a long, long time. Don't miss it!
Monday, March 20, 2006
then-ism
LI sometimes feels bad that our radical sensibilities aren’t really captured by a correspondingly radical politics. It is nice to be more ultra than thou, and to either proclaim the self-evident virtues of anarchy or Marxism or libertarianism, etc.
But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism.
Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.
Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it.
The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage. Of course! A perfect “then” moment.
Correspondingly, we love reading Marxist oriented criticisms of, say, the intricate capitalist structure that has led to the environmental horrors of the shrinking ozone layer and global warming. And how are we going to change that? Why, by a revolutionary breakthrough overthrowing capitalism! Brilliant. That’s a darn tootin’ brilliant plan, there, boss. And who is going to lead that, finance it, and how long will it take? Why, we just gotta trust that a party composed of self-less people, financed by George Soros and Jesus Christ, will arise from the Lit Crit departments to mirror, perfectly, the wants of the people in a brand new revolutionary space, a perfect vacuum created by destroying the influence of the capitalist. Capitalism, which in paragraphs 1 through 10 is described as an all powerful evil system, is overthrown in a wink in paragraph 11 by a group of people absolutely uninfluenced by the mechanisms used to overthrow the all powerful evil system, and now ready to lead us to nirvana. And didn’t such a party system lead to the so far greatest crimes against the environment ever committed, re the whole industrial structure of the Soviet union, as this unchecked leadership shifted social costs massively onto the general population. Well,some people are just spoilsports. Another perfect “then” moment.
The whole bloody story of Iraq is, of course, a triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America. And I have noticed, looking around at the celebration of the third year of the fiasco, that the triumph of the “then” has gone almost completely unnoticed, as new schemes, unattached to any 'then', are proposed to "get America out of Iraq.” We particularly like the one where America, much like the baddest cop on your favorite show, just tells the Iraqis, okay, break it up into three different nations. There you go! The painlessness of that solution, the obvious compliance of the Iraqis when they hear the jig is up, and the Johnny come marchin’ home of our boys (who we all support so much! support support support, that’s our middle name around here), points to the genius at work in the American population at large.
But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism.
Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.
Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it.
The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage. Of course! A perfect “then” moment.
Correspondingly, we love reading Marxist oriented criticisms of, say, the intricate capitalist structure that has led to the environmental horrors of the shrinking ozone layer and global warming. And how are we going to change that? Why, by a revolutionary breakthrough overthrowing capitalism! Brilliant. That’s a darn tootin’ brilliant plan, there, boss. And who is going to lead that, finance it, and how long will it take? Why, we just gotta trust that a party composed of self-less people, financed by George Soros and Jesus Christ, will arise from the Lit Crit departments to mirror, perfectly, the wants of the people in a brand new revolutionary space, a perfect vacuum created by destroying the influence of the capitalist. Capitalism, which in paragraphs 1 through 10 is described as an all powerful evil system, is overthrown in a wink in paragraph 11 by a group of people absolutely uninfluenced by the mechanisms used to overthrow the all powerful evil system, and now ready to lead us to nirvana. And didn’t such a party system lead to the so far greatest crimes against the environment ever committed, re the whole industrial structure of the Soviet union, as this unchecked leadership shifted social costs massively onto the general population. Well,some people are just spoilsports. Another perfect “then” moment.
The whole bloody story of Iraq is, of course, a triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America. And I have noticed, looking around at the celebration of the third year of the fiasco, that the triumph of the “then” has gone almost completely unnoticed, as new schemes, unattached to any 'then', are proposed to "get America out of Iraq.” We particularly like the one where America, much like the baddest cop on your favorite show, just tells the Iraqis, okay, break it up into three different nations. There you go! The painlessness of that solution, the obvious compliance of the Iraqis when they hear the jig is up, and the Johnny come marchin’ home of our boys (who we all support so much! support support support, that’s our middle name around here), points to the genius at work in the American population at large.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
bozoism: a swedenborgian perspective
How the delights of every one's life are changed after death into things that correspond can be known from a knowledge of correspondences; but as that knowledge is not as yet generally known I will try to throw some light on the subject by certain examples from experience. All who are in evil and who have established themselves in falsities in opposition to the truths of the church, especially those that have rejected the Word, flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves; and this because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caves and clefts of rocks well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those that have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such caves; and they frequent rooms so dark that they are even unable to see one another; and they whisper together in the ears in corners. – Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell
The sinister farce of American drug policy hit its normal two notes this past week: one clownlike, and the other terroristic. The clownlike note was provided by the DEA’s demand that Canada extradite the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana to stand trial for thirty years – thirty years the monsters want to cut from his body – for selling pot seeds. Now, LI has long been in favor of putting DEA agents themselves in prison, after suitable show trials, for kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and the usual like, but we have doubts this is going to happen. It is one of those peculiarities of national character that the American, a type that tattoos snakes not being tread on on its forearm, has been shredding his rights like so much dead dermis for thirty years in the ‘war against drugs.’ Is this because the average American is a buffoon, an asskisser, a dog in love with a flea or a flea in love with a dog, a pariah among the higher order of Swedenborgian angels that circulate through our celestial body continually? I dunno, I just live here. A nation that passes two million of its population through the prison pipeline, many of them for either selling the means to medicate and enjoy oneself without a permit from the doctor and a profit made by a pharmaceutical company, should be investigated not so much by Amnesty international as by Bozo international. The alarming growth of bozoism in this country, which triumphed in Florida in 2000, is, perhaps, something that can be cured. I recommend high gas prices and another decade of 700 billion dollar debts, myself. Maybe it is a temporary epidemic. Those who think bozoism is simply a tiresome fad disease, a psycho-somatic poltergeist, are urged to read Rumsfeld’s op ed in the WAPO. Obviously, this is a man in the last throes of bozoism. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that he has not yet been quarantined.
The terroristic face is being shown in America’s great ally in Latin America: Columbia. On the one side of the coin is sending a harmless Canadian to jail, and on the other side of the coin is supporting, with might and main, the familiar conjunction of fascist and drug dealer, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of free trade for all. Somehow, the media critics of Chavez, who go through every election and referendum in Venezuela looking for the stronghanded methods of communism – we just know they are there! – somehow ignored an election in which armed narcotics godfathers, paramilitaries who have already negotiated with the Uribe government to avoid extradition to the U.S., have helped Bush’s man achieve that magical 70 percent of the vote – with more than 60 percent of the voters abstaining.
The place to read about it is the invaluable Colombia Journal online.
“Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office.”
An additional factor that aided the paramilitary cause in the congressional elections was the low voter turnout. Preliminary reports show that only 34 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, low even by Colombian standards—42 percent of voters participated four years ago. In one Bogotá precinct, only 80 of the 1,200 registered voters showed up to cast a ballot. The combination of the paramilitarization of the electoral process and the voter apathy evident in many areas not under paramilitary control ensured a victory for pro-Uribe parties.”
Hilariously, the Bush administration is worried about the coca growers in Bolivia, and so is the American news media.
Who will deliver us from the curse of Bozoism, o my fallen cohort of droogs?
I don’t know. I’m going out to smoke a joint, now.
The sinister farce of American drug policy hit its normal two notes this past week: one clownlike, and the other terroristic. The clownlike note was provided by the DEA’s demand that Canada extradite the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana to stand trial for thirty years – thirty years the monsters want to cut from his body – for selling pot seeds. Now, LI has long been in favor of putting DEA agents themselves in prison, after suitable show trials, for kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and the usual like, but we have doubts this is going to happen. It is one of those peculiarities of national character that the American, a type that tattoos snakes not being tread on on its forearm, has been shredding his rights like so much dead dermis for thirty years in the ‘war against drugs.’ Is this because the average American is a buffoon, an asskisser, a dog in love with a flea or a flea in love with a dog, a pariah among the higher order of Swedenborgian angels that circulate through our celestial body continually? I dunno, I just live here. A nation that passes two million of its population through the prison pipeline, many of them for either selling the means to medicate and enjoy oneself without a permit from the doctor and a profit made by a pharmaceutical company, should be investigated not so much by Amnesty international as by Bozo international. The alarming growth of bozoism in this country, which triumphed in Florida in 2000, is, perhaps, something that can be cured. I recommend high gas prices and another decade of 700 billion dollar debts, myself. Maybe it is a temporary epidemic. Those who think bozoism is simply a tiresome fad disease, a psycho-somatic poltergeist, are urged to read Rumsfeld’s op ed in the WAPO. Obviously, this is a man in the last throes of bozoism. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that he has not yet been quarantined.
The terroristic face is being shown in America’s great ally in Latin America: Columbia. On the one side of the coin is sending a harmless Canadian to jail, and on the other side of the coin is supporting, with might and main, the familiar conjunction of fascist and drug dealer, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of free trade for all. Somehow, the media critics of Chavez, who go through every election and referendum in Venezuela looking for the stronghanded methods of communism – we just know they are there! – somehow ignored an election in which armed narcotics godfathers, paramilitaries who have already negotiated with the Uribe government to avoid extradition to the U.S., have helped Bush’s man achieve that magical 70 percent of the vote – with more than 60 percent of the voters abstaining.
The place to read about it is the invaluable Colombia Journal online.
“Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office.”
An additional factor that aided the paramilitary cause in the congressional elections was the low voter turnout. Preliminary reports show that only 34 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, low even by Colombian standards—42 percent of voters participated four years ago. In one Bogotá precinct, only 80 of the 1,200 registered voters showed up to cast a ballot. The combination of the paramilitarization of the electoral process and the voter apathy evident in many areas not under paramilitary control ensured a victory for pro-Uribe parties.”
Hilariously, the Bush administration is worried about the coca growers in Bolivia, and so is the American news media.
Who will deliver us from the curse of Bozoism, o my fallen cohort of droogs?
I don’t know. I’m going out to smoke a joint, now.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
d.c. linguistics
There was a story on the radio the other day about a new movie, "thank you for smoking," that features a cigarette industry lobbyist as its hero. The cigarette lobbyist does funny things, like, for instance, trying to brand anti-tobacco programs aimed at children with cigarette company names – this anti-smoking film is brought to you by R.J. Reynolds, for example.
In actual fact, the cigarette lobbyist in the film is a tame and pallid version of the real life wild wild D.C. variety. Example:
There’s a story in the WAPO today about the D.C. Federal court overturning one of Bush’s responses to Global Warming – making it easier for coal plants to pollute.
“Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their operations.”
What this means, in layman’s terms, is that coal plants simply cannot shift those costs of operations to third parties. As the court put it about the Bush administration’s argument:
“EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."
And now, here is where the vocabulary of the lobbyists comes in.
