Getting the dead bodies out before mom comes home

I have had no time to blog decently lately. But I have noticed a certain thing, a certain panic point spread between the political blogs, all eyes on the prize and the Obama Clinton slug orgy, and the financial blogs, where everybody is on code speedy, fleeing the Wall Street Chernobyl. Interesting discrepancy, there. It is the equivalent of slow motion in the flicks – the bullet travels ever so slowly towards the body. And so it is with this, the dramatic and entertaining part of the 3 trillion dollar recession.

The strategy of the Fed is a lot like the strategy of the guy who disposes of bodies in Pulp Fiction, although you have to imagine that guy trying to cover up for the St. Valentine’s day massacre. How does the Fed take out the dead bodies in full public view while pretending that nothing is happening? Very carefully. Some third party action here, a casual announcement that it is opening up half of its resources, 400 billion dollars, as a sort of charity fund for predatory meta-lenders there. And it is treating the dollar like skeet, of course –let’s shoot that value down and treat the American consumer to some real, good old fashioned inflation – ein bisschen Weimarmusik, if you will. Later on, maybe we will all sit down and try to figure out why the economy was put in the hands of Milton Friedman's mutant ejaculate. Fun while it lasted, boys!

Here’s the grit in the grift: if you keep saying shit that turns out not to be true and it turns out to be not true the very next day, it can get embarrassing. If you say we have no liquidity problem one day and the next you say, oh, did I say liquidity? I meant to say liquids – we have plenty of liquids here in the Boardroom. Single malts galore! Then people begin to suspect you not only don’t know your shit, you never knew your shit. Now, you can tell the yahoos and suckers out there almost anything – the last eight years have shown that. But the slightly more elevated yahoos and suckers who are aspiring to the yacht class get all panicy when they realize they have serious money in the Liars Club. Hence, they rush in to get it out. They start to shake the very bones of the system, moan, groan, and shit in public. It is very hard, in the midst of this freak show, to discretely dispose of the victims.

All of which leads me to this quote from Chernow’s biography of J.P. Morgan:

The 1907 panic would be the last time that bankers loomed so much larger than regulators in a crisis…

“The panic was blamed on many factors – tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the “malefactors of great wealth,” and excessive speculation in copper mining and railroad stocsk. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn’t take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these had been synonymous with safe investment. By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative. To draw money for risky ventures, they paid exorbitant interest rates, and trust executives operated like stock market plungers. They loaned out so much against stocks and bonds that by October 1907 as much as half the bank loans in New York were backed by securities as collateral – an extremely shaky base for the system.”

Pikers! in our new supersystem, places like Carlyle Capital thought nothing about being leverage 32 to 1 - keeping money as a sort of white elephant being so fucking passé.

Well, we will see what tricks in the body removal trade the Fed will come up with next week. This is the new, ”please don’t notice you are in a recession and your 401(k)s are crap” recession. There’s even a Faulknerian note – Birmingham, Alabama is rapidly becoming a sink hole as the stock market plunging done by the good uber-Christian city managers there have lost more money than anybody knew one midsized city could lose.

So this song goes out to my Birmingham Alabama buds who obviously were doing this whilst planning Jefferson County bond issues!

I love a millionaire

Lust corrodes my body
I’ve lost count of my lovers
but I can count my money
forever and forever…

Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., being a hard boiled New Yorker, is ho humming Nostradamas’ prediction that Bear Stearns is toast. As he sees it, it just means someone’s going to get lucky at the fire sale – shed no tears for the scapy, déclassé financial house as it gets that look on its face like the wicked witch of the West after Dorothy slopped the pail of water on her.

Hmm. I can never impress the wise guy crowd. You Gothamites! eating raw steel spikes for breakfast. They talk out of the side of their mouths up there, and never say howdy.

Unfortunately, there is no video for the most appropriate song for today – the Mekon’s Soldier from the Retreat from Memphis album, which I’ve quoted before.

But here’s a link to the second most appropriate song for today – which is a song that stands outside from the society of men in chains, and men who hang themselves in chains. An impossible dream of the past!

Men of chains

“The Roman law as to the payment of borrowed money (pecunia certa credita) was very strict. A curious passage of Gellius (xx.1) gives us the ancient mode of legal procedure in the case of debt, as fixed by the Twelve tables. If the debtor admitted the debt, or had been condemned in the amount of the debt by a judex, he had thirty days allowed him for payment. At the expiration of this time, he was liable to the Manus Injectio and ultimately to be assigned over to the creditor (addictus) by the sentence of the praetor. The creditor was required to keep him for sixty days in chains, during which time he publicly exposed the debtor on three nundinea, and proclaimed the amount of his debt. In no person release the prisoner by paying the debt, the creditor might sell him as a slave or put him to death."

This story, under the entry Nexum in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities, is of interest not only for the amusingly suggestive idea that the creditor was named an addictus, but for the idea that the chains worn by the debtor were simply the visual and material endpoint of the chain he had invisibly agreed to wear when he took on debt. Nexus comes from necto, to bond. The nexum is often coupled with mancipium, sale, which is of course at the center of emancipation.

The image of the man in chains is a powerful one. Dickens, that great instinctive mythmaker, brilliantly switches the chains to the addictus in A Christmas Carol:

The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound,and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."

His colour changed though, when, without a pause,it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him,
and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.”

Now, nexum wasn’t the literal Latin for chains – but as the transaction it named could all end in chains, the figurative here is like Marley’s ghost – the nexum is transparent, and you could look through it to the chains wound about the exposed debtor.

In philosophy, the notion of the chain of being is well known, especially since A.O. Lovejoy’s book. However, Lovejoy was a traditional intellectual historian. He wasn’t one to ask about the shifting between the material and the figurative, that interplay which, of course, is as ice cream and pie to a deconstructionist minded guy like LI. However, though we have pored in libraries over various books on archaeology and anthropology and ancient history, we still have not come across an account of the invention of the chain. The wheel, writing, bronze, the chariot – you can always find speculative accounts of these things. The chain, on the other hand, seems to have been forever familiar. In the Iliad, Book 8, one of the most famous references to chains occurs in Zeus’s flyte:

“Now Dawn the saffron-robed was spreading over the face of all the earth, and Zeus that hurleth the thunderbolt made a gathering of the gods upon the topmost peak of many-ridged Olympus, and himself addressed their gathering; and all the gods gave ear: "Hearken unto me, all ye gods and goddesses, that I may speak what the heart in my breast biddeth me. Let not any goddess nor yet any god essay this thing, to thwart my word, but do ye all alike assent thereto, that with all speed I may bring these deeds to pass. Whomsoever I shall mark minded apart from the gods to go and bear aid either to Trojans or Danaans, smitten in no seemly wise shall he come back to Olympus, or I shall take and hurl him into murky Tartarus, far, far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth, the gates whereof are of iron and the threshold of bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth: then shall ye know how far the mightiest am I of all gods. Nay, come, make trial, ye gods, that ye all may know. Make ye fast from heaven a chain of gold, and lay ye hold thereof, all ye gods and all goddesses; yet could ye not drag to earth from out of heaven Zeus the counsellor most high, not though ye laboured sore. But whenso I were minded to draw of a ready heart, then with earth itself should I draw you and with sea withal; and the rope should I thereafter bind about a peak of Olympus and all those things should hang in space. By so much am I above gods and above men."

Macrobius’ comments on this passage are the locus classicus of the chain of being – for, in his Neo-Platonic way, Macrobius metaphorized and metaphysicalized the chain simultaneously. Lovejoy seized on the passage in Macrobius as his starting point:

“When, for example, Macrobius, in the early fifth century, gives, under the guise of a commentary on a work of Cicero’s, a Latin abridgment of much of the doctrine of Plotinus, he sums up the conception in a concise passage which was probably one of the chief vehicles through which it was transmitted to medieval writers; and he employs two metaphors – of the chain and of the series of mirrors – which were to recur for centuries as figurative expressions of this conception:

Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises, and from Mind, Soul, and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life, and since this single radiance illumines all and is reflected in each, as a single face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.”

Now, I spy with my little eye a curious thing. The curious thing is that the divine order of being uses, as its organizing metaphor, an instrument associated with debt slavery and capture. It is said that the Roman armies traveled with chains for their prisoners of three types, iron, silver and gold, which corresponded to the prisoners they expected to take, with Princes and Kings getting the gold chain. To conquer was not just to abolish the property relations holding in the conquered territory – the law of res nullius exposed all to the chain, to the property one holds in oneself.

