the class war in Iraq and in the U.S.

LI’s old far flung correspondent, T. in NYC, called us to buck us up about our new direction on this blog – our turn to the vehement language and shocking images of German dada.

Well, the venom is temporarily out of our system. I won’t put any cracked open mouths and eyeless, bloody faces up to illustrate these here paragraphs. I’ve thought – rather than just rattled and put my fangs out – a lot about the current state of moral and mortal play in America since the Democratic cave in.

One of the things that is most striking about this war – and striking about post-Cold War kultcha in general – is the lack of any reference to class. When Marx analyzed the civil war in France, after the French defeat in 1870, he naturally turned to class analysis. Somehow, this handy and hardy tool has become obsolete. Googling for some reference to class analysis of the situation in Iraq, I found zip.

So let me take it out of my ass here.

I could make a joke, and say that the sectarianism really is a big problem in the Iraq war – sectarianism in the U.S. of A.., that is. But that would be inexact. More coldly, the class segmented structure of Iraq has been shattered by the war, and that shattering has been the prerequisite to sectarianism. It is an odd American colonial venture, precisely for that reason. American foreign policy has consistently sought out its natural constituency – the management and upper class - in other countries for at least the past one hundred twenty years. The shift from supporting ‘republicans’ was going on even in the late eighteenth century – hence, Tom Paine’s disgust with George Washington over the French Revolution. However, it wasn’t until the domestic U.S. scene had assumed the plutocratic cast we are familiar with, under McKinley, that this was reflected fully in U.S. foreign policy. And even then, there were big exceptions. Wilson’s foreign policy is always defined by WWI, but as important, during the Wilson years, was the reaction of the Americans to the revolution in Mexico. That reaction was internally conflicted by the struggle between the progressive side and the plutocratic side. Add, of course, the idiosyncracy of Wilson’s own Puritanism – he truly disapproved of the personal lives of certain Mexican generals – and so the struggle went forward, and in a way forged the patterns that then became apparent on a world wide scale after 1918. The progressive side was looted for its rhetoric, while the plutocratic side was exploited for its internationalism – for plutocrats are, among other things, the truest internationalists. And the Wilsonian Puritanism always provided a wild card – for instance, the outsized influence exerted on the U.S. china policy by Christian missionaries.

In Iraq, however, everything quickly reversed itself. Rove was right to admire McKinley – Bush’s administration is the most plutocratic since McKinley’s – but on foreign policy, there is nothing McKinley like about the Iraq adventure. The merger of the Christian faction and the plutocratic faction created a contradiction that couldn’t sustain itself in Iraq, since the Christian side had no interpretive grid through which to understand Iraqi society. Consequently, the U.S. fucked up in its outreach to its natural constituency. Instead of getting the middle and upper class on its side – and one has only to read the Iraqi bloggers, the ones who write in English, who are mostly from that strata, to see how much they truly longed for the U.S., how much trust they had in America – the U.S. unleashed all the forces that scared them to death. In essence, the U.S. underwrote the expropriation of the upper class in Iraq without even knowing it. Contra those who think that every mistake that the U.S. makes is part of some devilish, conspiratorial plan, this unleashing of forces is precisely the kind of thing that upsets the plutocratic vision of Iraq. To see this, look at the place where the class structure remains intact, in Northern Iraq: characteristically, there, the plutocratic, ruling sector is adamant about privatizing oil resources. But this is a program that could only be carried out by a confident, ruling upper class. It couldn’t be carried out at all by the U.S.’s supposed ‘allies’ in the rest of Iraq. Such is the incompetence of the Bush administration that it even fucked up its relationship with its ‘base’. This isn’t a small thing. While the U.S. will no doubt, one of these days, get some version of its oil law through, I very much doubt that law will endure. Meanwhile, the professional class and their capital leave Iraq every day.

What about the U.S.? One of the things that discredits class analysis is its use as an inflexible tool. Class doesn’t determine everything. We know a lot more about how strata endure, how they self-identify, how they communicate now than we did in Carlos Marx’s time.

There was a striking Gallup Poll that came out a couple of week’s ago, which categorized support or opposition to the war according to age and sex. Unfortunately, they did not include either race or income as an indicator. http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=27562 The poll showed that support for the war is strongest in the male group, from 18-49. It is merely to speculate – but I would guess that within that group, race matters – more white support than black – and income matters – more upper income support than lower income. Who knows, there might be a peckerwood factor here, but that is the general pattern in American wars. What is striking about that is that in the upper ranks of the supposed opposition party, the Democrats, we find an overabundance of the white male group, aged 18-49. It is this group that is most convinced that the war is somehow still popular. It is this group, on the Dem sides, that still holds a fearful respect for Bush. And that makes sense. This group talks to itself. It goes to lunch with itself. It watches tv made by itself. It sees itself on the political shows. It reads newspapers written by itself. It is living in the bubble of its own exhalations. Thus, even when members of it come out and shit, and speak up against the war, they consider themselves to be doing something daring.

As you go up from 49, however, you find that opposition grows and support shrinks even among the male segment. This is where the real American strategy is being fought out. On the one hand, the plutocrats have seen, for a year at least, that Iraq is not only a foul mess, but that it is fouling up a lot of potential money in the Middle East. It is going to be much harder to privatize enterprises in the Gulf states – a bonanza awaiting a lot of private firms – if the war is going on. Privatization is a soft soap job anyway – a population, being robbed of its resource, has to be in a tranquil state where it will swallow the minimum number of lies necessary to affect the heist. The spillover from Iraq is very bad for that business. On the other hand, it is even worse for business for America to be weak. To track the real economy – that mix of the material and positional one – you have to have a sense not just for dollars and cents, but for the symbolic systems that support dollars and sense. And most important for that system is the illusion of America’s strength.

Thus, there is a push and pull that blurs the plutocratic line on Iraq. The Democrats, who have made compromise itself into a universal solvent and policy to meet all ills, reflect that push and pull. The withdrawal from Iraq is not going to be built within the Democratic party at the present time, but… there is no antiwar movement to build it outside of that party, either.

About which, I will have more in a future post.

Michael Gordon, war pig* reporter for the Times - another day, another lie

Michael Gordon, the man who tried to float clueless propaganda from the Bush administration about Iranian supplied weapons in Iraq, is back again with another clueless propaganda story from the Bush administration – this one is about the ardent desire of the Iraqis for the Americans to occupy their country.

It is a necessary piece. As he notes in like the 17th graf, the Iraqi parliament recently voted for the U.S. to set a timetable for leaving. This is unfortunate, as Gordon only seems to find Iraqi politicians who want the U.S. to stay, or do the bloodbath is coming shuffle. Apparently, instead of the 100 bodies a day, the Baghdad norm, it will really get serious!

Michael Gordon will always be remembered for the brilliant reporting on the Aluminum tubes. Here is the beginning of that story:

“WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2002 -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.

Iraqi defectors who once worked for the nuclear weapons establishment have told American officials that acquiring nuclear arms is again a top Iraqi priority. American intelligence agencies are also monitoring construction at nuclear sites.”

Over the years, Gordon has shown himself to be a seasoned professional you can trust. If he says it is raining, the sun is shining. If he says nice day, you know it is hurricane weather outside. Being a complete patsy, a war pig, a liar, an accomplice in the murder of thousands, a joke of a reporter, a man who wouldn’t know a fact if it bit him in the ass, a man with his head so far up Cheney’s ass that doctor’s worry about the first case of prostate to nose infection – he is the type of Timesman of whom we can only say, let the buyer beware.

*apologies to IT for the porcism.

dance dance dance listen to the radio

Heroism running on empty - Kurt Tucholsky

The Leipzig trial for high treason has unveiled the mental situation of the German military for those who did not know it.

We don’t take the trial very seriously. The official court has long disappointed the trust of all observers with its political judgments – what is inscribed in its judgments is resentment and politics, which are served up as a form of justicery.

That communists would never be treated like these three officers doesn’t surprise us. “I have”, said one of the government attornies, “not wanted to offend the accused, and I would regret it if they had been offended (gekraenkt habe). Well, that’s all righty then….



The important and implication heavy thing is not the attitudes of the court, but instead, the the pattern of military thought, which is less known.

It is grim.

