One of the truly astonishing things about the past five years, all things considered, is the de-emphasis on crimes that make the Bush administration feel threatened. So, once it was apparent that the FBI was too disorganized to solve the anthrax case, the case disappeared from the news, generating less stories in all, than, say, the prosecution of Michael Jackson. And once it became apparent that the Bush administration strategy in Afghanistan was not aimed at destroying Al Qaeda, but preserving a remnant of it (terrorism-on-tap, a cynical and criminal tactic), the press fell into line, invariably describing Osama bin Laden as ‘on the run,’ and pretending that his whereabouts are a deep dark mystery. It is less deep and dark a mystery than what VP Cheney was doing at that ranch in Texas last autumn. And Osama bin Laden seems far less on the run than your average Hollywood starlet, always having to jet off to some new location. Al Qaeda’s structures are alive and vigorous in Pakistan, and have aligned with a whole network of Islamicist parties there. In the rural areas, they provide what little governance there is, if Stephen Coll’s articles in the New Yorker are to be believed.
However, delusions must be maintained. And so, for example, for the last two years, the London bombings were routinely described as home grown stunts – al Qaeda merely providing a distant, media accessed model. Within a week after the bombings it was apparent that this was nonsense, but only now is it starting to be acknowledged as nonsense in the press – hence this Peter Bergen article.
Of course, the governments that intentionally aborted military action against al Qaeda in the winter of 2001 and spring of 2002, preserving a manipulable threat to accomplish their other, unspeakably shabby foreign policy goals are playing a difficult game – on the one hand, periodically hyping the threat to garner support, and on the other hand, playing down the history of their non-response to the threat, in order to cover up their practical collusion in terrorism. The trick is as old as the bribed cop -- in order to maintain a lucrative beat, one needs a certain quota of arrests and a lot of bluff about law and order, while at the same time one is quietly bribed by the more prosperous criminal. The Blair government, which foolishly pitched in to help the U.S. in Iraq – unlike, say, the cleverer Labour government under Harold Wilson, which managed to avoid sending troops to Vietnam – recklessly made itself a target. In order to avoid the obvious – if British troops weren’t in Basra, there would have been no London bombing – we are fed ridiculous stories of self-administered teen mesmerism in today's version of the Victorian opium den -- the radical mosque (gasp) in which the fiends gather to denounce Israel and such. Issuing from these palaces of wickedness, we are then supposed to believe that boys who can 't get it together enough to hold down jobs as pizza delivery men are suddenly Hollywood like in their coordinated activity, coming up with arms and tactics themselves. Of course, as in the Miami case, sometimes you have to actually create the home grown radicals out of home room dropouts – but you have to produce your quota of threats from the materials on hand, no?
….
The pattern here is evident – when an event occurs in the “war on terrorism’ world, the first instincts of the press are to transmit the official line, no matter how cockeyed and contradictory that line is. Slowly, page A19 stories eat away at that line. Finally, two to three years later, we read some revelation that the official line was self serving bullshit. Luckily for the power structure, by that time, the majority of people have turned off. We live in the era of time lapse schizophrenia – the hottest news is always two years out of date.
This is the opposite of what we are usually told by the media theorists, who love to go on about the cultural meaning of reality shows and how the media has invaded reality and blah blah blah. Rather, it is a retreat to a pre-Vietnam mindset in which the interests of the state, or the pirate crew that roosts, at the moment, in the executive branch, is abjectly colluded in by media companies. Actually, the media era has passed – the era of independent media. The summit of that was in the sixties and seventies. The era in which the media organizations and their technostructure exerted such a monopolistic pull in the market that they were relatively insulated from the economic pressure that could be brought against them by the government. Instead of media taking over reality, reality has taken over the media. The absurd ROI expectations of investors and the fragility of once secure demographics, the new competition posed by international groups, like Murdoch’s News Corp, combine to exert an effect on the media corporations similar to the effect of Japanese car companies on Detroit. The NYT, the Washington Post, the network TV news programs really have, actually, no immediate need to fear the usual mob of angry rightwingers – that market demo is already wrapped up by Fox, Hustler, Guns and Ammo and the Southern Baptist Messenger. Guntoters in Valdosta Georgia aren’t going to stop buying those beautiful diamond necklaces advertised in the NYT Sunday Style section if the Times doesn’t apologize for revealing that the government is looking into our bank accounts. No, their fear is all about the extended well being of the corporation. Surely some Valdosta tv station is owned by a corporation with ties to the NYT. Michael Wolff, the New York media critic, has long contended that we are looking in the wrong places for answers to the curious paralysis of the media in the last five years, its compliance with the transparent lies of the current administration. The answer isn’t in this or that ‘wanker’ – the answer is in the holdings of the media corporations and their constant need for positive interaction with the government in licensing, in preventing competition from gaining entry to various markets in which they hold quasi-monopoly power, in the need, eventually, to get lucrative slices of the internet. In, another words, a dimension that is not filmed and is barely reported on, and that filters into the pre-emptive censorship of everything written in the press or put on tv. I know this first hand – I have often written reviews for conservative leaning newspapers, and I confine those reviews, mostly, to non-political topics. Or, stumbling onto politics, I liberally water down any smart ass crack I may want to make. And then the editor waters down any further remarks that have escaped me.
All the more reason, then, to fight tooth and nail against the executive usurpation of foreign policy. The executive prefers to act in a time frame in which the people are deprived of the information necessary to judge their actions. This is the temptation to which executive power invariably succumbs. Take away that power, reinvigorate the Congressional role as a balance on the executive, paralyze the ability of the War Department to shape U.S. policy, and we would have a more peaceful and prosperous country.
PS - there's a story in the Nouvelle Obs that will get no airplay in the US. Here is the first graf.
The death of Abu Mousab al Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda, Iraq, which the American army has been congratulating itself upon, may owe nothing to the GI search. One of Zarqawi's wives, Oum Mahammed, told an italian magazine on July 2 that her huasband was 'sold to the Americans in exchange for a pause in the hunt for OBL, for he had become 'too powerful' in the eyes of Al Qaeda."
Myself, I don't believe her. I have doubts that OBL is really being 'tracked' that severely. But it is one voice heard from -- and of course this will not ever turn up on the American radar, although many a bogus D.C. expert, knowing nothing about the case, will be gravely quoted.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Saturday, July 01, 2006
shout out to kimberly -- LI loves you!
Sometimes, I pity myself.
Here I am, a poor, miserable scribbler given the chance of a lifetime by the coup of 2000 that thrust upon my life a corrupt, authoritarian government; one as specious in all its cotton pickin’ policies and lubberly justifications as a shell game managed by retards. So I pull out the references, I edit my sentences until they bite hard enough, at least, to break the skin, I make with the withering put downs. I dream of Mandlestam, Solzhenitsyn, or, at least, Karl Kraus.
But yesteryear’s dissidents lived in times that, cruel and genocidal as they were, still retained enough respect for writing to get rid of the inconvenient writer. I, in contrast, live in the sticks and stones age: words will never hurt yahoos who have squandered the little literacy they ever acquired on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
So here I am, about to unsheathe the razor and do myself in – or at least break the plastic on those damn disposable bics and try to get a purchase on the narrow, child safe strip of sharpened alloy – when I get a news flash from Mr. T, our far flung correspondent in NYC. And suddenly, in the darkness, there is a tiniest amount of light, like that shed by an ascending saint in a mannerist painting. Here it is, in its entirety:
Lil' Kim to Be Released From Prison Monday
New York Lawyer
June 30, 2006
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK -- Lil' Kim says she'll be celebrating Independence Day early this year.
The rapper, who was sentenced in September to a year and a day in prison for lying about a shootout outside a hip-hop radio station, is being released Monday, the day before July Fourth.
"I am thrilled to be coming home," Lil' Kim said Thursday in a statement issued by her publicist, Tracy Nguyen. "I thank all my fans for all their letters, as well as my family and friends for all their support throughout the past 10 months."
The entertainer, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, began serving her time at a federal detention center in Philadelphia on Sept. 19. Her lawyer, L. Londell McMillan, noted then that she could be released early for good behavior.
"She has accepted responsibility and handled herself in an exemplary manner," McMillan said Thursday.
The rapper, who will remain under house arrest for 30 days after her release, was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury and in the subsequent trial.
The case stemmed from a gun battle that erupted outside WQHT-FM, known as Hot 97, when Lil' Kim's entourage crossed paths with a rival rap group, Capone-N-Noreaga, whose song "Bang, Bang" contains an insult to her from rival Foxy Brown. One man was hurt in the shootout that followed.
Lil' Kim, who won a Grammy in 2001 for her part in the hit remake of "Lady Marmalade," maintained she hadn't noticed two of her close friends _ who later pleaded guilty to gun charges _ at the scene of the shootout. But jurors at her trial saw radio station security photos that depicted one of them opening a door for her, and witnesses said they saw her at the station with both of them."
Here I am, a poor, miserable scribbler given the chance of a lifetime by the coup of 2000 that thrust upon my life a corrupt, authoritarian government; one as specious in all its cotton pickin’ policies and lubberly justifications as a shell game managed by retards. So I pull out the references, I edit my sentences until they bite hard enough, at least, to break the skin, I make with the withering put downs. I dream of Mandlestam, Solzhenitsyn, or, at least, Karl Kraus.
But yesteryear’s dissidents lived in times that, cruel and genocidal as they were, still retained enough respect for writing to get rid of the inconvenient writer. I, in contrast, live in the sticks and stones age: words will never hurt yahoos who have squandered the little literacy they ever acquired on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
So here I am, about to unsheathe the razor and do myself in – or at least break the plastic on those damn disposable bics and try to get a purchase on the narrow, child safe strip of sharpened alloy – when I get a news flash from Mr. T, our far flung correspondent in NYC. And suddenly, in the darkness, there is a tiniest amount of light, like that shed by an ascending saint in a mannerist painting. Here it is, in its entirety:
Lil' Kim to Be Released From Prison Monday
New York Lawyer
June 30, 2006
By The Associated Press
NEW YORK -- Lil' Kim says she'll be celebrating Independence Day early this year.
The rapper, who was sentenced in September to a year and a day in prison for lying about a shootout outside a hip-hop radio station, is being released Monday, the day before July Fourth.
"I am thrilled to be coming home," Lil' Kim said Thursday in a statement issued by her publicist, Tracy Nguyen. "I thank all my fans for all their letters, as well as my family and friends for all their support throughout the past 10 months."
The entertainer, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, began serving her time at a federal detention center in Philadelphia on Sept. 19. Her lawyer, L. Londell McMillan, noted then that she could be released early for good behavior.
"She has accepted responsibility and handled herself in an exemplary manner," McMillan said Thursday.
The rapper, who will remain under house arrest for 30 days after her release, was convicted of lying to a federal grand jury and in the subsequent trial.
The case stemmed from a gun battle that erupted outside WQHT-FM, known as Hot 97, when Lil' Kim's entourage crossed paths with a rival rap group, Capone-N-Noreaga, whose song "Bang, Bang" contains an insult to her from rival Foxy Brown. One man was hurt in the shootout that followed.
Lil' Kim, who won a Grammy in 2001 for her part in the hit remake of "Lady Marmalade," maintained she hadn't noticed two of her close friends _ who later pleaded guilty to gun charges _ at the scene of the shootout. But jurors at her trial saw radio station security photos that depicted one of them opening a door for her, and witnesses said they saw her at the station with both of them."
Friday, June 30, 2006
montage of american history
The problem is you have a terrorist insurgent population that is wreaking havoc on a hapless Iraqi civilian population that is trying to fight back.
--Condoleeza Rice to Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Affairs Minister.
Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday.
The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of raping.
-- AP Story.
On September 11, 1965, The Saigon Daily News, a newspaper published entirely for the English speaking Western community of Vietnam, showed on its front page a large photograph of American servicemen standing with drawn weapons over a heap of what the caption describes as ‘dead VC’ – all lying face down on the ground , and with their hands tied behind their backs. – Bernard Fall, New Republic Magazine, October 9, 1965.
--Condoleeza Rice to Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Affairs Minister.
Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday.
The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of raping.
-- AP Story.
On September 11, 1965, The Saigon Daily News, a newspaper published entirely for the English speaking Western community of Vietnam, showed on its front page a large photograph of American servicemen standing with drawn weapons over a heap of what the caption describes as ‘dead VC’ – all lying face down on the ground , and with their hands tied behind their backs. – Bernard Fall, New Republic Magazine, October 9, 1965.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Here's to Fonda Day
Fly for the hills, pick up your feet and let’s go
- Black Angels
Continuing on LI’s Vietnam craze, we saw Winter Soldier last night on DVD. It made us think, among other things, about Jane Fonda. Of the actors who have come out of Hollywood and gotten involved in politics – Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, etc. – none had a more beneficial effect than Jane Fonda. For Fonda’s anti-war work in the 70s, LI forgives her for every celebrity sin since.
Fonda helped finance the Winter Soldier trials that exposed, from a grunts eye point of view, what Vietnam was about – a racist and criminal enterprise that massacred Vietnamese, on the one side, and introduced psychosis into the American population, on the other. We have never shed the last black drop of that psychosis – the Freikorps is still alive and well in this country, as the last six years have shown. But things could be much worse. It was the sheer patriotism of such as Fonda that kept it from being worse.
She saw – as the antiwar movement in general saw – that the problem with the United States was similar to the problem faced by an alcoholic. Just as an alcoholic needs, for his own sake, to be de-toxed, so the U.S., for its own sake, needed to be severely demoralized. Stabbing the war in the back was the patriotic duty of every concerned American, and the anti-war movement, back then, was willing to grasp that nettle. We need to take a lesson – we need tribunals like the Winter Soldier tribunals about Iraq. And most of all, we need to spread the news that no patriot will enroll in a mercenary army, bent to the will of an unelected despot.
Unfortunately, the liberal side of the spectrum, now, seeing that the U.S. is embarked on another criminal adventure, in which, once again, thinly disguised massacres are the strategy of choice, still has not grasped the nettle. This is understandable. Fonda, compared to whose high standards of moral action a politburo automaton like Ronald Reagan looks like a monster, has been subject to coordinated vilification ever since she helped, in her own small way, extract the country from the effects of its governing class’ misrule. Of course, in one hundred years, when things clear up, we will, of course, see the Reagans, the Cheneys, the Bushes as the villains they are, peckerwood Richard IIIs, while it is always possible there will be a national Fonda day. Surely we owe it to her and the antiwar movement that every war since Vietnam has been fought by volunteers – and that the system is now spiraling into the purest form of mercenary violence, with duty almost wholly replaced by various compensation packages. I don’t think the era of executive mercenary wars is going to last too long – eventually, there will come a backlash. Eventually, Congress might even assert its authority, instead of acting like a bribed cop, looking the other way as the local Mafia loot a store.
Anyway, here’s to some future Fonda Day.
- Black Angels
Continuing on LI’s Vietnam craze, we saw Winter Soldier last night on DVD. It made us think, among other things, about Jane Fonda. Of the actors who have come out of Hollywood and gotten involved in politics – Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, etc. – none had a more beneficial effect than Jane Fonda. For Fonda’s anti-war work in the 70s, LI forgives her for every celebrity sin since.
Fonda helped finance the Winter Soldier trials that exposed, from a grunts eye point of view, what Vietnam was about – a racist and criminal enterprise that massacred Vietnamese, on the one side, and introduced psychosis into the American population, on the other. We have never shed the last black drop of that psychosis – the Freikorps is still alive and well in this country, as the last six years have shown. But things could be much worse. It was the sheer patriotism of such as Fonda that kept it from being worse.
She saw – as the antiwar movement in general saw – that the problem with the United States was similar to the problem faced by an alcoholic. Just as an alcoholic needs, for his own sake, to be de-toxed, so the U.S., for its own sake, needed to be severely demoralized. Stabbing the war in the back was the patriotic duty of every concerned American, and the anti-war movement, back then, was willing to grasp that nettle. We need to take a lesson – we need tribunals like the Winter Soldier tribunals about Iraq. And most of all, we need to spread the news that no patriot will enroll in a mercenary army, bent to the will of an unelected despot.
Unfortunately, the liberal side of the spectrum, now, seeing that the U.S. is embarked on another criminal adventure, in which, once again, thinly disguised massacres are the strategy of choice, still has not grasped the nettle. This is understandable. Fonda, compared to whose high standards of moral action a politburo automaton like Ronald Reagan looks like a monster, has been subject to coordinated vilification ever since she helped, in her own small way, extract the country from the effects of its governing class’ misrule. Of course, in one hundred years, when things clear up, we will, of course, see the Reagans, the Cheneys, the Bushes as the villains they are, peckerwood Richard IIIs, while it is always possible there will be a national Fonda day. Surely we owe it to her and the antiwar movement that every war since Vietnam has been fought by volunteers – and that the system is now spiraling into the purest form of mercenary violence, with duty almost wholly replaced by various compensation packages. I don’t think the era of executive mercenary wars is going to last too long – eventually, there will come a backlash. Eventually, Congress might even assert its authority, instead of acting like a bribed cop, looking the other way as the local Mafia loot a store.