Well, I haven’t gotten to Livy’s men in chains running in the streets of Rome, where they ran and ran until they appeared in Rousseau’s essay on social contract – but I’ll get there some day. I am struggling with work, at the moment, and barely have time to do research! Sorry, sorry, sorry.

To finish off, a quote from Henry Maine:

“The Law of Warlike Capture derives its rules from the assumption that communities are remitted to a state of nature by the outbreak of hostilities, and that, in the artificial natural condition thus produced, the institution of private property falls into abeyance so far as concerns the belligerents. As the later writers on the Law of
Nature have always been anxious to maintain that private property
was in some sense sanctioned by the system which they were expounding, the hypothesis that an enemy's property is res nullius has seemed to them perverse and shocking, and they are careful to stigmatise it as a mere fiction of jurisprudence. But, as soon as the Law of Nature is traced to its source in the Jus Gentium, we see at once how the goods of an enemy came to be looked upon as nobody's property, and therefore as capable of being acquired by the first occupant.

me and my nostradamus

In other news – LI’s estimate of a three trillion dollar recession is the same sum talked about in Martin Wolf’s new Financial Times column. We get to that sum in different ways – Roubini, who Wolf quotes, comes, as it were, from the grassroots up, estimating the fallout from an extreme estimate of mortgage failures, whereas LI came to it from the top down, taking the figure of the excess of consumer spending and borrowing over income over the last ten years. Well, my fine readers, there you go – whilst some might take this for amateurish wankery, others will find my figures to be eerily prescient. Why? Because every night, the ghost of Nostradamus visits me and whispers sweet apocalyptic nothings in to my ear.

It is the only way to do predictions, man. Oh, one other thing Nostradamus told me: Bear Stearns is toast. Or was it that he said all men will turn to toasteating as the Angel of Death, looking remarkably like Gloria Graham playing in a movie that prefigures Elliot Spitzer’s downfall, sounds the last trumpet? I couldn’t quite understand the lang d’oc he was muttering in.

the Götterdämmerung as staged by Disney’s seven dwarves

LI can only regard the current festuche, the harmonic convergence of lavender buncombe (Mencken’s phrase) and the thug masters, with something approaching that musical feeling Nietzsche used to get from hiking around Switzerland in his fancy boots. It the Götterdämmerung as staged by Disney’s seven dwarves. We have, on the one hand, our vice president, fresh, apparently, from having some new virgin’s heart tucked into his breast cavity, going to Saudi Arabia to ask them to kindly give us cheaper oil Tuesday for repayment on Friday, on the same day the Fed decrees that banks can trade old socks, diaries, lamps, and broken chairs for loans in a brand spanking new entity that is determined to pump 200 billion dollars into the system. Everywhere one looks, the governing class is displaying a totally cute imbecility. Gosh, that CEO class, which has gotten so awful smart over the last two decades that they had to increase their compensation packages by a good 1000 percent, are showing what they are made of.

Cheney’s joke hejira and the Fed’s determination to have the middle and working class pay not only for the party the Ponzi rich have been throwing for themselves, but even for the cleanup afterwards, are treated with the usual awe by the royal stenographers of the press – but outside the gated community, the boobs are getting restive. They got all their Hummers. They got all that great equity out of their houses, which was a-gonna appreciate in price forever. They got their yellow ribbons supporting the soldiers, and some of them even know where Iraq is on the map. Their kids googled it! And now everything does seem to be tumbling down. How could this have happened, after we so terrifically won our war on terrorism and freed the downtrodden Islamic people – didn’t we buy them all bibles or something? Surely they’ve learned to believe in Jesus and watch Dancing with the Stars like a civilized group? Inexplicable that they resist, and we did it all out of the goodness of our hearts!

The boobs have still not quite understood what it means for them when the President energetically shits on the dollar, but they are getting a nice little lesson at the gas pump. And eventually the boobs might even start asking who, exactly, the Fed works for. So the question is: what kind of crowd control is the gated community going to exert?

“They are mad; they are fools,” said the Dog-man. “Even now they talk together beyond there. They say, ‘The Master is dead. The Other with the Whip is dead. That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are. We have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end. We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no Whips for ever again.’ So they say. But I know, Master, I know.”

I felt in the darkness, and patted the Dog-man's head. “It is well,” I said again.
“Presently you will slay them all,” said the Dog-man.

“Presently,” I answered, “I will slay them all,—after certain days and certain things have come to pass. Every one of them save those you spare, every one of them shall be slain.”

“What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills,” said the Dog-man with a certain satisfaction in his voice.

“And that their sins may grow,” I said, “let them live in their folly until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.”

“The Master's will is sweet,” said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of his canine blood.

“But one has sinned,” said I. “Him I will kill, whenever I may meet him. When I say to you, ‘That is he,’ see that you fall upon him. And now I will go to the men and women who are assembled together.”

ps - here's a little ditty we wrote on November 6, 2004 - after Bushypoo was elected. Somehow, it seems to fit, here.



The Snopes and the freeriders

If LI were a Democratic Party strategist (brrr!), this weekend we would settle down with our Faulkner. The utter rubbish being tossed around by the talking heads about the Democrats adopting Republican moral values to win presidential elections has been untempered by reality. Moral values, we think, had little to do with this election. Rather, what brought out the hicks was the promise of entertainment. Instead of cockfighting or bearbaiting, gaybashing of a high and rare type was on the ticket. This was as irresistible to your average Snopes as a guest appearance on the Jerry Springer show used to be to your average overweight stripper.

The Snopes sullenly populated the backreaches of Yoknapatawpha County in the days before the New Deal. Faulkner’s preferred novelistic time period was the twenties, which brought a lot of changes to Mississippi – but not like the Great Depression and the New Deal did. In the post WWII period, going through the Great Society, the Snopes, with their rabid angers and short term views and long term grudges, grew used to benefiting from multitudinous government entitlements that they never properly contributed to. They have continued to revel in the whole system. But there is a problem here that the system’s designers never considered. It is the problem of the freerider.

The freerider – the user of a public good who does not contribute to the maintenance of that good – has deep resonance in the Snopes culture. It is one of the reasons Jesus is so popular among them – he elevates the status of the freerider to a divine principle, in which, for no real act, a man can be forgiven for his sins simply by prostrating himself before Jesus and declaring to all and sundry the uninteresting mental tidbit that he believes Jesus is the son of God. This, from a man whose beliefs on any cosmological question have been unleavened by reading material since the age of ten. Given the amount of sinning that Snopes like to engage in (q.v. any c & w station in your vicinity), this is the kind of deal Snopeses can’t refuse.

The government, however, is different from Jesus. The government does come in and try to change your behavior, instead of knocking ineffectually at your heart. For instance, lynching, poll taxes, and other useful means of keeping down blacks were all knocked down by the government. This made the government very unpopular. They were against having fun. A moral libertarian, confronted with the government interfering with his behavior, would perhaps try to free himself from dependence on the government. This is why Snopeses can never be real libertarians. They have no sense of integrity. They don’t even understand the problem. For the Snopeses, Bush’s career looked unblemished – he got away with everything he ever did. That counts as a blessed sign of consanguinity among that crowd.

Your average Snopes, then, has no motive to get away from depending on the government, but every reason to denounce it. And this is how your Snopes votes. He sends his Republican congressman to Washington to do two things. One is to interfere with the lives of people that Snopes have no use for – gays, blacks, feminists, New Yorkers, Hollywood types. The other is to reward the Snopes with ever deeper experiences of freeriding. This is done by cutting his taxes – the Snopes, although they don’t make a lot, rely on those refunds to get them out of the most pressing of the enormous mass of debts they have piled up in lives unrelieved by any intellectual activity that goes beyond shopping at the mall and the aforesaid Jesus idolatry – and by borrowing money. Thus, the whole system, with its trillion dollar stockpiles of arms and its special pill provisions for the elderly Snopeses, runs of itself. When it starts to choke, some Democrat will step in and sacrifice his sense of the social welfare to the necessity of taming the deficit. The Snopeses call this God's country for a reason.

