OSAMA BIN LADEN DEATH DAY

Friday, July 28, 2006
Reprinting my blog posts

the tora bora conspiracy
"Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today," Clark said. – Virginia Pilot, series on Blackwater, the mercenary company, July 24, 2006

In one of his weirder essays, “Secret Societies,” De Quincey claimed that at the age of seven (an important age for de Quincey – the age when his father died, and the age when he started dreaming vividly), he was introduced to the literature on secret societies – specifically, the dreaded Illuminati – by a thirty four year old woman. She loaned him Abbe Barruel’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire du Jamcobinisme, a book that recounted the “dark associations” of a vast society organized to over throw Christianity. De Quincey was particularly – or perhaps morbidly – fascinated by Barruel’s use of a disease metaphor that has perennially clung to the conspiracy discourse

“I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant a crab; and that the disease so appalling to a child’s imagination, which in English we call a cancer, asoon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent scirrhous tumour, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots, by which it connected itself with distant points running underground, as it were, baffling detection, and defying radical extirpation.”

De Quincey, at seven, asks the right questions: ‘Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did people take all this trouble to be wicked? The how and the why were alike incomprehensible to me.”

“The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners (and by no means sleeping partners) in a society of which they had never heard, - or, again, of one fellow standing at the beginning of a century, and stretching out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow standing at the end of it, without either having known of the other’s existence, -- all that did but sharpen the interest of wonder that gathered about the general economy of Secret Societies. Tertullian’s profession of believing things, not in spite of being impossible, but simply because they were impossible, is not the extravagance that most people suppose it. There is a deep truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion as they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a tendency to repel belief on that part of the scale which is governed by the lower understanding. And here, as so often elsewhere, the axiom with respect to extremes meeting manifests its subtle presence. The highest form of the incredible is sometimes the initial form of the credible.”

Albert Pionke, in Plots of Opportunity, his study of conspiracy literature in Victorian England, highlights the notion of a general economy of secret societies – the phrase being marked, for the literatus, by Bataille’s notion of general economy. But LI loves those last two sentences – English eccentricity finding its metaphysics.

Myself, I take a literary interest in conspiracies. I’ve noticed, however, much talk about conspiracy theory lately on the blogs, including a post on Charlotte Street contrasting conspiracy theory and incompetence. I think Mark Kaplan is responding to the conspiracy theories that still revolve around 9/11. In fact, there are nothing but conspiracy theories that revolve around 9/11. The orthodox view, which I share, is that the 9/11 attack was the result of a conspiracy devised by the leadership of Al Qaeda. Other theories finger other devisers of the attack – none of those theories seem to me to be convincing on any level. De Quincey’s question to the woman who gave him Barruel’s book was, why are the illuminati conspiring to overthrow Christianity? Her response was that then they could commit all kinds of wickedness, to which the wise child replied, but they could commit all kinds of wickedness anyway.

On the other hand, I have nursed my own conspiracy theory about another incident in the “war on terror … ttt-terrorism… ttt-terrorists.” In fact, I am very surprised that this incident has attracted so little attention. Perhaps it is because the Lefty side that opposes Bush has such ambiguous feelings about the Afghanistan war that it doesn't want to investigate what it means to leave a terrorist group on tap. I’m talking, of course, about the battle of Tora Bora, and the escape of Bin Laden into Pakistan.

Here is an instance, I think, when incompetence and conspiracy are two faces of the same coin. What really happened at Tora Bora has been reported, as most of the fuck-ups of the non-war have been reported, long after it really happened. To disarm the news, simply delay it for enough years that people don’t care any more – that does seem to be the strategy of the Big Fix in D.C., and it certainly works on the journalists. None of them, so far, have taken the hint from Suskind about Bush’s meeting with the CIA in August, 2001 and deepened it, so we still don’t know have a complete sense of our unpreparedness due, almost uniquely, to the apathy of the reigning potentate.

Anyway, I recently came across Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle. According to Naylor, the incompetence factor (although he doesn’t put it so bluntly) can be laid at the feet of General “Kick me in the ass” Franks, who operated in our heroic Afghanistan war as a conduit for the senilities of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, of course, didn’t want the Afghanistan war to involve regular troops, on the theory that that is where the Russians went wrong. No, we’d used bombing and our super duper special forces – initial decisions that we are paying for today. Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.”

Implausible is a kindly word. Let’s recall what was happening back at the scene in Tora Bora. This is from the NYT Magazine’s rather thorough article about it in 2005:

“The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden's commanders to abandon Tora Bora.” – Mary Ann Weaver, NYT, 9/11/05

Recall, also, that at the time Franks was displaying this untoward shepherdophilia, the U.S. was accepting payment from the Northern alliance in captives gathered at random – the camel driver, the Avon salesman, the cab driver – and subjecting them to the waterboarding, beatings, and sometimes murder that they obviously richly deserved.

So if it wasn’t kindness that drove Franks, what could it be? Well, LI’s search for a theory would begin by asking who would gain an advantage by a stripped down force of Al Qaeda escaping to Pakistan. Hmm. Well, they would provide a ready reminder of “terror” if there were people in the military and in the White House who intended to use the 9/11 attack to provoke, for purely political reasons, further wars that would aggrandize their shaky political position and – oh joy – unleash the fruits of the war culture, giving the government an excuse to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, especially in the Red States, and sweetening the retirement of every general who went along.

The problem with this theory is that it implies that the White House is full of cretinous, treasonous creatures who would flush the interests of the country down the toilet if it gave them an extra meal or two at Signatures restaurant.

Hmmm.

In any case, how nice and thoughtful of OBL to be around, and popping out whenever needed, at the small cost of a few collateral deaths in Casablanca, London, and Madrid.

One of the very grateful people should be the founder of Blackwater, the mercenary company. The Virginia Pilot’s JOANNE KIMBERLIN AND BILL SIZEMORE have written a six piece series on that company. Here are highlights from different articles in the series.

“Blackwater wants all doors open. The company says it has more than two dozen projects under way, an almost dizzying pursuit of new frontiers.

“Among them:

-- In addition to its ongoing assignments guarding American officials and facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater has won contracts to combat the booming opium trade in Afghanistan and to support a SEAL-like maritime commando force in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic.

-- On the home front, Hurricane Katrina's $73 million purse has persuaded Blackwater officials to position themselves as the go-to guys for natural disasters. Operating licenses are being applied for in every coastal state of the country. Governors are being given the pitch, including California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom a Blackwater official recently visited to discuss earthquake response.

"We want to make sure they're aware of who we are and what we can bring to the table," said Seamus Flatley, deputy director of Blackwater's new domestic operations division. "We want to get out ahead of it."

-- Last year, the company opened offices in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan. More recent expansion plans call for a Blackwater West in Southern California and a jungle training facility at the former Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines.”

From the first article:

“The company had spent its first three years struggling for an identity, paying staff with an executive's credit card and begging for customers.

"But in 2000, in the fallout from the terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole, Blackwater found its future: providing security in an increasingly insecure world.

"There is nothing humble about the company today. In March, Fast Company business magazine, under the heading "Private Army," named Blackwater President Gary Jackson No. 11 in its annual "Fast 50" list of leaders who are "writing the history of the next 10 years." It made special note of the company's estimated 600 percent revenue growth between 2002 and 2005.

Blackwater has rocketed from obscurity to the big time in less than a decade. Peter Singer, author of "Corporate Warriors" and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says that although Blackwater might not be the biggest player in the private military industry, "they've certainly gained the biggest profile."”

“While the company had struggled early on, its timing was excellent. Several forces had created a perfect storm for the rise of the private military industry.

"Instead of peace, the end of the Cold War created a power vacuum and a chaotic world order, putting millions of former soldiers out on the market. At the same time, there was a growing trend toward privatization of government functions. The result: a $100 billion-a-year global business.”

Ah, all the disgusting details. Definitely check out these articles at the Virginia Pilot’s site. Yes, who did benefit from OBL’s escape? Hint – it wasn’t shepherds.

Thursday, January 04, 2007
As faithful readers of LI know, we are stout conspiracy theorists. No, we don’t think the CIA took down the World Trade Center by implanting JFK’s assassin shattered brain in a comatose Mohammed Atta. Our theory, much simpler, has been that in December, 2006, somewhere in the U.S. government, the decision was made to allow Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. We referenced Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle in this post. Recycling ourself (oh, the egotism!):
Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.’