Anyway, here’s to some future Fonda Day.
news from the war front -- D.C.
Interesting article in the WAPO today
Stolen VA Laptop Recovered
By Christopher Lee and Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; 12:56 PM
Authorities announced the recovery today of computer equipment stolen from an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying that the laptop was recovered in Vice President Cheney’s undisclosed location. Apparently, the sensitive personal information of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel has merely been subjected to a standard security search and appropriation by Cheney’s office.
The laptop and external hard drive apparently stolen from the Aspen Hill, Md., home of a VA data analyst on May 3 contained the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of millions of current and former service members, amounting to what appeared to be the largest information security breach in government history. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson did not make public the apparent burglary until three weeks later, triggering both widespread anxiety over possible identity theft and anger at federal officials for the delay in announcing the theft. Today’s announcement by the FBI clarifies the VA’s confusion. Due to the merger of the U.S. Government and Halliburton, according to a provision in the PATRIOT act, Social Security accounts of all government employees can be accessed if a national security threat to the price of Halliburton equities is declare to exist. Such appropriations and access are only admissible after ruling by a special secret court, the WCDAWFWT (‘We can do anything we fucking want to’), located in the Vice President’s bathroom.
...
“The news that the stolen data had, in fact, merely been accessed as part of a USA/Halliburton recuperation of revenue operation is wonderful for veterans and active duty personnel," said Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. "We were all holding our breath due to unsupported stories in the Press. Apparently, the Veterans are sacrificing now, so that later, we don’t have to face a terroristic shortfall in USA/Halliburton 2006 financing. It is, however, shocking that the media has revealed this operation, which can only help Al Qaeda’s quest to destroy our free enterprise system."
Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, applauded the administration for ‘coming clean’ on the supposed burglary. “Questions, however, still exist: was the WCDAWFWT called into session? Or was this a unilateral decision on the part of the Vice President’s office? I have introduced legislation to make sure that the WCDAWFWT is applied to when these kinds of shortfalls occur. The war on terror is no excuse for the White House ignoring the will of the Congress.”
A spokesman for the Vice President’s office refused to comment on any on-going national security operations, merely remarking that Lane Evans has a small penis.”
Stolen VA Laptop Recovered
By Christopher Lee and Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; 12:56 PM
Authorities announced the recovery today of computer equipment stolen from an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying that the laptop was recovered in Vice President Cheney’s undisclosed location. Apparently, the sensitive personal information of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel has merely been subjected to a standard security search and appropriation by Cheney’s office.
The laptop and external hard drive apparently stolen from the Aspen Hill, Md., home of a VA data analyst on May 3 contained the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of millions of current and former service members, amounting to what appeared to be the largest information security breach in government history. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson did not make public the apparent burglary until three weeks later, triggering both widespread anxiety over possible identity theft and anger at federal officials for the delay in announcing the theft. Today’s announcement by the FBI clarifies the VA’s confusion. Due to the merger of the U.S. Government and Halliburton, according to a provision in the PATRIOT act, Social Security accounts of all government employees can be accessed if a national security threat to the price of Halliburton equities is declare to exist. Such appropriations and access are only admissible after ruling by a special secret court, the WCDAWFWT (‘We can do anything we fucking want to’), located in the Vice President’s bathroom.
...
“The news that the stolen data had, in fact, merely been accessed as part of a USA/Halliburton recuperation of revenue operation is wonderful for veterans and active duty personnel," said Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. "We were all holding our breath due to unsupported stories in the Press. Apparently, the Veterans are sacrificing now, so that later, we don’t have to face a terroristic shortfall in USA/Halliburton 2006 financing. It is, however, shocking that the media has revealed this operation, which can only help Al Qaeda’s quest to destroy our free enterprise system."
Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, applauded the administration for ‘coming clean’ on the supposed burglary. “Questions, however, still exist: was the WCDAWFWT called into session? Or was this a unilateral decision on the part of the Vice President’s office? I have introduced legislation to make sure that the WCDAWFWT is applied to when these kinds of shortfalls occur. The war on terror is no excuse for the White House ignoring the will of the Congress.”
A spokesman for the Vice President’s office refused to comment on any on-going national security operations, merely remarking that Lane Evans has a small penis.”
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
From parody to policy -- Li pats itself on the back.
There are those who think that reading, as well as writing, Limited Inc is a less valuable use of time than, say, cutting holes in the pockets of your pants so you can play pocket pool.
But LI says, au contraire!
Proof exists right around the corner of your NYT -- go to the science section today. The global warming story. The geo-engineering story:
"Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.
...
Dr. Cicerone [President of the National Academy of Sciences] recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere.
The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."
Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding."
For faithful readers, this should ring a bell. It doesn't? Mein Gott, Vhat am I doing dis fuer? I've instructed Igor to go back in the files. This is LI for February 19 2006. Hey, I wonder if I should hit this Cicerone cat up for consulting duties?
"money makin' ideas for the AEI to consider
Being broke at the moment, LI has been in search of a surefire source of revenue. And then it occurred to us: what kind of pro-active, pro-business response to global warming would warm the hearts of rightwing moneybags and bring in the checks?
Surely the thing to do is controlled volcanic management! We keep our cars, SUVs and coal generated plants going along at full carbon tilt, toss in a few atom bombs into the crater of some isolated volcano every year or so, and get the wonderfully cooling effect of pumping “sufficient amounts of ash into the air.” This package has everything: major manipulation of nature, atom bomb use, and a pro-carbon agenda. We are writing to the Scaife foundation for a grant right away! Happy days are here again!
From the Washington Post Q and A with Eugene Linden, author of Winds of Change:
Q: “As I've followed the global warming/climate change discussion, three historically based questions have always interested me. First, the drop in temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s seems to contradict the correlation between human generated greenhouse gases and warming. Has this been adequately explained? Second, there was a significant warming period during the middle ages during which an agricultural colony was established in Greenland, but there was little or no human generated greenhouse gases at the time. Does this indicate that other factors besides human activity are the predominant causes of warming? Finally, proxies for temperature measures (i.e. ice cores, tree rings) have indicated that current temperatures are below long-term millennial temperature averages, and these long term trends track very closely to trends in solar activity. Does this indicate that current levels of solar activity are a more likely cause of current warming than greenhouse gases? Thank you for your consideration of my questions.
Eugene Linden: Since human greenhouse gas emissions only truly ramped up in the last century or so, it should be obvious that past warmings were the result of natural cycles (although one scholar argues that humans have had an impact through deforestation and agricultural going back thousands of years). Moreover, periodic coolings don't contradict the connection between GHG emissions and warming. For instance, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s put sufficient amounts of ash into the air to cool the planet the following year. Climate is one of the most complex systems on the planet, responding at any given time to countless pushes and pulls, but, on relatively short time frames, CO2 has tracked temperature as far back as we can reliably measure. It's one big variable that we can affect, and since we've upped it by 50%, temperatures have responded much the way climate scientists have expected. There will never be 100% certainty that the recent warming represents a response to human inputs, but the consensus is strikingly strong that it does. Moreover, it's the one thing we can do something about.
Finally, even if the current warming was entirely natural, it would still represent something that we should take very seriously. Natural climate change did in past civilizations, and we've seen the destructive potential of extreme weather just recently on the Gulf Coast.”
ps
Ah, fuck the think tank peanuts. LI is now thinking of the plot for the latest Michael Crichton novel – you know, our Rebel in Chief’s favorite expert on so called climate change. In this plot, St. Exxon (the first corporation ever to be beatified by the Vatican), trying, as usual, to save humanity, comes up with the volcano management idea. Evil environmentalists – the Osama bin Laden league for Deep Ecology – try, of course, to stop them. In the exciting last scene, Jesus Christ, played by Mel Gibson, machine guns the Laden-ites just as they are about to mess up St. Exxon’s scheme. Beautiful fadeout as Jesus turns to the CEO of Exxon – played by St. Peter – and says, in a choked up voice, “I just want my country… to love me… like I love it,” copping the finale to Rambo II – but also a wink and a nod to the idea, gaining increasing currency in the Red States, that Sly’s movie now has official gospel status.
A subplot involving St. Exxon falling deeply in M & A love with Chevron (who is pursued by a lustful, deceptive Chinee company, backed by some evil liability chasin’ lawyers) is, of course, de rigeur, since we need some nude accounting scenes – or at least nude flowsheet scenes. Hey, and to be all comme il faut and shit, how about a stand-in for you know who, toting a pellet gun loaded for bear, who tattoes cartoon images of the prophet on the buttocks of the aforementioned liability lawyers? We gotta think outside the box here, boys. Outside of the Hollywood mindset. Family values and like that. I’m going to pitch this plot to Seth."
Well, looking at our proposal, now, with an eagle eye, I can see a major flaw in it. It does have explosions. It would please the ever apoplectic male population, all pumped up on their Limbaugh brand Viagra and shit. But... it really needs to pump federal money into the South. This is, after all, pretty much the reason the U.S. exists any more -- find some reason to send another couple billion to a Peckerhead War Industry firm. I concede that, feeding the Dixie monkey wise, my simple proposal might not go over. But wait! What if we chose to explode volcanos in countries that aren't free? Couldn't we liberate them first? Which is invasion, which is moola-moola for those greasy kentucky fried fingers. And a lot of brown bodies, all torn to bits, ocassionally flashed on the tv screen. Wow. A lyncherooni of an idea.
I'm seeing if Tom Delay is available for board membership of this thing.
But LI says, au contraire!
Proof exists right around the corner of your NYT -- go to the science section today. The global warming story. The geo-engineering story:
"Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.
...
Dr. Cicerone [President of the National Academy of Sciences] recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere.
The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."
Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding."
For faithful readers, this should ring a bell. It doesn't? Mein Gott, Vhat am I doing dis fuer? I've instructed Igor to go back in the files. This is LI for February 19 2006. Hey, I wonder if I should hit this Cicerone cat up for consulting duties?
"money makin' ideas for the AEI to consider
Being broke at the moment, LI has been in search of a surefire source of revenue. And then it occurred to us: what kind of pro-active, pro-business response to global warming would warm the hearts of rightwing moneybags and bring in the checks?
Surely the thing to do is controlled volcanic management! We keep our cars, SUVs and coal generated plants going along at full carbon tilt, toss in a few atom bombs into the crater of some isolated volcano every year or so, and get the wonderfully cooling effect of pumping “sufficient amounts of ash into the air.” This package has everything: major manipulation of nature, atom bomb use, and a pro-carbon agenda. We are writing to the Scaife foundation for a grant right away! Happy days are here again!
From the Washington Post Q and A with Eugene Linden, author of Winds of Change:
Q: “As I've followed the global warming/climate change discussion, three historically based questions have always interested me. First, the drop in temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s seems to contradict the correlation between human generated greenhouse gases and warming. Has this been adequately explained? Second, there was a significant warming period during the middle ages during which an agricultural colony was established in Greenland, but there was little or no human generated greenhouse gases at the time. Does this indicate that other factors besides human activity are the predominant causes of warming? Finally, proxies for temperature measures (i.e. ice cores, tree rings) have indicated that current temperatures are below long-term millennial temperature averages, and these long term trends track very closely to trends in solar activity. Does this indicate that current levels of solar activity are a more likely cause of current warming than greenhouse gases? Thank you for your consideration of my questions.
Eugene Linden: Since human greenhouse gas emissions only truly ramped up in the last century or so, it should be obvious that past warmings were the result of natural cycles (although one scholar argues that humans have had an impact through deforestation and agricultural going back thousands of years). Moreover, periodic coolings don't contradict the connection between GHG emissions and warming. For instance, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s put sufficient amounts of ash into the air to cool the planet the following year. Climate is one of the most complex systems on the planet, responding at any given time to countless pushes and pulls, but, on relatively short time frames, CO2 has tracked temperature as far back as we can reliably measure. It's one big variable that we can affect, and since we've upped it by 50%, temperatures have responded much the way climate scientists have expected. There will never be 100% certainty that the recent warming represents a response to human inputs, but the consensus is strikingly strong that it does. Moreover, it's the one thing we can do something about.
Finally, even if the current warming was entirely natural, it would still represent something that we should take very seriously. Natural climate change did in past civilizations, and we've seen the destructive potential of extreme weather just recently on the Gulf Coast.”
ps
Ah, fuck the think tank peanuts. LI is now thinking of the plot for the latest Michael Crichton novel – you know, our Rebel in Chief’s favorite expert on so called climate change. In this plot, St. Exxon (the first corporation ever to be beatified by the Vatican), trying, as usual, to save humanity, comes up with the volcano management idea. Evil environmentalists – the Osama bin Laden league for Deep Ecology – try, of course, to stop them. In the exciting last scene, Jesus Christ, played by Mel Gibson, machine guns the Laden-ites just as they are about to mess up St. Exxon’s scheme. Beautiful fadeout as Jesus turns to the CEO of Exxon – played by St. Peter – and says, in a choked up voice, “I just want my country… to love me… like I love it,” copping the finale to Rambo II – but also a wink and a nod to the idea, gaining increasing currency in the Red States, that Sly’s movie now has official gospel status.
A subplot involving St. Exxon falling deeply in M & A love with Chevron (who is pursued by a lustful, deceptive Chinee company, backed by some evil liability chasin’ lawyers) is, of course, de rigeur, since we need some nude accounting scenes – or at least nude flowsheet scenes. Hey, and to be all comme il faut and shit, how about a stand-in for you know who, toting a pellet gun loaded for bear, who tattoes cartoon images of the prophet on the buttocks of the aforementioned liability lawyers? We gotta think outside the box here, boys. Outside of the Hollywood mindset. Family values and like that. I’m going to pitch this plot to Seth."
Well, looking at our proposal, now, with an eagle eye, I can see a major flaw in it. It does have explosions. It would please the ever apoplectic male population, all pumped up on their Limbaugh brand Viagra and shit. But... it really needs to pump federal money into the South. This is, after all, pretty much the reason the U.S. exists any more -- find some reason to send another couple billion to a Peckerhead War Industry firm. I concede that, feeding the Dixie monkey wise, my simple proposal might not go over. But wait! What if we chose to explode volcanos in countries that aren't free? Couldn't we liberate them first? Which is invasion, which is moola-moola for those greasy kentucky fried fingers. And a lot of brown bodies, all torn to bits, ocassionally flashed on the tv screen. Wow. A lyncherooni of an idea.
I'm seeing if Tom Delay is available for board membership of this thing.
Monday, June 26, 2006
LI helps out the poor Dems...
LI is reviewing a bio of LBJ. So, doing some research, we rented the film Hearts and Minds, a documentary about Vietnam that made a big splash in the in the seventies. Well. We heard a few things in that documentary that made us think about the Democrats.
The Democrats apparently have a problem with their message. Now, that’s a shame. That’s a doggone shame. It makes LI weep, sometimes. So, out of our infinite compassion for our Democratic brothers and sisters, we copied down those things so that the Dems could use them.
One was said by a past Democratic presidential candidate about the Vietnam war – Eugene McCarthy – and we think it is still such a sturdy, succinct, and generally correct phrase that we’d recommend it for Iraq: “It is unwise, immoral and not in the national interest of this country, and that therefore it must be brought to an end.” Except, of course, that it has to be brought to an end now. Withdrawal in the next, oh, three months.
And here’s a remark from Senator Fullbright. He was speaking to a question about Johnson’s speech on the Gulf of Tonkin that began the official U.S. military intervention in Vietnam:
“We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie but a lie’s a lite, it’s a misrepresentation of fact and it is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”
Short and sweet and from a Senator, no less.
And then there was a comment from a former Oklahoma bomber pilot – the most impressive American in the documentary, including the Kennedys, Johnson, Daniel Ellsburg, Nixon and Bob Hope. The guy’s name was Randy Floyd.
Q: Do you think we’ve learned anything from this.
A: “I think we are trying not to… I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and policy makers have exhibited.”
One of the things about Vietnam that the film doesn’t show, but that I am beginning to see, reading around, is that Vietnam was not lost after the Tet offensive. Vietnam was lost in late 1963-1964. That was when Diem was assassinated, and the next government tried, and failed, due to American obstruction, to create a neutralist state. That this would eventually lead to the re-unification of Vietnam was obvious. That Vietnam would be Communist dominated was obvious. That American could do nothing about that was also obvious. The French floated the neutralist balloon. The Americans shot it down. 750,000 casualties later, Vietnam was a communist state. And twenty some years after Hearts and Minds was made – with certain sections devoted to the big fat Vietnamese capitalist pigs that the filmmakers saw as American puppets – the united communist nation was speaking exactly that big fat capitalist tongue. In fact, the businessman they interviewed made chamber of commerce statements about South Vietnam (which, in the commentary, the filmmaker points out with some disdain) that are now state doctrine – the pablum official line. The war was not only pointless strategically, it was even pointless ideologically. Just as the Americans were bound to lose the war, American ideology was bound to win it.