The Snopeses have been fortunate in that their opponents, the Liberals, have generally misunderstood the relationship. For instance, the Liberals were the ones denouncing the Bush tax cuts for privileging the wealthy. The odd thing about that is that the wealthy generally don’t live in Snopes places. There truly are a great many limosine liberals. One actually just ran for president. And the even odder thing about that is that the Liberals think that they have developed a credo that represents the income strata that encompasses the Snopes. So that your average Liberal is making an economic sacrifice of a certain sort on behalf of a people who dislike nothing more than a Liberal. This is a true comedy of errors. It is also American history, circa 1980-2004.

So the question for the next four years is: have the Snopes misjudged the situation. Having decimated the Liberals so that they cannot possibly defend the income strata of the Snopes, the rhetoric of conservatism can now become a reality. The Snopes always relied, partly, on the fact that their enemy/defenders were powerful enough to defend them. That’s done with. So will the reckoning finally come? Will reality bite? are the Snopes finally about to learn about the world outside free riderdom? It wouldn’t really hurt the Liberal, except morally.

LI has been enraged by the election, but we are fascinated by the aftermath. We’ve lived around the Snopes most of our life. And we were, until maybe three days ago, in the Liberal position. We were blind. Now we see. And what we see is the enemy. We want to see them suffer. Badly. And we want to see the self-destroying machinery they have set up work – oh so gloriously. So slowly, painfully, we are regaining our joie de vivre. This might not be so bad after all.

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN

Atheists received a real blow today when it was announced that the Carlyle Group – the Carlyle Group – the Carlyle Group’s “troubled mortgage-debt investment fund, Carlyle Capital” is about to fall to the first run (oh, okay, counting Northern Rock, second) of the New New New Economy.

Oh sure, there’s no Goooooood. Chump. Then how to explain this instance of a poetic justice so breathtaking that we’d reject it as the impossible happy end sequence of some movie? I mean, we are talking about the Carlyle Group – did I say that? The henhouse for old, corrupt, murderous politicos – the Bush family Mafioso – which was the very model and exemplum of the new private equity vehicles that provide corrupt, murderous pols with an easy transition space to the money they have, as legislators, made available to the most murderous and corrupt. Hmm, did I put in here, yet, the part about them being murderous and corrupt?

So – averting my eyes from the crash of that motherfucker, Spitzer – there is something to celebrate, to party hard about today!

“The fund, which invests mainly in triple-A rated mortgage securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has received $400 million in margin calls, and some of its lenders started to liquidate collateral for $5 billion of debt. Banks are asking for their money back amid concerns the economic climate may deteriorate further.
The Carlyle fund said on Monday that it “requested a standstill agreement whereby its lenders would refrain from foreclosing and liquidating their collateral, and we are awaiting responses.”

Banks are asking for more collateral to cover loans after writing down more than $160 billion in assets linked to the subprime mortgage crisis, and fears of a recession are prompting them to call in some of the loans outright. Costs to protect even the safest bonds are close to a record, and investment funds like Carlyle Capital are finding it increasingly difficult to meet rising demands for collateral as the value of their portfolios declines along with the financial markets.

“At the beginning banks were willing to accept not to trigger margin calls because they feared forced assets sales,” said Philip Gisdakis, a senior credit strategist at Unicredit in Munich, “but now that there is a serious deterioration in the valuation of collateral, they cannot do that any longer and need to protect their loans.”
The Carlyle fund, which sold shares in an initial public offering on the Amsterdam stock exchange last summer, shares some of the Carlyle Group’s management and received a $150 million credit line from the firm. Among the fund’s lenders are Citigroup, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.”

And you thought the divinity had exhausted himself with that last message of his, 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.' Fuck no. The big guy is just a hesitant writer – rather like Flaubert, lying on a sofa, suffering over the exact description of Charles Bovary’s hat. However, as we all know, God is a fantastic stand up comic – he filled the ears of his prophets with wonderful routines, real William Burroughs stuff. So I thought it might be appropriate to quote something to celebrate the Carlyle Capitals imitation of an armadillo meeting a sixty mile an hour 18 wheeler.

“All this came upon the king Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon. 30 The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? 31 While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. 32 And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will. 33 The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.”

the Werepoet's Tolstoy

I have a feeling the werepoet is growing weary of her long posts about War and Peace. Well, this is too bad. Winn has a rare talent for not only cutting a plot down to its elements (something I am always trying to do as a reviewer), but rebuilding it as a comic tour de force. How terrible to subject my hero Tolstoy to such fine sacrilege! yes - sometimes Winn shivers my timbers, especially when she casts an evil eye on Tolstoy’s regrettably sexist lapses. But the werepoet is no snark meister – like certain NY writers – for instance, Matthew Sharp, in Jamestown – Winn has the ability to merge spleen and an oddly innocent humor. I believe this is the temperament of our era – we (Americans at least) all have this odd combination of imperial experience and disappointed expectation, it creeps into the way we talk, the way we pre-load failure into our hopes. The way, in essence, we try to trick our own naivete. It is another transmutation of irony - and I'm not speaking of post modernism here, that bugger all phrase for failed exercises in wit. Fuck that. I am speaking of the irony that comes out of being surrounded, as we all are, by constant lures set for our desires which are absolutely transparent to us, and to which we absolutely succumb. We embody both the conmen and the victim, it is the way we live. These are the dreams, crafted by the worst, forced upon us by every fucking old song blasting through a grocery store sound system, by every movie ad campaign, by every political hoax. We've built this irony on the ruins of authenticity, with the knowledge that nothing can be more authentic than what we experience, and what we experience is utterly bogus. I feel this style in myself, but I am too old to have it entirely.

However, Winn hasn't just been stuck in one register - as she went through the books, she gave the reader a fair sense of what it means to be caught in the trance-like pull of the book

So, here’s a link list. Start here. Then go here , here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Michael Walzer, moral midget

It is a bright shiny morning – oops (or erm, as IT says) now that I look out the window, I see that it is a gray, lifeless morning. A good morning to read about our wonderful celebrities in the NYT Magazine. There’s Angelina Jolie with some person in the photo on the cover – oops, that’s not Angelina Jolie. It is Natalie Portman. In truth, celebrities are a bit of a mash to LI – they blend into each other so that telling them all apart becomes one of those intellectual tasks that I, like Sherlock Holmes, have decided to leave to my reference books – or Google. I have never exactly seen Natalie Portman in a movie, but apparently she is a strong advocate for micro-lenders in Mexico. Hurray! Except that it is notorious that village usurers have usurped the title micro-lender to loan out small sums at rates of interest that are almost unbelievable – 300 percent per month, for instance. But such factoids have no place in the grand sweep of this article.

Hmm, LI has been thinking that it is about time that one of the newspapers mentioned that Blackwater, the murder outfit, is still operating with impunity in Iraq. Or maybe that Andrew Moonan, a murderer whose escape to the U.S. was facilitated by the State Department, is not only still at large but happily living in the 300,000 dollar home he built in Seattle while the family of his victim is no doubt happily on the way to Syria or Northern Iraq, given that surviving in a Baghdad apartment when the man of the apartment is shot down in cold blood causes Hobbesian problems. But lo! what light in yonder faux liberal palace breaks? It is the irrepressible Michael Walzer in the New Republic, filling a page with such depressingly ill thought out and ill written dribble that one wonders where his keepers are.

Walzer starts out with a couple sentences that seem to have been written in a mild state of intoxication:

“Weber's definition suggests that the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, justified by its monopoly. This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before they do anything else--shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state's grip on the use of violence, to allow war to become anything other than a public responsibility.”

Since there was no preceding reference to Weber in this fucking throw-away, to refer to Weber’s definition is a bit of intellectual discourtesy – it assumes we all know Weber’s theory of the state. But, in actuality, it assumes that we all know the leading cliché that we get from a first year sociology class about Weber’s theory of the state. And even here we have this weird construction of “monopoly on” rather than “monopoly of”, which, though a common construction among sociologists (who are to the English language as the borer beetle is to the pine tree) shows a significant lack of looking up the Weber quote – which goes, for fans of the Economy and Society translation by Talcott Parsons:

“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order. Social action, especially organized action, will be spoken of as “politically oriented” if it aims at exerting inflence on the government oof a polical organization….”

This, of course, is an entering wedge of rotten cheese for the decayed Walzer, because, being a moral interventionist of such moral gravitas that the moral atmosphere bends when he walks, and when he meets with his other good friend, that moral entrepreneur of fame and fortune, Paul Berman, it is almost moral hurricane weather – Walzer wants to consider whether another saintly organization, Blackwater – which he compares with the daring of a zombie on prozac to the International Brigades in Spain – should “save” Darfur.

