And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should see V., and write about it.
So, last night LI did our duty. We’ve read many finely drawn theorizations of the movie. Here’s one, and here’s one. These people know their shit.
The way I saw the movie was influenced, a bit, by the recent re-translation of We. I just did the review for that and interviewed Natasha Randall (a lovely, talented woman who I aim to publicize to the extent I can -- read WE!) for Publishers Weekly. In We, D-503 becomes a free man, politically, as he becomes a slave, erotically, to the sexy I-330. I’m not sure if anybody associated with V ever read We, but the S/M subtext under the political message certainly influenced Orwell and Huxley, and presumably has crept into the dystopian genre. It is a sort of contingent conjunction, really – the original We is influenced less by the experience of Stalinism (it was written in the early 1920s), than by art nouveau decadence – that style that you find in Sologub’s Petty Demon and in Bely’s Petersburg. Those seem to be the major influences in We. Seeing Evie disciplined by V, then, didn’t surprise me. By this time, that motif is almost bound to pop up, rooted in the deep structure of dystopias. And to the marriage of Venus in Furs and The Rights of Man, I bring no impediment. The bride may now suck the blood out of the groom, or vice versa.
About the film itself: we definitely got a rush from it. Especially we liked the blowing up of the Parliament. As blowings up go, that was the shit.
Since this is a Wachowski brothers film, I was looking forward to some exemplary slo mo in the service of bloodshed, and I wasn’t disappointed. Usually, slow mo pisses me off. It is a detour around a big narrative problem, which is that people, even big people, can get easily hurt and die. Now if the big person is fighting, say, three little people, and the three little people are vicious and armed, the chances of death or injury dramatically increase. In the Iliad, when a hero is about to succumb to sheer material force, sometimes he is wrapped in a cloud or a mist by a god and rescued. However, if you had too much deus ex machina action in the Iliad, the battles would truly go nowhere. It would sap all the danger, and hence the dignity, from the poem. There’s a fate, a bare spot – much like the bare spot that makes Achilles vulnerable – that the Gods can’t hide. This is why we hate deus ex machina being thrown into a movie on an industrial scale – as happens in your standard action film. Slo mo is of course the easiest of all technical solutions. What was cool about the Matrix was that the W. brothers decided to make a film all about slo mo. They elevated avoiding an all too human truth by way of a gimmick into a meta-gimmick. Pretty brassy. This time around, the slo mo is connected with an old and pretty disused fighting style – sword play, of which we see bits on tv in the background in the film. And by the time we get to where we want the movie to let go –the climactic bloodletting – the movie has gained some cred by not endangering its superhero in some silly way, so we are in the mood to make allowances. Thus, we get some beautiful bloody wackings, in lovely slow mo. And this is a major lure for us, what we came for.
However, there was one surprisingly bogus moment at the very end. The movie closes on, of all things, Rolling Stones’ Street fighting Man. No way! The Matrix ended on the perfect Marilyn Manson song, God is in the TV. It was calling out there at the end to all the kids. But the Stones? That old clunker? Really, if we had to have something from the age of rock dinosaurs, why not Patti Smith’s Power to the People. Myself, I would have thought about Pavement, or, perhaps, the Tricky version of Public Enemy’s Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. Or, moving up into the living world, how about Black Angel’s Manipulation. The latter would have been so bold I would definitely have creamed in my pants, but – alas, the Brothers W.'s music sense failed them. Too bad.
Friday, April 21, 2006
forbidden zones among the statistics
Last year, the UN’s IAEA along with the WHO published a revisionist account of the Chernobyl disaster. It put the long term death toll estimate at 9,000, gave a much lower estimate of the radiation released from the plant than any previous one, gave a much lower estimate of the number of people involved in the cleanup of the disaster than any previous estimate, and dismissed 20 years of death and health impairment as so much psychosomatic folderol. It should be said that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency loves atomic energy. It is composed of believers. And the report was written as part of a campaign to de-demonize nuclear power. As Michael Flynn pointed out in a review of the report for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“But according to other observers, while the report seems to demonstrate that Chernobyl’s devastation is less dramatic than once thought, it can hardly be called “reassuring.” They argue that the report provides little solace to those still suffering from the effects of the accident and fails to accurately portray
its total impact. And they draw a sharp distinction between the actual report— which is composed of two draft studies, one on health consequences and another on the environment—and the report’s summary and press release, which they argue minimize and contradict the report’s findings. Richard Garwin, an internationally renowned physicist and IBM fellow emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, calls the report “deliberately misleading,” arguing that it overlooks evidence that contradicts some of its conclusions.”
Greenpeace attacked the report as a whitewash, and has recently published its own report, which estimates 11 times the death load. And the related TORCH report this month does a pretty nice job of sacking the IAEA’s report – which nevertheless will, of course, be quoted as the Bible on Fox news, and other sources of propaganda.
The IAEA report was greeted with hallelujahs by the conservative media and their spokesman in this country last year. As LI has pointed out before, the GOP and the Soviet hardliners converge in their feelings about the environment – whether nature was given to man by God or seized by the revolutionary worker, the main thing is that nature exists as a free resource and dump, a gold mine and a sewer. One of the great things about nuclear power, from this point of view, is that disaster is long term: the land around Chernobyl is contaminated for millennia, and the injuries done to the victims of Chernobyl space out over 20 to 40 years –well, except for the stillbirths and the deformities that die off quickly. In that time, a lot happens, and one can plausibly say, oh, that person died of smoking – never mind the history of fainting, the long stays in the hospital, the anemia, the impotence, the bowel trouble. And then you pick those things off. For instance, by chance, Belarus actually had a record of child birth deformities going back before the accident, so much research was done in the Soviet Union and by Belarussian researchers on the rise in birth defects. Similar studies have shown a brief peak in Downs syndrome in Germany, in the path of the wind driven fallout, and similar studies have shown jumps in spina bifida, for instance, in Turkey. Of course, the IAEA didn't even take into account - in its whole report -- the entire area affected by the fallout -- which by its own epidemiological method makes its figures simply wrong. Further, the IAEA demands a linear causal link which, of course, is very hard to show for accidents like this, that take place over long periods of time. If you set the parameters right, you can wish the disaster away. Time favors the liar -- especially the motivated, wealthy liar. Those who actually believe the IAEA should look at Belarus' fascinating and ongoing demographic disaster and ask what happened between 1987 and the present day. But such a question would be considered very, very vulgar by the physicists who composed the membership of committees like the IAEA, with their mandate to "calm public fears."
There was an interview with a Russian physicist, Yevgeny Velikhov, published by RIA Novosti that typifies this Frozen Belief set – the techno-millenarian belief that fits so well with economic systems based on profit or on a party’s command and control:
“Since the tragic day 20 years ago the physicists have been trying hard to defeat radio phobia, and prove to the people that atomic power engineering brings light and heat to their homes. Have they done all they could? The drawbacks which this industry had, and some of which were revealed by Chernobyl have been largely overcome. Nuclear power engineering has evolved incredible safety measures. I'd call some of them even somewhat excessive. In general, the experience amassed today by the physicists and designers, and the high safety standards of nuclear power engineering guarantee that accidents similar to Chernobyl will never repeat.”
A piece of boilerplate that could easily fit into a speech by Cheney.
Peter Neils of the Los Alamos Study Group cuts to the heart of the recent movement to revive nuclear power in this country:
“Nuclear power has never been economically viable without massive government subsidies. In the case of nuclear power, we have socialized the development, liability and waste disposal expenses while privatizing the profit, an absurd deal for the taxpayer. In fact, the market has already left nuclear power behind.”
However, it isn’t simply a question of the market – Chernobyl posed a question about what the economy is for in the first place. It poses the basic question of the social and planetary cost of our whole system. Just as the arms race in the Cold War presupposed, absurdly, that two systems – the West and the East – at one point in time had suddenly seized the right to defend themselves with the threat to end humanity itself (implying that we had reached a truly utopian moment, for only a utopia could be defended in such an absolute manner), nuclear power is the emblem of a systematic insanity of need which we will either confront or succumb to.
Given LI’s recent lurch to black humor, we’ll end with this bit about James Lovelock, the Gaia person. Lovelock, according to George Dvorsky’s blog, actually advocates more Chernobyls, showing that there is no political ecological niche that isn’t filled by somebody.
“Back in 2001, Lovelock told the Telegraph that we need nuclear power. He also asked the British government to revive atomic energy as an alternative to burning fossil fuels. He went on to downplay the Chernobyl disaster, claiming that it was not the industrial catastrophe that so many people made it out to be
Further, Lovelock noted his delight in the fact that diverse wildlife had once again returned to the 30km area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear facility. This is the area, of course, that remains off-limits due to radiation. “The wildlife of Chernobyl know nothing about radiation and do not fear it,” he says, “That they might live a little less long is of no great consequence to them.”
Inspired by this shining and radioactive example of passive environmental remediation, Lovelock argues that we should actually recreate similar situations elsewhere: “I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers.”
As Dvorsky says: “that’s a hardcore solution to the global warming problem.”
“But according to other observers, while the report seems to demonstrate that Chernobyl’s devastation is less dramatic than once thought, it can hardly be called “reassuring.” They argue that the report provides little solace to those still suffering from the effects of the accident and fails to accurately portray
its total impact. And they draw a sharp distinction between the actual report— which is composed of two draft studies, one on health consequences and another on the environment—and the report’s summary and press release, which they argue minimize and contradict the report’s findings. Richard Garwin, an internationally renowned physicist and IBM fellow emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, calls the report “deliberately misleading,” arguing that it overlooks evidence that contradicts some of its conclusions.”
Greenpeace attacked the report as a whitewash, and has recently published its own report, which estimates 11 times the death load. And the related TORCH report this month does a pretty nice job of sacking the IAEA’s report – which nevertheless will, of course, be quoted as the Bible on Fox news, and other sources of propaganda.
The IAEA report was greeted with hallelujahs by the conservative media and their spokesman in this country last year. As LI has pointed out before, the GOP and the Soviet hardliners converge in their feelings about the environment – whether nature was given to man by God or seized by the revolutionary worker, the main thing is that nature exists as a free resource and dump, a gold mine and a sewer. One of the great things about nuclear power, from this point of view, is that disaster is long term: the land around Chernobyl is contaminated for millennia, and the injuries done to the victims of Chernobyl space out over 20 to 40 years –well, except for the stillbirths and the deformities that die off quickly. In that time, a lot happens, and one can plausibly say, oh, that person died of smoking – never mind the history of fainting, the long stays in the hospital, the anemia, the impotence, the bowel trouble. And then you pick those things off. For instance, by chance, Belarus actually had a record of child birth deformities going back before the accident, so much research was done in the Soviet Union and by Belarussian researchers on the rise in birth defects. Similar studies have shown a brief peak in Downs syndrome in Germany, in the path of the wind driven fallout, and similar studies have shown jumps in spina bifida, for instance, in Turkey. Of course, the IAEA didn't even take into account - in its whole report -- the entire area affected by the fallout -- which by its own epidemiological method makes its figures simply wrong. Further, the IAEA demands a linear causal link which, of course, is very hard to show for accidents like this, that take place over long periods of time. If you set the parameters right, you can wish the disaster away. Time favors the liar -- especially the motivated, wealthy liar. Those who actually believe the IAEA should look at Belarus' fascinating and ongoing demographic disaster and ask what happened between 1987 and the present day. But such a question would be considered very, very vulgar by the physicists who composed the membership of committees like the IAEA, with their mandate to "calm public fears."
There was an interview with a Russian physicist, Yevgeny Velikhov, published by RIA Novosti that typifies this Frozen Belief set – the techno-millenarian belief that fits so well with economic systems based on profit or on a party’s command and control:
“Since the tragic day 20 years ago the physicists have been trying hard to defeat radio phobia, and prove to the people that atomic power engineering brings light and heat to their homes. Have they done all they could? The drawbacks which this industry had, and some of which were revealed by Chernobyl have been largely overcome. Nuclear power engineering has evolved incredible safety measures. I'd call some of them even somewhat excessive. In general, the experience amassed today by the physicists and designers, and the high safety standards of nuclear power engineering guarantee that accidents similar to Chernobyl will never repeat.”
A piece of boilerplate that could easily fit into a speech by Cheney.
Peter Neils of the Los Alamos Study Group cuts to the heart of the recent movement to revive nuclear power in this country:
“Nuclear power has never been economically viable without massive government subsidies. In the case of nuclear power, we have socialized the development, liability and waste disposal expenses while privatizing the profit, an absurd deal for the taxpayer. In fact, the market has already left nuclear power behind.”
However, it isn’t simply a question of the market – Chernobyl posed a question about what the economy is for in the first place. It poses the basic question of the social and planetary cost of our whole system. Just as the arms race in the Cold War presupposed, absurdly, that two systems – the West and the East – at one point in time had suddenly seized the right to defend themselves with the threat to end humanity itself (implying that we had reached a truly utopian moment, for only a utopia could be defended in such an absolute manner), nuclear power is the emblem of a systematic insanity of need which we will either confront or succumb to.
Given LI’s recent lurch to black humor, we’ll end with this bit about James Lovelock, the Gaia person. Lovelock, according to George Dvorsky’s blog, actually advocates more Chernobyls, showing that there is no political ecological niche that isn’t filled by somebody.
“Back in 2001, Lovelock told the Telegraph that we need nuclear power. He also asked the British government to revive atomic energy as an alternative to burning fossil fuels. He went on to downplay the Chernobyl disaster, claiming that it was not the industrial catastrophe that so many people made it out to be
Further, Lovelock noted his delight in the fact that diverse wildlife had once again returned to the 30km area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear facility. This is the area, of course, that remains off-limits due to radiation. “The wildlife of Chernobyl know nothing about radiation and do not fear it,” he says, “That they might live a little less long is of no great consequence to them.”
Inspired by this shining and radioactive example of passive environmental remediation, Lovelock argues that we should actually recreate similar situations elsewhere: “I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers.”
As Dvorsky says: “that’s a hardcore solution to the global warming problem.”
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
DEATH THREATS FOR DUMMIES
Recently, LI has noticed another blog trend that is passing us by. Apparently, if you are anybody nowadays in the blogosphere, somebody is threatening you with death. Ezra Klein published an account of how Malkin published the phone numbers of anti-recruitments students, and how these students got death threats. Then Malkin got death threats. On CT, some friend of one of the group is getting death threats.
And how about moi? Is LI chopped liver or something? Not only do we heartily approve of the anti-recruiting students, we heartily approve of the little tire slashing action engaged in by some of them. The spirit of the Boston tea party is not dead! Those who want to phone in death threats (no creditors please) should call us at 513-478-3699.
That said, it won’t do to just say, I want to kill you, or fuck you up the ass, or that kind of thing. So yesterday! Let’s have a little creativity among the death threat group. First, set the atmosphere. I’d recommend music for this. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has an excellent death threat song with a spaced out male voice going “Little Girls. I like little girls!” But if you are going to play yesteryear’s NIN, you really aren’t even trying. Suggestion: the gorier the death, the better. Why not a little power tool action in the background to give it that Leatherface atmosphere? Nothing says fear like a drillbit. On the other hand, don’t go overboard, or the neighbors will definitely complain. You do not want to be standing there, power drill in hand, pants to your knees, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on stereo overdrive, explaining to a cop what you are doing. On the other hand, those death threaters who live far from human kind, in rural areas, don’t need me to advise them. You all are the pros. After all, I’m doing death threats for dummies, here.
Second, personalize the death threat. Calling LI and giving us a ho hum death threat is not going to cut the mustard. We recommend doing a computer search beforehand. Remember, stalkers, research makes all the difference between the yawning and the shitting in his pants response. For this, you have to put on your thinking cap. For instance, knowing LI lives in Austin, we recommend some local color. Like, someday, fuckwad, you will be walking out of Mean Eyed Cat and I’ll be there with my favorite knife, Betsy.
Third, of course, is don’t hog the line. Other death threateners might be trying to call too, you know. Plus, the cops can trace it if you stay on for, like ten minutes. Or so I believe from various crime dramas I’ve seen.
This has been a public service message from your friends at LI!
And how about moi? Is LI chopped liver or something? Not only do we heartily approve of the anti-recruiting students, we heartily approve of the little tire slashing action engaged in by some of them. The spirit of the Boston tea party is not dead! Those who want to phone in death threats (no creditors please) should call us at 513-478-3699.
