the masque of castlereagh

The British are used to lunatic leaders. Castlereagh, the emblem of odiousness in the Masque of Anarchy, committed suicide in 1822. Shelley wasn’t alive to hear the glad tidings:


”I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he look'd yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them humanhearts to chew,
Which from his wide cloak he drew.”

Castlereagh was, of course, a relentless pursuer of native radicals spawned by the French Revolution, and the proto-chartists who were beginning to respond to the horrors of the new industrial system. But even Castlereagh might have hesitated to propose the Blairist blasphemy acts.

Then of course there was Anthony Eden, who, after Suez in 1956 and the realization, among the English political elite, that they were no longer independent of America – basically, the Americans told the English, get a new p.m. – retired with a nervous breakdown. Churchill finally went senile in office. Thatcher, of course, came into office senile, but her senility was ideological. And then there is the mad Blair.

Simon Hogarth’s sketch in the Guardian captures the inheritor of Castlereagh’s mask, the mullah of the third way, in all his seedy, lunatic glory. This is Hogarth’s report on the Blair press conference – the one after the reports were out that Blair had demoted his foreign secretary due to Jack Straw’s slight hesitation to endorse the Bush doctrine of tossing about nuclear weapons to win popularity and power the winds of democracy. Well, you have to stay with the Americans, after all, to moderate their line:

“He {Blair) also showed - unusually - signs of suffering from secondary Prescott, the verbal disorder that afflicts anyone who has dealings with the deputy PM, like the lasagne that laid waste Spurs. Of Charles Clarke's dismissal, he said: "There was no one I less wanted to make the decision in respect of."
And through it all we were hypnotised by the eye, the one gleaming, bulging eye that tells us so much about what is really going on inside the Blair brain. It seems to act independently of the other, often wider, sometimes hooded. Occasionally, even while he is grinning, the eye focuses balefully on a tormentor. It resembles a special branch officer, who, while the politician glads hands and slaps backs, scans the crowd for concealed weaponry.
The amazing thing is that the eye has changed sides, twice! I checked with my colleague Steve Bell, who first spotted the staring orb, and he said it was the left one.

But just a year ago, while he was defending himself over Iraq, it was the right eye that resembled Sir Roderick Spode's, capable of opening an oyster at 60 paces.”
Well, LI can only see this as the realization of the curse. The throngs of the dead haunt the “coalition” leaders, lying scoundrels every one. It is true that LI’s often expressed wish that the dead of Falluja surround the bed of the President and his “caliente” wife every night seems, as of yet, not to have come true. On the other hand, Bush’s soullessness, the path upward from failure to failure and promotion to promotion, that makes it hard to pinch the man under all that Pavlovian conditioning. The self made Manchurian candidate.

snopes, revisited

Snopes, revisited

In the aftermath of the election of Bush (not the coup in 2000, but his real election in 2004), LI wrote a series of slamming posts directed at a silly meme in the progresso-sphere. This meme crudely separated the cultural from the economic, and was postulated on the idea that the working class folks in the red states just didn’t understand their economic self interest.

LI thought this was bullshit. The Snopes well understood their short term interest, which was to substitute, for wage increases, tax cuts; and to further substitute heavy borrowing, at reduced interest, in both the private and public spheres, for real time increases in wealth. What the progs thought was some mystical kind of false consciousness was nothing of the sort – it was classical Free Ride behavior.

At the time, we made such angry comments as:

“We want to pick up on our freerider thesis. Some readers might think that we have gone nihilistic. We haven’t. Really, our point is simple. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s, progressive thought in America was all about instituting progressive legislation at the national level. It so happens that this extended benefits for the working class to a whole region of the country, the South, which generated no autonomous progressive organizations. Between the Revolutionary War and today, I can think of only one Southern generated progressive movement: the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement, led by middle class blacks and peopled by working class and agrarian blacks, broke the back of the South’s pseudo-feudal system and opened it up to the world market. The South owes its prosperity to this act; and so, in gratitude, throughout the Snopesian South, from South Carolina to Mississippi, the Confederate colors were sewn into the state flag, where they remain today. Reminders that the Snopes leave no act of generosity unpunished.”

And:

Dems have taken on the role of both Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, reigning in the deficit through paying for it while trying to preserve national progressive programs, like social security. The Snopes hate the Hoover thing – hate the idea of paying for something when they have figured out how to get it free. And of course they hate the Roosevelt thing of tolerance and enlightenment and blacks moving in next door and marrying their kids. But what they hate most is the idea that the progressives they are conning don't understand what is happening. The progressive harping on the ignorance or bad consciousness or brainwashing of the Snopes class has to stop. Far from being ignorant or unaware of their self advantage, they have had a free ride that has given them the luxury of being able to indulge in reactionary hate while being bankrolled by progressive legislation and opened up to the world through Civil Rights. Everything they hate has supported everything they love: credit cards, big trucks, big motor boats leaking oil over various federally funded dammed lakes, etc., etc. It is no wonder they feel like God's remnant on earth. They have the satisfaction of knowing who is conning who in the great progressive deal, and what they really can't stand is that the liberals that are being suckered don't know who is suckering them. This is the Snopes version of class consciousness. It is that resentment which is at the bottom of the conservative complaint that the liberals are “snobby”. What they mean is: we are screwing you, and you think you are so smart!”

Well, out there in Snopes land, there are intimations of a free rider meltdown. And it isn’t going over well for Bush. LI misjudged the timing, here – the world market continues to support Bush’s economic policy, which is much like the steroid use he so deplores among athletes – inject a hundred billion borrowed bucks here, a hundred billion tax break there, and presto chango – the economy is hitting home runs! Except, after a while, the runs are all being made by the wealthy.

This is from the NYT story surveying the Snopesian landscape:

“Wayne Toomey and Nancy Tuttle, who live in Parrish, Fla., and co-own a vending machine business, have gotten smaller cars and cut some household costs because of high gasoline and insurance prices.

But many Americans now say they are feeling squeezed in the absence of these factors. Their concerns are instead centered on a combination of high gasoline prices, creeping insurance costs and the pressure of a large number of adjustable-rate mortgages, now jumping to market rates, that helped to fuel one of the largest housing booms in American history.”

Well, well, it seems that there is a puzzling sour taste in the mouths of the parents – and the chillen’s tooths are bein’ set on edge no less. And hurricane season is around the corner - which has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with the warming of the ocean.

"We're really worried about a lot of things," said Nancy Tuttle, co-owner of a vending machine business in the suburbs here. "The cost of gas, the cost of house insurance, the cost of medical insurance, it's just everything."

The increase in prices, particularly of gasoline, is taking a political toll on President Bush, even in a Republican area like these suburbs. A recent nationwide CBS News poll found that only 33 percent of those surveyed approved of Mr. Bush's job performance and that 74 percent disapproved of his handling of the gasoline issue.

"We went from totally believing in Bush to really having our doubts," said Wayne Toomey, who owns a house with Ms. Tuttle in the nearby suburb of Parrish. "It comes down to his lack of care about gas prices."

That lack of care about the gas prices is a killer. I mean, he was doing good there for a while – the torture thing, he was for that; the dozing at the wheel while NYC was attacked, check; and the persecuting homos thing was so very sweet. It was like everything was becoming cool and Christian again. But now, how about taking care of our SUVs, motherfucker?

I love, oh I love love love good old fashioned American values. That’s what I like about the South.

a small theory

Once again, the liberal press, the naysayers, the blame America first crowd, the Politically Correct a-holes, the academic jerkoffs, the ones who say happy holidays, the Islamofascists, the useful idiots, the Marxo-anti-semitic-stopper supporters of Saddam are refusing to publicize the good news from Iraq. Oh, they say, look at all declining stats – fucking electricity, fucking petroleum. Oh, like we are supposed to shit in our pants. Well, here’s something that shows Iraq is on course, steady as she goes:

“Kidnapping has flourished here since the fall of Saddam Hussein, as insurgents, militias and criminal gangs have taken advantage of the breakdown in social order. Iraq has caught up with the traditional world leaders in kidnapping — like Colombia, Mexico and Brazil — and may have surpassed them. The vast majority of victims are Iraqis. Between 5 and 30 are abducted every day, according to figures maintained by the American Embassy in Baghdad, though Iraqi and American officials acknowledge that any estimate is merely guesswork, since most kidnappings go unreported.’