The Americans “lost” in Iraq in 2004 – whatever they were trying to do. The post Iraq syndrome is already in – Richard Perle, who is so odious that he is a bit unbelievable, like a comic book villain, is still smart enough to know that the reactionary line is, Bush is losing Iran. Because Bush is. Because nobody is going to keep paying for America’s stinkin’ wars. Bush is both a parody of LBJ and a parody of detentish Richard Nixon. Who knew that one frat boy had it in him?
The Democrats apparently have a problem with their message. Now, that’s a shame. That’s a doggone shame. It makes LI weep, sometimes. So, out of our infinite compassion for our Democratic brothers and sisters, we copied down those things so that the Dems could use them.
One was said by a past Democratic presidential candidate about the Vietnam war – Eugene McCarthy – and we think it is still such a sturdy, succinct, and generally correct phrase that we’d recommend it for Iraq: “It is unwise, immoral and not in the national interest of this country, and that therefore it must be brought to an end.” Except, of course, that it has to be brought to an end now. Withdrawal in the next, oh, three months.
And here’s a remark from Senator Fullbright. He was speaking to a question about Johnson’s speech on the Gulf of Tonkin that began the official U.S. military intervention in Vietnam:
“We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie but a lie’s a lite, it’s a misrepresentation of fact and it is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”
Short and sweet and from a Senator, no less.
And then there was a comment from a former Oklahoma bomber pilot – the most impressive American in the documentary, including the Kennedys, Johnson, Daniel Ellsburg, Nixon and Bob Hope. The guy’s name was Randy Floyd.
Q: Do you think we’ve learned anything from this.
A: “I think we are trying not to… I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and policy makers have exhibited.”
One of the things about Vietnam that the film doesn’t show, but that I am beginning to see, reading around, is that Vietnam was not lost after the Tet offensive. Vietnam was lost in late 1963-1964. That was when Diem was assassinated, and the next government tried, and failed, due to American obstruction, to create a neutralist state. That this would eventually lead to the re-unification of Vietnam was obvious. That Vietnam would be Communist dominated was obvious. That American could do nothing about that was also obvious. The French floated the neutralist balloon. The Americans shot it down. 750,000 casualties later, Vietnam was a communist state. And twenty some years after Hearts and Minds was made – with certain sections devoted to the big fat Vietnamese capitalist pigs that the filmmakers saw as American puppets – the united communist nation was speaking exactly that big fat capitalist tongue. In fact, the businessman they interviewed made chamber of commerce statements about South Vietnam (which, in the commentary, the filmmaker points out with some disdain) that are now state doctrine – the pablum official line. The war was not only pointless strategically, it was even pointless ideologically. Just as the Americans were bound to lose the war, American ideology was bound to win it.
The Americans “lost” in Iraq in 2004 – whatever they were trying to do. The post Iraq syndrome is already in – Richard Perle, who is so odious that he is a bit unbelievable, like a comic book villain, is still smart enough to know that the reactionary line is, Bush is losing Iran. Because Bush is. Because nobody is going to keep paying for America’s stinkin’ wars. Bush is both a parody of LBJ and a parody of detentish Richard Nixon. Who knew that one frat boy had it in him?
Sunday, June 25, 2006
that diorama style
Taine’s introduction to his history of English literature became famous as soon as the first volume was published, in 1864. Its fame has dwindled, as fame does, into an exercise in memorization for grad students in comparative literature: Q: what was Taine’s thesis? A: History is about race, milieu and the moment. Which you can know without ever reading Taine – it is the kind of knowledge you get in an overview written by someone who may, perhaps, have acquired his or her knowledge of Taine from another overview.
This is not to bitch – Taine’s intro begins with set pieces in a Believe it or Not diorama style that has aged as badly as the American Natural History museum’s Culture Halls, with their celebration of how the Peoples of the World live in their natural setting. The diorama style is not just Taine’s, of course – he is writing in the wake of fifty years of ethnographic shows and exhibits, including the great Crystal Palace one in 1851 (in which the U.S. was represented by our amazing gunsmiths – the Colt rifles and revolvers, and the way they were made of standard parts in factories in which, it was rumored, machines made machines, so shook the British that they sent a special mission to the U.S. to observe and report on U.S. manufacturers). But Taine intellectualized this hybrid of scholarship and entertainment. So, he urges the historian to act much like the visitor to one of these shows – to view the country and culture, instead of merely drawing philosophical conclusions from the logic of texts its might produce:
“In order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imaging the father of a family who, having seen a son on the knees of his son, retires, according to the law, into a solitary state, with a vase and an axe, under a banana tree on the edge of a stream, ceasing to speak, multiplying his fasts, standing nude between four fires, and under the fifth fire, the terrible sun that devours and incessantly renews all living things; who, by stages, during entire weeks, keeps his imagination fixed on the foot of Brahma, then on his knee, and then on his thigh, and then on his belly button, and so on, until, under the pressure of that intense meditation, hallucinations appear, presenting all the forms of being, transformed confusedly one into the other, oscillating inside that head carried away by its vertigo, up to the point that the man, perfectly still, breathing once again, his eyes still fixed, sees the univers vanish smoke above the universal and empty Being, in which he aspires, himself, to plunge.”
This kind of speech cries out for a showman’s cane – and in fact was quickly absorbed into popular literature and then into films.
While Taine’s prose is a little, well, funny, his point is interesting – he wants the historian to begin his own meditation by way of starting with the novel, or the drama. To make a history is to visualize the settings and persons in the history. Thus, Taine counts, among those who have put history on the right track in the 19th century (the track of science), Walter Scott.
‘This is the first step in history: we have made it in Europe thanks to the renaissance of the imagination produced, at the end of the last century, with Lessing, Walter Scott; a little later in France, with Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, M. Michelet and so many others.”
All of which is by way of pointing back to Marx’s use of a literary method in the 18th Brumaire. LI has had a bit of a discussion about these matters with Le Colonel Chabert. Marx, who wrote the 18th Brumaire in the very year of the Crystal Palace Exhibit, sounds so modern, compared to Taine. Or modernist – for Taine’s diorama style is, as I am coming to see more and more, the style of the comic book, which is not so marginal any more – and which probably never was. There are bizarre enjambments between Marx’s text and Taine’s, and my next post on this matter is going to explore one of them – Marx’s remark about the pretence of the actors in the events he is looking at to actually be enacting a classical, analogous drama.
This political charade is, for Taine, stage two of the historic method:
If you wish to observe this operation [the historian’s attempt to plumb the psychology of historical personages] look at the promoter and model of all great contemporary culture, Goethe, who, before writing his Iphigenie, used his days to design the most perfect statues, and who, at last, his eyes filled by the noble forms and landscapes of antiquity, and his mind penetrated by the harmonious beauty of the classical era’s lives, came to reproduce so exactly inside himself the habits and tendencies of the Greek imagination that he gives us almost a twin sister to Sophocles’ Antigone, and the goddesses of Phidias.”
The tendency to for political actors to play this game of masquerade is something we see, at present, in the proliferation of analogies for the Iraq war. What is this about?
This is not to bitch – Taine’s intro begins with set pieces in a Believe it or Not diorama style that has aged as badly as the American Natural History museum’s Culture Halls, with their celebration of how the Peoples of the World live in their natural setting. The diorama style is not just Taine’s, of course – he is writing in the wake of fifty years of ethnographic shows and exhibits, including the great Crystal Palace one in 1851 (in which the U.S. was represented by our amazing gunsmiths – the Colt rifles and revolvers, and the way they were made of standard parts in factories in which, it was rumored, machines made machines, so shook the British that they sent a special mission to the U.S. to observe and report on U.S. manufacturers). But Taine intellectualized this hybrid of scholarship and entertainment. So, he urges the historian to act much like the visitor to one of these shows – to view the country and culture, instead of merely drawing philosophical conclusions from the logic of texts its might produce:
“In order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imaging the father of a family who, having seen a son on the knees of his son, retires, according to the law, into a solitary state, with a vase and an axe, under a banana tree on the edge of a stream, ceasing to speak, multiplying his fasts, standing nude between four fires, and under the fifth fire, the terrible sun that devours and incessantly renews all living things; who, by stages, during entire weeks, keeps his imagination fixed on the foot of Brahma, then on his knee, and then on his thigh, and then on his belly button, and so on, until, under the pressure of that intense meditation, hallucinations appear, presenting all the forms of being, transformed confusedly one into the other, oscillating inside that head carried away by its vertigo, up to the point that the man, perfectly still, breathing once again, his eyes still fixed, sees the univers vanish smoke above the universal and empty Being, in which he aspires, himself, to plunge.”
This kind of speech cries out for a showman’s cane – and in fact was quickly absorbed into popular literature and then into films.
While Taine’s prose is a little, well, funny, his point is interesting – he wants the historian to begin his own meditation by way of starting with the novel, or the drama. To make a history is to visualize the settings and persons in the history. Thus, Taine counts, among those who have put history on the right track in the 19th century (the track of science), Walter Scott.
‘This is the first step in history: we have made it in Europe thanks to the renaissance of the imagination produced, at the end of the last century, with Lessing, Walter Scott; a little later in France, with Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, M. Michelet and so many others.”
All of which is by way of pointing back to Marx’s use of a literary method in the 18th Brumaire. LI has had a bit of a discussion about these matters with Le Colonel Chabert. Marx, who wrote the 18th Brumaire in the very year of the Crystal Palace Exhibit, sounds so modern, compared to Taine. Or modernist – for Taine’s diorama style is, as I am coming to see more and more, the style of the comic book, which is not so marginal any more – and which probably never was. There are bizarre enjambments between Marx’s text and Taine’s, and my next post on this matter is going to explore one of them – Marx’s remark about the pretence of the actors in the events he is looking at to actually be enacting a classical, analogous drama.
This political charade is, for Taine, stage two of the historic method:
If you wish to observe this operation [the historian’s attempt to plumb the psychology of historical personages] look at the promoter and model of all great contemporary culture, Goethe, who, before writing his Iphigenie, used his days to design the most perfect statues, and who, at last, his eyes filled by the noble forms and landscapes of antiquity, and his mind penetrated by the harmonious beauty of the classical era’s lives, came to reproduce so exactly inside himself the habits and tendencies of the Greek imagination that he gives us almost a twin sister to Sophocles’ Antigone, and the goddesses of Phidias.”
The tendency to for political actors to play this game of masquerade is something we see, at present, in the proliferation of analogies for the Iraq war. What is this about?
Saturday, June 24, 2006
the best of times
Let’s review the week’s news, shall we?
On the one hand, we learn that the president was amply warned about Al Qaeda’s planned attack. He did nothing. As a result, 3,000 people died.
On the other hand, a band of poor young black men in Miami were cozened by a secret policemen into planning an attack on the Sears building in Chicago. They only lacked equipment, weapons, a plan, any connection to al Qaeda, and, most likely, the foggiest idea of where Chicago is, not to speak of the Sears building. Testimony from neighbors has shown conclusively that they wore things on their heads like turbans.
Two stories. Which story does the media go with?
There is a psychological problem in preserving the level of contempt the governing class, the press, and the culture that is perfectly content with the two, deserves. As my commentor, Mr. Nyp, has pointed out, as this and other information scrolls before our eyes for years and years, there is a contempt burn out. There only so many levels of disgust one can go through. There is such a thing as spectator paralysis. It is like the situation of the boy in Clockwork Orange – eyes forced open with little wire brackets, secured in a seat so that we can’t move, the movie unrolls before us. And such are the truths of Pavlovian conditioning that after a time, they can remove the wire clamps and the seat restraints, and they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Foist another Clinton or Bush upon us. Raise another ignorant crop of privileged white men and women to wink and blink at us on tv, babbling on, swollen mindless egos knowing nothing and filling the gaping intellectual hole by repeating endless versions of childhood taunts, heads filled with straw. The kind of people who consider themselves the crown of the meritocracy – and who are. Meritocracy, American version, circa 2006. We even see stories that clearly indicate that the next terrorist action in the U.S. will likely be the result of a botched sting operation -- and nobody questions it. LI is laughing so hard that blood is bubbling out of his mouth.
The angels weep. Better I were distract/So should my thought be sever’d from my griefs/And woes by wrong imagination lose/The knowledge of themselves – as Gloucester says in Lear, prophetically envisioning the cable news networks of the future.
And then there is this from the Washington Post:
“Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?
By Richard Morin
Friday, June 23, 2006
This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.
Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.”
Morin, who in the past has shown himself entirely clueless about sieving social science studies, reports this story with an earnestness that could earn him a place on the show itself. I have to give him credit for producing the best grafs of the week, however:
“To test for a "Daily Effect," Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from "The CBS Evening News" to another group. Then they measured the students' attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.”
On the one hand, we learn that the president was amply warned about Al Qaeda’s planned attack. He did nothing. As a result, 3,000 people died.
On the other hand, a band of poor young black men in Miami were cozened by a secret policemen into planning an attack on the Sears building in Chicago. They only lacked equipment, weapons, a plan, any connection to al Qaeda, and, most likely, the foggiest idea of where Chicago is, not to speak of the Sears building. Testimony from neighbors has shown conclusively that they wore things on their heads like turbans.
Two stories. Which story does the media go with?
There is a psychological problem in preserving the level of contempt the governing class, the press, and the culture that is perfectly content with the two, deserves. As my commentor, Mr. Nyp, has pointed out, as this and other information scrolls before our eyes for years and years, there is a contempt burn out. There only so many levels of disgust one can go through. There is such a thing as spectator paralysis. It is like the situation of the boy in Clockwork Orange – eyes forced open with little wire brackets, secured in a seat so that we can’t move, the movie unrolls before us. And such are the truths of Pavlovian conditioning that after a time, they can remove the wire clamps and the seat restraints, and they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Foist another Clinton or Bush upon us. Raise another ignorant crop of privileged white men and women to wink and blink at us on tv, babbling on, swollen mindless egos knowing nothing and filling the gaping intellectual hole by repeating endless versions of childhood taunts, heads filled with straw. The kind of people who consider themselves the crown of the meritocracy – and who are. Meritocracy, American version, circa 2006. We even see stories that clearly indicate that the next terrorist action in the U.S. will likely be the result of a botched sting operation -- and nobody questions it. LI is laughing so hard that blood is bubbling out of his mouth.
The angels weep. Better I were distract/So should my thought be sever’d from my griefs/And woes by wrong imagination lose/The knowledge of themselves – as Gloucester says in Lear, prophetically envisioning the cable news networks of the future.
And then there is this from the Washington Post:
“Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?
By Richard Morin
Friday, June 23, 2006
This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.
Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.”
Morin, who in the past has shown himself entirely clueless about sieving social science studies, reports this story with an earnestness that could earn him a place on the show itself. I have to give him credit for producing the best grafs of the week, however:
“To test for a "Daily Effect," Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from "The CBS Evening News" to another group. Then they measured the students' attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.”
Friday, June 23, 2006
where did you go, Rambo? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
The War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs are, of course, not wars at all. They are declared illegally, pursued intermittently to both scourge a potentially rebellious population and to score public relations points, and tend inevitably to the government’s oldest trick: inducing citizens to commit crimes, then clapping them in irons.
So, the Bush administration, in its infinite wisdom, has said, let a thousand little Reichstag fires burn – and it has come up with sad things like the arrest of those boys in Miami, yesterday. Clearly, this was a case of talking shit. Even the Washington Post, ever willing to the administration’s cat’s paw, can’t turn this ridiculous administration concoction into the kind of threat to leave us householder’s trembling in our beds.
In reality, these young men were enacting one of the perennial phenomena of urban streetlife, from Jerusalem in 1 A.D. to James Baldwin’s Harlem in the 40s – the incubation of a religious cult:
“Residents living near the warehouse said the men taken into custody described themselves as Muslims and had tried to recruit young people to join their group. Tashawn Rose, 29, said they tried to recruit her younger brother and nephew for a karate class.
She said she talked to one of the men about a month ago. "They seemed brainwashed," she said. "They said they had given their lives to Allah."
Residents said FBI agents spent several hours in the neighborhood showing photos of the suspects and seeking information. They said the men had lived in the area for about a year.
Benjamin Williams, 17, said the group sometimes had young children with them. At times, he added, the men "would cover their faces. Sometimes they would wear things on their heads, like turbans.”
