the portmanteau tombstone

Le voyez-vous, dit-elle, il meurt, ce vieux pervers,
Tous les frimas du monde ont passé par sa bouche – Nerval, “Horus”

Nerval is a poet of strange, strange lines. All the frost of the world passed through his mouth – a truth that could shatter some world, one you possibly live in, if you could find the key to it.

An anecdote: When Nerval went mad in 1841, he naturally tried to suppress the news of this from leaking out. He was the most discrete of men. So imagine his shock when his friend, the critic Jules Janin, wrote a charming mock obituary for Nerval’s reason. So funny! Nerval, in public, even played along with the image Janin had stamped upon him, but in a despairing letter to Janin Nerval denounced the article and Janin for ruining that thing in a life that you can’t get back: the seriousness that surrounds one. He’d been made a buffoon, who feared being made a buffoon.

Here’s how Jonathan Strauss, in Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel and the Modern Self, describes what happened to Nerval that first time, borrowing from Aurelia: “The importance and complexity of Nerval’s role as a mad writer have evolved over the years since the evening of late February 1841 when, following the appeals and declination of a certain star hanging over the horizon, he wandered naked through he streets of Paris, into the arms of the night patrol, and into what was to be the first of a long series of voluntary and involuntary confinements.” The result of Nerval’s stay in Dr. Blanche’s madhouse (a few blocks down from Balzac’s house) was, according to the reliable introduction to the Penguin Nerval, a necronym. Nerval named himself Gerald Nerval after having given himself an immense and mythic geneology. He convinced himself that he was really related to Napoleon, the bastard child, unacknowledged, of Napoleon’s brother. But he was related, as well, to more ancient monarchies. “Gerald Nerval” complicatedly encodes a secret message from the dead – who, in Nerval’s books, are never really dead. They pass into a realm of haunting. Nerva is from the Roman emperor, Averne is the realm of death, vernal of spring, geras is the Greek for glory – and thus a portmanteau tombstone name. He put his suicide into his name – who among us can say as much?

But I have more to say about this Janin.

LI was going to put in this here space one of our ever popular posts about Janin, Nerval and Baudelaire, but unfortunately, where does the fucking time go? LI can't be translating French stuff today, ladies and gents.

We did want to announce that we got a contribution of enormous proportions for this site, yesterday. Thank you, Mr. ....

And, in lieu of something interesting and fun, it is compare and contrast day. Here is an article about the new oil law in Iraq from a warmonger. The gentleman has never been right about Iraq, has found the killing fields in Iraq something of a bracer, supported installing a convicted criminal as the head of the conquered territory, and has never met an opposition argument that he hasn't disposed of by dishonestly manhandling it. We are talking about one suave voiced peckerwood here. And over here is one from a sensible person who knows about the oil business. You decide which one is within the ballpark of reality, and which one is another sad evidence of debility, decay, and decline.

An anecdote for IT

Grimod de Reyniere was a famous gourmand of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. We have mentioned him in an earlier post. He is mentioned by Nerval as an esprit faible – Nerval tells the story of the two philosophical feasts that were given by Grimod in the Roman fashion, at which women with long hair were scattered among the guests so that their hair could be used by the guests to wipe their hands – just the kind of touch that drove Carlyle and Dickens crazy about the ancien regime.

Anyway, Grimod de Reyniere was notoriously fond of pigs, and not so fond of women – or at least, of his mother. I have found a quote from him from a history of feasting, Charlemagne’s Tablecloth:

Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted its name to become a form of opprobrium?

Is there a woman, no matter how pretty she may be, who can equal … Arles sausage, that delicacy which makes the person of the pig so valuable and precious?

And yet, this pig love is a rather odd thing. Grimod de Reyniere was born with deformed hands – one was a “webbed pincer, the other like a bird’s claw, both required false hands to be fitted”. And to cover up the shame of the deformities, his parents made up a story that he had been mauled by a pig.

Of course, there are those who say the praise of the pig was ironic. And there are those who say Grimod de Reyniere spent too much time with his friend, the Marquis de Sade.

This site gives a different view of Grimod de Reyniere, and has an example of his handwriting – sadly, with his chicken claw hand, Reyniere’s handwriting is better than LI’s.

our standard begging post

Limited Inc has not posted a begging contribution post in a while. So I figure it is time to post one. This is an excellent month to contribute to the maintenance of this enterprise if you are so inclined, since this month is proving to be a cruel one to LI's bones. We had a nice anonymous contribution last week - for which, much thanks! Contributors large and small, check out the little paypal link.

the soundtrack

Q: In everyday life, do you sometimes have the impression of being in a film?
Baudrillard: Yes, particularly in America, to a quite painful degree. If you drive around Los Angeles in a car, or go out into the desert, you are left with an impression that is toally cinematographic, hallucinatory. You are … steeping in a substance which is that of the real, of the hyper-real, of the cinema. This is so even with that foreboding of catastrophe: an enormous truck bowling along a freeway, the frequent allusions to the possibility of catastrophic events, but perhaps that is a scenario I describe to myself.”
-From Baudrillard Live: selected interviews.

LI is of the opinion that post-modernity never happened, that all the features that are supposed to be postmodern – the hyperreal, the self as self-reference, the undermining of epistemic certainties by pure doxic moments (doxa, you Platonists will remember, are the half way real) – that all of this is what happens as we wander about the extended sensorium created by modernism. When Gerald Nerval in Aurelia recounts the l'épanchement du songe dans la vie réelle (the effusion of the dream in real life), the segues and montages and dissolves could be referenced, at best, to paintings and optical instruments like the microscope, telescope, and kaleidoscope, but now the dream is shot through real life in every grocery store and gas station rest room. And as for Nerval’s own version of the occult influence of the ordinary on his life – “I’ve often had this idea that in certain grave moments in life, the exterior world spirit, as such, incarnated itself suddenly in the form of an ordinary person, and acted or attempted to act on us, without the knowledge or memory of that person” – this is what I think I meant in yesterday’s post by saying that everything we touch turns to mythology, and it is that quality, raised to the power of an external system, that is the sensorium of modernity, on all tracks.

Which leads me to movie music, and in particular, the way my sense of myself has been bound up, at least since early adolescence, with the idea that there is a soundtrack to my life. Here we have a question for psychologists: what is the meaning and history of the life soundtrack? I know many people who definitely have this same sense – and in fact, those are the people who have always fascinated me in my life. There are many things that go into elective affinity – one of them for me is the intuition that a certain person has this soundtrack, lives with it, nourishes it, realizes, obscurely, that it is important. These people are poseurs, and I do love poseurs – it requires a lot of push back against the inertia of the everyday, which, after a while, wears on even Popeye’s muscle. I do think the soundtrack dies, for a lot of people – who knows, perhaps most people – in the twenties. It might be a sign of one’s retarded development in late modern capitalism to retain it, as I do, into middle age.

I do know, however, that Baudrillard’s sense of living in a film in America leaves out that very important thing – the radio. The cd deck. Without it – especially in those vast eyeaching spaces that you have to speed through, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Texas – the movie-in-life becomes simply a trance of sleep inducing landscapes. I have left behind a little bit of myself – the little bit that lived at a fictitious address in Georgia - in the computers of the state police of each of those states, just trying to get out of there.