“The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet under, where before it was just in a casket."
Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. "This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."
That last sentence is a joy and a treasure, obviously forged in one of the most advanced laboratories in hell. The WAPO wisely ends the article with these words:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
In actual fact, the cigarette lobbyist in the film is a tame and pallid version of the real life wild wild D.C. variety. Example:
There’s a story in the WAPO today about the D.C. Federal court overturning one of Bush’s responses to Global Warming – making it easier for coal plants to pollute.
“Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their operations.”
What this means, in layman’s terms, is that coal plants simply cannot shift those costs of operations to third parties. As the court put it about the Bush administration’s argument:
“EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."
And now, here is where the vocabulary of the lobbyists comes in.
“The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet under, where before it was just in a casket."
Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. "This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."
That last sentence is a joy and a treasure, obviously forged in one of the most advanced laboratories in hell. The WAPO wisely ends the article with these words:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
Friday, March 17, 2006
our long national nightmare is over
The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq, would be -- and this is my preference -- the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. – Thomas Friedman
These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.
I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.
Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”
Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!
These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.
I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.
Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”
Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!
the bloody third -- part 2
Another post (re my post below) from the travelogue of the beginning of this war. A home movie. I'll entitle this clip, "what do you get when you have a sick and narcissistic left?" You get debate on a level that would make the angels -- the departed souls of the babies on the Gerber jars, those boomer emblems -- weep.
March 13, 2003
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which (the scientists now tell us ) we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who’ve had sex, but their many children. That’s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in ‘04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I’d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush’s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ‘04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies. Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we’ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
March 21, 2003
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
March 13, 2003
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which (the scientists now tell us ) we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who’ve had sex, but their many children. That’s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in ‘04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I’d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush’s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ‘04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies. Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we’ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
March 21, 2003
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
the bloody third
The bloody third anniversary. There is a demonstration in Austin tomorrow, starting at eleven. Myself, I'd advise --as a protest -- reading MacBeth, today. Take this passage as your guide to Iraq:
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
In honor of this anniversary, we are going to publish a little travelogue of posts. A travelogue from a man who never budged, a pocket Cassandra.
This is from March 09, 03:
March 09 03
The Exile's Temptation
"C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de révolutionner pour la vertu que de révolutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des scélérats violent les formes contre les hommes honnêtes, on sait que c'est un délit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation même ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, à les regarder comme des choses sacrées, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honnêtes violent les formes contre des scélérats, le peuple ne sait plus où il en est ; les formes et les lois se présentent à lui comme des obstacles à la justice" " -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
It is infinitely more dangerous to revolutionize for virtue than to revolutionize for crim. When the scoundrels violate the forms against the honest people, we know that it is just one more of their crimes. We are attached to the forms, even by their violation: we learn in silence, and by the weight of mischance, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and conservators of the social order. But when honest men violate the forms against the scoundrels, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves then as obstacles to justice.”
How would I see the War if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremacy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
In honor of this anniversary, we are going to publish a little travelogue of posts. A travelogue from a man who never budged, a pocket Cassandra.
This is from March 09, 03:
March 09 03
The Exile's Temptation
"C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de révolutionner pour la vertu que de révolutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des scélérats violent les formes contre les hommes honnêtes, on sait que c'est un délit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation même ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, à les regarder comme des choses sacrées, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honnêtes violent les formes contre des scélérats, le peuple ne sait plus où il en est ; les formes et les lois se présentent à lui comme des obstacles à la justice" " -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
It is infinitely more dangerous to revolutionize for virtue than to revolutionize for crim. When the scoundrels violate the forms against the honest people, we know that it is just one more of their crimes. We are attached to the forms, even by their violation: we learn in silence, and by the weight of mischance, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and conservators of the social order. But when honest men violate the forms against the scoundrels, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves then as obstacles to justice.”
How would I see the War if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremacy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
their every word is a lie
Later Thursday, Rice was twice shouted down by anti-war protesters as she spoke to students at Sydney University's music school.
"Condoleezza Rice, you're a war criminal," a young man shouted minutes Rice began her address. "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you can't wash that blood away," he repeated until guards led him away.
Rice drew applause with her response: "I'm glad to see that democracy is well and alive at the university," she said, adding that democracy is now also alive at universities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. – Washington Post
BBC report, 10 January 2006
“Text of report by Ali Ajjam headlined "Shi'i and Sunni extremists tighten grip over the cities of Mesopotamia, Iraqi religious parties have secured control over Basra and turned its universities into centres of mourning for Al-Husayn and its department into mobilization centres" published by London-based newspaper Al-Hayat website on 6 January
When the young female engineer who works in a government department in Al-Kut Governorate (180 km south of Baghdad) arrived at work, she was surprised to find that her male and female colleagues were absent. Soon she discovered that most of the employees had gone down to the parking lot of the office building. The department's director had called an "electoral allegiance" meeting, and every employee was told to participate in the meeting to show allegiance to the "Shi'i list" just four days before the last elections.
The scene stunned engineer "HA". Government employees, who had grown beards following their director's orders, were chanting slogans and reciting inflammatory vernacular poetry to raise enthusiasm among the audience. The director had also banned neckties. She recalled a similar scene with her former director. Almost three years ago, the former director stopped work in the same department and gathered the olive-uniformed employees who were carrying their weapons in preparation for the war, which ended with the fall of the former regime.
Exactly as she did before the war, when she decided to leave her job, once again she collected her papers and personal belongings and returned home. The picture of her director among his employees while chanting "Ali... Ali..." was chasing her. In addition, his harsh words urging her to wear a headscarf were reverberating in her ears.”
"Condoleezza Rice, you're a war criminal," a young man shouted minutes Rice began her address. "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you can't wash that blood away," he repeated until guards led him away.
Rice drew applause with her response: "I'm glad to see that democracy is well and alive at the university," she said, adding that democracy is now also alive at universities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. – Washington Post
BBC report, 10 January 2006
“Text of report by Ali Ajjam headlined "Shi'i and Sunni extremists tighten grip over the cities of Mesopotamia, Iraqi religious parties have secured control over Basra and turned its universities into centres of mourning for Al-Husayn and its department into mobilization centres" published by London-based newspaper Al-Hayat website on 6 January
When the young female engineer who works in a government department in Al-Kut Governorate (180 km south of Baghdad) arrived at work, she was surprised to find that her male and female colleagues were absent. Soon she discovered that most of the employees had gone down to the parking lot of the office building. The department's director had called an "electoral allegiance" meeting, and every employee was told to participate in the meeting to show allegiance to the "Shi'i list" just four days before the last elections.
The scene stunned engineer "HA". Government employees, who had grown beards following their director's orders, were chanting slogans and reciting inflammatory vernacular poetry to raise enthusiasm among the audience. The director had also banned neckties. She recalled a similar scene with her former director. Almost three years ago, the former director stopped work in the same department and gathered the olive-uniformed employees who were carrying their weapons in preparation for the war, which ended with the fall of the former regime.
Exactly as she did before the war, when she decided to leave her job, once again she collected her papers and personal belongings and returned home. The picture of her director among his employees while chanting "Ali... Ali..." was chasing her. In addition, his harsh words urging her to wear a headscarf were reverberating in her ears.”
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
remember, remember
It has been a long time since I bothered with Norman Geras’ blog, or others in the supposedly left pro-war camp. But I did go to the Geras blog tonight, and found a reply to Madeleine Bunting’s op ed in the Guardian. Bunting's article is a j'accuse, directed against the pro-war intellectuals -- the belligeranti.
Geras’ reply comes in several parts. Here are three of the Iraq parts:
“Ingredient 4 This one concerns the distribution of blame. It's totally forthright, but only in one direction: '[T]he most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented...'; 'the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and still uttering the same meaningless platitudes.' As for the daily carnage being perpetrated by political forces actively opposed to any democratic process and bound by none of the recognized moral constraints in their choice of methods and targets, here Bunting is coyly indirect. It's just 'blood and brutality' and 'nightmare scenarios', and even then it's because (borrowing the words of Zalmay Khalilzad) 'we have opened a Pandora's box'. But even if 'we' are to blame, in Bunting's judgement, for having done that, why does she have no word of blame to direct at anyone else, as if there were no other forces - former Baathists, just for example, jihadis - determining where Iraq is headed? The anger is all reserved for 'the politicians who made the decisions' and so forth - as if there were just one culpable party.
Ingredient 5 Is there any positive side to what has happened in Iraq? Is Bunting pleased at least for the Kurds? Who knows? She offers no word to enlighten you. Is it at all material, as far as she's concerned, that despite everything 'Iraqis have continued to say by decisive margins that, on balance, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was still worth it'. Given Bunting's way of drawing up a balance sheet on Afghanistan, one shouldn't expect her to say anything about this when it comes to Iraq, and she doesn't.
Ingredient 6 And that brings us to the heart of things here - the heart of things being that Bunting doesn't allow that the differences over the Iraq war were a matter of judgement, in which not all the considerations pointed in the same direction. The only look-in this gets from her is this: 'One can understand the eagerness to topple Saddam might have blinded some into backing a recklessly foolish war.' You see, it 'blinded' us. It couldn't have been, could it, that for people of left and liberal outlook this was a genuine and extremely powerful consideration - to terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves? Writing as if there was only ever one arguable or legitimate side of the story, as if the future was from the start completely transparent, and as if there were no human costs in not going to war against Saddam, is a piece of the purest demagogy, if it isn't (as it usually isn't in such things) outright dishonesty. In this latest piece of hers, Madeleine Bunting speaks for all those in the anti-war camp who have simply silenced the 'other' considerations, disallowing that they carried any weight. They have been, unfortunately, many. There were ways of opposing the war, ways that did not indulge in this silencing, this disallowing, and these can and should be respected. The Bunting-style concoction is something else.”
This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that we can expect from the belligeranti as the death spiral plays itself out -- the irrelevance of American power, the unpredictable direction of Iraqi violence, the shedding of all credibility by the Coalition. In essence, the belligeranti re-writing of history will make everything depend on the moral rightness of wanting to “terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves.”
Unfortunately for this argument, it makes no sense. America and Britain could as well have invaded Indonesia in 1990 – after all, Suharto murdered easily 500-800 thousand Indonesians in 1966 and 1967, and if I wished to divide those by the years, I could easily come up with a per year figure of deaths. But the latter would be a lie, just as Geras' remark about Saddam Hussein is a lie. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was feeding the mass graves in 2003. To have smashed him in 1991 would, indeed, have prevented that – but not to have smashed him then casts as much doubt on the moral dimension of the invasion as would be cast if we invaded Serbia today for having invaded Bosnia in 1992.