We bring this up because, thanks to the Tiny Revolution site , we went to an article in the Christmas Time Magazine and had one of those moments, you know, like when a Warner Bros. cartoon Tom Cat sees a shapely femme cat – all eyes bugging out, wowowowoweeee! For amidst the confab of the heavy hitting journalists Time had gathered to ruminate over what went wrong in Iraq, we read this, from Lawrence Wright, the (Austin) author of The Looming Tower:
“TIME: Did the failure to capture Osama bin Laden play a role in the decision to go to war?
GORDON: I was at Tora Bora at that point, in December '01. The desire to have a war plan for Iraq has already been telegraphed to [General] Tommy Franks at Centcom. Franks is actually struggling with Tora Bora, with his unhappiness with the results in Afghanistan, just as he is on the eve of returning for a very important meeting at Crawford with the President. I think they made a very quick decision that in principle Iraq was next on the agenda.
WRIGHT: Al-Qaeda essentially was dead after December 2001. The war on terror, you know, had succeeded. [If we had] captured the leaders, I think people would've felt a sense of finality and might not have had that impulse to roll into Iraq. I'm not sure [the Administration] would have had the public support.”


Of course, like paranoiacs, conspiracy theorists are aces at reading silence. Silence is a multiply intentioned text, and you can lose yourself in it and wind up on a drip in the State nuthouse quicker than you might think. Myself, I saw the Q and A shift from Wright’s comment with amazing quickness.

As I’ve said before, the Tora Bora conspiracy is almost perfect. The left pretends that Al Qaeda wasn’t even dangerous – it was merely a version of high spiritied Boy Scout Jamboree, with a harsher handbook. The right, of course, is hell bent on excuses to break into Iraq and shed some real blood – the little Keegan under the pants gets hard at the very thought of all that wondrous raghead blood being spilled by our F/X. Osama was always an excuse for them. As for the moderate to moderate liberal, why, conspiracy is out of the picture. No, society is one big SAT test, and though some of the players might cheat – those are the ones that have to go to jail again and again, and my, isn’t it just a coincidence that they are mostly black males, who have, by coincidence, been the subject to rancid and consistent bigotry in this country for four hundred years – the test is sound, the teacher is honest, and as for the guys who run the SAT – you couldn’t meet a sweeter bunch of guys. Honestly, listening to President Bush, a man who can really make you laugh (he owns a marvelous ranch, too, and the nicknames he thinks up! reminds me of my roommate back at UMass – some of those frat parties were really a lot of fun!) and not some broad who might be getting into a “catfight” (1) – well, you just don’t suspect people like that of letting slip the leader of the first attack on the continental U.S. since Pancho Villa took Columbus, N.M.

So it was a perfect crime. Nobody wanted to believe it was happening. And it was victimless - or the equivalent, since the victims were only the volunteers that have been sent to Iraq over the last three years, plus the Iraqis - dead that are, to be frank, culled from the Low Use population.

Saturday, July 05, 2008
Rashid
LI noticed, with resignation, that the press largely ignored Ahmen Rashid’s book on the war in Afghanistan. It came out last month, and we reviewed it in the Statesman. There must be other reviews around somewhere, but I haven’t seen them. This is because s Rashid handily dispatches the media woven legends of the war, and shows how appallingly the Bush administration conducted the war in 2001 – 2002, guaranteeing its continuance and expansion. The latter point is never, ever expressed with any energy in these here States. Over the years, I have developed a sort of instinct about the lines that separate the serious from the never spoken in this country that arises from the comments sections in political blogs. One thing that leads to complete lack of response – to silence – is to mention what happened in Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Luckily, campers, LI does have notes – on this very blog! – recording the deadly propaganda offensive. Our fave piece of thumbsucking vis-a-vis Afghanistan came from Jack Shafer at Slate. On the eve of the Iraq war (March 27, 2003) Shafer, a gung ho journalist who would really, really have liked to have been there, bullets whizzing by his head, but, sadly, had instead to take up the burden of informing us folks at home of our superduper victories, criticized the late Johnny Apple, a NYT reporter who had apparently worried that we were getting into a quagmire in Afghanistan, with a contrarian bolletino that was stuffed with the narrative the press stuck to for years:


“Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco.”

Now, that Shafer thinks that if American bombed him, eviscerating his wife, burning the skin off his children, destroying his property, and perhaps incapacitating him for life, that he'd cheer them on, is a view that radiates from an inability to imagine that is so deep, has been nourished so long by a predatory lifestyle, that it can well be called a form of moral autism. To put Shafer’s screed in the proper perspective of evil, hubris, and warmongering, this is from the Slate of June 17,2008:

What is going on in Afghanistan?
In the past week, Taliban fighters staged a prison raid and freed at least 1,000 of their brethren. Soon after, they mounted offensives on seven villages and are moving in on the southern stronghold of Kandahar. One of the fiercest Taliban leaders, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a major U.S. ally during the days of resistance to Soviet occupiers, is bringing in foreign jihadists from all over the region to help his cause.
Meanwhile, Taliban attacks are up considerably from last year despite increases in NATO and Afghan troop levels. Gen. Dan McNeill, who recently finished a 16-month tour as NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last week that we need 400,000 troops to control the country. There are now just 110,000 (including 58,000 from the still-green Afghan National Army) and few prospects for recruiting many more—none for remotely approaching McNeill's desired head count.


Shafer wasn’t mislead by the subtle Bushies, but, instead, was one of the misleaders. He wrote well after the failure at Tora Bora, after the failures of the Anaconda campaign, after Kunduz. Kunduz? Rashid has a passage about the Kunduz airlift in his book. I’d bet 99.9 percent of the American population has no idea what that is. I’ll quote my review:

“The trouble began in the early phase of the war the press celebrated, back in 2001. Osama bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora has been well documented; Rachid notes that "Pakistani officers ... were amazed that Rumsfeld would not even put 1,000 U.S. soldiers into battle," and concluded that America was not serious about the war. This reaffirmed Musharraf's belief that the Americans would grow tired of Afghanistan and allow it once again to fall to forces more pliable to Pakistani ministrations, namely, the Taliban.

Less noted was another great escape. In Kunduz, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan, the U.S. surrounded 8,000 Taliban, Arab and Pakistani forces in November 2001. The Pakistanis were ISI, Pakistan's secret service, who were fighting with their Taliban allies against the Americans. At Musharraf's request, the Americans allowed Pakistan to send in two planes and airlift its people out. It's unclear who, precisely, was evacuated, but according to Rashid's sources, "Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (an Uzbekistan guerilla group) and al-Qaeda personnel boarded the planes."

So, I was pleased that someone was dispatched from the Olympian heights of the NYT to interview the guy.

It is still a bit of a kid glove interview. It doesn’t deal with what Rashid shows of Rumsfeld’s dealing, for instance, with Afghanistan, for which he should certainly be on trial right now. But it actually acknowledges he exists. Amazing!

Summing up: the disappearance of osama bin laden and the my pet goat presidency
The time seems ripe for going over the way in which the Bush administration deliberately let Obama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan to manipulate an unnecessary and disastrous global war on terror. We’ve done this before, of course. But since we are now in the passenger seat, watching the consequences rush forward through the driver’s window – and since the usual shitheads, the O’Hanlon-Kagan crowd, are suggesting their usual shithead policy to deal with it (send U.S. soldiers that are apparently created by magic to occupy a Pakistan that is just aching and shaking to have its nukes taken away by a loving ally) – it is always a fun and fitting thing to marshal the facts and inferences. Where at one time malign, fucked up behavior on the part of the Bush administration might have seemed implausible, after seven incredible years of devious behaviors, second and third rate thinking, and a consistently juvenile policy of thoughtless aggression, wrapped in an impenetrable aura of entitlement and impunity, our theory seems all the stronger. Dismayingly, it has never made a dent in the blogo-chatter sphere.

The facts are pretty simple. Six years ago, the CIA, which had the most connection with opposition groups in Afghanistan, had succeeded in using a limited American force, in conjunction with a number of Afghani warlord-headed forces (given a misleading unity as the “Northern Alliance”), and supported by heavy air cover, to force the fall of Kabul (November 13) and drive Osama bin Laden’s paramilitary force into the mountainous region southeast of the capital city. The fall of Kabul was greeted as a turning point in the quick war by the press. By December 10, the Defense department was treating the defeat of the Taleban as a fait accompli, and issuing misleading press reports, like this one:

“Al Qaida fighters near Tora Bora are reported to be putting up stiff resistance as the operation to dislodge them from their mountain stronghold continues. U-S officials say the operation is making moderate progress as anti-Taleban forces on the ground push forward on several fronts. The American military is still not sure where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is, but officials believe they have a general idea.
In the southern part of the country, Afghanistan's new interim leader, Hamid Karzai, has settled a dispute between tribal chiefs over who will control Kandahar, which the Taleban surrendered Friday.