That voluntary soldiers are voluntary opponents of pacifism ought not to astonish us, and is understandable. That has always been the case. Although it is rarely thought about - as it would be if the fire department, for example, struggled against those who wanted to put out flames… but these soldiers have never felt like firemen, who are called in the moment of danger, but have always seen themselves as their own end.
Although I won’t speak to those majors and lieutenants, who can’t be persuaded because they can’t read, and if they could read, could not understand, and if they could understand what they read, would apply it falsely – I will speak to people who wish to battle un-intelligence with intelligence.



Every man creates in his mind a world, in which he stands in the center, according to his abilities. Few confess this. Let’s begin with ourselves.

Pacifists who are good horsemen are exceptions. In every pacifistic tendency is – next to the best ethical intentions – the rejection of a world in which the preaching pacifist does not play a leading role. It is already much, if he could stand with respect in this warrior’s world. This dainty aunt-y feature is unmistakable in pacifism; where it works itself out sentimentally, is where it is hardest to defend. For that is not the sense and content of pacifism. The military opponent fights with us: with slanders, as for example in this trial; with insults, that are uninteresting, and … with a trace of justice. They struggle mostly, however, against the worst and lowest level of pacifism, against its caricature, against the cry baby in it.
Otherwise such a fight is a question of intellectual force, and really not only of the brachial type, as it is thoroughly impressed upon us today. The peaceloving person, who doesn’t want to squander his best forces on the battle field, builds himself a world, in which he has some value. He is easily inclined to place this world ethically higher than all the others.
It is weakness and lies to close one’s eyes to the fact that these elements have to be cleanly expelled. I hold it for wholly just and natural.
The pacifist is correct, even so, in his fight against war, because he is denying it the power to manage the lives of other people. I have no vegetarian feelings in any way: there may be situations, in which spilling blood is no injustice. But one must hold upright, as a fundamental demand, that nobody have the right, to rule over the life of his fellow men in order to elevate himself. But that’s exactly what soldier’s do.
“Yesterday morning, police recruits sank their shovels into a shallow grave alongside a highway and turned up the bodies of 29 unidentified men, bound, blindfolded and recently shot.
Hours later, the bodies of 15 more men, their faces splattered with mud, their necks cut with wire, were found piled in the back of a pickup truck.
On Monday, it was the same. More than 40 bodies were picked up from the streets of Baghdad, many having a single bullet wound in the head.
No one seems to know how, for example, a pickup truck full of dead men could turn up at a busy intersection in Baghdad, where there is a strict curfew at night and ceaseless checkpoints during the day. – NYT, March 15, 2006

The establishment of expressed opinions in the Leipzig trial was more than miserable. One doesn’t have to cite any documents. Ours indeed smells of where the opinions come from. Their views stem completely out of this feeling. It isn’t that they need to be bad because of this. But they are empty and disgusting. For:




If one taps hard enough on the young lieutenant and the suspiciously older officers, one will always find that they think of Germany, their fellow citizens and the collected world as a place for military exercises, for maneuvers, and look at it all as a future battlefield, on which they can unfold what they call their best talents. There we can say ecce homo – there and only there. It is for significant for this heroism, that by many is doubtless believed to be authentic and masculine, that it never asks after the goal of the soldier’s work. The fight is fought; if it is once begun, it must be gone through – but to what end the whole goes, for what reason, for who, to whose use: this is something they don’t question. In Heinz Pols novel Either-or, there is a marvelous passage: “ He wanted to see just once what he was struggling against.” That’s it. The struggle is primary – only afterward is it rationalized.
This leads easily to wanting to fight in general, and thus: to evoke hostilities and to make enemies, with whom man can be a soldier. The soldier needs an enemy. Otherwise he would be nothing.
Thus, if these officers win influence on the politics of the country – and they have achieved more than is commonly assumed – than we are near the point that they, for the sake of activating their handwork, will provoke fighting even where one could avoid it.
What the young men have said before the tribunal does not deserve any contradiction: where there is sheer nothingness, the polemicist loses his rights. It was the typical resentment of the soldier’s attitude, a casino speech, that anybody who has been through a war could repeat in his sleep. It was and is the rejection of the intellectual world, the world of peace in general, because it is too boring for men of this mold to live in. One can’t ask an actor to approve of a social order in which the theater is banned and expelled. The actor wants to act. The soldier wants to make war.

Now, the military man didn’t fall from heaven. He is nothing than a kind of person found throughout the human race, who is in germany, through history and tradition, simply overbred, because a certain type of German is wired to go beserk.

In the soldier is – observing this with complete value neutrality – force; youth, a spirit that wants to be applied; a surplus energy, that wants to spill out; a desire for riot; joy in obedience and joy in being obeyed; joy in working in the fresh air; joy in colors and in equipment – all of this and more. All of which is scrambled up, in modern soldiers, with the type of office-capable organisor, men who want to command and let others work. And with technicians, who just enjoy modern machinery, which he commands with his type of orders… for these people, it is unimportant if, in striking England, Germany is right, that doesn’t move them at all. What moves them is commanding a division and using a tank. Sports.

In this activity there is a lot of what is good and legitimate. But instead of exploiting such forces, they are regressing the modern social order. In the capitalistic office-industry, young men who are so constituted cannot begin to make anything of themselves and their particular strengths, and now they are making themselves what they need.

For the military with all its trimmings is not only a need of the society in general, but it is primarily a need of a particular part of society.
Thus, like the half-intellectual, who “not knowing, what he should do”, enters in the administrative world or in industry and builds a “niche for himself’ that didn’t exist before, one, which needs the man who holds it in order to exist at all: similarly , the soldier creates in every country: a, the necessary spiritual preconditions for his existence in the form of enemies, dangers, and a nationalism intensified to an insane level, and b., a mechanism, in which he reigns supreme, and works, and unfolds his special powers – in which he can, in other words, simply be. These institutions congealed out of powerful men inclined towards violence are the armies; these instruments are used, misused and needed by whatever reigning order is current: for the suppression of the class enemy, thus the worker, for the diversion of the society to external threats and so on. The soldier doesn’t see this for the most part. He just is.

This heroism runs on empty. It is heroism in and for itself – and so it isn’t heroism at all. The vague concept of the ‘fatherland’ is a mythical formula; there is nothing that these men defend against as much as a conceptual analysis of their pseudo-religious formulas, and they know well why. It would be the end. The blank nullity of it would be revealed to the light of day.
It is not that the fundamental forces in play here are reducible to: joy in destruction; the joy of little men parading before little women; that is not the fact to be negated. Negation is aimed fully at the way these powers, running forever on their own emptiness, are put in place and misused.
We must fundamentally distinguish this military pattern of thought from that that the young nationalists preach. They are busily lending to a previous basic feeling a new and spiritual form – but not out of respect for the spirit, of which they mostly have not a breath, but in order to erect their main man on this ground. How much uncertainty is therein! What Ernst Junger did, while becoming in the meantime a clever war reporter, assiduously, obsessively and hop hop, is spiritually thin, undernourished and much more from yesterday than it is from tomorrow, as it pretends to be. Always it is significantly more lyrical than the cold fundamental perspective of the eternal officer class, who are nothing but that. Jünger aims for a mysticism whose clouds can be dispelled by a wave of the hand; behind them grins the blank nothingness, the stubborn view that fighting is something affirmable in itself. Young people in today’s so called “Bunde” associations are not much different. One must be suspicious – against the right and the left – every someone meets the attack on a given view with the cry, ‘blasphemy’! Because it means something is rotten within.
On both levels, in the military as in the nationalist associations, rules the same running on empty heroism. They are distinct from one another and even divided; possibly, one day they will join together – but by this junction they will mutually keep an eye on each other and never let a moment pass in which one can betray the other … the young nationalists being, for the military, much too literary, for as is known to all the world, he who reads a book is a bookworm…

But in these circumstances the eternal military man will create what he needs. An ‘air defense’, a ‘water defense’, a ‘train defense’, and whatever a man needs when he doesn’t know how to do anything intelligent. These and their like are aids to the unfolding of his nature.

But it is a little much to ask all society to pay for the excitation of the internal secretions of a small group of men. Certainly, on all sides the payer is being bombarded with demands for: maneuvers, war reports of all types, uniforms, music, photo ops with cannons … somewhat overbilled, it seems to me.

But it is all empty, completely empty. And it steps up with the complete aplomb of the muscleman, who is, on first impression, always at an advantage over the brainy man. His opponent doesn’t have much time. And as for your average householder… great god. They are touched by the like of General von Seeckt because he has the cleverness not to open his mouth – there are not only inscrutable geniuses, there are other kinds, too. And a book of some reputation seeking general is a curiosity: if the man were not a staff officer, nobody would care about his views and his empty essays.