That Geras clings, still, to the idea that 2003 was 1991, and that invasion was the only way to stop the ‘feeding of the mass graves” is merely the usual farce. But I’d like to concentrate on Ingredient 4, since one of the things that will slip by in the coming battle of recriminations is how much the pro-war party did, actively, to worsen the situation once Iraq was invaded. The mistakes here came fast and thick, and are indicative of the stew of intellectual corruption in which these characters are steeped. A small bill of particulars would go like this:
1. The de-legitimation of secular democracy. The first and most lasting damage done to post Saddam Iraq by the neo-cons and the war supporters happened indirectly. Even as Iraq was being invaded, the Pentagon flew a known swindler, Ahmed Chalabi, with the nucleus of a paramilitary (the first of so many) to Iraq. Not one war supporter I know of blanched. None protested that putting the face of a criminal on the American supported Iraqi force was a tremendous mistake, and would wound any attempt to create a democratic faction in Iraq. Imagine, if you will, gathering a party to support feminism and putting a former rapist at the head of it. Imagine appointing Ken Lay the head of the SEC. Imagine appointing George Bush to some commission to repair New Orleans. In all of those situations, the grotesque disparity between the record of the person so appointed and the ostensible purpose of the organizations to which they were appointed would have immediately created an outcry. Chalabi, the first of a number of sinister American clients in Iraq (Allawi having, perhaps, an even worse record), was placed in Iraq as though it were the most normal thing in the world. This should reveal, pretty much, the massive bad faith of the pro-war side’s ostensive and gaudy “concern for the Iraqi people.” It was the typical colonialist gambit of finding a criminal for a dark skinned, conquered population that can keep enough order to allow looting to proceed in a peaceable manner.
2. The next opportunity for the pro-war crowd to actually make a difference was in the first couple months of the occupation. Those months planted the terrible seeds of what has come after. The refusal to consider immediate Iraqization of the government; the appointment of sub-competent Americans to positions of authority in Iraq; the attempt to redo the Iraqi economy to the benefit of the U.S.; the disbanding of the army; the laissez faire attitude to looting. At no point did the pro-war people flinch. Even when the policy was clearly insane – the disbanding of the army was, obviously, insane, and LI wrote about it as early as May 30, 2003, to say so – the pro-war people never raised a single peep. Of course, what we wrote then was not the CW it is now, but it was pretty easy to guess. But of course, that isn't all. When Halliburton came on the scene like a devouring locust, Christopher Hitchens wrote a column praising the company. For some reason, he didn’t write a column recently, about the Pentagon overruling their auditors and allowing Halliburton to collect 200 million dollars in gouged profits. Surely he should have. The whole attitude of the pro-war party was either smug or organizing themselves in absolute lockstep behind the Bush plan.
3. As the occupation got under way in earnest, and it was evident that an insurgency was taking place, the pro-war people did their best to lie about this. It took months for them to unglue themselves enough from following every jot and tittle of the pronunciamentos issuing from the Bush white house to even notice that something might have gone a teensy bit wrong. Instead of operating, then, in terms of their supposed love for erecting a ‘liberty loving’ Iraq – which would clearly require internationalizing both the coalition force and the governing structure, kicking out Bremer, and speeding up the transition to an all Iraq government – they continued the childish and stupid project of spitting at the French – what they were hired for in the first place, I suppose. This was probably the last chance to transition from the occupation into an Iraq that could have connected with the strong traditions of its pre-Saddam past. However, this was certainly not in the interests of the Americans, who were determined to knock down one of those traditions – Iraq’s seminal role in nationalizing oil and starting OPEC – and so this never happened.
4. After that, of course, the crimes come thick and fast – the air strikes, the massacres of crowds, the outlawing of Sadr, the attacks in Najaf, and the crowning war crime of sacking Falluja, all celebrated by a crowd that now had wandered so far from supporting anything but colonial oppression in Iraq that they had simply become a joke. A joke whose main indignation was directed at George Galloway. The disgusting left in pursuit of the irrelevant left.
5. So, let us not forget what the pro-war group has wrought. And let’s not get caught up in pointless conversations about the worth or non-worth of toppling Saddam Hussein, since regime change and occupation are two different issues -- one did not have to flow into the other, after all. That they did -- that it was obvious that the bogus D.C. warriors were going to invade to stay -- delegitimated the attack in the first place. But the questions should be separated, anyway, for maximum clarity. The question is the worth or non-worth of the occupation of Iraq, and the guilt, the indelible guilt of the pro-war intellecutals is built on that dark and bloody ground.
ps -- I exempt, from the above five points, Johann Hari -- one of the few belligeranti who actually consulted something other than his own moral superiority when writing about Iraq. While disagreeing with Hari's notion of feedback - especially the curious reverence in which he holds obviously flawed polls of the Iraqi people -- at least he has a notion of feedback, and it extends beyond what is being cleverly expressed on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the latest Hitchens screed in Slate. LI understands the moral grounds that would move someone like Hari, or even Geras, to support an invasion to knock out Saddam Hussein. But a morality so doped up on its own righteousness that it mainly functions to produce a smokescreen of invective and sophism behiind which a gang of corporate hustlers and imperialists are trying to impose an unpopular order on an unwilling populace soon passes into immorality. Hari, to his credit, realized this early on.
Geras’ reply comes in several parts. Here are three of the Iraq parts:
“Ingredient 4 This one concerns the distribution of blame. It's totally forthright, but only in one direction: '[T]he most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented...'; 'the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and still uttering the same meaningless platitudes.' As for the daily carnage being perpetrated by political forces actively opposed to any democratic process and bound by none of the recognized moral constraints in their choice of methods and targets, here Bunting is coyly indirect. It's just 'blood and brutality' and 'nightmare scenarios', and even then it's because (borrowing the words of Zalmay Khalilzad) 'we have opened a Pandora's box'. But even if 'we' are to blame, in Bunting's judgement, for having done that, why does she have no word of blame to direct at anyone else, as if there were no other forces - former Baathists, just for example, jihadis - determining where Iraq is headed? The anger is all reserved for 'the politicians who made the decisions' and so forth - as if there were just one culpable party.
Ingredient 5 Is there any positive side to what has happened in Iraq? Is Bunting pleased at least for the Kurds? Who knows? She offers no word to enlighten you. Is it at all material, as far as she's concerned, that despite everything 'Iraqis have continued to say by decisive margins that, on balance, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was still worth it'. Given Bunting's way of drawing up a balance sheet on Afghanistan, one shouldn't expect her to say anything about this when it comes to Iraq, and she doesn't.
Ingredient 6 And that brings us to the heart of things here - the heart of things being that Bunting doesn't allow that the differences over the Iraq war were a matter of judgement, in which not all the considerations pointed in the same direction. The only look-in this gets from her is this: 'One can understand the eagerness to topple Saddam might have blinded some into backing a recklessly foolish war.' You see, it 'blinded' us. It couldn't have been, could it, that for people of left and liberal outlook this was a genuine and extremely powerful consideration - to terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves? Writing as if there was only ever one arguable or legitimate side of the story, as if the future was from the start completely transparent, and as if there were no human costs in not going to war against Saddam, is a piece of the purest demagogy, if it isn't (as it usually isn't in such things) outright dishonesty. In this latest piece of hers, Madeleine Bunting speaks for all those in the anti-war camp who have simply silenced the 'other' considerations, disallowing that they carried any weight. They have been, unfortunately, many. There were ways of opposing the war, ways that did not indulge in this silencing, this disallowing, and these can and should be respected. The Bunting-style concoction is something else.”
This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that we can expect from the belligeranti as the death spiral plays itself out -- the irrelevance of American power, the unpredictable direction of Iraqi violence, the shedding of all credibility by the Coalition. In essence, the belligeranti re-writing of history will make everything depend on the moral rightness of wanting to “terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves.”
Unfortunately for this argument, it makes no sense. America and Britain could as well have invaded Indonesia in 1990 – after all, Suharto murdered easily 500-800 thousand Indonesians in 1966 and 1967, and if I wished to divide those by the years, I could easily come up with a per year figure of deaths. But the latter would be a lie, just as Geras' remark about Saddam Hussein is a lie. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was feeding the mass graves in 2003. To have smashed him in 1991 would, indeed, have prevented that – but not to have smashed him then casts as much doubt on the moral dimension of the invasion as would be cast if we invaded Serbia today for having invaded Bosnia in 1992.
That Geras clings, still, to the idea that 2003 was 1991, and that invasion was the only way to stop the ‘feeding of the mass graves” is merely the usual farce. But I’d like to concentrate on Ingredient 4, since one of the things that will slip by in the coming battle of recriminations is how much the pro-war party did, actively, to worsen the situation once Iraq was invaded. The mistakes here came fast and thick, and are indicative of the stew of intellectual corruption in which these characters are steeped. A small bill of particulars would go like this:
1. The de-legitimation of secular democracy. The first and most lasting damage done to post Saddam Iraq by the neo-cons and the war supporters happened indirectly. Even as Iraq was being invaded, the Pentagon flew a known swindler, Ahmed Chalabi, with the nucleus of a paramilitary (the first of so many) to Iraq. Not one war supporter I know of blanched. None protested that putting the face of a criminal on the American supported Iraqi force was a tremendous mistake, and would wound any attempt to create a democratic faction in Iraq. Imagine, if you will, gathering a party to support feminism and putting a former rapist at the head of it. Imagine appointing Ken Lay the head of the SEC. Imagine appointing George Bush to some commission to repair New Orleans. In all of those situations, the grotesque disparity between the record of the person so appointed and the ostensible purpose of the organizations to which they were appointed would have immediately created an outcry. Chalabi, the first of a number of sinister American clients in Iraq (Allawi having, perhaps, an even worse record), was placed in Iraq as though it were the most normal thing in the world. This should reveal, pretty much, the massive bad faith of the pro-war side’s ostensive and gaudy “concern for the Iraqi people.” It was the typical colonialist gambit of finding a criminal for a dark skinned, conquered population that can keep enough order to allow looting to proceed in a peaceable manner.
2. The next opportunity for the pro-war crowd to actually make a difference was in the first couple months of the occupation. Those months planted the terrible seeds of what has come after. The refusal to consider immediate Iraqization of the government; the appointment of sub-competent Americans to positions of authority in Iraq; the attempt to redo the Iraqi economy to the benefit of the U.S.; the disbanding of the army; the laissez faire attitude to looting. At no point did the pro-war people flinch. Even when the policy was clearly insane – the disbanding of the army was, obviously, insane, and LI wrote about it as early as May 30, 2003, to say so – the pro-war people never raised a single peep. Of course, what we wrote then was not the CW it is now, but it was pretty easy to guess. But of course, that isn't all. When Halliburton came on the scene like a devouring locust, Christopher Hitchens wrote a column praising the company. For some reason, he didn’t write a column recently, about the Pentagon overruling their auditors and allowing Halliburton to collect 200 million dollars in gouged profits. Surely he should have. The whole attitude of the pro-war party was either smug or organizing themselves in absolute lockstep behind the Bush plan.