“There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. Speaking at a conference of arms merchants and war contractors in Amman, Jordan, in March 2006, Blackwater vice chairman J. Cofer Black offered to stop the killing in Darfur. "We've war-gamed this with professionals," he said. "We can do this." Back in the United States, another Blackwater official, Chris Taylor, reiterated the offer.

Since neither the United Nations nor nato has any intention of deploying a military force that would actually be capable of stopping the Darfur genocide, should we send in mercenaries? Scahill quotes Max Boot, the leading neoconservative writer on military affairs, arguing forcefully that there is nothing else to do. Allowing private contractors to secure Darfur "is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations," Boot writes. "They claim that it is objectionable to employ--sniff--mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peace-keeping forces and letting genocide continue."

Some of us might prefer something like the International Brigade that fought in Spain over a force of Blackwater mercenaries. But the International Brigade was also a private militia, organized by the Comintern and never under the control of the Spanish republic. Does it matter that most of its members fought for ideological rather than commercial reasons? Scahill tells us that Blackwater is run by far-right Christian nationalists--for me, as for him, that doesn't make things better.”

Ah, you will notice that this brief from Max Boot and Blackwater skips lightly over Blackwaters Einsatzgruppe actions in Iraq – for instance, the recent massacre in Baghdad. If Walzer suggested sending, say, Al Qaeda to sort our the Darfur mess, he might have generated some controversy. But our terrorists have been normalized, in places like the New Republic, so that we don’t even bother referencing their blood spotty record.

Here’s how he finishes up – with a soupcon of irony that must make the ice rattle in the ice tea glasses in Princeton. Oh that Walzer, always one for the glancing reference to the tragic fate of man!

“Whatever Blackwater's motives, I won't join the "moral giants" who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too. But we should acknowledge that making this exception would also be a radical indictment of the states that could do what has to be done and, instead, do nothing at all. There should always be public accountability for military action--and sometimes for military inaction as well.”

So sweet! He is willing to send American mercenaries to the oil rich fields of Southern Sudan on … on moral grounds. I’m sure that the oppressed Christians of southern Sudan are contributing, even as we speak, a portion of their corn meal to raise a monument to this dissenter from the “moral giants.” Quoting Max Boot, whose sincere moral midgethood has been burnished by his support for the massacre of more than half a million Iraqis over the past four years – plus, let’s not forget, an amount of refugees that is a million over the count in Darfur – shows that Walzer is able to sally out and meet the knights of rightward thinking. His lance is at the ready!

Ah well. Walzer at one time did have a brain. But when you set yourself up as a moral panjandrum whilst slurping with the high and mighty, gradually it begins to slip away – down to the back pocket, then out the hole in the back pocket onto the floor, and next thing you know, mistaking that ugly grey spot for some chewing gum, you’ve thrown your brain away. A sure sign of that is writing pro-warmonger pieces in Marty Peretz’s mag.

Now, dance

LI chatted with our brother on the phone last night. This brother got burned last year in the stock market. Although who didn’t? So he’s letting his buys coast at the moment – the wisest course. As always, in these conversations there comes a moment when D. tells me that I’m always pessimistic. He claims I’ve been pessimistic since 1990 – and that I had to be right once, so that last year, when I told him to get out in the summer after he’d had a good ride on his stocks, I was simply lucky that, for once, pessimism was the correct view.

Well, I always squirm and protest that I’m not a pessimist. I’m sour-castic – an entirely different thing. This means that I always sound pessimistic. But all I mean is – we’re all gonna die!

In actuality, I am a great admirer of the plodding tenaciousness of your average American Joe. So I found this article about the rise and fall of a house building family, the Dunmores, pretty fascinating.

“When George P. Dunmore started his business in Sacramento in the early 1950s, World War II was over and the building boom was on. Over the next several decades his company, Dunmore Construction, along with other respected builders, took the tabula rasa that was California’s Central Valley and etched it with entire neighborhoods filled with well-built ranch houses on trim lawns.

Mr. Dunmore lived through his share of lean years, of course; that is the rhythm of the home construction business. But for the most part, his company prospered. His son Sidney got into the business. And Sidney B. Dunmore’s boys followed him.

But by the time Mr. Dunmore died last October, at age 89, his son Sidney found himself caught in the middle of a real estate collapse. Overextended and pursued by a long line of creditors, the company bearing the family name, Dunmore Homes, was sold to a New York corporation owned by a Sacramento-area mortgage broker for $500, including the assumption of liabilities totaling more than $250 million. Two months later, the new owner filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.

A bankruptcy court in Sacramento is left with the task of untangling a web of transactions, affidavits, property transfers, loans and liens that have come to symbolize the real estate crisis not just for Dunmore Homes, but for an entire industry.”

My old man, like George Dunmore, wanted to cash in on the building boom of the fifties. Unfortunately, my old man did not live in sunny California, but in snowy Syracuse, N.Y. Outside Syracuse, really. Back in the days when the Cold War idea of creating living patterns that mirrored the concentric rings on a bombing chart was just getting started. Always the outlier, my old man, he converted the farm that he’d borrowed money from his folks to buy into lots, upon which he erected large houses. Too large, it turned out. These beauties he built on spec, and sold in the end, to the family. My earliest memories are of the sweet work of carpentry. The smell of sawdust, the whine of an electric saw, the pocking sound of hammers and the way a nail will tune itself in the wood to a straight blow. Its work to make your hands bigger; always, no matter how much Lava you use, there’s something under your nails in the evening – grit, tar.

The Dunmores did well for themselves (unlike the Gathmanns) and prospered in what the NYT calls “the go-go years of the California real estate boom.” What curious years they have been!

“Not only was George Dunmore a fair businessman, friends and acquaintances say, but he was an avowed family man as well. Of Mr. Dunmore’s three children, Sidney, now 53, showed the most interest in taking up the family trade. After years of apprenticing under his father, the younger Mr. Dunmore started his own firm, Dunmore Homes.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dunmore Homes expanded. The company formed more than a dozen subsidiaries throughout the state, with more than two dozen developments, many of them catering to first-time home buyers in need of subprime and nonconventional loans. The company eventually built a total of 22,000 homes.

The region was one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in the country. In Sacramento County, from 2000 to 2005, the median price of homes more than tripled, to $385,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems.”

That’s a lot of board feet. When you have an asset run up like that of the early Bush years, you have to ask – I asked, continually, just drag my blog posts – where the money was coming from. As I’ve said before, the recession that keeps yawning before us (providing the newspapers with a by now very stale conditional for the last three months, that we may be in a recession) is the 3 trillion dollar recession – the difference between wages and borrowing. It would be interesting to know how many of those 22,000 homes became piggy banks for the homeowners, as the offers came in to borrow money against the accelerating value of the house. As my bro said last night, why not? The puritan in me protests that there had to be something wrong with the life of consumer prodigality which characterized the middle class lifestyle in the Bush era. Are we not men? Are we mere locusts? On the other hand, why knock the locusts? The non-puritan part of myself has always taken the grasshopper’s side in the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

The Dunmore saga does not end in a “There will be blood” fashion – no homicide for these folks. It ends, more sensibly, in tax evasion:

“Any builder, even the best-capitalized builders, drank the Kool-Aid and bought too much land and loaded up at the peak,” said Ivy Zelman, a home building industry analyst. Ms. Zelman, who said she had no direct knowledge of Dunmore Homes, said she believed that the company might have taken on “way too much risk and just assumed values would go up.”
“I imagine that’s what they were thinking and didn’t have good disciplines in place.”
John Slaughter, a spokesman for Dunmore Homes who left the company this week, recalled how “so much happened with the mortgage industry, and prices dropping, and all the foreclosures.”
“It got to where we were a private company, competing with the large billion-dollar companies that could continue to reduce prices, and we just couldn’t compete with that,” he said.

In September, Dunmore Homes changed its name to DHI Development and sold its assets for $500 to a New York entity called Dunmore Homes Inc. The new Dunmore Homes is owned by Michael Kane, a Sacramento mortgage broker. He declined to comment.
Mr. Kane got not just the assets, but debts amounting to more than $250 million owed to a lengthy list of creditors that includes banks, contractors, landscapers, electricians, plumbers and paving companies.

Mr. Dunmore’s creditors cried foul over the sale, as well as the bankruptcy court filing in New York, a continent away.

