ann

Ann Richards is dead. Those who aren’t Texans might have a moment connecting name to face, or more than a moment. But those who are Texans will be … shocked, I guess is the word.

Here are two anecdotes about the former governor from the Houston Chronicle obituary:

“After voting early one afternoon at the Travis County courthouse, Gov. Ann Richards held up her Department of Public Safety detail to admire a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Richards carefully studied the bike, admiring its shiny chrome in the October sunlight, its size, shape and color.
When a reporter queried the governor about what she was doing, Richards replied: "I am trying to decide whether I want a cruise, or a Harley for my 60th birthday."
It was a short news story, accompanied by a photograph, that got noticed by the motorcycle company's moguls. Within hours of publication, Richards had a letter offering her a Harley-Davidson.
Richards, 73, died Wednesday after a six-month battle against esophageal cancer. Her death prompted others to praise her legacy to Texas and her well-known wit that made her national political star.
Richards' former press secretary Bill Cryer of Austin, recalled the whole Harley-Davidson saga.
"Right after that story, she came into my office and said, 'You're going to have to learn to ride a motorcycle with me.' So, she and I spent every Sunday (the next) August, learning how to ride a motorcycle, out on the Department of Public Safety headquarters' parking lot," Cryer said. "She got her license, and I got my license. And I still ride a motorcycle."
On her 60th birthday, Richards went to the DPS and passed the test for her motorcycle license. She donated the Harley-Davidson to the DPS' motorcycle safety training classes.”
And here is the second one:
“Richards -- and many other Democrats -- used to frequent a small Mexican food cafe on Congress Avenue, Las Manitas.( Republicans go there now.)
Once, Richards ordered a cappucino, and the waitress apologetically explained that they only had coffee. True to her generous spirit (and selfish to her love for cappucino) Richards bought the owners of the small restaurant a beautiful, copper cappucino maker.
There is an official portrait of Ann Richards next to the cash register at Las Manitas. With her irreverent sense of humor, Richards signed it: "Thanks for all the great food. Love, Meg Ryan."”
It isn’t that LI unequivocally loved Ann Richards – we know how responsible she was, in the early 80s, for developing Travis County. And at one time that was still a very sore topic. But shit, I’m tired of grudges - beware of the carcinogenic quality of memory. She may have been the last Democratic Texas governor in this state, or at least for the next fifty years. And she was one of those Dixie governors – the populist governors, like Earl and Hughie – for whom politics was inseparable from appetite – not like the pinheaded ideologues of today, not the policymaking wonks, not the exercise freaks, the people Burke despised, the theoreticians. This shouldn’t pass from the world without a few tears.

introducing the LI sockpuppet

A recent post on ufobreakfast convinced LI that we were falling behind the times. The middle aged man, in this busy, blogorific epoch, is nothing without his own sockpuppet -- a loveable pseudonym/imaginary friend that can lick his ass and attack his enemies.

So we've been auditioning sockpuppets.

YOURTHEBIGGESTGENIUSEVER turned in a very fine comment on our Kiss me post: "this journalism, not unlike Moses' ten commandments, will change all of human history." However, YOURETC. forgot, in a post that doesn't really get to the heart of our brilliance, that the ten commandments are not journalism. Moses, like Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, was a new journalist, and so he reported on himself in the third person in Exodus. However, there is a difference between journalism and what journalism reports -- or at least, that is what they taught me at the Deep Eddie bar I hang around. I don't want to have to be correcting my sockpuppet, otherwise what is the point? So, alas, we told YOURETC to set up his own blog and get a few links from Instapundit.

Now, since the most famous sockpuppet at the moment is Lee Siegal's Sprezzatura, we did call up its agent, and Sprezzatura agreed to try out on the Tomatoes post. But Sprezzatura obviously has worked the New Republic route a little too much. His comment was, This post, as so many of your brave and brilliant posts, are like bullets in the back of the Israeli hating Islamo-fascists that I know you, for one, would give your wife and sacrifice your neighbors, and their dogs, and even their goldfish to stop. Thumbs up -- even better than Marty Peretz!

Personally, I don't think Sprezzatura was even trying. Supposedly he has been flooded with offers, and you know how uppity a sockpuppet can get. If you DON'T, I suggest you see that old Anthony Hopkins movie, Magic.

As Sprezzatura and his entourage walked out the door with LI's week's supply of cocaine (goddamn that little pissant!), another sockpuppet, Jesuslovesyourbigcock, walked in. At first of course we mistook him for spam, since spam is always either trying to enlarge our penis or get us to pour the treasures of our checking account into a sure thing investment. After showing us ID, Jesuslovesyourbigcock wrote, about the Marat post: You are my Rebel-in-Chief, LI - spermatic, decisive, a skinny A.J. Liebling. You are reaching the young people of America with your marvelous prose, and they are, figuratively, throwing down their swords, or at least giving up their fucking war gamer mentality, and turning them into plowshares.

Hot diddley! Now that's what I call sockpuppetry. On the spot we hired him -- which is why the cupboard is now totally bare of blow! Oh well, we hope it is worth it. Those in the LI community who have a cup of cocaine they can loan us should mail us ASAP.

Nine views of Jean Paul Marat (first part)

Création difforme de la société, Fille sourde de cette mère aveugle. Lie de ce pressoir, Marat c’est le mal souffert devenu le mal vengeur… "
- Victor Hugo


1. Of all those revolutionary lives in the 1790s, Marat's has the most symbolic narrative arc -- a hider in the sewers, a brief triumph over his enemies, the moderate Girondists, a death in the bathtub, apotheosis in David's famous picture. Its symbolic perfection is exploited both by those who find Marat a saint and those who find him an ogre. To Taine, he was obviously insane with delusions of gradeur – le delire ambitieux. To his Marxist biographer, Earnest Belfort Bax, he was, as he entitled himself, the “people’s friend,” although untutored in the ways of class – a transitional figure, in short, which nineteenth century Marxists loved the way Darwinians loved fossils of mammoths and pygmy horses. I think he is a prototype of that essentially modern figure, the Underground Man. After all, he literally did hide underground – in Paris’ sewers, waiting out a hunt mounted for him by the police. While hiding from the police is nothing new, there is something very interesting about Marat’s legendary descent into the sewer. He himself exploited it for its mythic resonances – as though he foresaw the romantic aura that would attach to it in the nineteenth century. On November 2, 1792, Marat writes:

“Freres et amis, c’est d’un souterrain que je vous addresse mes reclamations. Le devoir de conserver, pour la defense de la patrie, des jours qui me sont enfin devenus a charge, peut seul me determiner a m’enterrer de nouveau tout vivant pour me soustraire au poignard des laches assassins qui me poursuivent sans relache.”

[Brothers and friends, I am sending you these protests from the underground [literally – from an underground tunnel]. The duty to preserve myself for the defense of my country, with the days that I have left, are the only reasons that have determined me to bury myself once gain, alive, in order to remove myself from the dagger of cowardly assassins who pursue me without letup.]

2. This is unbelievably stirring, if you have the right historic sense for it. On a popular level, this is the release of a voice that will be exploited throughout the nineteenth century, in novel after novel. This is the Comte de Monte Cristo. This is the attitude of Les Miserables – or part of the mix of elements Hugo put into that novel. The more sinister undertone, in English novels, is borrowed by such covert master villains as Holmes’ great antagonist, Moriarity. And that voice will continue on in the twentieth century in film and comics, the dividing line between the hidden hero and hidden villain expressing the new moral uncertainties of politics in the age of capitalism – which is also, intrinsically, the age of contesting capitalism. In fact, Marat’s enemies didn’t believe a word of the underground story. “We know that Marat was in England, in consultation with Pitt, when it was believed he was hidden in the underground in Paris,” wrote Fantin des Oudards in 1801 – when the denigration of all Marat stood for had been going on for some time. To be in the underground could mean that you were anywhere – only the Shadow knows.

kiss me

Our readers will no doubt call to mind, on this day that seems especially appropriate to survey the ongoing war on terror, how often, and with what righteousness, the U.S. has threatened Iran and Syria for allowing insurgents to use their territory to access Iraq.

The Bush administration has also, lately, been in an upbeat mood about its contribution to the w-w-war on terror, to wit, the legalization of torture, and the extension of executive, judicial and penal power to the CIA. And one has to admit, this contribution almost exactly mirrors the soul of this administration: brutish, small, incompetent, and of a piece with the Dixie totalitarianism that runs, a rich vein, through our history: from the pro-slavery freebooters of the 1850s in Kansas through the lynchers of the 1890s to the segregationists of the 1950s.