3. As the occupation got under way in earnest, and it was evident that an insurgency was taking place, the pro-war people did their best to lie about this. It took months for them to unglue themselves enough from following every jot and tittle of the pronunciamentos issuing from the Bush white house to even notice that something might have gone a teensy bit wrong. Instead of operating, then, in terms of their supposed love for erecting a ‘liberty loving’ Iraq – which would clearly require internationalizing both the coalition force and the governing structure, kicking out Bremer, and speeding up the transition to an all Iraq government – they continued the childish and stupid project of spitting at the French – what they were hired for in the first place, I suppose. This was probably the last chance to transition from the occupation into an Iraq that could have connected with the strong traditions of its pre-Saddam past. However, this was certainly not in the interests of the Americans, who were determined to knock down one of those traditions – Iraq’s seminal role in nationalizing oil and starting OPEC – and so this never happened.
4. After that, of course, the crimes come thick and fast – the air strikes, the massacres of crowds, the outlawing of Sadr, the attacks in Najaf, and the crowning war crime of sacking Falluja, all celebrated by a crowd that now had wandered so far from supporting anything but colonial oppression in Iraq that they had simply become a joke. A joke whose main indignation was directed at George Galloway. The disgusting left in pursuit of the irrelevant left.
5. So, let us not forget what the pro-war group has wrought. And let’s not get caught up in pointless conversations about the worth or non-worth of toppling Saddam Hussein, since regime change and occupation are two different issues -- one did not have to flow into the other, after all. That they did -- that it was obvious that the bogus D.C. warriors were going to invade to stay -- delegitimated the attack in the first place. But the questions should be separated, anyway, for maximum clarity. The question is the worth or non-worth of the occupation of Iraq, and the guilt, the indelible guilt of the pro-war intellecutals is built on that dark and bloody ground.
ps -- I exempt, from the above five points, Johann Hari -- one of the few belligeranti who actually consulted something other than his own moral superiority when writing about Iraq. While disagreeing with Hari's notion of feedback - especially the curious reverence in which he holds obviously flawed polls of the Iraqi people -- at least he has a notion of feedback, and it extends beyond what is being cleverly expressed on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the latest Hitchens screed in Slate. LI understands the moral grounds that would move someone like Hari, or even Geras, to support an invasion to knock out Saddam Hussein. But a morality so doped up on its own righteousness that it mainly functions to produce a smokescreen of invective and sophism behiind which a gang of corporate hustlers and imperialists are trying to impose an unpopular order on an unwilling populace soon passes into immorality. Hari, to his credit, realized this early on.
Monday, March 13, 2006
the world historical tinkerer
"To invent useful and successful inventions, those with inventive minds should take up individual advanced work and study along some worthwhile line. One should not be afraid to look far, far into the future and visualize the things that might be. . . . Remember, the things which are so commonplace today would have been the ravings of a fanatic a few years ago .”—Earl Silas Tupper
LI had promised, last week, to surprise the world by delineating the features of the tinkerer, considered dialectically. Well, the world yawned, days passed, LI went to the rodeo, and – as our readers can see – there is still no earthshaking tinker post, to put beside that moment, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel finds the embodiment of self-consciousness rising up as a narrative moment involving emblematic figures draped in the rich white vocabulary of abstraction.
This morning we are dosed with the proper amount of coffee, and we successfully pieced together a post for another site that is, in some ways, a side-effect of our obsession with the tinker, and so we thought we’d give it another shot.
Let’s first remember Hegel’s figures. The Lordship and bondsman section begins with a movment from life to thinghood:
“In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman.
The master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, i.e. through an other whose very nature implies that it is bound up with an independent being or with thinghood in general. The master brings himself into relation to both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood. And since the master, is (a) qua notion of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of self-existence, but (b) is now moreover at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other — he [the master] stands in relation (a) immediately to both, (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the bondsman mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the bondsman in thrall; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood.”
Interpreting Hegel is like sticking your hand into a beehive for honey. There’s a lot of stinging, unknown variables you have to grope your way past. But my purpose in quoting the Venerable is to bring forward, first, the relationship of self-consciousness to life – which, in Hegel’s terms, has an order to it that moves from the unity of irreconcilables – the absolute object and the absolute mediation seen as one thing – to the division of the perpetually to be reconciled. In that movement, historically, mastery has migrated to the control of the vision of the those irreconcilables, and their administration, while bondship – stuck in thinghood – has no immediate higher level to spare itself its immediacy, and so its dependency. The dependency is a trick, since the thinghood is never perfect, but is at best the simulation of thinghood. And, as we all know, this moment is followed by the struggle for recognition, which Blake summed up best in the notbook verses beginning:
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft/
Farted & belchd & coughd/
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering/
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering..."
But for the tinkerer, the irreconcilability can actually be put to one side if we just stop with the self-consciousness and begin with self-improvement. Self-consciousness we can leave to the teenagers.
Which brings me to the title of one of Hugh Kenner’s books: The Homemade World. The book was about American modernist writers. But confining that phrase to writers is, LI thinks, a waste of its capaciousness. The homemade world is goal towards which treks the tinkerer as well as the Europe addled modernist. While the phrase works for Robert Frost, it also works for another North of Boston man: Earl Silas Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware. About whom we will have more to say in another post.
LI had promised, last week, to surprise the world by delineating the features of the tinkerer, considered dialectically. Well, the world yawned, days passed, LI went to the rodeo, and – as our readers can see – there is still no earthshaking tinker post, to put beside that moment, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel finds the embodiment of self-consciousness rising up as a narrative moment involving emblematic figures draped in the rich white vocabulary of abstraction.
This morning we are dosed with the proper amount of coffee, and we successfully pieced together a post for another site that is, in some ways, a side-effect of our obsession with the tinker, and so we thought we’d give it another shot.
Let’s first remember Hegel’s figures. The Lordship and bondsman section begins with a movment from life to thinghood:
“In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman.
The master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, i.e. through an other whose very nature implies that it is bound up with an independent being or with thinghood in general. The master brings himself into relation to both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood. And since the master, is (a) qua notion of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of self-existence, but (b) is now moreover at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other — he [the master] stands in relation (a) immediately to both, (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the bondsman mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the bondsman in thrall; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood.”
Interpreting Hegel is like sticking your hand into a beehive for honey. There’s a lot of stinging, unknown variables you have to grope your way past. But my purpose in quoting the Venerable is to bring forward, first, the relationship of self-consciousness to life – which, in Hegel’s terms, has an order to it that moves from the unity of irreconcilables – the absolute object and the absolute mediation seen as one thing – to the division of the perpetually to be reconciled. In that movement, historically, mastery has migrated to the control of the vision of the those irreconcilables, and their administration, while bondship – stuck in thinghood – has no immediate higher level to spare itself its immediacy, and so its dependency. The dependency is a trick, since the thinghood is never perfect, but is at best the simulation of thinghood. And, as we all know, this moment is followed by the struggle for recognition, which Blake summed up best in the notbook verses beginning:
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft/
Farted & belchd & coughd/
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering/
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering..."
But for the tinkerer, the irreconcilability can actually be put to one side if we just stop with the self-consciousness and begin with self-improvement. Self-consciousness we can leave to the teenagers.
Which brings me to the title of one of Hugh Kenner’s books: The Homemade World. The book was about American modernist writers. But confining that phrase to writers is, LI thinks, a waste of its capaciousness. The homemade world is goal towards which treks the tinkerer as well as the Europe addled modernist. While the phrase works for Robert Frost, it also works for another North of Boston man: Earl Silas Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware. About whom we will have more to say in another post.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
false friends
Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, ‘aire’ – which, of course, means area in French.
LI sometimes thinks that this is the era of false friends in the political and moral sphere. If there is one thing that the neo-conservative movement has implanted like a bad seed in the sphere of political discourse, it is this parasitic creeping into figures and ideas that are good, liberal and humane, and the distorting of them for ends that are violent, oppressive, and exploitative.
Case in point: there is a heartening portrait, in the NYT today, of a woman who is subjecting Islam to a withering Enlightenment critique.
“Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.
Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.”
Sultan’s journey into sanity began with her experience in Syria:
“Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.
But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."”
A rational human being! or at least one whose search for another god begins in the right moral circumstances.
Yet I fear that Sultan is going to be adopted, lock stock and barrel, by those who have no real desire to criticize religion and every desire to promote and old and decayed colonial project: the breaking of a culture by dissolving its glue, so to speak. The difference should be clear – it is the difference between therapy and kidnapping. Alas, the school of kidnappers – the false friends – are all around us. So one can foresee, with a sinking heart, that her smart remarks comparing the reaction to oppression by the Jews and by the Muslims will probably not lead to an auto-critique by either group:
“Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."
She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."
…
Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.”
Hopefully, the AJC will hear her golden words on apartheid and the ridiculous sops
thrown to the theocratic party in Israel – for instance, the administration of the marriage laws by Orthodox rabbis, or the enforcement of Sabbath shutdowns of business, etc., etc. But why is it that we doubt that this will be the brunt of the message? It should be. We like Sultan’s title for her upcoming book, in any case: "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." And we know how these things work. The thugs are already calling her up and threatening her. The liberals (moi, for instance) will point out that, indeed, the Moslem world does seem to be under assault by Western powers (Chechnya, Iraq). A divide will grow as absolute loyalty is demanded, even as the enlightenment moment is one of radical relativism. Etc. It is all so predictable.
Anyway, we wonder whether Sultan's book bears a title that will be bought in Kentucky, where the governor, your usual corrupt GOP autocrat, has decided to lift his popularity by pushing through a law mandating the display of the ten commandments in all state offices – hell, soon it will be tattooed on his kids’ faces. So, in the spirit of being a true friend to the assault on those religions that promote the idea of a personal God, there is another book that is, surprisingly, lodged in the best seller lists: "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."
Last week WAPO profiled Bart Ehrman, the author of that little treatise. Once a fundy, Ehrman journeyed into the light by studying his Bible. In truth, we don’t actually believe his conclusion – that Jesus was a legend. Or, rather, legend and biography, in the ancient Meditteranean world, are interconnected in more complicated ways than are allowed by the American mind. Jesus’s legend is much like the legend of Tino Riini, the capo di capo in Sicily, in the 80s – testimony about what Riini did and when is scrambled, and would be even if Riini’s men didn’t help the process along by breaking the legs and torturing to death the testifiers.