So, they thought they would hold Iraq down below Mexico, eh? And Brazil – it is such a coup about Brazil! Brazil is like twice as big as Iraq, but the brave, liberated Iraqis have actually surpassed their kidnapping stats like it was nothing. Rumor is that Tony Snow’s first day on the job will concentrate exclusively on this statistic, and that generals are to be made available to explain that kidnappers imply money, money implies wealth, hence, Iraq is getting wealthier every day! The problem, of course, is a little security problem. Some say it isn’t there at all – as is well known, the AEI, Mark Steyn, and the Weekly Standard now sponsor cookouts in Samarra with Girls go Wild and tequila, without a care in the world! Most of what we see on tv is old Soviet Afghanistani clips redubbed by the well known communists who run the media. But I think we have to be honest here: we have killed every insurgent three or four times – since, of course, there were only about 2,000 deadenders to begin with, I believe. I think that was the secretary of War’s estimate. And the department of war has claimed to have killed, now, around 24,000 insurgents, give or take a corpse. So what gives?

My theory is that Iran has developed a special undead medicine which it has distributed to its worldwide network of terror – Iran being the world’s number one financer of terrorism – and that they are using this Iranian medicine (did I mention that Iran is the world’s number one financer of terrorism?) in Iraq to terrorize. Flagrantly. Also, Iran is the world’s number on financer of terrorism. The merciful way to handle this – the thing that the youth of Iran cry out for – is for us to lob numerous atom bombs, or as we like to call them, bunker n house n yard n dog n cat n baby n man n woman n car n tv n telephone pole n street n yard n restaurant n tower n office building busters, to break up the nefarious mullah ring. Since Iran is the world’s number one financer of terrorism. This solution will make us totally popular in the Middle East, since Middle Easterners like a strong hand. They like to be justly punished for what they did wrong. If they did something wrong, they hang around and say, I wish someone would irradiate me and my immediate family, striking me down for generations to come. That’s what they say.

Wolfowitz for CIA Director!

LI is sad, today, about the resignation of Porter Goss. For years our opinion of the CIA has been like Cato's opinion of Carthage: Delenda est CIA. Destroy the fucking place lock stock and barrel. Birthed by a clearly illegal extension of executive authority -- the very decree by which Truman founded the CIA was secret for years - the CIA has been one of the great anti-communist machines, its purpose being to manufacture paranoia in order to keep the perpetual war ethos alive.

Goss was, if anything, a product of that. But he was something more. He was a product of the Bush culture. High idealism, in the Bush culture, is yoked to that pure strain of incompetence which brings a smile to Three Stooges fans everywhere. And thus, upon an agency that has long outlived its usefulness, Bush sicced a man destined, in a mere two years, to gut the place.

According to Dana Milbank's post mortem story:

"In public, Goss once acknowledged being "amazed at the workload." Within headquarters, "he never bonded with the workforce," said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.""

Now, anyone who trawls through the Net knows that the rumored understory is that it was Porter's dedication to pussy in the limo and call girl scandal that completed his downfall. The WAPO, a company town paper that has no desire to insult the Bush Court, headed by a genuinely likeable, and funny, oh so funny king, doesn't entertain these rumors... at least yet. But the story of Goss's tenure, from his attempt to transform the CIA into a retirement haven for Republicans to his own brand of isolationism, cutting off America's intelligence interaction with foreign intelligence agencies, brought the rare hurray to our lips. If the CIA can't simply be destroyed by Congressional writ -- after all, in Bush's America, Congress is a mere advisory board, delegated to the lesser job of larding the wealthy with tax dollars -- the second best thing is to have it commit hari-kari. Putting Goss and his minions (with their incredible, frat boy names -- that a man named Dusty Foggo was his close friend and fellow limo user shows something about the culture. I'm just not exactly sure what. Are we merely the dream of Thomas Pynchon?)operated upon the place the way termites treat a Stativarius.

Thus, we are completely saddened by Goss' departure. Surely, there is only one man out there who can complete Goss' valuable work. One man out there whose career shows an almost mystical level of incompetence. One man out there with the idealism to mistreat and mutilate experience in the quest for his own personal contact high.

Paul Wolfowitz, come home!

wolf to wolf, wolf to man, man to wolf

...
This post attaches to yesterday's post, where I meant to draw a dance diagram with three positions – hating – being hated – being hated for hating – in order to choreograph the romance of hatred...

Bringing me to Richard Bessel’s article, Hatred after War, in the Winter History and Memory.

“This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions.”

Brief the essay is, but full of interesting and, to LI, startling observations. The first and most startling observation is this: after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Germany was swept by a wave of mass suicides. It is part of the racist code in which our history is given to us that this fact is, I think, pretty much unknown in the U.S. – and, actually, it seems pretty repressed in Europe as well – while the fact that Japan was swept by mass suicide is very well known in the U.S. In fact, the politics of suicide in war is a strange thing. Thus, the condemnation of suicide bombers is pretty much a standard editorial gesture nowadays – but that condemnation remains outside of the fact that the defense posture of the U.S., for fifty years, has depended on our potential for suicide bombing. SAC pilots and crews knew that they had little chance to survive delivering to their targets. In essence, they were asked to be suicide bombers on a much bigger scale. The risk of dropping an bomb on Moscow is undoubtedly close to the risk of being killed delivering a rigged car to be exploded in front of an embassy. But the higher American morality, here, apparently rests on the fact that the bomber has a perhaps 5 percent chance of getting away unharmed from delivering a nuclear holocaust.

The inability to accept that war is an equal opportunity barbarizer goes along with the strange colonial mindset that attributes atrocities to those barbarians one aims at exterminating – that part of the romance of hatred in which hating is a cause for being-hated. So the Japanese, being Asians, set a different value on life – that was the kind of thing that was said, even in the sixties, about Asians (i.e. – the Vietnamese) by American military men. Meanwhile, back back back in Deutschland:

“One of the most remarkable features of the collapse of Nazi Germany is the huge wave of suicides that accompanied it. This surge of suicides included not only much of the regime’s political leadership—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Thierack and Ley—but also dozens of Wehrmacht generals and many lesser Nazis and lower-level functionaries, as well as thousands of civilians who killed themselves as Allied forces pushed their way into Germany and occupied the country. Already in early 1945, as the roof was caving in on the Third Reich, many Germans contemplated killing themselves; according to a report of the German security service about popular morale in the dying days of Nazi Germany, “many are getting used
to the idea of making an end of it all. Everywhere there is great demand for poison, for a pistol and other means for ending one’s life. Suicides due to genuine depression about the catastrophe which certainly is expected are an everyday occurrence.”10 The gruesome sight that greeted American soldiers when they arrived at the Neues Rathaus in Leipzig—littered with the bodies of Nazi officials who had killed themselves and their families— was but a spectacular example of a widespread phenomenon.”

And:

“After the German military collapse, the atmosphere in entire communities was colored by such events, as suicide became almost a mass phenomenon. A particularly extreme example is that of the Pomeranian
district town of Demmin, where roughly five percent of the entire population killed themselves in 1945;13 when the Landrat, who had been installed by the Soviet authorities in May 1945, surveyed conditions in Demmin in a report for the Interior Administration of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in November 1945, he noted: “365 houses, roughly 70 percent of the city, lay in ruins, over 700 inhabitants had ended their lives through suicide.”14 In Teterow, a town in Mecklenburg numbering fewer than ten thousand inhabitants in 1946, the burial register included a “Continuation of the Appendix for the Suicide Period (Selbstmordperiode) Early May 1945,” containing details of 120 suicide cases, listing how the act had been carried out: people shot themselves, hanged themselves, drowned themselves, poisoned themselves; frequent reports noted how fathers killed their entire families and then themselves.15 After years when they had been able to aim massive violence against other people, Germans now turned violence on themselves.”

Then, of course, there was the phenomena following the mass rapes of 44 and 45. The soviet army’s advance, as we now know, was accompanied by the greatest concentration of raping that we know of – the estimates go as high as 2 million women raped. The Western advance had a lower number of rapes – but this is due less to the higher moral standards of the Allied army, and more to the “opportunity”, under capitalism, to exchange sex for money. Prostitution was the Western allies answer to rape.

Here’s Bessel again:

“No less emotionally charged were the abortions carried out on women who had been raped by Soviet soldiers in 1945. Some idea of the emotional consequences may be gained from the account of Heinz Voigtländer, who had been a consultant surgeon at the Stift Bethlehem hospital in Ludwigslust, of the turmoil that the hospital staff faced in 1945:

It was particularly dreadful ... with the pregnancies that dated from the first half of 1945.... I remember a figure of 150 to 180 abortions that we had to carry out at that time. Frequently this was a matter of pregnancies in the fourth, fifth and even in the sixth month....Sometimes, in the seventh or eighth month, this help no longer was possible. Then the nurses promised to look after the child after the birth. But once we observed that a woman left the hospital after the birth and drowned her child in the brook that flowed right by the hospital. We spoke as little as possible about these matters.”