That said, it won’t do to just say, I want to kill you, or fuck you up the ass, or that kind of thing. So yesterday! Let’s have a little creativity among the death threat group. First, set the atmosphere. I’d recommend music for this. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has an excellent death threat song with a spaced out male voice going “Little Girls. I like little girls!” But if you are going to play yesteryear’s NIN, you really aren’t even trying. Suggestion: the gorier the death, the better. Why not a little power tool action in the background to give it that Leatherface atmosphere? Nothing says fear like a drillbit. On the other hand, don’t go overboard, or the neighbors will definitely complain. You do not want to be standing there, power drill in hand, pants to your knees, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on stereo overdrive, explaining to a cop what you are doing. On the other hand, those death threaters who live far from human kind, in rural areas, don’t need me to advise them. You all are the pros. After all, I’m doing death threats for dummies, here.
Second, personalize the death threat. Calling LI and giving us a ho hum death threat is not going to cut the mustard. We recommend doing a computer search beforehand. Remember, stalkers, research makes all the difference between the yawning and the shitting in his pants response. For this, you have to put on your thinking cap. For instance, knowing LI lives in Austin, we recommend some local color. Like, someday, fuckwad, you will be walking out of Mean Eyed Cat and I’ll be there with my favorite knife, Betsy.
Third, of course, is don’t hog the line. Other death threateners might be trying to call too, you know. Plus, the cops can trace it if you stay on for, like ten minutes. Or so I believe from various crime dramas I’ve seen.
This has been a public service message from your friends at LI!
a subplot from shame
Sad times at LI – even our faithful and long time reader, Mr. T., said about the post a couple of days ago: “the terms "common sense" and "manifesto" appeared in the headline - I could not proceed to read the post; those terms have a garlic-like effect on this vampire.”
LI’s frantic attempt to intervene in the discussion of the Euston Manifesto – our comments on threads, our two posts – seem to have been spoken in Hittite. We get so frustrated that nobody is ever outraged by LI! Nobody listens to us! The tears glisten. Is it because we have gone over the edge? Surely this is what goldbugs feel like -- those culty rightwingers who blame all of the world's ills on the retirement of the gold standard, in spite of the fact that the world is immensely more prosperous without the gold standard. So is our fight for re-democratizing foreign policy a sort of anachronistic re-enactment? Didn't the strong executive branch lead the Free World to victory in the Cold War?
No, and no. The key, I feel, to the spiral of global crises - the criminal neglect of the looming environmental crisis, in conjunction with the mafia like attempt to control the oil states in the Middle East -- goes back to a ‘legitimacy’ crisis. We cannot remain half monarchical and half democratic. A house divided against itself, etc. etc. The root of the evil done to us by the supposed missionaries of democracy began in their employment as flaks of fraud, and continues to this day as they defend with tooth and nail every sleazy move made by this regime. See the comic frothings, this week, of Hitchens in Slate. Yet the left-right battle about the Euston Manifesto goes on as if the Iraq invasion did not lay bare every seedy and disgusting pattern that has been going on for the last sixty years or so – with the Cold War creating a rotten pattern that keeps generating disaster.
Which is amply confirmed by the article we mentioned yesterday, by Langewiesche, who shows that: a, the U.S. was pretty thoroughly informed about what A. Q. Khan was doing, and b., that they connived to cover it up, once again converging the official American interest with a military tyrant, and once again distorting the American interest to the eventual hurt of who knows how many populations.
Langewiesche is sanguine about nuclear proliferation. He sees the obvious: the inability of the great powers to do without their missiles eventually makes the limitation of nuclear weapons nearly impossible. I should also add, as a caveat to the quotes I am going to give, that LI has always stood foursquare against the very term, WMD. That is a bogus category, a commercial category. Yes, the weapons companies and governments of the most developed countries will sell you the aircraft to deliver your atom bomb, but no, they are not going to sell you centrifuges, at least officially. As we have pointed out many times, oh so many times even we are bored, WMD are small arms. The biggest killers in the world are automatic rifles. That is it. WMD simply means – Western people can get killed. There is no moral high ground here, just a lot of low dealing.
Okay. On to the grafs. Langewiesche’s article in the Atlantic is actually the second in a series. The villain in the article, although never quite villainous so much as vain, is the father of Pakistan’s H-bomb, A.Q. Khan. LI loved this graf:
“The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West — an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role. The nuclear laboratory was nourished by a large and secret budget for which no accounting was required and from which Khan freely drew funds as if they were his own. One might expect that Khan's largesse would have triggered an investigation, but in Pakistan it did not. I have repeatedly asked people there if they ever wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth. One man close to the ruling military regime led by the current dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, tried recently to convince me that Khan's wife, Hendrina, came from a rich Dutch family, and that it was her money he was spending. But most people were straighter with me. They made it clear that my question was naive, and typical of an American abroad; they had not wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth because they had taken it as a given that he was skimming, like everyone else. A Pakistani parliamentarian made the point that some of the highest positions in the government today are held by people who are not merely corrupt and opportunistic but are the very icons of Pakistani criminality — people from families with a known history of murder, extortion, vote-rigging, smuggling, and fraud. He had once complained about this to Musharraf, who had advised him to be more realistic: Pakistan, Musharraf had said, is an imperfect society. The parliamentarian shrugged. Even the army is run like a real-estate racket, expropriating land from ordinary citizens and passing it on to officers for their personal gain. It is not by chance that Islamabad is a city of mansions, and that many of them are inhabited by retired generals. What was Khan's skimming compared with all that? And unlike the generals, who tended to lose every fight they provoked, Khan had delivered on his words.”
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Aren’t we always here? Isn’t the man in charge Duarte? Or Rios Montt? Or Marcos? Or Suharto? Or Carlos Andrés Pérez? Aren’t these the streets of the City of Eternal Night, or Pandemonium, or the L.A. conjured up by Philip Dick? Really, this is a story that seems to have been some erased subplot of Shame. And Langewiesche is actually interested in the personality of Khan, all that cushioned vanity. In fact, it is a worldwide set. These people are perched on our shoulders, like very heavy buzzards.
Langewiesche cleverly decided that he needed a counterpart to Khan. He follows an obscure but persistent reporter for the energy mags, a guy I can sympathize with: Mark Hibbs. Hibbs is the man who put together the pieces of all the nuclear puzzles, finding that every connection led him to Pakistan. And he published his findings in Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, not exactly mags of record for most people. But apparently his findings kept driving this government apeshit. Especially since the U.S. was playing a game of pretending not to know what was going on. The same game the Americans played in the nineties, pretending not to know who was using who in the setting up of the Taliban and the quid pro quo between Al Qaeda and the ISI.
Which brings us to the post 9/11 era, when everything changed and then changed back, a war was declared against an impalpable object and the palpable object was encouraged to find a hiding place in a mountain somewhere. The era of diversion and bogus threats. This is the graf I really wanted to cull from the piece. By 2001, Khan’s sales to North Korea were finally getting America’s goat. They knew Khan dealt with Saddam H. before the Kuwait invasion. They knew he was selling to Iran. They knew that he couldn’t do what he was doing without the military being in on it body and soul. And the U.S. has been married to that military since the Reagan days – a marriage formed in the heat of anti-communist ardor, when the CIA was all for small, Islamicist groups hitting targets in the Soviet Union with bombs. So this is what happened:
“Khan was therefore dumbfounded, upon returning from a short trip to Dubai in 2000, when Musharraf, having called him in for a conversation, told him that he had been under surveillance by Pakistani agents and that there were concerns about financial improprieties. Financial improprieties? In the world of Khan the word had lost all meaning. There was no question of going to prison, but in 2001, just days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, A. Q. Khan was gently relieved of his command, forced to retire with honors from his cherished laboratory, and "promoted" to the position of scientific adviser to Musharraf. This last was a particularly nice touch. There is evidence that the exchanges with North Korea continued for at least another year. When the Bush administration finally decided to go public with its concerns about the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program, it delayed leaking the intelligence information until late October of 2002, after Congress had given its approval for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The blundering that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. government condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan — which, as any reader of Hibbs would have known, was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America's most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists. Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Musharraf himself had accommodated Osama bin Laden, had supported the Taliban, and had used international jihadis against the Indians in Kashmir and beyond. But times had changed, and by October of 2002 Musharraf was Washington's friend, engaged in trying to suppress the Islamist idea by gunning it down. It was useful that with his move against Khan he had partially protected himself from revelations of Pakistan's trade in nuclear technology. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with Musharraf, and afterward, when asked on ABC television about Pakistan's assistance to North Korea, said, "President Musharraf gave me his assurance in that conversation, as he has previously, that Pakistan is not doing anything of that nature … The past is the past. I am more concerned about what is going on now. We have a new relationship with Pakistan."
Which is the same as the old relationship, pusher to addict roleplaying. As LI has pointed out again and again, the Bush regime's mantra that everything changed after 9/11 is not only not true -- all events having a before and an after, a then and a then - but it is a special plea that we ignore the negligence before the attack and the truly puzzling inability to deal with the attackers afterwards.
LI’s frantic attempt to intervene in the discussion of the Euston Manifesto – our comments on threads, our two posts – seem to have been spoken in Hittite. We get so frustrated that nobody is ever outraged by LI! Nobody listens to us! The tears glisten. Is it because we have gone over the edge? Surely this is what goldbugs feel like -- those culty rightwingers who blame all of the world's ills on the retirement of the gold standard, in spite of the fact that the world is immensely more prosperous without the gold standard. So is our fight for re-democratizing foreign policy a sort of anachronistic re-enactment? Didn't the strong executive branch lead the Free World to victory in the Cold War?
No, and no. The key, I feel, to the spiral of global crises - the criminal neglect of the looming environmental crisis, in conjunction with the mafia like attempt to control the oil states in the Middle East -- goes back to a ‘legitimacy’ crisis. We cannot remain half monarchical and half democratic. A house divided against itself, etc. etc. The root of the evil done to us by the supposed missionaries of democracy began in their employment as flaks of fraud, and continues to this day as they defend with tooth and nail every sleazy move made by this regime. See the comic frothings, this week, of Hitchens in Slate. Yet the left-right battle about the Euston Manifesto goes on as if the Iraq invasion did not lay bare every seedy and disgusting pattern that has been going on for the last sixty years or so – with the Cold War creating a rotten pattern that keeps generating disaster.
Which is amply confirmed by the article we mentioned yesterday, by Langewiesche, who shows that: a, the U.S. was pretty thoroughly informed about what A. Q. Khan was doing, and b., that they connived to cover it up, once again converging the official American interest with a military tyrant, and once again distorting the American interest to the eventual hurt of who knows how many populations.
Langewiesche is sanguine about nuclear proliferation. He sees the obvious: the inability of the great powers to do without their missiles eventually makes the limitation of nuclear weapons nearly impossible. I should also add, as a caveat to the quotes I am going to give, that LI has always stood foursquare against the very term, WMD. That is a bogus category, a commercial category. Yes, the weapons companies and governments of the most developed countries will sell you the aircraft to deliver your atom bomb, but no, they are not going to sell you centrifuges, at least officially. As we have pointed out many times, oh so many times even we are bored, WMD are small arms. The biggest killers in the world are automatic rifles. That is it. WMD simply means – Western people can get killed. There is no moral high ground here, just a lot of low dealing.
Okay. On to the grafs. Langewiesche’s article in the Atlantic is actually the second in a series. The villain in the article, although never quite villainous so much as vain, is the father of Pakistan’s H-bomb, A.Q. Khan. LI loved this graf:
“The fame had unbalanced him. He was subjected to a degree of public acclaim rarely seen in the West — an extreme close to idol worship, which made him hungry for more. Money seems never to have been his obsession, but it did play a role. The nuclear laboratory was nourished by a large and secret budget for which no accounting was required and from which Khan freely drew funds as if they were his own. One might expect that Khan's largesse would have triggered an investigation, but in Pakistan it did not. I have repeatedly asked people there if they ever wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth. One man close to the ruling military regime led by the current dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, tried recently to convince me that Khan's wife, Hendrina, came from a rich Dutch family, and that it was her money he was spending. But most people were straighter with me. They made it clear that my question was naive, and typical of an American abroad; they had not wondered about the origins of Khan's wealth because they had taken it as a given that he was skimming, like everyone else. A Pakistani parliamentarian made the point that some of the highest positions in the government today are held by people who are not merely corrupt and opportunistic but are the very icons of Pakistani criminality — people from families with a known history of murder, extortion, vote-rigging, smuggling, and fraud. He had once complained about this to Musharraf, who had advised him to be more realistic: Pakistan, Musharraf had said, is an imperfect society. The parliamentarian shrugged. Even the army is run like a real-estate racket, expropriating land from ordinary citizens and passing it on to officers for their personal gain. It is not by chance that Islamabad is a city of mansions, and that many of them are inhabited by retired generals. What was Khan's skimming compared with all that? And unlike the generals, who tended to lose every fight they provoked, Khan had delivered on his words.”
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Aren’t we always here? Isn’t the man in charge Duarte? Or Rios Montt? Or Marcos? Or Suharto? Or Carlos Andrés Pérez? Aren’t these the streets of the City of Eternal Night, or Pandemonium, or the L.A. conjured up by Philip Dick? Really, this is a story that seems to have been some erased subplot of Shame. And Langewiesche is actually interested in the personality of Khan, all that cushioned vanity. In fact, it is a worldwide set. These people are perched on our shoulders, like very heavy buzzards.
Langewiesche cleverly decided that he needed a counterpart to Khan. He follows an obscure but persistent reporter for the energy mags, a guy I can sympathize with: Mark Hibbs. Hibbs is the man who put together the pieces of all the nuclear puzzles, finding that every connection led him to Pakistan. And he published his findings in Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, not exactly mags of record for most people. But apparently his findings kept driving this government apeshit. Especially since the U.S. was playing a game of pretending not to know what was going on. The same game the Americans played in the nineties, pretending not to know who was using who in the setting up of the Taliban and the quid pro quo between Al Qaeda and the ISI.
Which brings us to the post 9/11 era, when everything changed and then changed back, a war was declared against an impalpable object and the palpable object was encouraged to find a hiding place in a mountain somewhere. The era of diversion and bogus threats. This is the graf I really wanted to cull from the piece. By 2001, Khan’s sales to North Korea were finally getting America’s goat. They knew Khan dealt with Saddam H. before the Kuwait invasion. They knew he was selling to Iran. They knew that he couldn’t do what he was doing without the military being in on it body and soul. And the U.S. has been married to that military since the Reagan days – a marriage formed in the heat of anti-communist ardor, when the CIA was all for small, Islamicist groups hitting targets in the Soviet Union with bombs. So this is what happened:
“Khan was therefore dumbfounded, upon returning from a short trip to Dubai in 2000, when Musharraf, having called him in for a conversation, told him that he had been under surveillance by Pakistani agents and that there were concerns about financial improprieties. Financial improprieties? In the world of Khan the word had lost all meaning. There was no question of going to prison, but in 2001, just days short of his sixty-fifth birthday, A. Q. Khan was gently relieved of his command, forced to retire with honors from his cherished laboratory, and "promoted" to the position of scientific adviser to Musharraf. This last was a particularly nice touch. There is evidence that the exchanges with North Korea continued for at least another year. When the Bush administration finally decided to go public with its concerns about the North Koreans' nuclear-weapons program, it delayed leaking the intelligence information until late October of 2002, after Congress had given its approval for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The blundering that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. government condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan — which, as any reader of Hibbs would have known, was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America's most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists. Before the attacks on New York and Washington, Musharraf himself had accommodated Osama bin Laden, had supported the Taliban, and had used international jihadis against the Indians in Kashmir and beyond. But times had changed, and by October of 2002 Musharraf was Washington's friend, engaged in trying to suppress the Islamist idea by gunning it down. It was useful that with his move against Khan he had partially protected himself from revelations of Pakistan's trade in nuclear technology. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with Musharraf, and afterward, when asked on ABC television about Pakistan's assistance to North Korea, said, "President Musharraf gave me his assurance in that conversation, as he has previously, that Pakistan is not doing anything of that nature … The past is the past. I am more concerned about what is going on now. We have a new relationship with Pakistan."
Which is the same as the old relationship, pusher to addict roleplaying. As LI has pointed out again and again, the Bush regime's mantra that everything changed after 9/11 is not only not true -- all events having a before and an after, a then and a then - but it is a special plea that we ignore the negligence before the attack and the truly puzzling inability to deal with the attackers afterwards.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
i'm with stupid
Sometimes, it does seem like the American unconscious speaks not through our novels or songs, but in our cutesy tshirt phrases. Historians, looking at the Bush epoch, might want to apply the phrase I'm with Stupid. It will explain a lot about the national decline...