“"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.”
Ehrman obviously doesn’t like fiction. Ourselves, we remember Oscar Wilde’s remark – or rather, the remark he attributes to a fictitious interlocutor – that he has never gotten over the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Unfortunately, in the current state of these United States, Ingersoll’s village atheism is more relevant than Wildean aestheticism.
LI sometimes thinks that this is the era of false friends in the political and moral sphere. If there is one thing that the neo-conservative movement has implanted like a bad seed in the sphere of political discourse, it is this parasitic creeping into figures and ideas that are good, liberal and humane, and the distorting of them for ends that are violent, oppressive, and exploitative.
Case in point: there is a heartening portrait, in the NYT today, of a woman who is subjecting Islam to a withering Enlightenment critique.
“Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.
Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.”
Sultan’s journey into sanity began with her experience in Syria:
“Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.
But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."”
A rational human being! or at least one whose search for another god begins in the right moral circumstances.
Yet I fear that Sultan is going to be adopted, lock stock and barrel, by those who have no real desire to criticize religion and every desire to promote and old and decayed colonial project: the breaking of a culture by dissolving its glue, so to speak. The difference should be clear – it is the difference between therapy and kidnapping. Alas, the school of kidnappers – the false friends – are all around us. So one can foresee, with a sinking heart, that her smart remarks comparing the reaction to oppression by the Jews and by the Muslims will probably not lead to an auto-critique by either group:
“Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."
She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."
…
Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.”
Hopefully, the AJC will hear her golden words on apartheid and the ridiculous sops
thrown to the theocratic party in Israel – for instance, the administration of the marriage laws by Orthodox rabbis, or the enforcement of Sabbath shutdowns of business, etc., etc. But why is it that we doubt that this will be the brunt of the message? It should be. We like Sultan’s title for her upcoming book, in any case: "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." And we know how these things work. The thugs are already calling her up and threatening her. The liberals (moi, for instance) will point out that, indeed, the Moslem world does seem to be under assault by Western powers (Chechnya, Iraq). A divide will grow as absolute loyalty is demanded, even as the enlightenment moment is one of radical relativism. Etc. It is all so predictable.
Anyway, we wonder whether Sultan's book bears a title that will be bought in Kentucky, where the governor, your usual corrupt GOP autocrat, has decided to lift his popularity by pushing through a law mandating the display of the ten commandments in all state offices – hell, soon it will be tattooed on his kids’ faces. So, in the spirit of being a true friend to the assault on those religions that promote the idea of a personal God, there is another book that is, surprisingly, lodged in the best seller lists: "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."
Last week WAPO profiled Bart Ehrman, the author of that little treatise. Once a fundy, Ehrman journeyed into the light by studying his Bible. In truth, we don’t actually believe his conclusion – that Jesus was a legend. Or, rather, legend and biography, in the ancient Meditteranean world, are interconnected in more complicated ways than are allowed by the American mind. Jesus’s legend is much like the legend of Tino Riini, the capo di capo in Sicily, in the 80s – testimony about what Riini did and when is scrambled, and would be even if Riini’s men didn’t help the process along by breaking the legs and torturing to death the testifiers.
“"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.”
Ehrman obviously doesn’t like fiction. Ourselves, we remember Oscar Wilde’s remark – or rather, the remark he attributes to a fictitious interlocutor – that he has never gotten over the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Unfortunately, in the current state of these United States, Ingersoll’s village atheism is more relevant than Wildean aestheticism.
the mission party, 03 -- a kegger!
We’ve spent three years watching a comatose anti-war movement spend its time begging Democrats to “lead an opposition.” This shows a fundamental misconception about the war.
[divertimento time]
Many think that the war is a foreign policy issue. Those people are always worried about the purpose of the war. Well, we long ago figured out that this was not a foreign policy issue, and we know the purpose of the war.
To explain this, some background.
When Bush was coming up through the sons-of-millionaire ranks, he landed, lucratively, on a sports franchise. But he wouldn’t be a Texas trust funder if he wasn’t aware that as he was making baby bucks with his franchise, his peers were bringing home double and triple that, leaving him, status wise, in the dust. Well, Bush took the higher road, of public sacrifice and shit, but it still burned a little bit, these CEOs and their money and perks.
So when Bush was elevated to the CC’s chair, he did what a CEO president does, and he amply rewarded the investor class. And just like a CEO – for instance, Dennis Kozlowski, after a busy couple of years making spurious profits, demands a little perk for himself, so did Bush. Kozlowski threw himself a two million dollar bash. Or actually, because he is a good, kind caring type, he threw it for one of his wives. And it was Roman themed, because Kozlowski, though an owner of an off shore company, had hung around NYC enough to meet uptown chicks who told him he had a roman profile and such, as he was stuffing hundreds in their panties. Actually, he has a classic fascist profile, but what is the diff?
Bush wanted his party, which is where Iraq came in. That was the party. And a great party it was. Everybody liked it.
Now, just as Kozlowski cast himself as a roman, Bush has a secret soldier side to him that is sort of cute. The purpose of the party was revealed on May 2, 2003. The purpose was so that Bush could say, Mission accomplished,.
Our CEO president loves to say mission. We won’t speculate overmuch about his love life, but let’s just say that we bet mission impossible has a place in it.
Everything was groovy. And the investors got another taste of sweetness, another huge theft of public resources in the form of a tax cut. The party was officially for the Iraqis, and this is where the trouble started. As Bremer has pointed out, Bush was pretty p.o.-ed that the people he threw his party for were not thanking him. And that was just the beginning of it. The natives are supposed to love parties РI mean, what else are they doing, herding sheep and shit? Bartending pays way more. But the Iraqis started getting in the way of the guests, started wolfing down the canap̩s and, frankly, setting fire to the tablecloths and shit.
This is where the Dems come in. Like any swank party, you have to have a pliable police force. That force is supposed to stifle calls from irate neighbors. The dems were perfect. Oh sure, like all cops, they made faces and rolled their eyes, especially when some of the guests poured white phosphorus on a major city, attacked its hospital, and scattered its people, all 200,000 of them, across the desert, and generally shot up the place, killing thousands. However, the cops were too thrilled with the people in that city anyway.
Actually, this is why Murtha was a big deal – as you will have noticed, he looks like a cop. He’s the weary, about to retire cop, and he says, enough is enough. This party has to end, and we have to go to Kuwait and only send out our planes on special occasions to drop bombs on wedding parties and shit. And everybody is like, Murtha is the chief but he’s getting old.
However, the good time is wearing down. Just as with Kozlowski, Bush must notice that his peers are suddenly, eerily silent. Not only that, but there are all these spitballs from respected conservative figures. Drop the ideological label – I think the last conservative in the U.S. died in 1948. But these guys are innovators, little lures cast out by the investing class. And as the investing class pulls the plug on the party, the tom toms beating in the press for what a great party it is, and how we have to do it for the next ten years or so, are going to go silent.
All of which means that if – if Bush really does have to stop his party in Iraq – the Mission party, man, you can just hear him moaning. I deserved that party! … well, if he has to wrap it up, first sign will be Rumsfeld resigning. And here is the prediction from our fearless party planning consultant –watch for the M word. That will come out of Bush’s mouth as he speechifies his undying gratitude to Rumsfeld for sure.
[back to our sponsor time]
Oh, here's our ps. Bush might feel bad about like nobody liking his party. But the upside is, he has raised the bar on parties. That is so for sure. Hilary, who is a status sniffer if there ever was one, is sure to throw herself a party if she gets elected. Not in Iran – she’s not nuts – but some little place where we can go in, liberate, kill a couple thousand and get out. Maybe Bolivia – a total party opportunity, and I believe we own their army!
[divertimento time]
Many think that the war is a foreign policy issue. Those people are always worried about the purpose of the war. Well, we long ago figured out that this was not a foreign policy issue, and we know the purpose of the war.
To explain this, some background.
When Bush was coming up through the sons-of-millionaire ranks, he landed, lucratively, on a sports franchise. But he wouldn’t be a Texas trust funder if he wasn’t aware that as he was making baby bucks with his franchise, his peers were bringing home double and triple that, leaving him, status wise, in the dust. Well, Bush took the higher road, of public sacrifice and shit, but it still burned a little bit, these CEOs and their money and perks.
So when Bush was elevated to the CC’s chair, he did what a CEO president does, and he amply rewarded the investor class. And just like a CEO – for instance, Dennis Kozlowski, after a busy couple of years making spurious profits, demands a little perk for himself, so did Bush. Kozlowski threw himself a two million dollar bash. Or actually, because he is a good, kind caring type, he threw it for one of his wives. And it was Roman themed, because Kozlowski, though an owner of an off shore company, had hung around NYC enough to meet uptown chicks who told him he had a roman profile and such, as he was stuffing hundreds in their panties. Actually, he has a classic fascist profile, but what is the diff?
Bush wanted his party, which is where Iraq came in. That was the party. And a great party it was. Everybody liked it.
Now, just as Kozlowski cast himself as a roman, Bush has a secret soldier side to him that is sort of cute. The purpose of the party was revealed on May 2, 2003. The purpose was so that Bush could say, Mission accomplished,.
Our CEO president loves to say mission. We won’t speculate overmuch about his love life, but let’s just say that we bet mission impossible has a place in it.
Everything was groovy. And the investors got another taste of sweetness, another huge theft of public resources in the form of a tax cut. The party was officially for the Iraqis, and this is where the trouble started. As Bremer has pointed out, Bush was pretty p.o.-ed that the people he threw his party for were not thanking him. And that was just the beginning of it. The natives are supposed to love parties РI mean, what else are they doing, herding sheep and shit? Bartending pays way more. But the Iraqis started getting in the way of the guests, started wolfing down the canap̩s and, frankly, setting fire to the tablecloths and shit.
This is where the Dems come in. Like any swank party, you have to have a pliable police force. That force is supposed to stifle calls from irate neighbors. The dems were perfect. Oh sure, like all cops, they made faces and rolled their eyes, especially when some of the guests poured white phosphorus on a major city, attacked its hospital, and scattered its people, all 200,000 of them, across the desert, and generally shot up the place, killing thousands. However, the cops were too thrilled with the people in that city anyway.
Actually, this is why Murtha was a big deal – as you will have noticed, he looks like a cop. He’s the weary, about to retire cop, and he says, enough is enough. This party has to end, and we have to go to Kuwait and only send out our planes on special occasions to drop bombs on wedding parties and shit. And everybody is like, Murtha is the chief but he’s getting old.