Bessel’s notion is that we should pay more attention to the literal truth Goebbels enunciated:

“Germany’s war was fought, as Goebbels boasted in a radio speech on 28 February 1945, not long before his own suicide, “with a hatred that knows no bounds.””

Simmel, in his Sociology, modeled sociological processes on what he took to be the fundamental elements of society – on the one hand, the individual, and on the other hand, the universal. In some ways, this is a dubious translation of medieval logic, that eternal game of the particular and the universal. One wants some meso-level between the I and the community. In Simmel’s schema, however, the third entity is conflict. It is neither a quality of the individual or a property of the universal, but a third thing – a socializing process. The thirdness of violence has been taken up by other thinkers – notably, Rene Girard – and given other directions. The important thing is that it lifts hatred out of its supposedly privileged and limited place as a wholly private and interior affair. Unlike Girard, however, I don’t think the endpoint of the logic of hatred is Christ on the Cross, but the Werewolf – the wolf as the hunter of men becoming inhabited by a man. The wolf image was peculiarly important in Nazi Germany. But the soldier of any army almost instinctively drifts to the imago of the predator.

This is my own drift, my own Nazi like fugue. At the moment, I too, dream of being a were wolf – of exacting some infinite revenge on my enemies. Bessel talks about the violent intention encoded in suicide, its use as an instrument to hurt “the important other.” This is an old cliché – and it covers up how the other is already eaten by the suicide. The suicide eating his victim, the wolf eating the man, the werewolf living in and on the wolf that lives on people.

the path of the pins or the path of the needles

“Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house. “

He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed. "Knock, knock." "Come in, my dear." "Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk." "Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry." So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

The wolf said, "Undress and get into bed with me." "Where shall I put my apron?" "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." For each garment--bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings--the girl asked the same questions; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." When the girl got in bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!" "It's to keep me warmer, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!" "It's for better carrying firewood, my dear" "Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!" "It's for scratching myself better, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!" "It's for eating you better, my dear." And he ate her.

- From Little Red Riding Hood: Werewolf and prostitute, by David Teasely and Richard Chase.

In the emotional pattern of LI’s life, the big change, in the last five years, has been the importance of hatred. Indeed, if it is possible for hatred to be at the center of any life – that center which is the field of affection, insofar as affection has gotten down among the tropisms, is the first human response, antedating consciousness – hatred has crept into the command of mine. Hatred for the governing class; hatred for the onward rushing into what I see as the destruction of, indeed, the world, the physical globe; hatred of a self perpetuating order of violence in which I seem condemned to live. Hatred every day.

And this isn’t uncommon. Mine isn’t an unusual case. Which is why it is odd, when one comes to think of it, that the consideration of hatred as a social fact so quickly dissipates into consideration of hatred's effects. And those effects, in turn, are quickly distanced from the emotion -- quickly structuralized. There is a journal now dedicated to hatred – the muses have been replaced by the academic journals, and their domains are infinitely sub-divided – but hatred, conflict, the configuration of the enemy, are all still mercury to the touch of the intellect.

So, I thought I'd start with Little Red Riding Hood.

Teasely and Chase’s article about Little Red Riding Hood, which applies close reading to the tale in the tradition of Darnton (and, though not mentioned, of Febvre), mentions an interesting fact:

“Two folklorists have analyzed Red Riding Hood to demonstrate that a nineteenth-century source, despite being altered from its original and unrecoverable earlier versions, can provide credible insights into an earlier period. Moreover, the variants reveal remarkable consistency. Folklorists have argued that a tale's symbolic features are retained and transmitted through the centuries because they remain meaningful to their users and because they refer to features of the real world as experienced by the members of the storytelling communities. If this were not the case, tales would have no function and would be forgotten.(3)

Paul Delarue, in analyzing the variants of the story, has found that the greatest consistency occurs in French tales that originated in a region encompassing the Loire basin, the northern Alps, northern Italy, and the Tyrol. In this area where the greatest number of werewolf trials occurred during the period of witch persecution, three symbolic features of the tale were frequently repeated: the choice of the path that the wolf and the girl selected, the cannibalism that occurs when the girl eats her grandmother, and the savage ending when the wolf eats the girl.”

If LI were going to do a “history” of hatred in the Western World, we’d certainly make a long excursus to consider the wolf and the werewolf. In Teasley and Chase’s telling, the story’s giveaway (in a version they prefer to the one in which we are happily delivered by the woodsman) is given to us by the enigmatic path of pins and path of needles. The path of needles, according to T and C, goes back to the needle worn as an emblem of the prostitute; the path of pins – by a much more obscure act of exegesis – is associated with the werewolf. The werewolf is, of course, the wolf times two – the intentional wolf, the man become wolf. The werewolf in the movies is such usually be accident – the disease model takes over from an older tradition, in which the werewolf is such by pact with the devil.

“The issue of the paths alerts the reader to the presence of a false choice: between the path of the pins and the path of the needles. The girl defies the social order by selecting prostitution, a non-procreative act. Explicit in the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is a similar threat to creation through the attacks of witches on children either born or unborn. By choosing similar paths, the wolf and the girl enter into an unnatural pact from whence the rest of the story, including cannibalism, unfolds.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, making a survey of the werewolf in literature and cinema, begins with the first literary werewolf tale, which is in the Satyricon. A servant goes out of a lodging house to visit his girlfriend. One of the lodgers, a soldier, accompanies him. Halfway there, they both stop in a cemetery to rest. The soldier then peels off all his clothes, pisses in a circle around them, and turns into a wolf. He goes off howling. As Lawrence remarks, taking off the clothes is taking off humanity – the human being the private animal, the one that hides or distorts its privates in various and sundry ways. And of course the doglike peeing, the marking of territory, is another threshold feature – the movement towards being something else – and not Rimbaud’s autre, not someone else.

Lawrence considers what that something else is:

"In order to understand the werewolf and the emotions it evokes, one must take a close look at the extraordinary history of human relationships with the wolf and the crusade of annihilation. The species was long ago extirpated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and wolf populations were decimated in its former range throughout the world (Lopez 13-14). As one wolf researcher points out, the destruction of that animal represents "the first time in the history of the planet [that] one species made a deliberate organized attempt to exterminate a fellow species." Ingrained hatred of the wolf was brought with the colonists to the New World. The American war against the species was "one of the most successful programs ever carried out by the federal government." The original wolf population in what is now the lower forty-eight states before the arrival of European settlers is estimated to have been two million. "By the 1950s, except for isolated populations of a few hundred wolves in the Upper Midwest, the gray wolf had been exterminated in those areas" (Mcintyre 69, 77).

"Ironically, at least "since the advent of death certificates, there have been no verifiable records of unprovoked attack on humans by [healthy] wolves in the North American continent" (Thiel 35). Yet countless injuries and deaths attributable to wolves have been recorded from the Old World. A partial explanation may be that these attacks were related to rabies epidemics. There is also the plausible theory that some of the aggressive encounters involved wolfdog hybrids, which are much less wary of humans than wolves. In particular, the eighteenth century attacks in southern France by the so-called "Beast of Gevaudan" can likely be traced to a wolf-dog cross (Trotti 126). Another factor is that wolves can tell when a person is armed. Modern wolves have had many generations' experience with firearms, and thus are much more cautious than their ancestors (Russell and Russell 158). Numerous causes underlie the hatred that motivated brutal wolf-exterminating campaigns throughout the animal's range. Culturally ingrained superstitions imbued the animal with mysterious frightfulness. Anti-wolf sentiment was inspired by the desire to protect vulnerable livestock and also to preserve the species preyed upon by the wolf, such as deer and elk, for human sport-hunting purposes. But ignorance of the actual ecological role of the wolf, and its value, also accounts for much of the tragedy. Overall, the issue at stake has always been a lack of knowledge about humankind's relationship to the universe, the age-old dilemma relating to determining "man's place in nature." “

Lawrence is right. That is an extraordinary history. It charges the whole notion of the desire to be a wolf, which is also inscribed in that history. Lawrence points out that the when the Boy Scouts came to the Lapp part of Finland, “… the Boy Scout movement was resisted by the children, who "objected strongly to being called Wolf-cubs."