Under the agreement, Kandahar's pre-Taleban governor, Gul Agha, will resume his position. He will be assisted by Mullah Naqibullah, who accepted the Taleban's surrender.

Pentagon officials says U-S Marines are having success in preventing armed Taleban and al-Qaida fighters from fleeing southern Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan.”

In actuality, the U.S. marines were not having success in preventing armed Taleban and al Qaida fighters from going into neighboring Pakistan. And in actuality, the U.S. had a pretty good idea that Osama bin Laden was in the cave system in Tora Bora.
Peter Bergen has written several articles about Osama bin Laden’s “disappearing act” – which is more act, obviously, than disappearance. In a 2004 article about Tora Bora, he underlines two things: one is that Tora Bora was a pretty well known location to the Americans – it had been extensively used during the guerilla war financed by the U.S. in the eighties; and the other is that far from the Pentagon throwing in its U.S. marines en masse to capture Osama bin Laden, the Pentagon was being curiously stingy about resourcing the end game:

For some perspective on Jalalabad, I spoke with Dr. Muhammad Asif Qazizada, the deputy governor of Nangarhar, the province that contains Jalalabad. In his office, in a splendid blue-domed nineteenth-century building that was once the winter palace of Afghanistan's kings, Qazizada explained why Jalalabad and the nearby mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora were the perfect places for bin Laden to stage one of history's great disappearing acts. In his early twenties Qazizada worked as a medic in Tora Bora when it was an important base for the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. At the time, he recalled, Tora Bora was a warren of caves and fortifications defended by machine guns and anti-aircraft batteries. Because it offered easy access by foot to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts like a parrot's beak into Afghanistan, it was also an ideal place from which to mount hit-and-run operations against the Soviets. Indeed, bin Laden fought his first battle against the Soviets, in 1987, at Jaji, an Afghan village that abuts Parachinar.

During the 1980s, Qazizada said, Tora Bora was the object of several Soviet offensives, one of them involving thousands of soldiers, dozens of helicopter gun ships, and several MiG fighter jets; so solid were the fortifications that the Soviet offensives were held off by a force of no more than 130 Afghans. For this reason, Qazizada believes, bin Laden chose the region as his hideout and escape route in November of 2001. When the two-week battle of Tora Bora took place shortly afterward, in December, it was fought largely by the forces of local Afghan commanders, supported by small numbers of U.S. Special Forces, who called in intense air strikes against al-Qaeda's positions. But Tora Bora's mountainous topography worked to bin Laden's advantage. "It was difficult for the Americans to attack," Qazizada says, "and there was a way to flee."

What happened next was seen but not seen by the U.S. press. I’ll quote myself, here, from my more extensive post about this, July 28,2006:

“Anyway, I recently came across Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle. According to Naylor, the incompetence factor (although he doesn’t put it so bluntly) can be laid at the feet of General “Kick me in the ass” Franks, who operated in our heroic Afghanistan war as a conduit for the senilities of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, of course, didn’t want the Afghanistan war to involve regular troops, on the theory that that is where the Russians went wrong. No, we’d used bombing and our super duper special forces – initial decisions that we are paying for today. Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.”

Implausible is a kindly word. Let’s recall what was happening back at the scene in Tora Bora. This is from the NYT Magazine’s rather thorough article about it in 2005:

“The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden's commanders to abandon Tora Bora.” – Mary Ann Weaver, NYT, 9/11/05

Recall, also, that at the time Franks was displaying this untoward shepherdophilia, the U.S. was accepting payment from the Northern alliance in captives gathered at random – the camel driver, the Avon salesman, the cab driver – and subjecting them to the waterboarding, beatings, and sometimes murder that they obviously richly deserved.”

The military is still scratchin’ its head, apparently, as to when OBL ‘disappeared’. For years, the standard Bushie defense of what obviously happens when you saturation bomb an area in front of a force and leave its rear untouched by explosive and unguarded by any force was that OBL could be anywhere. Now, one of the things that we have been taught, over the past seven years, is to swallow verbiage that an average six year old could debunk, since that is usually the age, according to Piaget, in which the logical faculties kick in. The age in which the logical faculties kick in for war mongers is obviously much later - sixty-five? seventy-five? hard to put a number on it. Remember, though, that Piaget drop outs run this land of ours. And benefit enormously from their pseudo-incomprehension. It is the system of the big fix. And in that vein: we bet that not a single reporter will, at Bush’s next press conference, press the president on why the facts of the case seem to lead to the conclusion that the U.S. intentionally let OBL escape. And ask whether, now that Pakistan seems caught in an act we have all seen before, that was such a bright idea. In fact, Osama bin Laden is now not mentioned in our King’s present – it upsets his dainty mechanism.

On the other hand, we know that Osama bin Laden is not as dumb as the U.S. press. He made the logical conclusions long ago. And he has followed through on his end of the gentlemen’s agreement. Instead of attacking the U.S. on U.S. soil, again, he has aided in a series of attacks that tiptoe around U.S. soil. Attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Spain and the U.K. To attack, say, NYC again would be a dishonorable act against his host and protector, George Bush.

What a win win situation the two have produced for each other! The GWOT spawned a vast, unnecessary war that generated, in turn, an excuse for an unprecedented and pointless buildup of the military that in turn - oh the dominos! - generated unprecedented profits up and down the line for companies even only peripherally touched by the Santa Claus policy of the Pentagon; Bush sailed into a second term on the comical pretense that he had shown himself a strong leader (when, in fact, we have never had a modern president who is so paralyzed by panic in the face of critical situations - the man who kept reading My Pet Goat as he wondered who he was and why he was there on 9/11 is the same guy all the way through the past six years, a second rate golf pro’s mind stuffed into the body of another rich man’s prodigal son); and after an obvious down period following the disorganization of Al Qaeda in 2002, OBL reconstituted himself as a kingmaker in Pakistan, training the Taleban forces for edging into Afghanistan again, connected to a number of Islamicist groups who have ingratiated themselves with the Pakistani rural population in a number of ways, not least of which is a proto-social welfare system that is more efficient in rushing aid to, say, earthquake victims than the government itself. We are about to hit another harmonic convergence as Musharref increasingly looks like he is doing the dictator’s death spiral, a thing we have seen before. And we will continue to swallow lies and bullshit like troopers on our way to an ever more malformed relationship with the rest of the world.

Neo-liberalism and the insanity of the economists

Marx may be ‘out of date’ for some folks, but it is only by absorbing Marx’s way of thinking that you can really enjoy the high comedy produced by mainstream economists in a dither. In today’s NYT, Robert Schiller uses the ‘fact’ that few predicted the housing bubble’s collapse to moan about how we need a clearer crystal ball.
Well, prediction is pretty, but it is also cheap. What I'm interested in is the tactic of shifting the onus of the argument to the issue of prediction, for what this does is help us easily and comfortably misunderstand just how rational the housing bubble was. One of the commentors in Mark Thoma’s blog, Economist’s View, has linked to a August, 2002 column by Krugman which he thinks is discrediting because in it he discerned the advice that Bush should create a housing bubble. On the contrary, Krugman’s column is an excellent analysis of the state of play of the Bush economy in 2002. What Krugman saw is that Greenspan's excuse for blessing the Bush tax cuts was threadbare and ideologically driven, and that the tax cut therapy for the recession that resulted from the tech stock crash didn't work. What he did not see was the whole rationale between combining tax cuts, deregulating the credit markets, and maintaining abysmally low interest rates.

What this all means is that the bubble was engineered, in as much as you can engineer economic events using the powers of the state. It was a solution to a problem before it was a problem to be solved. Perhaps America solved the problem of our Puritan ancestors - the problem of bearing guilt from the very creation of the world - by nurturing a cult of amnesia, which would allow us to bear no guilt at all. But amnesia in this case is killing us. We have never seriously posed the question: what problem was the housing bubble solving?