Things on their heads like turbans… Wow. The problem with the current Bush culture is that it is a scary clown culture. It is both funny and terrifying at the same time – as though the S.S. had been issued rubber red noses to wear before they went out and did their raiding. Although these cornpone authoritarians have made up this terrorist shit before – in Detroit, in Ohio, etc., etc. - this time out the fraudulent nature of the enterprise is hard to disguise even in the first flush of the scoop. The oldest gesture encoded in the genes of the secret police is to protect us from crimes that it first makes up. But when the secret police are so contemptuous of the public that they deliver shoddy goods like this for our consumption, you know something has gone awry, culturally. Is it that the U.S. population will put up with anything? Is it that, unlike the heroic culture that resisted the invading Soviets in many a Reagan era film, in reality, we are composed of surrenderers, dickerers, halfwits and dupes? Will no Rambo arise among us, muscular and oiled, to save us from the Bushist beast?
“The person they believed to be an al-Qaida representative gave Batiste a digital video camera, which Batiste said he would use to record pictures of the North Miami Beach FBI building, the indictment said. At a March 26 meeting, it went on, Batiste and Burson Augustin provided the "al-Qaida representative" with photographs of the FBI building, as well as video footage of other Miami government buildings, and discussed the plot to bomb the FBI building.
But on May 24, the indictment said, Batiste told the "al-Qaida representative" that he was experiencing delays "because of various problems within his organization." Batiste said he wanted to continue his mission and his relationship with al-Qaida nonetheless, the document said.”
Discussed his plot to bomb the FBI building? What kind of comic book language is that?
Oh well. This is proof, once again, that Conrad’s The Secret Agent should be made part of the high school curriculum, in order to inoculate Americans from a disease that has been carefully nurtured in them by fifty some years of tv: their love for a man in a uniform.
PS – there is another wapo article readers should check out. I still heard it said, all of the time, that the U.S. has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq. I hear this said even by anti-war people. While that sounds fine, in reality, as long as the U.S. is in Iraq, there will be no serious negotiation between the government and the various insurgents. Of course there should be amnesty for insurgents who have fought Americans – otherwise, we are talking about a decade long war to the death. But that can’t happen as long as Americans are holding the strings and making the puppets dance. Except that old fusty metaphor isn't exactly right -- the Americans can pull strings, but they don't really know what the puppets are doing. They didn't in South Vietnam, and they don't here.
Americans – this is the point – are prolonging the war in Iraq. Not limiting it.
So, the Bush administration, in its infinite wisdom, has said, let a thousand little Reichstag fires burn – and it has come up with sad things like the arrest of those boys in Miami, yesterday. Clearly, this was a case of talking shit. Even the Washington Post, ever willing to the administration’s cat’s paw, can’t turn this ridiculous administration concoction into the kind of threat to leave us householder’s trembling in our beds.
In reality, these young men were enacting one of the perennial phenomena of urban streetlife, from Jerusalem in 1 A.D. to James Baldwin’s Harlem in the 40s – the incubation of a religious cult:
“Residents living near the warehouse said the men taken into custody described themselves as Muslims and had tried to recruit young people to join their group. Tashawn Rose, 29, said they tried to recruit her younger brother and nephew for a karate class.
She said she talked to one of the men about a month ago. "They seemed brainwashed," she said. "They said they had given their lives to Allah."
Residents said FBI agents spent several hours in the neighborhood showing photos of the suspects and seeking information. They said the men had lived in the area for about a year.
Benjamin Williams, 17, said the group sometimes had young children with them. At times, he added, the men "would cover their faces. Sometimes they would wear things on their heads, like turbans.”
Things on their heads like turbans… Wow. The problem with the current Bush culture is that it is a scary clown culture. It is both funny and terrifying at the same time – as though the S.S. had been issued rubber red noses to wear before they went out and did their raiding. Although these cornpone authoritarians have made up this terrorist shit before – in Detroit, in Ohio, etc., etc. - this time out the fraudulent nature of the enterprise is hard to disguise even in the first flush of the scoop. The oldest gesture encoded in the genes of the secret police is to protect us from crimes that it first makes up. But when the secret police are so contemptuous of the public that they deliver shoddy goods like this for our consumption, you know something has gone awry, culturally. Is it that the U.S. population will put up with anything? Is it that, unlike the heroic culture that resisted the invading Soviets in many a Reagan era film, in reality, we are composed of surrenderers, dickerers, halfwits and dupes? Will no Rambo arise among us, muscular and oiled, to save us from the Bushist beast?
“The person they believed to be an al-Qaida representative gave Batiste a digital video camera, which Batiste said he would use to record pictures of the North Miami Beach FBI building, the indictment said. At a March 26 meeting, it went on, Batiste and Burson Augustin provided the "al-Qaida representative" with photographs of the FBI building, as well as video footage of other Miami government buildings, and discussed the plot to bomb the FBI building.
But on May 24, the indictment said, Batiste told the "al-Qaida representative" that he was experiencing delays "because of various problems within his organization." Batiste said he wanted to continue his mission and his relationship with al-Qaida nonetheless, the document said.”
Discussed his plot to bomb the FBI building? What kind of comic book language is that?
Oh well. This is proof, once again, that Conrad’s The Secret Agent should be made part of the high school curriculum, in order to inoculate Americans from a disease that has been carefully nurtured in them by fifty some years of tv: their love for a man in a uniform.
PS – there is another wapo article readers should check out. I still heard it said, all of the time, that the U.S. has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq. I hear this said even by anti-war people. While that sounds fine, in reality, as long as the U.S. is in Iraq, there will be no serious negotiation between the government and the various insurgents. Of course there should be amnesty for insurgents who have fought Americans – otherwise, we are talking about a decade long war to the death. But that can’t happen as long as Americans are holding the strings and making the puppets dance. Except that old fusty metaphor isn't exactly right -- the Americans can pull strings, but they don't really know what the puppets are doing. They didn't in South Vietnam, and they don't here.
Americans – this is the point – are prolonging the war in Iraq. Not limiting it.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
american crisis 2: cheney's moral blackmail
Dear President Bush,
Yesterday you said, "I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I'm not going to forget them.”
Good for you. I’m not going to forget September 11th, either.
In my last letter I discussed your aversion to reading. Well, my topic seems to have coincided by happy chance with Ron Suskind’s new book. The book reveals, among other things, your less than stellar habits in the matter of information retrieval. According to Suskind, you have created a political tactic out of your feigned illiteracy: plausibly claiming ignorance, for instance, about the brummagem nature of your assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry. After all, you just didn't read that piece of paper when it came across your desk. You trusted what Dick told you.
However, let's remember the lessons of 9/11. Suskind's book, according to reports of it in the press – see the section in the ps to this letter that I am citing from Brad Delong’s site – throws even more light on what happened between 8/6/01 and 9/11. The more light that is cast, the more disturbing your actions appear. Much more disturbing than they appeared even in Michael Moore's movie, or in any number of conspiratorial accounts of 9/11. In all of those accounts, you are assumed to be more than competent. Your mission accomplished persona is simply morally reversed -- from superhero to supervillain.
But the truth is otherwise, isn't it? In fact, you have no idea what to do in an emergency. I have often why nobody has ever pressed you about what you did in that month. We knew, before Suskind, that you had been told about Al Qaeda intentions to attack the U.S. We still don't know if, for instance, you pressed the FBI director, alerted the Secretary of Transportation, etc. Now we do know a bit more, and that glimpse looks bad. Just as happened before Katerina, you took it to be your role to play observer -- and a disinterested, dumb observer at that. According to Suskind, your almost incomprehensible indolence during that summer was interrupted not by reports you had asked for, but by the CIA thrusting an assessment upon you, disturbing the great work of brush clearing on your ranch. You were clearly more interested in the brush clearing. At that time, apparently, you considered the presidency a part time job – much like being the Governor of Texas, or being a teenage liquor mixer at your Dad’s country club.
Suskind’s discovery has given us another piece of the mystery that has long troubled LI – namely, Cheney’s role in your administration. It has become a given among the press that Cheney’s power is due to your inexperience. This, I think, is incorrect. There is nothing in your character that would indicate that you are capable of the kind of cool self-assessment this story implies – to wit, deciding that you are inexperienced, and handing power to Cheney. Nothing in your actions pre-9/11 make this plausible. Cheney, in those halcyon days, was given the task of mind melding with his fellow extraterrestrial energy company CEOs. He was not the man behind the throne.
Instead, I have an alternative narrative. Please tell me if this is correct. In the weeks following 9/11, you had a big secret – your neglect of all warnings that this was about to happen. At the time that you were most conscious of this secret, your VP began to press his own agenda, and his own desire to take over foreign policymaking from you. Or at least operate as the chief shaper of that policy. I have always suspected that the timing of those two things is not a coincidence. In effect, the person who knew about your negligence, who made it his duty to know, was your Vice President. And this Vice President is extraordinarily unscrupulous. If we turned to the pseudo-science of criminal profiling, I think we could show, pretty easily, that he is a socio-path.
LI thinks that this period was a time of moral blackmail. My hypothesis depends on two things: your guilt and your secret. There are those who think that you, like Cheney, are a socio-path – I don’t think so, however, I think you are prey to two polar moods – one of supreme vanity, and the other of guilt. The latter, of course, being the product of your mother’s upbringing. As a good Freudian, I consider that your Jesus Christ obsession is not just for political show, but a way of mediating between these two contradictory traits. As a reward for your abasement, you are made a son of God yourself. This is almost perfect as a solution to your little psychic woes. But surely on 9/11, a day you spent flying around, as though looking for another country to be president of, all the past failures must have come bubbling up – that pre-spree feeling. The failure to be a fighter pilot, like Daddy. The failure to be an oil company founder, like Daddy. The need for Daddy to get you on Harkin, and your eagerness to profit to the point where Daddy’s friends had to squelch an embarrassing investigation. You were vulnerable as you had never been, since past fuck ups were, after all, country club affairs. So you stole from Harkin and dropped out of the National Guard. Really, these weren’t big deals. But this time, it was a big deal.
The presidential bios of dead presidents often fill us in on things that we didn’t know at the time – notably, who the president was fucking. In your case, we will find out something different – who was fucking the president.
It was during this period that an inexplicable grant of authority was given to your Vice President. I am not saying that the Vice President went into your office and laid all his cards out on the table – although he might have. This is a crude man. I am saying that the emotional pre-requisites for emotional and political blackmail were there; that out of your consciousness of failure, you ceded power you would not otherwise have ceded to Cheney; and that your inability to free yourself from him stems from these crucial weeks.
Any other president would, at the very least, have been angry that his vice president went to see his mistress on a Texas ranch and ended up shooting a friend (a friend of your family) in the face and leaving your people to clean up the P.R. mess. But you weren’t. This blackmail has now become not just a single thread in your administration – it is the whole spider web.
Of course, my story shouldn’t be taken to suggest that you aren’t on board for such crimes as the invasion of Iraq – it is just that, on your own, I don’t think you would have had the courage or the interest to drive that enterprise. When, on your own, you do attempt to drive an enterprise – cast your mind back to ‘reforming’ social security – the enterprise peters out. You are not what I’d call a transformational leader, to use management speak. You are rather a rare case of transformational/patsy leadership.
And, of course, your guilt about 9/11 is not enough. If we only had known then, what we know now, surely you would not only have been impeached – you might have been imprisoned. You must be grateful, on some level, to Cheney for his role in creating such an unparalleled atmosphere of bullying that the facts of your non-role, pre 9/11, have never become a real issue. Who has ever asked about it? The same press that went into ecstasy about a sperm stained dress, years ago, has an incredible disinterest in what, exactly, you did, post August 6. I assume that is because the press feels threatened itself, for reasons I am not going to go into, here. However, the success of Cheney’s socio-pathic demeanor, the spread of his combination of guilt free lying and absurd truculence, has spread like a meme through the right wing media-sphere. Joe McCarthy has been normalized in the last six years.
This doesn’t answer all of the questions about 9/11, by any means. The collapse of the Democratic party – the abdication of the oppositional role – is not explained by Cheney-ian moral blackmail. I think there are structural explanations for that. There is a notion, on the part of grassroots Democrats, that the party is supposed to win elections. But the party doesn’t really exist to do any such thing for the party’s leading spirits in D.C. – rather, it exists as a form of entrée into the power structure. If winning elections threatens that power structure, it threatens those leading spirits. Consequently, they will take the knife to any oppositional strategy that leads to threats on their own entrenched positions. It is extremely odd that a party that held the White House for eight years would simply surrender as it did, but it is surely less odd if that party, for a long time, had become a vehicle for self-aggrandizement of a selected group in the Court society of D.C.
Yours sincerely,
Limited Inc.
PS – From Suskind’s book:
Ron Suskind: The "what ifs" can kill you.... [I]n terms of the tragedy of 9/11, a particular regret lingers for those who might have made a difference. The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to [Bush]--"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"--has been widely noted in the past few years. But also in August CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President--to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode.... They didn't know place or time... but something was coming. The President needed to know.
Verbal briefings of George W. Bush are acts of almost inestimable import... more so than... for other recent presidents. He's not much of a reader... never has been... not a President who sees much value in hearing from a wide array of voices.... But he's a very good listener and an extremely visual listener. He sizes people up swiftly and aptly... and trusts his eyes. It is a gift, this nonverbal acuity.... What does George W. Bush do? He makes it personal.... The expert... has done the hard work... [Bush] tries to gauge how "certain" they are of what they say....
The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markers can be crucial... they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it.
And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.
He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.
"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."
Yesterday you said, "I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I'm not going to forget them.”
Good for you. I’m not going to forget September 11th, either.
In my last letter I discussed your aversion to reading. Well, my topic seems to have coincided by happy chance with Ron Suskind’s new book. The book reveals, among other things, your less than stellar habits in the matter of information retrieval. According to Suskind, you have created a political tactic out of your feigned illiteracy: plausibly claiming ignorance, for instance, about the brummagem nature of your assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry. After all, you just didn't read that piece of paper when it came across your desk. You trusted what Dick told you.
However, let's remember the lessons of 9/11. Suskind's book, according to reports of it in the press – see the section in the ps to this letter that I am citing from Brad Delong’s site – throws even more light on what happened between 8/6/01 and 9/11. The more light that is cast, the more disturbing your actions appear. Much more disturbing than they appeared even in Michael Moore's movie, or in any number of conspiratorial accounts of 9/11. In all of those accounts, you are assumed to be more than competent. Your mission accomplished persona is simply morally reversed -- from superhero to supervillain.
But the truth is otherwise, isn't it? In fact, you have no idea what to do in an emergency. I have often why nobody has ever pressed you about what you did in that month. We knew, before Suskind, that you had been told about Al Qaeda intentions to attack the U.S. We still don't know if, for instance, you pressed the FBI director, alerted the Secretary of Transportation, etc. Now we do know a bit more, and that glimpse looks bad. Just as happened before Katerina, you took it to be your role to play observer -- and a disinterested, dumb observer at that. According to Suskind, your almost incomprehensible indolence during that summer was interrupted not by reports you had asked for, but by the CIA thrusting an assessment upon you, disturbing the great work of brush clearing on your ranch. You were clearly more interested in the brush clearing. At that time, apparently, you considered the presidency a part time job – much like being the Governor of Texas, or being a teenage liquor mixer at your Dad’s country club.
Suskind’s discovery has given us another piece of the mystery that has long troubled LI – namely, Cheney’s role in your administration. It has become a given among the press that Cheney’s power is due to your inexperience. This, I think, is incorrect. There is nothing in your character that would indicate that you are capable of the kind of cool self-assessment this story implies – to wit, deciding that you are inexperienced, and handing power to Cheney. Nothing in your actions pre-9/11 make this plausible. Cheney, in those halcyon days, was given the task of mind melding with his fellow extraterrestrial energy company CEOs. He was not the man behind the throne.
Instead, I have an alternative narrative. Please tell me if this is correct. In the weeks following 9/11, you had a big secret – your neglect of all warnings that this was about to happen. At the time that you were most conscious of this secret, your VP began to press his own agenda, and his own desire to take over foreign policymaking from you. Or at least operate as the chief shaper of that policy. I have always suspected that the timing of those two things is not a coincidence. In effect, the person who knew about your negligence, who made it his duty to know, was your Vice President. And this Vice President is extraordinarily unscrupulous. If we turned to the pseudo-science of criminal profiling, I think we could show, pretty easily, that he is a socio-path.
LI thinks that this period was a time of moral blackmail. My hypothesis depends on two things: your guilt and your secret. There are those who think that you, like Cheney, are a socio-path – I don’t think so, however, I think you are prey to two polar moods – one of supreme vanity, and the other of guilt. The latter, of course, being the product of your mother’s upbringing. As a good Freudian, I consider that your Jesus Christ obsession is not just for political show, but a way of mediating between these two contradictory traits. As a reward for your abasement, you are made a son of God yourself. This is almost perfect as a solution to your little psychic woes. But surely on 9/11, a day you spent flying around, as though looking for another country to be president of, all the past failures must have come bubbling up – that pre-spree feeling. The failure to be a fighter pilot, like Daddy. The failure to be an oil company founder, like Daddy. The need for Daddy to get you on Harkin, and your eagerness to profit to the point where Daddy’s friends had to squelch an embarrassing investigation. You were vulnerable as you had never been, since past fuck ups were, after all, country club affairs. So you stole from Harkin and dropped out of the National Guard. Really, these weren’t big deals. But this time, it was a big deal.