Mars is blind and has no head. He just has a helmet.

And you are reflected in this helmet. How, after all, did 1914 go so far? How was that possible? It was made possible by refined and pointed preliminary labor: through a day by day drum fussilade of war preparation, through the market cries of running on empty heroism.

Ignaz Wrobel
Die Weltbühne, 04.11.1930, Nr. 45, S. 684.

"war suits me like a dip in a medicinal bath"

In pursuit of our futile anti-war shrieking and babbling, LI is going to translate a famous article of Tucholsky’s entitled the “Der Leerlauf eines Heroismus” – “One Heroism’s hollow trajectory” – but before we do it in the next post, a little background is necessary. Luckily, Time Magazine put up an article, “Handsome Adolf”, all about the treason trial in Leipzig that ‘uncovered the mental situation of the military for those who didn’t know it,” as Tucholsky puts it.

Here’s the salient first grafs, displaying Time’s truly annoying journalistic style – this is the kind of writing that Robert Coover parodied in The Public Burning:

“Not in Berlin, not even in Prussia, but in Saxony, in Leipzig sits the German Supreme Court: das Reichsgericht. Justice is done beneath a mighty dome topped by a big bronze statue of Truth. Through tall casement windows Saxon sunbeams glint upon carved oak. In such a setting presiding Judge Baumgarten (except when fiddling with one of his ears) is a sight awesome as Olympian Jove. Boldly to face the justice down, to use the Supreme Court dome as a demagog's thumping tub, to hurl from dem Reichsgericht a defy which reverberated throughout Europe, such was the feat last week of Adolf Hitler, No. I Brown Shirt Fascist (TIME, Aug. 25).
Ostensibly the proceedings were a trial for High Treason. Three young German army officers (Lieutenants Richard Scheringer, Hans Ludin, Friedrich Wendt) were charged with inciting their men to join a Fascist putsch should it be proclaimed. Without quite admitting their guilt the young officers waxed hotly truculent. "I would obey an order to shoot down Communists," shouted Lieutenant Scheringer, "but I would disobey a command to fire on men of my own persuasion!"
Exactly what was this "persuasion"? Evading damaging admissions, the Lieutenants said in effect that their views are those of Brown Shirt Hitler, leader of the National Socialist [Fascist] party whose sensational gains in the last election make it second strongest in Germany (TIME, Sept. 22). If such views be treason, argued the defense, then make the most of it!
Smart, the defense determined to do exactly this, subpenaed Herr Hitler as a witness, got ready to offer him the opportunity to use the witness stand as a soapbox.
Housewives & Blue Eyes. "Hitler Kommt!" cried 2,000 excited Saxons massed inside and outside the supreme courthouse. Many were women—for thrifty German housewives particularly dislike paying reparations, have swallowed eagerly the brash Fascist promises to repudiate the Young Plan. As Herr Hitler's motorcar swirled up the women pelted him with flowers. As this medium sized man with a small blond mustache but hard, blue, twinkling eyes stepped out, soprano voices cried "Ach, der schöne Adolf!" (Ah, handsome Adolf!). But so vast, dim, labyrinthine is the supreme courthouse that Witness Hitler, studiously quiet at first, stepped into the chamber and was actually on the stand before the courtroom galleries saw him.

"Heads Shall Roll!" Asked if he were planning revolution, Herr Hitler answered composedly:

"Nein, we are merely preparing an intellectual eruption of the German people by peaceful means."

When this drew from the gallery a roar of "Germany Awake!" (Fascist slogan), Judge Baumgarten glared at the assemblage, rumbled, "Silence, this is not a theatre!" but soon Herr Hitler in smashing demagog style was carrying all before him.”

Oh, and always being ready to oblige the pro-war side's masturbatory fantasies, we are putting up a photo from Karl Friederich’s Krieg dem Kriege, which Tucholsky helped to distribute. It is full of fun photographs. War, what is it good for – making prosperous white males hard. This one is accompanied by a saying of Hindenberg's: War suits me like a dip in a medicinal bath.

My kisses to the Dem leadership. XOX, motherfuckers.

captain sword

One of the first explicit antiwar poems – by which I mean it was subtitled an antiwar poem – is Leigh Hunt’s Captain Sword and Captain Pen.

Here’s a bit from the battle:

Down go bodies, snap burst eyes;
Trod on the ground are tender cries:
Brains are dash’d against plashing ears;
Hah! no time has battle for tears;
Cursing helps better – crusing, that goes
Slipping through friends’ blood, athirst for foes’.
What have soldiers with tears to do?
We, who this mad-house must now go through,
This twenty-fold Bedlam, let loose with knives –
To murder, and stab, and grow liquid with lives –
Gasping, staring, treading red mud,
Till the drunkenness’ self makes us stead of blood
[ O! shrink not thou, reader! Thy part’s in it, too;
Has not thye praise made the thing they go through,
Shocking to read of, but noble to do?]”

It is a long poem. In the remarks on war in prose that prefaced it, Hunt puts this sensible judgment, against which there is no appeal, in his first paragraph:

“The object of this poem is to show the horrors of war, the false ideas of power produced in the minds of its leaders, and, by inference, the unfitness of those leaders for the government of the world.”

Hunt's preface goes on to speak of hte "ladies handkerchief' that is put over the horrors of war, decently veiling it from civilian eyes. He is against it. So is LI. This is what the Congress voted to fund.



Take a deep breath, people, and remember though: this is part of the Democratic party's overall strategy. As Michael Tomasky, a hero to so many of us for his insight into framing the issues, put it in his article about seemingly giving President Bush what he wanted in the funding bill: Cave-in, or smart politics?

That's the only question that counts. We won. We secretly kept Bush from calling us weak. And is he ever pissed! We are amazing, really. A big pat on the back. Now, on to electing Hillary in 2008.

Dear Baal: please take this framer back to hell's workshop and bring us a new one. This one is broken.

Because LI has the sickness unto death this morning, we have been looking around the liberal blogs, trying to find some outrage about the Democratic Party’s embrace of the surge. Or trying to find some bland spinning, something tasty - oh, you know the taste - old jism and pesticide - that consultant's breath perfume, that body odor that's built right into the suit, the hardened partisan hireling suit with the matching enviro-boots - good for climbing up to the confabs to really really really think about America's problems with some of Hilary's closest friends! O, you know the type of text I'm talking about, all down from the mountain and shit. Looking for a niche. Looking for a steal. Since, like the Underground Man, we think nothing is more refreshing than a tooth ache, we scoured the net. Really! Because we wanted to quality produce. But we never expected to hit fool’s gold like this piece by a Jeffrey Feldman – a … wait for it… expert on… o wait for it … “framing”. Framin’ dem dere issues, my masters. Too make us feel all rich souled in these here prosperous states. Although sick unto death, the terrorist RAF star seemingly emerging where our own little throbbing LI heart used to be, we are generous enough to link here, for our UFOB squirrel hunting friends – for if this ain’t target practice, I don’t know what concentric rings around a bullseye are for! Bring out the dart gun, boys! and a wooden stake, garlic, and a bible.

Oh please, Baal, take back your prophets and give us less disgusting ones!


PS- being in the gift giving mood - thinking of what to send your favorite Democratic congressman? How about this nice music video? xox, motherfuckers.

No to Funding Bush's war - No in thunder, No in lightning, No in the hurricano

LI has taken a wait and see attitude towards Pelosi and the Dems. The first couple of months looked promising. Pelosi seemed pretty unbothered by the storm about going to Syria, and though she did nothing there but convey the usual pap, symbols are important. We loved the emphasis on decriminalizing union activity. But the last few weeks, and now this – surrendering to a president who has nothing, who is down to his few last pet peeves– makes me wonder if we are in some eternal return of the Pit and the Pendulum. Did they really not know, do they really not know, how to rally this country? Legislators, it is true, are constitutionally more prone to inside deals and endless process than to the kind of ceremonial politik necessary to stand in the face of the Crowned Garbage Fly and his unutterably Lovecraftian sidekick, Dick Cheney, and spit – but the time had come to spit. A big gob, with tobacco juice mixed in with the snot, right between the eyes of that mass murderer. Unfortunately it was not to be – although the misfortune isn’t really mine. I’m merely going to go crazy, I’m going to suffer from the American bulimia, the desire to gorge on this country, its gross stupidities, its failing infrastructure, its insane masses, so I can upchuck on it all the better. All of which is meaningless. No, the sorrow and the pity is for the people over there in Mesopotamia who we are robbing, beating, killing, turning one against the other. What is meaningful is that the Dems have given Bush his mercenary license. They didn’t even challenge him to make this part of the real budget, for Christ sake.