Often, LI is blinded by our rationality. For instance, because we believe that it is entirely irrational for the White House, even given that it is presently inhabited by the petulant, death spiraling child , to actually bomb Iran. As for other forms of military intervention, besides the odious and everpresent American use of small secret forces, forget it.
However, we have abundant evidence that Bush will engage in hugely irrational acts, and will be enabled in doing so by the American population. A population that still has not computed the enormity of the fuckup that was Tora Bora, or the meaning of Osama Bin Laden’s continuing happy existence. Requiring a terrorist to maintain a bogus war on terror, the Bushies have kept Osama bin Laden on tap – partly intentionally, partly accidentally. The accidental part is derived from the original conditions of our vanity project in Iraq: here, the war on terror reveals that underneath the feint, it is a war to recolonize the Middle East on the part of an American petro elite that believes it can reverse history and bring back the fifties. This is ironic, since the petro industry actually needs OPEC to keep prices up. But obviously, today’s oil execs are driven by the panic fear of the nineties, when the bottom dropped out of the energy market. The fear that oil prices will once again go down below the 20 dollar a barrel level drives all the petro-carnivores, the cancerous brood that nests around Cheney and has tied a tire around Uncle Sam’s neck and set it on fire. However, their overreach, using American tax dollars and American blood, has backfired big time – the pieces are not going to be picked up in the Gulf Region by some magical combination that leads us to victory. The question is, how is America going to deal with defeat? The war on terrorism is over – to put it in AEI terms: We Lost. All of which means this: dealing with the consequences of that systematic failure has overshadowed apparently peripheral problems, like bin Laden. In those shadows, those problems are building.
All of which leads us to the nuclear crisis we face – in Pakistan. Pakistan possesses both the bomb and a large and powerful constituency for Al Qaeda like politics. And what happened with the bomb and its technology in Pakistan is, shall we say, rather underreported. So we enjoyed the large article by William Langewiesche in the January Atlantic. Oddly enough, it hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity from our cursory survey around the Net – but then, it wouldn’t. The great and real problems facing the world – the environmental crises that are upon us (he says, in Austin, where the temperature today might just climb to 100), the economic crises that are upon us, and the strategic crises that are upon us are all silently exorcized by newspapers that are happy to be Good Leakers, God bless them every one.
Langewiesche’s article is about celebrity as much as it is about the bomb. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the Father of the Pakistan hydrogen bomb, was and is a celebrity of Bollywood proportions. It is his fame and what he did with it that makes the story fascinating on the human level as a sort of Rushdie tale – before Rushdie began repeating himself like some demon possessed clock that had learned it was funny to tell the wrong time.
Tomorrow, we are going to examine the article.
Often, LI is blinded by our rationality. For instance, because we believe that it is entirely irrational for the White House, even given that it is presently inhabited by the petulant, death spiraling child , to actually bomb Iran. As for other forms of military intervention, besides the odious and everpresent American use of small secret forces, forget it.
However, we have abundant evidence that Bush will engage in hugely irrational acts, and will be enabled in doing so by the American population. A population that still has not computed the enormity of the fuckup that was Tora Bora, or the meaning of Osama Bin Laden’s continuing happy existence. Requiring a terrorist to maintain a bogus war on terror, the Bushies have kept Osama bin Laden on tap – partly intentionally, partly accidentally. The accidental part is derived from the original conditions of our vanity project in Iraq: here, the war on terror reveals that underneath the feint, it is a war to recolonize the Middle East on the part of an American petro elite that believes it can reverse history and bring back the fifties. This is ironic, since the petro industry actually needs OPEC to keep prices up. But obviously, today’s oil execs are driven by the panic fear of the nineties, when the bottom dropped out of the energy market. The fear that oil prices will once again go down below the 20 dollar a barrel level drives all the petro-carnivores, the cancerous brood that nests around Cheney and has tied a tire around Uncle Sam’s neck and set it on fire. However, their overreach, using American tax dollars and American blood, has backfired big time – the pieces are not going to be picked up in the Gulf Region by some magical combination that leads us to victory. The question is, how is America going to deal with defeat? The war on terrorism is over – to put it in AEI terms: We Lost. All of which means this: dealing with the consequences of that systematic failure has overshadowed apparently peripheral problems, like bin Laden. In those shadows, those problems are building.
All of which leads us to the nuclear crisis we face – in Pakistan. Pakistan possesses both the bomb and a large and powerful constituency for Al Qaeda like politics. And what happened with the bomb and its technology in Pakistan is, shall we say, rather underreported. So we enjoyed the large article by William Langewiesche in the January Atlantic. Oddly enough, it hasn’t gotten a lot of publicity from our cursory survey around the Net – but then, it wouldn’t. The great and real problems facing the world – the environmental crises that are upon us (he says, in Austin, where the temperature today might just climb to 100), the economic crises that are upon us, and the strategic crises that are upon us are all silently exorcized by newspapers that are happy to be Good Leakers, God bless them every one.
Langewiesche’s article is about celebrity as much as it is about the bomb. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the Father of the Pakistan hydrogen bomb, was and is a celebrity of Bollywood proportions. It is his fame and what he did with it that makes the story fascinating on the human level as a sort of Rushdie tale – before Rushdie began repeating himself like some demon possessed clock that had learned it was funny to tell the wrong time.
Tomorrow, we are going to examine the article.
Monday, April 17, 2006
common sense in foreign policy: a manifesto
Inspired by the ravings of the Euston pub crowd, LI has made up a manifesto our own selves. It isn’t a manifesto for the left, whatever the fuck that is. This manifesto is, modestly, a Common sense in Foreign Policy manifesto – named after old Tom Paine’s pamphlet, and taking as our motto his phrase: “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it the superficial appearance of being right…”
So, here it is, ladies and gents. Pass it around, print it out, and please, don’t handle it with greasy fingers: that is sooo gross.
1. Democracy. A democracy cannot be divided into a monarchy with regard to foreign policy and a democracy with regard to domestic policy. It must be one thing all the way through. Thus, foreign policy that is contrived in a tricky, low, or fraudulent matter by the executive, and pulled off like a trick on the body politic, is immoral to begin with, and will not result in any good thing. Instead, foreign policy options, especially when they involves extreme violations of the sovereignty of another nation, must be presented straightforwardly. There must be no skewing of or hiding of intelligence. There must be no unjustified threatmongering. A democratic foreign policy cannot be run like a crooked casino. There is no excuse in running it in this way to a good end, any more than there would be in cheating at cards to donate the winnings to an orphanage.
2. Transparency of options. If an “intervention” is contemplated by any democratic power, we must have good faith projections as to the cost of it, the human resources required, the need for it, and the timeline by which we can judge whether it is a success or not.
3. Transparency of human means. No intervention can be considered moral that seeks to foist fraudulent proxies for the intervening power on the conquered state. Any alliance of multinational democracies that seek to enforce norms of human rights or governance upon another state by violence cannot, rightfully, double that violence by elevating pawns whose loyalty is to the intervening state(s) to positions of power.
4. Transparency of interests. All states have interests. Not all interests are the same. States may have widely varying economic, political, and ideological interests. A coalition of states that intervenes in the affairs of another state must take care not to merely bend the subjugated state to the interests of the occupiers.
5. Occupational forces – checks and balances. Multinational coalitions call for multinational governance. Unchecked executive power cannot reside in the most powerful state in the alliance.
6. Occupational means. No occupying force is justified in making sweeping changes to the occupied state’s infrastructure that are not a direct result of the state’s previous inhumane behavior. A state, for instance, that has an interest in free trade cannot use the opportunity of occupying another state to enforce economic codes to its liking. Nor can it denude a state of its entire defense structure, or destroy its social welfare system.
7. Transparency of occupational means. Occupying powers cannot seize the funds of the occupied state to do with what they will. Elementary rules of transparency must apply.
8. Timeliness. Occupation should occur with a clear timeline and conditions for exit from the very beginning. Sincere efforts to enroll the occupied in self-government should be enacted from the very beginning. No occupied state should become the scene of mere opportunism by the occupied powers military forces in terms of siting military headquarters, using the territory of the occupied state to attack other, neighboring states, and so on. All of this is, again, to bend the occupied state exclusively to the partial interests of the occupier, which violates the spirit and letter of humanistic intervention.
There you go. Much shorter, for one thing, than the gasbagging of the Euston pubcrawlers.
To top it off, a little grandiose language. If these conditions are not met, we, the undersigned,. will try with might and main to sabotage those efforts that are undemocratic or fraudulent by peaceful means, such as working to deny the military the manpower it needs to continue, working to cut off funding for the occupation, and propagandizing against it to the best of our abilities.
So, here it is, ladies and gents. Pass it around, print it out, and please, don’t handle it with greasy fingers: that is sooo gross.
1. Democracy. A democracy cannot be divided into a monarchy with regard to foreign policy and a democracy with regard to domestic policy. It must be one thing all the way through. Thus, foreign policy that is contrived in a tricky, low, or fraudulent matter by the executive, and pulled off like a trick on the body politic, is immoral to begin with, and will not result in any good thing. Instead, foreign policy options, especially when they involves extreme violations of the sovereignty of another nation, must be presented straightforwardly. There must be no skewing of or hiding of intelligence. There must be no unjustified threatmongering. A democratic foreign policy cannot be run like a crooked casino. There is no excuse in running it in this way to a good end, any more than there would be in cheating at cards to donate the winnings to an orphanage.
2. Transparency of options. If an “intervention” is contemplated by any democratic power, we must have good faith projections as to the cost of it, the human resources required, the need for it, and the timeline by which we can judge whether it is a success or not.
3. Transparency of human means. No intervention can be considered moral that seeks to foist fraudulent proxies for the intervening power on the conquered state. Any alliance of multinational democracies that seek to enforce norms of human rights or governance upon another state by violence cannot, rightfully, double that violence by elevating pawns whose loyalty is to the intervening state(s) to positions of power.
4. Transparency of interests. All states have interests. Not all interests are the same. States may have widely varying economic, political, and ideological interests. A coalition of states that intervenes in the affairs of another state must take care not to merely bend the subjugated state to the interests of the occupiers.
5. Occupational forces – checks and balances. Multinational coalitions call for multinational governance. Unchecked executive power cannot reside in the most powerful state in the alliance.
6. Occupational means. No occupying force is justified in making sweeping changes to the occupied state’s infrastructure that are not a direct result of the state’s previous inhumane behavior. A state, for instance, that has an interest in free trade cannot use the opportunity of occupying another state to enforce economic codes to its liking. Nor can it denude a state of its entire defense structure, or destroy its social welfare system.
7. Transparency of occupational means. Occupying powers cannot seize the funds of the occupied state to do with what they will. Elementary rules of transparency must apply.
8. Timeliness. Occupation should occur with a clear timeline and conditions for exit from the very beginning. Sincere efforts to enroll the occupied in self-government should be enacted from the very beginning. No occupied state should become the scene of mere opportunism by the occupied powers military forces in terms of siting military headquarters, using the territory of the occupied state to attack other, neighboring states, and so on. All of this is, again, to bend the occupied state exclusively to the partial interests of the occupier, which violates the spirit and letter of humanistic intervention.
There you go. Much shorter, for one thing, than the gasbagging of the Euston pubcrawlers.
To top it off, a little grandiose language. If these conditions are not met, we, the undersigned,. will try with might and main to sabotage those efforts that are undemocratic or fraudulent by peaceful means, such as working to deny the military the manpower it needs to continue, working to cut off funding for the occupation, and propagandizing against it to the best of our abilities.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
the yevtushenko gambit
LI was moved to comment on the current mini-affair revolving around the Euston Manifesto. It was published in the New Statesman (apparently, Nick Cohen has a Svengali like power at that magazine, making it publish any trash he dreams up) and was assassinated in the Guardian. This is the comment I put over there. And it being a day of work for yours truly, this is also today’s post.
Ahem.
Ahem.
Although the Euston manifesto will remain in the memory of mankind for about a nano-second, still, its existence poses an interesting question: why would any anti-war “leftist” in his or her right mind sign the thing?
If the supposed anti-war person is at all sincere, it is hard to see what they gain from this document, which is written as though the disaster of the Iraq war never happened, save for some boilerplate references to Abu Ghraib. Nowhere is there a consciousness of the rules and forms of “intervention.” Nowhere, for instance, do the signatories caution the rulers of the great powers who will, presumably, “protect” the peoples of inhumane states from campaigns designed to mislead their populace. Nowhere do they support punishment for those who lead such campaigns. Nowhere do they even touch upon the rules for the ‘protective occupations’ enacted by these powers. For instance, should the economic rules in occupied territories be changed to advantage the occupying states? Should there be transparency in the seizure of the funds of such states, and their use? Shouldn’t occupying powers be condemned for using excessive force, and in particular, from making examples of cities and towns? Shouldn’t there be a blanket condemnation for occupying powers encouraging militias, and cherrypicking the leadership of the occupied state? Shouldn’t such occupied states be unoccupied as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t all coalitions, to be legitimate, clearly devolve political power to all members of the coalition, making them multinational in reality, instead of concentrating power in the hands of the Americans, and using other nations simply as advisors, to be ignored at the pleasure of the Americans?
To sum this up: shouldn’t the anti-war signatories have demanded a more rigorous laying out of the rules that legitimate intervention as a whole process, rather than vaguely referring to the initial conditions that might justify making this or that country a target of such occupations?
Of course they should. But, as such anti-war intellectuals know, the manifesto only real function is in the game of one upsmanship, in which one can keep one’s credentials writing in the mainstream press as a mock dissident, a purveyor of ineffectual and timid protest against the scandalous use of power by the powerful all the better to serve as an attack dog against real dissidence that threatens the powerful. If intellectual gamesmanship were a board game, I’d call this the Yevtushenko gambit, named for the Soviet poet whose dissent from the Brezhnev regime gained him credit outside the country, all the better to undermine real dissidence inside the country.
Ahem.
Ahem.
Although the Euston manifesto will remain in the memory of mankind for about a nano-second, still, its existence poses an interesting question: why would any anti-war “leftist” in his or her right mind sign the thing?
If the supposed anti-war person is at all sincere, it is hard to see what they gain from this document, which is written as though the disaster of the Iraq war never happened, save for some boilerplate references to Abu Ghraib. Nowhere is there a consciousness of the rules and forms of “intervention.” Nowhere, for instance, do the signatories caution the rulers of the great powers who will, presumably, “protect” the peoples of inhumane states from campaigns designed to mislead their populace. Nowhere do they support punishment for those who lead such campaigns. Nowhere do they even touch upon the rules for the ‘protective occupations’ enacted by these powers. For instance, should the economic rules in occupied territories be changed to advantage the occupying states? Should there be transparency in the seizure of the funds of such states, and their use? Shouldn’t occupying powers be condemned for using excessive force, and in particular, from making examples of cities and towns? Shouldn’t there be a blanket condemnation for occupying powers encouraging militias, and cherrypicking the leadership of the occupied state? Shouldn’t such occupied states be unoccupied as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t all coalitions, to be legitimate, clearly devolve political power to all members of the coalition, making them multinational in reality, instead of concentrating power in the hands of the Americans, and using other nations simply as advisors, to be ignored at the pleasure of the Americans?
To sum this up: shouldn’t the anti-war signatories have demanded a more rigorous laying out of the rules that legitimate intervention as a whole process, rather than vaguely referring to the initial conditions that might justify making this or that country a target of such occupations?
Of course they should. But, as such anti-war intellectuals know, the manifesto only real function is in the game of one upsmanship, in which one can keep one’s credentials writing in the mainstream press as a mock dissident, a purveyor of ineffectual and timid protest against the scandalous use of power by the powerful all the better to serve as an attack dog against real dissidence that threatens the powerful. If intellectual gamesmanship were a board game, I’d call this the Yevtushenko gambit, named for the Soviet poet whose dissent from the Brezhnev regime gained him credit outside the country, all the better to undermine real dissidence inside the country.
the old man's scat
Isn’t this headline a thing of beauty?
For Leading Exxon to Its Riches, $144,573 a Day
The accompanying story tells us about Lee R. Raymond, paid “$686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant. That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon's "God pod," as the executive suite at the company's headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known.”
For the better understanding of this great man’s tres riches heures, remember that each day includes lunch and, surely, a pee and a dump. Now, given that Raymond is in his sixties, I imagine that a dump takes about ten minutes. Of course, he could have had some young Brazilian man’s rectum transplanted into his (no doubt, you can check Exxon’s quarterly reports to see – such an operation would surely be a courtesy given by the company, for services rendered, rather than being paid for straight out of his own compensation package – but until better information, I will put it at ten minutes). I’m including wiping and washing the hands – something his fourth wife has surely taught him by now.