Liars all the way down

LI recommends this article by Gretchen Morgensen today. Although it scares the living bejesus out me – since one of the things about the temporary collapse of capitalism is that poor people tend to get wiped out first, and I tend to be a poor person. Shit. In the dream, I am at the wheel of the car, and the brake stops working, and the accelerator jams, and there is a brick wall looming just ahead.

There is a conservative mindset which pops up among the Clinton liberal set that is all about balanced budgets. I think that is fucking braindead. Debt is not a bad thing – for instance, the European economy, with its paralyzed fear of inflation, did not do the necessary in the past six years, ease up lending requirements and use the European real estate market, in classic Keynesian fashion, to operate as a multiplier at the same time as it transferred savings into investment - but reading this made me sick. This is when the evaporation of savings becomes, uh, real:

In 2000, according to Banc of America Securities, the average loan to a subprime lender was 48 percent of the value of the underlying property. By 2006, that figure reached 82 percent.

Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.

While the poet in me experiences a certain frisson that the Weltgeist so brilliantly propped up the liar war and the liar government on the back of the liar loan economy - the poor forked creature who is worried about bread and shelter is not happy. I do get antsy when bad things impact the "$6.5 trillion mortgage securities market" - I'm funny that way.

ersatz outrage, real outrage, and the boy that go a-lynchin'

LI will, perhaps, shock all true hearts by admitting that we weren’t at all shocked by Ann Coulter’s use of faggot last week. It wasn’t as good a joke as it could have been, but fuck it – it isn’t that we are especially worried that the Conservative Congress of Dimwits is going to hear something that will corrupt them, or their endorsement of various politicians who will do all within their power to give us a nice, toasty, lifeending atmosphere and lead up to it with one bloody and pointless war after the other.

We thought, at most, that this was a sign of the separation of conservative politics from the conservative constituency. It may surprise liberals, but the conservative constituency is not that interested in politics. Fundamentally, it needs to be prodded into paying concerted attention to who rules the country (although I should say, the attention is directed to a counterfeit network of who runs the country – nobody wants the fundamentalist yahoos looking at the life styles of the rich and the famous, they might begin to get all biblical about that wealth). LI would hazard that the fundamentalists are getting more and more fed up with their so called leaders – for the leaders are political creatures. The reason for going to church, asking forgiveness for sin, being reborn, has everything to do with the emotional and existential satisfactions of accepting Jesus in your heart, and little to do with the epiphenomena of laws, wars, tax cuts, abortion, homosexuality and all the rest of it. And when the people of Muskegee look up and see their so called leaders listening to a blonde pottymouth who seems to have more cultural connection to Lenny Bruce than to Billy Graham, I think they are overcome with a deep and justified apathy. I may be wrong, but the faggot remark is much worse for Red Staters than for liberal sensibilities. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but: taboos don’t exist in society in terms of straight binaries. There is a whole middle ground of decorum, and it is on that middle ground of decorum that your good Southern Baptist takes his or her stand.

But LI can be moved to loathing by small, spontaneous outrages. The recent story about AutoAdmit, an online community that seems to exist to combine the sensibility of the titty bar customer with the maddening attitude of spoiled rich male law student, did move me to go here and sign the petition to stop their obnoxious condoning of sexual harassment. For details about this crewe of the misbegotten, go to this Feministe post. There is a distressing thread, to me, equating the sum of the wrong done by the people at AutoAdmit who take women’s pictures from their homepages, submit them for various bogus contests, make a lot of comments re tits, ass, desire to hatefuck, etc. to a bump in the upward trajectory of a career. I understand why this is quantified in money terms, and in fact I think AutoAdmit should be hit in money terms – I think that if liberal and feminist organizations issued advisories against law schools that apparently contain members of AutoAdmit, the company would change its policy in a heartbeat.

However, I do think it is interesting that in the same week that Girls Gone Wild is blamed on feminism, Boys Gone a-Lynching is given a free pass. Mind, I believe the 20 something generation in this country is much less sexist and racist than my generation was – I have a mild faith in the incremental progress of the human spirit in this department. But the lyncher mentality of rich or upper class males is a huge cultural festuche.

There is a sub-outrage to the AutoAdmit stupidity: Ann Althouse's attack on Jill at Feministe for... well, for something. It isn't clear what. Althouse is a conservative, and her kneejerk reaction is determined by three variables, in descending order: class, race, and sex. If you fill those things in wealthy, white and male, you get the Althouse prize of sympathy, if you want it. Temperaments are important in politics: fill those things in poor, black and female, and you'd get LI's kneejerk sympathy. I have no problem with conservative kneejerk reaction per se - I simply am on the other side of that class war. But disguising it in a fake populism does tend to piss me off. When Russell Kirk was replaced by Rush Limbaugh, it was a deal with the devil.

LI apologizes for the poor quality of the programming this week, surfers

It is nice to see that, according to the NYT, the author of “Party Til You Puke” – Andrew W.K. now wants to discuss the merits of Martin Buber with his fans.

“Mr. W. K. — the initials stand for his real last name, Wilkes-Krier — is a connoisseur of excitement, as anyone who has seen his hair-flinging performances or videos can attest. Lately he’s been exuberant about ideas, like the nature of coincidences and paradoxes and solipsism. Also pancakes. Over lunch near his apartment in Midtown, he ordered a stack of blueberry-banana-chocolate-chip-walnut, a blend of every flavor the restaurant offered — and slowly made a mash of them as he talked about his new passion: thinking.

He has been reading the works of the philosopher Martin Buber, among others, and contemplating consciousness. “I have been very into the idea that the only way the external world exists is by you observing it, and that the only way you can interact with that external world through that observation is to intend it to be,” he said, his eyes closed in concentration. He opened them to eat observably a strip of bacon.”

This is Martin Buber’s theory of reality as a tv to which you hold a channel changer – which has pretty much satisfied us for the last fifty years. The problem with that interaction is that the internal world might come out of you into the external world in big spontaneous doses if you party til you puke, but such are the chances of life.

Well, LI has been closing our eyes, too, trying to think our way through various intractable problems this week. We have been – okay? – a piss poor blogger this week. Sorry. Not only that, but we’ve been making little money doing the stuff that Melena Ryzik – the reporter who interviewed Mr. W-K – is doing in this article: smirkily affirming the prejudices of the reader. We have not queried a newspaper or magazine regarding a thousand words to fill up a couple of columns since – since early February. Although we did just get some nice feedback from a professor whose article on Russian cinema we edited, who advised us to radically raise our prices. So there you go. We are going to have to plea for work a little bit in the next week, probably on this site. Sorry.

While Mr. W-K wrestles with couch potato idealism, we’ve been thinking about a line that popped into our head whilst running around the lake yesterday: we turn everything we touch into mythology.

This wasn’t exactly a thought, and it wasn’t exactly a line of poetry – it was a freefloating externality, a stray, something overheard as the language talks to the language via my brain, a singleton – which is, of course, why I run around the lake. Loosen your thoughts until they are no longer your thoughts. Unlike W-K or Baudelaire (Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime/ Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves/ Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés), I try to turn potential ‘verse’ into propositions – I chop its head off, I pluck it, I gut it, I cut it into pieces. I couldn’t say that this line came out of nowhere – lately, as my suffering readers know, I’ve been thinking about the destiny of figures that are unloosed in literature and life, especially the buffoon and the sage, and how that destiny impinges on the social like the way a particular style will impinge on a text – a nuance that isn’t caught by discourse or the truth table.