The presidential bios of dead presidents often fill us in on things that we didn’t know at the time – notably, who the president was fucking. In your case, we will find out something different – who was fucking the president.
It was during this period that an inexplicable grant of authority was given to your Vice President. I am not saying that the Vice President went into your office and laid all his cards out on the table – although he might have. This is a crude man. I am saying that the emotional pre-requisites for emotional and political blackmail were there; that out of your consciousness of failure, you ceded power you would not otherwise have ceded to Cheney; and that your inability to free yourself from him stems from these crucial weeks.
Any other president would, at the very least, have been angry that his vice president went to see his mistress on a Texas ranch and ended up shooting a friend (a friend of your family) in the face and leaving your people to clean up the P.R. mess. But you weren’t. This blackmail has now become not just a single thread in your administration – it is the whole spider web.
Of course, my story shouldn’t be taken to suggest that you aren’t on board for such crimes as the invasion of Iraq – it is just that, on your own, I don’t think you would have had the courage or the interest to drive that enterprise. When, on your own, you do attempt to drive an enterprise – cast your mind back to ‘reforming’ social security – the enterprise peters out. You are not what I’d call a transformational leader, to use management speak. You are rather a rare case of transformational/patsy leadership.
And, of course, your guilt about 9/11 is not enough. If we only had known then, what we know now, surely you would not only have been impeached – you might have been imprisoned. You must be grateful, on some level, to Cheney for his role in creating such an unparalleled atmosphere of bullying that the facts of your non-role, pre 9/11, have never become a real issue. Who has ever asked about it? The same press that went into ecstasy about a sperm stained dress, years ago, has an incredible disinterest in what, exactly, you did, post August 6. I assume that is because the press feels threatened itself, for reasons I am not going to go into, here. However, the success of Cheney’s socio-pathic demeanor, the spread of his combination of guilt free lying and absurd truculence, has spread like a meme through the right wing media-sphere. Joe McCarthy has been normalized in the last six years.
This doesn’t answer all of the questions about 9/11, by any means. The collapse of the Democratic party – the abdication of the oppositional role – is not explained by Cheney-ian moral blackmail. I think there are structural explanations for that. There is a notion, on the part of grassroots Democrats, that the party is supposed to win elections. But the party doesn’t really exist to do any such thing for the party’s leading spirits in D.C. – rather, it exists as a form of entrée into the power structure. If winning elections threatens that power structure, it threatens those leading spirits. Consequently, they will take the knife to any oppositional strategy that leads to threats on their own entrenched positions. It is extremely odd that a party that held the White House for eight years would simply surrender as it did, but it is surely less odd if that party, for a long time, had become a vehicle for self-aggrandizement of a selected group in the Court society of D.C.
Yours sincerely,
Limited Inc.
PS – From Suskind’s book:
Ron Suskind: The "what ifs" can kill you.... [I]n terms of the tragedy of 9/11, a particular regret lingers for those who might have made a difference. The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to [Bush]--"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"--has been widely noted in the past few years. But also in August CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President--to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode.... They didn't know place or time... but something was coming. The President needed to know.
Verbal briefings of George W. Bush are acts of almost inestimable import... more so than... for other recent presidents. He's not much of a reader... never has been... not a President who sees much value in hearing from a wide array of voices.... But he's a very good listener and an extremely visual listener. He sizes people up swiftly and aptly... and trusts his eyes. It is a gift, this nonverbal acuity.... What does George W. Bush do? He makes it personal.... The expert... has done the hard work... [Bush] tries to gauge how "certain" they are of what they say....
The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markers can be crucial... they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it.
And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.
He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.
"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
the 18th brumaire
One of the more discouraging things about Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is how much its famous opening lines, about tragedy and farce, have absorbed interest in the entire work. (Hegel observed somewhere that all great world historical facts and persons occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce). Those lines weren’t meant as toss offs, any more than the individual witticisms in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest are written to be relished solely outside of their place in the play. Rather, the tragedy/farce duality initiates a series of complex and beautiful inversions which operate, on the literary level, to make this account of the long ago doings of half forgotten Frenchmen still a fast paced read, and on the political level, to give us perhaps the first analysis of the kind of reactionary politics that, it turns out, is the ever-recurring counterpart, in modernity, to modernization itself. The convergence of a literary trope and a political truth is quite astonishing – it is like being able to use a poem as a household cleaner. In other words, the literary and the political ought to come from completely separate conceptual domains. That they don’t is one of the surprises of the text. It is a surprise that destabilizes our ideas of genre, journalism, history, politics and philosophy. In this sense, Marx’s work is close to Swift’s Drapier Letters, Burke’s Reflections, and Paine’s The Rights of Man.
Terell Carver, in a brief intro to the work in Strategies (2003), gives us its publication history:
“Put through the mill of the Selected or Collected Marx and Engels, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is just another text, falling at 1852 in the lineup. Compared to its usual neighbors, The Class Struggles in France and The Cologne Communist Trial, it is more famous and more widely read. In Marx’s own time, matters were rather different: The Class Struggles appeared in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung-Revue with a reasonable circulation in Germany and amongst the e´migre ´s, and The Cologne Communist Trial became a notorious pamphlet smuggled over borders and past censors. The Eighteenth Brumaire was supposed to appear in installments in a functioning periodical (Die Revolution), published in the USA, but the plans for a periodical fell through. The text eventually appeared as a whole in May 1852 in something more like a pamphlet than a periodical (there were no other works in it), though styling itself an “occasional” publication. Excerpts appeared in English in the Chartist People’s Paper from September through December. While the Eighteenth Brumaire was distributed in the US (20¢ wholesale, 25¢ retail), Marx and his associates had little luck getting it re-imported (in any language) back into Europe, and it is safe to assume that its existence was known to but a select few. It was also not the only pamphlet circulating that satirized the deadly funny Louis Bonaparte, nor the only one that recalled the original 18th Brumaire of Year VIII of the revolution. In Prussia Marx’s brother-in-law the Interior Minister Friedrich von Westphalen was informed by his police that an embarrassing relation had published a work entitled Revolution, but there is no evidence that many others of any political persuasion were taking such a keen interest. In short, its contemporary impact was disproportionate to its later fame, even as one of Marx’s second-rank texts.”
Carver has an anachronistic suggestion as to the pamphlet’s genre:
“I have suggested that the Eighteenth Brumaire was the closest Marx could get to the movies, and that the genre is that of the docu-drama, in which factual reportage merges with political performance.10 While Marx did not have access to the drama as such (stage, screen, television), he did his best through his vivid
characterizations and colorful language. If metaphors could murder, he would have gone to prison or the scaffold, and there is no doubt that he was a master of character assassination. The colorful language of the Eighteenth Brumaire should have made it performative as a pamphlet, if anything could, that is,
rallying democratic forces in several countries against the principle and practice of authoritarianism and gangsterism, as practiced by Louis Bonaparte in his politics of constitutional subversion. Moreover, what Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire reflects his view of politics as a performance in an astonishingly subtle and complex way.”
LI has been re-reading the Eighteenth B. with a lot of pleasure, in our off moments – since we are thinking a lot, at the moment, of the political pamphleteering. Marx put his finger on the way the reactionary moment is structured in this pamphlet – with the structure of that moment being in contradiction with the very premise of the modern version of history. That version, codified in the eighteenth century, made history the story of progress. Ranke, in the 19th century, famously objected that all moments are ‘equally distant’ from God – but he didn’t actually believe this, as his treatment of Asian history shows (Asian history, for Ranke, was ‘stagnant’). Progress operates as the Anankê of history – its necessity. That progress happens through people, behind their backs, so to speak, is the condition for the tragic opposition between the hero and the story in which he figures -- at least for the modern hero. While I don’t want to press this too hard, obviously one of the differences between tragedy and farce is the difference between a story in which necessity conditions the general trajectory of discoveries (both by agents in the narrative and by observers outside of it) and a story in which necessity continually dissolves into contingency – into lovers hiding in closets, policemen chasing funny crooks, banana peels getting under the heels of harlequins.
The masterly design into which Marx presses the highly resistible but curiously unresisted rise of the very louche Louis Napoleon is to make all accidents happen under the sign of inversion. Now, it is true that Marx does a little cheating to get his inversions. The French revolution, as he presents it, progresses by moving from a bourgeois revolution to a popular one – from the fall of the Bastille to Robespierre. He makes a little cut there, although we know that isn’t the end of the story. The reactionary sequence of 1848 to 1851 is the inverse of this: it moves from a popular revolution through a bourgeois reaction to a dictatorial conclusion.
“Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows who have mislaid their bodies.”
LI will return to this notion in another post.
Terell Carver, in a brief intro to the work in Strategies (2003), gives us its publication history:
“Put through the mill of the Selected or Collected Marx and Engels, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is just another text, falling at 1852 in the lineup. Compared to its usual neighbors, The Class Struggles in France and The Cologne Communist Trial, it is more famous and more widely read. In Marx’s own time, matters were rather different: The Class Struggles appeared in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung-Revue with a reasonable circulation in Germany and amongst the e´migre ´s, and The Cologne Communist Trial became a notorious pamphlet smuggled over borders and past censors. The Eighteenth Brumaire was supposed to appear in installments in a functioning periodical (Die Revolution), published in the USA, but the plans for a periodical fell through. The text eventually appeared as a whole in May 1852 in something more like a pamphlet than a periodical (there were no other works in it), though styling itself an “occasional” publication. Excerpts appeared in English in the Chartist People’s Paper from September through December. While the Eighteenth Brumaire was distributed in the US (20¢ wholesale, 25¢ retail), Marx and his associates had little luck getting it re-imported (in any language) back into Europe, and it is safe to assume that its existence was known to but a select few. It was also not the only pamphlet circulating that satirized the deadly funny Louis Bonaparte, nor the only one that recalled the original 18th Brumaire of Year VIII of the revolution. In Prussia Marx’s brother-in-law the Interior Minister Friedrich von Westphalen was informed by his police that an embarrassing relation had published a work entitled Revolution, but there is no evidence that many others of any political persuasion were taking such a keen interest. In short, its contemporary impact was disproportionate to its later fame, even as one of Marx’s second-rank texts.”
Carver has an anachronistic suggestion as to the pamphlet’s genre:
“I have suggested that the Eighteenth Brumaire was the closest Marx could get to the movies, and that the genre is that of the docu-drama, in which factual reportage merges with political performance.10 While Marx did not have access to the drama as such (stage, screen, television), he did his best through his vivid
characterizations and colorful language. If metaphors could murder, he would have gone to prison or the scaffold, and there is no doubt that he was a master of character assassination. The colorful language of the Eighteenth Brumaire should have made it performative as a pamphlet, if anything could, that is,
rallying democratic forces in several countries against the principle and practice of authoritarianism and gangsterism, as practiced by Louis Bonaparte in his politics of constitutional subversion. Moreover, what Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire reflects his view of politics as a performance in an astonishingly subtle and complex way.”
LI has been re-reading the Eighteenth B. with a lot of pleasure, in our off moments – since we are thinking a lot, at the moment, of the political pamphleteering. Marx put his finger on the way the reactionary moment is structured in this pamphlet – with the structure of that moment being in contradiction with the very premise of the modern version of history. That version, codified in the eighteenth century, made history the story of progress. Ranke, in the 19th century, famously objected that all moments are ‘equally distant’ from God – but he didn’t actually believe this, as his treatment of Asian history shows (Asian history, for Ranke, was ‘stagnant’). Progress operates as the Anankê of history – its necessity. That progress happens through people, behind their backs, so to speak, is the condition for the tragic opposition between the hero and the story in which he figures -- at least for the modern hero. While I don’t want to press this too hard, obviously one of the differences between tragedy and farce is the difference between a story in which necessity conditions the general trajectory of discoveries (both by agents in the narrative and by observers outside of it) and a story in which necessity continually dissolves into contingency – into lovers hiding in closets, policemen chasing funny crooks, banana peels getting under the heels of harlequins.
The masterly design into which Marx presses the highly resistible but curiously unresisted rise of the very louche Louis Napoleon is to make all accidents happen under the sign of inversion. Now, it is true that Marx does a little cheating to get his inversions. The French revolution, as he presents it, progresses by moving from a bourgeois revolution to a popular one – from the fall of the Bastille to Robespierre. He makes a little cut there, although we know that isn’t the end of the story. The reactionary sequence of 1848 to 1851 is the inverse of this: it moves from a popular revolution through a bourgeois reaction to a dictatorial conclusion.
“Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows who have mislaid their bodies.”
LI will return to this notion in another post.
Monday, June 19, 2006
the American crisis
Dear President Bush,
In 1776, at a time when American forces were being pushed back by the British, Tom Paine took up his pen and wrote a series of letters to various British officials, and even to the people of England. These letters were published as a pamphlet entitled, The American Crisis. While Paine likely did not believe that his letters would actually persuade their addressees to cease and desist from the various depredations that he deplored, his letters gave them a moral chance.
In fact, the commander of the British forces in America, Lord Howe, might well have read the letters Paine addressed to him. After all, Paine was a wildly popular author, and Howe might have felt it was his duty to read a writer whose words would have an immediate effect on the morale of the population he had come to subdue.
Times have, of course, changed. In 2002, you often hinted that you did not even read newspapers. The image of you, barely able to pull yourself away from ESPN 1 to watch some paen to your genius on Fox News, was calculated to anger your enemies. The enemies at that point had, admittedly, dwindled. Here it is important to note – it is always important to note - that you were not really elected as president. You lost the popular vote. You were nevertheless elevated to your office in one of the most singular acts of corruption in U.S. history – since the Supreme Court, however low it has fallen at times, had never before played the role ward boss. If the U.S. were another country – say, Iran, or the Ukraine – the machinations that brought a man of your feeble abilities and family connections to power would have caused the U.S. state department to issue some tut-tuttery about the whole thing. However, solely because the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, you became popular. The rallying round effect erased the shameful memory of your criminal ascent. In addition, the knowledge that your disinterest in newspapers extended to disinterest in memos advising you of imminent Al Qaeda attack was not, in 2002, in the sphere of public knowledge.
What is one to make of the boast of ignorance by a man who is evidently willing to commit any infamy to become president? There is something bullying about the ignorance, something that hints at the kind of hoodlum who actually takes pride in some outrageous act of brutality. But, on balance, I don’t think that you are a hoodlum. Rather, yours is a character in which grudges have long been stored up and ossified. The contradiction between your failure to ever achieve anything by yourself, your reliance on a network of cronies, and the code of the self made man that is your public ideology, is too gross for you to completely ignore. Instead, a man of your type immediately decides that his failures are due to a cabal. In your set, that cabal is usually represented as some vague but powerful one composed of East Coast liberal elites. Without thinking much about it, you have obviously accept this idea. So to shock them by playing the Texas ignoramus proved irresistibly tempting to a man who, evidently, spent his happiest days as the class clown at the private school he went to long ago.
The short era in which playing the Clown Prince reaped applause is now over, however, and you are back to admitting to the habit of reading newspapers. This is progress of a sort – vaunting your ignorance as an electoral ploy is not a thing that even your most fanatic followers can stomach any longer. Even though they can stomach quite a bit.
With the myth of your functional illiteracy exploded, my conceit, that I am writing a letter to a man who might actually read it – however dim the chance – acquires a little more verisimilitude. My idea, then, is to occasionally pen letters to you about Iran, Iraq, your foreign policy, your environmental policy, your economic policy, etc. – and show you the error of your ways. Since your errors are so multitudinous and so fundamental, this task will require a little work. Like Paine, however, I believe that at the very center of the person is a flickering but permanent moment of liberty. By demonstrating, irrefutably, that you have set this nation on the path to ignoble defeat in Iraq; that you are acting the madman with regard to reality in the Middle East, in China, in Europe, and in Latin America; that you have multiplied and augmented the environmental crises that are now upon us; that you have oppressed the poor and the working class; that the money that you have poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the attempt to shift the balance of opportunities in this country, so that the descendents of the poor will always be poor, the descendents of the middle class will be burdened with such intolerable debts that they sink into poverty, and the descendents of the wealthy, like you yourself, will be free to tread across the bodies of their innumerable victims without any fear of retaliation, is blood money and fairy money – money that will be revenged, and money that will vanish; all of these things will, if you receive them into your heart, perhaps change you at the last minute into a tolerable human being and a president who, from being a laughing stock, becomes a leader upon whom we can look back with gratitude. There are those who say that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, especially if the sow has been hardened in her vices, stewed in her crib, for the whole of her life. But this is too hard on sows, I think, and it might even be too hard on you.