So, a full Raymond dump is worth more money than I made last year. Or is it about the same? In any case, your average Cameroonian or Egyptian or Sri Lankan doesn’t make near a Raymond dump. I would put them at half a Raymond pee.
This is LI’s modest proposal. Imagine if Franklin, Washington and Lincoln came back to life. Imagine them wandering in to some fundraising dinner for the G.O.P or the Squirrel party and plopping themselves down in the seating reserved for "Raymond and party". Do you think that the guards would not be upon them in a second? Do you think those old malcontents would be allowed to stay for a minute, after such a vile act of lese majeste? No, I’m sure you will agree, the offense would be too egregious. They would be fortunate indeed if the secret service, or people claiming to be the secret service, didn't descend upon them and extradite them to a special American prison.
So why, pray tell, do we let that band of gypsies camp on the currency? Why, especially, when we could order the finest engravers of the greatest Republic the world has ever seen to render, in full, rich detail one of the great Raymond dumps, substituting for a history we don't remember a sign and symbol we all revere, a veritable american eucharist? I hasten to add, not a scape of the whole mass and accumulation of excretia. Currency is meant to be exchanged, and we don’t need bills that high. I was thinking, however, that to honor the magic of the marketplace, of which the U.S. is a veritable monument and museum, that one finely etched turd, one rich, ravishing portion of the great man’s scat, could, perhaps, take the place of paltry Grant. For smaller denominations, I would suggest we send some of the great chefs with their finest cutlery to slice into appropriate portions that product of great man's dyspepsia. A portion of the turd on the one, the five, the twenty-five and the fifty would remind us by its majestic look in whose country we have temporary residence.
The real thing, however – that standard Raymond turd – should, of course, be whisked to the Smithsonian. Preserved at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the turd should then be encrusted with 14 carat gold so that it can be displayed to the adoring populace. I imagine it would dwarf the King Tut exhibits, as proud parents could point it out to their children and urge them to remember the historic moment.
I am hoping that this post is not in vain, and that all of us beg and plead with our congressmen to get rid of that archaic pantheon that botches up our currency. I also call upon the fair Republic’s finest artists to turn their eyes upon the sublime object, doing justice to its length, its multitudinous segmentation but also – a symbol of the power of these States – its unity.
The ownership society. Coming to a planet near you.
For Leading Exxon to Its Riches, $144,573 a Day
The accompanying story tells us about Lee R. Raymond, paid “$686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant. That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon's "God pod," as the executive suite at the company's headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known.”
For the better understanding of this great man’s tres riches heures, remember that each day includes lunch and, surely, a pee and a dump. Now, given that Raymond is in his sixties, I imagine that a dump takes about ten minutes. Of course, he could have had some young Brazilian man’s rectum transplanted into his (no doubt, you can check Exxon’s quarterly reports to see – such an operation would surely be a courtesy given by the company, for services rendered, rather than being paid for straight out of his own compensation package – but until better information, I will put it at ten minutes). I’m including wiping and washing the hands – something his fourth wife has surely taught him by now.
So, a full Raymond dump is worth more money than I made last year. Or is it about the same? In any case, your average Cameroonian or Egyptian or Sri Lankan doesn’t make near a Raymond dump. I would put them at half a Raymond pee.
This is LI’s modest proposal. Imagine if Franklin, Washington and Lincoln came back to life. Imagine them wandering in to some fundraising dinner for the G.O.P or the Squirrel party and plopping themselves down in the seating reserved for "Raymond and party". Do you think that the guards would not be upon them in a second? Do you think those old malcontents would be allowed to stay for a minute, after such a vile act of lese majeste? No, I’m sure you will agree, the offense would be too egregious. They would be fortunate indeed if the secret service, or people claiming to be the secret service, didn't descend upon them and extradite them to a special American prison.
So why, pray tell, do we let that band of gypsies camp on the currency? Why, especially, when we could order the finest engravers of the greatest Republic the world has ever seen to render, in full, rich detail one of the great Raymond dumps, substituting for a history we don't remember a sign and symbol we all revere, a veritable american eucharist? I hasten to add, not a scape of the whole mass and accumulation of excretia. Currency is meant to be exchanged, and we don’t need bills that high. I was thinking, however, that to honor the magic of the marketplace, of which the U.S. is a veritable monument and museum, that one finely etched turd, one rich, ravishing portion of the great man’s scat, could, perhaps, take the place of paltry Grant. For smaller denominations, I would suggest we send some of the great chefs with their finest cutlery to slice into appropriate portions that product of great man's dyspepsia. A portion of the turd on the one, the five, the twenty-five and the fifty would remind us by its majestic look in whose country we have temporary residence.
The real thing, however – that standard Raymond turd – should, of course, be whisked to the Smithsonian. Preserved at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the turd should then be encrusted with 14 carat gold so that it can be displayed to the adoring populace. I imagine it would dwarf the King Tut exhibits, as proud parents could point it out to their children and urge them to remember the historic moment.
I am hoping that this post is not in vain, and that all of us beg and plead with our congressmen to get rid of that archaic pantheon that botches up our currency. I also call upon the fair Republic’s finest artists to turn their eyes upon the sublime object, doing justice to its length, its multitudinous segmentation but also – a symbol of the power of these States – its unity.
The ownership society. Coming to a planet near you.
Friday, April 14, 2006
a pointless post about a pointless episode
Gossip has traditionally not been the subject of a multilevel evolutionary analysis that hypothesizes different utilities of gossip for individuals and groups. Wilson and colleagues (2000), however, designed and administered hypothetical paper and-pencil tests of reactions to self-serving and group-serving gossip. In samples of undergraduates in the northeastern United States, they presented subjects with a series of hypothetical vignettes that varied the interests of the fictional gossiper. Wilson et al. (2000) found a consistent pattern of approval for group-serving gossip and disapproval for self-serving gossip. In one set of varied scenarios, respondents found no fault with gossip exposing cheaters on a test, while gossip that derogated fellow classmates (i.e., competitors) drew harsh reactions. –Utilities of Gossip across Organizational Levels: Multilevel Selection, Free-Riders, and Teams Kevin M. Kniffin and David Sloan Wilson, Human Nature, Fall 2005.
LI has been pondering a pattern that has played out again and again on the blogosphere. While it would seem, at first glance, that people who have generally the same opinions, or the same range of opinions, the same references, and the same cultural level would display the easy ties of mutual affection, the blogging world periodically erupts in knife throwing and taunts.
Yesterday there was a poisonous dustup between a blog I have written for, Long Sunday, and another blog written by a gifted woman, Le Colonel Chabert. LCC split with this group a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, her supposed career, her opinions on this and that, and her comments section have since then been the target of an ugly and astonishingly childish mobbing.
LCC has a sharp and too ready tongue. When she is under attack, she never ever counts to ten. In fact, feeling the sharp side of her tongue would certainly make the blood rush to my eyes. Plus, she has insulted various bloggers I like. But … who cares? There is such a thing as reasoning, as well as throwing plates. On the other hand, she’s a good writer and she is doing one thing that I can sympathize with a lot: she is trying to find her own vocabulary and paths for thoughts which may have their roots in Marx or Foucault or Derrida, etc. History is a nightmare I am trying to wake up from, says Stephen Daedelus early in Ulysses. The same is true of philosophy, which is made by waking up from philosophy. This is why it is always going to resist professionalization. Which is also why, in spite of appearances, the form of the blog is good for philosophical musing.
So, what is the deal? Why did LS descend into a mad frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation, leaving readers astonished?
It is an odd thing about blog communities that lynching by effigy is such a popular thing. Perhaps the sublimation of these darker energies is a good thing, preventing the substitution, for effigies, of real people. Still, LI is against it. We felt the same thing, actually, about the recent lynching of the Red States America blogger. WAPO made a mistake hiring him, because he isn’t that good. However, it isn’t as if WAPO’s collective of opinion givers are geniuses. Anyway, the search was on for something this Red States guy had done in his past, and bingo, it was soon found that he plagiarized a film review for his college newspaper – absolutely shaming, no? It went on and on. Everybody was pleased when his head was put on the pike. Truly, a victory for liberalism everywhere.
So we turned to the literature – namely, this rather sinister paper by Kniffen and Wilson on gossip. K and W begin with some gems they found, in the organizational literature, such as the following:
“In larger industrial settings that are less traditionally studied by anthropologists, Knez and Simester (2001) and Hamilton et al. (2003) found that firms can benefit from the creation of structures that encourage “mutual monitoring,” a state where members of a given unit take greater responsibility for the actions of others in their unit and a prerequisite condition for gossiping (Campbell 1994). In their study of the effects of an incentive scheme that rewarded airport-specific units of ground staff as independent groups, Knez and Simester (2001) found that the introduction of team-based incentives to preexisting units increased performance as measured by the timeliness of airline flights. In a different context, Hamilton and colleagues (2003) found that the creation of work teams and the institution of team-based incentive structures led to an increase in the factory’s overall garment production.”
Ah, that “mutual monitoring” – it is lovely the way one can shake enough academic Comet in the language to wash away unlovely terms, like backbiting, spying, tale telling, informing, betraying, asskissing, and the like.
K and W’s own study was of a rowing team. The study attempted to distinguish between group-advancing and self-advancing targets of gossip. Interestingly, gossip is extended by K and W to mean something more than ‘news’ – it encompasses a number of behaviors in which the group “self-reflects.” And so we get some heartening tales like this one, of the “slacker,” a disliked member of the rowing team:
“The slacker’s most egregious offense occurred during one of the weeks when practices were being organized two times each day. While this rigorous schedule was accepted by all other members as a necessary sacrifice, the slacker informed his rowing mates one morning that he would not come to the afternoon session because “he was tired.” Since the fatigue of twice-a-day practices was shared commonly within the team, the slacker’s excuse was treated as an insult by his mates. The slacker was routinely the butt of jokes and the target of verbal sticks and stones,
but on this day he was also the subject of personal threats (because rowing teams need to be fully intact to practice since coordination and balance are so integral to boat-level performance).
As we reported elsewhere (Kniffin and Wilson 2004), the slacker’s behavior also impacted the way in which fellow team members viewed his physical attractiveness. When we compared ratings of the slacker’s physical attractiveness offered by strangers and by fellow crew members, we found that strangers rated him as relatively attractive whereas familiars rated him as relatively unattractive. Although Merry (1984) has argued that gossip needs to be consequential to function as a deterrent to anti-social behavior, these results point to important fitness-related effects that accompany negative gossip. Assuming a correlation between perceived physical attractiveness and potential reproductive fitness, the slacker’s inferior contributions to the team’s operations reduced his potential reproductive fitness among familiars within the crew. In the broader social environment replete with strangers, the slacker’s relationship to his team had no impact; however, our finding would presumably have been more important in the EEA when mutually exclusive social groups were not so abundant and accessible.
As one might expect, the slacker did not remain very long with the team; instead, he left after the first semester of our study (i.e., his second semester of participation). Gossip as a social control has two likely end-points: reforming an individual’s behavior or rejecting the person’s behavior. In this case, gossipers intended reformation as the near-term goal, at least, but their actions ultimately contributed to rejection of uncooperative behavior.”
All is obviously for the best in the best of all possible worlds there in rower land, where “rowing teams need to be fully intact to practice since coordination and balance are so integral to boat-level performance.” Culling, culling, culling, so integral to physical attractiveness – if only those damned “mutually exclusive social groups” weren’t so abundant and accessible, in which unpopular and unfit people can lick their wounds and grossly display their happiness.
K and W end their paper with a conclusion that is so dystopianly business utopian that it made me laugh:
“The multilevel selectionist perspective tested by our study contributes to research concerning gossip as well as organizational planning managed by business leaders. The model of gossip supported through this study suggests that when rewards are partitioned at the group level on a scale that permits mutual monitoring, individuals will use gossip as a tool to defend and affirm group-beneficial norms. Although contemporary industrial organizations are more explicitly and intentionally managed than groups prevalent in the EEA, our paper suggests practical benefits to be gained from evolutionary studies of behavior.”
The practical benefits of witch hunting will surely lead us to greater efficiencies, translating into serious elevations in ROI! K and W.’s conclusions converge with the conclusions of another famous researcher, Jonathan Swift:
“Another thing he wondered at in the Yahoos, was their strange disposition to nastiness and dirt; whereas there appears to be a natural love of cleanliness in all other animals.” As to the two former accusations, I was glad to let them pass without any reply, because I had not a word to offer upon them in defence of my species, which otherwise I certainly had done from my own inclinations. But I could have easily vindicated humankind from the imputation of singularity upon the last article, if there had been any swine in that country (as unluckily for me there were not), which, although it may be a sweeter quadruped than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, be a sweeter quadruped than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, pretend to more cleanliness; and so his honour himself must have owned, if he had seen their filthy way of feeding, and their custom of wallowing and sleeping in the mud.”
LI has been pondering a pattern that has played out again and again on the blogosphere. While it would seem, at first glance, that people who have generally the same opinions, or the same range of opinions, the same references, and the same cultural level would display the easy ties of mutual affection, the blogging world periodically erupts in knife throwing and taunts.
Yesterday there was a poisonous dustup between a blog I have written for, Long Sunday, and another blog written by a gifted woman, Le Colonel Chabert. LCC split with this group a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, her supposed career, her opinions on this and that, and her comments section have since then been the target of an ugly and astonishingly childish mobbing.
LCC has a sharp and too ready tongue. When she is under attack, she never ever counts to ten. In fact, feeling the sharp side of her tongue would certainly make the blood rush to my eyes. Plus, she has insulted various bloggers I like. But … who cares? There is such a thing as reasoning, as well as throwing plates. On the other hand, she’s a good writer and she is doing one thing that I can sympathize with a lot: she is trying to find her own vocabulary and paths for thoughts which may have their roots in Marx or Foucault or Derrida, etc. History is a nightmare I am trying to wake up from, says Stephen Daedelus early in Ulysses. The same is true of philosophy, which is made by waking up from philosophy. This is why it is always going to resist professionalization. Which is also why, in spite of appearances, the form of the blog is good for philosophical musing.
So, what is the deal? Why did LS descend into a mad frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation, leaving readers astonished?
It is an odd thing about blog communities that lynching by effigy is such a popular thing. Perhaps the sublimation of these darker energies is a good thing, preventing the substitution, for effigies, of real people. Still, LI is against it. We felt the same thing, actually, about the recent lynching of the Red States America blogger. WAPO made a mistake hiring him, because he isn’t that good. However, it isn’t as if WAPO’s collective of opinion givers are geniuses. Anyway, the search was on for something this Red States guy had done in his past, and bingo, it was soon found that he plagiarized a film review for his college newspaper – absolutely shaming, no? It went on and on. Everybody was pleased when his head was put on the pike. Truly, a victory for liberalism everywhere.
So we turned to the literature – namely, this rather sinister paper by Kniffen and Wilson on gossip. K and W begin with some gems they found, in the organizational literature, such as the following:
“In larger industrial settings that are less traditionally studied by anthropologists, Knez and Simester (2001) and Hamilton et al. (2003) found that firms can benefit from the creation of structures that encourage “mutual monitoring,” a state where members of a given unit take greater responsibility for the actions of others in their unit and a prerequisite condition for gossiping (Campbell 1994). In their study of the effects of an incentive scheme that rewarded airport-specific units of ground staff as independent groups, Knez and Simester (2001) found that the introduction of team-based incentives to preexisting units increased performance as measured by the timeliness of airline flights. In a different context, Hamilton and colleagues (2003) found that the creation of work teams and the institution of team-based incentive structures led to an increase in the factory’s overall garment production.”
Ah, that “mutual monitoring” – it is lovely the way one can shake enough academic Comet in the language to wash away unlovely terms, like backbiting, spying, tale telling, informing, betraying, asskissing, and the like.
K and W’s own study was of a rowing team. The study attempted to distinguish between group-advancing and self-advancing targets of gossip. Interestingly, gossip is extended by K and W to mean something more than ‘news’ – it encompasses a number of behaviors in which the group “self-reflects.” And so we get some heartening tales like this one, of the “slacker,” a disliked member of the rowing team:
“The slacker’s most egregious offense occurred during one of the weeks when practices were being organized two times each day. While this rigorous schedule was accepted by all other members as a necessary sacrifice, the slacker informed his rowing mates one morning that he would not come to the afternoon session because “he was tired.” Since the fatigue of twice-a-day practices was shared commonly within the team, the slacker’s excuse was treated as an insult by his mates. The slacker was routinely the butt of jokes and the target of verbal sticks and stones,
but on this day he was also the subject of personal threats (because rowing teams need to be fully intact to practice since coordination and balance are so integral to boat-level performance).