Could it really be true that everything we touch turns into mythology? Are human beings machines for making myths?

Well: here’s a dialogue in the Upanishads that gives us two sides on this issue, which ends on a note of pure Beckett. I hope Mr. W-K finishes his Martin Buber soon, so he can move on to the Upanishads. Maybe I should write him a letter.

There was a man of the Garga family called Proud Balaki, who was a speaker. He said to Ajatasatru, the king of Benares, ‘I will tell you about Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, ‘For this proposal I give you a thousand (cows). People indeed rush saying "Janaka, Janaka". (I too have some of his qualities.)’
II-i-2: Gargya said, ‘That being who is in the sun, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, ‘Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as all-surpassing, as the head of all beings and as resplendent. He who meditates upon him as such becomes all-surpassing, the head of all beings and resplendent.
II-i-3: Gargya said, ‘that being who is in the moon, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as the great, white-robed, radiant Soma.’ He who meditates upon him as such has abundant Soma pressed in his principal and auxiliary sacrifices every day, and his food never gets short.
II-i-4: Gargya said, ‘That being who is in lightning, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as powerful’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes powerful, and his progeny too becomes powerful.
II-i-5: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the ether, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as full and unmoving’. He who meditates upon him as such is filled with progeny and cattle, and his progeny is never extinct from this world.
II-i-6: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in air, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as the Lord, as irresistible, and as the unvanquished army.’ He who meditates upon him as such ever becomes victorious and invincible, and conquers his enemies.
II-i-7: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in fire, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as forbearing’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes forbearing, and his progeny too becomes forbearing.
II-i-8: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in water, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as agreeable’. He who meditates upon him as such has only agreeable things coming to him, and not contrary ones; also from him are born children who are agreeable.
II-i-9: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in a looking-glass, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as shining’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes shining, and his progeny too becomes shining. He also outshines all those with whom he comes in contact.
II-i-10: Gargya said, ‘This sound that issues behind a man as he walks, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as life’. He who meditates upon him as such attains his full term of life in this world, and life does not depart from him before the completion of that term.
II-i-11: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the quarters, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as second and as non-separating’. He who meditates upon him as such gets companions, and his followers never depart from him.
II-i-12: Gargya said, ‘This being who identifies himself with the shadow, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as death’. He who meditates upon him as such attains his full term of life in this world, and death does not overtake him before the completion of that term.
II-i-13: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the self, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as self-possessed.’ He who meditates upon him as such becomes self-possessed, and his progeny too becomes self-possessed. Gargya remained silent.
II-i-14: Ajatasatru said, ‘is this all ?’ ‘This is all’. ‘By knowing this much one cannot know (Brahman)’. Gargya said, ‘I approach you as a student’.

some more errant scribbles

I have noticed that no matter how many cups of coffee I drink in the morning, I am still sleepy. Hmm, I wonder if this has something to do with my overuse of sleeping pills? I guess eventually they get you if you don’t watch out – look what happened to Evelyn Waugh.

But to return to … the preface. Yesterday I figured out how to tightly describe Silja’s argument. Today I have to assess her argument, first about the continuity of mainstream economics – is it true that equilibrium models are at the center of economic theory, and is it plausible that the elevation of equilibrium models is an expression of the underlying ontological bias towards substantivism in economics? I’m going to point out that the exceptions prove the rule. The great exception is Keynes, of course. Keynesian economics begins with a grand gesture – the kicking over of Say’s law. In a sense, that is what you have to know about Keynes. Say’s law is the notion that production equals demand, or as the neoclassicals like to put it, demand grows out of production. Keynes discovered, or claimed he discovered, that even the classical economists had doubts about this – notably, Malthus. It is because economists adhere to Say’s law – Robert Lucas, who is a much more important economist to economists, by the way, than Milton Friedman, even made the claim that Say’s Law is an intelligibility requirement for economics – that economists make various bizarre claims. For instance, the claim that the unemployed chose unemployment. With Say’s law in hand, the classical economists and the neo-classicals that follow them had a principle that disallowed, or at least obscured, the business cycle. The way this is put in the gobbledygook of theory is: aggregate demand intersects the aggregate supply curve at full employment and aggregate demand will, a priori, not fluctuate save for disturbance by some endogenous factor.

Now, in truth, nobody actually believes Say’s law anymore. That is, no government will operate on the principle that the market is self-regulating. Instead, the state has operated, since the great depression, on the assumption that it is the state’s business how much the citizens of the state save. Reaganism, while founded in appearance on neo-classical economics, operates as a robust Keynesian engine for destroying savings, and creating ever higher levels of demand. This is an easy proposition to prove, actually. Whenever the IMF and investors go into a country that has a strong public sector – like the Latin American countries of the 1970s – the first thing that happens is that the spending of the public sector goes down, but savings also go down – in other words, there is a rush to consume and borrow. Reaganism is simply a sort of half and half Keynesianism – it seeks to restrict government economic policy to the purely fiscal, while at the same time encouraging massive borrowing. That borrowing, even by the private sector, is considered by lenders to be guaranteed by the state. The avatar of Reaganism in Latin America, Chile under Pinochet, experienced this in the early eighties, when foreign lenders forced the state to take on the debts of private corporations. I guess you could call Reaganism a form of moral hazard Keynesianism.

But I am digressing, damn it.

practice exercises

The death of Jean Baudrillard was marked by an obituary in the NYT that reminded its viewers how important the man was – why, he was quoted in a popular movie, the Matrix. That settles that. Surprisingly, though, the Guardian had two posts about him in their Commentisfree section, stirring my competitive and patriotic juices. What the fuck is happening? England, the land where the phlegmatic philistine was born and suckled, is now more intellectual than our Purple Mountain’s Majesty in these here states, where the masses go to classes? How low have we fallen in this age of Cheney?

The comment threads in the Guardian piece here and here are pretty good, although they eventually peter out in that futile and bizarre controversy that pits the unscientific and wild French against the scientific and rational Anglo-Americans. The many levels of ignorance involved in this controversy continue to astonish me. While the Anglo-Americans do read as though they were scientific and rational, i.e. the level of dullness of articles in analytic philosophy seems to be a quirk that the creators of that dullness are actually proud of, anybody who reads them soon gets that all over weird feeling, since it is like the Mad Hatter doing accounting. The A-A’s are always going on about things like possible worlds, coming up with completely stupid thought experiments, and spending decades formalizing supervenience relations – supervenience coming neither from science nor common sense, but being the overheated product of the cramped scientistic imagination. Actually, the best part of A-A philosophy is its wildness, which has its charms if one can only dust off the language in which it is chained. Meanwhile, for all Baudrillard’s rhetoric of hyperreality, his stuff is firmly anchored in tv, war, money, sex, fashion – watercooler and newspaper realities. Not for him the question: is H2O on our planet the equivalent of XYZ on Counter-Earth 1? On which tottering foundations careers have been built.

Well, as my favorite epileptic St. Paul said, we see now as in a glass, darkly.

But this is all an excuse for me to scribble a few notes in this post re a section of the preface I am writing for Silja’s book. Maybe this will straighten out my God damn argument, and I can just transfer it, minus the fucks, shits, damns, cunts and dicks with which I like to sprinkle my musings. Oops, did I forget pussy and cock? I do want to make the current rightwing blog craze for collecting naughty words easier.