Those who, like LI, believe the war on terror is a farce being performed by madmen, with various subject populations in walk on roles, found confirmation for that view in two articles this weekend. One, in the Washington Post, threw in the towel on the “Osama bin is on the run” line that has become a media’s mock Homeric epithet, forged in the fires of press syncophancy and always served piping hot to the hoi polloi who might, by some unwarranted exercise of the mental faculty, wonder where that dead or alive man is today. Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson’s article, “Bin Laden Trail Stone Cold,” was notable for one scoop:

“Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.”

This scoop, by those who keep up with such things, should be combined with the information we already have about what the military did during the battle of Tora Bora and Rumsfeld’s claim, afterwards, reprinted in Philip Smucker’s book, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, “We have seen repeated speculation about his [bin Laden’s] possible location,” he said, adding that the pieces of information “haven’t been actionable, they haven’t been provable, they haven’t resulted in our ability to track something down and actually do something.” Ah, a spoonful of the Rumsfeldian sugar makes the medicine go down – LI’s little conspiracy theory that Osama was let to escape to provide the Bushies with a terrorist on tap looks better every day.

Our theory combines with another of our theories – that letting Osama escape was premised on the Bushist fantasy that America’s strength, like that of a god, was such that we could always pull in the little rascal. According to Priest and Tyson, in a year in which the President is sore in need of an October surprise, he’s doing his best to get one:

“"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."
But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.”

The last three months our old rootin’ tootin’ Rebel in Chief suddenly flashed on that outlaw Osama, did he? Imagine that.

Mary Ann Weaver, in a NYT Mag article last year, has a very nice summary of what happened at Tora Bora and concludes thusly:

“On or about Dec. 16, 2001, according to American intelligence estimates, bin Laden left Tora Bora for the last time, accompanied by bodyguards and aides. Other Qaeda leaders dispersed by different routes, but bin Laden and his men are believed to have journeyed on horseback directly south toward Pakistan, crossing through the same mountain passes and over the same little-known smugglers' trails through which the C.I.A.'s convoys passed during the jihad years. And all along the route, in the dozens of villages and towns on both sides of the frontier, the Pashtun tribes would have lighted campfires along the way to guide the horsemen as they slowly continued through the snow and on toward the old Pakistani military outpost of Parachinar.

Tora Bora was the one time after the 9/11 attacks when United States operatives were confident they knew precisely where Osama bin Laden was and could have captured or killed him. Some have argued that it was Washington's last chance; others say that although it will be considerably more difficult now, bin Laden is not beyond our reach. But the stakes are considerably higher than they were nearly four years ago, and terrain and political sensibilities are far more our natural enemies now.

There is no indication that bin Laden ever left Pakistan after he crossed the border that snowy December night; nor is there any indication that he ever left the country's Pashtun tribal lands, moving from Parachinar to Waziristan, then north into Mohmand and Bajaur, one American intelligence official told me. The areas are among the most remote and rugged on earth, and they are vast. Had bin Laden been surrounded at Tora Bora, he would have been confined to an area of several dozen square miles; now he could well be in an area that snakes across some 40,000 square miles.

Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp."
The NYT article that provides a sweet-n-sour chaser to Priest’s obituary for the Osama on the run meme is about Pakistan’s treaty with the Taliban, which might get in the way of flooding the zone – although, being a mere peapicker instead of the Rebel in Chief, I just don’t know.

“On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a “truce” with militants who have resisted Pakistani military efforts to gain control of the region, which is roughly the size of Delaware. The agreement, which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks, immediately set off concern among American analysts.”

I love the concern business. Usually, I don’t know, such a thing would set off condemnation. Our vampiric V.P. would show his fangs on that show he does on Fox, “Cheney Shows His Fangs” – you know, it comes on right before “America’s Funniest Waterboarding Videos.” But here we have the measured responses of the mature republic we are.

“After two attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 were linked to the tribal areas, Pakistani officials expanded the military effort to subdue the region. But after suffering heavy casualties in 2004 and early 2005, they began negotiating with local militants. Last year, Pakistan signed a separate agreement with militants in South Waziristan, but the move failed to slow the killing of government supporters.

“If you look at the number of deaths in the region, it’s not clear that they’ve dropped,” said Xenia Dormandy, former director for South Asia for the National Security Council. Signing such truces, she said, “is a potentially dangerous route to take because there is little pressure that you can bring to bear to make sure they can follow through on the agreements.”

"Two hundred miles to the south, the Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta, according to American analysts. Afghan officials say the Taliban used the area to plan and carry out sweeping attacks in southern Afghanistan in the spring.”

The amazing thing, to LI, is that the fraud of the war on terror is so threadbare. You don’t have to really rise from your reclining chair to connect the dots. We know how it was done, we know who did it, and we know how it goes on, and on, and on. This truly offends me. As the Al Pacino character says in Dog Day Afternoon says:
Kiss me! Kiss Me!
Cause I liked to be kissed when I’m fucked!

My motto for this all too sad day.

the final exciting episode in the ongoing series, I married a tomato!

In perhaps my favorite Wodehouse novel, Heavy Weather, there is a scene in which the unscrupulous and ultimately unlucky detective, Pilbeam, is manipulating Lord Emsworth, (who is, as always, ridden by the nightmare vision of his pig, the Empress, being poisoned). Pilbeam is maneuvering to get Monty Bodkin, Lord Emsworth’s secretary, fired – for reasons too complex to go into here. Of course, in lieu of conversing, Lord Em is pottering about verbally, tossing out of of those stream of association sequences, as is his wont. This provokes one of those wonderful, casual paragraphs from the master that crushes the heart of any true writer – for how can you top this?

“Pilbeam had not had the pleasure of the nineth Earl’s acquaintance long, but he had had it long enough to know that, unless firmly braked, he was capable of trickling along like this indefinitely.”

And so it is, too, with LI. We’ve been trickling along about the tomatoes, now, for a couple of posts, what? And perhaps it is time we got down to brass tacks.

So, to sum up what we have learned so far: we have an industry that is not centered on California, and that is heavily reliant on manual labor, in the 1940s. Then we have the agricultural department at the University of California putting their heads together and coming up with a solution to the farmer’s labor problem: a mechanical tomato harvester. The machine is perfect, except for the squiffy nature of the tomato itself. So, into the laboratory we go, and out we come with a more content filled tomato, designed specifically for the machine that harvests it. This results in, one, a concentration in the tomato farming field, as “by virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing.” We have a reorganization of the labor force – it is thinned out, its functions are re-distributed, the unions that represent it are slashed, and it is less costly. And we have – although this fact isn’t in Winner’s essay, but comes from the invaluable Pritchard and Burch – a shift in the center of the tomato industry to California. And of course, remember that the majority of tomatoes are being processed for pastes and ketchup – ah, the golden age of ketchup, that Cold War fixture. As Lee Reich points out in Gourmet Vegetables, the deal with tomatoes is that ‘determinate varieties’ have been designed to resist all the many perils that nature strews in the path of the tomato, but at the cost of becoming, at best, insipid.

Reich is especially keen to extirpate the myth that garden grown tomatoes of themselves are tasty little fruits, because the seeds that are usually bought to grow them are (cue the music from Jaws) of the determinate variety. Which is no surprise, as the seventies experienced a burst of gourmandise in the seed industry, with big agri-businesses eating little seed companies. With Heinz owning something like 90 percent of the tomato seed stockpile, we are, it seems, condemned to ketchup. Ketchup, ketchup everywhere.

Okay, LI is trickling on once again. What is the point of this? Oh, yes. The point is that one made so often and so loudly by the ideologues of the free market. It is that the freemarket extends preferences, and thus, those people who enjoy free markets are freer themselves. Little determinate varieties of liberty, those people.

And yet, it is easy to see that something is wrong with this picture of preferences. The idea seems to be that you are given preferences, just as you are given a menu. But back in the back room, back in the kitchen, who is cooking up the varieties of preferences? And as they cook it up, redesign the tomato, buy the seed stocks, and in general make life better for all of us ketchup swillers, isn’t there a silent moment when the flavor of the tomato exits, stage right? And without any tomato gourmands having a sayso in the matter. Indeed, is the taste of the tomato a public good, or a private one? These, as you can see, are the questions that arise from all this tomato throwing.

To which, at some point, we will return to weary the poor Pilbeams out there.

bjorn lomborg

LI is going to interrupt our tomato laden series of posts to point our readers to the latest effusion from Bjorn Lomborg. It is rather like his last effusion, and the one before that – Lomborg is an endlessly content to produce the same thing: an article that will, one, deny some scientific truth about environmental degradation by happily cherrypicking among instances, and two, offer up some vague, charitable counter-program – the idea being to either wean the liberal from his environmentalist idols by shaking a little guilt making reference to the poor in front of him, or at least to point to the hypocrisy of the liberal, convicted of shamefully ignoring the poor by worrying about them broiling to death.