But the habits of D.C. are grooved into the politicos that move and have their being there – and after all, the place is flourishing. The war has been so good, there seems to be endless sweetmeats to pass around, and what will the consultants say? What will the motherfucking consultants say?

This was among the easiest plays in history. Did the Dems really pass the timelimits budget without a sense of what to do next? Has the palsied shadow of Pentagon planning a la Wolfowitz fallen upon their councils? Are they that fucked up? Apparently. Apparently they really thought that a Republican saviour would emerge – in a party that has narrowcast itself into a home place for anti-brown pinheads and peckerhead weekend and weakheaded warriors who consider Iraq an elaborate game of paintball, with good news every day, insofar as the killed on the killing field are mostly of the ever lynchable type they, their lynchhappy, Jimcrowing ancestors and the yahoo murderers of Indian nations before them, have always delighted in making bleed, cry, and die – that from this pustulous mass of zombies there was going to shake lose some bipartisan posse of Good GOP and Moderate Dem (the good housekeeping seal from Fox on his ass) that would rescue American ‘honor’. Sorry fuckers – Jacob Javits is dead, and you can roll over and tell Henry Kissinger the news. You are dealing with the dumbest of the Dixie dumb, the senators from Plains states where the growth industry is all in home produced meth – and even these fearsome freaks, these bible thumpers and child abusers on the far edges of barbarism know deep in their burger filled, gurgling guts that Iraq is lost. The Dems are still suffering the aftereffects of having imbibing stern Washington Post editorials week after week preaching the Truman Democrat, lets cut up and eat girlscouts to show we are tough line. Poor things, scared that they will be ‘soft’ on National security – instead of softheaded. Softheaded, however, is not going to be their option for long.

Well, the tension is exacerbating between the disgust of the majority and the greed and powerlust of the elite. In this contest, all the wise money is on the elite. But I’m betting on some outside rider, some storm within the mass. LI sometimes gets caught up in the politics of party and side, but mostly we do try to avoid that, because it is pointless. These are empty vessels, and if they are driven by demons at the moment, the way to change them is to patiently curse them, every day, curse, malign, laugh at, mock, wave your peepee at, stick your tongue out at, piss on, shit on, elbow, disdain, satirize, analyze, and delight in the utter downfall of when it comes, as it will come. Reality is a hard taskmaster.

PS

Genossen, hört auf, euch hinter den
Massen zu verschanzen! Hört auf, die
Frage des Widerstandes auf die Massen
abzuwälzen! Hört auf, eure Angst vor der
maßlosen Gewalttätigkeit des Systems als
Vermittlungsproblem zu rationalisieren!
Hört auf, eure Ratlosigkeit als Belesenheit
auszugeben, eure Hilflosigkeit als
den großen Durchblick! – RAF Communique, May 31, 1972

Ulrike, je pense a vous

viagra: don't leave home without it

They’ve finally found a purpose for viagra. So far, viagra seems to have been devised solely to coddle the American male watercooler belief that 50 is really just a breath away from 15 – for proof, look at the GOP presidential lineup. Eventually, they will be embalming us with boners intact. This is definitely no country for old men...

But it turns out viagra is really about helping ... jetsetting rodents! I knew it!

“It's a safe bet that most people who take sildenafil — better known under its commercial name, Viagra — aren't looking for a good night's rest. But it turns out that the 'little blue pill' commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction is also good for relieving some forms of jetlag. Well, at least in hamsters.

Diego Golombek and his colleagues at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina, injected hamsters with sildenafil and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50% faster, the team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

The upshot is - does this effect also work with human jetsetters?
The thought of all those trans-Atlantic passengers gulping their viagra before they embark leads to... scary thoughts, to say the least.

Happiness vs. sagacity: 1

In the seventeenth century, the rehabilitation of Epicurus became a kind of code behind which was assembled the program of the enlightenment – which, as I have remarked in a post last week, can be looked at, using Fred Hirsch’s terms, as the accompaniment to the loosening of the positional economy as old feudal ties and customs waned. Interestingly, one of the loosened ties had to do with the role of women. Mostly this loosening was about women in the periphery around either the court or the aristocratic salons.

For LI, Epicurus marks an important moment in that covert struggle, that dialectic, between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity. Here seemed to be a counter-sage to the ascetic Socrates, just as Socrates seemed to counter Jesus for the humanists. The game is to find an emblem to trump an emblem.

Gassendi was the major sponsor of the new Epicurus in the 17th century. He was also the godfather of the line that challenged the Cartesians from what I suppose you could call the philosophical left. But one shouldn’t be too programmatic about these things – while the neo-Epicurians were devising materialist explanations of the world, they were also in sharp disagreement with, for instance, Descartes notion of the anima-machine. Antoinette Deshoulieres, as John Conley points out in his chapter on her in The Suspicion of Virtue: Women philosophers in Neo-classical France, was celebrated for her affection for animals, derived from Lucretius. Bayle, in his dictionary, ‘lauded her naturalist subordination of the human species to nonrational animals: “One of the most lucid and of the most brilliant minds of the seventeenth century preferred the condition of sheep to that of humans.”

In my next post, I want to say some biographical things about Deshoulieres and maybe translate her imitation of Lucretius (it isn’t long – she called it a galimatias).

and another thing we won't get to...

LI is on a grueling editing schedule this week, so we can’t unroll the usual red carpet of delusional associations and retarded insights we do so like to give our readers. We are going to try to write a couple of posts about the sage and the divide between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity, zeroing in on the seventeen century libertines, the rehabilitation of Epicurus, and that woman lost to French poetry and philosophy, Madame Deshoulieres, a seventeenth century French poet who translated Lucretius, ran a salon for neo-Epicurians, and fell back into the arms of the church as she was dying of breast cancer. And have you heard of Deshoulieres, reader of mine? I hadn’t until a couple of days ago, researching these posts. The lady was buried, and I suspect she was buried because she was a lady. She was still known to the 18th century philosophes, however. In her day, she was aggrieved by being ignored, and wrote this poem “To M. Bouhours on his book entitled The art of expert thinking (de bien penser): on works of the mind”:

“Dans une liste triomphante
De célèbres auteurs que votre livre chante
Je ne vois point mon nom placé.
A moi, n’est-il pas vrai? vous n’avez point pensé.
Mais aussi dans le même role
Vous avez oublié Pascal,
Qui pourtant ne pensoit pas mal.
Un tel compagnon me console.”

Such a poem, I hope, is consoling to the Werepoet.
…
In other news, we have received two emails regarding The Savage Detectives. Our friend K. told us that she actually kept people away because she just wanted time to read it. And from our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., who met the enchanting translator herself, Natasha Wimmer at our never to be forgotten LI party, has been reading it with equal delight, and told us this:

“So, last night S. and his lovely girlfriend R. came over for dinner. At a point, I asked S. to join me on a smoking excursion and as we descended the stairs I mentioned over my shoulder that I also wanted to tell him about a book. He asked: "Is this about The Savage Detectives?" Holy shit, said me, yes it is I said.

There is something in the air, in this time, I am there and I glad to be so.”

the sage enters, wearing a scholar's mask...

“I knew in my time one of many arts, a Grecian, a Latinist, a mathematician, a philosopher, a physician, a man master of them all, and sixty years of age, who, laying by all the rest, perplexed and tormented himself for above twenty years in the study of grammar, fully reckoning himself a prince if he might but live so long till he could certainly determine how the eight parts of speech were to be distinguished, which none of the Greeks or Latins had yet fully
cleared: as if it were a matter to be decided by the sword if a man made an adverb of a conjunction.” – Erasmus, In praise of folly.

LI has always wanted to be that man – a man who took the smallest matters of wordplay as a duelist takes a challenge to his honor. Literature at swordpoint. Not that LI can really manipulate a sword, but we do have a ready steady tongue.

At the same time, we realize that the grammarian who throws himself into the vast matter of the eight parts of speech, the man who searches for the key to the mythologies, the woman who uncovers the false analogies strewn among the no longer read economists of the 19th century, the whole bag and baggage of the scholarly mindset seems pretty absurd. Folly speaks in Erasmus from a point of view that is very close to common sense. The commonest sense, in fact.