As we reported elsewhere (Kniffin and Wilson 2004), the slacker’s behavior also impacted the way in which fellow team members viewed his physical attractiveness. When we compared ratings of the slacker’s physical attractiveness offered by strangers and by fellow crew members, we found that strangers rated him as relatively attractive whereas familiars rated him as relatively unattractive. Although Merry (1984) has argued that gossip needs to be consequential to function as a deterrent to anti-social behavior, these results point to important fitness-related effects that accompany negative gossip. Assuming a correlation between perceived physical attractiveness and potential reproductive fitness, the slacker’s inferior contributions to the team’s operations reduced his potential reproductive fitness among familiars within the crew. In the broader social environment replete with strangers, the slacker’s relationship to his team had no impact; however, our finding would presumably have been more important in the EEA when mutually exclusive social groups were not so abundant and accessible.
As one might expect, the slacker did not remain very long with the team; instead, he left after the first semester of our study (i.e., his second semester of participation). Gossip as a social control has two likely end-points: reforming an individual’s behavior or rejecting the person’s behavior. In this case, gossipers intended reformation as the near-term goal, at least, but their actions ultimately contributed to rejection of uncooperative behavior.”
All is obviously for the best in the best of all possible worlds there in rower land, where “rowing teams need to be fully intact to practice since coordination and balance are so integral to boat-level performance.” Culling, culling, culling, so integral to physical attractiveness – if only those damned “mutually exclusive social groups” weren’t so abundant and accessible, in which unpopular and unfit people can lick their wounds and grossly display their happiness.
K and W end their paper with a conclusion that is so dystopianly business utopian that it made me laugh:
“The multilevel selectionist perspective tested by our study contributes to research concerning gossip as well as organizational planning managed by business leaders. The model of gossip supported through this study suggests that when rewards are partitioned at the group level on a scale that permits mutual monitoring, individuals will use gossip as a tool to defend and affirm group-beneficial norms. Although contemporary industrial organizations are more explicitly and intentionally managed than groups prevalent in the EEA, our paper suggests practical benefits to be gained from evolutionary studies of behavior.”
The practical benefits of witch hunting will surely lead us to greater efficiencies, translating into serious elevations in ROI! K and W.’s conclusions converge with the conclusions of another famous researcher, Jonathan Swift:
“Another thing he wondered at in the Yahoos, was their strange disposition to nastiness and dirt; whereas there appears to be a natural love of cleanliness in all other animals.” As to the two former accusations, I was glad to let them pass without any reply, because I had not a word to offer upon them in defence of my species, which otherwise I certainly had done from my own inclinations. But I could have easily vindicated humankind from the imputation of singularity upon the last article, if there had been any swine in that country (as unluckily for me there were not), which, although it may be a sweeter quadruped than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, be a sweeter quadruped than a Yahoo, cannot, I humbly conceive, in justice, pretend to more cleanliness; and so his honour himself must have owned, if he had seen their filthy way of feeding, and their custom of wallowing and sleeping in the mud.”
Thursday, April 13, 2006
the antichrist in america
Yesterday I was listening to Terri Gross, on NPR, interview a woman who has made a film about Betty Page. Betty Page, the woman said, is still alive. Page saw the film, in fact – it was screened for her by Hugh Hefner. So there was some talk about that, and then Terri Gross asked, with incredulity straining her voice, And Betty Page is still religious?
She meant that since Betty Page had been a sex industry worker, in the old days, that she couldn’t reconcile such things with being a Christian.
And I thought, wow. The stupidity. It is that shock one gets from the media, you know. The flaubertian frisson. The gross, intolerable, stupidity.
I have never, ever heard a TV or Radio journalist ask this question of or about a wealthy person. Yet, there is nothing in the Gospel about being tied up and spanked. Frankly, I don’t know what Jesus would have made of that. Or Paul. But one thing we know, at least, about the scriptures is that there is one thing that keeps you out of heaven: wealth. In fact, we have no story of a Judean version of Betty Page coming to Jesus and asking the master how to get into the Kingdom of God. We do have a clear story about a rich man coming to Jesus and asking about how to get into the Kingdom of God. And the answer was to give everything away. You can’t, really, be clearer than that. No parable here.
There is not a day that goes by that I’m not struck by the fact that the early Christian idea of the Anti-Christ, the black horizon of that apocalyptic cenacle, has been well and truly realized. The anti-Christ is mainstream American evangelical Christianity. Everything about capitalism – everything about considering the world as an occasion for profit – goes against the spirit and letter of the Gospel. There is no reconciliation, here. None. You cannot serve God and Mammon, and you certainly can’t serve Christ and the Anti-Christ. This is where sex comes in. Sex, which is much on all of our minds, wasn’t really on Jesus’ mind. No divorce, and no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus’s ideas about sex would have either been broadened or shocked by a little visiting around the Meditteranean periphery, but he had the cosmological urge on his brain.
As in all charismatic religions, the enemy was the very idea of the world becoming monetized, so to speak. The great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – were all intensely suspicious of the power of money. Charisma itself – the “gift” – is what these religions, with their peasant/nomadic base, with the prophet as its poetic correspondent, aimed to preserve. What Deleuze and Guattari called the deterritorializing effects of money call up the deepest anxieties in peasant societies, for good reason. Money holds in itself the end of peasant society.
Of course, the throbs of this anxiety still exist to some extent even in American Christianity. The macro story of modernity is all about the end of peasant society, and no society went at the ending of it with such a vengeance as these here states. That is why America is a different nation, historically. (Perhaps LI should make this clear – we have no nostalgia for peasant society. Quite the contrary. These are simply historical observations.)
However, it does amaze me, sometimes, how successfully the Anti-Christ structure has replaced this with sex, as if into this empty variable you could simply slot any force.
I can’t imagine a Terri Gross figure ever asking, say, Mel Gibson in some interview, so, since you have not given everything away to the poor, how can you possibly be a Christian?
Poor Betty Page. The triumph of the Anti-Christ in America definitely calls for some mock heroic epic, some Dunciad, with Betty Page as the muse of a Christ lost and buried.
She meant that since Betty Page had been a sex industry worker, in the old days, that she couldn’t reconcile such things with being a Christian.
And I thought, wow. The stupidity. It is that shock one gets from the media, you know. The flaubertian frisson. The gross, intolerable, stupidity.
I have never, ever heard a TV or Radio journalist ask this question of or about a wealthy person. Yet, there is nothing in the Gospel about being tied up and spanked. Frankly, I don’t know what Jesus would have made of that. Or Paul. But one thing we know, at least, about the scriptures is that there is one thing that keeps you out of heaven: wealth. In fact, we have no story of a Judean version of Betty Page coming to Jesus and asking the master how to get into the Kingdom of God. We do have a clear story about a rich man coming to Jesus and asking about how to get into the Kingdom of God. And the answer was to give everything away. You can’t, really, be clearer than that. No parable here.
There is not a day that goes by that I’m not struck by the fact that the early Christian idea of the Anti-Christ, the black horizon of that apocalyptic cenacle, has been well and truly realized. The anti-Christ is mainstream American evangelical Christianity. Everything about capitalism – everything about considering the world as an occasion for profit – goes against the spirit and letter of the Gospel. There is no reconciliation, here. None. You cannot serve God and Mammon, and you certainly can’t serve Christ and the Anti-Christ. This is where sex comes in. Sex, which is much on all of our minds, wasn’t really on Jesus’ mind. No divorce, and no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus’s ideas about sex would have either been broadened or shocked by a little visiting around the Meditteranean periphery, but he had the cosmological urge on his brain.
As in all charismatic religions, the enemy was the very idea of the world becoming monetized, so to speak. The great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – were all intensely suspicious of the power of money. Charisma itself – the “gift” – is what these religions, with their peasant/nomadic base, with the prophet as its poetic correspondent, aimed to preserve. What Deleuze and Guattari called the deterritorializing effects of money call up the deepest anxieties in peasant societies, for good reason. Money holds in itself the end of peasant society.
Of course, the throbs of this anxiety still exist to some extent even in American Christianity. The macro story of modernity is all about the end of peasant society, and no society went at the ending of it with such a vengeance as these here states. That is why America is a different nation, historically. (Perhaps LI should make this clear – we have no nostalgia for peasant society. Quite the contrary. These are simply historical observations.)
However, it does amaze me, sometimes, how successfully the Anti-Christ structure has replaced this with sex, as if into this empty variable you could simply slot any force.
I can’t imagine a Terri Gross figure ever asking, say, Mel Gibson in some interview, so, since you have not given everything away to the poor, how can you possibly be a Christian?
Poor Betty Page. The triumph of the Anti-Christ in America definitely calls for some mock heroic epic, some Dunciad, with Betty Page as the muse of a Christ lost and buried.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
calling back the dawgs of war
LI believes in détente with Iran. My friend, the Brooding Persian, doesn’t. Now, my friend, Mr. B.P., has the advantage of Persian birth, an infinitely greater knowledge of the history, culture, and politics of Iran, and all of the tacit knowledge brought by recent and prolonged immersion in the country, while LI sits on his ass in Texas and reads newspapers. So the advantage is all to Mr. B.P.
However, we are still unconvinced. We are also unconvinced that the evident belief of some in the Bush administration that we should start the bombing of Iran any day now is actually going to be realized. It is easy to get hysterical about how incompetent the Bushies are and how bloodthirsty they are, but it is best to put this in context: the thing about history is that it operates by thens. Those who think it is the year 2002 all over again fail to reckon with the consequences of the year 2002, or the year 2004. The war in Iraq, for one thing, seemed like, and was, a short term economic winner. The excuse to mount a policy of extreme military Keynesianism in 2002, after a debilitating market crash and a pretty soft demand landscape, fit into the general Bush governing policy. But the war in Iran looks like a short term economic loser – just for starters. Plus, of course, the soldiers in Iraq are hostages to fortune, and any Cambodia invasion ploy now would simply lead to both Iran and Iraq as lead and dead weights around the President’s party. Those who have been through a war hysteria are, of course, going to be impressed by it enough to suspect that it lies latent in the population like some flue virus. They ignore the other side of war – war fatigue. War fatigue about the war in Iraq has come with remarkable swiftness – see our post about legitimacy for one (partial) explanation of it. In moments of stress, we sometimes buy into the underground comix version of America as a land of redneck Neanderthals. Exaggeration in caricature does not, however, point to statistical truth – it is best at pointing to existential and particular truths. I could easily go out into the streets of Austin and find some guy whose opinion would be that the Middle East should be nuked. But to really judge this guy, I would have to know how much that opinion weighs in his life. I would have a much harder time finding a guy who really devotes a lot of time to such questions. And even my imaginary Mr. Blowhard would probably back down (if he didn’t have one for the road in his belly) to a more moderate position. One of the things I do not like about blogs is that, all too often, one feels the blogger is writing with some caricature opponent leaning over his shoulder – this leads to a Flintstone version of politics, and you just have to put in your villain – a righwinger can put in Jane Fonda and John Kerry, a lefty can put in George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Myself, I’m of the lefty tribe, and I find George Bush and Dick Cheney villainous. But I don’t think they are unhuman – they largely share a set of motives with myself. When I lose my grip on that fact, I devalue any analysis I make of what is going on in D.C.
Which brings me to this Q and A in the post with the president of the American/Iranian council, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers. I highly recommend the piece. While Dr. Amirahmadi has an academically naïve realism about states – to say that states have interests rather than allies sounds realistic, but actually presupposes more clarity within a state about its interest than is ever, or could be ever, the case – I am generally impressed by his grasp, a, of the political reality in Iran, in which President Ahmadinejad is struggling for internal power rather than invested with it, and b., his grasp of the wider situation.
First, a,: “Mr Ahmadinejad is a calculative man. He is also an ambitious person that have to run a country dominated by powerful clergies. His reference to Twelve Imam is directed at nuetralizing that power and gain legitimacy from it. In really, and as the experience in the last 7 months show, he has not been more religiously strict then his predecessors. No new religious restrictions have been imposed and the population does not feel that a major change in that direrction has taken place. Note also that he does not any more speak about imams but about nuclear techonology and other mundane issues.”
And … this should be soooo emphasized:
“On Ahmadinejad, his statements are to be condemned, but I must also note that the man is not the one who makes war and peace decisions for Iran, and strategic policies like ones toward the US and Israel are not determined at his level. Those bigger decisions, including the nuclear matter, are decided by the Leader, the Expediancy Council, and the National Security Council of the country. Iran has a 20-year "Vision Plan" that has set directions for the President to follow. He has some degree of autonomy but cannot disregard those directives.”
And on b, which is where Mr. B.P. and I disagree:
"Waldorf, Md.: Why are we assuming that these people are not telling the truth? Has the U.S. given them some kind of bomb making materials in the past and that is why we are so adamant about this? To me the U.S. is coming across as bullying these people. Why don't we back off a little bit. Or is there a hidden agenda that only certain people know and the public, of course, is the last to know?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: There is no hidden agenda! The US and Iran have had serious difficulty in the last 26 years. It all started with the revolution (which was made against past US interventions in Iran and against "its" dictator in Tehran). The nuclear matter is only one among such problems. There are issues of terrorism, peace in the Middle East and human rights/democracy. Over time, the situation has become even more complicated (e.g. the US situation in Iraq). Please note that nations have neither enemies nor friends; they have interests. It is only unfortunate that the governments in Tehran and Washington (as well as in Tel Aviv) have not looked deeper into the tremendous common interests that exist here and have instead focused on differences. This must change for the situation to normalize. [misspellings corrected]"
LI thinks that one of the roots of the Iraqi invasion was retaining a policy of double sanctions against Iraq and Iran in the nineties, when it should have been adjusted – there should have been a definite tilt towards Iran. Not only would this recognize reality, but Iran’s incorporation into the world system would, we think, work towards strengthening civil society in Iran by making palpable the everyday advantages of eroding the power of the mullahs. It seems to be the case – and I may be totally off base – that Iran’s majority working class population has been economically stagnant while its ownership class has prospered. Since the appeal of civil society freedoms is mixed up with economic policies that seem to reward the already prosperous ownership class, however, that appeal is justly subject to the suspicion that the price of freedom is continuing economic misery. The Cold War interpretive scrim, which the neo-cons like to drag out, is particularly distorting here: the Islamicist politico can well combine that position with the neo-liberal ultra – hence the American affection, at the moment, for a SCIRI leader who is also a free trader maximus, privatize the oil fields kind of guy.
Given what I am saying, however, I can imagine an easy objection: what you are saying, Mr. LI, contradicts itself. You are advocating normalizing Iran – integrating it into a neo-liberal world system – while analyzing the internal political situation in terms that posit the neo-liberal system as a standing evil that incites a nationalism that would interfere with any normalizing process.
I’ll slip out of that strait jacket, and doing amazing other Houdini like feats, in another post.
However, we are still unconvinced. We are also unconvinced that the evident belief of some in the Bush administration that we should start the bombing of Iran any day now is actually going to be realized. It is easy to get hysterical about how incompetent the Bushies are and how bloodthirsty they are, but it is best to put this in context: the thing about history is that it operates by thens. Those who think it is the year 2002 all over again fail to reckon with the consequences of the year 2002, or the year 2004. The war in Iraq, for one thing, seemed like, and was, a short term economic winner. The excuse to mount a policy of extreme military Keynesianism in 2002, after a debilitating market crash and a pretty soft demand landscape, fit into the general Bush governing policy. But the war in Iran looks like a short term economic loser – just for starters. Plus, of course, the soldiers in Iraq are hostages to fortune, and any Cambodia invasion ploy now would simply lead to both Iran and Iraq as lead and dead weights around the President’s party. Those who have been through a war hysteria are, of course, going to be impressed by it enough to suspect that it lies latent in the population like some flue virus. They ignore the other side of war – war fatigue. War fatigue about the war in Iraq has come with remarkable swiftness – see our post about legitimacy for one (partial) explanation of it. In moments of stress, we sometimes buy into the underground comix version of America as a land of redneck Neanderthals. Exaggeration in caricature does not, however, point to statistical truth – it is best at pointing to existential and particular truths. I could easily go out into the streets of Austin and find some guy whose opinion would be that the Middle East should be nuked. But to really judge this guy, I would have to know how much that opinion weighs in his life. I would have a much harder time finding a guy who really devotes a lot of time to such questions. And even my imaginary Mr. Blowhard would probably back down (if he didn’t have one for the road in his belly) to a more moderate position. One of the things I do not like about blogs is that, all too often, one feels the blogger is writing with some caricature opponent leaning over his shoulder – this leads to a Flintstone version of politics, and you just have to put in your villain – a righwinger can put in Jane Fonda and John Kerry, a lefty can put in George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Myself, I’m of the lefty tribe, and I find George Bush and Dick Cheney villainous. But I don’t think they are unhuman – they largely share a set of motives with myself. When I lose my grip on that fact, I devalue any analysis I make of what is going on in D.C.