To pay this guy a lot of attention is, perhaps, a mistake. But we are still attracted to Lomborg’s bait.

His latest trick has been to wave around a sum – 75 billion dollars – which Lomborg has extracted from some UN report: “According to UN estimates, for $75 billion a year - half the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol - we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on Earth. Shouldn't that be a higher priority?”

Anybody who believes 75 billion a year would come close to providing clean drinking water for ever person on earth, let alone the rest of his list, is truly out of his mind. There are of course no specs on a project like this. Yet it is, in a way, a perfect conservative project, in the tradition hatched by Grandpa Reagan. Reagan faced a huge puzzle as a president – while popular as a slogan, nobody really wants small government. But he did want to cut back any government leftovers for those he was hostile to – the poor, blacks, environmentalists, etc. The solution, which came to him in a vision (with Edward Teller playing the part of the Virgin), was to create programs that would uniquely benefit his base. Thus was born Star wars, the prototype of conservative big government ever since. It is an almost perfect program: it has a vague or non-existent goal, there are no criteria to measure its success, and even as the need for it collapses, the rhetoric for it gets ever more heated. A trillion dollars later, it is still chugging along, producing endless streams of revenue to war industries and putting dinner on the table for thousands of engineers, economists and managers across the country. Who, reliably, are strong national security voters.

75 billion a year for drinking water means, of course … endless futile water projects. And he who says water projects says Scandinavian engineering firms. The very idea makes such as Lomborg all dreamy.

There isn’t a chance in hell that that sum would be enough to guarantee drinking water to the Indian subcontinent, let alone the whole world. Nor is the 120 billion dollar cost Lomborg quotes as derivative from the Kyoto protocols exactly honest. A regulatory regime that tilted the field to the greener company has always, in the past, resulted in more efficiency, greener technologies, and disturbances of big monopolies – in fact, it results in new companies, the breaking of old monopolies, and new sources of wealth. If the theory of free trade is correct, the kind of low tech manufacturing that naturally devolves to cheaper sites does so in order to give way to higher quality manufacturing – and green technology certainly qualifies as that. The Kyoto protocols are actually part and parcel of the kind of third way neo-liberalism so embraced by the Economist in the nineties. That, for LI, is a definite problem, but – saving our objections for another time – it is a sign of how quickly the neo-liberal credo has degenerated into the cannibalism that was always under the surface that it no longer recognizes its children. But perhaps the truth is, that credo could only go as far as a certain sector in the economy – the petro-war industry sector – allowed it to go.

you say tomato/ and I say/ oppression

Langdon Winner’s essay, Do Artifacts have Politics, in 1986, makes the following thematic point about the relationship between technology and politics:

“[There are] … two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily under stood. Second are cases of what can be called "inherently political technologies," man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term "politics" I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements.”

Winner gives a number of examples of politically conditioned artifacts. One is the height of the overpasses over Long Island parkways, which are set at a default nine feet. Winner claims that the long bridges are in accordance with the intention of the man who devised the Parkway system in the twenties, Robert Moses. Moses did not want blacks from New York City to get out to Long Island by way of his Parkways. Since New York City blacks were, disproportionately, bus users, the discouragement of buses, which were two high for the underpasses, discouraged blacks from getting on the Parkways.

This example has spawned a little subset of pro and contra pieces. There are two points that are disputed here. One is the general political point. As Latour has pointed out, designed objects have what Donald Norman calls affordances – that is, multiple uses. Some of them are unexpected, revealing themselves over time. According to Latour, then, the prevailing intention when a design is introduced shouldn’t be analyzed as if it were equivalent to the function the design really plays:

“That designers use detours through material objects to enforce types of behaviour, everyone who has been made to slow down near a school because of the silent presence of a speed trap (also called a 'sleeping policeman') would readily agree. Yes, we are made to do things we would not have done otherwise every time we enter into contact with an artifact: when we want to boil water for our morning coffee, lock a door behind us, fasten our seat belt before our car engine starts, and so on about two hundred times a day. This doesn't mean however that only oppression and discrimination are expressed through those humble and devious techniques. We are also, thanks to them, 'allowed', 'permitted', 'enabled', 'authorised' to do things.
Thus, to say that our ordinary course of action is intermingled with artifacts does not mean that they have politics —at least, not yet. Does politics begin when the irreversible built in techniques are taken into account? Architects are well aware of the heavy weight bequeathed to them by their predecessors. My own Haussmanian building in Paris, has the perverse tendency to force the students inhabiting its coveted 'chambre de bonnes' to climb six stories through a steep and narrow staircase, while the happy owners of the flats are allowed to glide through a comfortable lift inserted inside a wide staircase. Are the students ‘discriminated’ against? Undoubtedly, but the reason is that during the Belle Epoque it was unthinkable to have the servants and valets take the same stairs as the Zolaesque bourgeois for whom those buildings had been designed. In the meantime, though, servants have disappeared, students have come in and the discriminating power of two incompatible stairs has remained: it is now, literally, cast in concrete. To undo Hausmann's political bigotry would mean destroying my house, stone by stone... Does it mean, however, that buildings in the Latin Quarter ‘have’ politics?”

Although I usually like Latour, I admit that this is an unusually sloppy response. Winner is certainly not equating politics with oppression, although that can be an aspect of politics – it is the most striking aspect, so it makes for the most striking example. And that the social scene around an artifact changes doesn’t mean that the Latin Quarter buildings don’t ‘have’ politics. To use an example Winner uses in another essay, the American constitution is an imminently designed program. Yet, over time, the program has meant different things, and been used in different ways. Does that mean that the constitution doesn’t ‘have’ politics?

A more disturbing response to Winner was given by one of Latour’s pupils, Woolgar, who claimed in “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS” that the whole story of Moses’ decisionmaking rests on mythical grounds – buses, back in the twenties, weren’t twelve feet high; the assistant who attributed the decisions about the Parkways to racism was simply one source in Caro’s biography of Moses; and other highway structures in NYC are also nine feet high – lower than the national standard.

This should put us on our guard about the stories that collect around artifacts. However, Winner’s other examples haven’t been so disputed – Cyrus McCormick’s pneumatic molding machines, which did a less efficient job of molding metal for his threshers, but which kicked the skilled workmen, who were largely union supporters, out of his factories; and .. the reason for this post … the tomato picker.

Tomatoes, it turns out, are a much studied subject. If you want the very scoop of the long saga of tomato ‘improvement’, you could turn to the fascinations, such as they are, that stock every page of Bill Pritchard and David Burch’s Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Global Tomato Processing Industry. For those of you with a train to catch, however, I will quote a long excerpt from Winner’s essay:

“The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.9 Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting. 10 But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough re shaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.
“By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization. 11 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.
“The University of California's research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them "would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application." 12
“As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate economic concentration in that industry.13 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.14 It is in the face of such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem "antitechnology" or "antiprogress." For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.”

Ohoho – as Peter Pan used to cry, before he engaged with Captain Hook. I spy something going on here. About which I will write in my next post.

whose taste is it?

Last week, LI ran a series of posts about menus. Our point was that menus, which seem like innocent things, actually encode and enact important social attitudes and arrangements. Our more specific point was that menus came out of the great houses -- where they were used as a means of communication between the cooks and the owners (aristocrats or the great bourgeois families) into the public sphere as one of the components in the making of restaurants.

My point in sketching that history was to question the division between the private and the public -- and to point to the way the division is made absolute in liberal myth.

When I use the word myth, I don't mean a thing that has no social effect -- a mere illusion. There's a charming story, in Sydney Smith's Lectures on Moral Philosophy, that is the perfect illustration of myth:

"Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hands of Mr. Hume in 1737; so that with all the tendency to destroy, there remains nothing left for destruction: but I would fain ask if there be any one human being, from the days of Protagoras the Aderite to this present hour, who was ever for a single instant a convert to these sublte and ingenious follies? … Pyrrho said there was no such thing as pain; and he saw no proof that there were such things as carts and wagons; and he refused to get out of their way: but Pyrrho had, fortunately for him, three or four stout slaves, who followed their master without following his doctrine, and whenver they saw one of these ideal machines approaching, took him up by the arms and legs, and without attempting to controvert his arguments, put him down in a place of safety."