However, the good time is wearing down. Just as with Kozlowski, Bush must notice that his peers are suddenly, eerily silent. Not only that, but there are all these spitballs from respected conservative figures. Drop the ideological label – I think the last conservative in the U.S. died in 1948. But these guys are innovators, little lures cast out by the investing class. And as the investing class pulls the plug on the party, the tom toms beating in the press for what a great party it is, and how we have to do it for the next ten years or so, are going to go silent.
All of which means that if – if Bush really does have to stop his party in Iraq – the Mission party, man, you can just hear him moaning. I deserved that party! … well, if he has to wrap it up, first sign will be Rumsfeld resigning. And here is the prediction from our fearless party planning consultant –watch for the M word. That will come out of Bush’s mouth as he speechifies his undying gratitude to Rumsfeld for sure.
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Oh, here's our ps. Bush might feel bad about like nobody liking his party. But the upside is, he has raised the bar on parties. That is so for sure. Hilary, who is a status sniffer if there ever was one, is sure to throw herself a party if she gets elected. Not in Iran – she’s not nuts – but some little place where we can go in, liberate, kill a couple thousand and get out. Maybe Bolivia – a total party opportunity, and I believe we own their army!
Friday, March 10, 2006
party poopers on the Titanic
It is entertaining to see D.C.’s international thinkin’ set run like the three blind mice this morning, groaning about the Dubai port deal. It isn’t that the Friedmanites are wrong per se – it is just that this part of the deal – the deal in which the U.S. liquidates its manufacturing status, borrows money indefinitely to maintain the world’s largest consumer market, and adopts for domestic purposes your standard third world distribution of wealth – was supposed to go down a little smoother.
Stephen Pearlstein at WAPO, in four paragraphs, lays it out like an exasperated boiler room jack who has plugged your money into a black hole and is trying to tell you that th-th-th-that’s all, folks:
“Maybe it was possible to get away with this noxious blend of arrogance and ignorance when the United States was the world's only economic superpower. But now that we've become the biggest debtor nation in the history of civilization, we might want to give a bit more thought to whom we tell to buzz off.
It was more than a bit ironic that on the very day that Dubai Ports World threw in the towel and agreed to sell off its U.S. operations, the Commerce Department announced yet another record monthly trade deficit for January, putting us on course to exceed last year's record deficit of $724 billion. At this rate, we are adding to our debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $2,500 a year for every man, woman and child in America.
Where do you think that $724 billion comes from? Let me tell you: It comes from the people who have the dollars. And in case you hadn't noticed, tops on that list are the Japanese who are selling us all those cars, Arabs selling us all that expensive oil, and the Chinese selling us the shirts on our backs, the athletic shoes on our feet and all those computers and flat-screen TVs in front of our noses.
If these folks suddenly get the idea that we don't really trust them enough to do business with them, and begin acting the way human beings do when they get poked in the eye, you could be looking at 8 percent mortgage rates, 6 percent unemployment, $4 gasoline, a $1.50 euro and a 9000 Dow.”
Gee, Dad. Are you saying we can’t afford the war?
But of course, Americans, dummies that they are, don’t get the program. They don’t get that, as they are stripped of all the good things they used to get under the old social welfare regime that taxed, actually taxed, the wealthy and shit (the horror!), they are also stripped of the right to say peep about who in particular owns them. Unfortunately, the notices haven’t yet gone out in the mail. So the American people look at the joke called Homeland Security and go charging against scarecrows, and it is tut tut time for the think tankers. David Ignatius, who has been toured around the UAE by pro-American types just eager to use the sea of money coming in from oil revenues to do everything the pro-American way, can’t get over the ingratitude of the American people. And it is a little puzzling.
After all, the American people have been so grateful to Exxon that not a word in anger has been spoken as the company gouged out the biggest profit ever made by an American corporation – and in fact, the American people felt so grateful to oil companies that even as the oil giants have been cutting back on oil exploration and R and D -- you know, the alternative fuels that will either have to get up and running in the next ten years or bye bye Americans remaining wealth, plus the health of the planet - and, instead, raining money down to its stock holders -- even while this was going on, the American people, through the Gov, was larding these companies with 7 billion dollars in handouts The Minnesota Star Tribune interviewed an petroleum hack who produced some beautiful prose on this issue:
“Profits are soaring, and that's part of the reason the U.S. oil industry has encountered slippery times. Congress is investigating the Interior Department's decision to grant oil and gas companies a $7 billion windfall - reducing required royalty payments for drilling on government land. Meanwhile, the New York Times estimated that natural gas companies have shortchanged taxpayers by $700 million in royalties.
In an interview Thursday, Sara Banaszak, senior economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said tales of royalty windfalls and oversized oil profits present a distorted picture of an industry that needs huge amounts of capital to capture energy that's getting harder to find.
Q: Why can't natural gas companies pay royalties in full when you and I have to pay our taxes in full?
A: Many companies are disputing what's owed under a number of different royalty programs. I'm not an expert on the details on this, but it's complex. The idea of royalties is you get producers to produce where they might not produce or to keep a well open where they might otherwise shut down.
If you are a large company and managing a lot of exploration risk - trying to decide where to invest - you need to manage your income over the life of the program. A single offshore well will [cost] $1 billion. You're trying to decide where you're going to drill and not going to drill. If you decide to drill into an area, based on royalty relief, [and] then it's removed, it's changing the economics.
Q: Do you think the industry's behavior is inviting more regulation by slipping through loopholes?
A: Where's the loophole? That's my point. If the New York Times reporter's "loophole" is [what the industry sees as] the rules being changed on them, it's not a $7 billion loophole. It's a $7 billion royalty relief program.”
Royalty relief is relief for our royalty. So apt!
Never have so few pinheads in so little time pissed away so much – surely this will be on the tombstone of the American empire.
But now that LI has pissed to his heart’s content on the think tankers, let’s put in a good word for Bush. Lately, we are trying to be less ulcerous about the gang in the White House. And there is more good news today. Due to John Bolton’s single minded, and simple minded, crusade to keep Americans from ever being subject to an international court, the U.S. Military is having to abridge its traditional ties with Latin American militaries. Whenever a country signs on with the International Criminal Court, the official Bush policy is to ask that country to exempt the U.S. If they don’t officially do that, the U.S. cuts military aid. This policy brought forth a great deal of handwringing from Jackson Diehl, the WAPO’s uberhawk, in a column entitled A Losing Latin American Policy. According to deal, U.S. military aid to Chile is going to be terminated next month. In fact, “12 of 21 nations in Latin America have been suspended from U.S. military training and aid programs because of the ICC rule, including Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay.”
This is the best news of the day. Keep John Bolton – this is LI’s new cause. The U.S. military has been the biggest misery-maker in Latin America since Pizarro made a deadfall on the Peruvian coast. To think that the Americans are going to discontinue their deadly subversion of Latin American independence due to the pique of a noxious neo-con gives LI an unusual feeling of joy and peace. Unfortunately, the military is trying to water down the Bolton amendment to our military aid covenants. Don’t let them! Call the State Department (Condi’s number there is: 202-647-5291) and stand four square behind Bolton’s ultra American American ultraism. Are we going to abandon our Rebel in Chief now, at his hour of greatest danger? Hell no.
Ps -- another LI band pick for SXSW. Check out this Black Angels track, black grease. The chorus expresses LI's feeling post the Rumsfeld hearings: But I kill kill kill kill/I kill what I can, dear
oh oh
That Rice, trying to impose a liberal scheme on these here United States! Why, you can hear the wind whistle mightily in the nostrils of any number of C.S.A. Senators:
“SANTIAGO, Chile, March 11 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice indicated Saturday that the United States would look for ways to resume military assistance to Latin American nations cut off from aid programs because of their refusal to shield Americans from the International Criminal Court.”
This story does have a comic side, however:
“Officials traveling with Ms. Rice said that in meeting with President Evo Morales of Bolivia, she had emphasized the importance of cooperating on efforts to combat drugs despite his vow to end coca plant eradication programs. The newly installed Bolivian leader favors the legal cultivation of coca, the plant used to manufacture cocaine, but says he opposes cocaine and has agreed to let American antidrug officials remain in the country.
In a friendly but pointed gesture, he gave Ms. Rice a small guitar decorated on the front with real leaves from a coca plant in lacquer. Ms. Rice, perhaps not realizing that the decoration was from the plant that the United States has sought to eradicate, then smiled and strummed the guitar for television cameras. American officials said Bolivian leader was clearly trying to show how growing the plant that is made into cocaine is a part of his nation's culture.”
Like Bush, Rice clearly can’t resist a guitar.
Stephen Pearlstein at WAPO, in four paragraphs, lays it out like an exasperated boiler room jack who has plugged your money into a black hole and is trying to tell you that th-th-th-that’s all, folks:
“Maybe it was possible to get away with this noxious blend of arrogance and ignorance when the United States was the world's only economic superpower. But now that we've become the biggest debtor nation in the history of civilization, we might want to give a bit more thought to whom we tell to buzz off.
It was more than a bit ironic that on the very day that Dubai Ports World threw in the towel and agreed to sell off its U.S. operations, the Commerce Department announced yet another record monthly trade deficit for January, putting us on course to exceed last year's record deficit of $724 billion. At this rate, we are adding to our debt to the rest of the world at the rate of $2,500 a year for every man, woman and child in America.
Where do you think that $724 billion comes from? Let me tell you: It comes from the people who have the dollars. And in case you hadn't noticed, tops on that list are the Japanese who are selling us all those cars, Arabs selling us all that expensive oil, and the Chinese selling us the shirts on our backs, the athletic shoes on our feet and all those computers and flat-screen TVs in front of our noses.
If these folks suddenly get the idea that we don't really trust them enough to do business with them, and begin acting the way human beings do when they get poked in the eye, you could be looking at 8 percent mortgage rates, 6 percent unemployment, $4 gasoline, a $1.50 euro and a 9000 Dow.”
Gee, Dad. Are you saying we can’t afford the war?
But of course, Americans, dummies that they are, don’t get the program. They don’t get that, as they are stripped of all the good things they used to get under the old social welfare regime that taxed, actually taxed, the wealthy and shit (the horror!), they are also stripped of the right to say peep about who in particular owns them. Unfortunately, the notices haven’t yet gone out in the mail. So the American people look at the joke called Homeland Security and go charging against scarecrows, and it is tut tut time for the think tankers. David Ignatius, who has been toured around the UAE by pro-American types just eager to use the sea of money coming in from oil revenues to do everything the pro-American way, can’t get over the ingratitude of the American people. And it is a little puzzling.