A section of this preface is devoted to defending the conceptual reconstruction of the longue durée of economics that would permit citing economists across a pretty wide chronological spread. The argument that Silja makes is an immanent one: mainstream economics is astonishingly consistent with itself from its roots in the 18th century right up to, say, the attempt by Lucas in the 1980s to define the business cycle in terms of a sequence of equilibrium states – an attempt that even preserves Says law. Thus, the ruptures within economics – most notably, the recasting of the classical notion of value by the marginal utilitarians – do not have the profundity characteristic of ruptures found in other sciences, where real questions of reduction can be raised – interfield reduction is the useful phrase of Darden and Maull. Okay?

So: what does this mean? Well, here’s one way of looking at the story that Silja is telling. Take two moments in economics. One is a famous survey conducted by Leontief in 1982. Let’s quote Mark Blaug: “In a letter to Science, Wassily Leontief (1982) surveyed articles published in the American Economic Review in the last decade and found that more than 50 percent consisted of mathematical models without any empirical data, while some 15 percent consisted of nonmathematical theoretical analysis, likewise without empirical data, leaving 35 percent of the articles using empirical analysis.

Morgan (1988) has updated Leontief’s findings, showing oce again that half the articles published in the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal do not use data of any kind…”

One of the proudest claims of economics is that it is the physics of the social sciences – in fact, the only truly scientific social science. Economics imperialism sometimes goes so far as to claim that economics is the foundation of physics itself – a claim Schumpeter pushed in a rather bizarre passage in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Morgan both compared the economists to articles published in physics and chemistry journals, finding 12 percent of the articles in physics contained no empirical data and 0 percent in chemistry. Economists know this, of course. Alan Blinder has made a typical economist’s joke about it: an economist is "someone who sees that something works in practice and wonders if it also works in theory." The punchline wasn’t supplied by Blinder, but it is: if it doesn’t work in theory, then it simply can’t work in practice, and must be ignored until economists have successfully pressed for policies to destroy it. That is the story of the minimum wage law, for instance.

I select this survey in order to look back two hundred years to Dugald Stewart’s memoir of Adam Smith. In this memoir, Stewart introduced a brilliant phrase to describe the methodological justification that underlies Smith’s theories of language, ethics and political economic – in fact, all Smith’s theories about human institutions. Stewart called this “conjectural history”. “To this species of philosophical investigation, which has no appropriated name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History, an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr. Hume, and with what some French writers have called Histoire Raisonnee.” This history follows the contours of the “known principles of human nature” to understand “how all its various parts might have gradually arisen.” From theorizing about the origin of language, this method could be ‘applied to the modes of government, and to the municipal institutins which have obtained among different nations.” And in particular: “In his Wealth of Nations, various disquisitions are introduced which have a like object in view, particularly the theoretical delineation he has given of the natural progress of opulence in a country, and his investigation of the causes which have inverted this order in the different countries of modern Europe.” (Stewart, 34-36)

These two moments may seem as divided and different as the Wealth of Nations is, itself, from the mathematically sophisticated modeling of the standard essay in the contemporary mainstream economics journals. Yet a little analysis will reveal that conjectural history is at the very root of the modeling culture of modern economics.

more leftovers!

More leftovers, I'm afraid. And where are those editing jobs that my readers were supposed to find me, eh? Poor LI, mired in poverty and an article about the philosophy of economics!

So, if you want more interesting fare, go to UFOB, where Mr. Scruggs is lamenting the decline of the yellow ribbon industry, or go to IT, for the post on Jean Baudrillard's death. Or go to the KinoFist essay on Brecht, which I would probably be writing about except that I'm not. It is long and well argued, yet it contains a couple of assumptions that I'd like to thrash out - but I can't! Gotta run.

And now, without further ado: a post from October of 2001!

Sometimes you come upon a fact that you know has an essayistic depth to it, if you only had the time, or the mental capacity, to write the essay. For instance: last night I read this anecdote about Hans Christian Andersen. Since he lived in fear of awakening in a coffin, "he always carried a card with him saying, "I am not really dead," which he put on the dressing table whenever he stayed at a hotel abroad, to prevent some careless doctor from wrongly declaring him dead." -- Buried Alive, by Jan Bondeson.
Now the Walter Benjamin in me takes that as an image applicable to every modernist artist -- didn't they all carry with them, at least metaphorically, some card saying 'I'm not really dead?' And what kind of sentence is that, anyway? Who, after all, is the speaker? What kind of truth claims can the dead make? There's a good reason that wills begin with a declaration of health -- we only trust the living.

Cheney: even sociopath's sometimes feel sad

I am trying to procrastinate, looking around the web, and I come across the NYT story about whether Cheney, in the tumor he calls a heart, felt pinpricks of sympathy for Scooter Libby - or whether it was a fuck him and fold him like a Dixie cup situation - the usual m.o. of our sociopathic VP. The article ended with this startling graf:

"With a career in politics that goes back to the Nixon White House, Mr. Cheney is no stranger to Washington scandal and how to weather it. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he went hunting with the vice president late last year and did not sense that the trial was bothering him."

No doubt. The reporter failed to ask Graham how much time he spent pondering the VP's mood, and how much time he spent thinking, if the son of a bitch plugs me, I'm going to shoot him back!

my humble prayer

Well, I am still stuck in this unremunerative task, writing this preface to Silja's book. God is punishing me for all those times I said the Lord's Prayer sideways. Come on, God, don't be like that, dude. Send me that angel of inspiration. I promise I'll, uh, be better. How about: no cocaine for a whole year? How about: I'll get back in contact with the old man?... No, don't think I'll do the latter. Probably I should - oh well.

In the meantime, I'm going to cheat and recycle a post from 2005 on La Salamandre.

Here it is...

My friend D. sent me a little CD the other day. It had the Rage against the Machine song on it, Killing in the Name of. D. is an old Metallica fan, from before they had an on-call psychoanalyst. Myself, I love noise, but I am not a metal person. I particularly hate the voices that a lot of metal music features, in which some singer has to assume the precise sound that would be made by the Cowardly Lion on meth – a fake monster voice, full of empty volume and scatchiness.

All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.

A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.

The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.

Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.

That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.

Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.

Menger mania

I am going to be trying to write this preface to my translation of Silja Graupe’s Basho of Economics. So I might not be too on the mark this week. However, it is a good time to beg – I’m really looking for some editing jobs this month, which is lookin’ kind of Mother Hubbard bare. The dog wants a bone. LI wants a bone. The Landlady wants a bone. The phone company wants a bone. All God’s children want bones, want bones. So – if you want editing, research, proofreading, the whole deal, know somebody who wants same, know somebody who knows somebody, etc. – send them to me, please.

In the meantime, I’m going off to think about Carl Menger’s curious notions concerning the foundations of economics.

Goodbye 20th century, it was good to know you

Prospect Magazine did a survey for this month’s mag. This was the question they asked, and their sense of the response they got:

“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”

Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question. LI, however, thinks the premise is wrong. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.

The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It strikes us as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. But given the need to feed the war culture, terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster. There is nothing like having a vicious, dark skinned enemy to slaughter – Keynes’ “animal spirits” get all stirred up and shit. But LI will never get our brain around the fact that this might be the future. This is because we don’t want to commit suicide right away – we do want a reason to hang around a bit longer. So we will not believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health. Otherwise – somebody get me a rusty razor!