Mr. Dunmore apparently had his reasons for the quick, cheap sale. According to court documents, by declaring his losses in the sale of the business, Mr. Dunmore is due a 2007 tax refund of approximately $11 million — money that he will use to pay off an $11 million obligation to Dunmore Homes.”

My brother might be right about my pessimism, which does blind me to certain truths that we hold self-evident. This is the New World, god damn it. We’ve moved out of the peasant world, with its iron Malthusian laws:

Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
--Vous chantiez ? j'en suis fort aise.
Eh bien ! dansez maintenant. »

Brer Rabbit and Lycurgus

"'I come atter you, Brer Rabbit,' sez Brer Fox, sezee. 'Dar's gwineter be a party up at Miss Meadows's,' sezee. 'All de gals 'llbe dere, en I promus' dat I'd fetch you. De gals, dey 'lowed dat hit wouldn't be no party 'ceppin' I fotch you,' sez Brer Fox, sezee.

"Den Brer Rabbit say he wuz too sick, en Brer Fox say he wuzzent, en dar dey had it up and down, 'sputin' en contendin'. Brer Rabbit say he can't walk. Brer Fox say he tote 'im. Brer Rabbit say how? Brer Fox say in his arms. Brer Rabbit say he drap 'im. Brer Fox low he won't. Bimeby Brer Rabbit say he go ef Brer Fox tote 'im on his back. Brer Fox say he would. Brer Rabbit say he can't ride widout a saddle. Brer Fox say he git de saddle. Brer Rabbit say he can't set in saddle less he have bridle fer ter hol' by. Brer Fox say he git de bridle. Brer Rabbit say he can't ride widout bline bridle, kaze Brer Fox be shyin' at stumps long de road, en fling 'im off. Brer Fox say he git bline bridle. Den Brer Rabbit say he go. Den Brer Fox say he ride Brer Rabbit mos' up ter Miss Meadows's, en den he could git down en walk de balance er de way. Brer Rabbit 'greed, en den Brer Fox lipt out atter de saddle en de bridle.”

Many a reader of Plutarch’s Lycurgus must have been struck by the resemblance between Sparta’s lawgiver and Br’er Rabbit. At least I was, last night.



In Kautsky’s book on Thomas More’s Utopia, he listed Lycurgus as a fore-runner of socialism. Kautsky said nothing about Brer Rabbit, however. Lycurgus got on the short list because, as Plutarch’s life shows, he imposed an apparently radically egalitarian ideal on the Spartans. Save, of course, for the helots. Myself, I think it is important to see this ideal for what it is: it is animated less by egalitarianism than for a hatred of the effects of wealth.

However, to continue along the traditional lines of telling the story: Lycurgus did create an egalitarian state. The way he did it was Brer Rabbit like. For instance, here is Lycurgus, solving the perennial problem of wealth inequality. First, he solved it for immovables (Henry Maine claims that the primal category of property is into immovables and moveables) by creating a new, equal division of land between all Spartans and all Laconians.

Then he moved onto moveables.

“Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left amongst them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course…”

"Co'se Brer Rabbit know de game dat Brer Fox wuz fixin' fer ter play, en he 'termin' fer ter outdo 'im, en by de time he koam his ha'r en twis' his mustarsh, en sorter rig up, yer come Brer Fox, saddle en bridle on, en lookin' ez peart ez a circus pony. He trot up ter de do' en stan' dar pawin' de ground en chompin' de bit same like sho 'nuff hoss, en Brer Rabbit he mount, he did, en dey amble off. Brer Fox can't see behime wid de bline bridle on, but bimeby he feel Brer Rabbit raise one er his foots.
"'W'at you doin' now, Brer Rabbit?' sezee.
"Short'nin' de lef stir'p, Brer Fox,' sezee.
"Bimeby Brer Rabbit raise up de udder foot.
"'W'at you doin' now, Brer Rabbit?' sezee. Pullin' down my pants, Brer Fox,' sezee.
"All de time, bless grashus, honey, Brer Rabbit wer puttin' on his spurrers, en w'en dey got close to Miss Meadows's, whar Brer Rabbit wuz to git off, en Brer Fox made a motion fer ter stan' still, Brer Rabbit slap de spurrers into Brer Fox flanks, en you better b'leeve he got over groun'.

In order, Plutarch claims, to complete his radical egalitarian program, Lycurgus had to attack both the possessions and the private life of the Spartans. The first he did in the following way:

“… he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth; so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedæmon; for who would rob another of such a coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked.
In the next place, he declared an outlawry of all needless and superfluous arts; but here he might almost have spared his proclamation; for they of themselves would have gone after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work; for, being of iron, it was scarcely portable, neither, if they should take the pains to export it, would it pass amongst the other Greeks, who ridiculed it. So there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, no harlot-monger or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and died away of itself.”

What Lycurgus is aiming at is luxury –luxury is the vice of inequality, the effect of wealth, the thing that brings in itinerant fortune-tellers, harlot mongers and gold and silver smiths. The attack on wealth is an attack on the effect of wealth. And though it seems to be an attack levied for the sake of equality itself, it turns out that it is a way of clearing out unnatural hierarchies so that natural ones can flourish. The natural ones will be of the healthy and the strong over the weak – the good fuckers and good bearers of children over the degenerates – the silent, or plain speakers over the garrulous – the spending of words being parallel to the spending of money – etc.

In this, Brer Rabbit is different than Lycurgus. Lycurgus is the great deceitful lawmaker, and Brer Rabbit is the great deceitful lawbreaker. Since I’ve been considering the nineteenth century stories concerning the origin of property, I thought I’d put this note aside for later.

The shock of conquest.

This was the situation which capitalist production confronted as it, since the age of geographic discoveries, prepared itself for world domination through global trade and manufacture. One should think that this mode of marriage had suited it exceptionally well, and so it also was. And yet – the irony of world history is fathomless – it was capitalism that had to make the decisive breach in it. While it turns all things into commodities, it dissolves all obsolete, ancient relations, substitutes buying and selling, the free contract for inherited morals, historical right – as when the English legal scholar H.S. Maine believed to have made a great discovery when he said that our whole progress against earlier epochs consisted in the fact that we have come from status to contract, form inherited, transcended circumstances to freely contractual ones. Which was of course already in the Communist Manifesto, in so far as it was correct.

– Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Engels is, of course, right to point to the coincidence of views between Marx and Maine, even though there is little evidence that Maine came to his views from reading the Communist Manifesto. Like Marx, Maine rejected out of hand the 18th century’s Robinsonades, the stories of society's birth in the experience of some exemplary, isolated individual. Yet Maine was certainly on the other side of the political spectrum from Marx. Acton wrote, in a letter to Gladstone, that he found Maine to be a commonplace Tory. However, Acton might have been exaggerating Maine’s mediocrity. His star was descending at the time of his death – Thomas Huxley lamented, a decade after it, that Maine was largely neglected. Ford Maddox Ford was so struck by Maine’s expository prose that he exempted him from his general condemnation of the stupid nineteenth century in Britain. Contemporary anthropologists don’t give a lot of credit to Maine’s scholarship in Ancient Law – his friend and foe, James Fitzjames Stephen, claimed that Maine, at the time he wrote Ancient Law, was but dimly acquainted with Roman law, and had merely glanced at the Pandects on the way, so to speak, to the podium.

While these criticisms may be true, it is also true that Ancient Law is a great nineteenth century text, a codex of imperialist mythmaking. Using the theme of the origin of property relations allows Maine to touch on some of the great sore topics of the imperium – for instance, the relationship between violence and property. His use of the Indian village communes (supplemented by his use of the Russian village communes) introduces into the self satisfied Lockian tradition themes that can only distress it, that are outside of its reach. Even so, of course, Maine fit comfortably into the Lockean tradition, and in his real life, as a jurist in India, extended the rights of private property incrementally, thus adding his bit to the great work. Here we touch on one of those moments fraught with tension: Maine is, perhaps, the only real heir of that part of Burke’s philosophy that was expressed in the Hastings trial. He, too, extended his reverence for traditional social arrangements to other societies – notably, of course, India. (It is always India and Ireland for the British). Yet, practically, this was a move stunted by its inability to justify its own standing – for neither Burke nor Maine were opposed to empire. They could only shunt the moment of initial violence to the category that contained special cases. And so, although Maine takes an anti-Millian, anti-utilitarian approach in Ancient Law, one shouldn’t see this opposition as too absolute. Remember, too, that Maine was associated with the whole cast of imperial bureaucrats who responded with unparalleled criminality to the famine of 1879 – which is spelled out by Mike Davis in his book, the Late Victorian Holocaust. So the Burkean and Millian controversy about law in India, and, by extension, the social arrangements of European imperial states, is at the same time exquisitely evasive about the British responsibility for the state of utter misery and impoverishment that resulted in the series of famines in the late nineteenth century – famines which, as we know, could well have been mitigated by timely interventions, but were instead exacerbated by a punitive system of aid that was more attentive to laissez faire ideology than to human catastrophe. I reference Mike Davis because, if you look at histories of the Raj, at least by British authors, you will find references to famine are confined to a page or a paragraph, so as not to interrupt the pageantry.