Which brings me to this Q and A in the post with the president of the American/Iranian council, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers. I highly recommend the piece. While Dr. Amirahmadi has an academically naïve realism about states – to say that states have interests rather than allies sounds realistic, but actually presupposes more clarity within a state about its interest than is ever, or could be ever, the case – I am generally impressed by his grasp, a, of the political reality in Iran, in which President Ahmadinejad is struggling for internal power rather than invested with it, and b., his grasp of the wider situation.
First, a,: “Mr Ahmadinejad is a calculative man. He is also an ambitious person that have to run a country dominated by powerful clergies. His reference to Twelve Imam is directed at nuetralizing that power and gain legitimacy from it. In really, and as the experience in the last 7 months show, he has not been more religiously strict then his predecessors. No new religious restrictions have been imposed and the population does not feel that a major change in that direrction has taken place. Note also that he does not any more speak about imams but about nuclear techonology and other mundane issues.”
And … this should be soooo emphasized:
“On Ahmadinejad, his statements are to be condemned, but I must also note that the man is not the one who makes war and peace decisions for Iran, and strategic policies like ones toward the US and Israel are not determined at his level. Those bigger decisions, including the nuclear matter, are decided by the Leader, the Expediancy Council, and the National Security Council of the country. Iran has a 20-year "Vision Plan" that has set directions for the President to follow. He has some degree of autonomy but cannot disregard those directives.”
And on b, which is where Mr. B.P. and I disagree:
"Waldorf, Md.: Why are we assuming that these people are not telling the truth? Has the U.S. given them some kind of bomb making materials in the past and that is why we are so adamant about this? To me the U.S. is coming across as bullying these people. Why don't we back off a little bit. Or is there a hidden agenda that only certain people know and the public, of course, is the last to know?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: There is no hidden agenda! The US and Iran have had serious difficulty in the last 26 years. It all started with the revolution (which was made against past US interventions in Iran and against "its" dictator in Tehran). The nuclear matter is only one among such problems. There are issues of terrorism, peace in the Middle East and human rights/democracy. Over time, the situation has become even more complicated (e.g. the US situation in Iraq). Please note that nations have neither enemies nor friends; they have interests. It is only unfortunate that the governments in Tehran and Washington (as well as in Tel Aviv) have not looked deeper into the tremendous common interests that exist here and have instead focused on differences. This must change for the situation to normalize. [misspellings corrected]"
LI thinks that one of the roots of the Iraqi invasion was retaining a policy of double sanctions against Iraq and Iran in the nineties, when it should have been adjusted – there should have been a definite tilt towards Iran. Not only would this recognize reality, but Iran’s incorporation into the world system would, we think, work towards strengthening civil society in Iran by making palpable the everyday advantages of eroding the power of the mullahs. It seems to be the case – and I may be totally off base – that Iran’s majority working class population has been economically stagnant while its ownership class has prospered. Since the appeal of civil society freedoms is mixed up with economic policies that seem to reward the already prosperous ownership class, however, that appeal is justly subject to the suspicion that the price of freedom is continuing economic misery. The Cold War interpretive scrim, which the neo-cons like to drag out, is particularly distorting here: the Islamicist politico can well combine that position with the neo-liberal ultra – hence the American affection, at the moment, for a SCIRI leader who is also a free trader maximus, privatize the oil fields kind of guy.
Given what I am saying, however, I can imagine an easy objection: what you are saying, Mr. LI, contradicts itself. You are advocating normalizing Iran – integrating it into a neo-liberal world system – while analyzing the internal political situation in terms that posit the neo-liberal system as a standing evil that incites a nationalism that would interfere with any normalizing process.
I’ll slip out of that strait jacket, and doing amazing other Houdini like feats, in another post.
Here’s a news item that will be well hidden in the NYT or WAPO.
The president of Colombia, the strongest American ally in South America, is making moves that would be hyper-criticized if they were made by the greatest American devil figure in South America, Chavez. This is from Global Insight Daily Analysis:
“Incumbent Colombian consul to Italy and former head of the South American country's intelligence service, Jorge Noguera, has denied involvement in an alleged plot to kill Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe has recalled the one-time Administrative Department of Security (DAS) chief from his current post in the European country to answer allegations that were published recently by two magazines in Colombia. Noguera is accused of overseeing the plot in conjunction with Colombian paramilitaries. Claims that the DAS had been infiltrated by paramilitary groups brought about Noguera's resignation in late October last year (see Colombia: 26 October 2006: Director of Colombia's Intelligence Service Resigns). Reports stem from former DAS employee Rafael Enrique García, who accused the Uribe administration of acting in an authoritarian manner similar to that of the disgraced former Alberto Fujimori government of Peru (1990-2000).
García described Noguera as the Vladimiro Montesinos of the Uribe government, referring to the imprisoned Peruvian one-time intelligence chief who helped Fujimori control his political opponents through a spying network.”
Venezuela has done nothing, really, to harm American interests – the interests of the international lenders, perhaps. But our greatest ally, as is the way of rightwing allies, is a ticking bomb of black market money, connected to the bogus, ongoing drug war. The drug war is noxious both in what it purports to do – restraining people from medicating themselves in order to allow big pharma and the medical industry to charge us more for doing the same thing – and what it really does, creating a huge secret source of funds that America’s intelligence agencies and their clients eagerly fasten themselves to. Not surprisingly, the supposedly “disarmed” rightwing paramilitaries, who claim to have 35 percent of the Colombian legislature in their pocket and who have certainly merged their interests with Uribe, are also involved with Noguera:
“Colombia's intelligence chief has quit amid allegations that his security agency was infiltrated by the main right-wing paramilitary group. President Uribe accepted the resignation of Jorge Noguera, the head of the Administrative Security Department (DAS). President Uribe also dismissed the agency's deputy director, Jose Narvaez. The daily El Tiempo reported that DAS officers were secretly taped while discussing alleged plans by a close aide to Mr Noguera to sell intelligence information to Colombia's paramilitaries. The newspaper also claimed that Mr Narvaez asked for the recording to be made to ensnare his boss in the scandal, revealing deep divisions within the agency, Reuters reports.”
Meanwhile, according to Gary Leech, the Bush administration has indicted the leadership of Farc as the masterminds of the drug trade. FARC is the hardcore leftist group that divides atrocities with the paramilitaries in the countryside:
“The indictment of the FARC leaders further illustrates the Bush administration’s strategy to portray the FARC as the greatest perpetrator of violence and drug trafficking in Colombia. The reality, however, is very different from the Bush White House’s fictitious portrayal. The U.S. indictment provided no evidence to support its claim that FARC leaders have earned $25 billion from drug trafficking and are responsible for 60 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States.
Meanwhile, most Colombia experts agree that the country’s right-wing paramilitaries are far more deeply involved in drug trafficking than the rebels, a fact supported by the numerous drug busts in which the seized cocaine was traced back to paramilitary groups. In fact, former associates of Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the now-defunct Medellín cartel, established some of Colombia’s most prominent paramilitary groups.
At the same time that the Bush administration is making the FARC the focus of its drug war propaganda, it is becoming increasingly evident that the U.S.-backed paramilitary demobilization is nothing more than a charade. Last week, demobilized paramilitary leader Ivan Roberto Duque confirmed publicly on Caracol Radio what Amnesty International, the United Nations and many analysts had been alleging for more than a year: that demobilized paramilitaries are taking up arms again. According to Duque, ex-militia fighters are offering their services to drug traffickers or “private justice” groups, also known as paramilitaries. As a result, the number of killings by paramilitaries in 2005 more than doubled that of the previous year.”
Meanwhile, how about those honest American narcs fighting away in Colombia? The Narco News has been running a nice series on those guys via reporter Bill Conroy:
“A document obtained recently by Narco News makes those questions more than hypothetical queries. In this document, Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs. (The DEA is part of the larger Justice Department.)
The information in that document is also corroborated by a number of other sources that spoke directly to Narco News, including former government officials who are familiar with the DEA’s Bogotá operations
Kent’s memorandum contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”
Since this definitely doesn’t fit into the narrative American papers prefer, it won’t be coming out any time soon. Since Conroy’s report in this January, Kent, the whistleblower, you will be happy to know, has been transferred.
The president of Colombia, the strongest American ally in South America, is making moves that would be hyper-criticized if they were made by the greatest American devil figure in South America, Chavez. This is from Global Insight Daily Analysis:
“Incumbent Colombian consul to Italy and former head of the South American country's intelligence service, Jorge Noguera, has denied involvement in an alleged plot to kill Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe has recalled the one-time Administrative Department of Security (DAS) chief from his current post in the European country to answer allegations that were published recently by two magazines in Colombia. Noguera is accused of overseeing the plot in conjunction with Colombian paramilitaries. Claims that the DAS had been infiltrated by paramilitary groups brought about Noguera's resignation in late October last year (see Colombia: 26 October 2006: Director of Colombia's Intelligence Service Resigns). Reports stem from former DAS employee Rafael Enrique García, who accused the Uribe administration of acting in an authoritarian manner similar to that of the disgraced former Alberto Fujimori government of Peru (1990-2000).
García described Noguera as the Vladimiro Montesinos of the Uribe government, referring to the imprisoned Peruvian one-time intelligence chief who helped Fujimori control his political opponents through a spying network.”
Venezuela has done nothing, really, to harm American interests – the interests of the international lenders, perhaps. But our greatest ally, as is the way of rightwing allies, is a ticking bomb of black market money, connected to the bogus, ongoing drug war. The drug war is noxious both in what it purports to do – restraining people from medicating themselves in order to allow big pharma and the medical industry to charge us more for doing the same thing – and what it really does, creating a huge secret source of funds that America’s intelligence agencies and their clients eagerly fasten themselves to. Not surprisingly, the supposedly “disarmed” rightwing paramilitaries, who claim to have 35 percent of the Colombian legislature in their pocket and who have certainly merged their interests with Uribe, are also involved with Noguera:
“Colombia's intelligence chief has quit amid allegations that his security agency was infiltrated by the main right-wing paramilitary group. President Uribe accepted the resignation of Jorge Noguera, the head of the Administrative Security Department (DAS). President Uribe also dismissed the agency's deputy director, Jose Narvaez. The daily El Tiempo reported that DAS officers were secretly taped while discussing alleged plans by a close aide to Mr Noguera to sell intelligence information to Colombia's paramilitaries. The newspaper also claimed that Mr Narvaez asked for the recording to be made to ensnare his boss in the scandal, revealing deep divisions within the agency, Reuters reports.”
Meanwhile, according to Gary Leech, the Bush administration has indicted the leadership of Farc as the masterminds of the drug trade. FARC is the hardcore leftist group that divides atrocities with the paramilitaries in the countryside:
“The indictment of the FARC leaders further illustrates the Bush administration’s strategy to portray the FARC as the greatest perpetrator of violence and drug trafficking in Colombia. The reality, however, is very different from the Bush White House’s fictitious portrayal. The U.S. indictment provided no evidence to support its claim that FARC leaders have earned $25 billion from drug trafficking and are responsible for 60 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States.
Meanwhile, most Colombia experts agree that the country’s right-wing paramilitaries are far more deeply involved in drug trafficking than the rebels, a fact supported by the numerous drug busts in which the seized cocaine was traced back to paramilitary groups. In fact, former associates of Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the now-defunct Medellín cartel, established some of Colombia’s most prominent paramilitary groups.
At the same time that the Bush administration is making the FARC the focus of its drug war propaganda, it is becoming increasingly evident that the U.S.-backed paramilitary demobilization is nothing more than a charade. Last week, demobilized paramilitary leader Ivan Roberto Duque confirmed publicly on Caracol Radio what Amnesty International, the United Nations and many analysts had been alleging for more than a year: that demobilized paramilitaries are taking up arms again. According to Duque, ex-militia fighters are offering their services to drug traffickers or “private justice” groups, also known as paramilitaries. As a result, the number of killings by paramilitaries in 2005 more than doubled that of the previous year.”
Meanwhile, how about those honest American narcs fighting away in Colombia? The Narco News has been running a nice series on those guys via reporter Bill Conroy:
“A document obtained recently by Narco News makes those questions more than hypothetical queries. In this document, Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs. (The DEA is part of the larger Justice Department.)
The information in that document is also corroborated by a number of other sources that spoke directly to Narco News, including former government officials who are familiar with the DEA’s Bogotá operations
Kent’s memorandum contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”
Since this definitely doesn’t fit into the narrative American papers prefer, it won’t be coming out any time soon. Since Conroy’s report in this January, Kent, the whistleblower, you will be happy to know, has been transferred.
Monday, April 10, 2006
the double face of illegitimacy
In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, LI quoted a phrase of Benjamin Constant’s that seems to haunt the whole misadventure: “When villains violate the forms against honest men, one knows that this is just one more crime. One is attached to the forms exactly insofar as they are violated; one learns, in silence, and by misfortune, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and preservers of the social order. But when the honest men violate the forms against the villains, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves now as obstacles to justice.”
Constant was active in the French revolution, and he saw the price paid by violating the “forms.” Unlike Burke, he was on the side of the revolution. Young as he was, he saw, as Burke did not, that the French monarchical system had decayed past the point of salvage. But he also appreciated, as Ste Just never did, that the republic is built on forms. As Paine once put it, while monarchy is based on will, the Republic is based on justice. Not on the guillotine, and not on God.
LI has persistently pointed out that the scandal at the heart of this war, and the reason the conversation about it in this country compulsively returns to its origin is that its origin was a brutal violation of the forms by the “honest men” against the villains. The French phrase “hommes honnêtes” is not an assessment of private moral character, but of social position – and in this case, the Bush administration plays the role of honest men. The more modern term for the forms, stemming from Weber, is legitimacy. The illegitimacy of this war has been, from the start, the thing within it which has worked against it, silently unraveling every plan and every defense of this war.
The crime against legitimacy has a double face:
On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the tactics used to promote the war, from cherrypicked intelligence reports to slander to half truths to the contemplation of open frauds, such as Bush’s suggestion that a U.N. plane be shot down over Iraq by the U.S. military disguised as Iraqis. The followers of the Bush administration in the press, the whole tribe of belligeranti, carried into the argument a foul atmosphere of libel, of derision, and of disguise. The latter was particularly important. The war’s very dimensions were disguised. From the disgracing of Shinseki to Wolfowitz’ painful testimony about the cost of the war to the refusal to even discuss the occupation, the war’s press followers existed largely to block any inquiry into what the war would entail.
On the other hand, there was the ragged band of adventurers, half Garibaldi, half Lucky Luciano, that the American government evidently intended to put in place as the native Iraqi government. The most prominent of this band, Ahmed Chalabi, is a notorious thief. And indeed, from the reports of the massive defrauding of the Iraqi people, both directly, in terms of the funds seized from Saddam’s government after Baghdad collapsed, and indirectly, from the use of American reconstruction money, it is apparent that the spirit of Chalabi like thievery has presided over every move the American’s made in “reconstructing” Iraq, right down to the military’s publication of false and unchecked numbers about schools repaired (in which the money for the repairing vanished, and the school’s employees are using the same, unreconstructed structures) to the libraries and monument restored. As importantly, the cohort of exiles, save for some of the SCIRI and DAWA politicians, had no roots in Iraq and quickly became unpopular there. A country that had seen Saddam Hussein was in no mood to support another set of thieves.