Whereever you see myth, you see slaves. They are the necessary concomittant of the ideal. And just as Pyrrho's slaves paid for Pyrrho's myth, so, too, we pay for the myth of the absolute distinction of the private and the public every day, rescuing the system that dedicates itself to the myth in every newspaper and tv show by giving it our absolute belief while spending the brute and best part of ourselves, in everyday life, negotiating its unworkablity. And so we are gnawed at, year in and year out. The system actually wears a hole in us, a black hole of existential exhaustion, which becomes the malign center into which we toss every fucking thing we love, letting it all disappear in order to save the shaky, self-contradictory structure for one more day.

The terms public and private have never been so flung about as during the last two decades -- the age of 'privatization.' LI's notion is that the private and public spheres have been redefined, both in reality and in myth, in tandem with the disembedding of the forces of production - to use Polanyi’s phrase for the assumption of systematic autonomy on the part of the economic system, and the bending of the social to fit its necessities. In capitalism, this long event was accompanied and justified by a notion of freedom, which in turn was entangled in a notion of the separation of the private and public spheres from one another. Socialism derives its own notions about the system of production from the capitalist event. LI, ever the Derridian, maintains that the separation of the private and the public sphere is forever undecidable. It simply cannot sustain the strain of being elevated to an absolute.

To illustrate these things, I'm going to pursue a related question, which is: what kind of property is taste? In particular, the taste of the tomato. I'm choosing the tomato because that fruit has, it turns out, been the object of an awful lot of literature. So first I am going to look at Langdon Winner's famous essay, Do Artifacts have Politics. In the next post.

PS
The Inestimable Mistah Scruggs sent me a link to a website we can all rally around. The site is dedicated to a policeman who is riding a one eyed horse across America, preaching the gospel of DECRIMINALIZING DRUGS. Sanity, in the current moronic inferno, can only be heard above the talk radio roar by dressing itself up in motley. Hurray for the legions of King Lear's Fools out there - our last fuckin hope, buckos!

the ballad of haditha

By way of the Sweet Nothing site, LI was alerted to a budding neo-con Wallace Stevens, one Lynn Chu, whose poem entitled “Why I Continue to Believe in the War in Iraq” would make even a man sitting in an electric chair laugh. The opening lines possess the sublime beauty of, say, a drunk’s missed piss:

“Because to depose a murderous despot is a good thing.
Because the UN resolved to do something a dozen times and didn't.
Because we are the only nation in the world with the decency and strength to do it.
Because we did so with a minimum of human loss.
Because other nations, rueing their past glory, are envious.
Because I believe in nationbuilding. “

It goes on. And then it goes on.

According to the Sweet Nothing site, Lynn Chu is a literary agent.

On a pro-war site called the Democracy Project, there is an indication that Chu’s verse, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is putting starch into the souls of the drooping.

“Lynn Chu holds a J.D from the University of Chicago Law School, is admitted to the New York Bar, and is a very successful literary agent. Midge Decter emailed me a first draft of a poem Chu wrote. Chu may not give up her day job for poetry, as she admits. It’s a long read, but a good creed. Pay special attention to the last line.”

“It’s a long read, but a good creed.” Is that a line for the remake of the Dukes of Hazard or what? It was born to be spoken late at night, in some truckstop parking lot, by two all Americans. What they do next in that parking lot should be left to our all American imagination.

All of which reminded me of a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter Thompson and his attorney have finally pursuaded the hotel people to let them have a room. They’ve sorted out their chemical situation. Hunter is feeling better – no more lizard men in the halls, which had been bugging him. Naturally, in the hotel room, he flicks on the tube:

“The TV news was about the Laos Invasion—a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men fleeing in terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. “Turn that shit off!” screamed my attorney “Let’s get out of here!” A wise move.

"Moments after we picked up the car my attorney went into a drug coma and ran a red light on Main Street before I could bring us under control. I propped him up in the passenger seat and took the wheel myself...feeling fine, extremely sharp. All around me in traffic I could see people talking and I wanted to hear what they were saying. All of them. But the shotgun mike was in the trunk and I decided to leave it there. Las Vegas is not the kind of town where you want to drive down Main Street aiming a black bazooka-looking instrument at people. Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple—red convertible...stoned, ripped, twisted...Good People.

Great God! What is this terrible music?

“The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley”:

“...as we go marching on When I reach my final campground, in that land beyond the sun, and the Great Commander asks me...” (What did he ask you, Rusty?) “Did you fight or did you run?” (and what did you tell him, Rusty?) “...We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had...”

No! I can’t be hearing this! It must be the drug. I glanced over at my attorney, but he was staring up at the sky, and I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun. Thank christ he can’t hear this music, I thought. It would drive him into a racist frenzy.”

If we are to climb to the true heights of the belligeranti aesthetic in our current dire moment (a summit once or twice approached by Christopher Hitchens Mirror pieces) when so many have lost confidence in the Rebel in Chief, we need someone to write us the Ballad of Haditha. Imagine it! The way in which the press has leaped on the marines already for doing nothing more than splattering a number of Iraqi kids to kingdom come, which will teach their type not to plant IEDs again, does boil the blood. Clint Black, perhaps, could sing it. Chu is God’s appointed lyricist for this divine mission, but she has to get some kinks out of her infected brain first. She is never going to be raptured if she keeps trying to impress the liberals with that godawful imitation of Jubilate Agno. Honey, come on down to the racetrack, where the meth flows like wine and everyone is a good red stater, full of Christian impulses but never, never the Coward of the County – especially when it comes to taking shit from dark skinned pissants, bellyaching about the freedom we have brought to their shitkicker’s hell. “Did you fight or did you run?” That sums up our creed, and it is a good read. However, even the lowliest sadsack down at the race track knows that the actual fighting should be left to the final fucker on the end of the great national daisy chain - the young, dumb, full of cum pussy married too early and with the talons of the credit card companies in him, which talons, looked at from the Rapture perspective, represent the American bald eagle its own self.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord – and gosh, it looks just like Vice President Cheney with a boner!

LI provides the baloney early - remembering 9/11

In the 1960s, you could always get a laugh by referring to the John Birch crusade against fluoridation. It was so obviously bogus. And yet, the bogus does live cheek by jowl, in America, with the deepest and darkest anxieties and realities. Fluoridation might not lead to a weak kneed surrender to communism, but the channelization and pollution of America’s streams and rivers, cheerfully commanding bipartisan assent from the social engineers who know what is good for us, was a sign of something seriously out of whack with the system. The Birchers were advocates for an even more extreme out of whackness, but sometimes you have to crystallize your anxieties by going to the far end of the masochistic spectrum.

The best horse laugh to come out of 9/11, an event that hasn’t exactly given rise to a lot of comedy, is in the idea circulating among some parts of the left – parts that have spent years, decades upping the rhetorical ante in denouncing the sundry crimes of Amerika and competing with declarations of fidelity to one Amerikan enemy or another – that 9/11 was an inside job. And so it is that the comfortable lefties take one look at the most successful guerilla act in recent times and immediately attribute it… to the CIA.

However, the bogus, here, sits next to a myth that both the left and right are very comfortable with. The myth is of America’s overwhelming military power. The myth simply ignores the fact that most instances of the extended expression of American military power in the last fifty years have blown up in America’s face.

To illustrate what this means re 9/11, let me tell relate a heartwarming fable.

Say you have a fly, a pesky stinging fly, buzzing around your room.
For the sake of the fable, let’s say you have two instruments to deal with the fly.
One of those instruments is an old flyswatter. It consists of a perforated rubber pad mounted on a rickety wire handle.
The other of these instruments consists of an expensive hammer. Not a hammer with a wooden shaft, either – one with a nice metal, graphite core shaft.
Now, the hammer could truly pound the rickety wire handle of the fly swatter into an unuseable mass. The hammer is mightier than the fly swatter. The fly swatter, too, has a tendency to grossly palp the fly into jelly, whereas the image, at least, of the fly under the hammer is that the jelly would be atomized. Oh, that will hurt the fly!

However, in the face of that pesky stinging fly, it is a bad idea to use the hammer. The reason is this. You will punch holes in the wall. You will break plates and glass. You will break the window. And you might, in some swing, bring the hammer into contact with your leg, which will definitely make you forget about the fly.

Al Qaeda – I’m talking here of the military end, not the popular video subsidiary that has just put out its groovy “Convert to Islam” vid for the American party market – has been rather brilliant. For instance, take the fact that the 20 hijackers came to America to learn how to fly airliners. Now, it is undoubtedly true that there are other places in the world to learn the pilot’s trade, or what they had to know of the pilot’s trade. But to boldly emplace the 20 who are going to attack the U.S. in the U.S. was a small piece of genius. It was the genius of being able to think like the fly. Of course, genius is nothing without luck, and it appears that Al Qaeda was very lucky to get Atta. The man seemed to understand how to organize a project. In fact, from what we know about the project, he operated like most software companies operate when getting guys together for a project – allowing a little social time in which everybody could relax with each other in Vegas, for instance. After the event, much time was spent debating whether Atta was a coward or not. This was a great debate, insofar as it shifted the terms to an emotional plane we can all understand – much like the terms in which we can all take sides on whether Brad should have left Jen or not. Little time or effort was spared for looking at how well Atta organized his group. To do that would make us, well, uncomfortable with our assumption that hammers are all purpose tools, and the bigger the hammer, the more flies you kill.