All of this is simply an animalistic preliminary to what this post is really supposed to be about -- Richard Bessel’s extraordinary article, in last winter’s History and Memory, Hatred After War: Emotion and the post war history of East Germany. However, it looks like this post has gone on long enough. We’ll return to that article in our next post.

oedipus jr. and the paper tigers!

The dustup between Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole would be worth commenting on if Hitchens were still worth commenting on. At one time, LI was fascinated with him as, at least, the most articulate of the belligerents. But now he is taking his stylistic cues from old Evans and Novak columns. Style to Hitchens is what Dorien Gray’s portrait was to Dorian Gray – it is where the damage shows up.

But – there is a bit in Cole’s defense upon which I’d like to hook this post.

“As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.”

I wonder whether that isn’t a huge underestimation of Ahmadinejad. I wonder because of the article in this Spring’s National Interest by Ray Takeyh: “Being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The National Interest used to be a beehive of neo-conservatives, so it is interesting, now that the Nixonian realists have cleaned them out – with much clucking all around – that the Spring issue practically coos. The consensus among the authors of four articles about Iran is that the U.S. is fucked. And being fucked, the sensible thing is to initiate détente – although the word isn’t thrown out there. Takeyh’s article, however, made me think that things are going to get worse between the U.S. and Iran because Ahmadinejad is not only not a non-entity, but represents a certain recognizable current in Iran. The same rightwing current that emerged in the U.S. when the Vietnam vets started taking political office – the Top Gun boys, the Duke Cunninghams:

“AFTER 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.

For Ahmadinejad and his allies, the 1980-88 war with Iraq defined their experiences, and it conditions their political assumptions. The Iran-Iraq War was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba'athi secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for those who went to the front, the war came to embody their revolutionary identity. Themes of solidarity, sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power, they also made the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one's revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity--the notions of compromise and a "ceasefire" were anathema to this point of view.

Suddenly, in August 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the conflict to be over. After eight years of brutal struggle and clerical exhortations of the inevitability of the triumph of the armies of God, the war ended without achieving any of its pledged objectives. For veterans like Ahmadinejad, not unlike post-World War I German veterans, there was a ready explanation for this turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders, but the West's machinations and its tolerance of Saddam's use of chemical weapons that had turned the tide of the battle.”

Whether this analysis is true or not, it is certainly true that Iran lies under the shadow of a war that killed 500 thousand to a million people. It is not that long ago that missiles were coming down in Teheran. And surely memories of that experience are being prodded by all of those heavy handed American threats.
Happily, Takeyh’s tack is not to keep up the World War I analogy, but to point out that, after thirty years of having no relations with the U.S., people in Ahmadinejad’s circle don’t really see the need. In fact, they dismiss the U.S. as an irrelevance.

“For the aging mullahs such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more pragmatic head of the Expediency Council, Hashemi Rafsanjani, America remained the dominant actor in Iran's melodrama. For those hardliners, the United States was the source of all of Iran's problems, while for the older generation of more pragmatist conservatives it was the solution to the theocracy's mounting dilemmas. In either depiction, America was central to Iran's affairs. Given that this cohort came into political maturity during the reign of the shah and his close alliance with the United States, was engaged in a revolutionary struggle that was defined by its opposition to America, and then led a state often in conflict with Washington, it was natural that they were obsessed with the United States.

In terms of their international perspective, Ahmadinejad's generation of conservatives does not share its elders' preoccupation with America. Their insularity and their ideology-laden assumptions about America as a pernicious, imperial power lessen their enthusiasm for coming to terms with a country long depicted as the "Great Satan." Even a cursory examination of the younger hardliners' speeches reveals much about their view of international relations: that power in the international system is flowing eastward. As Ali Larijani, the head of the Supreme National Security Council, noted, "There are certain big states in the Eastern Hemisphere such as Russia, China and India. These states can play a balancing role in today's world." In a similar vein, another stalwart of the new conservatives, the current mayor of Tehran, Muhammad Qalibaf, declared, "In the current international arena we see the emergence of South Asia. And if we do not take advantage of that, we will lose." From the perspective of the new Right, globalization does not imply capitulating to the United States but cultivating relations with emerging power centers on the global landscape. It is hoped that such an "eastern orientation" might just obviate the need to come to terms with the United States.”

That is a terrible delusion, but an understandable one. As LI has been saying over and over again, there is a price for being a paper tiger. American irrelevance in Iraq, combined with the apparent carelessness about Al Qaeda, (so reminiscent of the aborted Carter era rescue of the hostages) combine to make American power seem not only defiable, but on a downhill slope. The Iranians can see every day who pays and who gains in Iraq. The Americans can loot the place, but they can’t even repair the fucking oil pipelines. And while the American papers always like to trumpet comments from their favorite Iraqi leaders that are anti-Iranian, that is window dressing. Oddly enough, Americans believe their own bullshit on these kinds of issues. Infinite are the paths of gullibility. In any case, instead of using Europe as the proxy for talking with Iran, we should surely be using China. Alas, Bush’s rude and frankly stupid behavior during the visit of the guy who has been paying our bills, the Chinese president Hu Jintao is a bad sign. It is always a bad sign when the neo-con agenda (China is the rising enemy!) converges with Bush’s bad Oedipal problems (Dad liked China!). Our royal nonesuch has a tendency to act out, then, when rationally, he should be heavily medicated and stored in a hangar somewhere at -10 degrees fahrenheit.

peak privatization

The Wall Street Journal’s David Luhnow and Jose de Cordoba turn in a good article on Bolivia’s nationalization – it puts it in the broad picture of the global trend away from privatization. The least LI can say about this is that we wrote an article for the Austin American Statesman a long time ago – in November, 2001 – predicting that the tide had turned on privatization. It is nice to be proven right. And Daniel Yergin can eat his hat.

However, while it makes sense from the standpoint of a country that depends on a primary product export to make as much off that export as possible, there are various problems with doing so. The Gulf states long ago nationalized their major export, and nobody calls the Gulf states hotbeds of communism – it is, in fact, a mistake to take the ideological tenor of nationalization too seriously. Whether Bolivia’s nationalization will just be a passing affair, or whether it will take, will depend on whether Morales’ government can attract the capital to build up a supervisory structure. And the time really is fortunate, insofar as Venezuela, if it was so inclined, could be a source of seed money.

"Chavez and Morales are both playing a game of chicken with foreign oil companies," said David Mares, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego who studies the regional oil industry.
It remains to be seen whether the moves by Messrs. Chavez and Morales will lead to a broader regional backlash against foreign oil companies and further complicate the global energy market. "Obviously there are concerns" about a ripple effect, "but we don't know what the future impact is going to be," said Bob Davis, an Exxon Mobil Corp. spokesman.”

Interestingly, Ecuador, mistaking itself for a free and autonomous country, has recently tried to put a surplus tax on oil companies sucking out Ecuador’s petroleum wealth. Of course, the Bush White House has decided that decision just won’t stand:
“Proposed legislation will increase the Ecuadorean government’s income from oil revenues by some US$600m a year at current prices, but could ruin the chances of a bilateral trade agreement with the US, which must be initialled by a May 15th deadline. Negotiations between the two countries have been in abeyance since March.
As have other oil-producing countries, Ecuador has moved to capture a greater share of the windfall earnings arising from a tripling of oil prices since 2002. Talks on a free-trade agreement (FTA) deal with the US began two years ago, at the same time as Andean neighbours Peru and Colombia. The latter two have both now signed agreements, which must now be ratified by their respective legislatures (as well as by the US Congress).

In all three countries there has been substantial domestic opposition to freer trade with the US, largely from producers such as farmers who see it as prejudicial to their interests but also from a vociferous nationalist lobby that considers it a capitulation to US pressure. In Ecuador, however, indigenous groups form the backbone of opposition to the trade accord. They have proven to be a potent force of protest in the recent past, contributing to direct action that has given rise to successive bouts of extreme political instability.
…
Although the US government is not bound to interfere in the foreign dealings of its domestic companies, the issue is closely tied to FTA negotiations because rules guaranteeing the enforceability of contracts are a central part of bilateral trade deals. FTA talks were suspended when the oil plans were first announced, and are yet to resume. Unless a comprise solution can be worked out by mid-May, a trade deal is unlikely to be brought before the US Congress for ratification before the mid-term elections later this year. Manuel Chiriboga, Ecuador’s chief trade negotiator, denies Ecuador is reneging on its commitment to investment protection clauses in established contracts, but has acknowledged that completing the trade deal on time is now a remote possibility.”