I love to jerk off, but I don't love all jerk offs

“But if the personalities weren’t ridiculous by themselves, one wouldn’t be able to make up good stories.” – Rameau

Frankly, LI doesn’t like Atrios’ wanker of the day award, because it associates one of God’s greatest gifts – wanking – exclusively with the warmonger and the feeb. I guess it is the last gasp of the great onanism fear that swept over Europe and the States in the 18th century. But it has had one good effect at least – it is obviously driving Time Magazine’s Joe Klein crazy. Today, he published a You can trust a Communist to be Communist post on his blog, and it is a useful map of the parameters of U.S. reporting. Anything that seems to indicate that a reporter will be called a “left wing extremist” is excluded. Since Klein is an insider to these circles, I think we can trust his accuracy. Here are the rules, the things that are tabu for your average thumb up his ass D.C. scribe:

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.
--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.
--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.
--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).
--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.
--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.
--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.
--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.
--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.
--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.”

While Joe Klein richly deserves Atrios’ scorn – if he is a wanker, he is the kind of masturbator who gives that glorious supplement a bad name – he’s done a service by spelling out the rules that run through the head of the press corps. One by one, the fear that one will show, for instance, that a corporation is acting evilly, or the fear of showing that fundamental democratic rights are violated by the governing class in the U.S., stifles the baby news story in its cradle. The item that particularly amused me was “believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.” Let’s see. The U.S. financed the Islamic radical fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the U.S. encouraged Saudi Arabia, from 1956 onward, to use its position as a fundamentalist Islamic state to fight Nasser and communism; the U.S. gave a green light, after the Iranian revolution, to the Saudi program of pouring millions into Wahabi controlled mosques, placed from Morocco to Indonesia, from Germany to Turkey; the U.S. went so far, in the 1980s, as to give the man who directed the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a CIA signed visa into the U.S. His air fare and travel arrangements were practically comp’ed by the CIA in the 80s, which he spent flying around on behalf of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This is Robert Friedman’s article for that communist magazine, the New Yorker – which Klein, innocent of those vile red schemes, actually worked for himself! – published in 1995:

Here’s a snippet:

The Alkifah Refugee Centre, in addition to providing a hangout for the disaffected, distributed pamphlets and videotapes on the rebel war in Afghanistan. On any given day, a visitor to the centre might take martial-arts classes, or sign up for an automatic-weapons training course taught by instructors from the National Rifle Association. The club even had its own T-shirts: A MUSLIM TO A MUSLIM IS A BRICK WALL. But the highlight for the centre’s regulars were the inspirational jihad lecture series, featuring CIA-sponsored speakers.

”One week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA-trained Afghan rebel travelling on a CIA-issued visa; the next, it might be a clean-cut Arabic-speaking Green Beret, who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujaheddin, or ‘warriors of the Lord.’ The more popular lectures were held upstairs in the roomier Al-Farooq Mosque; such was the case in 1990 when Sheikh Abdel Rahman, travelling on a CIA-supported visa, came to town. The blind Egyptian cleric, with his ferocious rhetoric and impassioned preaching, filled angry, discontented Arab immigrants with a fervour for jihad – holy war. This was exactly what the CIA wanted: to stir up support for the Muslim rebels and topple the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.

The sheikh, however, had a somewhat broader agenda.

A former investigative counsel for the Senate Foreign Relatiosn Committee, now a private attorney in Washington, Jack Blum speaks bitterly but fatalistically. ‘After every covert war there is an unintended disposal problem,’ he says, as if he were talking about unexpected land mines and not potential Islamic terrorists living in Brooklyn. ‘We steered and encouraged these people. Then we dropped them. Now we’ve got a disposal problem. When you motivate people to fight for a cause – jihad – the problem is, how do you shut them off?’”

This, of course, is noway near as satisfying as Paul Berman's little book, that blames it all on the Nazis. Those nazis. Intellectual history as wanking - oh, wanking, so many crimes have been committed in your name!

And, according to Sy Hersch, the latest Bush folly is to … start the Saudis up again.
How does this work out as a parameter? when looking at the news, one has to have a sense of what isn’t being reported as opposed to what is. For instance, the reports about Iran’s supposed supplying of weapons to the Shi’a militias have taken up, I’d estimate, oh one hundred times more story space than the story of the Saudi and Gulf Sunni financing of the Sunni insurgents. Now – it isn’t that I don’t expect that the Saudis would operate like that, in their own self defense. That financing just happens to have contributed to a hundred times more deaths of American soldiers than the Iranians have. But… just as a hijacking that was manned mostly by Saudis and financed by a Saudi millionaire in close contact with Pakistan’s secret service operates as an excuse to invade Iraq, so, too, the dance around the obvious is a way of trying to lead us into a war with Iran. The truth, of course, is that the U.S. just isn’t powerful enough to take on the Saudis. Who wants them to? I don’t. I simply want the U.S. to recognize its real strength in the Middle East is weak at best, and operate accordingly. But to get back to the theme – sometimes, newspapers do stumble over reality. They do their best, at these moments, to move on. One of the funnier examples of this, recently, was a NYT story about the evil Iranians, supplying those evil Shi’ite militia those American killin’ weapons. Here’s an excerpt from this James Glanz piece, Feb. 27th:

In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.
Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.'s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.
''I've lost good friends to these E.F.P.'s,'' said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. ''And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.''
The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.
But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.'s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, ''plastic made in Haditha,'' a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, ''Leave your number and we will call you back.''

Right ho. Why is it that the NYT isn’t going to call back? Joe Klein gave us the answer. I think I could pretty much predict the ratio of stories about reality - who supplies the money to buy the goods for the insurgents - as opposed to the Administration's soft soap story about Iran. I would guess one to fifty. I'll check this with Factiva some time. It is nice to have a propaganda criterion.

And people say wanking has never lead to anything good.

happy texas independence day, pardners!

Happy Texas Independence day!

"Today is the 171st anniversary of the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836." - Houston Chronicle.

This is a good time to remember one of my favorite American politicians, Sam Houston - friend of the Indian (they didn't call him the fuckin Raven for nothing), agin that bestial slavery system, pro-Union, and especially pro the bottle. Sammy, what happened? LI is going to commune with his ghost today.

Here's a bit of history. On April 19, 1861, Sam went to Galveston, which was like the Charleston of this state, pro-secesh, and from the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel he threw down, which was a dangerous thing to do in Texas. After all, at around the same time, round the Dallas area, Confederate hoodlums were lynching pro-Unionists (always remember, the Confederacy was founded on the blind criminal violence, and was a completely dishonorable enterprise from start to finish - a nation of lynchers, crosseyed nosepickers, and rapists, ruled by bearded retards). When Houston made the speech, someone in the crowd shouted: here's a rope, let's hang the old traitor. Ah, the peabrained descendents of the man who shouted that now run the country!

Being a man of some sense, Houston ended his speech with a prediction: "You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of precious lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you: but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of State rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery impulsive people as you are for they live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, such as the present issues before the country, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche, and what I fear is they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."

So you see, not all Texans are as retarded as the freak show specimen currently parading his baboon like hindquarters around the White House.