LI has already anchored our account of the triumph of happiness in the Great Transformation that brought about the dominance of free trade and the industrial system of production. Looking at the intellectual history of the discourse over the emotions (one of the dimensions of which is to ground and legitimate capitalism and the democratic state) , it is striking – it struck, I think, Maine – how the use of “enjoyment’ and ‘use’ are coupled together as the distinctive characteristics of the relation of the holder of property to the property he holds in British law. One has a sense that the telescoping of enjoyment and use by Bentham is suggested by this legal idiom. Maine’s question about the origins of the property relation is, in one way a question about how it came about that property is defined in terms of the exclusive enjoyment of an object by the propertyholder. Chapter 8, which we want to examine, takes up various aspects of the property relation, finds echoes of them (or, sometimes, does not find echoes of them) in ancient law and custom, and beats a trail back to India, its primitive status trumping Rome’s. We’ll start with the notion of res nullius – which, we have noticed, hasn’t attracted a lot of modern attention. However, for us, looking at Maine’s text in terms of imperial legitimacy, res nullius – the notion that the conqueror’s triumph dissolves all property bonds, rendering the objects free for the conqueror to seize – should be looked at as more than a curiosity.

the croakers want their own index

LI recommends David Leonardt’s column on unemployment in the NYT today. Leonardt has positioned himself as the NYT’s thorough Business columnist – he doesn’t have Gretchen’s instinct for hot stories of corrupt dealing, or Floyd Norris’ air of being a business columnist paterfamilias. Instead, he’s the economic historian of the bunch. In keeping with that rep, he begins with a fascinating story about the man who invented the way we measure unemployment, Carroll Wright, the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor in 1873 who was convinced that unemployment wasn’t as bad as the newspapers said it was. To “combat” the erroneous picture, “he created the first survey of unemployment.

The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who “really want employment,” according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they
had been earning before.

Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22,000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his “intelligent canvas” had proven the “croakers” wrong.”

The croakers have been down ever since – we croak that the reserve army of the unemployed is cynically manipulated to lower wages. Croak! We croak that the unemployment figures, like inflation figures, have been fine tuned by a combine of neo-classical economists and conservative politicians to churn out mind-numbingly bogus figures. Croak!
Which brings us up to the present:

“Over the last few decades, there has been an enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man’s land of the labor market that Carroll Wright created 130 years ago. These people are not employed, but they also don’t fit the government’s definition of the unemployed — those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.”

Consider this: the average unemployment rate in this decade, just above 5 percent, has been lower than in any decade since the 1960s. Yet the percentage of prime-age men (those 25 to 54 years old) who are not working has been higher than in any decade since World War II. In January, almost 13 percent of prime-age men did not hold a job, up from 11 percent in 1998, 11 percent in 1988, 9 percent in 1978 and just 6 percent in 1968.

Even prime-age women, who flooded into the work force in the 1970s and 1980s, aren’t working at quite the same rate they were when this decade began. About 27 percent of them don’t hold a job today, up from 25 percent in early 2000.”

It is a mad world, my masters. The croakers have still not penetrated the gated community in which dwell the pretty media princes and princesses. But outside that community, something is stirring. Us croakers have long been aware of an existential malaise, as we fight for our lives in our individual ratholes and receive reports about a world of sugar plum fairies in sugar plum McMansions, reports that are totally void of any hint that this magic world in which the dogs have all eaten the dogs and now want their desserts is not all the world there is.

the fall of the house of LI

I can feel, as I type this, the wind creaking in the shingles, the moon staring malevolently down, and the curse of the ancient house of UFOB creeping into the LI office like the mummy’s last cough. Because tonight, well, we went to the caucus, we v-v-voted for Obama, and we even signed up to be an alternate delegate to the county convention. Oh no, I see the fatal shadow of the raven on the wall!

So, we’ve cast ourselves into the whole shilly shally of White House Idol. The convention was held at the middle school a couple of blocks from here. About five hundred people showed up, including my worst enemy in the world. We nodded at each other – the WEIW and I no longer threaten bodily harm to each other. The flames have been banked. About 425 Obama people sat on one side of the room, and the rest were Clinton supporters on the other side. I was with the group that encompassed the cool young college crowd and the prosperous homeowners whose housing prices have regularly increased 25 percent a year in my Tarrytown neighborhood. I was staring at the aggrieved Clintonites. They were chunkier, less lively, and even those who did seem to be well employed seemed shabbier. They were obviously my people. This, I admit, has puzzled me through the last four months – my peckerwood genes tell me that Hillary has a lock on the vote of people like me: the losers. The through the cracks folks. To join the winning side makes me feel a bit like… a traitor.

Afterwards, I talked with a couple of Clintonites. Two women in their mid to late thirties who had this bearing I always respect, that down to earth, healthy, outrage outworn, lefty attitude. They didn’t say a lot – a young Obama precinct captain was bantering with them, and couldn’t resist asking whether Clinton didn’t seem to dance around answers during the debates. They didn’t think so. I didn’t ask, why did your candidate sign up for the war – because I doubt these two women were for the war, and they would have had to come up with some bs for it, and that would simply be painful. Oh well, it will be a slow end.

However, although the allure of the Clinton side was powerful, it was, of course, ultimately the Clinton side. As in Hillary Clinton. As in all the old shit. So I was there as the caucusers dwindled down to sixty or so, signed on as an alternate delegate for reasons I don’t understand, and went home.

Every which way: IT comes to America

Announcement:

IT and a monkey are comin’ to America. (I think the monkey is an homage to a forgotten Clint Eastwood hit of the seventies. Or maybe it is just a monkey). She has kindly left her schedule on her site, here. We’d urge any LI readers in Los Angeles, SF, NYC or Ithaca, New York to contact her to make arrangements to ply her with food and drink (and peanuts for her monkey, if it likes that kind of thing).

Property and hierarchy

Sir Henry Maine makes an interesting remark – interesting for the observer of emotional customs who also happens to be interested in the history of commodity fictions – in his lectures on Ancient Law to the effect that, to one looking at Roman law in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Bentham, it might seem as though that ancient law was constructed according to some notion of the happiness of the greatest number:

“The Roman theory guided men’s efforts in the same direction as the theory put into shape by the Englishman; its practical results were not widely different from those which would have been attained by a sect of law-reformers who maintained a steady pursuit of the general good of the community. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose it a conscious anticipation of Bentham’s principles. The happiness of mankind is, no doubt, sometimes assigned, both in the popular and in the legal literature of the Romans, as the proper object of remedial legislation, but it is very remarkable how few and faint are the testimonies to this principle compared with the tributes which are constantly offered to the overshadowing claims of the Law of Nature. It was not to anything resembling philanthropy but to their sense of simplicity and harmony – of what they significantly termed ‘elegance’ – that the Roman jurisconsults freely surrendered themselves.” (79)

Like most legal philosophers of the 19th century in Britain, Henry Maine was impressed by the anthropological knowledge that could apparently be gleaned from the Sanskrit documents that had started coming into Europe by way of the Asiatic society – William Jones and the like. He also – like James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, Stephen Fitzjames Stephen and many others – worked in India or in the Indian office. India had a massive effect upon the way these people viewed the upward course of civilization, which was not simply a phrase or a hobby, but the framework for the entire imperial enterprise. They did not simply find their antiquarian interest aroused by tracing myths or concepts back to India, but found in the myth of ancient India which they gradually wove an addendum to, or a corrective to, the Edinburgh Enlightenment notion of progress. On the one hand, you had a middle class (to use Engel’s term for the English managers of capital) that had created and depended upon a structural loosening of the positional market – and on the other hand, as the middle class solidified its gains, you had a model of a society - ancient Indian society – which, with its rules that supposedly threw the symbols of a caste system over every facet of everyday life, indicated the depth of hierarchy not just as a political fact, but as a primal social principle.