After all, the American people have been so grateful to Exxon that not a word in anger has been spoken as the company gouged out the biggest profit ever made by an American corporation – and in fact, the American people felt so grateful to oil companies that even as the oil giants have been cutting back on oil exploration and R and D -- you know, the alternative fuels that will either have to get up and running in the next ten years or bye bye Americans remaining wealth, plus the health of the planet - and, instead, raining money down to its stock holders -- even while this was going on, the American people, through the Gov, was larding these companies with 7 billion dollars in handouts The Minnesota Star Tribune interviewed an petroleum hack who produced some beautiful prose on this issue:
“Profits are soaring, and that's part of the reason the U.S. oil industry has encountered slippery times. Congress is investigating the Interior Department's decision to grant oil and gas companies a $7 billion windfall - reducing required royalty payments for drilling on government land. Meanwhile, the New York Times estimated that natural gas companies have shortchanged taxpayers by $700 million in royalties.
In an interview Thursday, Sara Banaszak, senior economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said tales of royalty windfalls and oversized oil profits present a distorted picture of an industry that needs huge amounts of capital to capture energy that's getting harder to find.
Q: Why can't natural gas companies pay royalties in full when you and I have to pay our taxes in full?
A: Many companies are disputing what's owed under a number of different royalty programs. I'm not an expert on the details on this, but it's complex. The idea of royalties is you get producers to produce where they might not produce or to keep a well open where they might otherwise shut down.
If you are a large company and managing a lot of exploration risk - trying to decide where to invest - you need to manage your income over the life of the program. A single offshore well will [cost] $1 billion. You're trying to decide where you're going to drill and not going to drill. If you decide to drill into an area, based on royalty relief, [and] then it's removed, it's changing the economics.
Q: Do you think the industry's behavior is inviting more regulation by slipping through loopholes?
A: Where's the loophole? That's my point. If the New York Times reporter's "loophole" is [what the industry sees as] the rules being changed on them, it's not a $7 billion loophole. It's a $7 billion royalty relief program.”
Royalty relief is relief for our royalty. So apt!
Never have so few pinheads in so little time pissed away so much – surely this will be on the tombstone of the American empire.
But now that LI has pissed to his heart’s content on the think tankers, let’s put in a good word for Bush. Lately, we are trying to be less ulcerous about the gang in the White House. And there is more good news today. Due to John Bolton’s single minded, and simple minded, crusade to keep Americans from ever being subject to an international court, the U.S. Military is having to abridge its traditional ties with Latin American militaries. Whenever a country signs on with the International Criminal Court, the official Bush policy is to ask that country to exempt the U.S. If they don’t officially do that, the U.S. cuts military aid. This policy brought forth a great deal of handwringing from Jackson Diehl, the WAPO’s uberhawk, in a column entitled A Losing Latin American Policy. According to deal, U.S. military aid to Chile is going to be terminated next month. In fact, “12 of 21 nations in Latin America have been suspended from U.S. military training and aid programs because of the ICC rule, including Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay.”
This is the best news of the day. Keep John Bolton – this is LI’s new cause. The U.S. military has been the biggest misery-maker in Latin America since Pizarro made a deadfall on the Peruvian coast. To think that the Americans are going to discontinue their deadly subversion of Latin American independence due to the pique of a noxious neo-con gives LI an unusual feeling of joy and peace. Unfortunately, the military is trying to water down the Bolton amendment to our military aid covenants. Don’t let them! Call the State Department (Condi’s number there is: 202-647-5291) and stand four square behind Bolton’s ultra American American ultraism. Are we going to abandon our Rebel in Chief now, at his hour of greatest danger? Hell no.
Ps -- another LI band pick for SXSW. Check out this Black Angels track, black grease. The chorus expresses LI's feeling post the Rumsfeld hearings: But I kill kill kill kill/I kill what I can, dear
oh oh
That Rice, trying to impose a liberal scheme on these here United States! Why, you can hear the wind whistle mightily in the nostrils of any number of C.S.A. Senators:
“SANTIAGO, Chile, March 11 — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice indicated Saturday that the United States would look for ways to resume military assistance to Latin American nations cut off from aid programs because of their refusal to shield Americans from the International Criminal Court.”
This story does have a comic side, however:
“Officials traveling with Ms. Rice said that in meeting with President Evo Morales of Bolivia, she had emphasized the importance of cooperating on efforts to combat drugs despite his vow to end coca plant eradication programs. The newly installed Bolivian leader favors the legal cultivation of coca, the plant used to manufacture cocaine, but says he opposes cocaine and has agreed to let American antidrug officials remain in the country.
In a friendly but pointed gesture, he gave Ms. Rice a small guitar decorated on the front with real leaves from a coca plant in lacquer. Ms. Rice, perhaps not realizing that the decoration was from the plant that the United States has sought to eradicate, then smiled and strummed the guitar for television cameras. American officials said Bolivian leader was clearly trying to show how growing the plant that is made into cocaine is a part of his nation's culture.”
Like Bush, Rice clearly can’t resist a guitar.
My kingdom for BET
“… I left that working world for the altogether different working world of shaping the future, raising, rearing my girls to be citizens of the world and to make a difference, tough when our culture deifies Lil Kim.” – interview with the blogger for Atlas Shrugged.
As readers of LI know, we are happy to promote L’il Kim as a bad role model for Atlas Shrugged’s daughter, and anybody else’s. The woman makes me go smoky at the knees, and soon I’m pulling out my copy of the sonnets:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
that she might think me some untutored youth
unlearned in the world’s false subtilties…”
Our correspondent in NYC, Tom, sent us a notice from the Washington Post
Our queen has condescended to star in a real life tv series on BET, risking the freakishness of the sheer voyeurism attaching to watching the pratfalls of the rich and famous – because she can. There’s a nobility that even the greedy, beady camera can’t degrade. It kills me not to have cable. Please, some reader more fortunate, watch it and report back to LI.
As readers of LI know, we are happy to promote L’il Kim as a bad role model for Atlas Shrugged’s daughter, and anybody else’s. The woman makes me go smoky at the knees, and soon I’m pulling out my copy of the sonnets:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
that she might think me some untutored youth
unlearned in the world’s false subtilties…”
Our correspondent in NYC, Tom, sent us a notice from the Washington Post
Our queen has condescended to star in a real life tv series on BET, risking the freakishness of the sheer voyeurism attaching to watching the pratfalls of the rich and famous – because she can. There’s a nobility that even the greedy, beady camera can’t degrade. It kills me not to have cable. Please, some reader more fortunate, watch it and report back to LI.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
the war will not be pre-owned
First, a shout out to reader M.E., who sent a grad student our way for editing work. Remember friends (he said in dulcet tones), rwg communications does heavy editing, proofing, research, and other writing tasks. As the deadlines get closer for turning in dissertations, those wanting quick, thorough editing should definitely contact us. Write us at rgathman@netzero.net
Second… well, this is difficult. In 2003 and 2004, there was one belligeranti we loved to kick around above all others: Christopher Hitchens. Gradually, we lost interest, however – Hitchens as a propagandist ate into Hitchens as an essayist until the writing was all hollowed out. Mental corruption is as bad for a certain sort of writer as termites are for a wood framed house.
But we do have to recommend the article in Slate, since it represents the position on Iran (détente) that we have advocated at this little blog since we started. It even shows an admirable awareness that there actually is such a thing as a future. LI’s position is that the American irrelevance in Iraq -- a situation over which it has long had no control, – is ultimately dangerous, insofar as America is a very aggressive superpower. While the disconnect between real American powerlessness and the delusion that America is doing the moving and shaking in the Gulf has so far been papered over by the almost supernatural blindness of D.C., reality has a way of biting you in the ass in these situations. Our opinion is that the immediate withdrawal of American troops must be coupled with broader, radical changes in Middle Eastern policy. The one most necessary is to accept reality. The regional position of Iran as the strongest of the Shiite powers now stretching from Iran to Lebanon is reality. Another reality is that U.S. policy has systematically and perversely aided the Islamic revolutionary parties in Iran.
We were pleasantly surprised that Hitchens ends his article about Iran with this image:
“So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.
The aging mullahs might claim this as a capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how right would they be? The pressure for a new constitution and genuine elections is already building. Within less than a decade, we might be negotiating with a whole new generation of Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget that it has been generally not unhelpful in Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully entitled and which would decrease its oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and verifiable provisions. American technical help would be available for this, since it was we who (in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism") helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first place.”
While this fantasy of Bush doing the rational thing is unlikely (and the rapid rewiring of zombie brains, if this ever really happened, might lead to thousands of fatalities in the U.S.), it points to what should happen in the Gulf. The U.S. has taken a position – that Iran basically isn’t there, and that a fantasy Iran of our making is a-comin’ round the corner – that is a non-position. It is a classic instance of neuroses on the mass scale. And so, to go back to reality – to surrender – the U.S. will have to weave around it another fantasy. But it can very easily be done (as the promoter who nearly fell on the floor says in Highway 61). Nixon’s surrender in going to China is the great model.
And – just to get the taste of an approving link to Hitchens out of the LI mouth – we’d also recommend going to Jefferson Morley’s article about the Iranian media group, Rooz Online. We hope our friend Brooding Persian writes about this soon.
And finally, re the current climate of tension -- LI believes that the way in which to understand the Bush administration is to follow the lack of sacrifice. This is why we don't much believe the idea that the U.S. is invading, or even bombing, any time soon. To think that Americans are going to welcome another war, and a hike in the price of their gas by at least a dollar a gallon, even as the hurricane season this summer plays dice with more American cities -- well, we think the odds are against it. And while the Rebel-in-Chief is delusional, about the need for no sacrifice he is very realistic. If he can find some way to pre-own the war, to mount it without any immediate sacrifice, even if it means borrowing another trillion bucks -- he'd do it then in a heartbeat. But I don't think this war will be pre-owned.
Second… well, this is difficult. In 2003 and 2004, there was one belligeranti we loved to kick around above all others: Christopher Hitchens. Gradually, we lost interest, however – Hitchens as a propagandist ate into Hitchens as an essayist until the writing was all hollowed out. Mental corruption is as bad for a certain sort of writer as termites are for a wood framed house.
But we do have to recommend the article in Slate, since it represents the position on Iran (détente) that we have advocated at this little blog since we started. It even shows an admirable awareness that there actually is such a thing as a future. LI’s position is that the American irrelevance in Iraq -- a situation over which it has long had no control, – is ultimately dangerous, insofar as America is a very aggressive superpower. While the disconnect between real American powerlessness and the delusion that America is doing the moving and shaking in the Gulf has so far been papered over by the almost supernatural blindness of D.C., reality has a way of biting you in the ass in these situations. Our opinion is that the immediate withdrawal of American troops must be coupled with broader, radical changes in Middle Eastern policy. The one most necessary is to accept reality. The regional position of Iran as the strongest of the Shiite powers now stretching from Iran to Lebanon is reality. Another reality is that U.S. policy has systematically and perversely aided the Islamic revolutionary parties in Iran.