David Nuttall, the literary scholar who died this January, wrote a book, Dead from the Waist Down, about the emblematic transformation of the scholar, from the humanistic heretic of the seventeenth century to the dry as dust pedant of the nineteenth century. He uses Isaac Casaubon as a touchstone – first, the real Casaubon from the seventeenth century, then the fictional Casaubon, the scholar as a Fisher King who lacks even a knack for minnow catching in Middlemarch, then Casaubon’s biographer, a nineteenth century scholar named Pattison who George Eliot might have known, whose wife (o those suffering wives of the Victorian sages! married in perpetuity to a toothache!) certainly saw herself reflected in Dorothea.

All of which is of interest to me in my multiply interrupted, omni-directional quest to understand the gradual fading of the sage as a possible mask, to use Yeats’ term. More later.

The exacta - For North

Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go!

The exacta: 1. Street Sense 2. Curlin 3. King of the Roxy

The last named didn’t race at the Derby, and I know, I know that Hard Spun will be out there, biting Street Sense’s flank. Deep in my gut, I have deep doubts about my horsey’s chance of winning this time. On the other hand, he’s a balanced horse. I like his views about getting out of Iraq now, nationalizing health care, and the hydrogen fuel cell. Street Sense is also all about Jackson Pollack, his favorite painter, and mine.

Curlin is a strong horse. Everybody knows he’s a strong horse. He does one hundred push ups every night before he goes to bed. If somebody is going to beat my horsey, it will be Curlin. It might be a KO. Curlin not so secretly wants to be a boxer, having once said, "fuck racin'! I can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." He has also stolen milk money from other horseys in the stables. Bad pony!

Finally, King of the Roxy. Since all eyes are gonna be on the Derby horseys, King of the Roxy is getting’ no kind of look in. Unfair! He’s fast, and he’s got nothing to lose.

Finally: song for this race is Patti Smith’s Horses, of course:

Do you know how to pony?

abusing president backbone

An old friend and foil of LI wrote us an email the other day, asking how we were doing and whether we were still lobbing insults at the president.

The question made us hang our head in shame. In fact, a quick survey of LI backpages lately will show an astonishing paucity of commentary about that human equivalent of the green garbage fly, the POTUS. President Backbone. Or, as he was known to the prophet Isaiah, a drunken man who staggereth in his own vomit.

We might as well confess: we’ve reached the limit with the old pissingpost.

The burden of the torchsinger’s song needn’t be some magnificent object, nor does it need to arouse the deepest sentiments. A song I learned as a lad and could still sing for you on a long car trip, as my friend D. can testify, commemorates a bad day at the races for some slack rounder who didn’t bet on Old Stewball, but took the odds on favorites, the gray mare and the bay. Now, this isn’t the kind of news that should lend its impress to the collective memory of all mankind, but – conveyed by Peter Paul and Mary and then distributed a thousandfold by humdrum strummers in every weekend pizza joint in suburban Atlanta, when they weren’t building a staircase to heaven, Old Stewball has refused to be dislodged from my braincells, and will probably still be ghosting me when, in some public charity ward, I’m trying to figure out where my penis is so I can piss out of it or at least know my I still have my valuables about me.

Yet here I am with one of the great subjects. A rich and semi-educated Republic. A population reveling equally in short term memory loss and its dream of f/x military action, with Doby surroundsound. A man whose sum total of talents would gain him only sporadic employment as a second rate golf pro at country clubs in midsized Southern cities, who descends, fortunately enough for him, from one of those families wealthy in exact proportion to their worthlessness. A suspect, not to say sinister elevation; a lack of interest by our crowned golf pro in leadership so incredible that he simply waves away warnings of an attack that does come because they interrupt his cypress trimming and sleep – besides which, they challenge him to do something, and he has never and will never know fuckall about doing anything; a senseless, vain, cruel war, in which gradually every member of the said yo yo Republic becomes complicit – all of these are surely themes for a satiric epic, an unending Dunciad. Yet LI has eaten the ashy fruit of this for six years, and we have finally had enough. What new insults, shocks, jeremiads can one haul out of the cellar? Isaiah only had to do with uncircumsized armies worshipping Baal in the place of the Lord. He never had to confront the deadly horror of modern mediocrity riding in its nasty little triumph (o, the moralizing of the well fed!) over the necks of taste, sense, sensibility, reason, truth, and the hardwon virtues of the little humanity we might have gained to get us through various bilious nights of the soul – if that is we can’t find sleeping tablets.

So LI has broken the covenant of perpetual abuse which we once pledged to our readers. Cursing and shrieking bores the fuck out of us.

The witch of Endor is dead.

The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and
fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof;
because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that
dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the
earth are burned, and few men left.

Wolfie goes down

Headline in the NYT: Wolfowitz to Leave the World Bank

Come out/Come out
Whereever you are!

holy and unholy fools in the streets

- Sophie Calle, Les dormeurs

Okay. To summarize our last post, Fred Hirsch proposed that, enfolded within the material economy, there is a positional economy, one derived from and dependent on social hierarchy. This is a broader notion than Ann Krueger’s rent-seeking, which was also being floated by the neo-classicals in the 70s, but you can see how they dovetail with one another. While Krueger thinks the extraction of rents is ‘non-productive’, Hirsch is saying, in effect, that Krueger is using the criteria of the material economy to analyze the positional economy, and that won’t do. In fact, there are positional goods and services, and one of the key drivers of the material economy since the dawn of capitalism has been positional competition.

Well, LI could spell out the current political implications of Hirsch’s notion – but we’d prefer to apply Hirsch’s notion to the little thread of history that LI has made its little theme over the past six months. If you take the positional economy as the lens through which you view the history of the early modern era, Foucault’s L’age classique, one possible interpretation leaps to mind – or to a mind ready to catch the larger leapers. In the early modern era, the great bourgeois project was to liberate the positional market, as it were. Much of the work of the enlightened philosophers was to that end. At the same time, by one of those fateful pieces of dialectical luck, their identity as philosophers was undermined by their success at this task. In other words, the philosopher as a type was tied to a certain kind of positional market – a highly rigid one. Far into the 18th century, the philosopher as a type really had a strong influence on the real philosopher, be he Locke or Condorcet. This figure was a sage. As a sage, he was bound to the ascetic ethos that developed a sort of hole in the rigid positional economy – proposed a way out of it. Renounced it. And here’s where the dialectical luck comes in – the culminating point for the liberation of the positional market was encoded in Jefferson’s phrase, the pursuit of happiness. Now, as it happens, the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of wisdom had been rivals – well, since Socrates was a pup. As the pursuit of happiness came to dominate the tenor of the positional market, the space in which the sage could exist was squeezed shut. The sage, in that space, took up a relation to the buffoon – his figural other, partner, foe – as well as to a way of thinking of the spacing of human life (how one should age) and practices consonant thereto.

So yeah, ha ha – we’ve come back to sages and buffoons. You didn’t think I was letting them go, did you?
More on this in a later post.

a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time

Back in the 70s – the era that suckled LI, and that provides the whole framework for Bolano’s great novel, which all should read, The Savage Detectives, and all should talk about, bringing an end of all talking about 300 and Spiderman, enough enough enough! – an economist named Fred Hirsch wrote a tract reflecting the time and the mores entitled The Social Limits of Growth. And then, of course, they came from nowhere – or from Pentagonia – the Reaganauts, and for the past thirty years the only discourse about Growth is how we are blessed its many wonders to behold. Meanwhile, we laid claim to another piece of the atmosphere to store our car exhaust and coal exhaust shit, destroyed the Aral Sea, depleted the Ogallala Acquifer, and etc., etc.

This week, LI is going to say some things about Hirsch’s idea of positional goods. It is an idea that has its ancestry in institutional economics and Veblen, but Hirsch was a post-World War II economist, a quantifier, and he wanted a more specific way to talk about a certain kind of social good and service.

Hirsch distinguishes between between the Material Economy and the Positional economy in order to describe the post WWII economic order in the developed world. The material economy is that one familiar to neo-classicals and Marxists. it is deined “as output amenable to continued increase in productivity per unit of labor input: it is Harrod’s democratic wealth. The material economy embraces production of physical goods as well as such services as are receptive to mechanization or technological innovation without deterioration in quality as it appears to the consumer.” On the other hand, you have Harrod’s “oligarchic wealth”: it “relates to all aspects of goods, services, work positions and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or sically imposed sense or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through extensive use.” The question posed by Hirsch is: “What happens when the material pie grows while the positional economy remains confined to a fixed state?”