I’m not saying that the Bush administration and Greenspan decided, lets have a housing bubble. Rather, the neo-liberal rules for the economy had, by 2001, outlived their usefulness. The old rule, under Clinton, was that one could have a liberal social insurance system and a deregulated private sphere through the magic of growth. The Clinton administration added a crucial liberal element in 1993, with its tax hikes and its expanded use of EITC. And it benefited from the coming to fruition of advances in computing that were partly the result of decades of government funding, via the pentagon and various universities, and partly the result of entities in the private sphere. It also benefited, it must be said, from a semi-rational foreign policy that was not built on using the military as the multiplier of last resort (although weapons sales did boom during the Clinton years – which is not good). But by 1998, when the capital gain tax was lowered and the Clinton administration was beginning to buy its own neo-lib propaganda - memorably encoded in Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree as the 'golden straightjacket" - things were starting to go wrong. The idea that the business cycle had been eliminated was being touted as a serious notion, rather than as one of the predictable hallucinations of a group intoxicated by greed. And in 2000-2001, the business cycle came back with a vengeance. If we depend on above average growth to take care of the endemic problem of inequality and less than average wage growth in the median household, then when growth is less than average, and when it plummets to negative growth, we obviously have reached the end of the neo-liberal policy paradigm.
At this point, the neo-lib synthesis shatters and the policy choice is simple. Either save the rich or save the rest. The one is conservative policy, the other is liberal policy.
Bush obviously took the first option, but to make this politically feasible, there had to be something done about the rest. Asset inflation was the perfect answer. Its anaesthetizing affect was such that the GOP actually won the 2002 midterms even as the incomes of Americans were either stagnating or being savaged. Who cared? You might make less, but you could buy a house with zero down and flip it. And though this was an extreme response, still - wealth, for most people, is measured in terms of their life styles, not in terms of the numbers they give to the IRS. If the lifestyles are big and the interest rates seem low, then they feel rich.
Well, the delusion lasted about as long as the delusion that we were 'winning' in Iraq. At this point, the 'save the rest' party came into power - supposedly. But a funny thing happened on the way to liberal utopia - it was de-liberalified. Mysteriously, liberal legislation couldn't pass, or wouldn't pass. When the malarky wealth built on asset inflation imploded, however, legislation passed awful quick to save the rich. And then of course Bush's successor, Obama, came in with a crew of old neo-libs and Bush era officials and did an amazing job os saving the rich. Fed policy in 2008-2010 is an excellent example of what a state that is determined to use welfare for the betterment of a segment of society can do. The rich have never been so coddled, so stuffed with money, so babied and made up to in the whole history of the Republic. Obama makes McKinley look like a communist.
Unfortunately, the only asset bubbles in sight at the moment are such that the rest can't benefit from them. Well, too bad - maybe the answer is to strip them of the benefits that they have enjoyed - via the power of the state - for the last 75 years. This seems to be the template in D.C. Liberalism is dead. The question is, what kind of plutocracy are we building? The kind that will strip the rest of everything, or the kind that will leave them with enough money to buy lottery tickets?

It is in this context that the questions the economists are posing themselves look, well, insane.

cherchez the lobster 2

In 1763, according to Linda Hanas, John Spilsbury, a printer, began to sell an item he called the “dissected map” to children in London. Interestingly, Spilsbury had worked as an apprentice to Thomas Jeffreys, who bore the title of Geographer to the King. But though Spilsbury is generally credited as the first jigsaw puzzle maker, there are other candidates. However, as Ann Douglas Williams points out in her book on the history of the jigsaw puzzle, Marie-Jean Le Prince de Beaumont was using “wooden maps” to teach children in 1759, which gives her a priority. The name should ring a bell among LI readers – we have mentioned Le Prince de Beaumont and her connections to the proto-Enlightenment in Rouen in a previous post. That the author of Beauty and the Beast would see, in the map, a labyrinth, is an almost too beautiful intersigne of the connection between the mythic and the enlightened, the battle of the moderns versus the ancient and the discovery of the Volksmythologie. A folk mythology that was, as is always true of the Europe of the classical age, caught, as well, in the toils of a colonialist tension – for maps were colonial and imperial instruments, making rational labyrinths of imperial power out of blank wildernesses and their blank inhabitants, all the dead indians and africans.

But there is another intersigne here – for it is in the 1760s that Kant was writing his papers on space and orientation, culminating in his paper on incongruent counterparts – left and right hands, etc. – in Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume" – Of the basis of the differences of areas in space – which is when Kant ‘flipped’ sides and went from a relational and Leibnitzian view of space to the absolute view of Newton.

There was no instrumental optical revolution in the period between the 1760s and the 1820s, when Geoffroy proposed the law of analogies, but there was an intellectual optical change that recuperated the folk mythology of analogies into a structural system of homologies. This optical movement is characterized by its full acceptance of what one might call a clarifying distortion – only by means of cutting up a whole, or of positing changes in a fourth dimension, or of moving away from a view of up and down given by common sense, do we understand fundamental structures.

It is within the city, which combines the features of a jigsaw puzzle and the reconstructed skeleton of an extinct beast, do we get this new sense of what allegory can do – that is, we get a sense of how poetic allegory can merge with hard sociological fact.

It is on this basis that I think we can understand the diagonal science of Caillois, and the sort of allergy to analogy of Roland Barthes.

cherchez the lobster: modernist analogy

To discover the source of the philosophy of analogy in the 19th century, cherchez le homard.

In 1822, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire published his General Considerations on Vertebrae in which he announced the law of analogies – that is, he announced that living beings could be considered to have analogous organs or organic plans when such organs or plans were connected according to the same order. To show this, he took the lobster as an example. When we consider the lobster’s body plan by imagining the beast horizontal to the ground, we get one sense of the order of those connections – but if we imagine them “swimming on their sides”, our dissection of the lobster shows that the order of its organs are analogous to those of vertebrates. This, in turn, shows that we have a false view of the how the lobster moves – if he moves in a way that seems, from our perspective, right side up, from the perspective of the ‘law of connections’ he is moving on his side. “What our law of connections demands absolutely is that all the organs, in the interior as well as the exterior of the animal, be in the same relations with regard to one another; but it is indifferent in itself that the cavity containing them lies on the ground by applying one or the other of its surfaces.”[translation in Hervé Le Guyader, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: a visionary naturalist]

Geoffry Saint-Hilaire’s law of connections – or law of analogues – entered into the mainstream of biology after being contested by Cuvier in a famous debate in 1830. On the one hand, within biology, his work was taken up by Robert Owen, who developed his own law of homology of body plans, taking it to be evidence for the history of connections between different species – a point that was picked up by Darwin - and on the other hand, the notion that you could manipulate an image to find analogies to other images was taken up by literature. Balzac thought that Saint-Hilaire’s laws could be applied to the Comedie Humaine, and gave him credit in his preface, from which I quote the Victorian translation:

“The idea originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality.

It is a mistake to suppose that the great dispute which has lately
made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, arose from a
scientific innovation. Unity of structure, under other names, had
occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries. As we
read the extraordinary writings of the mystics who studied the
sciences in their relation to infinity, such as Swedenborg, Saint-
Martin, and others, and the works of the greatest authors on Natural
History--Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the
”monads” of Leibnitz, in the “organic molecules” of Buffon, in the
”vegetative force” of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of
Charles Bonnet--who in 1760 was so bold as to write, "Animals vegetate
as plants do"--we detect, I say, the rudiments of the great law of
Self for Self, which lies at the root of /Unity of Plan/. There is but
one Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized
being. "The Animal" is elementary, and takes its external form, or, to
be accurate, the differences in its form, from the environment in
which it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of
these differences. The announcement and defence of this system, which
is indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of Divine Power, will
be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier's victorious
opponent on this point of higher science, whose triumph was hailed by
Goethe in the last article he wrote.”

Balzac assimilates Geoffroy’s discovery to the theme of physiology – the tableau of the city, or nation. Yet in fact the law of connections has a deeper poetic power, in that it wipes away the impression we gain unconsciously from our first degree analogies – for instance, that we know the upside and downside of a lobster by eye, having a sense that all creatures walk upright – by a deeper, dissecting vision to the connection of the organs underneath – which gives us body plans that we don’t recognize at first, such as the creature that walks on its side.

This vision is actually more pertinent to the way Balzac’s Human Comedy plays itself out, where the law of connections underneath appearances often propel the plots – plots that are the ‘Reverse side of History’. Balzac’s acknowledgment of Swedenborg is more pertinent to his achievement than the Enlightenment physiologies. As we know, it was also pertinent to Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences. In a letter to his friend, the Fourierist Alphonse Toussenel, Baudelaire wrote:

“I have said for a long time that the poet is sovereignly intelligent, that he is the supreme intelligence, - and that the imagination is the most scientific of faculties because it alone understands the universal analogie, or what a mystic would call correspondence.”