The Bush White House position is simple. In order to become independent of foreign oil, we have to start thinking of companies where American hq-ed oil companies work as secretly American. That way, it isn’t foreign anymore. And as American hq-ed companies do a lot for America – they lower the taxes they pay, they cycle money through offshore banks, and they send American legislators on very fun junkets – it is all to the good of your average American citizen.

One does have to laugh a bit, though. Here the biggest collection of senile cold warriors in the world sit on their asses in the Executive branch, losing a war in Iraq, while under their noses Latin America has tilted so far to the left that it makes the late seventies, when Carter was president, look like reactionary heaven. Plus, even Mexico has recently passed a reasonable law decriminalizing private possession, within reasonable limits, of most drugs.

All of the seams are coming out of the baseball.

hurray for the swinish multitude

For who can tell but the Millennium
May take its rise from my poor Cranium?..


LI has been reading a lot about the English radicals around Tom Paine in the 1790s. Interesting lot of characters, and very a propos for May Day. One of them, Thomas Spence, was a refugee from the North of England, coming to London after being expelled from a Dissenter congregation for publishing a pamphlet proposing that land itself was common – land, like air, could not be bought. A proposition that John Stuart Mill entertained, later, and that made up the bulk of Henry George’s radicalism. In London, Spence continued to emit his radical views through a wonderfully named weekly journal:

“Edmund Burke's reference to "the swinish multitude" provided Spence with a title for his greatest publishing venture. Between 1793 and 1796, he issued a weekly paper called "Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude," consisting of excerpts from many writings on liberty, attacks on despotism, and frequent verse. These papers were later issued as complete volumes; there were three in all, each with an engraved frontispiece by Spence's son.

The frontispiece for Volume I depicts a well-fed missionary and three graceful Indians. The missionary says: "God has enjoined you to be Christians, to pay rent and tythes, and become a Civilized People." One Indian replies: "If Rent we once consent to pay, Taxes next you'll on us lay, And then our Freedom's poured away;" at which the Indians chorus: "With the Beasts of the Wood We'll ramble for Food, And live in wild deserts and Caves; And live poor as Job, On the Skirts of the Globe, Before we'll consent to be Slaves, My Brave Boys, Before We'll consent to be Slaves!"

The frontispiece for Volume II has two Indians gazing at an unhappy donkey. One Indian says: "Behold the civilized Ass, Two pairs of Panyers on his Back; the First with Rents a heavy mass; With Taxes next his bones do crack." To which the donkey brays in response: "I'm doomed to endless Toil and Care-I was an Ass to bear the first Pair."

Spence apparently grew rather disgusted, at times, with the swinish multitude. While pigs “squeal most seditiously,” Spence found the people much too passive and compliant to live up to the piggish standard. Well, here’s to a May Day of squealing seditiously. Here’s Spence in a more satiric and bitter mood (from Carl Fisher’s essay on Politics and Porcine Representation):

“Ye swinish multitude who prate,

What know ye `bout the matter?'

Misterious are the ways of state,

Of which you should not chatter.

Our church and state, like man and wife,

Together kindly cuddle;

Together share the sweets of life

Together feast and fuddle.

Then hence ye swine nor make a rout,

Forbearance but relaxes;

We'll clap the muzzle on your snout,

Go work, and pay your taxes.”

galbraith, RIP

Loneliness. John Kenneth Galbraith is dead.

In the NYT obituary, which is generous (as it should be), there are two paragraphs on the matter of Galbraith’s isolation from the economic community which cast a broad light on why Galbraith is generally right, and the mass of economists, drudges of rightwing ideology, are generally living in outer space:

“Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed.

Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.”

Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, said that De Sade’s vision of a world of universal prostitution is a dystopian version of capitalism. Gary S. Becker’s neo-classical analysis of the family unit as essentially a matter of efficient transaction costs cast the world as a matter of universal prostitution and pronounced it good, and in doing so founded the Law and Economics field that has swallowed the justice system. Galbraith never liked the idea that we should live in a world of universal prostitution. For this, he got rocks thrown at him by the economics professors.

Not all, however:

“Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr. Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's book recounts, Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society" was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.
"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.”
Well, LI searched for the proper poem to commemorate JKG. Here is Donald Davies’ Obiter Dicta,

Trying to understand myself, I fetch
My father's image to me. There he is, augmenting
The treasury of his prudence with a clutch
Of those cold eggs, Great Truths---his scrivener's hand
Confiding apopthegms to his pocket book.
Does mine do more than snap the elastic band
Of rhyme about them? In an age that teaches
How pearls of wisdom only look like eggs,
The tide, afflatus, still piles up on the beaches
Pearls that he prizes, stones that he retrieves
Misguidedly from poetry's undertow,
Deaf to the harsh retraction that achieves
Its scuttering backwash, ironies. And yet,
Recalling his garrulity, I see
There's method in it. Seeming to forget


The point at issue, the palmer tells his beads,
Strung by connections nonchalantly weak
Upon the thread of argument he needs
To bring them through his fingers, round and round,
Tasting of gristle, savoury; and he hears,
Like rubbing stones, their dry conclusive sound.

Himself an actor (He can play the clown),
He knows the poet's a man of parts; the sage
Is one of them, buffoonery like his own,
Means to an end. So, if he loves the page
That grows sententious with a terse distinction,
Yet lapidary moralists are dumb
About the precepts that he acts upon,
Brown with tobacco from his rule of thumb.

'Not bread but a stone!'---the deep-sea fishermen
Denounce our findings, father. Pebbles, beads,
Perspicuous dicta, gems from Emerson,
Whatever stands when all about it slides,
Whatever in the oceanic welter
Puts period to unpunctuated tides,
These, that we like, they hate. And after all, for you,
To take but with a pinch of salt to take
The maxims of the sages is the true
Great Truth of all. To keep, as you would say,
A sense of proportion, I should portion out
The archipelago across the bay,
One island to so much sea. Assorted
Poetic pleasures come in bundles then,
Strapped up by rhyme, not otherwise supported?

Turning about his various gems to take
Each other's lustre by a temperate rule,
He walks the graveyard where I have to make
Not centos but inscriptions, and a whole
That's moved from inward, dancing. Yet I trace
Among his shored-up epitaphs my own:
Art, as he hints, turns on a commonplace,
And Death is a tune to dance to, cut in stone.

the state is already lost...

Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre !

“Not a lot of probity is required by a monarchic or despotic government in order for it to sustain and maintain itself. The force of the law in the one, the arm of the prince, forever lifted, in the other rules or contains everything. But in a popular government, we require another resource, which is virtue.

What I am saying is confirmed by the entire body of history, and is very conformable to the nature of things. For it is clear that in a monarchy, where he who has the laws executed judges himself above the law, one has need less of virtue than in a popular government, where he who has the laws executed feels he himself subject to them, so that he bears their burden.

It is, again, clear that the monarch who, by bad counsel or negligence, ceases to have the laws executied, can easily repair the injury: he has only to change the counsel, or correct his negligences. But when, in a popular government, the laws cease to be executed, like that there can only come the corruption of the republic – the state is already lost. “

Well said, Montesquieu. Bringing us to the intermittent series of Bush’s crimes, of which Jonathan Schwartz, at Tiny Revolution, is making an account. He noticed, as of course the whole of the opposition hasn’t (the willfully blind, still fretting about framing a national security policy bloody enough to garner a good percentage of the lyncher vote. Hilary C.’s proposal of a lottery bombing, in which average citizens can reach into a tub full of billets with the names of countries written on them, and we bomb that country for a day, has apparently received the endorsement of the New Republic crowd), LI, too, is compiling a small history of how a great republic crawled through a small time, and gave up the ghost. This would be a sad story, if one could tell it in Montesquieu’s language, a classical, hard tone deriving from a lifelong acquaintance with the Latin historians. However, LI can only tell it, has only been responding to it, in the vulgar tones of street worm made victim by some hit and run frat car, careening crazily down the street. We wave our empties at it, spit, zip down our zipper and piss in its general direction. More Père Duchêne than Montesquieu, I’m afraid.

Still, it is a spectacle, no? The usurpation of tyrannical power by an executive branch which, after failing completely to protect the citizenry, after allowing America to be attacked by a bunch of pikers, and after failing systematically even to punish the relative handful of people who made that happen, now uses the bloody results of that failure as the grounds for usurping ever more illegal power, which it concentrates in ever more incompetent and fraudulent hands.