In a sense, this problem is all around us now, the effect of the growth plus increase in inequality that describes the Reaganomic era. Hirsch had the foresight to see that the economy in the developed world was tending towards positional competition. On the one hand, unless there was robust economic growth, there would be increasing privation. On the other hand, the concomitant to growth would be increasing inequality, which would re-define the terms of affluence. To give one of a number of examples: take a social good such as education. On the one hand, for a democratic, capitalist society to continue, it must invest in human capital – it must educate. On the other hand, positional competition imposes on that education its logic – in order to be rewarded within the educational system, it isn’t enough that a person actually be educated, but it is also important that others be less certified – that others be excluded from certain institutions of education and the like, what Hirsch calls a “competition by people for place, rather than competition for performance.” Hirsch discusses a number of sectors – real estate, education, jobs – and then makes a fine, although dense, summary:

‘… material growth intensifies what may be termed positional competition. By positional competition is meant competition that is fundamentally for a higher place within some explicit or implicit hierarchy and that thereby yields gains for some only by dint of losses for others. Positional competiton, in the language of game theory, is a zero-sum game: what winners win, losers lose. The contrast is with competition that improves performance or enjoyment all round, so that winners gain more than losers lose, and all may come out winners – the positive sum game.”

And – an important point – positional competition is about scarcity: "… competition in the positional sector serves as a general filtering device through which excessive demand has to be matched to available supply. This aspect – which I seek to isolate by the term positional competition – at best yields no net benefit and usually involves additional resource costs, so that positional competiton itself is liable to be a negative sum game. Competition in the positional sector, however, may still yield net benefits if its contributions to individual efficiency and allocation of resources outweigh additions to resource costs and misallocation. But this cannot be judged from the conventional measures of economic output, since these measures gloss over the negative or deadweight elements of positional competition.”

Well… yeah. That last sentence is a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time, friends and fiends. About which we will have more to say in another post.

Jerry Fallwell goes to heaven

In other news - Jerry Fallwell did make it to heaven. He was admitted as part of an affirmative action program for the delusional. "We try to encourage diversity among our heavenly hosts," according to Peter, a spokesman for Heaven. "Oftentimes people have the most astonishing preconceptions about our admission system. Jehovah is going to be unveiling an advertising campaign this fall to reinvigorate interest in the Heaven brand. Heaven: it's not just for losers! There's a whole generation out there who think, well, I'm scorin' dope, I'm fucking anything that moves, and I voted for gay marriage. I'm bound to go to hell. Au contraire! If people only knew: our older alum were whacked out on anything from morning glory seeds to starvation in the desert - that's a real high! - and as for sex, well, we've assimilated cultic prostitutes, self castrators and everybody in between! In fact, we are trying to combat the idea that Jehovah is particularly interested in human genitals. As he said only the other day at dinner: "when I designed those things, tell you Jehovah's honest truth, I was not thinking about where they went or what you could do with them. This is a little bogus, but I've had some wine, I'll confess: I was thinking of something else entirely. I was thinking, damn, I should not have signed off on the wisdom tooth design."

According to the Pearly Gates Express, Fallwell was mostly pleased with everything. To get around with the wings, of course, he is going to have lose a few of those earthly pounds. "The diet of rice and seaweed will tone him up nicely," according to Gautama, one of Heaven's premier dieticians. However, Fallwell was reported to have been "astonished" to meet the son of God and discover that the son of God is...



Tinky Winky!

Come back!

If you see any of these little things humming around, tell them how very very very very very grateful you are, and that you want them to come back!

God in the Zoo

At various points in my life, I’ve called myself a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, and a Spinozan. I have never found God an indifferent proposition in any guise, although I have often thought that the habit of attributing the name God to objects of such vast and conflicting variety must say something about, at the very least, our systems of classification. I won’t get all deconstructive on your ass (as the policeman said to the monkey), but it is no accident that the signifier which floats so freely in a system built, ostensibly, to fix the meanings, is that of the creator of the structure itself. From the speaker of the word comes the word 'confusion'.

As a middle aged man working on being a sage, of course, my meditations naturally turn to the Gods or Goddesses. And being a perennial, low carat, glue sniffing punk, my inclination is to mix and match my divinities, scratching the cosmic record – which is why, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot of the spirits at the portals of each sense.

Which is by way of pointing LI readers to Anthony Gottlieb’s review of the recent spate of atheist books – by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris in the New Yorker.

It is much more learned and witty than Terry Eagleton’s mishandling of Richard Dawkins. Gottlieb is less eager to show his cards, or to try to make books on religion automatically into books on theology. Gottlieb’s handle on that contretemps reflects LI’s own attitude:

“For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.”

That is a neat little paragraph, partly because one of the themes of Gottlieb's piece is that you can't trust the polls about people's religious beliefs - while, at the same time, Gottlieb does like to quote polls about people's religious beliefs. There is a slight inconsistency there, but the real point is that religious belief is not about yes and no responses to questions that are formed in order to facilitate quantification. When the questions are left open, the responses then become much more difficult to quantify over. So the contradictory attitude towards polls is - almost- justified.

Gottlieb is an editor at the Economist, a magazine that likes to think that it is still plugged into the Edinburgh enlightenment. The tone he strikes is Humean – that is, Gottlieb is repelled by zealotry more than he is attracted to advocating one or another belief about God’s existence. He approves of Hume’s openendedness about the whole God question – although of course that openendedness is derived, partly, from a justified fear of legal and professional prosecution on Hume’s part. After all, in his youth a man was actually executed for disbelief, a fact given great play in James Buchan’s excellent book on the Edinburgh enlightenment. Here’s Gottlieb’s Hume:

“Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.

In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.”

Gottlieb’s taste is towards just such ‘cheerfulness’ – but one man’s jovial Hume is another man’s lukewarm countenancer of religion’s many and varied oppressions. And those oppressions, in turn, are about the class composition of society. There is a cheerfulness that comes with eating well and disbelieving the credo that supports the social order one both benefits from and defends, and that cheerfulness can turn vinegary and cynical if the order is shook the least bit. Oddly, Gottlieb doesn’t mention Paine. Hitchens has to be understood, or at least, I suspect, understands himself, as working in the tradition of Paine – and definitely Paine dispensed with the elite culture and cheerfulness of Hume and the discussions of the philosophe and spread light as he saw it in vulgar language among the vulgar. But Paine was never an atheist, and was offended by the term. Of course, the Age of Reason was used to batter his reputation into dust in America, which was just starting to flirt with one of cycles of panic revivalism. On the other hand, The Age of Reason sold astonishingly well. It competed with the Bible in the first decades of the 19th century – and of course, the Bible is always being given away, so it has an unfair advantage. The notion that churches, mosques and temples – and the whole order of clerisy – are oppressors whose very bread and butter depends on imposture is something that Paine, more than any other historical figure, spread abroad. Of course, anti-clericalism was a standard tenent of the philosophes, and it became a mark of ‘liberalism’ in Spain, Italy and France in the 19th century, but it was Paine who gave it the vernacular it had in working class culture.

Iraq was not a doomed enterprise, but a U.S. crime

It has become fashionable for those who originally supported the war but turned against it – like Matt Yglesias – to push a strange sort of deterministic anti-war critique that has caught on elsewhere as well in the liberal side of the blogsphere.

Yglesias’ version is smart in many ways. Today, he uses a version of it to defend Bremer:

“I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there's been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything's fine, it's just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.

The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he's refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has -- that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce.”

Now, if the idea is that the catastrophe in Iraq is just due to a few bad American leaders, then of course that isn’t true. But the notion of the “doomed enterprise” is romantic nonsense, and has the additional negative externality that it washes away all responsibility from the actors involved. While the U.S. had no business, right, or need to invade Iraq, once Iraq was invaded, there were a number of courses of action that presented themselves. Not every action braided into the disaster that has impacted with such mind boggling force on the Iraqis. Allowing Iraq to be looted and calling it the price of freedom, and then disbanding the army and most of the security forces was not forced upon the U.S. by the gods above. In fact, in Gulf War I, the U.S. devised a coalition that actually had force – the members of the coalition could impact and even change U.S. actions. The French basically forced George Bush I to protect Northern Iraq from Saddam’s army. The lesson that his pea brained son took from this was never involve the U.S. in an arrangement in which the U.S. does not have supreme power. That, of course, was at the root of the evil of the occupation. The U.S. had a responsibility, once Baghdad fell, to consult with the U.N. and submit to the appointing of a U.N. approved interim government. At that point, the U.S. military should have been subordinate, taking orders from, that interim government. Almost surely, that interim government would have been more interested in the security of the Iraqis than the benefits accruing from giving them a flat tax – one of Bremer’s comic opera achievements.