Similarly, little attention was paid to the evidence that came out at the 9/11 hearings about the military response to the hijacked planes. The day of the attack, we had what Karl Weick has called a collapse of sensemaking. This kind of thing is endemic to disasters involving rapid response organizations – firefighters, jet fighter pilots, nuclear power plant technicians. As Weick has shown, it is not so much from misapplying the rules, or even using the wrong rules, but the collapse in the faith in rules per se that occurs in the heart of the panic. Our air force has, since 1947, been trained to respond immediately to attack – but when the attack finally came, the picture was of scrambled orders and jetfighters heading off in a classic front to protect the U.S. from incoming. The exercises were never designed to protect the U.S. from its own airliners. Again, Al Qaeda’s strategy – to think like a fly – worked. Who sees flies enter a room? But of course, if you see a fly, your response might well be to close the door. That gives the fly its brief opportunity.

It should be said, in one way we are all alive because rapid response organizations are not fail-safe. In the fifties, that crazy fuck, Eisenhower, had a series of sortees mounted by SAC that penetrated Soviet air space and deliberately mimicked the profile of a first strike. The point was to see how rapidly the Soviets responded – and the lesson was that, just as in 1941, the Soviets were not great responders. Their strength was in holding on.

Now, about that fly swatter. John Kerry, in the nineties, wrote, or had written, a nifty little book about terrorism. In it, he makes the observation that terrorist groups are structured like mafia groups, and so are most effectively dealt with by law enforcement – a suggestion he furiously backpedaled from in 2004 (poor Kerry evidently shot the whole wad of his courage in 1971). Kerry was right then and he is right now. Al Qaeda is not the National Liberation Front. The NLF succeeded, as Francis Fitzgerald showed in The Fire in The Lake, because they depended on the Vietnamese villagers. This was something that didn’t compute to the Americans in Vietnam – they were so determined to see the NLF as a terrorist group, coercing cooperation by violence, that they didn’t listen to their informants, who explained that the NLF could not operate that way. They really needed the cooperation of the villagers, hence, they actually talked to them, asked them for advice, etc. When, in the late 60s, the Americans started sending in South Vietnamese cadre to operate on the NLF model, it never worked – as soon as the SV cadre would get to the villages, they would start acting impolite. They would march around like cocks of the walk. The NLF strategy worked not because the NLF recruited nice people – far from it – but because the NLF got the people to see that the NLF was operating from necessity. Maybe they wanted to shove around the village bosses, but they couldn’t afford to.

…

So, if one were going to grade a Q, you’d have to give them an A for strategy, and F for governance, and a B for home video manufacturing. As for the American faith in hammers – well, I remember shortly after Tora Bora, a friend of mine, a Bush supporter, told me with the utmost confidence that we would pick him up. He named several pieces of ultrafine spying equipment we had aloft. It was just a matter of getting our special forces in their ultrafast helicopters and giving them the OK. This idea was believed on the left too – how many scenarios about the October surprise in 2004 were about Bush casually reaching out the God like hand and grasping our pesky wabbit with the turban. It turned out the October surprise was how many Americans live in a bubble of complete illusion about the world. One fed by a press that can’t mention Osama Bin without giving him the Homeric epithet, on the run. On the run Osama. He’s been so on the run he must have a pretty good heart – and that is the kind of thing our bicycling Rebel in Chief can appreciate! It is funny how all these on the run folks keep running back. In the meantime, one does wonder if the strategy of the fly is exhausted. Myself, I think that depends on the quality of the middle managers. Besides, there really is no need to attack the U.S. here when the U.S. is making itself so available for attack elsewhere.

the old English magicians and ours

William Lilly, the English astrologer and the last of the great English magicians, was called before a Committee of the House of Commons in 1666. It had been noticed that the eighth plate of his book, Monarchy or No Monarchy, published in 1651, “represented persons digging graves, with coffins and other emblems of mortality, and the thirteenth a city in flames. Hence it was inferred that he must have had something to do with the Great Fire which had destroyed so large a part of London, if not with the Plague, which had almost depopulated it.”

In response to a question from the chairman of the committee, Lilly explained that he had written the book after Charles I was beheaded, and sought to depict the future of England, as revealed to him by his stellar sources.

“At last, having satisfied myself as well as I could, and perfected my judgment therein, I thought it most convenient to signify my intentions and conceptions thereof in Forms, Shapes, Types, Hieroglyphics, etc., without any commentary, that so my judgment might by concealed from the vulgar, and made manifest only unto the wise. I herein imitating the examples of many wise philosophers who had done the like.” Today, of course, wise philosophers have refined and perfected this method to adapt it to our more sophisticated civilization: hence the cornucopia of highly placed sources, defense experts, and a White House aids that lead us into depressions, wars, and all the wonderful ways we have invented for gulling the poor, polluting the planet, and stuffing miraculous amounts of money into the pockets of the rich.

Lilly added something that no doubt inflated the price for his expertise, and in our day would have had him writing op eds and lending his eminence to Heritage Foundation sponsored debates:

“Having found, sir,” continued Lilly, “that the city of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague, and not long after with an exorbitant Fire, I framed those two hieroglyphics as represented in the book, which in effect have proved very true.”
I take these quote from the very useful account in W.H. Davenport’s Historical Sketches of Magic and Witchcraft in England and Scotland. Lilly, in his autobiography, marks his testimony as the last event of note in his life, thereby marking himself down as an ass.

Any of our terrorist experts, our equivalent of the old English magicians, only without the superfluous culture, (cultivation of knowledge being, as is well known, the hobby of the losers) would have taken the opportunity to produce a book, gotten in many a spot on talk radio, and eventually reached the heaven of Fox News, CNN, and Good Morning America. Admittedly, the American magicians seem less kin to the great Faust than to the sad and greasy Elmer Gantry, but seen correctly, this is a great advance, a progress in our march to the Rapture. Lilly’s testimony up to that point seems so promising that it is with great sadness that we see him, next, admitting that he didn’t know, exactly, what sinister enemy caused the plague and set the fire. The sense of get up and go, of opportunity, is still born in the old magicians – there’s no getting around the fact that they aren’t, well, Americans. Surely he should have consulted with some young aide to one of the committeemen and read off of some sheet strongly implicating England’s enemies, devils all, internal and external. He could have denounced the appeasers once and for all, admitted their patriotism but strongly implied that torturing them would not, after all, be the worst thing that could happen. He could have used the arts that we see used, every day, in our lovely country. Instead, he merely and mildly told the committee men that the finger of God uses instruments.

Today’s American magicians, whether Michael Ledeen writing for the National Review, Stephen Emerson writing for the New Republic, or the thousands of terrorism experts freshly back from confronting the hordes of Belzebuub in night visions, may have a justified contempt for the simple naivete of the old style magician, seemingly hemmed in by those tiny scruples deriving from the ninth commandment and somehow keeping him from testifying about his certain knowledge that it was Jews, Catholics and Dutchmen that did the dirty deeds – groups who think, in the immortal words of the Rebel in Chief, “the opposite of the way we do.” However, our contemporary thaumaturges should keep in mind the relatively low level of culture prevalent in the 17th century. Bearing false witness, which in the days before democracy was hardly a science at all, has now developed into a major and blessed industry, and we are surrounded by the fruits of those who toil in its vineyards - the political magazines, the newspapers with the stimulating editorials urging us onward to ever more wars, the tv. True, with education has come great progress in creating gullibility. At least half the electorate will actually believe almost anything. They will believe they were abducted by UFOS. They will believe Iraq had tremendous stocks of WMDs, even though they don’t exactly know why certain weapons are WMDs and certain ones aren’t. They will believe that the Rebel in Chief is the toughest hombre since John Wayne quit chewing rocks. In fact, the only thing they won’t believe is that humans come from monkeys, or that the world existed earlier than 10,000 years ago. This is why we are the greatest people in the world.

…

Since the fifth anniversary of 9/11 will unleash such a flood of baloney that it might have turned the fires that day into a gigantic weenie roast, LI figures to get in with his own post now, and beat the rush. We will flip it out tomorrow.

more fun boy-boy girl-girl boy-girl action in Iraq!