Interestingly, Constant’s dictum is so correct that support for the war, collapsing in tandem with the supposed American plan for “victory” in the war, is simply a response to the initial violation of forms. For that initial violation requires infinite covering work, thus perpetuating the violence. And this, in itself, points to a constitutional neglect which we have inherited from the Cold War. Among other things, the Cold War suspended the constitutional duty of the legislature to validate American military action. This duty wasn’t an arbitrary whim of the founding fathers. They knew too well that an executive can use a nation’s resources, its taxes and fighting men, to wage wars to its own personal advantage – in effect, making the military the mercenary force of the executive. George III’s use of Hessian soldiers was a vivid instance. The pretence that an elected executive would have more legitimacy doing the same thing was scotched by the Constitutional Convention’s skeptics. They were right. There’s been an argument – well propounded by Paul Craddick – that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq in March of 2003. That war was the result of legislative resolutions passed in 1998, as well as resolutions passed at the U.N. in 1991. In a sense, this is true – but this simply shows, in a bold way, how the forms for war have fallen into disrepair. Your average American citizen was so unaware that he lived in a nation at war in 2000 that the issue never even surfaced in the election. In fact, it was not a war so much as a sporadic hampering action. The Bush administration knew that it did not have political carte blanche to invade Iraq because of some obscure legislation passed in 1998. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if they did – surely the rotten fabric of post-constitutional warmongering would have been brought down with a resounding crash. This would have been, all things considered, a good thing. That the U.S. Congress couldn’t even formally declare war on the government of Afghanistan after 9/11 shows how fearful both the executive and legislative branch are of resurrecting the old Constitutional curb on military action. Its use would call into question future military actions, not so legitimized.
One consequence, of course, of the failure to declare war on the Taliban and the failure to officially enact a policy that called explicitly for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is that the outrageously negligent military campaign against OBL, culminating with Tora Bora (which, given a competent administration, would certainly have resulted in Rumsfeld’s resignation, since OBL’s escape was the direct result of Rumsfeldian policies in Afghanistan), was allowed to go forward with no ending, and to turn into a campaign in Iraq, as though all wars desired by the President are connected.
It is puzzling that supposedly sharp political reporters and commentators – the tribe of the belligeranti –were so blind to the consequences of violating, repeatedly, the forms – of advocating actions that were, on the surface, illegitimate. The puzzle is that no long war can be fought in this way. The conviction that a war is legitimate is a necessary condition for pursuing a long war. There is no way of whistling around this. As the invasion was being mounted, the belligeranti mouthpieces were still mouthing the credo that the war would be short, and were still covering up questions about the occupation with fantasies about flower strewing natives. From their own point of view, this was really suicidal behavior. A long war or a long occupation would inevitably be compared to their rhetoric, and found wanting. As the means were rotten, so would the reaction be violent.
And so it has come to pass that the crisis in Iraq is a double crisis. The group of American proxies in Iraq has been on a continuous retreat, mitigated, perhaps, by the untold wealth that said proxies have deposited in banks in England and America and Switzerland. American strength in the country now depends, oddly enough, on an alliance with an increasingly theocratic Shi’ite majority. And though American papers and politicians look hopefully at “free market” theocrats, like the NYT favorite, Mahdi, it is hard to imagine that the looting of Iraq’s oilfields by opening them up to foreign ownership could really be contrived by any party. The Americans can fall back on the warlords in Kurdistan, but this, too, looks infinitely riskier than it did in 2003. Meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration and its press followers are sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of evasions that materially weaken support for continuing this war – already a minority position, according to most polls, for more than six months now.
Yet also peculiar to this war is the passivity and foolishness of the organized anti-war faction. In LI's opinion, this is also an interesting sign. Much of the opposition to the war seems to come not from liberals, but from leftists. This is problematic. How can leftists complain about the neglect of the forms and at the same time blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeois ideology? It makes the opposition seem either childish or Machiavellian.
This should, then, be the hour of liberalism. Liberals do not blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeouis self interest. At the same time, liberals do not believe that the orienting points of legitimacy are absolute and unchanging. In fact, the illegitimacy of this war results from lies that were acceptable means of promoting wars at other times. The war of 1898 was promoted exactly the way the war in Iraq was promoted. But 1898 is not 2003. The difference in civil rights, in the ower of the state, in our expectations about justice and equity, is considerable. It is the liberal idea that one can push those expectations, and thus reorient what is and what is not "good form." This seems to be a good time for pushing -- alas, just as there seems to be an absense of prominent liberals, save for the mayor of New York City.
Which simply means, to LI -- grassroots work. As Paine said, We have it in our power to make the world anew.
Constant was active in the French revolution, and he saw the price paid by violating the “forms.” Unlike Burke, he was on the side of the revolution. Young as he was, he saw, as Burke did not, that the French monarchical system had decayed past the point of salvage. But he also appreciated, as Ste Just never did, that the republic is built on forms. As Paine once put it, while monarchy is based on will, the Republic is based on justice. Not on the guillotine, and not on God.
LI has persistently pointed out that the scandal at the heart of this war, and the reason the conversation about it in this country compulsively returns to its origin is that its origin was a brutal violation of the forms by the “honest men” against the villains. The French phrase “hommes honnêtes” is not an assessment of private moral character, but of social position – and in this case, the Bush administration plays the role of honest men. The more modern term for the forms, stemming from Weber, is legitimacy. The illegitimacy of this war has been, from the start, the thing within it which has worked against it, silently unraveling every plan and every defense of this war.
The crime against legitimacy has a double face:
On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the tactics used to promote the war, from cherrypicked intelligence reports to slander to half truths to the contemplation of open frauds, such as Bush’s suggestion that a U.N. plane be shot down over Iraq by the U.S. military disguised as Iraqis. The followers of the Bush administration in the press, the whole tribe of belligeranti, carried into the argument a foul atmosphere of libel, of derision, and of disguise. The latter was particularly important. The war’s very dimensions were disguised. From the disgracing of Shinseki to Wolfowitz’ painful testimony about the cost of the war to the refusal to even discuss the occupation, the war’s press followers existed largely to block any inquiry into what the war would entail.
On the other hand, there was the ragged band of adventurers, half Garibaldi, half Lucky Luciano, that the American government evidently intended to put in place as the native Iraqi government. The most prominent of this band, Ahmed Chalabi, is a notorious thief. And indeed, from the reports of the massive defrauding of the Iraqi people, both directly, in terms of the funds seized from Saddam’s government after Baghdad collapsed, and indirectly, from the use of American reconstruction money, it is apparent that the spirit of Chalabi like thievery has presided over every move the American’s made in “reconstructing” Iraq, right down to the military’s publication of false and unchecked numbers about schools repaired (in which the money for the repairing vanished, and the school’s employees are using the same, unreconstructed structures) to the libraries and monument restored. As importantly, the cohort of exiles, save for some of the SCIRI and DAWA politicians, had no roots in Iraq and quickly became unpopular there. A country that had seen Saddam Hussein was in no mood to support another set of thieves.
Interestingly, Constant’s dictum is so correct that support for the war, collapsing in tandem with the supposed American plan for “victory” in the war, is simply a response to the initial violation of forms. For that initial violation requires infinite covering work, thus perpetuating the violence. And this, in itself, points to a constitutional neglect which we have inherited from the Cold War. Among other things, the Cold War suspended the constitutional duty of the legislature to validate American military action. This duty wasn’t an arbitrary whim of the founding fathers. They knew too well that an executive can use a nation’s resources, its taxes and fighting men, to wage wars to its own personal advantage – in effect, making the military the mercenary force of the executive. George III’s use of Hessian soldiers was a vivid instance. The pretence that an elected executive would have more legitimacy doing the same thing was scotched by the Constitutional Convention’s skeptics. They were right. There’s been an argument – well propounded by Paul Craddick – that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq in March of 2003. That war was the result of legislative resolutions passed in 1998, as well as resolutions passed at the U.N. in 1991. In a sense, this is true – but this simply shows, in a bold way, how the forms for war have fallen into disrepair. Your average American citizen was so unaware that he lived in a nation at war in 2000 that the issue never even surfaced in the election. In fact, it was not a war so much as a sporadic hampering action. The Bush administration knew that it did not have political carte blanche to invade Iraq because of some obscure legislation passed in 1998. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if they did – surely the rotten fabric of post-constitutional warmongering would have been brought down with a resounding crash. This would have been, all things considered, a good thing. That the U.S. Congress couldn’t even formally declare war on the government of Afghanistan after 9/11 shows how fearful both the executive and legislative branch are of resurrecting the old Constitutional curb on military action. Its use would call into question future military actions, not so legitimized.
One consequence, of course, of the failure to declare war on the Taliban and the failure to officially enact a policy that called explicitly for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is that the outrageously negligent military campaign against OBL, culminating with Tora Bora (which, given a competent administration, would certainly have resulted in Rumsfeld’s resignation, since OBL’s escape was the direct result of Rumsfeldian policies in Afghanistan), was allowed to go forward with no ending, and to turn into a campaign in Iraq, as though all wars desired by the President are connected.
It is puzzling that supposedly sharp political reporters and commentators – the tribe of the belligeranti –were so blind to the consequences of violating, repeatedly, the forms – of advocating actions that were, on the surface, illegitimate. The puzzle is that no long war can be fought in this way. The conviction that a war is legitimate is a necessary condition for pursuing a long war. There is no way of whistling around this. As the invasion was being mounted, the belligeranti mouthpieces were still mouthing the credo that the war would be short, and were still covering up questions about the occupation with fantasies about flower strewing natives. From their own point of view, this was really suicidal behavior. A long war or a long occupation would inevitably be compared to their rhetoric, and found wanting. As the means were rotten, so would the reaction be violent.
And so it has come to pass that the crisis in Iraq is a double crisis. The group of American proxies in Iraq has been on a continuous retreat, mitigated, perhaps, by the untold wealth that said proxies have deposited in banks in England and America and Switzerland. American strength in the country now depends, oddly enough, on an alliance with an increasingly theocratic Shi’ite majority. And though American papers and politicians look hopefully at “free market” theocrats, like the NYT favorite, Mahdi, it is hard to imagine that the looting of Iraq’s oilfields by opening them up to foreign ownership could really be contrived by any party. The Americans can fall back on the warlords in Kurdistan, but this, too, looks infinitely riskier than it did in 2003. Meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration and its press followers are sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of evasions that materially weaken support for continuing this war – already a minority position, according to most polls, for more than six months now.
Yet also peculiar to this war is the passivity and foolishness of the organized anti-war faction. In LI's opinion, this is also an interesting sign. Much of the opposition to the war seems to come not from liberals, but from leftists. This is problematic. How can leftists complain about the neglect of the forms and at the same time blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeois ideology? It makes the opposition seem either childish or Machiavellian.
This should, then, be the hour of liberalism. Liberals do not blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeouis self interest. At the same time, liberals do not believe that the orienting points of legitimacy are absolute and unchanging. In fact, the illegitimacy of this war results from lies that were acceptable means of promoting wars at other times. The war of 1898 was promoted exactly the way the war in Iraq was promoted. But 1898 is not 2003. The difference in civil rights, in the ower of the state, in our expectations about justice and equity, is considerable. It is the liberal idea that one can push those expectations, and thus reorient what is and what is not "good form." This seems to be a good time for pushing -- alas, just as there seems to be an absense of prominent liberals, save for the mayor of New York City.
Which simply means, to LI -- grassroots work. As Paine said, We have it in our power to make the world anew.
Friday, April 07, 2006
gone to houston
Going to Houston, me buckos. So don't look for anything new here. However, I have to bitch - for some reason, last week, my readership numbers collapsed just as I was putting together some assez cool posts, especially the little one about Marx, Elizabeth Kolbert, and global warming. Or at least I thought that LI was hot, there. (It is an alarming sign for a writer when his hottest stuff falls stillborn from the press, as Davy Hume said about his first book. But vanity forbids me to think that I stink as much as the numbers suggest -- so I press onwards for the good of humanity!)(or at least to appease the chokehold of my evident graphomania!)(and I am using the ! because I like the quivering, tail wagging quality of that punctuation mark. An exclamation mark is the equivalent of a writer jumping up on your pants leg and peeing on your shoe, he's so happy to see you. Take it as a compliment!)
After making the round of Houston's finest stripjoints with my friend David, deconstructing the male gaze, of course, I'll be back. Hey, that was a joke about the stripjoints ... Houston's finest is a little too expensive for either Dave or me. Cheap bars, however, (and Houston is abundantly blessed with them) are another story.
After making the round of Houston's finest stripjoints with my friend David, deconstructing the male gaze, of course, I'll be back. Hey, that was a joke about the stripjoints ... Houston's finest is a little too expensive for either Dave or me. Cheap bars, however, (and Houston is abundantly blessed with them) are another story.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
censure
LI needs to do some advertising today – we’ve not had a lot of client activity lately. And we’ve set up a new, streamlined site for our writing service. It is at this site: RWG Communications. So if you know someone who is looking for editing, translating, or general writing help, direct them to that site. Please!
…
And now, for today’s bombshell. LI has made it clear in the past that we don’t approve of impeachment except in extraordinary cases. To us, impeachment shortcircuits one of the Pavlovian advantages of democracy. Voters who elect incompetent, immoral people to public office should suffer from that choice. Not because of some Calvinistic doctrine, but simply from the old chestnut that a burnt child learns not to plunge into fires, lie on hot coals, or put his face over a gas fired burner and turn the thing to on. Democracy is not only about benefiting from good choices, but suffering from bad ones. The reason that suffering is good is that it fully explores those bad choices, which usually extend beyond particular persons to whole domains of policy and character.
For this reason, we have never joined in the chorus of impeach Bush – we hope. Maybe a hasty, angry post here and there. But today’s news, if true – that Bush approved of the campaign of leaks against Wilson – is close to a limit. That limit is best expressed in censure. If the Democrats can’t get around a measure of censure for this president, they … we were going to say something like, they will never get it together. But what is the use? Slamming the crash test dummies one more time affords us no satisfaction. So we simply hope, without putting too much energy into it, that one of the crash test dummies will blink, the Hans Christian Anderson magic will cause a focusing of those painted eyes, and convey a message to the other dummies – something like, isn’t it good to be alive? If this happens, they will censure our criminal president.
…
And now, for today’s bombshell. LI has made it clear in the past that we don’t approve of impeachment except in extraordinary cases. To us, impeachment shortcircuits one of the Pavlovian advantages of democracy. Voters who elect incompetent, immoral people to public office should suffer from that choice. Not because of some Calvinistic doctrine, but simply from the old chestnut that a burnt child learns not to plunge into fires, lie on hot coals, or put his face over a gas fired burner and turn the thing to on. Democracy is not only about benefiting from good choices, but suffering from bad ones. The reason that suffering is good is that it fully explores those bad choices, which usually extend beyond particular persons to whole domains of policy and character.
For this reason, we have never joined in the chorus of impeach Bush – we hope. Maybe a hasty, angry post here and there. But today’s news, if true – that Bush approved of the campaign of leaks against Wilson – is close to a limit. That limit is best expressed in censure. If the Democrats can’t get around a measure of censure for this president, they … we were going to say something like, they will never get it together. But what is the use? Slamming the crash test dummies one more time affords us no satisfaction. So we simply hope, without putting too much energy into it, that one of the crash test dummies will blink, the Hans Christian Anderson magic will cause a focusing of those painted eyes, and convey a message to the other dummies – something like, isn’t it good to be alive? If this happens, they will censure our criminal president.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
what the coup was for
From David Kay Johnston’s excellent article in today’s NYT, an analysis of the last round of Bush tax cuts found:
Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.
These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.
Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years. “
The conservative reaction to this is hilarious:
“The Times showed the new numbers to people on various sides of the debate over tax cuts. Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, a Washington organization, and other supporters of the cuts said they did not go far enough because the more money the wealthiest had to invest, the more would go to investments that produce jobs. For investment income, Mr. Entin said, "the proper tax rate would be zero."
As the beast slouches towards Bethlehem, it is nice to know that it has handlers like Mr. Entin, who claim that the beast is hungry, and needs more of the planet to process through its delicate bowels. Or, in Maria Antoinette speak: let them eat shit.
Of course, the proper response is not just to close down the Bush giveaway, but to take that money back – raising tax rates on the wealthy by twenty to thirty percent to start with. Tax rates aren’t only about revenue, but they counter the Matthew effect - that is, the mechanism of cumulative advantage, defined by Robert K. Merton in a famous paper like this:
“…cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advantages of trained capacity, structural location, and available resources make for successive increments of advantage such that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots in science (as in other domains of social life) widen until dampened by countervailing processes.” Merton named this the Matthew effect after the passage in the Gospel in which our Lord said: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
In a footnote, Merton quotes a Bible scholar who says that Jesus was showing his usual Tolstoy peasant shrewdness here:
“Most recently, I am indebted to M. de Jonge, professor of theology at the University of Leyden, … He notes further that “it is highly likely that [Jesus] took over a general saying, current in Jewish (and/or Hellenistic) Wisdom circles - see, e.g., Proverbs 9:9, Daniel 2:21, or Martialis, Epigr. V 81: ‘Semper pauper ens, si pauper es, Aemiliane. Dantur opes nullis [nunc] nisi divitibus.’ “And de Jonge concludes: “The use made of this sentence [in Matthew] by modern authors neglects the eschatological thrust inherent in the saying in all versions, and (in all probability) in Jesus’s own version of it. It links up, however, with the Wisdom-saying taken over by Jesus: ‘Look around you and see what happens: If you have something, you get more; if you have not a penny, they will take from you the little you have.’” M. de Jonge, summary of lecture, “The Matthew Effect,” 24 July 1987.”