It is definitely true, as Yglesias points out, that the U.S. war goals were internally incoherent. They were logically incoherent, insofar as they promoted democracy in Iraq and the supreme rule of a foreign occupying power in Iraq. They were psychologically incoherent as they premised paying for the foreign occupying power with Iraq’s own money while at the same time promoting the alliance of Iraq and the U.S. – as though massive resentment about the looting of Iraq’s wealth to go to the richest country in the world wouldn’t be the result of that plan. The second plan was scotched, the first was never meant seriously. But the U.S. miscalculated, as it became apparent in 2004 that the American forces would simply be fighting everybody if they didn’t start on the road to elections. When, as I have lamented until I am tired of lamenting, the anti-war party fell apart, refusing to become an anti-occupation party and freezing time in a perpetual quest to go back to Spring, 2003, the chance for pushing back against U.S. policies in Iraq in the country was missed. The reason for this was the palpable fear of seeming anti-American. But that reason was fucking lame. The Iraqis became the victims of the inability of the anti-war movement to scream out loudly about the looting of Iraq, the deadly insouciance and moral turpitude of disbanding Iraq’s security forces, the thrusting of insane shock therapy economic policies on the country. It won’t do now to look back at those things as inevitable concomitants of the occupation, for which nobody is to blame. The blame is with the U.S. Let’s all say that in a rousing manner. The blame is with the U.S. This fucking country was directly responsible for the violence that ensued in Iraq. This fucking country promoted sectarianism by way of the usual occupier’s divide and conquer methods it introduced from the minute it touched Iraqi soil and airlifted the comic opera militia of Chalabi into the country. This fucking country was the first to make a mockery of Iraq’s judiciary by using it as an instrument of arbitrary arrest, as per Bremer’s hard on against Sadr. This fucking country couldn’t seem to gather the army together in POW camps and demobilize and remobilize it, but had plenty of time for herding ordinary Iraqis en masse into prison camps like Abu Ghraib. As a general rule, when a state invades a second state and the first state is absolutely unfamiliar with the language and culture of the second state, the first state is going to make a hash of governing the second state. However, this doesn't mean that it is necessarily going to unleash mass murder on an unprecedented scale in the second state. For that, you need to be especially bad.

There was no deterministic doom at work here, as in a Faulkner novel. Let’s cut the crap.

Always read nir rosen

Right after the invasion of Iraq, Lujai told me, Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad’s hospitals but did not know how to manage them. “They were sectarian from the beginning,” she said, “firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the problems started. They wanted to separate Sunnis. The Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement” — that is, to the Shiite faction loyal to Moktada al-Sadr.

Following the 2005 elections that brought Islamist Shiites to power, Lujai said, the Sadrists initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The minister of health and his turbaned advisers saw to it that in hospitals and health centers the walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics like Sadr, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Shiite religious songs could often be heard in the halls. In June of last year, Ali al-Mahdawi, a Sunni who had managed the Diyala Province’s health department, disappeared, along with his bodyguards, at the ministry of health. (In February, the American military raided the ministry and arrested the deputy health minister, saying he was tied to the murder of Mahdawi.) Lujai told me that Sunni patients were often accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors treated them, the special police from the Ministry of the Interior would arrest the Sunni patients. Their corpses would later be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.”

On Sept. 2, 2006, Lujai’s husband went to work and prepared for the first of three operations scheduled for the day. At the end of his shift a patient came in unexpectedly; no other doctor was available, so Adil stayed to treat him. Adil was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later, his dead body was found on the street.

As she told me this story, Lujai began to cry, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband’s murder and was told: “He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn’t stay in Iraq. That’s why he was killed.” Two weeks later she received a letter ordering her to leave her Palestine Street neighborhood.

On Sept. 24 she and her children fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife and their four children. They gave away or sold what they could and paid $600 for the ride in the S.U.V. that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, as many as 20 other doctors also fled.
- Nir Rosen, NYTM

Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't shake it loose. These days, everyone "knows" that the Coalition Provisional Authority made two disastrous decisions at the beginning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly disband the Iraqi army. The most recent example is former CIA chief George J. Tenet, whose new memoir pillories me for those decisions (even though I don't recall his ever objecting to either call during our numerous conversations in my 14 months leading the CPA). Similar charges are unquestioningly repeated in books and articles. Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.
Like most Americans, I am disappointed by the difficulties the nation has encountered after our quick 2003 victory over Saddam Hussein. But the U.S.-led coalition was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny. Hussein modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's, which controlled the German people with two main instruments: the Nazi Party and the Reich's security services. We had no choice but to rid Iraq of the country's equivalent organizations to give it any chance at a brighter future. – L.Paul Bremer

LI was impressed that Nir Rosen touches, however lightly, on the story of class in Iraq – for the peculiarity of the Iraq war, as we have often emphasized and expect, one day, some heavier honcho in the punditosphere will pick up, is that the U.S turned against its one natural constituency in Iraq – the upper class – from the beginning of the occupation, thus rapidly making itself irrelevant as anything more than a random force in Iraq. Rosen’s article is great. Bremer’s article is why the Washington Post needs competition. When a paper uses its editorial page as a white house corkboard, pinning up the self-serving lies penned by self-deluded failures to actions that were near that fine edge between dumb and pathological imbecility – well, that paper needs competition. Fred Hiatt and Marty Peretz are, I suspect, one person, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is very depressing that Hiatt has the ear of the public with his position. Is there a worse editor in the U.S.?

ps - Rosen's piece also contained a paragraph of such pure Bushism that LI must quote it. It is a treat, in a way. Since Idi Amin and Mobutu, there have been few world leaders willing to venture so far into the most impudent of excuses for mass murder. Lucky Ducky Americans are seeing, in their leadership, a resurgence of the rhetoric of Kampala in the 70s. Truly refreshing.

“What I find most disturbing,” Bacon went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he [John Bolton] told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.” Bolton likewise did not share the concerns of Bacon and others that the refugees would become impoverished and serve as a recruiting pool for militant organizations in the future. “I don’t buy the argument that Islamic extremism comes from poverty,” he said. “Bin Laden is rich.” Nor did he think American aid could alleviate potential anger: “Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay. You want them to go home. The governments don’t want them to stay.”

The United States is really just beginning to grapple with the question of Iraqi refugees, in part because the flight from Iraq is so entwined with the vexed question of blame. When I read John Bolton’s comments to Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, they mainly agreed with him. Sauerbrey maintained that “refugees are created by repressive regimes and failed states. The sectarian violence has driven large numbers out. During the Saddam regime, large numbers of Iraqis were displaced, and the U.S. resettled 38,000 Iraqis. We would take 5,000 a year at given points in time. After 2003, there was great hope, and people were returning in large numbers. The sectarian violence after the mosque bombing in February 2006 is what turned things around. The problem is one caused by the repressive regime” of Saddam Hussein. She did add, “We take the responsibility of being a compassionate nation seriously.

Ah, that last sentence is such whipped cream! One does so wish that there were some curse that would cause vampires like Sauerbrey, Bolton, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the horde to fall, frothing, on the ground, crumbling as the rays of the sun hit their disgusting bodies. Alas, they will end up well fed and having their assistants pen nice little op ed pieces for the Washington Post. America, Night of the Living Dead, 2007.

memes and hooks

LI is a pretty jaded reviewer. One of the things we like about doing anonymous reviews for Publishers Weekly is seeing the hooks we put in the reviews spread out to other reviewers. Amazon provides a big megaphone. So we noted that two reviewers we don't much care for - Kakatuni in the NYT and Dirda in the Washington Post - echo, in their disparaging reviews of Delillo's Falling Man, themes we set going in ours, mercifully and mysteriously pretty much as we wrote it up there on Amazon. We liked Falling Man - and though I don't really care to look it up, I would bet Dirda liked that awful, jello sweet Jonathan Safron Foers novel about 9/11. Dirda has terrible taste in contemporary American novelists - sorta Sub Michael Wood - without the eloquence to make me care one way or another.