So GO OUT AND GET DRUNK TONIGHT! And sing the yellow rose of Texas, or - oh my favorite, I'm gonna cry - Marty Robbins El Paso: "Down in the west texas town of El Paso/ I fell in love with a Mexican guuuuurlll".

If you don't like that song - well, fuck you.

the art of the lickspittle

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe two.

The first story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. As we’ve pointed out before, there is a game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and Rameau. Here, then, is Rameau’s story.

It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office. Variations of this happened at Enron. But let's get on with it, right?

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.21
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder – [he is chummy]), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the tatter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here (LI said, tapping you familiarly on the shoulder). For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and Rameau. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most benign grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing. The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancor. In another century, Bouret is Foley, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

The next story I reserve for the next post.

Rieff

LI recommends Gerald Howard’s book review of Philip Rieff’s posthumous My Life Among the Deathworks and CHARISMA: THE GIFT OF GRACE, AND HOW IT HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY FROM US. Rieff’s sociology was entirely in the domain of what Mills called the sociological imagination - rooted in the novelist's sense of the moment, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, the latter coming to Rieff via a lifelong engagement with Freud. The review profiles the entire career, and the entire career sounds very much like Herzog’s in Bellow’s novel, down to the young wife – in Herzog’s case, Madeleine - who simultaneously divorces Herzog and starts on the threatening upward academic journey. In Rieff’s case, the young wife was Susan Sontag:

It was in a Chicago classroom in 1950 that he met and was instantly smitten with his beautiful student the seventeen-year-old Susan Sontag. Autres temps, autres mœurs, they were married ten days later. In the annals of miserable American literary marriages, only the misalliance of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy can match this one for marriage-of-true-minds interest and, perhaps, reciprocal influence. She followed him as half graduate student, half faculty wife, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they had one child, the writer David Rieff. But they separated and were divorced in 1959, and the tenor of the marriage may be judged by Sontag's comment, years later, that after reading Middlemarch at age eighteen she "realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon"…

Sontag’s putdown is so very awesome that it almost removes its sting – if one of my lovers could abase me with one punch like that, I’d be awful damn proud.

I want to discuss Rieff’s conservative social vision in another post. From LI’s perspective, the review brought home the troubled trajectory of the American sage – again, reminding me of Herzog. The American sage is well aware of being the peculiar object of an exterior negation at large in the culture. That negation is a characteristic compound of two of the enduring features of American life: anti-intellectualism and worship of success.

That awareness drives the angry movement from sage to buffoon, gets into the sex, the clothes, the dialogue with so called old neighborhood friends, the longing for power, the vendettas which figure in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mosby’s Memoirs – so many of Bellow’s novels.

However … before I get to Rieff and Bellow, perhaps I should finish up the Rameau thread. I will do one more post on that, translating two anecdotes that Rameau tells which contain a certain dreadful touch of the historically premonitory.

Don't let it get you down, it's only castles burning...

Like all good Americans – and Russians, come to that – LI harbors apocalyptic fantasies and eagerly looks for the promised horror in the flotsam and jetsam of bad news in the newspapers. In The Idiot, you’ll remember, Lebedev is a buffoon/parasite of the Rameau type who insinuates himself into Salon society with his interpretations of the Book of Revelations. At one point, somebody accuses him of interpreting the star Wormwood as the railroads spreading through Europe. Actually, an excellent interpretation – it was, after all, the contention of the more sober historian, AJP Taylor, that the schedule of those same railroads was the driver for the mobilizations that led to WWI.

So – in spite of my worry about my brother’s investments – I got that certain vertigo from the 400 point stock market drop yesterday – although I in no way believe that indicates a permanent trend. And it made me think of posting a little story about the end of Carthage written as one of the Imaginary Dialogues by the always bizarre late romantic, Walter Savage Landor. Landor, of course, is now off the map as far as the canon is concerned, but remember – he was held in the highest esteem by Emerson, Swinburne, and other assorted literati in the 19th century.

The dialogue is imagined to take place between Scipio Africanus, Polybius, and Panaetius – ah, the air of mustiness is already collecting around your muzzle, lecteur! – but don’t worry, this isn’t some Victorian re-enactment of Roman virtues. Like Flaubert, Landor has a view of Carthage that is full of sexual imagery and violence. Scipio describes the razing of the city – shades of Fallujah – with a cynical view of the meaning of it all. Far from honor and dignity, it is a matter of business – Carthage offers a competitive advantage to Rome that can’t be tolerated. Then Polybius tells a story. He and a patrol enter the half destroyed city. They hear cries issuing unexpectedly from a part of it, and make their way through ash clogged streets until “two old men throw themselves on the ground” at his feet. The men are Carthage’s judges. One of the judges says, ‘the laws are yours, o Romans, and nobody judges treason and parricide more harshly.’ With that sentence, the old men led the patrol around the next corner. Here, I’ll let Landor take over:

‘We entered a small square: it had been a market-place: the roofs of the stalls were demolished, and the stones of several columns, (thrown down to extract the cramsp of iron and the lead that fastened them) served for the spectators, male and female, to mount on. Five men were nailed on crosses; two others were nailed against a wall, from scarcity (as we were told) of wood.

“Can seven men have murdered their parents in the same year?” I cried.
“No, nor has any of the seven,” replied the first who had spoken. “But when heavy impositions were laid upon those who where backward in voluntary contributions, these men, among the richest in our city, protested by the gods that they had no gold or silver left. They protested truly.”

“And they die for this! Inhuman, insatiable, inexorable wretch!”

“Their books,” added he, unmoved at my reproaches, ‘were seized by public authority and examined. It was discovered that, instead of employing their riches in external or internal commerce, or in manufactories, or in agriculture, instead of reserving it for the embellishment of the city, or the utility of the citizens, instead of lending it on interest to the industrious and needy, they had lent it to foreign kings and tyrants, some of whom were waging unjust wars by these very means, and others were enslaving their own country. For so heinous a crime the laws had appointed no specific punishment. On such occasions the people and elders vote in what manner the delinquent shall be prosecuted, lest any offender should escape with impunity, from their humanity or improvidence. Some voted that these wretches should be cast amid the panthers; the majority decreed them (I think wisely) a more lingering and more ignominious death.”

The men upon the crosses held down their heads, whether from shame or pain or feebleness. The sunbeams were striking them fiercely; sweat ran from them, liquefying the blood that had blackened and hardened on their hands and feet. A soldier stood by the side of each, lowering the point of his spear to the ground; but no one of them gave it up to us. A centurian asked the nearest of them how he dared to stand armed before him.

‘Because the city is in ruins, and the laws still live,” said he. “At the first order of the conqueror of the elders, I will surrender my spear.”

“What is your pleasure, O commander?” asked the elder.

“That an act of justice be the last public act performed by the citizens of Carthage and that the sufferings of these wretches not be abridged.”

Such was my reply. The soldiers piled their spears, for the points of which the hearts of the crucified men thirsted; and the people hailed us as they would have hailed deliverers.”

sources of disinformation: iran

The anonymous claptrap which, herded through the NYT, WAPO, LAT and the tv news helped Bush and his merry men lead this country into a most satisfying circle jerk of war in 2003, is happening all over again with Iran. But to get the full affect of the war aphrodisiac, you need a chosen set of experts to interpret the wisdom of anonymity.