As the rich get richer, opportunities to get rich, or to advance socially in general, get filled in; in a democracy, countervailing processes must be cyclically reactivated in order to break up entrenched momentary structures of advantage, lest these structures harden into chronic anti-democratic tendencies. In the U.S., the countervailing process has generally been growth – yet we have seen years, now, of productivity gains that have gone almost wholly to the top income level. This is definitely a flashing red light. And as we have seen with Katerina, the bankruptcy bill, the looting of Iraq, and the string of criminal capers for which the Bush gang will live in infamy, if you have not a penny, they will indeed take from you what little you have. Greed, in the Bush system, is not a vice but a systematic necessity – for the concentration of wealth in a period in which the Matthew effect is fed by a corrupt and compliant government means that you have to pick the pockets of the very poorest to keep up. The government is the best instrument to do that. Thus, the alliance of big business and big government produces round after round of oppressive, expropriative laws aimed at the working class.
ps Also see David Leonhart on the end of “fordism” – the NYT Biz section today is kicking. Here are the nut grafs.
"One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers," Mr. Ford said years later. "Paying high wages," he concluded, "is behind the prosperity of this country."
This turned into a pillar of 20th-century economic wisdom. It's time to ask, though, whether Mr. Ford's big idea is as ill suited to this century as his car company seems to be.
By any reasonable standard, the last few years have been bad ones for most people's paychecks. The average hourly wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that makes up 80 percent of the work force — is slightly lower than it was four years ago, once inflation is taken into account. That's right: Most Americans have taken a pay cut since 2002.
But you would never know it by looking at the headline numbers on economic growth. From the standpoint of the broad national economy — the value of the goods and services the country produces — the last few years have been stellar. Despite two wars, soaring oil prices and business scandals, the economy has been growing more than 3 percent a year.
Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.
These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.
Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years. “
The conservative reaction to this is hilarious:
“The Times showed the new numbers to people on various sides of the debate over tax cuts. Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, a Washington organization, and other supporters of the cuts said they did not go far enough because the more money the wealthiest had to invest, the more would go to investments that produce jobs. For investment income, Mr. Entin said, "the proper tax rate would be zero."
As the beast slouches towards Bethlehem, it is nice to know that it has handlers like Mr. Entin, who claim that the beast is hungry, and needs more of the planet to process through its delicate bowels. Or, in Maria Antoinette speak: let them eat shit.
Of course, the proper response is not just to close down the Bush giveaway, but to take that money back – raising tax rates on the wealthy by twenty to thirty percent to start with. Tax rates aren’t only about revenue, but they counter the Matthew effect - that is, the mechanism of cumulative advantage, defined by Robert K. Merton in a famous paper like this:
“…cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advantages of trained capacity, structural location, and available resources make for successive increments of advantage such that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots in science (as in other domains of social life) widen until dampened by countervailing processes.” Merton named this the Matthew effect after the passage in the Gospel in which our Lord said: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
In a footnote, Merton quotes a Bible scholar who says that Jesus was showing his usual Tolstoy peasant shrewdness here:
“Most recently, I am indebted to M. de Jonge, professor of theology at the University of Leyden, … He notes further that “it is highly likely that [Jesus] took over a general saying, current in Jewish (and/or Hellenistic) Wisdom circles - see, e.g., Proverbs 9:9, Daniel 2:21, or Martialis, Epigr. V 81: ‘Semper pauper ens, si pauper es, Aemiliane. Dantur opes nullis [nunc] nisi divitibus.’ “And de Jonge concludes: “The use made of this sentence [in Matthew] by modern authors neglects the eschatological thrust inherent in the saying in all versions, and (in all probability) in Jesus’s own version of it. It links up, however, with the Wisdom-saying taken over by Jesus: ‘Look around you and see what happens: If you have something, you get more; if you have not a penny, they will take from you the little you have.’” M. de Jonge, summary of lecture, “The Matthew Effect,” 24 July 1987.”
As the rich get richer, opportunities to get rich, or to advance socially in general, get filled in; in a democracy, countervailing processes must be cyclically reactivated in order to break up entrenched momentary structures of advantage, lest these structures harden into chronic anti-democratic tendencies. In the U.S., the countervailing process has generally been growth – yet we have seen years, now, of productivity gains that have gone almost wholly to the top income level. This is definitely a flashing red light. And as we have seen with Katerina, the bankruptcy bill, the looting of Iraq, and the string of criminal capers for which the Bush gang will live in infamy, if you have not a penny, they will indeed take from you what little you have. Greed, in the Bush system, is not a vice but a systematic necessity – for the concentration of wealth in a period in which the Matthew effect is fed by a corrupt and compliant government means that you have to pick the pockets of the very poorest to keep up. The government is the best instrument to do that. Thus, the alliance of big business and big government produces round after round of oppressive, expropriative laws aimed at the working class.
ps Also see David Leonhart on the end of “fordism” – the NYT Biz section today is kicking. Here are the nut grafs.
"One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers," Mr. Ford said years later. "Paying high wages," he concluded, "is behind the prosperity of this country."
This turned into a pillar of 20th-century economic wisdom. It's time to ask, though, whether Mr. Ford's big idea is as ill suited to this century as his car company seems to be.
By any reasonable standard, the last few years have been bad ones for most people's paychecks. The average hourly wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that makes up 80 percent of the work force — is slightly lower than it was four years ago, once inflation is taken into account. That's right: Most Americans have taken a pay cut since 2002.
But you would never know it by looking at the headline numbers on economic growth. From the standpoint of the broad national economy — the value of the goods and services the country produces — the last few years have been stellar. Despite two wars, soaring oil prices and business scandals, the economy has been growing more than 3 percent a year.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
planetary alienation
Though I have used a shovel more than once, I am neither a shovelist nor a ditchdigger. I have the same relationship to Marx – the man himself would recognize me, right away, as a liberal humanist (I’m amused by how that word, bandied about on Marxist leaning sites, always calls out the Raid. As if Liberal humanists were looming on the horizon like so many godzillas, trampling through the bidonvilles!). However, I find Marx infinitely useable, even when, as in The German Ideology, I also find him infinitely boring. (I sometimes fear that much of Derrida’s work, a hundred years hence, will read like the German Ideology – heavy irony in pursuit of long forgotten targets, and all that rich wordplay turned as incomprehensible as the dog latin Rabelais puts in the mouth of the students he mocks in Gargantua). The section on Feuerbach there, as we all know, is extremely pretty and eloquent and just. From it, these two grafs jump out at me this morning:
“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”
How individuals “express” – aussern – their lives is, at the moment, melting the permafrost. That is one of the many dire facts that strewed Elizabeth Kolbert’s three part series (first part here) (second part here) in the New Yorker last year. Now that series has grown a book, which I noticed, with a bit of a sinking heart, is being reviewed in tandem with Timothy Flannery’s book. The sinking heart comes from the fact that no author likes to be lassoed all over the place with another author’s work. But apparently, if we are going to have book reviews touching on the topic of the ecological crisis we are diligently preparing for ourselves, we are going to have to have them do two for the price of one. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, or very many books about global warming, especially when humankind has to get out there and buy those SUVs.
Back to the permafrost. In one of those scary passages that gives us facts that we have to immediately forget, Kolbert – in the first article of her New Yorker series – writes:
“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.
One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.
"It's like ready-use mix - just a little heat, and it will start cooking," Romanovsky told me. It was the day after we had arrived in Deadhorse, and we were driving through a steady drizzle out to another monitoring site. "I think it's just a time bomb, just waiting for a little warmer conditions." Romanovsky was wearing a rain suit over his canvas work clothes. I put on a rain suit that he had brought along for me. He pulled a tarp out of the back of the truck.”
The refusal to take that kind of planetary wide damage seriously is going to be the real legacy of the Bush administration. The key to this time is the rush to create major policy out of minor opportunities, while major crises are waived away or postponed on the premise that the future takes care of itself. This is a misreading of Bush’s fave book, the New Testament, where we are told that it is the dead who take care of themselves. Treating the future as if we were all dead there is, in fact, the mark of the morally dead, the living dead, or –as we like to call them on this site – the zombies. For a nice review of Kolbert’s book (surprisingly), go to Slate this week. Instead of having their usual infinitely smarmy rightwing economic hacks do a bunch of coughing about that obvious fraud, Global warming, they chose a scholar on Rachel Carson, our hero here, to do the review. Rob Nixon, the scholar, does both books (sigh). Here is how he begins:
“The political climate has shifted, too. Kolbert, a suddenly ubiquitous American science reporter, and Flannery, a prolific Australian evolutionary biologist, are emissaries of sanity from the only two sizable industrialized nations that refused to sign the Kyoto protocol capping carbon emissions. The United States, responsible for 25 percent of the planet's greenhouse gases, and Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, are both ruled by conservative governments with a strong fossil-fuel bias. Indeed, the Bush administration has turned foot-dragging over climate change into a veritable performance art—a bamboozling ballet of dissimulation and denial.”
That the U.S. has appropriated the atmosphere for depositing a hugely disproportionate amount of waste isn’t surprising – one of the keys to understanding pollution in capitalism is that capitalism is not, despite the first grade propaganda, based on private property. It is based, rather, on larger property owners seizing the private property of smaller owners. It is all about social costs, and renting your body for zero cents and zero dollars to lodge their corporate chemicals in. Marx had a shrewd idea that the progress of capitalism was the inverse of what the proponents of capitalism claimed - that captilism progressively abolished private property by concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. At the end of this process, Marx thought, the bargaining power of the working class would have to be expressed politically, in a revolution that would establish a new order founded on that capitalist accomplishment. As a liberal, I look at that prospect with horror, and would much rather fight to establish a better equilibrium between the concentration of wealth of the owners and the average householder, and the key front is the environment.
Beyond the playground of ideology, the important point here is that the melting of the permafrost is a collective crime against the planet. And that crime shouldn’t be happening. This is planetary alienation of a species extinguishing sort.
“Kolbert and Flannery write with a shared urgency, but they approach their vexing subject in radically different ways. The brilliance of Field Notes From a Catastrophe flows from Kolbert's gift for making the violence of climate change feel vast yet intimate. She clearly intuits that "global," as in "global warming," is a bland, unpeopled, world-weary word. So she shapes her argument around a series of excursions to talk with scientists in the field (often in the Arctic), many of whom become memorable characters. These aren't braying talk-show "experts" but men and women who have spent patient years, decades sometimes, calibrating shrinking sea ice, dwindling glaciers, and permafrost that has started to thaw. Kolbert works alongside them, getting snowmelt in her boots.
Her field-journal format adroitly bridges the gulf between professionals and amateurs, giving the writing a conversational tone without compromising the science. Kolbert grounds her quiet anecdotal advocacy in the sensory world of local inhabitants. She speaks to Inuits, who have many words for ice and must now find one for the robin, a previously unimagined bird driven north by warming. She speaks to a Dutchman who is developing amphibious homes to cope with the anticipated flooding of one-quarter of the Netherlands. She speaks to an Icelandic glaciologist whose models predict an Iceland stripped of ice by the end the next century. ("Glacial" as a metaphor should be retired from the language: When almost every glacier on the planet is beating a hasty retreat, "glacial progress" now means something else entirely.) In parts of Alaska, the average temperatures have risen 6 degrees since the early 1980s.”
“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”
How individuals “express” – aussern – their lives is, at the moment, melting the permafrost. That is one of the many dire facts that strewed Elizabeth Kolbert’s three part series (first part here) (second part here) in the New Yorker last year. Now that series has grown a book, which I noticed, with a bit of a sinking heart, is being reviewed in tandem with Timothy Flannery’s book. The sinking heart comes from the fact that no author likes to be lassoed all over the place with another author’s work. But apparently, if we are going to have book reviews touching on the topic of the ecological crisis we are diligently preparing for ourselves, we are going to have to have them do two for the price of one. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, or very many books about global warming, especially when humankind has to get out there and buy those SUVs.
Back to the permafrost. In one of those scary passages that gives us facts that we have to immediately forget, Kolbert – in the first article of her New Yorker series – writes:
“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.
One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.
"It's like ready-use mix - just a little heat, and it will start cooking," Romanovsky told me. It was the day after we had arrived in Deadhorse, and we were driving through a steady drizzle out to another monitoring site. "I think it's just a time bomb, just waiting for a little warmer conditions." Romanovsky was wearing a rain suit over his canvas work clothes. I put on a rain suit that he had brought along for me. He pulled a tarp out of the back of the truck.”
The refusal to take that kind of planetary wide damage seriously is going to be the real legacy of the Bush administration. The key to this time is the rush to create major policy out of minor opportunities, while major crises are waived away or postponed on the premise that the future takes care of itself. This is a misreading of Bush’s fave book, the New Testament, where we are told that it is the dead who take care of themselves. Treating the future as if we were all dead there is, in fact, the mark of the morally dead, the living dead, or –as we like to call them on this site – the zombies. For a nice review of Kolbert’s book (surprisingly), go to Slate this week. Instead of having their usual infinitely smarmy rightwing economic hacks do a bunch of coughing about that obvious fraud, Global warming, they chose a scholar on Rachel Carson, our hero here, to do the review. Rob Nixon, the scholar, does both books (sigh). Here is how he begins:
“The political climate has shifted, too. Kolbert, a suddenly ubiquitous American science reporter, and Flannery, a prolific Australian evolutionary biologist, are emissaries of sanity from the only two sizable industrialized nations that refused to sign the Kyoto protocol capping carbon emissions. The United States, responsible for 25 percent of the planet's greenhouse gases, and Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, are both ruled by conservative governments with a strong fossil-fuel bias. Indeed, the Bush administration has turned foot-dragging over climate change into a veritable performance art—a bamboozling ballet of dissimulation and denial.”
That the U.S. has appropriated the atmosphere for depositing a hugely disproportionate amount of waste isn’t surprising – one of the keys to understanding pollution in capitalism is that capitalism is not, despite the first grade propaganda, based on private property. It is based, rather, on larger property owners seizing the private property of smaller owners. It is all about social costs, and renting your body for zero cents and zero dollars to lodge their corporate chemicals in. Marx had a shrewd idea that the progress of capitalism was the inverse of what the proponents of capitalism claimed - that captilism progressively abolished private property by concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. At the end of this process, Marx thought, the bargaining power of the working class would have to be expressed politically, in a revolution that would establish a new order founded on that capitalist accomplishment. As a liberal, I look at that prospect with horror, and would much rather fight to establish a better equilibrium between the concentration of wealth of the owners and the average householder, and the key front is the environment.
Beyond the playground of ideology, the important point here is that the melting of the permafrost is a collective crime against the planet. And that crime shouldn’t be happening. This is planetary alienation of a species extinguishing sort.
“Kolbert and Flannery write with a shared urgency, but they approach their vexing subject in radically different ways. The brilliance of Field Notes From a Catastrophe flows from Kolbert's gift for making the violence of climate change feel vast yet intimate. She clearly intuits that "global," as in "global warming," is a bland, unpeopled, world-weary word. So she shapes her argument around a series of excursions to talk with scientists in the field (often in the Arctic), many of whom become memorable characters. These aren't braying talk-show "experts" but men and women who have spent patient years, decades sometimes, calibrating shrinking sea ice, dwindling glaciers, and permafrost that has started to thaw. Kolbert works alongside them, getting snowmelt in her boots.
Her field-journal format adroitly bridges the gulf between professionals and amateurs, giving the writing a conversational tone without compromising the science. Kolbert grounds her quiet anecdotal advocacy in the sensory world of local inhabitants. She speaks to Inuits, who have many words for ice and must now find one for the robin, a previously unimagined bird driven north by warming. She speaks to a Dutchman who is developing amphibious homes to cope with the anticipated flooding of one-quarter of the Netherlands. She speaks to an Icelandic glaciologist whose models predict an Iceland stripped of ice by the end the next century. ("Glacial" as a metaphor should be retired from the language: When almost every glacier on the planet is beating a hasty retreat, "glacial progress" now means something else entirely.) In parts of Alaska, the average temperatures have risen 6 degrees since the early 1980s.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...