So let’s move to the eighth chapter of Ancient Laws, shall we?

In the meantime, here's some Têtes Raides! and a cute claymation doggie.

secret societies

Though Balzac saw himself as a romantic legitimist, his real passion was for secret societies. Indeed, the Comedie Humaine is a hive of secret societies, a puzzle palace given over to l'envers de l'histoire. Cousine Bette is, among other things, a sort of equivalent to The Prince in terms of conspiracy. Once the motive is given – Cousine Bette’s resentment over the theft of her Polish sculptor by her relatives, the Hulots – she turns all her resources to overthrowing that family. She has an expert sense of the vices and virtues that render the Hulots so vulnerable, and she sets to work with her trump card – Valerie Marneffe, whose ass will bring down a little private kingdom - all the while sewing and sewing and sewing.

Naturally, Balzac was attracted to the mythography of conspiracy. Among this company, one of the greatest was Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall.

Hammer-Purgstall is no longer a name to conjure with – I admit! He was an Austrian diplomat during the Napoleonic era, dispatched to Istanbul by the Habsburg court. He traveled in Egypt as well, learned Persian and Arabic, came back and began to publish the manuscripts he’d collected and translated writers like Hafiz – his Divan inspired Goethe’s West-östliche Divan, for instance. He knew Schlegel, he corresponded with the great French orientalists.

And he published a colorful History of the Assassins. It came out in 1818, was translated into English soon afterwards, and insinuated itself – along with the rich, fantastic literature of the illuminati –into the European imaginary. Hammer-Purgstall’s shadow is on Sherlock Holmes stories, on Chesterton’s the Man who was Thursday. It is on Dostoevsky’s the Possessed. He was, of course, just the kind of comrade Balzac had to meet, and Balzac did meet him. He gave Balzac a seal ring from the East.

This is the story Hammer-Purgstall tells about the Assassins in his history.

In the hills of Syria and Persia, the Assassins will build their castles. The castles are attached to pleasure gardens full of flowers and fountains. When the grand master spots some likely lad, he will invite him up to the castle, and ply him with delicious food and drinks. Unbeknownst to the guest, their flavors conceal haschich. The guest will, invariably, fall asleep. The grand master will then have the servants take the guest into the garden. When the guest wakes up, he will be surrounded by the most delicious looking women. There will be music, delicious food, drink, amorous fondling. The youth will be assured that he has, indeed, been transplanted to paradise. Of course, haschich is again hidden in the food and drink. Again, he will fall asleep. He will then be taken into the castle. When he awakens, the grand master will assure him that he has, indeed, received a vision of paradise. All that is left to do is to swear allegiance to the order.

But the order was no simple set of bandits. No, it rested on a philosophy that included elements from Sufiism, Shiism, and folk beliefs. In the assassin view, there are seven speaking prophets with their seven seats were: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Ismail, the son of Jafer. But there were also seven Mute prophets. They began with Sus, and each had twelve apostles. These Mute prophets created a secret tradition that flowed into the knowledge held by the most illuminated assassins. The illumination of the Ismailis – the Assassins – had nine degrees. The first five took in the prophets. The sixth degree took in pagan knowledge – Plato and Aristotle’s teaching. This was the degree of rationality, but it was ‘very tedious” – according to Hammer-Purgstall. “… Only after the acolyte was wholly penetrated with the wisdom of philosophy was he ready to climb to the seventh degree, where he move from Philosophy to Mysticism. This was the actual All-Oneness doctrine, which the Sufis in their works had constructed. In the eighth degree the positive doctrine of religion would be taken up again, which after all the preceding stages would crumble into dust. Now the student had be enlightened as to the ephemerality of all God’s messengers and prophets, the nothingness of heaven and hell, the indifference of all actions, for which there is neither punishment nor reward, neither in this nor in the other world, and so he was then ready for the nineth and last degree, ripe to become a blind instrument of all the passions of power. To believe nothing and to do all things was in two words the sum of this wisdom, which fundamentally negated all religion and morality, and had no other goal, than enacting ambitious plans through pliant ministers. To honor nothing and to dare all, because one held all to be a deceit, and nothing is not to be permitted, these are the best elements of a devilish politics, which without other goal than the satisfaction of the unquenchable longing for power instead of climbing up towards the highest goals – to throw oneself in the abyss, where they are buried, eating themselves, under the ruins of thrones and alters, under the roar of anarchy, under the ruins of the happiness of the people and under the curse of mankind itself.” (36)

One can interestingly compare this with the murderers celebrated by De Quincy, who were less concerned with universal anarchy than art. However, De Quincy did read Hammer-Purgstall, and he does mention the assassins with some admiration.

Hofmannsthal was well aware of the friendship of Balzac and Hammer-Purgstall. In his dialogue, Over Characters in the Novel and Drama, he stages a dialogue between the two. Hammer-Purgstall is cast as an enthusiast trying to get Balzac to write plays. This leads to some discussion about human beings and novelistic characters. The note struck by Balzac is this: “I have said it – I don’t see humans, I see fates” .

Balzac claims that theater, as he loves it, is embodied by seventeenth century English drama. But he claims he couldn’t write like Shakespeare.

“The reason? The innermost reason? Perhaps I don’t believe that there are characters. Shakespeare believed it. He was a dramatist.

H-P: You don’t believe that there are people? That’s a good one! You have created about six or seven hundred: you’ve put them on their feet! and since then, they exist.

Balzac: I don’t know, whether people can live in drama. Are you aware of what they call “allotropy” in the mineralogical science? The same matter appears twice in the realms of things, in wholly different crystallation forms, wholly unexpected impress [Gepraege]. The dramatic character is an allotropy of the corresponding real one. I have put the event of Lear in Goriot, I put in the chemical process Lear, I am as distant as the sky from the crystallization form Lear. You are, Baron, as all Austrians, a born musician. You are even a learned musicians. Let me tell you, that the characters in a drama are nothing other than contrapuntal necessity. The dramatic character is a narrowing of the real one. What really enchants me, is just his breadth.”

Well, enough for now.

LI is financially chic!

Reading that Sprint is writing off 23 billion dollars, we here at LI got a little jealous. It seems that every organization worth its salt, nowadays, has to write off a few billion dollars. Even the girls selling girl scout cookies at a foldout table near the Randalls up the street have a sign claiming that for each box sold, they will write off a million dollars.

Where, readers will want to know, does LI stand on all of this?

As the finest and chicest of blogs, we have been a little dumbfounded by the pace of the write offs. Still, I think we can come up with 500 million dollars worth of write offs for starters.

For instance, the 100 million for the coffee machines. The office coffee machine broke a week ago, and the office assistant went to get a new one. The office manager meant to write a check for one hundred dollars, but slipped up and added the million. So of course we now have five warehouses stuffed full of coffee machines, plus tons of non-dairy creamer. We are, of course, writing that off.

Then there was the Nestroy business. We brought in a consultant to help us raise our subscription base from 200 to 200,000. The consultant assured our CEO that the youth of America was totally grooving to the plays of J. Nestroy at the moment. Thus, we went out and bought some very expensive writers to write about the Revolution in Kraehwinkel, and we purchased Nestroy today and Nestroy weekly for a comparative song – a thirty million dollar stock swap. So far, we’ve lost 50 million on the deal. No, it isn’t in the billions, but every bit helps.

Then, of course, comes the revision of our 2006 profits. We had originally figured our 2006 profits at 300 million dollars, which allowed us to pay our CEO a hundred million dollar bonus. Revision, however, has revealed that the 300 million was too high – in actuality, we made 17 cents. Actually, we found the 17 cents in our chair, which the consultant had been sitting in. Being sly business men, we made the lock your lips sign to each otehr until the consultant left the room, then quickly pocketed the princely sum. Of course, this profit was cause to award our CEO another 50 million dollars in bonuses, which included a warehouse full of coffee makers.

So, as you can see, we are doing our best, here, at LI to keep up with the times. At the moment, it may seem like a distant dream that we would lose a billion dollars. But just look at the ratings handed out to subprime mortgage companies by Standard and Poor – yes, dreams can come true!