We were pleasantly surprised that Hitchens ends his article about Iran with this image:
“So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.
The aging mullahs might claim this as a capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how right would they be? The pressure for a new constitution and genuine elections is already building. Within less than a decade, we might be negotiating with a whole new generation of Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget that it has been generally not unhelpful in Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully entitled and which would decrease its oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and verifiable provisions. American technical help would be available for this, since it was we who (in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism") helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first place.”
While this fantasy of Bush doing the rational thing is unlikely (and the rapid rewiring of zombie brains, if this ever really happened, might lead to thousands of fatalities in the U.S.), it points to what should happen in the Gulf. The U.S. has taken a position – that Iran basically isn’t there, and that a fantasy Iran of our making is a-comin’ round the corner – that is a non-position. It is a classic instance of neuroses on the mass scale. And so, to go back to reality – to surrender – the U.S. will have to weave around it another fantasy. But it can very easily be done (as the promoter who nearly fell on the floor says in Highway 61). Nixon’s surrender in going to China is the great model.
And – just to get the taste of an approving link to Hitchens out of the LI mouth – we’d also recommend going to Jefferson Morley’s article about the Iranian media group, Rooz Online. We hope our friend Brooding Persian writes about this soon.
And finally, re the current climate of tension -- LI believes that the way in which to understand the Bush administration is to follow the lack of sacrifice. This is why we don't much believe the idea that the U.S. is invading, or even bombing, any time soon. To think that Americans are going to welcome another war, and a hike in the price of their gas by at least a dollar a gallon, even as the hurricane season this summer plays dice with more American cities -- well, we think the odds are against it. And while the Rebel-in-Chief is delusional, about the need for no sacrifice he is very realistic. If he can find some way to pre-own the war, to mount it without any immediate sacrifice, even if it means borrowing another trillion bucks -- he'd do it then in a heartbeat. But I don't think this war will be pre-owned.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
hegelian approaches to tinkering
The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous man the world has ever known died without having an inkling that he was the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He wasn’t a politician, or a general, or a bandit, and the most publicity he ever received was when he was elected president of the American Chemical Association in 1944. His name was Tom Midgley. He was a tinkerer.
I know about tinkerers. LI’s old man was a tinkerer until he retired to the mountains of North Georgia (and, incidentally, cut off all relations with LI. But that is another story altogether). Who knows, he might have known Willis Carrier, since he worked for Carrier Air Conditioning, and Willis certainly knew Tom Midgley. In which case, yours truly has three degrees of separation from the most dangerous man the world has ever known. Gives me goosebumps.
Although elected president of the American Chemical Association, Midgley was not really a chemist. He was a mechanical engineer. However, his work for Dupont and GM – GM was, for all practical purposes, owned by the Duponts back in the 20s – resulted in two chemical/mechanical inventions.
The project he became famous for was getting the knocking out of the internal combustion engine. First, he pinpointed the source of the knocking. It was in the nature of the way the gas burned. Second, he experimented with additions to gasoline, until he came up with the perfect mix, tetraethyl lead. Called ethyl, you simply added it to gas and presto chango, no knock. Of course, that meant that you were adding lead to a liquid that burned and that left an exhaust. Necessarily, you increased ambient lead in the environment. And not just any environment, but that which surrounded roads. The heavily human environment. The government actually got concerned about this in the twenties, although there was no EPA back then, and in fact little regulation of even industrial safety. Still, headlines had been made when the news got out that a number of Dupont employees had gone clinically insane and died due to lead poisoning while researching tetraethyl lead. The news leaked out even though Dupont nearly buried the news, since Dupont owned the lab the men got sick in, the town the men lived in, the hospitals the men were sent to, and the cemetery where the men were buried. In other words, in something like a libertarian dream, the state’s role was taken over entirely by a private corporation. Unfortunately for Dupont, one of the happy beneficiaries of this arrangement escaped the embrace of Dupont and got to a non-Dupont owned hospital in Pennsylvania.
This meant that ethyl had to be defended. A Yale professor, Yandell Henderson, became the additive’s chief defamer. Now, Henderson was the kind of guy that, through the ages, tinkerers just hate – a smarty pants, a nosy parker, a pink professor, a nanny stater, an alarmist, practically a woman (In a review of Silent Spring published in 1963 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the reviewer concluded his dismissal of the book by writing that “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”). But at the conference that, essentially, rubberstamped the use of ethyl, Henderson made a pretty good shot at summing up the social side of the issue: “The men engaged in industry, chemists and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”
By this time, Midgley had moved on to his next project. He’d been called upon to devise a safe refrigerant. At the time, GM/Dupont owned Frigidaire, the largest refrigerator maker. Unfortunately, there was a dirty little secret about the refrigerators they sold – they used methyl chloride. In 1929, in a Cleveland hospital, the fumes of methyl chloride had diffused through the duct system after an explosion in the x ray room, and it killed 125 people – one of those extensively unremembered industrial accidents. Midgley set to work and eventually discovered a whole family of refrigerants: the chloroflorocarbons.
LI takes these facts from Cagan and Dray’s invaluable history, “Between Earth and Sky”.
…
Now, here is where LI’s private history grazes against the elephantine hide of public history. The great freon scare of the late eighties was played out, in miniature, at the LI family dinner table. Since the public discussion of global warming has followed, as though by the numbers, the public health/environmental discussions of yore – the same resistance to facts and theories, the same industrial coalitions finding “skeptics” of “junk science,” the same inevitable gathering of real events propelling the discussion from stage one, denial, to stage two, re-visioning benefits, to stage three, expenses and convenience – with the same stage managers, the state and big business, plying the lies – I figure a look back is useful not only to recognize the patterns, but to uncover the dialectical figures that emerge from the patterns. Surely the tinkerer is as worthy of philosophical attention as the master and the slave. In a future post, LI will try to draw his philosophical lineaments.
PS PS – Speaking of industrial accidents nobody has heard of, the Prudhoe Bay leak (via brickburner) has gotten zip attention. Largest spill since 1989. And figures for how much was spilled are still coming in. See here. And here, for a description of the state of the art monitoring of leaks – this one was heard gurgling by an oil field worker. There you go – the money those oil companies spend to be green and greener! It just makes the whole board of the AEI terribly sad.
I know about tinkerers. LI’s old man was a tinkerer until he retired to the mountains of North Georgia (and, incidentally, cut off all relations with LI. But that is another story altogether). Who knows, he might have known Willis Carrier, since he worked for Carrier Air Conditioning, and Willis certainly knew Tom Midgley. In which case, yours truly has three degrees of separation from the most dangerous man the world has ever known. Gives me goosebumps.
Although elected president of the American Chemical Association, Midgley was not really a chemist. He was a mechanical engineer. However, his work for Dupont and GM – GM was, for all practical purposes, owned by the Duponts back in the 20s – resulted in two chemical/mechanical inventions.
The project he became famous for was getting the knocking out of the internal combustion engine. First, he pinpointed the source of the knocking. It was in the nature of the way the gas burned. Second, he experimented with additions to gasoline, until he came up with the perfect mix, tetraethyl lead. Called ethyl, you simply added it to gas and presto chango, no knock. Of course, that meant that you were adding lead to a liquid that burned and that left an exhaust. Necessarily, you increased ambient lead in the environment. And not just any environment, but that which surrounded roads. The heavily human environment. The government actually got concerned about this in the twenties, although there was no EPA back then, and in fact little regulation of even industrial safety. Still, headlines had been made when the news got out that a number of Dupont employees had gone clinically insane and died due to lead poisoning while researching tetraethyl lead. The news leaked out even though Dupont nearly buried the news, since Dupont owned the lab the men got sick in, the town the men lived in, the hospitals the men were sent to, and the cemetery where the men were buried. In other words, in something like a libertarian dream, the state’s role was taken over entirely by a private corporation. Unfortunately for Dupont, one of the happy beneficiaries of this arrangement escaped the embrace of Dupont and got to a non-Dupont owned hospital in Pennsylvania.
This meant that ethyl had to be defended. A Yale professor, Yandell Henderson, became the additive’s chief defamer. Now, Henderson was the kind of guy that, through the ages, tinkerers just hate – a smarty pants, a nosy parker, a pink professor, a nanny stater, an alarmist, practically a woman (In a review of Silent Spring published in 1963 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the reviewer concluded his dismissal of the book by writing that “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”). But at the conference that, essentially, rubberstamped the use of ethyl, Henderson made a pretty good shot at summing up the social side of the issue: “The men engaged in industry, chemists and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”
By this time, Midgley had moved on to his next project. He’d been called upon to devise a safe refrigerant. At the time, GM/Dupont owned Frigidaire, the largest refrigerator maker. Unfortunately, there was a dirty little secret about the refrigerators they sold – they used methyl chloride. In 1929, in a Cleveland hospital, the fumes of methyl chloride had diffused through the duct system after an explosion in the x ray room, and it killed 125 people – one of those extensively unremembered industrial accidents. Midgley set to work and eventually discovered a whole family of refrigerants: the chloroflorocarbons.
LI takes these facts from Cagan and Dray’s invaluable history, “Between Earth and Sky”.
…
Now, here is where LI’s private history grazes against the elephantine hide of public history. The great freon scare of the late eighties was played out, in miniature, at the LI family dinner table. Since the public discussion of global warming has followed, as though by the numbers, the public health/environmental discussions of yore – the same resistance to facts and theories, the same industrial coalitions finding “skeptics” of “junk science,” the same inevitable gathering of real events propelling the discussion from stage one, denial, to stage two, re-visioning benefits, to stage three, expenses and convenience – with the same stage managers, the state and big business, plying the lies – I figure a look back is useful not only to recognize the patterns, but to uncover the dialectical figures that emerge from the patterns. Surely the tinkerer is as worthy of philosophical attention as the master and the slave. In a future post, LI will try to draw his philosophical lineaments.
PS PS – Speaking of industrial accidents nobody has heard of, the Prudhoe Bay leak (via brickburner) has gotten zip attention. Largest spill since 1989. And figures for how much was spilled are still coming in. See here. And here, for a description of the state of the art monitoring of leaks – this one was heard gurgling by an oil field worker. There you go – the money those oil companies spend to be green and greener! It just makes the whole board of the AEI terribly sad.
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