Baudelaire’s successor in the field of the law of connections is surely Mallarme. In Mallarme’s poem, “The demon of analogy”, the poet walks down the street imagining a wing gliding over a stringed instrument and the words “the penultimate is dead.” At a certain point, after playing with the words and then letting them ‘err’ upon his lips, he sees an image of his hand making a caressing motion, as though he were about to play the stringed instrument, reflected in a window, which, to his freshened gaze as he tears himself away from the toils of the line, reveals itself as the window of a shop selling old stringed instruments, which are hung up on the walls, and having, as a décor, potted palms scattered on the floor, under the branches of which old stuffed birds are displayed. “I fled, bizarre, a person condemned to bear, probably, the mourning for the inexplicable Penultimate” The image of the person fleeing from his mirrored semblable is heightened by the use of the word ‘personne’, which, of course, means nobody when used with the negation of the verb. The negation of the fleeing leaves us with the man and his image, a nobody, fleetingly impressed upon the shop of a seller of old instruments such as you may find down some crooked street in Paris. The doubles in this moment are such as one comes upon wandering the city street – such was Freud’s experience, related in his essay, The Uncanny.

Tomorrow, I will extend this meditation to Roger Caillois and Roland Barthes. Enough for the morning!

Freedom as a form of adventure

There is an overlap in the period of what Polanyi calls the Great Transformation – the period between the seventeenth and twentieth century – between various models of the modernization process. There is the theme of the liberal historians, taken up by Habermas in the sixties, that assigns to this period the creation of the bourgeois culture of sociability, which is identified with the schismogenesis of a private and public sphere; there is the theme articulated by Foucault that assigns to it the creation of the disciplinary society. And of course there is the Marxist analysis of it as the first epoch dominated by the capitalist mode of production, with all its cultural and political effects, from the creation of new class divisions to the establishment of new spaces and times – the space of the circulation of commodities, and the times - of abstract labor, of the turnover of commodity capital, etc. – in which whole populations begin to live.

There are other spheres that I would like to put into play here - for instance, the sphere of play, or entertainment, which seems to be shaped by the forces proposed by all three ways of seeing the 19th and 20th century; and similarly, the sphere of freedom, which – taking up Heine’s half serious suggestion, is not one thing, but something different according to radically different heuristics – an Anglosphere individualism, a Gallic equality, a Germanic utopia.

One of the tendencies of these explanatory models is to propose that all traditional usages and forms are purged, in modernity, to make room for building our iron cage. Myself, I hold, on the contrary, that the modernization process could not happen without a level of secondary elaboration in which traditional usages and practices come back. The weak ties are not broken, but they are stretched.

- Working with the above background, I want to look at freedom as a mode of adventure in Heine. I am not going to bind my connections close, here, but grope blindly for them. If they come to my hand, let them come.
…

Heine left Germany, in 1827, just as his book, Die Reisebilder, was being published. He had been living in Hamburg at the time, and not like the Hamburg bourgeoisie. This was the same Hanseatic bourgeoisie into which, in Lubeck, Thomas Mann was born at the end of the century. In the Magic Mountain, there is a scene in which the young Hans Castorp, whose mother and father have died, remembers his favorite object in his grandfather’s “Cabinet”, the baptismal bowl that had been used to baptize generations of Castorps, on which was inscribed the names of seven generations of them.

“The name of his father was there, that of his Grandfather himself, and that of his Great-Grandfather [Urgrossvaters) and then doubly, threefold, and fourfold the prefixing syllable ‘Ur’ [Great] in the mouth of his guide, and the boy listened to the Ur-Ur-Ur with his head inclined to the side, a reflective or even thoughtfree-dreamy inward look in his eyes, and his sleepily reverent mouth open, listened to the dark sound of the tomb and of buried time, which still expressed a piously guarded connection between the present, his own life, and that of the deeply sunk past, and this had a peculiar effect upon him, which was expressed on his face.”

Heine, in 1827, was particularly impatient with, stifled by, the huge burial mound of the Ur-Ur-Ur of the ancien regime. The romantic school had burned itself out – the Napoleonic wars had been fought in vain, it seemed – and so he set out in search not of the picaresque, as in his trip to Italy, but in quest of freedom. Political freedom.

On the eve of leaving Hamburg to travel to England, he wrote in a letter to a friend about the atmosphere of complete stagnation in Germany: ‘I even doubt that the book [his Reisebilder] will be forbidden. But it was necessary that it be written. In this dry, servile time, something must happen. I’ve done my part and am ashamed of those hard hearted friends who once wanted to do so much, and are now silent.”

confit de Hitchens

I had supplied myself with the proper material to take care of the three hours it would take for the train from Montpellier to reach Paris: an omnibus book of Maigret mysteries. A. had supplied herself with a stack of newspapers, among them the Sunday Observer. My eye was caught by the headline of the lead story in the Culture section: Amis on Hitchens. I decided, in the middle of one of Maigret's search for the murderer of a rich bourgeois in the Sixth Arrondissement, to sneak this section of the paper from A. and read the article, because the very headline gave me a feeling of ghoulish pleasure: for if, as I think is the case, Hitchens sacrificed not only his standing as a moral entrepreneur, but his art as a writer, in order to play the minstrel to the Cheney-Rumsfeld set of neo-colonialist wankers, then isn’t the most appropriate of all punishments that of being lauded in the suet-y prose of his friend, a man who has puzzlingly sacrificed his talents as a satirist of the bourgeois egotist and the lumpen blowhard to fabricate a string of almost unreadable fictions that use the twentieth century’s great crimes as the dollhouse furniture for his pathetic misreading of his own talents? Very much in the way Jerry Lewis latching onto muscular dystrophy as his way out of clownhood, Amis has latched onto genocide - it is his very own telethon. The novels dare us to laugh at him. He is no clown, but a thinker! Both Hitchens and Amis are pros who have systematically blown up their prose, caricaturists who have become caricatures.

How far Hitchens has fallen can be measured by comparing his Slate columns to his earlier work. Here is Hitchens in 1989, reviewing a book by Gordon Brown in the London Review of Books:

“It is rather a pity, considered from the standpoint of the professional politician or opinion-taker, that nobody knows exactly what ‘credibility’ is, or how one acquires it. ‘Credibility’ doesn’t stand for anything morally straightforward, like meaning what you say or saying what you mean. Nor does it signify anything remotely quantifiable – any correlation between evidence presented and case made. Suggestively perhaps, it entered the language as a consensus euphemism during the Vietnam War, when ‘concerned’ members of the Eastern establishment spoke of a ‘credibility gap’ rather than give awful utterance to the thought that the Johnson Administration was systematically lying. To restore its ‘credibility’, that Administration was urged, not to stop lying, but to improve its public presentation. At some stage in the lesson learned from that injunction, the era of post-modern politics began. It now doesn’t seem ridiculous to have ‘approval ratings’ that fluctuate week by week, because these are based upon the all-important ‘perception’ factor, which has in turn quite lost its own relationship to the word ‘perceptive’.

When the Tories first hired a public-relations firm called Colman, Prentiss and Varley, back in the dying moments of the Macmillan regime, they got a fair bit of ribbing from cartoonists like the great Timothy Birdsall, and a certain amount of ‘negative feedback’ from their own more fastidious supporters. The Labour Party in those days was sternly opposed to the pseudo-science of PR and polling, and to the political hucksterism (such as the interviewing of candidates’ wives) that went with it. Having won and lost a number of elections since then, and having seen Conservatism reinstated to an extent unguessed-at, Labour’s leadership is now agreed on at least one big thing, which is that the battle of image, perception and credibility is what counts.”

The first sentence is the weakest, as Hitchens does not regard it as a pity that nobody ‘knows’ what credibility is – rather, he regards it as a scandal that credibility functions as though it has meaning, which is its use: to create a political vernacular that is wholly useless for promoting political change. Thus, the drift towards plutocracy is well screened from being spoken about or recognized by a complicit political elite and a media which no longer functions as a thought police for the simple reason that it has eliminated thought among both its manufacturers and audience. But after the first sentence, every sentence hits, because Hitchens mind is stocked, at this point, with the analytical tools of the Left – an excellent training for tearing down the scrim of establishment chat.