If the Dems are serious about censuring Rumsfeld (something that should have been done, oh, on September 12, 2001), then they might well want to get their list of offences from Robert Looney’s article in Strategic Insights, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School. Discard Looney’s major new idea in the article, another fixer upper suggestion that begs the entire question of means – Looney would like to see Iraq adopt an Alaska style distribution of oil wealth to every member of the population. That’s fine and dandy, and perhaps Looney might consider running on that platform in Basra – except, of course, that if he landed in Basra, he would literally be running for his life. Like others of the ‘reformer-bots’ that have sprung up in the last twenty five years, Looney comes ready programmed with the neo-liberal default settings, which is the plug and play standard in D.C. (we must be brave and wise/and always, always privatize!) as they intone in their mass think tanker meetings.

On the other hand, his article is a quick survey of the collapse of Rumsfeld’s Mesopotamian protectorate. He has conveniently bullet pointed the ‘goals’, the ‘achievements’ and the, uh, failures of the occupation’s first phase – up to January, 2005. Here they are:

“Scope of the Problem

Many reconstruction challenges confronted the coalition after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Some of these were met successfully, while others have presented on-going difficulties and are still present today. In addition new ones have arisen. Of the initial tasks several stand out:[12]
· Restoring government economic functions after looting and state collapse;
· Preventing currency collapse, hyperinflation and economic chaos;
· Rebuilding infrastructure ravaged by war, sanctions, looting and neglect;
· Rehabilitating a health care system cut off from medical advances for two decades;
· Dismantling corrupt, dysfunctional state economic controls; and
· Stimulating the growth of a private sector that had been stunted by government interference.

A number of major successes did occur, especially under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Major successes under the
CPA included:
· Re-established nationwide food-ration system;
· Introduced a new currency and stabilized the exchange rate;
· Liberated most prices without igniting inflation;
· Rebuild the government’s economic ministries;
· Promulgated market-oriented banking, taxation, foreign trade, investment, and business regulations;
· Rehabilitated several thousand schools, health clinics, and hospitals;
· Provided public services to populations that had been deprived under Saddam;
· Increased electrical generation and output;
· Funded small projects across Iraq to meet critical community needs.

Still the Coalition’s economic accomplishments were overshadowed by its unfulfilled promises. During the occupation the CPA failed or was unable to:
· Prevent rampant looting or infrastructure and production facilities;
· Attract foreign investment;
· Implement its newly enacted economic regulations;
· Restructure state-owned industries.
· Fulfill promises of substantial job creation;
· Meet targets for electricity production (despite increases)
· Restore oil output to prewar levels;
· Eliminate costly distorting energy and food subsidies;
· Combat corruption in reconstruction projects;
· Spend more than a fraction of the $18.4 billion the U.S. Congress allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction.

"Patterns of Success and Failure

Following Henderson,[13] several patterns emerge. Most importantly, the Coalition’s success stores shared some essential elements. Its less successful ventures had their own set of distinctive characteristics. Specifically, successful initiatives appear to have imposed no major costs or sacrifices on the population at large.”

LI’s crow side can’t but revel in certain of the bullet points – we particularly liked the achievement of unilaterally restructuring Iraq into a neo-con paradise of de-regulation, and, on the other side of the ledger, the failure “to implement its newly enacted economic regulations.” Yeah, that implementation – the Heritage foundation crowd leaves that for others. No excitement there, baby! While the cowed, second amendment supporting American, his bumper sticker reading “You’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from my trigger”, passively watches as the entire manufacturing base of the country is shipped off to parts unknown and the structural elements of inequality are put in place so that his kids will go to junior college and serve up fresh fries to the children of the upper 1 percent, busy talking on their oh so splendidly outfitted cell phones (we just love the new program that allows you to launch nuclear weapons while driving your hummer!), the addled Iraqi masses did not greet the reforms as the second coming of the ten commandments. Funny, that. Looney quotes a survey that hasn’t quite garnered attention, as in any, in the media:

“A UNDP[14] household survey documents the impact the slow pace of reconstruction is having on the average Iraqi household:
1. The UNDP survey suggests the poorest 20 percent of the population earns 7 percent of the income, while the top 20 percent earns 44 percent.
2. Iraq’s median household income of 144 dollars has dropped from a post-war high of 255 dollars in 2003.
3. One-third of Iraqis canvassed by UNDP described themselves as being among the poor.
4. One-sixth of interviewees met all or most of the criteria suggesting that they lived beneath the poverty line.”

For those familiar with the disease, this is a shock therapy portrait. Plummeting incomes following an initial surge, a top level that aggrandizes its wealth as it builds in ever more indifference to the consequences of that wealth – it could be Russia in the 90s, n’est-ce pas? A situation that Americans might have wanted to examine a bit more closely, since we are surely going to get there by and by, reform-bot by reform-bot.
And that, of course, is the real constraint on Democratic opposition to the Iraq war. The opposition centers on that failure of implementation. Oh, how DLC-ers ache to manfully shoulder that job! They would make sure that flexible job markets and strong private sectors would make Iraq a happy little beehive. The drones would go back to what drones do, instead of devising those nasty IEDs.

Two other one shots from Looney, and then the crow will take wing:
Under the sententious heading, redolent of business inspiration books,

“High hopes and lofty promises are no substitute for sound planning and prudent expectations:”

“As we receive clearer accounts of the functioning of the CPA it is shocking to find how little planning went into the effort.”

And, our favorite sentences in Looney’s article:
“In part, the loss in reconstruction momentum stemmed from the CPA’s assumption that market forces and a surge in private investment would follow the initial reconstruction efforts. Ideological blinders and the lack of a contingency plan made it difficult to overcome these errors when confronted with the effects of increased violence and uncertainty.”

Ideological blinders? I doubt it. You don't put blinders on the blind.

an experiment in mercenary war - Iraq

This is how Emir de Vatel, the eighteenth century military writer, defines mercenaries: “Mercenary soldiers are foreigners voluntarily engaging to serve the state for money, or a stipulated pay. As they owe no serve to a sovereign whose subject they are not, the advantages he offers them are their solve motive. By enlisting they incur the obligation to serve him; and the prince on his part promises them certain conditions which are settled in the articles of enlistment.”

In Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, Janice Thompson describes the conditions that gave rise to the great use of mercenaries by the European kingdoms:

“Scholars agree that feudalism’s constraints on military service wre a major inducement for monarchs to turn to mercenaries. Whatever its other drawbacks, the feudal military system was based on the principle of defense. Knights were duty-bound to serve only a very limited amount of time – something like forty days a year – but, more importantly, were not obligated to serve abroad. Thus, feudal military rights and obligations presented a barrier to launching offensive military campaigns.”

Posthegemony has a very nice summing up of Thompson’s position:

"Janice Thomson's Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (discussed also in the Laboratorium) is about the constitution of sovereignty not (as is customarily stressed) so much by imposition of order within national territories, but by the delegitimation and suppression of extraterritorial violence wielded by non-state actors. In her words, she asks:

How did the state achieve a monopoly on violence beyond its borders that emanates from its territory? What explains the elimination of nonstate violence from global politics? (3; my emphasis)
For, as Thomson recounts at some length, until remarkably recently--the mid nineteenth-century at least--global violence was if anything dominated by non-state rather than state actors. Moreover, this non-state domination of extraterritorial force was for the most part accepted and even sanctioned by states themselves. Why, Thomson asks, should states desire to end this long tradition, especially in so far as it entailed numerous benefits to states both strong and weak?”

LI has been trying to weaken the idea that states are the fundamental units of political order, in favor of the (quite insane) idea that wars are. One of the results of supposing the fundamental status of war is that one looks at armies not as things mounted by a unitary thing called the state which then engage in wars, but instead, as organizations operating to define contests between powers shaping themselves in terms of either past, ongoing, or future wars, in which the state operates as one site of that struggle. If the state transcends war to the extent that it has an independent nature outside of war – and who would deny that? - that transcendence is precarious.

Our perspective does not dissolve states irretrievably into these contesting powers, since obviously states do have a unity and an effect – or some states do, at some times. However, we don’t assume a seamless unity of interest or identity between the sovereign and the people in states. And without that seamless identity, we look at the raising, maintaining and command of armies as perpetually subject to the temptation of the mercenary form even when a nation’s army is composed of citizens of the nation. The mercenary form is defined by how the army is maintained, who utilizes it, and how deviant its status is from that defined by the formal rules of law – from the constitution.