Schwartz has been citing outrageous bits from Bush’s favorite constitutional theorist, John Yoo, the man who never saw a torture he didn’t like – that is, if the torturer is an American. Yoo, basically, holds that the executive branch can conduct wars with its – America’s – army as he sees fit, with the only brake upon this power being the Congressional power over the purse strings. There is a latin legal phrase for Yoo’s position. It translates, roughly, as: Í’m pulling this out of my ass. In Policy Review, which is as conservative a journal as you can get, Yoo’s reviewer, Eugene Kontorovich, couldn’t quite go the whole route of claiming that the president is a king:

When the Constitution was ratified, the federal army numbered fewer than 700 men; there was no naval establishment. The state militias accounted for the bulk of the nation's military capability.

The Constitution makes clear that Congress, rather than the president, controls the "calling forth of the militia." Thus, the commander in chief, at the time of the founding, had no means with which to start a war without prior action by Congress. It would be odd if the decision about whether to wage war were placed solely on the shoulders of an official so ill-suited to
ensuring its success. … In Yoo's model.Congress's decision to create a military ready to meet any contingency allows the president to do what he will with it.”

The Policy reviewer also points out another flaw in Yoo’s position: one that, actually, reaches to the heart of the monster created by the crossing of the corporate power and warmaking under the aegis of the Cold War:

“Today, a hard-pressed president might seek out contributions or, worse, loans from other nations. This is not so far-fetched — the Gulf War was financed in part with foreign contributions, and much of the Iran-contra scandal was about the White House's efforts to obtain alternative funding from foreign nations after Congress cut off support for the Latin American freedom fighters.

“Or the president could pay for the war from its own proceeds — for example, by selling assets of a defeated enemy (Iraqi oil, for example). Or perhaps he could sell U.S. military hardware to other nations — he is, after all, commander in chief of the armed forces.”

That these are actually imaginable courses of action tells us something about the structural madness of giving the President this kind of power. So: let’s take it away from him.

Strangle the military. Support your anti-recruiter. Be a patriot.

the treadmill of production

LI finds the shenanigans over oil recently extremely funny and sad. To question the oil-chemical complex in any way is to invite massive retaliation – remember, conservatism in this country has nothing to do with conservative ideas. It has everything to do with well financed expression of the industry’s interests. The G.O.P., and much of the Democratic party, simply exist to forward their interests. The parties are allowed to take up hobbies, in the spirit of Junior League – the Dems going out for reproductive choice and home decorating, for instance, and the G.O.P. taking up preserving the brain dead and biking. So, even when, for instance, a pundit like Michael Kinsley comes out for a windfall tax, he hedges himself about – for instance, by saying that taxes should never, ever be used as punishment. Heavens no. In the world of pundit economics, taxes can only be used as rewards – everybody must get prizes, you see. Why punish an industry for gorging on limited resources, spending progressively less on R and D (actually, this is one of the big effects of the Bush tax giveaways – why spend on R & D when it is now more profitable to distribute your profits via dividends? And especially when the tax regime for the upper management is so favorable that those ethically challenged parasites move heaven and earth to take as much of a bite as they can from the enterprises they run, now) because who ever heard of a Republic limiting the power of the most powerful? It has occurred to Tacitus, Montesquieu, John Locke, Tom Paine and the like – but that’s a bunch of losers, as we well know.

So – since this is Chernobyl week, and since we’ve been thinking of the question of value posed during the recent Spivak to-do – we thought this would be a good post to talk about Allan Schnaiberg.

Schaiberg is an economist at Northwestern. In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics. Not a field people have heard of, right? But it is an influential field. The big controversy in the field is about ecological modernization. Briefly: a German sociologist, Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient.

Schaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis. We are going to try to comment on the treadmill of production part, which articulates a thesis about the economy for which we have tons of sympathy. But the environmental state part is equally interesting.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel
1999).”

Schaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. LI found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schaiberg writes:

First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of
"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled
refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes
infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has
occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters convened by Cheney in 2001 agreed to put the keebosh on conservation – it is because conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – should we sing the National Anthem in Spanish? Is the book by the guy who runs the Daily Kos doing better than the book written by the guy who runs instapundit? but we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors being perpetrated, for the last five years, by coal mining companies in West Virginia.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis.

Elephant King - Go

LI’s future murderer, Seth Grossman, is showing his film, Elephant King, in the Tribeca Film Fest. There’s a showing at Sat 4/29, 3:00pm Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11, one Tue 5/02, 10:00pm AMC Loews 34th Street 14, and one Sun 5/07, 10:00am
AMC Loews Lincoln Sq 5. Seth’s totally offensive sense of humor , narcissism, and ability to entangle himself with weirdos should certainly make him a fave for anybody who reads this site! He’s up for various awards, which range from 5-8 months at Rikers to aftercare with a sex therapist for at least 2 years under the supervision of his parole officer (chemical treatment and plethysmograph to be administered on court order).

Here’s an interview with him, and of course, his site is listed on our blogroll.

So a big shout out to NYC – check it out.

Let’s break the department of war.

“…having a great time here in Iraq."
Why, it was the Iraq and roll show with our two fave liars, Condi Rice and Don “I fucked up Tora Bora and I’m fuckin’ proud of it” Rumsfeld, yesterday, and the zombies can beam. It turns out that Iraq is “a tremendous pillar of stability through the Middle East." Who knew? And volcanoes are very good ways to fertilize the soil. That’s why you should always try to farm active ones.

The two can’t stand each other – this happens in a court society in which each player depends upon a differing mix of servility and arrogance to maintain position. Since Rumsfeld’s place in the Bush pantheon seems to be fixed – he’s part of the mission, and the mission is to make America pretty much toxic and unliveable for the next fifty year – Rice has to deal with him like the senile parent that you can’t move out of the house. Rice’s tremendous success in getting the Dawa party to nominate a man with precisely the same positions as Jafari to be P.M. can only be described as a tremendous success leading to tremendous stability in the best of all possible Mesopotamias.

As for the causes of that instability – LI has a long post coming up about the civil war in Iraq. The civil war that was programmed into Iraq. The civil war that is the constitution of Iraq. The American advisors of which are notorious for wanting to split up Iraq way back from the beginning of the invasion. So a bunch of theoreticians and calculators, as Burke called them, descend on this country and not only facilitate its looting, but actively seek to destroy its unity, while taking down the army in order to make it a perpetual dependent of American power. In its long series of foreign policy crimes, Iraq has become a sort of center, an emblem of all of D.C.’s vice and viciousness. Seizing the volunteer army at the grass roots level by whatever means and destroying the power of the executive branch to ever again wield a mercenary force are the proper political responses in this country to this crew of freaks. Let’s break the department of war. Suggestions?

Last night, exhausted by another day of translating, LI went down to the corner store and bought a Lone Star (hey, we are on our downers at the moment). And we started talking with the clerk, first about the Simpsons and then about literature. The clerk is, I believe, Lebanese, and he has not watched a lot of Simpsons, so we told him that it is in the line of classic American literature, Twain and Melville and Hawthorne -- but he said, but I don't read. So he wanted to know what was in Twain and Melville, and we gave some extremely condensed plot summary. But one thing we said he could relate to -- the description of Ahab as exemplifying one overwhelming American trait: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me," Our inadequate paraphrase of chapter 36. The clerk was most amused to see this customer hopping up and down with his Lone star, misquoting Moby Dick. But who knows, maybe he'll read it some day?

And if that trait makes us reach out and smite the nations -- we can turn it around as well, to strike at D.C. Shall we not strike the government if it insults us?

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask!"

glorious dreams, miserable dreamer

Last night, I had a wonderful dream. In this dream, I am in the midst of a people who may be Bedouins. They are dressed in flowing white robes. These Bedouins, however, have something against LI. What did I do? Well, I can’t remember that part of the dream. However, I started running, and they were coming up close behind me. Suddenly – and this has never happened to me in a dream, ever – I leaped into the air and became an eagle. Even in the dream I was a little startled by this. Sagittarius to Eagle, is that cool? So I’m an eagle. If I were a Roman, I’d immediately know not to repeat this dream to Caligula. So now I am high above the mass of white robed people. And in fact, they no longer frighten me. Instead, I mount higher and higher until I am in the middle of a cloud. And in this cloud, I become electrified. It is as if I am both an eagle and lightning. I become a network of white, branching light. I light up…

Well, I awoke and had to pee, god damn it. And when I got to bed, I couldn’t get back to my eaglehood. But I am interpreting this to mean…

That I will soon get editing work. LI readers, sorry, but it is coming to the end of the month, and I am running out of work, so this is an advert for my little service. If you or your friends or your relatives know of anyone looking for that quick, master editor, or want translation from German or French, or want research – call me up or give me an email. I have a new site here. And I am going after the undergraduate paper market, so check out my new low, low, low prices. (Why is it I feel like the wig salesman in Goodfellas?)