Now, here is the beginning of the "Fighting Words" column on October 16, 2006. Hitchens is writing aboutthe recently issued Lancet article reporting on an epidemiological survey that tallied up the cost of the American occupation of Iraq in human lives.

“The word lancet means either an old-fashioned surgical knife used to open a vein for the once-popular cure-all remedy of "bleeding" or "bloodletting," or (in architecture, especially Gothic) a rather narrow window. Both metaphors seem apt for the British medical journal of the same name, which appears to be seeking a reputation for conjuring bloodbaths and then reviewing them through a slitlike aperture.

In its latest edition, the Lancet publishes the estimate of some researchers at Johns Hopkins University that there have been "654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The figure is both oddly exact and strangely imprecise: It does not clearly state, for example, that all these people have actually been killed, but it does suggest a steep climb in the Iraqi death rate. In its attribution of cause, it is also more vague than it may appear. These deaths are the claimed result, be it noted, of "the war."”

Although I chose this column at random, it is a good example of what “fighting words” means. Or rather, it helps us understand why the title is such a ghastly, tasteless, and unconsciously appropriate symbol of the moral displacement that was at the heart of Hitchens’ turn to Bush. Words, as Hitchens in 1989 would have pointed out, don’t fight. They don’t bleed. Pound your words as hard as you like, but they cannot, like swords, be turned into ploughshares. But Hitchens was a hero to the set who chose to believe that they were fighting by, well, calling anti-war people names, and making money on defense industry stocks. Hitchens’ D.C. friends, in other words.

But whatever the political slant of his views, I’m as concerned with his way of presenting them. Thus, the interesting fact is that Hitchens analysis of Lancet magazine does not, in fact, analyze the magazine at all – it is a work of ‘credibility’ journalism of the lowest order, betraying the same language fetish as the rebarbative use of “fighting words” to portray the beneficiary of getting other people to fight for one.

The article itself contains the clackery that Hitchens now specializes in, and that was done much better by the old line conservative columnists like Westbrook Pegler or Robert Novak, who at least knew how to put a little steak tartar in their dyspeptic harangues. Hitchens method is to point out that the Lancet had previously published epidemiologies that put the number of people who died in Iraq as a result of the Bush Clinton sanctions at 500,000 plus. He doesn’t dispute these figures – rather, he simply insinuates that these figures have been ‘dropped’ by the anti-war crowd. Like so much of Hitchens’ drive-by style of journalism, this reflects a hazy impression, and it is undisturbed by any epidemiological attempt to see if it is true – like, say, going to Factiva and looking up how many references to the Lancet sanctions article you find after 2001.

Hitchens isn’t stupid – far from it. So at this point in his column, he has three choices: give us a reason to think the figures are wrong; withdraw any support for using epidemiology to determine the price in human life of a policy; or find a way of distracting us from what is going on.
What he does is mix up a cocktail of all three. This is credibility saving that wouldn’t fool a goose.

“There have been several challenges to the epidemiology of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins team concerning their definition of a population sample. And it's been noticed that Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the magazine, is a full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition. But I see no reason in principle why anyone who endorsed the liberation of Iraq, and who opposes the death squads of the Baathist/jihadist "insurgency," should want or need to argue that the casualty figures are any lower. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they are correct. We then enter an area of evidence and reasoning where epidemiologists are not the experts.”

What exactly is that ‘area of evidence’ into which Hitchens wants to divert his readers?

In one sense, this really is the existential problem facing the essayist, and his degenerate descendent, the pundit – they have no expertise. In fact, at their best, they are opposed to the very idea of expertise – that knowledge can be divvied up into various specialties as a sort of administrative decision by the powers that be. The essayist pits the power of his experience against the established power of the abstraction of experience, even as he raids the various disciplines for his facts and illustrations – for his poetry and his amateurism. Yet in so doing, he never mistakes his poetry for an act – his humility comes from his recognition that words don’t fight.

And yet, as he is also, institutionally, close to the journalist, he is constantly tempted to think that he is an actor – that he, the eternal bystander, is the real star. His temptation is always to become a blowhard – to harden and narrow his experience until it becomes an utterly predictable spout of verbiage in search of an act. The attraction of war for such a type is obvious – here, the bystander stands so close to ultimate acts that the illusion that one is an actor becomes almost overwhelming. It is precisely this blowhard Hitchens that Amis lards and lards and lards, until one feels that he is serving up Confit de Hitchens.

Hitchens deserves it.

spheres of freedom

“There is a famous Holderlin poem called “The Autumn”. In it Holderlin describes a foot
of earth, about a square meter, upon which the Duke ofWiirttemberg, Ulrich, is supposed once to have trod. Holderlin describes this piece of forest ground in a very beautiful poem. And now pick up a biology book and see how a piece of forest ground is described there: 16x10 to
the 57th lice, so-and-so many insects, so-and-so many spiders; and then it also says 10 to the minus 7 foxes and twice 10 to the minus six deer. You notice they are two quite different languages. One is the language of statistics: we deal with our surroundings in an unsensuous
way, exactly as we do with the real relations in history. And we deal with lyric peotry in a sensuousw ay with our direct sense for what is near. The two fall apart. The big decisions in history are not made in the realm of what we can experience close at hand. The really big disasters take place in the distance which we cannot experience, for which we don't
have the appropriate telescopes (or microscopes) in our senses. The two don't come together.”
-Alexander Kluge, “The Political as the intensity of everyday feelings.”


In 1827, as Heinrich Heine was approaching London in a steamship on the Thames River, he had a conversation with a “yellow man” who was standing at the rail with him. Heine, overcome by the moment, had expressed outloud his rapturous sense of England, the land of freedom, and of freedom itself, the new religion. The yellow man interrupted his monologue at this point, and, conceding that freedom might be the new religion, pointed out that it was a more complicated thing than was accounted for in raptures. It was a doctrine, he said, adapted its form to its environment - the “national character”. For the English, freedom was a matter of privacy, of the liberty to lead his domestic life as he saw fit:

The English are a homebody people, they live a limited, fenced in family life; in the circle of his family members, the Englishman seeks that spiritual comfort that is denied him outside the house by his inborn social awkwardness The Englishman is thus satisfied with that freedom, that unconditionally protects his personal rights and his body, his property, his marriage, his beliefs, and even his eccentricities. In his household, nobody is freer than an Englishman, if I may use a famous expression, there he is king and bishop within his four walls. The common hustings speech is not wrong: “my house is my castle”.”

Against this, the yellow man weighs the French:

If the Englishman’s largest need is for personal freedom, the Frenchman may, in a crisis, give this up, if one still gives him the plentiful enjoyment of only that part of common freedom that we call equality. The French are not a homebody people, but a social one, they don’t love to sit silently together, which is what they call conversation anglaise, but they run chattering from the café to the casino and from the casino to the salon, their light champagne blood and inborn talent for socializing drives them to a social life. The first and last condition of that, and yes, its soul, is: equality. With the extension of sociability in France, there had to grow in tandem the need for equality, and even if the reasons for the Revolution are found in the budget, its first word and voice was lent by those intellectual roturiers who lived in the salons with the nobility seemingly on the same foot of equality and yet, now and then, be it only in a hardly noticeable, but yet deeply wounding feudal smile, were reminded of the great, shameful fact of inequality. And when the canaille roturière took the freedom to top off the high nobility, this was done less to inherit their properties than their ancestors, and instead of a bourgeois inequality, introduce a noble equality.”

And then the yellow man analyzes the Germans:

As for the Germans, they need neither freedom nor equality. They are a speculative people, ideologues, visionaries and meditators, dreamers, who live only in the past and future and never in the present. The English and French have a present, by them every day presents its struggle and counterstruggle and its history. The German has nothing for which to struggle, and since he began to ruminate, that even so there could be things whose possession would be ever so desireable, his philosophers have been teaching him of the existence of such things to doubt. It can’t be doubted that the Germans love freedom too. But otherwise than other peoples. The Englishman loves freedom like his respectable wife, he possesses her, and if he doesn’t handle her with excessive tenderness, still, he knows how to defend her in a crisis like a man… and woe to the redcoated strapling who breaks into her holy bedroom – whether as a gallant or as a scoundrel. The Frenchman loves his freedom like his chosen bride. He glows for her, he flames, he throws himself at her feet… The German loves his freedom like his old Grandmother.«

The yellow man may have the intangible substance of one of those impossible, garish figures glimpsed by various characters in Master and the Margarita, but his comments expressed the sociology of the day, up to an including the comparisons with types of women, echoing Montesquieu’s geographic notion of the spirit of the laws, but rescored to the tune of the Hegelian obsession with triads.