This is what Paine wrote to Howe:
“TO argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of
reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in
contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring
to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of
feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man
will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival
and a bear your master.”
And, a paragraph later:
“…it would be a pity to pass you from the world in state, and consign you to magnificent oblivion among the tombs, without telling the future beholder why. Judas is as much known as John, yet history ascribes their fame to very different actions.”
Paine is harsh, but then, he was also confident that fate had not bound him up entirely with the fate of Lord Howe. Unfortunately, your actions do have an effect on my fate. For that reason, I lean towards the generous notion that your ignorance is not so ingrained as to make all my scrubbing vain, but that it can be rubbed away with enough friction.
Yours truly,
Limited Inc.
PS -- My next letter may touch on this Washington Post article about Iran, and more specifically, your almost infallible ability to get things wrong, screw things up, and generally leave a ring of scum about the most mundane matters of government. Did you and your cronies actually believe you were going to make the Iranian government fall with a flick of your magic military hand? We must work on that vanity. While you are evidently a slothful man, and not the brightest bulb in the bunch, I don't really think these are the keys to your gross incompetence. No, it is your vanity that is your and, alas, our undoing.
In 1776, at a time when American forces were being pushed back by the British, Tom Paine took up his pen and wrote a series of letters to various British officials, and even to the people of England. These letters were published as a pamphlet entitled, The American Crisis. While Paine likely did not believe that his letters would actually persuade their addressees to cease and desist from the various depredations that he deplored, his letters gave them a moral chance.
In fact, the commander of the British forces in America, Lord Howe, might well have read the letters Paine addressed to him. After all, Paine was a wildly popular author, and Howe might have felt it was his duty to read a writer whose words would have an immediate effect on the morale of the population he had come to subdue.
Times have, of course, changed. In 2002, you often hinted that you did not even read newspapers. The image of you, barely able to pull yourself away from ESPN 1 to watch some paen to your genius on Fox News, was calculated to anger your enemies. The enemies at that point had, admittedly, dwindled. Here it is important to note – it is always important to note - that you were not really elected as president. You lost the popular vote. You were nevertheless elevated to your office in one of the most singular acts of corruption in U.S. history – since the Supreme Court, however low it has fallen at times, had never before played the role ward boss. If the U.S. were another country – say, Iran, or the Ukraine – the machinations that brought a man of your feeble abilities and family connections to power would have caused the U.S. state department to issue some tut-tuttery about the whole thing. However, solely because the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, you became popular. The rallying round effect erased the shameful memory of your criminal ascent. In addition, the knowledge that your disinterest in newspapers extended to disinterest in memos advising you of imminent Al Qaeda attack was not, in 2002, in the sphere of public knowledge.
What is one to make of the boast of ignorance by a man who is evidently willing to commit any infamy to become president? There is something bullying about the ignorance, something that hints at the kind of hoodlum who actually takes pride in some outrageous act of brutality. But, on balance, I don’t think that you are a hoodlum. Rather, yours is a character in which grudges have long been stored up and ossified. The contradiction between your failure to ever achieve anything by yourself, your reliance on a network of cronies, and the code of the self made man that is your public ideology, is too gross for you to completely ignore. Instead, a man of your type immediately decides that his failures are due to a cabal. In your set, that cabal is usually represented as some vague but powerful one composed of East Coast liberal elites. Without thinking much about it, you have obviously accept this idea. So to shock them by playing the Texas ignoramus proved irresistibly tempting to a man who, evidently, spent his happiest days as the class clown at the private school he went to long ago.
The short era in which playing the Clown Prince reaped applause is now over, however, and you are back to admitting to the habit of reading newspapers. This is progress of a sort – vaunting your ignorance as an electoral ploy is not a thing that even your most fanatic followers can stomach any longer. Even though they can stomach quite a bit.
With the myth of your functional illiteracy exploded, my conceit, that I am writing a letter to a man who might actually read it – however dim the chance – acquires a little more verisimilitude. My idea, then, is to occasionally pen letters to you about Iran, Iraq, your foreign policy, your environmental policy, your economic policy, etc. – and show you the error of your ways. Since your errors are so multitudinous and so fundamental, this task will require a little work. Like Paine, however, I believe that at the very center of the person is a flickering but permanent moment of liberty. By demonstrating, irrefutably, that you have set this nation on the path to ignoble defeat in Iraq; that you are acting the madman with regard to reality in the Middle East, in China, in Europe, and in Latin America; that you have multiplied and augmented the environmental crises that are now upon us; that you have oppressed the poor and the working class; that the money that you have poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the attempt to shift the balance of opportunities in this country, so that the descendents of the poor will always be poor, the descendents of the middle class will be burdened with such intolerable debts that they sink into poverty, and the descendents of the wealthy, like you yourself, will be free to tread across the bodies of their innumerable victims without any fear of retaliation, is blood money and fairy money – money that will be revenged, and money that will vanish; all of these things will, if you receive them into your heart, perhaps change you at the last minute into a tolerable human being and a president who, from being a laughing stock, becomes a leader upon whom we can look back with gratitude. There are those who say that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, especially if the sow has been hardened in her vices, stewed in her crib, for the whole of her life. But this is too hard on sows, I think, and it might even be too hard on you.
This is what Paine wrote to Howe:
“TO argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of
reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in
contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring
to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of
feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man
will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival
and a bear your master.”
And, a paragraph later:
“…it would be a pity to pass you from the world in state, and consign you to magnificent oblivion among the tombs, without telling the future beholder why. Judas is as much known as John, yet history ascribes their fame to very different actions.”
Paine is harsh, but then, he was also confident that fate had not bound him up entirely with the fate of Lord Howe. Unfortunately, your actions do have an effect on my fate. For that reason, I lean towards the generous notion that your ignorance is not so ingrained as to make all my scrubbing vain, but that it can be rubbed away with enough friction.
Yours truly,
Limited Inc.
PS -- My next letter may touch on this Washington Post article about Iran, and more specifically, your almost infallible ability to get things wrong, screw things up, and generally leave a ring of scum about the most mundane matters of government. Did you and your cronies actually believe you were going to make the Iranian government fall with a flick of your magic military hand? We must work on that vanity. While you are evidently a slothful man, and not the brightest bulb in the bunch, I don't really think these are the keys to your gross incompetence. No, it is your vanity that is your and, alas, our undoing.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Wayne Morse day
LI is busy, busy -- hey, yesterday we put the finishing touches on the first draft of our translation of Silja Graupe's "Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens. Die Methodologie der Wirtschafts-wissenschaften im Licht japanischer Philosophie." More on the publication of that book as it developes.
Anyway, here are some choice morsels from Wayne Morse, the Oregon Senator who was one of the two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Morse foresaw the age of the executive vanity war. Such as the war in Iraq that Americans are suffering from (a bit here, a bit there -- an invisible sector with its amputated limbs and its freaked out minds) and that the Iraqis are really suffering from -- you know, from the policy of war crimes with which the U.S. military has chosen to pursue this 'low intensity warfare,' from Fallujah to Haditha.
“Likewise, there are many Congressional politicians who would evade their responsibilities as to American foreign policy in Asia by use of the specious argument that “foreign policy is a matter for the Executive branch of the government. that branch has information no Congressman has access to.” Of course, such an alibi for evading Congressional responsibility in the field of foreign policy may be based on lack of understanding, or a convenient forgetting of our system of checks and balances, that exists and should be exercised in the relationships between and Among our co-ordinate and co-equal branches of government.
Granted, there are many in Congress that would prefer to pass the buck to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon building in respect to our unilateral American military action in Asia. nevertheless, I am satisfied that once the American people come ot understand the facts involved in the ill fated military operations in Asia, they will hold to an accounting those members of Congress who abdicated their responsibilities in the field of foreign policy.
It is an elementary principle of constitutional law that the Executive branch of government cannot spend taxpayer’s money in the field of foreign policy, or for any other purpose except when the appropriation is passed into law.
…
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to declare war is vested in the Congress. No President has the legal authority under the Constitution to send American boys to their death on a battlefield in the absense of a declaration of war. – Wayne Morse, July 17, 1964
What America needs to hear is the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, in community after community, across the length and breadth of this land, in protest against the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal war in South Vietnam. Those protest must be within the law. Those protests must not violate the law. But the administration must also act in keeping with the rights of the protesters under the first amendment.
…
I wish to make clear once more my views as to why this administration is not declaring war. There are two main reasons… The administration knows that to ask Congress for a declaration of war would start a historic debate at the grassroots of America. The administration would soon come to recognize that the American people want peace, not war.
Second a declaration of war would completely change the international law relationships immediately with every non-combatant country in the world.
- Sen. Morse, October 19, 1965
The United States is on the way toward leading mankind to a third world war. …
The resolution of August, 1964 cites southeast Asia as an area where the United States regards the maintenance of international peace and security as vital to our interests. I submit that the continued intrusion of large-scale American military forces, bases and navies in this area will destroy what little international peace and security is left to the people of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and eventually Burma and Cambodia, for the war that is lapping at their shores will engulf them, too, if it is allowed to proceed on its present course. – April, 1966
Anyway, here are some choice morsels from Wayne Morse, the Oregon Senator who was one of the two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Morse foresaw the age of the executive vanity war. Such as the war in Iraq that Americans are suffering from (a bit here, a bit there -- an invisible sector with its amputated limbs and its freaked out minds) and that the Iraqis are really suffering from -- you know, from the policy of war crimes with which the U.S. military has chosen to pursue this 'low intensity warfare,' from Fallujah to Haditha.
“Likewise, there are many Congressional politicians who would evade their responsibilities as to American foreign policy in Asia by use of the specious argument that “foreign policy is a matter for the Executive branch of the government. that branch has information no Congressman has access to.” Of course, such an alibi for evading Congressional responsibility in the field of foreign policy may be based on lack of understanding, or a convenient forgetting of our system of checks and balances, that exists and should be exercised in the relationships between and Among our co-ordinate and co-equal branches of government.
Granted, there are many in Congress that would prefer to pass the buck to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon building in respect to our unilateral American military action in Asia. nevertheless, I am satisfied that once the American people come ot understand the facts involved in the ill fated military operations in Asia, they will hold to an accounting those members of Congress who abdicated their responsibilities in the field of foreign policy.
It is an elementary principle of constitutional law that the Executive branch of government cannot spend taxpayer’s money in the field of foreign policy, or for any other purpose except when the appropriation is passed into law.
…
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to declare war is vested in the Congress. No President has the legal authority under the Constitution to send American boys to their death on a battlefield in the absense of a declaration of war. – Wayne Morse, July 17, 1964
What America needs to hear is the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, in community after community, across the length and breadth of this land, in protest against the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal war in South Vietnam. Those protest must be within the law. Those protests must not violate the law. But the administration must also act in keeping with the rights of the protesters under the first amendment.
…
I wish to make clear once more my views as to why this administration is not declaring war. There are two main reasons… The administration knows that to ask Congress for a declaration of war would start a historic debate at the grassroots of America. The administration would soon come to recognize that the American people want peace, not war.
Second a declaration of war would completely change the international law relationships immediately with every non-combatant country in the world.
- Sen. Morse, October 19, 1965
The United States is on the way toward leading mankind to a third world war. …
The resolution of August, 1964 cites southeast Asia as an area where the United States regards the maintenance of international peace and security as vital to our interests. I submit that the continued intrusion of large-scale American military forces, bases and navies in this area will destroy what little international peace and security is left to the people of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and eventually Burma and Cambodia, for the war that is lapping at their shores will engulf them, too, if it is allowed to proceed on its present course. – April, 1966
note on Charlotte Street
I received an email today from the former Charlotte Street blog. The new address of the blog is http://www.mark-kaplan.blogspot.com. The old Charlotte Street blog is now inhabited by a spam alien.
Friday, June 16, 2006
the power of bazooka
There are the business stories that horrify; the business stories that make you despair; and then, every once in a while, business stories that make you think that there are few ticks left in the old capitalist heart.
Of the last is this story in the New Yorker about Topps, the bubble gum company that sells Bazooka bubble gum: “Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries for a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. The older man was Arthur Shorin, the chairman of Topps, which in 1947 created the iconic bubble gum Bazooka. "I am a bubble-gum maven," Cherrie said recently. "You can't help but be in awe of Mr. Shorin. There's only a few of him left."
They were wandering through the Seaport, eating hot dogs, when Shorin turned to Cherrie and said, "You know how good this thing could be." Cherrie knew that he was talking about Bazooka. Once Topps's prize product, the brand had lost its cachet. Cherrie responded, "Mr. Shorin, not only do I know it but I have been coveting this brand my whole career. Nobody understands the power of Bazooka better than I do."”
The power of Bazooka. Cold War culture was, also, children’s culture. It was only after WWII that it became the norm to finish high school. And all the technology build up was coming on line in the 50s, after being frozen out in the 30s and being shoved aside for military tech in the forties. TVs, the household appliance house, the drugs. The infinitely fine threads between world wide political struggle and millions of kiddies, with the intermediaries, the world historical myths, being superheros. The atom bomb was kiddified into atom balls, those little hot red balls of sugar; and the dogfaced GI’s weapon of choice, at least in the movies, the bazooka – that bizarre name – was kiddified into a bubble gum comic figure. But the kiddies knew they came from a scary world, no matter what they put in their mouths. Randall Jarrell's poem was the lullaby in their bloodstream, and many grew up to find, in Vietnam, that the lullaby was God's truth:
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
LI doesn’t totally understand the power of Bazooka, but we understand Cherrie. Obviously, the man has something all too rare in the business field: respect. Lack of respect is inscribed in the bones and knitting of the current age of the CEO. The top management is trained to have no respect from day one at business school. They aspire to the morals of a rabid dog, and the time horizon of a car accident victim. The economy they are building reflects those salient qualities.
“So Joe, who began life fifty-three years ago as a crewcut boy with an eye patch, sprouted a few inches. His blond hair grew out and became fashionably tousled. He kept the eye patch but started wearing his cap backward. To keep him company, Topps artists developed five new sidekicks, including an excitable German named Wolfgang Spreckels. "We want Joe to be beyond this Americancentric guy," Cherrie said. "We have aspirations for him to find his way across the world. What better way to accomplish that than with an exchange student?"
Another of Joe's new pals is Casey McGavin, a tomboy. She likes bleacher seats and watching "SportsCenter." DJ Change, who wears headphones around his neck, is a slouchy music snob. ("You've gotta have somebody who's into the tunes," Cherrie said.) Cindy Lewis is an environmentalist. She likes to hike and volunteer, and she hangs out at the farmers' market. Cherrie said, "A lot of little kids are like this.
"Approximately thirteen per cent of the American population is African-American," he went on. "We'd be foolish to ignore it. But we didn't want to have some stereotypical urban black kid." So Topps created Kevin Griffin, a science geek who travels with an iguana on his shoulder. The only old friend Joe was allowed to keep was Mort, with his spiked hair and trademark turtleneck pulled up over his mouth. "Mort is Kramer for kids," Cherrie said.”
LI finds few news stories, nowadays, that don’t point to the heat death of the civilization and a blankness as of death creeping over the culture. That’s because LI is a bit of a depressed putz. But this story cheered us up: a infinitesimal progress in the kid kulture. Bazooka Joe for a better tomorrow.
Of the last is this story in the New Yorker about Topps, the bubble gum company that sells Bazooka bubble gum: “Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries for a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. The older man was Arthur Shorin, the chairman of Topps, which in 1947 created the iconic bubble gum Bazooka. "I am a bubble-gum maven," Cherrie said recently. "You can't help but be in awe of Mr. Shorin. There's only a few of him left."
They were wandering through the Seaport, eating hot dogs, when Shorin turned to Cherrie and said, "You know how good this thing could be." Cherrie knew that he was talking about Bazooka. Once Topps's prize product, the brand had lost its cachet. Cherrie responded, "Mr. Shorin, not only do I know it but I have been coveting this brand my whole career. Nobody understands the power of Bazooka better than I do."”
The power of Bazooka. Cold War culture was, also, children’s culture. It was only after WWII that it became the norm to finish high school. And all the technology build up was coming on line in the 50s, after being frozen out in the 30s and being shoved aside for military tech in the forties. TVs, the household appliance house, the drugs. The infinitely fine threads between world wide political struggle and millions of kiddies, with the intermediaries, the world historical myths, being superheros. The atom bomb was kiddified into atom balls, those little hot red balls of sugar; and the dogfaced GI’s weapon of choice, at least in the movies, the bazooka – that bizarre name – was kiddified into a bubble gum comic figure. But the kiddies knew they came from a scary world, no matter what they put in their mouths. Randall Jarrell's poem was the lullaby in their bloodstream, and many grew up to find, in Vietnam, that the lullaby was God's truth:
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
LI doesn’t totally understand the power of Bazooka, but we understand Cherrie. Obviously, the man has something all too rare in the business field: respect. Lack of respect is inscribed in the bones and knitting of the current age of the CEO. The top management is trained to have no respect from day one at business school. They aspire to the morals of a rabid dog, and the time horizon of a car accident victim. The economy they are building reflects those salient qualities.