I know those who stop by this lonely little outpost are an educated, even hypereducated bunch, so I bet you know somebody struggling to write a dissertation, a book, a menu. Send them to me, and my eagle will ascend!

building a monument of amnesia to Chernobyl

It was inevitable that the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl would be greeted by American papers drawing the conclusion from an accident putting territory out of bounds for the next six millennia that—improvements had been made! American built reactors are safer than ever! more nuclear power is environmental! Look at those Finns!

So I wasn’t surprised that the NYT did not celebrate the anniversary by some story uncovering the scandalous record of the UN’s IAEA with regard to Chernobyl – its compliance with the Soviet coverup, its outlying figures about death, its attempt to use the massive social disaggregation following the Chernobyl accident (the increase in smoking, the increase in alcoholism, the increase in malnourishment – if you can’t drink milk that is radioactive and other milk is more expensive and you have considerably less spending money, you give up drinking milk – etc.) as an excuse to say that Chernobyl deaths are exaggerated, a result of radiophobia, in effect, using the massive side effects of Chernobyl to cover up the damage of Chernobyl – well, no, I wasn’t expecting anything as radical as that.

So, we have instead, William Sweet, a nuclear power advocate, writing the op ed about Chernobyl.

“And yet, though it went unnoticed at the time and has been inadequately appreciated since, Chernobyl also cast into relief the positive features of the reactors used in the United States and most other advanced industrial countries.

The reactor at Chernobyl belonged to a class that was especially vulnerable to runaway reactions. When operating at low power, if such reactors lost water, their reactivity could suddenly take off and very rapidly reach a threshold beyond which they could only explode. Making matters worse, surprisingly little more pressure than normal in the machine's water channels would lift its lid, snapping the vital control rods and fuel channels that entered the reactor's core.

On the night of April 25, 1986, poorly trained and supervised plant operators conducted an ill-conceived experiment, putting the machine into the very state in which reactivity was most likely to spike. Within a fraction of a second, the reactor went from being barely on to power levels many times higher than the maximum intended.”

Actually, no. The problem with the experiment -- and calling it an experiment without explaining that it was an experiment vis a vis the safety measures that would supposedly secure Chernobyl from problems in the case of shutdown, so that it was the kind of experiment you do in nuclear power plants - was structural. It was supposed to be done in conjunction with turning off the electrical power going to Kiev, but the people supervising electric power in Kiev objected, while the power was going down, that they still needed those lines. Thus, the experiment was extended –which meant extended over two extra shifts, and going on 24 hours longer than it was supposed to. If Mr. Sweet thinks that such a thing couldn’t happen in an American nuclear plant ever – and we are talking ever here, just as we are still talking ever about Chernobyl, where the concrete cladding over unit four will have to be replaced something like 6000 times over the next 12000 years, or there will be a release of radioactivity that will make Hiroshima look like recess – he is a bold man. Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen.

LI, reluctantly, can see situations in which nuclear does become an option, but we can see no situation in which it can possibly be a long term option.

“Still, critics and opponents of nuclear energy have wondered whether utility companies are competent enough to manage anything so complex as a reactor. The question is a reasonable one. In the 1980's, some anti-nuclear groups joined with free-marketeers to promote electricity deregulation. They reasoned that if utilities were no longer guaranteed cost-plus returns on investments -- the cushy sort of regulation that had prevailed for a century in the utility industry -- they would stop investing in expensive nuclear power plants that were difficult to run.

The utility industry has responded to deregulation by reorganizing itself. And as it happens, companies have emerged that specialize in managing nuclear power plants. Although their record is somewhat mixed (Exelon, for example, stands accused of having carelessly let tritium, a radioactive isotope, leak from three Illinois reactors), on the whole the performance of nuclear power plants has improved substantially.”

By performance, Sweet means the efficiency of power generation. Unfortunately, the deregulatory impulse, plus the pollution-ophilia of the monsters who govern us, is resulting in lessening safety standards to make nuclear power “cheaper.”

From yesterday’s Raleigh News and Observer (for which LI occasionally reviews):

“An oversight 15 years ago at Progress Energy's Shearon Harris nuclear plant ranked as the second-closest any U.S. reactor has come to a nuclear meltdown during the past two decades, Greenpeace reported Monday.

The environmental group, which opposes nuclear power, released a safety report to challenge industry claims of a sterling safety record.

The report comes as Progress Energy of Raleigh, Duke Power of Charlotte and other utilities are seeking to license the nation's first new reactors in three decades. The report reviews nearly 200 problems reported by many of the country's 64 nuclear sites.

Regulators and Progress Energy officials said the incident at the Shearon Harris plant in southern Wake County was serious, but they criticized the Greenpeace characterizations as alarmist.

"We dispute the part that these are 'near misses,' " said Progress Energy spokesman Rick Kimble. "'Near miss' makes it sound like it's minutes from a meltdown. ... This was a case that, if a series of incidents had happened -- all of them statistically remote -- then you could have had a partial failure."

During the 1991 malfunction, a backup cooling system at the Shearon Harris plant had not been functional for about a year before the problem was caught. The system would have discharged some water on the floor instead of pumping all the emergency coolant to the nuclear reactor core.”

the age of auto/erotic fatality

... This is one of those modern instances, beloved by magazine writers. When the first study came out in 1985 that showed that there was a growing ozone hole over the Antarctic, Nasa went over its data from 74 onwards from its Nimbus 7 satellite. The satellite had never showed an ozone hole. They discovered the reason for that. The Nimbus 7’s computer was a smart computer, and it was programmed to reject certain data as evidence of faulty instruments. Among the data rejected was that showing excessively low levels of ozone.

Which brings LI to George Monbiot’s interesting column in the Guardian comments are free blog. Monbiot writes that he has become a convert to the hydrogen power cell idea – which has appealed to LI’s Popular Science side since forever. He outlines the problems with the natural gas supply – especially the stranglehold it potentially gives to Russia – and the probable solution of the Blair government – nuclear power – and the increasing energy use per household in the U.K., and the certainty that CO2 buildup has to be stopped now.

And he writes:“I've looked into every source of sustainable heat I can find, and while there are plenty that could supply some of our houses - wood and straw, solar hot-water panels, district heating systems and heat pumps for example - all of them are constrained by one factor or another, such as a shortage of agricultural land, our feeble sun and the disruption involved in fitting them to existing homes. It seems that there is only one low-carbon source of heat that could (with a massive investment in new infrastructure) be supplied to most of the homes in the UK between now and 2030. It is hydrogen. Hydrogen can be used to power a fuel cell, which is a kind of gas battery. If, as their promoters predict, fuel cells can very soon be made small enough, cheap enough and reliable enough to take the place of domestic boilers, they could provide the heat and electricity our homes require. The natural gas pipes to which most of our houses are attached would be replaced by hydrogen pipes. These are about 50% wider but otherwise the system is much the same.”

The response to Monbiot’s post is overwhelmingly negative: the oil peakers poo poo natural gas; the solar energy people are outraged by the feeble sun remark; and the enviro crowd blames consumerism.

Now, I have some empathy with all of those complaints (except peak oil, which has the smell of a cult), yet the odd thing is, Monbiot is obviously not saying, drop solar energy, or drop conservation. He is saying that an intermediate step in the lowering of CO2 levels is hydrogen power. That he thinks the cost of obtaining hydrogen from natural gas, which is much lower than that of obtaining hydrogen using electrolysis through water, means that the former is to be preferred doesn’t necessary strike me as true. I imagine the state will have to massively subsidize any turnover to a new energy source. And the cult like part of my soul thinks, goddamn it, those Australian and Japanese scientists who are combining solar energy and hydrogen power cells are so obviously the wave of the future…. I recognize this as the cultish part of my soul because I don’t know if I am talking out my ass or not – it seems so do-able when you look at the graphics in Scientific American. Is this reason talking, or the worship of reason? Very different things. Still, it was a heckling crowd without being a thoughtful one -- each attached to his or her own solution to saving the world.

The factor that is persuasive to Monbiot, as it is to me, is that the infrastructure is in place for hydrogen conversion, which is imperfect. In other words, it makes the most minor changes to the current lifestyle. Which is the question in the long run – how are we going to overturn the unsustainable patterns of consumerism?

If you look at that question too long, you become insane.