Let's get out of afghanistan

“It is not clear whether the Ghanikhel raid was a case of mistaken identity or a successful anti-terrorist operation that also became a human tragedy.”

LI’s question to ponder this weekend is: what the hell is the U.S. still doing in Afghanistan?

In 2001, LI supported the attack on Afghanistan for the standard vanilla tit for tat reasons. But wars in the humanitarian intervention era ( “On your door I am a-knocking/with my toolbox and my stocking”) are sticky things, so sticky that the soldiers never seem to find the conditions just right to actually leave. Now, this is much to the satisfaction of all bien pensant people in D.C., and like a good little war, it is tossed into the forgettery of the back of the A section for bored householders to peruse if they will – although what’s the fucking point of that?

Occasionally the news comes from the front that things are going swimmingly, or they are going backwards, or that American marines have become so adroit at their anti-terrorist operations that they have permanently protected villagers in remote valleys from the insidious Taliban:

“On Tuesday, a senior U.S. military commander issued a formal apology to the families of 19 civilians who died in a March 4 incident in Batikot, in Nangahar province. A squad of Marines, ambushed by a suicide bomber, sprayed indiscriminate gunfire at cars and pedestrians.”

The Afghan war has some adorable characteristics, which you’d expect of a five year old. Five year olds love to build sand castles and destroy them. They love finger painting. Oh, and they love indiscriminate air warfare too!

“Almost every day, warplanes drop bombs, shoot rockets and fire cannon rounds into suspected enemy locations in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Generally, there tend to be more airstrikes in Afghanistan than in the war in Iraq. Since the beginning of this month, according to data released by Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, B-1 heavy bombers have struck Afghanistan four times, F-15 fighters have done so twice, and A-10 ground-attack jets have fired their cannons three times. Also, a British Royal Air Force Harrier jet carried out bombing.

The airstrikes and casualties are a direct result of the stepped-up Taliban insurgency, which employs suicide bombs and often uses civilian areas as hiding places. Yet according to diplomats and human rights groups, the tough military response is weakening Afghan support for foreign troops and playing into the insurgents' hands. President Hamid Karzai, sharply rebuking his foreign allies, declared recently that such civilian deaths were "no longer acceptable."”

The technostructure of war in America has been a win win on many fronts – it distributes money to the right array of companies, it keeps the budgets high, it makes a symbolic statement to the rest of the world, and it expresses pretty well the inexorable logic of the dialectic of vulnerability that the U.S. has been committed to since Hiroshima. It is a form of offshoring the war. However, although it is marvelous, it can’t do one thing: it can’t win a low intensity war. It can only delay losing a low intensity war. That Bush is presiding over two defeats makes him a remarkable American president in many ways – that he pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory in Afghanistan is, well, it is why his fans love him. Bush is like a Jesus figure, if you can imagine Jesus, at the wedding in Cana, turning water into radioactive urine and urging the guests to drink up.

So let’s add things up. First, you have to advance an essentially colonialist enterprise by manufacturing an election. Check – this is where Karzai comes from. Then you essentially bungle the one chance you have to actually force the enemy to surrender, or to break him. Check – the Pentagon’s nursing of the escape of Al Qaeda and much of the Taleban leadership into Pakistan was a sort of foresighted action, to guarantee that the war wouldn’t stop, because if the war stops, you might actually have to… gasp … withdraw. Then you need to wait around, let the economic situation plummet, produce amazingly liberal legislation for show in the capital which just happens to be in complete disconnect with the culture at large – this has the double advantage of maintaining the humanitarian label and making the powers you have propped up in the capital look like complete and utter puppets, which increases their dependence on the occupation – and finally, voila, you have the situation of an openended occupation that will feed on itself until those people in the mountains find the stingers to take down some of those bombers. Then things can get merrier.

It should be pointed out to establish LI's fucking non-partisan cred here that Clinton’s wars in the 90s actually put in place the elements that have grown to full fledged malignancy here. The party divide disguises a fundamental continuity. The bombing wars that avoided any American casualties seemed free and fun – save of course for a buncha landlubbers bleeding to death in the villages – but it turns out that they had no ending bracket. Occupation just goes on forever.

It is long past time to have an exit strategy for Afghanistan that actually makes sense – that is, that comes to an exit. You know what an exit is, don’t you Uncle Sam? Or does it have to leave muddy boot prints on your butt?

and it rained trash for two thousand years...

LI is always interested in trash. Humans have always left a non-supply line behind them of stuff other than our scat and mortality – it goes along with being tool using beasties. But the heaping helpings of trash that issue daily from the courses of the average American/European/Latin American/Asian/African are producing a sort of global coral reef of garbage, a carapace over the planet.

So we found this NYT article a timely treat, and we liked the f/x chart mapping the average mile of garbage along the road. Here are a few grafs:

“In California and across the nation, where some freeway shoulders have come to resemble weekend yard sales, the nature of road debris has changed, and litter anthropologists are now studying the phenomenon. Where “deliberate” litter used to reign — those blithely tossed fast-food wrappers and the like — “unintentional” or “negligent” litter from poorly secured loads is making its presence felt.

Steven R. Stein, a litter analyst for R. W. Beck, a waste-consulting firm in Maryland, attributes the change to more trash-hauling vehicles, including recycling trucks, and the ubiquity of pickup trucks on the country’s highways. In 1986, Mr. Stein said, two-thirds of the debris was deliberate, but surveys now show the litter seesaw balanced.

He said the two most recent surveys indicated a further increase in unintentional litter. In Georgia, which recently quantified its litter, 66 percent of road debris comes from unintentional litter, largely unsecured loads. A study in Tennessee last year showed that 70 percent of the state’s debris was unintentional.”

Bikers know. I had to bike deep into South Austin a couple of days ago. This means taking my life in my hands and pedaling far down Lamar, an experience akin to being a rabbit on some acreage the beaters are bearing down on. Bikes, in Texas, are hunted things. As you travel the major miles that are being humped over by SUVs and trucks without number, you see what all that portage costs. It isn’t just the perpetually cracked road, the omnipresence of broken glass, the oil slicked dust. Traffic sheds its skin every day, the skin consisting of every container you have ever drunk out of or broken your fingernails trying to tear open, of old magazines, of pipe, of splintered wood, of nails. Long ago I learned that ordinary street bike tires would last about two weeks on the Austin streets. My bike has mountain tires. As I headed out past the tangle of highways around Ben White, I even nearly ran over a diamond back rattler – whether alive or dead, I didn’t stop to find out. I am spooked by suburbia anyway – it always makes me feel like the man who fell to earth – and rambling over potentially tirepoppin stuff while cars as big as small whales go whizzing by you is one way to play the scales on your nerves. Although I shouldn’t exaggerate – I don’t worry too much about one of those whales socking me. If it happens, it happens.

An even better place to study the rain of trash is the path underneath the overpass leading to the lake that I jog every other day. Mopac is, what, fifty, seventy feet above the path? It is like a rain forest there, if you substitute, for drops of water, every kind of human trash. Trees will be shrouded not by the nets the net caterpillar spins – a pest around here – but by mysterious sheets of plastic and vinyl windripped from some truck. Ribbons, string, bags are distributed with abandon, to never decay eventually on the ground. It has all become part of the ecology, like the perpetual susurration of the cars themselves.

But we have to move around in this world:

“A 2004 report on vehicle-related road debris by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety underscored the hazards: In North America, more than 25,000 accidents a year are caused by litter that is dumped by motorists or falls out of vehicles.

“It’s really a problem of individual motorists’ not understanding the aerodynamics of what wind can do to a mattress,” said Scott Osberg, the foundation’s director of research.

Two years ago, a horrifying incident in Washington State led to the passage of Maria’s law, named for Maria Federici, 24, who was blinded and disfigured when a piece of a shelving unit flew off a trailer and crashed through her windshield. Before the accident, Washington drivers with unsecured loads received a traffic citation and a $194 fine. The tougher law made it a gross misdemeanor if an unsecured load caused an injury, carrying with it a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $5,000 fine.

Accident statistics alone may not accurately reflect the frequency of such incidents. Last year, a fatality in Washington State, in which a driver swerved to avoid a flying shelf and hit another car, was classified as a collision.”