But I have the triadic habit myself, and think that there is a recognizable social reality underneath the analogy making. More than that, these three understandings of freedom have competed with each other, often in the same national space, and always in some relation with the broader class structure of society. Usually, the social materialization of freedom has been crucified, by the social scientists, upon the insistence that there are two spheres under which we understand the modernization process – the private and the public sphere. The spheres make for a very manageable analysis of history, but do they really capture the reality of friendship, the office, the traffic jam, the tv show?

…
During the Great Transformation the drivers of the system of production changed in their rhythm, spacing, and effects. In Europe, the pre-modern modes of producton depended on the spread of one or other major technology – the wheel, the chariot, the plow – over a relatively long period of time, during which social relations adjusted as they could. But the modernization was synonymous with new rhythms, spacing and effects – a new regime of routines. Not only were diffusion times for new technologies shortened dramatically, but their interdependence created a system of disequilibrium, even as the system’s theorists searched for equilibrium – in the system of money, in the market, etc. – a system in which one part could be touched to produce predictable effects on the other part, feeding back into the first part to moderate and over time suppress the initial touch.

What I want to go into, here, is not that entire system, which lurks behind the walls of the artificial paradise, but a part of it – the technologizations of diffusion itself. The media. Which employs the same social group that is employed as agents of circulation, due to the fact that in both groups, there is the same educational background. The groups overlap, the white collar worker and the journalist, the adverting man and the painter. And in turn, both groups form both the ideologues of the home and the instruments for its penetration by capitalism, the latter under the necessity of creating demand, that second nemesis, a happy nemesis.

end of Breath

This is the second and last part of the story in the last post.
...

I felt good and military adhering to the discipline I’d outlined for myself. I felt like Mishima or something. That summer I read a biography of Mishima and Sun and Steel, his essays, which I’d found a used paperback copy of in the Dekalb Junior College Bookstore, and I felt that here was a darkly attractive figure who understood balancing the death drive against the life drive, and how that required a regime of spiritual and bodily exercises. So ‘military’, which had always meant something bad to me - stupidity, blind obedience, repression, Coach Sick’s crewcut - meant something different for me that summer. It meant strength, purity, will. Since this time I have been in a lot of protests - against the secret war in Nicaragua, against the Persian Gulf invasion - but I have always had a secret understanding of why people have such admiration for the military, unlike Julia and her friends, who are the people who get me to go to these demonstrations and sign petitions and do phone calling and contribute pieces to anti-war shows. I am clued into the erotics of control, of explicit systems of command and obedience. So there I’d be, I’d get up and get out around six, with the sky still shadowed by night, and I’d run my route. I went down from our court into Gladstone Drive, turned left on Verona Park and turned left on Shiloh Mill, ran a half mile down to the Shiloh Mill Baptist church, ran across the church grounds, jumped the creek that separated their property from the Salem Golf course, ran in the path that snaked among the pine trees around the course, hit Dial drive, then took Naman’s Way back to Verona Park proper, which by this time was showing a little activity - a white haired man in a blue suit would be sucking leaves out of the swimming pool with a long hose behind the big chain link fence to my right, and he’d raise one arm straight up, like he was pointing at something, and then he’d drop it, which I took to be a wave. I considered myself practically home at this point, I simply crossed to Verona Park Road and licked on up to my subdivision, and this last half mile I tried to hightail, I’d kick into my baddest ass run and run my breath out by the time I reached my driveway, when I would stop, then jog around the circle, letting my legs and arms simply shake, gearing down, and then, in the lawn, I’d bend over and hold my ankles and let pant hotly into my t shirt.

I concentrated, as Coach Fregee told us to, on breathing, the in and out, and I also tried to hold a certain balance within myself of energies, thinking that I was being very samurai. I liked to hold back and hold back the moment when I finally had to mouth breath, as opposed to nose breath, then I’d coordinate my rhythm to the way my lungs felt, thinking of them as two living animals inside me. My goal was to prolong nose breathing while I picked up my pace a little more each day, so I tried to cut off mouth breathing as soon as it occurred. The first incident of mouth breathing, I’d change my pace, get back to nose breathing, then speed up. I concentrated just on these things, I tried to keep my mind from straying beyond the confines of my immediate body situation. This, too, I thought of as somehow very Zen. I would concentrate sometimes so much on my body I’d feel like I was going cross eyed.

I’d chosen my course to give me a variety of landscape. Long ago, during a phase in the six grade when I went around with an almanac and was always pulling it out to mull over random and insignificant statistics, I learned that Atlanta was exactly 1,050 feet up in the air (although, admittedly, I wondered whether they had just averaged out heights and depths, or whether that was the highest point, or what, since obviously there were dips and rises all over the city). That meant that Gladstone, as a suburb, was about that high or higher. Coach Fregee, who came from Chicago, said that the times in Chicago were almost better on the average by a minute than the one’s in Atlanta, because of the altitude difference. So I was aware of that. I turned left on Verona Park each morning because I wanted to hit the hill there as soon as possible, thinking that it was sort of a merit. I was really convinced that I gained virtue every day just by making my body do things that put stress upon it, that required will on my part. Although I knew enough to see that there was a paradox here - I asserted my will over my body in order, eventually, to submerge myself in a balance of energies. The threshold to that energy situation was shucking the idea of will, or of individuality, or of the possessive “my” , as in “my body”. There was only the balance, the weighing of light and darkness, the Zoroastrian dimension of dawn and twilight, the hard muscle, the readiness to use it. It was like I was going to become a gunslinger, instead of a mediocre cross country runner.
I liked to compare, while I was running, the effort it took me to get up the hill to getting up it in the car, as I had done hundreds of times. It was then that I discovered what I didn’t like about cars, what in fact I still don’t like. In the car, I was divorced from the power of the hill. Now that power, I thought, was in the set and of the type of the power I wanted to feel in my body, my planetary membership, so to speak. I’d been shaped, in a way that went beyond the metaphorical, out of the earth - certainly out of the earth’s elements. I was not born an astronaut, in some manufactured suit, supported by some elaborate, artificial system, floating in space, but I’d been born out of the earth and I carried the earth with me, I would carry it with me if I were to become an astronaut, I would never be able to transform myself into the substance of any other planet. So I figured. So I began to get very Luddite about the whole thing, about technology and such. I would trot up the hill (step nose breath step nose breath) and realize that when there is nothing resistant about the hill and the power there is broken, one’s body’s power is injured too. I didn’t ‘realize’ this in so many words, but by the end of the summer those were about the words I would use to describe what I’d found out. The car is never quite as germane to one’s body’s issues as the hill, the valley, the stream, the meadow. It was a matter of exposure, I thought. To put myself against the hill, to bend to it, to experience it and remember it in my legs and thighs and with my lungs, with the air that I had to take in and give back, that seemed to me a human necessity. It was taken away by the car, you were stripped of your own power, thinking that power was at your fingertips. So you traded in muscle, all you have, in the end, to keep you respectable as a beast, for speed, which ultimately rushed you into a life where you never had any time. Eventually you’d get fat and lose the ability to run, which in turn would make you susceptible to panic, which in turn would make you defensive and reactionary. I saw it all, I was vouchsafed that vision, in increments, that summer.

something a little different - 1

I've been thinking of Dostoevsky's habit, in the Diary of a Writer, of inserting, now and then, a story to lighten up the heavy going opinion mongering. And also I have a large backlog of stories, and what the hell? Apparently nobody is reading Limited Inc anymore, anyway. So here's the first half of a story, Breath.
...