I keep calling Iraq a vanity war. I don’t mean that merely to be sarcastic. It really is a vanity war, and it really is being fought by the exploitation, by the sovereign, of armies that are no longer constrained by the formal rules for their employment, raising, and operation, but instead are being wholly subordinated to the whims of the executive. That the sovereign, here, is an American president, and that the troops are, for the most part, American citizens doesn’t make too much of a difference.

In fact, the warmongers are very eager to push at the boundaries of the mercenary form. A couple of years ago, Max Boot proposed that the U.S. hire illegal immigrants to fight in the army, with the reward being a path to citizenship.

“With combat dragging on in Iraq and plenty of jobs available at home, there aren't enough volunteers. So far, a real crisis has been averted only because the Army has exceeded its retention goals and kept some troops in uniform past their discharge dates, but it will only get tougher to keep volunteers in uniform if troops are constantly deployed overseas.

"There are two obvious, and obviously wrongheaded, solutions to this problem: Pull out of Iraq now or institute a draft. The former would hand a victory to terrorists and undo everything that more than 1,700 Americans have given their lives to achieve. The latter option, aside from being a political non-starter, would also dilute the high quality of the all-volunteer force.

"Having reviewed all the other possibilities and found them wanting, I return to the solution I proposed on this page in February: Broaden the recruiting base beyond U.S. citizens and permanent, legal residents. Legislation has been drafted to make a modest start in that direction.

"The proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is targeted at children of undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. for more than five years but not born here. They would get legal status and become eligible for citizenship if they graduate from high school, stay out of trouble and either attend college for two years or serve two years in the armed forces. This bill, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), drew 48 cosponsors in the Senate last year but failed to get a floor vote. It is likely to be reintroduced soon.

"The DREAM Act is a great idea, but I would go further and offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military.”

(I particularly like that it is called the Dream act. In my graphic novel, the U.S. is led by the Nightmare Party – and this is just the kind of thing the Nightmare party does)

Boot’s article casually calls it the U.S. military, as if it is self evident that a military that is trying to enlist non-U.S. citizens in a war that the citizenry itself doesn’t want to fight is still a U.S. entity. It is as American as a ship that registers in Liberia is Liberian – it is a cover for the usurpation of a particular collective of interests.

Boot, of course, is not the only DREAMer – the Pentagon has high hopes for a fully mechanized army, which would be the mercenary principle on batteries. The objective correlative of the return of the mercenary form – the sovereign’s response to the political upheaval caused by mass mobilization – is the mysteriousness of military funding. There was a New Yorker piece about this a few weeks ago by James Surowiecki.


“Over the past five years, we’ve heard a lot about the rise of what Donald Rumsfeld likes to call “asymmetric warfare,” and about the need to equip our military to fight “nontraditional” enemies. But a look at the defense budget shows that we’re building a new military while still paying for the old one. Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist—eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any “near peer” rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers—or, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.

"Not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance—designed to remake the battlefield with robot vehicles and networked communications systems—began as a ninety-billion-dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar project, and, a recent Pentagon estimate suggests, will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars. Such inefficiency is seldom punished—the Pentagon often hands out bonuses even when companies fail to meet their targets—and is tolerated by regulators. Although government agencies have been required to produce an annual audit of their operations since the late nineties, the Defense Department’s operations are so confused that it has never been able to produce a successful audit. A few years ago, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn’t be explained.”

As you would expect, a trillion dollars going missing elicits a big ho hum from the press – who are much more eager to pursue the homicidal fantasies of disturbed expatriate teachers in Thai prisons. Now, there’s some news we can use as we doze in our cheese like fats and watch the parade of the celebrity monsters on tv, the life force in us turning to dustballs and desolation. But LI, eccentric in all things, sorta wonders about that trillion dollar black hole. Maybe, huh, maybe that isn’t a good thing – not to be unpatriotic, and not to doubt the total validity of what our secretary of Defense so aptly terms our war against 12,000 Islamofascists and some of their mothers, too – a world war that of immense proportions such as has never been seen before or since. But I am thinking that a country that calmly allows the military to disappear that much money is well on its way to a sovereign whose control over a mercenary armed force is just the kind of tyranny that, well, this country was founded to escape. And that a people so supine as to let this happen in front of their eyes, a people that batten like maggots on the war industry and believe every tittle and jot of the warmonger rants they are fed on that bordello of shit called the tv news deserve all the many and staggering blows that they are inevitably storing up for themselves. The wrath to come is forged in the short attention spans of today's spectators, ADD DREAMers all.

Such, at least, are the disenchanted reflections of one inhabitant of DREAM act America.

casualty rates in Iraq -- what is that about?

There has been a rather disappointing discussion going on at Crooked Timber about a Washington Post article by Samuel H. Preston and Emily Buzzell about the casualty rate in Iraq. Kieran Healy attacks them, I think justly, for this passage:

“Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 “person-years” in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq. … One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

"The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000—39 percent of that of troops in Iraq.

"But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.”

As Healy points out,

“… it’s a well-known fact about the sociology of combat that even in a real, live, shooting war, only a comparatively small number of troops in an army ever see direct, front-line duty—if only because the number of people it takes to sustain those who do go out to the front line, or its equivalent, is very large. (Don’t get me wrong: many of those in support roles will face real dangers, too, and their lives will be very far from normal—it’s just that we’re talking about death rates here.) In fact, even amongst the front-line troops, exposure is more focused and limited than you might think. A similar thing is true of bombing campaigns in built-up areas, such as the recent one in the Lebanon. An awful lot of bombs can be dropped and an awful lot of buildings destroyed, and the deaths will be fewer than you might think. But that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, or completely dysfunctional. Who would think to say, “Hey, a bunch of buildings were destroyed by the bombing and hundreds died, but that’s fewer people per capita than will die of heart disease this quarter”?

This is why comparisons to death rates in civilian settings—even comparatively violent ones—are misguided. Anyone who thinks that someone walking around Philly is more likely to be violently attacked than a marine out on patrol in Baghdad is out of their mind.”

In other words, you aren't going to find "something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil" in Philly. The comments section than took off in the usual direction – was the comparison valid, was it invalid, etc., etc.

My own sense is that this avoids a more interesting question: what is the comparison supposed to prove? And why are comparisons like this common on pro-war sites?

I made a comment myself, which is about what the figures actually show us about the war:

"The obvious question posed by the stats of American military deaths is whether there is connection between the comparative lack of American military fatalities and the way the Iraq war has been lost by the Americans. I’d argue there is.

"The American way of fighting is to protect, with the massive advantages given by American technology, the American fighting man. This is a good strategy to win a conventional battle. But it is a bad strategy to win a guerilla war. Since the goal of the war was to occupy Iraq until the nation had reformed as an American ally, the tactics of the war had to be brought into line with that strategy. And that would mean minimizing collateral Iraqi casualties – that is, individuating Iraqi insurgents and killing or capturing them out of the general civilian population. But individuating those insurgents would significantly raise the level of hazard for American soldiers. The American military has opted, generally, not to do that – instead adopting a strategy like that revealed by the investigation of the Haditha murders. The American infliction of casualties on Iraqis is broadly permitted in order to protect every American soldier from harm; a policy that leads to re-inforcing the insurgency as more and more Iraqis have an incentive, given this policy, to join them or at least tacitly give them support. Add to this that the infliction of iraqi casualties by the Americans has no effect on the infliction of iraqi casualties by the insurgents, and you get a picture of why Americans have lost the war. It is like the police coming into a high crime neighborhood and killing random people in the neighborhood without ever lowering the crime rate.

"I think Americans have essentially been irrelevant in Iraq – a sort of mercenary ethnic cleansing unit – since Najaf in 2004. It is interesting to see how they got to that point so quickly. The stats give us a paradox that is at the center of Amrican foreign policy: the Americans are at once the most aggressive nation in the world and the one with the lowest tolerance for American deaths. Hence, they are more apt to get into wars (severely underestimating the costs) that they then mismanage (trying to remain below a threshhold of casualties that divides their tactical means from their strategic ends). This goes a long way back in American history— Grant and McClellan still fight for the soul of the military, with the compromise being a McClellan like delicacy about American deaths combined with a Grant like ferocity in inflicting massive deaths on the enemy—and identifying the latter as victory. Of course, that isn’t victory at all."

This is a point I've flogged all too often at this site.

But there is a broader issue still. As I keep repeating ad nauseum, the motivations for the Iraq war have to be found in the war culture itself – it is not just Iraq that is in question, but the past sixty years in which war has not only overturned elementary principles of democracy, but has so shaped the attitude of an influential segment in not only the U.S., but in every prosperous nation, that war has become a goal, weapon production has become a manufacturing mainstay, and a low level, constant belligerence has become the temperamental default for the ‘discourse’ about the interactions between states.