None is better than a man in uniform – and we know how much the media loves a man in uniform – and so who better to push to the front for yesterday’s bogus story about a weapons cache “found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital” than Maj. Marty Weber, who plumbed his infinite wisdom about Iran’s weaponry to explain that this cache, consisting of weapons easy to make in Iraq (and easy to buy, given the money flooding in from the Saudis for Sunni militias) had the high sulfur and brimstone smell of Iranian goods.

Yet then there was this: “But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.”

Marty Webb first appeared as our Iranian weapons expert yesterday, in a story about another weapons cache found in Hilla. In that story:

“Major Weber said he doubted that Hezbollah — the group that the Mahdi militia leader Moktada al-Sadr has used as a model for his political movement — would have provided the material and technology to the Mahdi militia or to other Shiite fighters in Iraq. “It is possible, but based upon my experience we have not seen Hezbollah share information or technology on anything until they have been told to,” he said.”

That Major Weber – apparently he is on Hezbollah’s “Look what those crazy mullahs want us to do now” email list.
…
But the other Iranian experts and analysts are the dealmakers, not one overworked, weapons cache rushing Major. This is why LI was so pleased to discover the Right Web site – which we have included on our blogroll – it is the link entitled, DIRECTORY OF THE PSYCHOPATHS WHO RULE US - SMELL THE INSANITY. It is proving very useful. For instance – take an article like this thumbsucker from the Christian Science Monitor, “Iran's pursuit of nuclear power raises alarms ; Does access to fuel ease nations toward nuclear weapons? Rising demand has nonproliferation experts unsettled.” Four Iranian ‘experts” are quoted – although why we call them experts is left in the shadows. They sort out in classic thumbsucker fashion. Two are foreign policy moderates, lukewarm imperialists: a Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, and a Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress. Cirincione even goes so far as to gingerly reference reality:

“A problem for the international community is that many developing countries, no matter what they may think of the Iranian regime, perceive that Iran has a point when it speaks of developed-world favoritism, says the Arms Control Association's Mr. Kimball. Other analysts agree.

"Whether we like it or not, Iran is tapping into this issue of fairness and equality," says Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress and author of a new book, "Bomb Scare," on the future of nuclear weapons.”

That the U.S., which has used nuclear weapons in the past, is pushing an ABM defense aggressively at the present, and is stocked full of lunatics like our Vice President, intent on restarting bomb testing, does have that quality of begging the question of fairness and equality. Oh, and then there are the hundred or so bombs stockpiled by Israel, and the U.S.’s gladhanding of the Indian nuclear program. So I suppose the questioning of the fairness and equality, here, is rather like the questioning of the fairness and equality of Jim Crow laws in the South. A shocking eruption of common sense.

Balanced against the lukewarm imperialists are the running dogs: Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington and a former Pentagon nonproliferation official, and Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and an Iran expert. This is where the righweb directory comes in handy. You can look up Sokolski and find out, among other entertaining things, that he signed a letter from Project for the New American Century on September 21, 2001, which said: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” This non-sequitor has, of course, become the principle to which the U.S. has sacrificed 200-400 thousand Iraqi lives. And Sokolski is all over the place, at the moment, pushing the proposal that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel at all – for it turns out that the U.S. is the only country that has the right to unilaterally withdraw from its treaty obligations, viz the limitations placed on the country by past ABM treaties. It is an asymmetric world for these people. As for Ilan Berman, you can learn that he is a freedom fighter. Yes indeed. This is what he has said about Iran: “A frequent invitee to congressional sessions covering Middle East and terrorism issues, Berman consistently advocates expansive U.S. intervention in the Middle East. At an October 2005 briefing for the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, Berman argued:

The fundamental problem facing the United States is that Iran's ‘nuclear clock' is ticking much faster than its ‘regime change clock.' Altering that equation—both through initiatives that delay and derail Iran's nuclear ambitions and through those that empower opposition forces inside and outside of the Islamic Republic—should be the starting point for any serious American strategy.

So, for those reading the papers, keep that invaluable link to the rightweb in mind. We will. As well as Berman’s comment, which pretty much sums up the wishful thinking of the Bush Administration. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The starting point for any serious American strategy should be – throw away Berman’s advice, recognize Iran, let NGOs engage with Iranian dissidents, do business, grow up, realize that American power has shrunk in the Middle East, and realize that we aren’t in World War IV, there is no long long long war, we are on the edge of economic and environmental problems that will require resources that we are massively wasting, etc., etc. You know the words and the tune.

Locke vs. the Witch

This is a typical story from Edward Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia. Wingfield, one of John Smith's men, is talking about another expedition of starving, quarreling gentlemen up another hopeless river in a country seemingly infinite in expanse and strangeness. He and Smith meet a kyng of an Indian nation, named Pawatah. The Englishmen presented him with a hatchet.

“Monday he came to the water side, and we went a shore to him agayne. He tolde us that our hott Drynckes he thought caused his greefe, but that he was well agayne, and we were very welcome. He sent for another Deere which was roasted and after sodd for us (as before). Our Captayne caused his Dynner to be Dressed a shore also. Thus we satt banqueting all the forenoone, some of his people led us to their houses, shewed us the growing of their Corne and the maner of setting it, gave us Tobacco, wallnutes, mulberyes, strawberryes, and Respises. One sheewed us the herbe called in their tongue wisacan, which they say heales poisoned wounds, it is like lyverwort or bloudwort. One gaue me a Roote wherewith they poison their Arrows. they would shew us any thing we Demaunded, and laboured very much by signes to make us understand their Languadge.”

LI thinks there are fascinating things in the early stories of the colonists – (and reminds you to be on the watch for Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown). We are bringing up this account of gifts to contrast it with a recent post on Crooked Timber by John Quiggen, which is about a recent survey of happiness and how one should interpret the results of it . This is a truly ponderable matter, although economists are only moved to spasmodically engage with empirical evidence about happiness once in a blue moon, as a sort of homage to Bentham.

Well, the post, and the assumptions, have made me ponder about the emphasis on the happiness parameter, and the neglect of others – among which, most strikingly, is generosity. And on this neglect hangs a tale of Weltanshauungs.

It really does make perfect sense for economists to be worried about happiness, just as it made sense, so long ago, for the Jamestown colonists to look at all those gifts and plan on seizing them – or just as it makes sense that one of the enduring American myths is of the “purchase” of Manhattan for a deal of beads. For here, the avant garde of the Early Modern Era, Lockians avant le lettre, encountered an ethos they had already overthrown in Southern England. They met it, too, in the Scots highland, and the wild country in Ireland. They met it and invariably they killed it. For this was the deal – the Lockian view was that liberty, that amazing invention of the Dutch and the English, consisted of the disposing of property. Freedom and owning property were synonymous. Whereas the Kynge Pawatah, the highland clans, the cattle raiding Irish, all saw liberty – not that they conceptualized it as such – as generosity. To be powerful was to give. Account after account of the first settlements tell us that the colonists, always seeming to be a miserable lot, survived, crucially, on the generosity of the salvages. The learning of planting techniques, the seeds, the food for the winter, the banqueting – it was all accepted without question by the settlers, who responded with maps, surveys, claims, and treaties. Of course, we are not talking of an unmixed capitalist ethos – these seventeenth century bravos were still too close to the older ways to be completely comfortable with the triumph of property. But so it went – the fall of one definition of freedom – transmuted into today’s terms, it is the freedom from the iron laws of economics, the remorseless gameplaying for profit – versus another: freedom of contract. While, from the Lockean viewpoint, generosity is nothing more than irresponsibility, a parasitic relationship to the production machine.