“So Joe, who began life fifty-three years ago as a crewcut boy with an eye patch, sprouted a few inches. His blond hair grew out and became fashionably tousled. He kept the eye patch but started wearing his cap backward. To keep him company, Topps artists developed five new sidekicks, including an excitable German named Wolfgang Spreckels. "We want Joe to be beyond this Americancentric guy," Cherrie said. "We have aspirations for him to find his way across the world. What better way to accomplish that than with an exchange student?"
Another of Joe's new pals is Casey McGavin, a tomboy. She likes bleacher seats and watching "SportsCenter." DJ Change, who wears headphones around his neck, is a slouchy music snob. ("You've gotta have somebody who's into the tunes," Cherrie said.) Cindy Lewis is an environmentalist. She likes to hike and volunteer, and she hangs out at the farmers' market. Cherrie said, "A lot of little kids are like this.
"Approximately thirteen per cent of the American population is African-American," he went on. "We'd be foolish to ignore it. But we didn't want to have some stereotypical urban black kid." So Topps created Kevin Griffin, a science geek who travels with an iguana on his shoulder. The only old friend Joe was allowed to keep was Mort, with his spiked hair and trademark turtleneck pulled up over his mouth. "Mort is Kramer for kids," Cherrie said.”
LI finds few news stories, nowadays, that don’t point to the heat death of the civilization and a blankness as of death creeping over the culture. That’s because LI is a bit of a depressed putz. But this story cheered us up: a infinitesimal progress in the kid kulture. Bazooka Joe for a better tomorrow.
ARGENTINA REBELS
There’s a nice review of “Argentina rebels” in Le Monde today.
Info on the book: ARGENTINE REBELLE : UN LABORATOIRE DE CONTRE-POUVOIRS de Cécile
Raimbeau et Daniel Hérard. Alternatives, 144 pages, 20 €.
Raimbeau and Herard were in Argentina when the economy suddenly collapsed in 2000, and they watched as people simply took over factories, stores, and private property of the rich and the worthless and re-started the economy. A heartening story – and who knows? Since hyper-Peronism is in the saddle in these here states, we might have to be picking up the pieces in much the same way – rummaging in the fallen columns of the investment bank impact trail.
“If you loved the film, you will adore the book. The documentary, “memoirs of a sacking” by Fernando Solanas has planted the décor of the Argentine crises: the pillage of wealth in the wake of the wave of privatizations launched by peronist president Carlos Menem in the 90s, the impotence of his successor, Radical party president Fernando de la Rua to close the gates, then the economic collapse, followed by the moratorium on foreign debt in December, 2001.”
The merit of the book by Cecile Raimbeau and photographer Daniel Hérard is to recollect that period’s effervescence, and to describe the forms of social innovation put in place against the bankruptcies and closing of enterprises, the dizzing augmentation of unemployment and the fall into poverty of a population used to enjoying a level of life superior to the Latin American average.
Argentine rebelle presents the typology of forms of experimental struggle, from the demonstrations of pot bangers to the putting back into functioning closed enterprises or public services thanks to cooperation and other forms of autogestion, going though barter on a national level.
Facing a crisis of traditional political representation, neighborhood assemblies became the place of deliberation and mutual aid. The extension of barter and the blocking of bank accounts entrained the apparition of parallel currencies. The taking over of elementary needs, like transportaton or the distribution of water, the more or less fraudulent failure of a ceramics factory or a hotel, brought about forms of popular organization and transformed the participants.”
Info on the book: ARGENTINE REBELLE : UN LABORATOIRE DE CONTRE-POUVOIRS de Cécile
Raimbeau et Daniel Hérard. Alternatives, 144 pages, 20 €.
Raimbeau and Herard were in Argentina when the economy suddenly collapsed in 2000, and they watched as people simply took over factories, stores, and private property of the rich and the worthless and re-started the economy. A heartening story – and who knows? Since hyper-Peronism is in the saddle in these here states, we might have to be picking up the pieces in much the same way – rummaging in the fallen columns of the investment bank impact trail.
“If you loved the film, you will adore the book. The documentary, “memoirs of a sacking” by Fernando Solanas has planted the décor of the Argentine crises: the pillage of wealth in the wake of the wave of privatizations launched by peronist president Carlos Menem in the 90s, the impotence of his successor, Radical party president Fernando de la Rua to close the gates, then the economic collapse, followed by the moratorium on foreign debt in December, 2001.”
The merit of the book by Cecile Raimbeau and photographer Daniel Hérard is to recollect that period’s effervescence, and to describe the forms of social innovation put in place against the bankruptcies and closing of enterprises, the dizzing augmentation of unemployment and the fall into poverty of a population used to enjoying a level of life superior to the Latin American average.
Argentine rebelle presents the typology of forms of experimental struggle, from the demonstrations of pot bangers to the putting back into functioning closed enterprises or public services thanks to cooperation and other forms of autogestion, going though barter on a national level.
Facing a crisis of traditional political representation, neighborhood assemblies became the place of deliberation and mutual aid. The extension of barter and the blocking of bank accounts entrained the apparition of parallel currencies. The taking over of elementary needs, like transportaton or the distribution of water, the more or less fraudulent failure of a ceramics factory or a hotel, brought about forms of popular organization and transformed the participants.”
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Beinart again
Jonathan Swartz has been doing a nice job of slice and dice exegesis on Peter Beinart’s claim, made in an interview with Kevin Drum, that
“Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.”
Schwarz’s pithy summary of this farrago is: “Peter Beinart Finally Achieves 100% Gibberish.”
From a logical point of view, Schwartz is right. However, there is more going on here than logic.
Beinart and the court D.C. set are not completely crazy to have decided to make jihadism the object of a ‘long war.’ First, however, one has to say that logically, this is one of the funnier isms ever – consider that it fits into a series including prayerism, meditationism, and reflexionism, or, ratcheting up the fiercesomeness, Iron Johnism (from the 90s male liberation movement). I imagine that at this assembly of apocalyptic movements our readership is already trembling like tapioca in an earthquake. But for those who can keep their teeth from chattering, you will notice that the main threat posed by this series is that each encloses its acolytes in such time consuming practice that it takes away from quality time better devoted to sexual congress. That’s about it, as far as the threat level goes. These aren’t even first person shooter games.
Politically, however, there is some subgenius thing going on. The cold war is obviously so hardwired into the D.C. mindset that the nineties, our glimpse of a world without a long war, caused actual physical agony among the think tanks – daylight seeped through the windows of the New American century, the Heritage Foundation, the Brooks Brothers Institute, the Psychotic Robotrons for a Stronger America Institute and other well funded and well staffed booby hatches, and many vampires, reportedly, died. To this day, it is said, Richard Perle has scars on his body.
But never let it be said that these low lights and paragons of political science were not thinking hard about strategy, geo-politics, the state of exception, tactical warfare, and the sweet taste of nymphette blood on a full moon night.
The problem with the Cold War, in a nutshell, was that the enemy actually had a few very attractive notions up its sleeve. Like the social welfare state. Like social and economic justice. Like equality. Like public investment. And the response in the West, up until the social welfare states were entrenched, was to compete partly by diluting the bloody capitalist order to accommodate the social welfare state. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights movement just didn’t coincide in time – they operated in the same political continuum. At the time, this was openly acknowledged. The investment made, for instance, in science education in the U.S. after 1957 was attributed directly to the Sputnik scare.
Hence, the genius of a long war on a non-existent enemy whose program is almost completely repulsive, insofar as you simply make it up on the spot of various exotic and repulsive items. Double bonus -- you can then justify the most repulsive behavior on the part of the anti-Jihadist forces -- razing Fallujah, say -- by claiming that these jihadists must be fought without moral compunction.
Jihadism isn’t even a Wahabi form of Islam – the closest thing to it that I can imagine is the Taliban in Afghanistan. The idea that the long war is on varieties of the Taliban (while, of course, the U.S.’s great ally in the Middle East remains Saudi Arabia and we spoonfeed billions to the Pakistani government that created the Taliban and, according to the current Afghan government, still sustains it) is, from the vampiric view of the defense industries, simply stunning – it is thinking out of the box, as the vampires like to say, with a chuckle – oh, they know about those long boxes in which the Peter Beinart types like to lie around, during the day. In one brilliant flash, it justifies pouring hundreds of billions into defense industries, allows for a prospective infinity of debates, white papers, meetings, and high level appointments, and undermines any metric of success. It is as if the U.S. declared itself rigidly, passionately, and completely committed to hunting unicorns.
Thus, the perfect war, in which the profit going to the plutocrats would not have to be balanced in any way by any act of economic justice to tame the potentially restive masses. And icing on the cake is the whole new world of executive branch mercenaries, the synthesis of ‘private military forces’ and the volunteer army, with no congressional restraint upon their deployment anywhere, at any time. This is Beinart's Utopia: Bushism forever.
“Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.”
Schwarz’s pithy summary of this farrago is: “Peter Beinart Finally Achieves 100% Gibberish.”
From a logical point of view, Schwartz is right. However, there is more going on here than logic.
Beinart and the court D.C. set are not completely crazy to have decided to make jihadism the object of a ‘long war.’ First, however, one has to say that logically, this is one of the funnier isms ever – consider that it fits into a series including prayerism, meditationism, and reflexionism, or, ratcheting up the fiercesomeness, Iron Johnism (from the 90s male liberation movement). I imagine that at this assembly of apocalyptic movements our readership is already trembling like tapioca in an earthquake. But for those who can keep their teeth from chattering, you will notice that the main threat posed by this series is that each encloses its acolytes in such time consuming practice that it takes away from quality time better devoted to sexual congress. That’s about it, as far as the threat level goes. These aren’t even first person shooter games.
Politically, however, there is some subgenius thing going on. The cold war is obviously so hardwired into the D.C. mindset that the nineties, our glimpse of a world without a long war, caused actual physical agony among the think tanks – daylight seeped through the windows of the New American century, the Heritage Foundation, the Brooks Brothers Institute, the Psychotic Robotrons for a Stronger America Institute and other well funded and well staffed booby hatches, and many vampires, reportedly, died. To this day, it is said, Richard Perle has scars on his body.
But never let it be said that these low lights and paragons of political science were not thinking hard about strategy, geo-politics, the state of exception, tactical warfare, and the sweet taste of nymphette blood on a full moon night.
The problem with the Cold War, in a nutshell, was that the enemy actually had a few very attractive notions up its sleeve. Like the social welfare state. Like social and economic justice. Like equality. Like public investment. And the response in the West, up until the social welfare states were entrenched, was to compete partly by diluting the bloody capitalist order to accommodate the social welfare state. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights movement just didn’t coincide in time – they operated in the same political continuum. At the time, this was openly acknowledged. The investment made, for instance, in science education in the U.S. after 1957 was attributed directly to the Sputnik scare.
Hence, the genius of a long war on a non-existent enemy whose program is almost completely repulsive, insofar as you simply make it up on the spot of various exotic and repulsive items. Double bonus -- you can then justify the most repulsive behavior on the part of the anti-Jihadist forces -- razing Fallujah, say -- by claiming that these jihadists must be fought without moral compunction.
Jihadism isn’t even a Wahabi form of Islam – the closest thing to it that I can imagine is the Taliban in Afghanistan. The idea that the long war is on varieties of the Taliban (while, of course, the U.S.’s great ally in the Middle East remains Saudi Arabia and we spoonfeed billions to the Pakistani government that created the Taliban and, according to the current Afghan government, still sustains it) is, from the vampiric view of the defense industries, simply stunning – it is thinking out of the box, as the vampires like to say, with a chuckle – oh, they know about those long boxes in which the Peter Beinart types like to lie around, during the day. In one brilliant flash, it justifies pouring hundreds of billions into defense industries, allows for a prospective infinity of debates, white papers, meetings, and high level appointments, and undermines any metric of success. It is as if the U.S. declared itself rigidly, passionately, and completely committed to hunting unicorns.
Thus, the perfect war, in which the profit going to the plutocrats would not have to be balanced in any way by any act of economic justice to tame the potentially restive masses. And icing on the cake is the whole new world of executive branch mercenaries, the synthesis of ‘private military forces’ and the volunteer army, with no congressional restraint upon their deployment anywhere, at any time. This is Beinart's Utopia: Bushism forever.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
“It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent Practice, when one Prince desires the Assistance of another to secure him against an Invasion, that the Assistant, when he hath driven out the Invader, should seize on the Dominions himself, and kill, imprison or banish the Prince he came to relieve. Alliance by Blood or Marriage, is a frequent Cause of War between Princes; and the nearer the Kindred is, the greater is their Disposition to quarrel: Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud; and Pride and Hunger will ever be at variance. For those Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.” – Jonathan Swift
Surprise. For three years, the media salivates about killing people – the recent flurry of stories glorying in the fact that the bomb that eviscerated Zarqawi did leave him a number of hours of pain to give us bystanders that extra soupcon of pleasure, provides us with a recent example. And then we have a ‘volunteer army’ – which means, really, one half composed of shanghai-ed National Guard, who are properly supposed to serve only domestically, sent overseas in order to avoid disturbing the jammy comfort level of the people back home who are reveling in their high gas prices, their stagnant wages, and voting for their tax cuts. These kidnapped troops are being cycled and recycled through the killing fields, with the usual high rate of injury, and the mental terror of themselves having to kill Iraqis, since to kill always puts a dark spot on the brain; killing comes back, in dreams, in sudden starts, riding down the street in a car, arguing with the wife or the husband or the son or daughter. And of course the price is paid ten times over by the Iraqis themselves. So the mix has been made, we’ve all danced to the music, and just like the old Vietnam days, crime is starting to rise. Wow, is that a surprise?
No, it isn’t even a consideration. WAPO, giving us the figures, isn’t deigning to match the rise in crime in the Midwest with the figures showing the majority of recruits are coming from the Midwest. Nor are they going to attribute the rise in crime to anything like the bloodthirsty culture they indulge in, editorially, day in and day out. So it is just a big, big coincidence that the end of the Cold War marks the downturn in crime – from 1991 – and the beginning of the mock war on jihadism marks an upturn in crime.
“The rise in violent offenses nationally represents the largest overall crime increase since 1991. Violent crime peaked in 1992, before beginning to plummet to its lowest levels in three decades.”
One hears the old suburbanite complaint in the background here. Can this be? Can’t American turn our jails into more permanent hellholes? Can’t Americans encourage more prison rape, longer sentences for ever more absurd offences, and – most of all –the march of black men in particular through those slaughterhouses, allowing the good citizen to vicariously and deftly strip these men of their civil rights, inheritors of a history of being boggled, chained, and lynched from American times immemorial of glorious freedom lovin’ history? Which history spills out into Iraq, where again, dark skinned men are the target of opportunity. But there is always a price to pay for killing as many of your species as possible. There are echoes and reverberations. There is the moral plague that is carried home.
“Criminal justice experts said there were a number of possible explanations for the increase, including an influx of gangs into medium-size cities and a predicted surge in the number of inmates released from U.S. prisons. The jump could also represent a lingering effect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, some experts said, because governments at all levels have diverted resources away from traditional crime fighting in favor of anti-terrorism and homeland security programs.
"One possibility for the rise overall that we will want to watch is whether the shifting of law enforcement priorities to various kinds of homeland security duties accounts for any of this," said David A. Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who studies homeland security and criminal justice issues.”
We’ve searched our damn archives for the post – alas, we haven’t found it – in which LI cawed prophetically about the rise in crime that would inevitably follow war in Iraq. Nobody is going to connect those dots, though.
In fact, the media, feeling awful bad that it even reported on the massacre at Haditha – and in some articles hinted that the techniques used there were perfected in Falluja, that war crime of blessed memory - has decided to go along with the Bush publicity offensive of the moment. Thus, we are being served the rewarmed, optimistic pablum of 2003 all over again. LI wonders when the choking point is finally, finally going to come.
Instead of Harris, LI has consulted another expert on homeland security and justice issues – the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah wrote:
And say, Hear the word of the LORD, O king of Judah, that
sittest upon the throne of David, thou, and thy servants, and
thy people that enter in by these gates:
Thus saith the LORD; Execute ye judgment and righteousness,
and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and
do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless,
nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.
For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of
David, riding in chariots and on horses, he, and his servants,
and his people.
But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself, saith
the LORD, that this house shall become a desolation.