In my next post, I want to get to the immediate political root of the Iraq war, which I think transcends the grab bag of the war supporters motives. This is, among other things, an experimental war – a new expression of creating a military force that is solely at the discretion of the executive branch, and using it aggressively with no need to respond in any fashion to any legal or social constraint. To roll out this model of war, you need war lite – you need a volunteer army that you can claim has an acceptable number of casualties in order for that army to, so to speak, operate outside the field of attention – of all except, of course, the unfortunates they operate on. The return of the mercenary form, although not labeled as such, is what we are seeing.

late breaking news

The World Wide News breaks the story first. The New York Times and The Washington Post both have egg on their faces, although of course the NYT have now assigned the crack team of Adam Nagourney and Elizabeth Bumiller to find the gypsy and ask her if her spells are the reason that, every time they are around the President, he just seems so big, strong, and competent.

My sources tell me that the gypsy has been thinking of placing a curse on UFOBreakfast. Don't be suprised if the tone, there, radically shifts to one of squirrel-o-philia. Rumor has it that Mr. Scruggs is writing a sonnet sequence to a certain H.C., beginning, "Like a man struggling vainly in a pillory/so is my heart bound to you, oh my Hilary."

a request

Our filmic friend at CoolSeason gave us some very valuable comments on the first 25 panels of our graphic novel. If any other member of the LI community (somehow, I started laughing when I wrote that phrase. Okay, the LI cult, sect, cell, cenacle, salon, militia – the LI al qaeda, our own base so help us Lucifer), please email me, and I will email them to you. I am fighting my way, in the GN, towards a clearer storyline, but it must ultimately sustain the load of anger and end-of-time angst that is supposed to detonate in the reader’s head, heart, and bowels. D., my illustrator, and me want to launch a virus that will end the war, bring down the military, return the country to the old time constitutional division of powers, and reverse the fatal trajectory towards destroying the planet's atmosphere and fresh water supply. Baby steps, really.

Solnit

Come on, fuck that NYT Magazine article this morning. Trust me – don’t you trust me? Read this article by Rebecca Solnit in Orion magazine instead.
Let’s begin with one of the statistics:

“The California Gold Rush clawed out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada considerable gold—93 tons or 2.7 million troy ounces in the peak year of 1853 alone, an estimated 973 tons or 28.4 million troy ounces by 1858, more than 3,634 tons or 106 million troy ounces to date.”

My brothers used to be in apartment maintenance. Now, standard practice calls for a quick clean up, laying new carpet and a possible paint job once your resident has vacated his place. If the resident was a smoker, inevitably the paint job followed, since the smoke would stain the walls. This is the literal materialization of human aura, but it isn’t just your renter and his Camels. No, we leave our indelible imprint on the landscape long after we have tidily tucked away the event. In human time, measured by the fingernail and hair growth, tumescence and the brief flurry of orgasm, the fleeting memory that flairs up in the night like a ghost of what the angle looked from a height that was just up to mom’s knee or thigh and is gone before you can complete the memory, organize that field of view, events are inevitably more fleeting, more bound to the attention span – but of course, in organic time, measured by proteins and fats, this isn’t so. An event can last a long time. Hence the interest in Solnit’s gold rush story. It is the quintessential Wild West story, the one the American dream life immediately focused upon – the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, the arrival of hundreds and then thousands come to stake a claim, the settling of California.

But Solnit brings out other pieces of the rush. For instance, by our manifest luck, we just happened to fight a war with Mexico that gave us both the Sacramento River and the means to exploit the gold we found there. That means was mercury:

“In the northwesternmost corner of old Mexico, in 1845, a staggeringly rich mercury lode was discovered by one Captain Don Andres Castillero. Located near San Jose at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the New Almaden Mine was well within the territory seized by the United States by the time it was developed. And only days before the February 2, 1848, treaty giving Mexico $15 million for its northern half was signed, gold was also discovered in California. Thus began the celebrated Gold Rush, which far fewer know was also a mercury rush, or that the two were deeply intertwined.”

Mercury combines with gold, making it much easier to extract from water or earth. Of course, there is the little problem that mercury is extremely poisonous, a neurotoxin that keeps on tickin’.

“During the California Gold Rush, an estimated 7,600 tons or 15,200,000 pounds of mercury were thus deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that placer, or stream-based, mining alone put ten million pounds of the neurotoxin into the environment, while hard-rock mining accounted for another three million pounds. Much of it is still there—a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes find globules the size of a man's fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams—but the rest of it ended up lining the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Some of it is still traveling: the San Jose Mercury News (named after the old mercury mines there) reports that one thousand pounds of the stuff comes out of gold-mining country and into the bay every year, and another two hundred pounds comes from a single mercury mine at the south end of the bay annually. Some of this mercury ends up in the fish, and as you move up the food chain, the mercury accumulates.

"According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, "Fish at the top of the food web can harbor mercury concentrations in their tissues over one million times the mercury concentration in the water in which they swim." All around the edges of the bay, warning signs are posted, sometimes in Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese, as well as English, but people fish, particularly poor and immigrant people, and some eat their catch. They are paying for the Gold Rush too.

“Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out of it. There is something fabulous about this, or at least fablelike. Gold and mercury are brothers and opposites, positioned next to each other, elements 79 and 80, in the Periodic Table of the Elements. And they also often coexist in the same underground deposits. Gold has been prized in part because it does not rust, change, or decay, while mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and that liquid is, for those who remember breaking old thermometers to play with the globules, something strange, congealing into a trembling mass or breaking into tiny spheres that roll in all directions, ready to change, to amalgamate with other metals, to work its way into the bodies of living organisms.”

In the tv series westerns, nobody ever complains about mercury fumes. In real life, the landscape after gold mining is laced with poisons, the sources of the water are diverted and fouled, and of course vegetation, which likes mercury no more than the human body, dies off:

“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether. "Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears," said one onlooker at a hydraulic mine. “

Well, what is good for the nineteenth century is good for the 21st, especially in the Bush culture of infinite waste for the betterment of the upper 1 percent income bracket. Nevada is now the place to go to watch humans poison the earth and the sources of water (in a state that is developing million plus cities, without any visible means of water in, say, fifteen years) because, well, the sacred and wondrous effects of private property are what brought down the communist menace. Notice how it all leads to the kingdom of God, who has a funded position at the Cato Institute.

“The current gold rush in northeastern Nevada, which produces gold on a monstrous scale—seven million ounces in 2004 alone—is also dispersing dangerous quantities of mercury. This time it's airborne. The forty-mile-long Carlin Trend on which the gigantic open-pit gold mines are situated is a region of "microscopic gold"; dispersed in the soil and rock far underground, imperceptible to the human eye, unaffordable to mine with yesteryear's technology. To extract the gold, huge chunks of the landscape are excavated, pulverized, piled up, and plied with a cyanide solution that draws out the gold. The process, known as cyanide heap-leach mining, releases large amounts of mercury into the biosphere. Wind and water meet the materials at each stage and create windblown dust and seepage, and thus the mercury and other heavy metals begin to travel.

“As the Ban Mercury Working Group reports, "Though cumulatively coal fired power plants are the predominant source of atmospheric mercury emissions, the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the United States are the three largest gold mines there." The Great Salt Lake, when tested in 2004, turned out to have astonishingly high mercury levels, as did wild waterways in Idaho, and Nevada's gold mines seem to be the culprit. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that year, "The scope of mercury pollution associated with Nevada's gold mining industry wasn't discovered until the EPA changed rules in 1998 to add mercury to the list of toxic discharges required to be reported. When the first numbers were released in 2000, Nevada mines reported the release of 13,576 pounds in 1998. Those numbers have since been revised upward to an estimated 21,098 pounds, or more than 10 tons, to make Nevada the nation's No. 1 source of mercury emissions at the time." Glen Miller, a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, estimates that since 1985, the eighteen major gold mines in the state released between 70 and 200 tons of mercury into the environment.”

Don’t you love it? The Western states, with their large GOP populations, are also the ones suffering from the various poisonings they bring down on themselves. In the AEC dialectic that has dominated the West since 1945, the low use population is hooked on the conditions that make it a low use population. The embrace of a rabid individualism that masks the grab of the corporate collectives is the route traveled by mercury into the brain, an ideological analogue of the actual route from the air and water via the pores, mouth and tongue to the internal organs, the weaving nerve tissue and up ever heavenward to the brain. In comic book terms, at least, this is no disadvantage -- far from it! As the low use human product gets literally stupider with mercury poisoning, it gets more apt to believe anything.

... And they wonder where that 35 percent of hardcore Bush supporters come from.