A social scientist, Peter Dauvergne, wrote an article in Global Environmental Politics last year that turned on the question of consumer behavior and irrationality. It wasn’t a great theoretical article – it was, instead, a cry of rage. Dauvergne’s exemplar of irrationality is the way the world has embraced the auto as its preferred way of going from a to b.

He begins with Bridget Driscoll. (Why is there no monument to Bridget Driscoll?)

“Bridget Driscoll was the ªrst to die, on a muggy August afternoon in 1896 in front of London’s Crystal Palace, from a fate that now kills over 3000 people every day. She was 44. Indeed, a long life for the time, but this in no way consoled her daughter, May Driscoll, who was at her mother’s side as Arthur Edsall ran her down in a demonstration “motor-car.” Within moments Dr. Charles Edwin Raddock rushed out of the Crystal Palace. But it was too late. Her brain was “protruding.””

Well, there was an inquest, at which it was determined that Edsall might have been attaining speeds in excess of 14 miles per hour. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death. And the coroner presiding over this first traffic fatality said that he hoped “such a thing would never happen again.”

As Dauvenel points out, it did happen again. In fact, by the time it stops happening, more people will have been killed in car wrecks than died in the Holocaust or the Gulag.

“Imagine, one day, that a Boeing 747 crashes in the United States, killing 135 people. Imagine the same day another Boeing 747 goes down somewhere in the European Union, killing another 135. Now imagine Boeing 747s begin crashing, like clockwork, every hour all day long—a few over the Pacific and Atlantic, a few into mountainsides, the rest into everyday neighborhoods—that day killing 3240 and injuring as many as 137,000 people. Finally, imagine this continues every day all year long. The technology would seem suicidal. No rational frequent ºflyer would ever fly again, . Yet these are the global figures for traffic for 2002.”

I have a feeling that the ability to comfortably coexist with those figures tells us a lot about how people are going to react as global warming begins to reconfigure thermal patterns all over the globe. (In Texas, this spring, due to a combination of hot weather and drought, about 4,000 miles of fence burned. Enough fence burned that, for the first time since the 1880s, a significant portion of the Panhandle is now free range. And that kind of drought is becoming common in Texas). The left dreams of revolution, the right dreams of war, and all of these dreams have in common the idea that a mass of people will change its habits. That they will wake up and look at the thing in the garage, for instance, as their 30 percent chance for an injury over the course of twenty five, thirty years.

The odd thing is, the consumer society has enacted the habit of rapid changes of habits – from tv to cable tv, from phones inside the house to phones in every fucking nook, etc., etc. -- without ever disturbing the essential, stone cold social complacency – the bedrock smugness. LI isn’t even sure that there is anything wrong with the bedrock smugness – if we weren’t speeding towards truly terrible things, while the only lively discussion about change happens on newspaper blogs.
...

Oh, I shouldn’t say that. Bush came up with a solution to the gas price problem today all on his lonesome: suspend environmental regulations. If there is a peculiar genius of predictability, it shines over that pointy little head.

the win-win war

Three stories about Iraqi business, today, give LI that hopeful feeling when the wind of freedom – the wind they call Moriah – sweeps through Iraq, just like our President, God bless him, has been saying.

First, all LI readers will be thrilled to know that, once again, defense industry firms (and please, let’s not call the Death, Inc.) are beating forecaster estimates for another banner quarter! We are raising our screwdrivers in a patriotic salute:

According to Reuters: “Lockheed and Northrop shares hit their all-time highs on Tuesday as fears of budget cuts have receded, and the Pentagon's latest strategic review, released in February, gave the green light to all kinds of expensive weapons.”

Further: “The results follow a sharp profit increase for tank and submarine maker General Dynamics Corp. last week, as arms spending shows no sign of slowing down and the U.S. sets aside more money for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other two top-tier defense contractors, Boeing Co. and Raytheon Co. , are expected to report higher quarterly profit later this week.”

No wonder the White House is angry that the good news about the economy has not been getting out there! Those fears of budget cuts are among the fears that the Bush administration has been fighting all along. I think we can all be proud that we walk the planet, potentially, as Lockheed shareholders – first in peace, first to get a piece of a dying planet, first to put the bullet in Gaia’s head.

The second news story can be filed under the “ungrateful Iraqi” department. As we all know, the big puzzle in this war is why the Iraqis are so darned ungrateful, after we have smothered them with all the good things.

James Glanz’s story about one reconstruction project is heartwarming:

“When Robert Sanders was sent by the U.S. Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines that had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.
What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass surgery gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot, or 90-meter, trench around a giant drill bit in a desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway.

A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a complete halt.”

Imagine, after a paltry 75 million was spent, the money pipe ran out. Surely Americans, who have done almost as good a job of running Iraq as the Mongols did long ago, could cough up the ready? After all, we had seized Iraq’s own money – although that story is a tale to enthrall children of all ages, the greatest disappearing act of all time. But back to Glanz:

“Exactly what portion of Iraq's lost oil revenue can be attributed to one failed project, no matter how critical, is impossible to calculate. But the Fatah pipeline has a wider significance as a metaphor for the entire $45 billion rebuilding effort in Iraq. Although the failures of that effort are routinely attributed to insurgent attacks, an examination of this project shows that troubled decision-making and execution have played equally important roles.

The Fatah project went ahead despite warnings from experts who said that it could not succeed because the underground terrain was shattered and unstable. It continued chewing up astonishing amounts of cash when the predicted problems bogged the work down, with a contract that allowed crews to charge as much as $100,000 a day as they waited on standby. The company in charge engaged in what some American officials saw as a self-serving attempt to limit communications with the government until all the money was gone.”

Typical. Here’s good news from Iraq – Americans getting rich – and Glanz doesn’t see it. I’d urge LI readers to check out the article.

And more good news on: Iraqis getting rich! Reuters has a report about how to form your own death squad in Baghdad. It’s affordable!

“At Baghdad's Bab al-Sharjee market, a haven for criminals, anyone can walk into one of about 15 shops selling police and military supplies and buy a police commando uniform for 35,000 Dinars (about $24) or an ordinary police uniform for $15.
No questions asked, no identity checks. Badges of rank from Captain to Major-General -- enough to ensure no one asks questions on the mean streets of the capital -- go for $2.

"One person came yesterday and took 12 full commando uniforms. Another took 15 army uniforms and ski masks with holes for the eyes," said Tariq, who runs one of the stores.”

Police cars are going for 12,000 dollars. You’ll also want your laser pointers and your handcuffs. You want, in other words, one stop shopping. Baghdad has it all. This is free enterprise to melt an AEI flak’s heart.

Once you get the uniforms, the ski masks, the handcuffs, and of course the handy guns – guns are on definite markdown – it is time for the final touches that make all the difference:

“For an extra few hundred dollars, sirens and police markings can be added at the central Sinak market. Then it's a short trip to Mureydi market in the sprawling Sadr City Shi'ite slum for fake IDs.

Car salesman Abu Mohammed will sell a customer anything they want, including a range of bullet-proof cars costing up to $340,000.”

Iraq – the longer we stay in, the safer and richer the people become. No wonder they all love us!

flotsam

For some reason, LI's comments section isn't showing all comments. Here's a comment from Mr. Rojas, the Naked Gaze blogger, re the last two posts:

"Roger,
This also ties back in nicely with Derrida's "Specters of Marx" theme, in the sense that it was precisely the development of artificial light during the nineteenth century which revolutionized the possibilities for the creation of ghostly apparitions (through projections, etc.), thereby informing, perhaps, Marx's fascination with spectrality."

LI's far flung correspondent, Mr. T., sent us a nice anecdote about his own reading/lighting experiment:

"I speculated at one point that it might be best to read things like The Brothers Karamazov and The Kreutzer Sonata and The Idiot by candlelight. What was this? This was a hope for purity, for a pure moment, a hope to encounter the author, that so much dead flesh, that foreign language, that religion....all of that that was not in the room in which I read. Could I approximate an over-coming of every distance by light? Could I set a condition, a space, where time might be trammeled? Ah, tried I did, and I am glad that I was so dissappointed, that I have forgoten what I read on those nights, but that I have remembered the effort."

Also, LCC has a nice post up about the Grid -- something we would like to get into at another time. One way of reading Gravity's Rainbow is to read it as the secret history of the Grid -- and we all, I hope, remember the Byron the Bulb section in Gravity's Rainbow, which clues the reader into the Phoebus, the international light bulb cartel, the engineering of techno forms of the grid experimenting with pathways later traveled by corporate power, penetrations of privacy that eventually reconfigure the whole notion of privacy, of what is and isn't for sale.