Now I’m going out to buy some cookies – the LI kitchen is all out! Hmm, how much money does this check give me, anyway?

in the golden egg (2)

All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint. The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos were, apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg. But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.

Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.

“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?

In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

LI, in middle age, knows a lot about this in particular. The imbecile gaps are longer; living as I do, mostly in solitude, I don’t have to face them as much as, perhaps, other, more normal people do, except when I’m around people and actually have to say something. I used to be a ready speaker, and can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! I noticed at the Bob-fest, when I was around people who I used to be around in my late twenties, that there was some control over the tearing of the web (which is how I think of this, the homunculus spider in my head weaving, over the seemingly endless time I’ve been alive, its complex, dreadfully dusty webs). It didn’t happen as often. Ah, blind habit friend of human kind! On the other hand, I know that surely the next time I have lunch with, say, my friend S., that the web will be torn. I’ll babble along when suddenly the web will tear off and fall in the dark – inside my head, of course – and I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. S.’s name, mine, whatever stupid thing I am talking about, even the whole path that lead me to become a babbler.

Intimations of Alzheimer’s, maybe. But Alzheimer’s simply names a badly understood disease, maybe not even one disease. Rather, in the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is the embarrassment that takes in my entire life. And the need to keep running it. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavor of this moment on my tongue.

Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a butter knife in the intervals. It is the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone.

in the golden egg (1)

Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.


The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony boughs of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the extremest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

Perhaps it is a mistake, even, to confine this to the modernist moment, or at least to pretend that the modernist moment isn’t structured according to the precepts of a broader mythology. Wasn’t Prajapati found lying in a golden egg, the first man, Purusa? The egg is both his bearer and his product – for it was born, itself, of Prajapati’s union with Vac, or speech. Laurie Paton, in Authority, Anxiety and Canon, took the story of the Golden Egg and writes this:

“In my reconstruction of the two-phase process of creation, based on several accounts in the Brahmanas, Prajapati and Vac both participate in each stage. The division between the first and second stages of the cosmogonic process is demarcated in certain accounts by the measure of time, generally the period of a year. In the first stage the creator Prajapai has a desire to reproduce and unites with his consort Vac. The Vac with which Prajapati unites at this stage is the unexpressed, transcendent level of speech that is generally identified with the primordial waters. Prajapati implants his seed in the waters of Vac and the seed becomes an egg, which represents the totality of the universe in yet undifferentiated form. In the second stage of creation a child, representing the ‘second self’ of Prajapati, is born and speaks. This speech, which represents the second phase of Vac, is the expressed, covalized speech by means of which the creator introduces distinctions in the originally distinctionless totality of creation represented by the egg, dividing it into the three worlds and manifesting various types of beings.” (43)

What the Letter records is an egg inward collapse. For on the brink of becoming an Elizabethan sage, Chandos found himself becoming something else entirely.

Buckley, r.i.p

The only American conservative I have any regard for just died – William Buckley.

It is a long regard, going back to my teen years. Not that Buckley has been a force on the right since the eighties. He was as alien to the Bush right as he was to the liberalism of the Great Society era. The right's utter intellectual collapse must have pained him - he always believed that the alliance between rich drones and highly stupid people was redeemed by tone. He had wit and literacy. You can search high and low for that in the National Review of the past decade, but you'll search in vain. The last controversial utterance from the old man was that Iraq was a big fuck up, which was greeted with the embarrassed silence the heirs reserve for the batty grandpa, peeing in his recliner.

And so is extinguished the last dying claim of conservatism to truth, beauty or logic. I'm not sure if I should quote Yeats, at this point - or Pope's the Dunciad.

scribble scribble scribble, mr. gathman

It might still not seem clear why LI’s relentless pursuit of the triumph of happiness should have lead us to talk about social animals. As our friend Alan said a couple of weeks ago, our posts about happiness fail to represent any principle of order. We leap around like the jester Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, stripes painted across our ass, now going here, now there.

Now, primo, partly the problem is due to the flightiness of LI’s mind. Partly it is due to the fact that we are doing this as an historien du Dimanche. No license or position outside the text assuages the readers doubts about the catholicity of our choice of topics. In essence, LI is claiming that there is a topical hole, here, however much the successors of Lucien Febvre have claimed to make the sensibilities the object of historical study. And so we beat about in that hole, looking for themes.

Segundo, topics are generated by actual enchainments within social facts. It is, for instance, a social fact that the early modern era treated the passions as thought they were properties of a certain ‘animality’ in the human makeup. This trope goes back a long way in folk psychology and the writing of the scholars. You find it cropping up among the philosophers of the enlightenment – Kant’s the royal example, with his strong notion that the passions are at once something not quite human and all too human. The sensual interest is an animal interest. The non-sensual interest is – freedom. Fit for men, those creatures who can disburden themselves of the soiled rags of their animal impulses.

Finally, tercero, if we see changes in the way animals are conceptualized in the nineteenth century, our instinct – which is that of a solid ‘birds flock together’ man – is that probably, we’ll see changes in the way emotions and feelings are conceptualized that will mirror their former concept kin. And if the opposite of the sensual interest is freedom and freedom is the political legitimator par excellence – and if, in a pantomime that reverses such talk, freedom in the economic sphere is to let your sensual interest dictate without impediment – well, this too has to have an impact on the way society becomes the object for a host of sciences.

…
These notes I shore against the book to come. Onward, then, to Hofmannsthal’s The Letter.

And this bird you'll never chaaaaiiiinnnnnn!

What can one say about Alabama? LI spent his molting years in an Atlanta suburb, learning to appreciate poetry, masturbation, and a correctly set up tennis serve – the usual adolescence. The old man worked, for a while, as a consultant on big HVAC jobs throughout the Southeast, so he was often posted to Birmingham. I have a vague memory of going with him to the town, which, back then, was a ironman’s heaven, a coaldust place, with a big statue of Vulcan on one of the many city hills. It was Orc city back then.

Georgians consider ourselves at least semi-civilized, and sniff a great deal at the whole idea of Bama. That’s where the wild west really begins – sullen cotton farmers settling sinister black rivers. Of course, that isn’t true – Alabama isn’t the analphabetic, rickets plagued place of my childhood mythology. For instance, there’s Tuskegee University, which was a steady light in the Dixie darkness for decades. Mencken wasn’t kidding when he claimed that the South of his time – 1917 – was the Sahara of the Bozart:

“Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

Mencken goes on to fling the kitchen sink at Dixie, and then the chairs, the curtains, the lamps, and anything else that he can get his hands on. And he was still short of the astonishing thing about the South, which is not that there are a lot of ignorant people there, but that no place on earth is one’s ignorance more aggressively adored – there is, in Southern tradition, a love for stupidity for its own sake that can only truly be appreciated by those who’ve lived down among the peckerwoods and swapped fleas with em. And if there is one state in which that love is condensed and made into an essence, it is Alabama. There’s a reason George Wallace came from Alabama. There’s a reason Lynyrd Skinner wrote that the “Governor was true.”

Which is why Alabama has turned out to be, much to my surprise, a precursor state in the Bush era. The stupidity-lite of the Bushies, their promotion of ignorance for ignorance sake, has very southern roots. Even Alabama roots. Stealing the election of 2000 in Florida did not begin with Election 2000 in Florida – it began with the Dixie wide attempt, through the nineties, to disenfranchise black males through mass jailing and the use of punitive laws that keep ex felons from voting. It is an old Dixie trick. Alabama, of course, led the way.

However, as we know in these good old states, an astonishing, public crime committed on the black population will rouse not a whimper of protest from the liberal media,. They are, after all, busy encouraging free trade and such. What has happened in Alabama lately even beats the old records – namely, the railroading of the one popular Democratic figure in the state, Don Siegelman, by Karl Rove, a man with deep, greasy roots in Alabama.

Harper’s blogger Scott Horton has tracked this primitive process, which bears comparison with the way Central Asian former Soviet Republics deal with the opposition, with astonishment. And little encouragement from the mainstream media. Finally, though, 60 minutes ran a segment about it. And – it was censored in Alabama! The tv stations in the Peckerwood Kazakhistan are apparently controlled by the usual bevy of corporate criminals, aka friends of the Bushes, and they just suffered an inexplicable outage when the 60 minutes film was a-rollin’. Fancy that!

I’ve wondered when Horton’s reporting was going to get some traction. I’m hoping the time has come. We’ll see.