Surprise. For three years, the media salivates about killing people – the recent flurry of stories glorying in the fact that the bomb that eviscerated Zarqawi did leave him a number of hours of pain to give us bystanders that extra soupcon of pleasure, provides us with a recent example. And then we have a ‘volunteer army’ – which means, really, one half composed of shanghai-ed National Guard, who are properly supposed to serve only domestically, sent overseas in order to avoid disturbing the jammy comfort level of the people back home who are reveling in their high gas prices, their stagnant wages, and voting for their tax cuts. These kidnapped troops are being cycled and recycled through the killing fields, with the usual high rate of injury, and the mental terror of themselves having to kill Iraqis, since to kill always puts a dark spot on the brain; killing comes back, in dreams, in sudden starts, riding down the street in a car, arguing with the wife or the husband or the son or daughter. And of course the price is paid ten times over by the Iraqis themselves. So the mix has been made, we’ve all danced to the music, and just like the old Vietnam days, crime is starting to rise. Wow, is that a surprise?
No, it isn’t even a consideration. WAPO, giving us the figures, isn’t deigning to match the rise in crime in the Midwest with the figures showing the majority of recruits are coming from the Midwest. Nor are they going to attribute the rise in crime to anything like the bloodthirsty culture they indulge in, editorially, day in and day out. So it is just a big, big coincidence that the end of the Cold War marks the downturn in crime – from 1991 – and the beginning of the mock war on jihadism marks an upturn in crime.
“The rise in violent offenses nationally represents the largest overall crime increase since 1991. Violent crime peaked in 1992, before beginning to plummet to its lowest levels in three decades.”
One hears the old suburbanite complaint in the background here. Can this be? Can’t American turn our jails into more permanent hellholes? Can’t Americans encourage more prison rape, longer sentences for ever more absurd offences, and – most of all –the march of black men in particular through those slaughterhouses, allowing the good citizen to vicariously and deftly strip these men of their civil rights, inheritors of a history of being boggled, chained, and lynched from American times immemorial of glorious freedom lovin’ history? Which history spills out into Iraq, where again, dark skinned men are the target of opportunity. But there is always a price to pay for killing as many of your species as possible. There are echoes and reverberations. There is the moral plague that is carried home.
“Criminal justice experts said there were a number of possible explanations for the increase, including an influx of gangs into medium-size cities and a predicted surge in the number of inmates released from U.S. prisons. The jump could also represent a lingering effect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, some experts said, because governments at all levels have diverted resources away from traditional crime fighting in favor of anti-terrorism and homeland security programs.
"One possibility for the rise overall that we will want to watch is whether the shifting of law enforcement priorities to various kinds of homeland security duties accounts for any of this," said David A. Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who studies homeland security and criminal justice issues.”
We’ve searched our damn archives for the post – alas, we haven’t found it – in which LI cawed prophetically about the rise in crime that would inevitably follow war in Iraq. Nobody is going to connect those dots, though.
In fact, the media, feeling awful bad that it even reported on the massacre at Haditha – and in some articles hinted that the techniques used there were perfected in Falluja, that war crime of blessed memory - has decided to go along with the Bush publicity offensive of the moment. Thus, we are being served the rewarmed, optimistic pablum of 2003 all over again. LI wonders when the choking point is finally, finally going to come.
Instead of Harris, LI has consulted another expert on homeland security and justice issues – the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah wrote:
And say, Hear the word of the LORD, O king of Judah, that
sittest upon the throne of David, thou, and thy servants, and
thy people that enter in by these gates:
Thus saith the LORD; Execute ye judgment and righteousness,
and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and
do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless,
nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.
For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of
David, riding in chariots and on horses, he, and his servants,
and his people.
But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself, saith
the LORD, that this house shall become a desolation.
Monday, June 12, 2006
on the schmitt fest
Long Sunday is hosting another symposium, this one on Carl Schmitt. We found the last symposium on Gayatri Spivak thought provoking – but our own preoccupations at the moment don’t jibe with Schmitt. We are bored with Schmitt talk. We disagree with the motivation for it – that is, that there is a philosophy behind the fascist state like there is behind the communist state. While Mussolini actually had your usual pundit-philosophical mind and liked people to see the collected works of Nietzsche in his office, he operated on the hop; as for Hitler, fascism in Germany was a matter of the continuation of institutional changes, for instance Van Seeckt’s in the military, combined with the reinflation caused by military keynesianism. The institutional innovations really did have a future – and then of course there was the mad streetdog stew of bigotries.
The funny thing about Heidegger applying, basically, for the job of National Socialistic philosopher is how incomprehensible his gibberish must have seemed, next to the flow of clear spring water coming out of Alfred Rosenberg. Such simplicity! Decadence comes from the Jews. Strength is good. A leader is good. A strong leader is gooder and gooder. Etc. Save for the pathological aggression and the (by this time) eccentric version of social Darwinism transposed to ‘races’, this is the kind of pap that would pass for common sense at any chamber of commerce meeting in Sinclair Lewis’ America. The job Heidegger applied for, in other words, was much better filled by dropout.
This, at least, is how we see that history. Nor do we see Schmittian themes as especially pertinent in America or Europe at the moment. Schmitt’s political philosophy actually seems more suited to another moment in German history: the beginning of the West German government. In that moment, a nation in which the bureaucracy and court system were still full of former Nazis did need a philosophical justification that went beyond the expediency of defeat. And that was the Schmittian moment, if there ever was one.
Now of course, all of this all might just come down to our idiosyncratic blindness to Schmitt’s je ne sais quoi.
Anyway, one of Schmitt’s mentors does interest us more and more – Georg Simmel. Institutions were the genius of the Nazi state; the institutionalization of war was its legacy to the post WWII world. We were reading Simmel the other day about war and socialization. Simmel was, like many a German intellectual, swept up in the war fervor of 1914. His pupil Ernst Bloch was shocked by Simmel’s idea that the war would lead to cultural elevation, and broke with him. Simmel wrote to Weber that Lukacs didn’t get it – a slight Lukacs, who indeed didn’t and also broke with the Webers over the war, resented.
Simmel gave a talk in 1916 in Vienna (surely the object of some derisive gloss by Kraus in the Fackel) in which he lays out his critique of modernity and his speculation that war, war, war is the answer. The critique of modernity derives from his analysis in the Philosophy of Money. Here it is in extremely compressed form:
“Thus every attitude that it is desirable to cultivate is bound to the form of a end and a means. But this But this attitude is split into countless partial orientations. Life is composed out of actions and productivitiess, for which a unified direction is recognizable, or even exists. only partially.”
Simmel, like Marx, was impressed by the new social distances capitalism created – the distance between the making of the product and the consumer, for instance. These distances were ingrained in the habits and impressions of everyday life. It is as if that life absorbed a huge omission – the omission of the actual means of production –in its everyday consciousness. In this way, real life moves closer to the movie and the movie to the mall, insofar as movies are enacted around the props of opulence that come from somewhere elsewhere – that are the givens -- and the department stores were a staging of those props for the movie goer. The way life is conducted in a movie becomes the ideal for conducting life. At least, this is one way of understanding Simmel’s view of the peculiar character of alienated modernity. Here is a world in which final goals, or the ends of man, were hidden behind the middle elements of the series of means to those goals. Most notably, of course, that middle series is governed by money. The crisis of culture comes about as the individual falls behind the structures he – or at least Man, der Mensch, the Paul Bunyan of German philosophy – has created. In a telling phrase, Simmel writes:
“The total hastiness, the exterior greediness and search for enjoyment of this age are only consequences and reaction phenomena, because the personal values are sought on a level in which they simply don’t exist: that technical progress without anything else is valued as cultural progress, that in the mental doman the methods often are valued as something holy and more important that the substantial results, that the will to money leaves the things, of which it is the means of payment, far behind it; this all proves the gradual submersion of ends and goals through means and ways.”
(Sorry if those semi-colons lead us on a bit of a wild goose chase – Simmel is a weird writer to translate).
Into this world comes the war. So, what does war do? Well, war has an odd authenticity, according to Simmel. In war, the inverted world rights itself – once again we can properly sort the means and the ends out. Modernity’s ripped soul – its ability to add book to book and technique to technique in a growing network of means, and the consequence obsolescence of ends -- is overcome in battle. He even makes this odd claim – although not so odd for anyone who has seen a Hollywood war film in the past couple of decades:
"War seems to shrink that rip [in modern culture] from two sides. Behind the soldier sinks the whole apparatus of culture, not only because he must actually dispense with it, but instead because the sense and challenge of existence in war relies on a performance, the moral consciousness [Wertbewusstsein] of which does not first take a detour through objects.
His force and morale, skill and endurance are immediately authenticated as the values of his existence, and obviously the ‘war machine’ has a whole other, and infinitely more living relationship to what he serves than the machinery of the factory."
Simmel’s claims have been routinized in the U.S. He could be writing ad copy for the Army, or commenting on the scene in Full Metal Jacket where it is explained that the rifle is your wife. This utopia of immediate ends and authentic objects should be put in context, however. Simmel’s idea that the ends of man could be found in the trenches was founded on a hopelessly out of date image of war. In last fall’s War in History there is a passage in Matthias Strohn’s essay on von Seeckt that makes the class coordinates of German military formation clear. The drivers for the Germans were, pari passu, the drivers that were in place in the remaking of the post-Vietnam American army:
“However, Seeckt drew different lessons from the war. In his campaigns he had seen that small, well-trained and mobile forces could overcome an opponent who was numerically stronger. Moreover, he realized that the army’s enlargement in the pre-war years and then during the war had had impacts on both the military and the political value of the army. The Volksheer’s discipline and morale had proven fragile, and Seeckt was worried about the inherent dangers of democratization. This was of course not an entirely new point of view. The question of parliamentary influence and democratization had been at the core of the Prussian state crisis of the 1860s, and only the arms race of 1912–14 and the general staff’s war plans had finally convinced the Kaiser and the Prussian war ministry of the necessity of the nation in arms.11 They had believed that the army should be recruited from the
more conservative rural people, instead of drafting the towns’ workers, who would bring socialist ideas and thus social unrest into the army. Seeckt was therefore in accordance with the pre-war opinion of the military when he stated that the masses, especially the cities’ proletariat, were lacking in military spirit. As brilliant and original as Seeckt was in his thinking, he was still a product of his class and highly critical of democratic ideas.
Moreover, the war had shown that the short training of conscripts could no longer meet the demands of modern, increasingly technical warfare, and it therefore appeared logical to Seeckt that the longserving, professional soldier would be the ‘more valuable warrior’.”
Seeckt's doctrine is undergoing a bit of a crisis in Iraq. And if LI has anything to do with it, democracy's revenge will be to squeeze the supply of professional soldiers until the army yells uncle.
The funny thing about Heidegger applying, basically, for the job of National Socialistic philosopher is how incomprehensible his gibberish must have seemed, next to the flow of clear spring water coming out of Alfred Rosenberg. Such simplicity! Decadence comes from the Jews. Strength is good. A leader is good. A strong leader is gooder and gooder. Etc. Save for the pathological aggression and the (by this time) eccentric version of social Darwinism transposed to ‘races’, this is the kind of pap that would pass for common sense at any chamber of commerce meeting in Sinclair Lewis’ America. The job Heidegger applied for, in other words, was much better filled by dropout.
This, at least, is how we see that history. Nor do we see Schmittian themes as especially pertinent in America or Europe at the moment. Schmitt’s political philosophy actually seems more suited to another moment in German history: the beginning of the West German government. In that moment, a nation in which the bureaucracy and court system were still full of former Nazis did need a philosophical justification that went beyond the expediency of defeat. And that was the Schmittian moment, if there ever was one.
Now of course, all of this all might just come down to our idiosyncratic blindness to Schmitt’s je ne sais quoi.
Anyway, one of Schmitt’s mentors does interest us more and more – Georg Simmel. Institutions were the genius of the Nazi state; the institutionalization of war was its legacy to the post WWII world. We were reading Simmel the other day about war and socialization. Simmel was, like many a German intellectual, swept up in the war fervor of 1914. His pupil Ernst Bloch was shocked by Simmel’s idea that the war would lead to cultural elevation, and broke with him. Simmel wrote to Weber that Lukacs didn’t get it – a slight Lukacs, who indeed didn’t and also broke with the Webers over the war, resented.
Simmel gave a talk in 1916 in Vienna (surely the object of some derisive gloss by Kraus in the Fackel) in which he lays out his critique of modernity and his speculation that war, war, war is the answer. The critique of modernity derives from his analysis in the Philosophy of Money. Here it is in extremely compressed form:
“Thus every attitude that it is desirable to cultivate is bound to the form of a end and a means. But this But this attitude is split into countless partial orientations. Life is composed out of actions and productivitiess, for which a unified direction is recognizable, or even exists. only partially.”
Simmel, like Marx, was impressed by the new social distances capitalism created – the distance between the making of the product and the consumer, for instance. These distances were ingrained in the habits and impressions of everyday life. It is as if that life absorbed a huge omission – the omission of the actual means of production –in its everyday consciousness. In this way, real life moves closer to the movie and the movie to the mall, insofar as movies are enacted around the props of opulence that come from somewhere elsewhere – that are the givens -- and the department stores were a staging of those props for the movie goer. The way life is conducted in a movie becomes the ideal for conducting life. At least, this is one way of understanding Simmel’s view of the peculiar character of alienated modernity. Here is a world in which final goals, or the ends of man, were hidden behind the middle elements of the series of means to those goals. Most notably, of course, that middle series is governed by money. The crisis of culture comes about as the individual falls behind the structures he – or at least Man, der Mensch, the Paul Bunyan of German philosophy – has created. In a telling phrase, Simmel writes:
“The total hastiness, the exterior greediness and search for enjoyment of this age are only consequences and reaction phenomena, because the personal values are sought on a level in which they simply don’t exist: that technical progress without anything else is valued as cultural progress, that in the mental doman the methods often are valued as something holy and more important that the substantial results, that the will to money leaves the things, of which it is the means of payment, far behind it; this all proves the gradual submersion of ends and goals through means and ways.”
(Sorry if those semi-colons lead us on a bit of a wild goose chase – Simmel is a weird writer to translate).
Into this world comes the war. So, what does war do? Well, war has an odd authenticity, according to Simmel. In war, the inverted world rights itself – once again we can properly sort the means and the ends out. Modernity’s ripped soul – its ability to add book to book and technique to technique in a growing network of means, and the consequence obsolescence of ends -- is overcome in battle. He even makes this odd claim – although not so odd for anyone who has seen a Hollywood war film in the past couple of decades:
"War seems to shrink that rip [in modern culture] from two sides. Behind the soldier sinks the whole apparatus of culture, not only because he must actually dispense with it, but instead because the sense and challenge of existence in war relies on a performance, the moral consciousness [Wertbewusstsein] of which does not first take a detour through objects.
His force and morale, skill and endurance are immediately authenticated as the values of his existence, and obviously the ‘war machine’ has a whole other, and infinitely more living relationship to what he serves than the machinery of the factory."
Simmel’s claims have been routinized in the U.S. He could be writing ad copy for the Army, or commenting on the scene in Full Metal Jacket where it is explained that the rifle is your wife. This utopia of immediate ends and authentic objects should be put in context, however. Simmel’s idea that the ends of man could be found in the trenches was founded on a hopelessly out of date image of war. In last fall’s War in History there is a passage in Matthias Strohn’s essay on von Seeckt that makes the class coordinates of German military formation clear. The drivers for the Germans were, pari passu, the drivers that were in place in the remaking of the post-Vietnam American army:
“However, Seeckt drew different lessons from the war. In his campaigns he had seen that small, well-trained and mobile forces could overcome an opponent who was numerically stronger. Moreover, he realized that the army’s enlargement in the pre-war years and then during the war had had impacts on both the military and the political value of the army. The Volksheer’s discipline and morale had proven fragile, and Seeckt was worried about the inherent dangers of democratization. This was of course not an entirely new point of view. The question of parliamentary influence and democratization had been at the core of the Prussian state crisis of the 1860s, and only the arms race of 1912–14 and the general staff’s war plans had finally convinced the Kaiser and the Prussian war ministry of the necessity of the nation in arms.11 They had believed that the army should be recruited from the
more conservative rural people, instead of drafting the towns’ workers, who would bring socialist ideas and thus social unrest into the army. Seeckt was therefore in accordance with the pre-war opinion of the military when he stated that the masses, especially the cities’ proletariat, were lacking in military spirit. As brilliant and original as Seeckt was in his thinking, he was still a product of his class and highly critical of democratic ideas.
Moreover, the war had shown that the short training of conscripts could no longer meet the demands of modern, increasingly technical warfare, and it therefore appeared logical to Seeckt that the longserving, professional soldier would be the ‘more valuable warrior’.”
Seeckt's doctrine is undergoing a bit of a crisis in Iraq. And if LI has anything to do with it, democracy's revenge will be to squeeze the supply of professional soldiers until the army yells uncle.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century
An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...