Poor Marx. He was born too late. If only he’d been there, at John Smith’s side.

Now, the thing about conservatives is that, no matter how they might go on about Aristotle and natural law, in the end, they are always going to come back to Locke. The Aristotelian virtue of generosity is absolutely foreign to the ethos of property based liberty. Try to imagine Americans, now, looking out at strangelooking, foreign tongued peoples straggling down their streets, and going out and – showing them all their wealth. Treating them to the best food. Giving them medicine. This is not going to happen.

The thing about liberals is this: we are nostalgic for the ethos of generosity, but aware of the amazing wealth created by the freedom of contract. Our idea is that eventually, the wealth will be so much that society will evolve, peacefully, into a thing more generous – generous beyond the belief of those Indians.

This is to tacitly ignore what “evolution” is all about. Marxists, of course, think that they can skip and seize, banking on a revolution that comes from outside history. And LI, ex-lefty, misfit liberal, only figured out, last year, that Red Riding Hood going up the path of pins is not the same as Red Riding Hood going back down the path of pins. That there are irreversible paths, and that the negation of the negation is best embodied in that moment in which the witch says the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Little Red Riding Hood can get eaten by the wolf, or have the wolf killed, or – back back back down that path – worship the wolf.

I imagine that, on the parameter of generosity, this country would show up as characteristically schizophrenic. If I close one crow’s eye and gaze at these here states, I see an astonishingly selfish place. Foreign aid has radically declined since the sixties, even as the country has become much, much richer. This is a country that calmly looked on in the nineties, watched Africa fight an AIDS epidemic that was, in its scope, like the Black Death, and moved only to make sure that the intellectual property rights of the drug companies were properly respected. This is a country that abolishes welfare, and substitutes the system of jails – jails being a two-fer – you can both enforce apartheid and sink the poor into such straits that they become absolutely demoralized. In these days of the long long war, World War IV, don’t you know, what country is taking in the million plus refugees from the Iraq war? Syria and Jordan – where the average income is, maybe, a tenth what it is in the U.S. The U.S. – the major cause of the death of the two to four hundred thousand Iraqis, and the flight of the million plus – will take in – 7.000 this year. Ideally. This is typical, however. Unless you are white, coming to the U.S. is always a fraught enterprise – from the coast card turning back starving Haitians all the way back to the policy of slamming the door in the face of the Jews in the 30s.

However, closing that eye and opening my other crows eye, I see evidences of generosity in another form. A restlessness and energy in the culture that is all about giving everything up. About second chances. The bold forging of new sexual relationships. A lot of things that I find incredibly moving, but would have trouble materializing it into questions on a generosity questionnaire.

I am finishing up a project that has powderized the marrow from my bones and snuffed it up its big fat nose. So, no big post today, no flapping of my dusty moth wings against the infamies of empire. No rousing and pointless charges at my usual tilts. Instead, go to this link, which is about something capitalism is getting right for a change: the google book project! I have a tragic and total love for the google book project. Gots to testify, here, friend, neighbors, mooks and gibberers! As a editor and researcher for hire, this project has certainly revolutionized my life and given me a stiff neck from hours of searching for hire. I haven’t used this blog to advertise myself, lately, or shill for buckos, but let’s just say LI is an early adapter, and well worth the pittance if you are in need of a research scout for that paper.

good news (again) in Iraq

As LI has said before, there is something curiously hollow about the Bush administration’s policy stated aim of victory in Iraq. On the one hand, we already won – you will remember the Saddam Hussein hanging. On the other hand, we are still there, fighting for something. Often, that something is simply conflated with “defeating Al Qaeda.” It is an interesting policy – one perhaps stemming from Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable - that seeks to protect the Iraqis from Al Qaeda while allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and party in Pakistan. Is this due to the saintliness of our president? Bravely trying to wrestle the control of the White House plane away from the pilot on 9/11/2001 so he could go mano a mano with the terrorist fiends, did Bush’s thoughts drift to the potential danger to the Iraqis – in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, Baghdad and all of those cities he had difficulty finding on a map – from an Al Qaeda that didn’t exactly exist in Iraq, but could, if America didn’t challenge them by inviting them in and then fighting them interminably.

Well, that’s our president. Even when he was knee high to a grasshopper, he was always in a sweat about Iraqis. Were they happy? Was their burning yearning for liberty being satisfied? Were there enough of them happily vacationing (in that funny way Iraqis vacation – they bring all their money, as many possessions as they can, and their families) in Jordan and Syria? Even then, he knew that when he grew up, he would protect them against the terrorists that he invited into their country and win a big victory and go down in history as one of our great presidents, like George Washington – except with better teeth.

Now that the British have started to withdraw from Basra, our Vice President has remarked that this is good news. This is all about success in Iraq. So now, at least, we can catch a glimpse of what victory means – what the Iraq of our dreams is going to look like. That’s why readers should go to Patrick Cockburn’s report in the Independent. It is a heady thing, victory, and this is what we are fighting for:

The British forces had a lesson in the dangers of provoking the heavily armed local population when six British military police were killed in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003. During the uprising of Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004, British units were victorious in several bloody clashes in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

But in the elections in January 2005, lauded by Mr Blair this week, Sciri became the largest party in Basra followed by Fadhila, followers of the Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr. The lat-ter’s supporters became the largest party in Maysan.
Mr Cordesman says the British suffered political defeat in the provincial elections of 2005, and lost at the military level in autumn of the same year when increased attacks meant they they could operate only through armoured patrols. Much-lauded military operations, such as “Corrode” in May 2006, did not alter the balance of forces.

Mr Cordesman’s gloomy conclusions about British defeat are confirmed by a study called “The Calm before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq” by Michael Knights and Ed Williams, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Comparing the original British ambitions with present reality the paper concludes that “instead of a stable, united, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy”.

Local militias are often not only out of control of the Iraqi government, but of their supposed leaders in Baghdad. The big money earner for local factions is the diversion of oil and oil products, with the profits a continual source of rivalry and a cause of armed clashes. Mr Knights and Mr Williams say that control in the south is with a “well-armed political-criminal Mafiosi [who] have locked both the central government and the people out of power”.

The war’s supporters, of course, have reason to feel smug. Our long nightmare is over. As a people, Americans – rich and poor, black and white – have, for over a decade, been clamoring for an Iraq ruled by Sciri and Sadr. It is all that we talk about. Sometimes we entertain ourselves with a few celebrity deaths or haircuts, but here in the States – I’m writing this down so that readers overseas get a feel for the American reality – conversations about money, sex, jobs invariably drift to that dreamy moment when your average American says, I don’t care how much money it takes or how much blood, I want to see an Shi’a fundamentalism take control in Mesopotamia – it is a long held childhood dream, actually! Then Americans get all misty eyed, thinking about how they can die happy if only things go the right way in Kirkuk.

One thing you have to say about this country – we are willing to sacrifice any amount of Iraqi blood to make our dreams come true. It is the way we are. Morally superior to the rest of the world. Which is why GOD has promised us victory, damn it, and we are going to reach for it!