When I was in high school, I was on two teams. I was on tennis, and I was on cross country. I ran, for a while, every morning. This was after I had been suspended from school for stealing a van. It was Mikey McCall’s father’s van, and since Mikey was in on it, Mikey’s father didn’t press charges. Still, it was a lot of trouble, and though I felt that stealing the van had definitely been worth it, since I got to see some country, hang out in Austin, which is where Rayber, the other guy I stole the van with, wanted to go, and meet this girl (Julia), I felt like I had better do some penance. At that time I was incredibly stubborn, so I didn’t want to stage some scene where, head bowed, I muttered that I was sorry to my folks, formally grouped, no doubt, on the living room sofa, but I started to express it in my actions, trying to be more helpful around the house, cleaning my room, folding clothes, setting the table, tasks which I initiated without Mom’s prompting.
Dad and Mom had both been pretty grim faced when I came home that night, and they gave me the silent treatment, more or less, while the cop who was over at the house sat with us all in the living room and explained how, if I was his son, two things would happen right fast: I’d get the whooping of my life, and then I’d get a haircut. After Dad had shown officer Bozo out, he said he wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t go to jail.
Mom said, oh, Jack.
I said, maybe you’re right, Dad. I said it in my most clenched style, it came out as barely a whisper. Lately, that is how I was talking to my parents.
That’s where we left it. They were both very indignant for a month, and we shuffled around each other in the house with some feeling of awkwardness. They found the phrase that summed up how they felt and they kept repeating variations of it. I can’t believe, Dad would say, out of nowhere, that you’d do something so stupid. Then his head would disappear behind his magazine, or lose all meaning, staring at the tv set. You are such a smart boy, Street, Mom said, her voice on the edge of sarcastic, although I had never known Mom to adopt overt sarcasm. It wasn’t her style. That she was driven to the length of hinting at sarcasm was her way of showing how much pain I caused her. I knew what was being implied, since it was an article of faith in the house, which I’d heard since I don’t know when, that brilliant people lack common sense, that prodigies end up as garbagemen, and that, if you want to get ahead in this world, perspiration is worth any amount of inspiration. This belief was in disjunction with another belief, the cult of genius, it being Dad’s credo that Einstein and Newton and Thomas Edison were gods, but it wasn’t something one sat down and worked out, logically. To believe two vaguely contradictory things was just a part of the suburban ethos, the suburban tolerance - beliefs were conceived of as being separate, discrete entities, like houses on the block, and contradictory beliefs were just like two houses headed by fathers who didn’t like each other. They didn’t, for that reason, move away or even argue with each other. It was simply known in the neighborhood, by some instinct, that they didn’t like each other. In the city, maybe, that dislike would have come to a head, there would have been some kind of screaming match - at least, that was always happening in cities in movies and on tv - but not in the suburbs. I ‘d heard belief number one, the vague anti-intellectualism re the inevitable deficiency of prodigies, expressed by other people in the neighborhood too, and though it violently offended me, I understood where it came from.
The full implication was that this is what comes of me vaugely flaunting the wounded angel routine, pretending I was so much smarter than my parents. Well, to me this had nothing to do with running away with the van. I was tempted to repeat a few of the stories Dad told me about his adolescence, what he and Uncle Henry did, but I didn’t, partly because that really hadn’t influenced me at all. I just wanted to do it, and I knew what the consequences were going to be. I tried to think that my life was going to be big and broad, that this was just a minor, bad stretch of it - although of course, in adolescence time isn’t like that at all, I would look up and the horizons of the minute would suddenly crowd in on me, showing me in a stabbing flash an image of time’s edged intensity, deepening my helplessness when I was miserable, destroying my common sense when I was happy, throwing me off balance. Although by then I had developed a sense of time’s extensivity, of how one’s energies must be distributed in projects that play out over long periods of one’s life, it wasn’t a consolation to me, because in reality I had never had to engage in one of those projects. So I really tried to get into cross country in the somewhat chastened spirit of a boy who is trying to make amends for having fucked up. I’d been a halfassed runner before, missing practices and always coming in around the middle, but it was in cross country that I really got to know Rayber to be friend’s with, who was an excellent runner, and I felt that, now that we’d had this van experience together, I ought to try to come up to his level on the running front, which was obviously how Rayber was going to get through college. They had let Rayber choose to get off suspension by doing school good citizen work. That way he didn’t have to miss any of the meets. Coach Fregee took care of it, just like Rayber told me he knew he would. On the other hand, since I was suspended from February to March, I missed most of them, although when I came back I was able to connect again with the tennis team. I made it my goal that summer - I was seventeen - to come in at least fourth in one of the meets in the fall.

Nietzsche and dynamite

According to Maxime Vuillame’s book, Les Travaux publics au XIXieme siecle (1883), the ‘sad’ town of Groeschen was the scene for one of the more spectacular engineering projects of the 1870s – the creation of the tunnel at the base of Saint Gothard mountain for the purpose of laying a railroad track. After the tunnel was proposed, Goeschen became quite different: “Side by side with the old quarter soon appeared a new town, put up in haste in order to give temporary shelter to a population of two thousand miners, mechanics, masons, canteen clerks, making an irruption in this desolate corner. During the nine years in which the work of mining proceeded, Goeschen presented to the tourist the strange aspect of one of those improvised American cities, full of movement, of cries, sometimes of bloody battles; each of the houses that lined the route of a long chain of window displays and cabarets, there was thrown out now the sounds of a waltz, now the sounds of a noisy dispute a l’italienne. Marching down the road, the troops of miners returning in groups from the tunnel, singing “the hymn to Garibaldi” or some old refrain from the other side of the mountains, which they beat out with their still illuminated lamps. A muffled explosion made the air shake, another, five or six in succession; this was the mines that blew up in the subterranean tunnel, taking from the mountain a part of its rock each day. Then, everything re-entered into silence, that was only pierced now and then by the sharp whistle of the locomotives hauling out the underground debris.”

Vuillaume may have noticed the songs of the workers all the more because of his experience in the Commune. But did Nietzsche notice them? Did he see them?

The Saint Gothard project was begun at about the time Nietzsche took up his post in Basel, in 1872. Nietzsche and his sister actually crossed the old pass on a horsedrawn sleigh in 1871, so he would have known the area. The the project was finished the year Nietzsche wrote Daybreak, in 1881.

The preface to Daybreak was written In 1886, while Nietzsche was living in Nice. He read, at the end of that year, a French translation of Notes from the Underground, and depending when one dates the preface, it is possible Nietzsche’s soutterain was influenced by Dostoevsky.

But there is another chain of connections, or at least intersigne.

The first of these is in a letter that Nietzsche writes to Overbeck in 1886, in which he mentions Goeschenen. This is a significant letter for many reasons, among which is the fact that Nietzsche is quite conscious that the sickness he suffers from is not simply a physical ill. Or rather, he sees the double aspect of illness, how it accrues psychological and existential meanings. He complains to Overbeck that it makes him ill every time he returns to Italy, and then he makes the fascinating point that the illness is specifically connected to his feeling of being intellectually cramped and exhausted by his post in the university of Basel. After telling his friend that “your post in Basel, really nothing to envy, but at least it is nothing, as well, to commiserate with, has something prospective and fine, which you couldn’t easily find elsewhere,” he writes revealingly about himself: “Unfortunately, this place is climactically impossible for me – than with whom would I rather now speak of my things than with you and Burckhardt? Thus I have really weighed Basel, and I always enjoy meeting someone from Basel (like I did again today: and each time it occurs to me how impregnated with the Buckhardtian spirit and taste everything is that comes from there: naturally assuming, etc. etc). But finally I thank God (or more precisely, my illness, and in good part you, my dear friend) that I am no longer there. To live in a false milieu and to weaken one’s life task, which I did, so long as I was a philologist and university instructor, unfailingly crushed me physically to the ground; and every advance on my way has brought me, as well, health in the physical sense.” [my translation, SB, 7: 207]

Add to this another letter on September 24, 1886, to his friend, Malwinda von Meysenburg. In it, Nietzsche reports on a simile that will have a fatal charm for him in the coming years:
“At the conclusion I want to write you a few wrds about me, that can be read in the »Bund« (16. und 17. Sept.) [A Bern newspaper]. The title: Nietzsche’s dangerous book.
»Those dynamite stocks, which was used in the construction of the Gotthadt railroad, were supplied with black flags to warn of the deadly danger. Completely in this sense will we speed of the new book by the philosopher Nietzsce as of a dangerous book. We are not strewing any trace of blame in this designation against the author and his work, as little as those black flags were supposed to blame the explosive material. Yet less has it occurred to us to call down upon the lonely thinker by reference to the dangerousness of his book official ravens and crows of the altar. The intellectual explosive, like the material, can serve to do very useful work; it is not necessary, that it be used for criminal purposes. Only it is a good idea, where such stuff is stored, to say clearly: here lies dynamite! ‹«
More even than Whitman, Nietzsche identified with his book – or perhaps I should say, Nietzsche’s identies shifted with the Nietzschian ‘we’. By the time we reach the one of the last texts before Nietzsche’s breakdown, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche has himself become this dynamite. But before we reach that point, in the winter of 1886, Nietzsche, working on the preface to Daybreak, was concerned with what appeared in the book – the book from 1881. He was concerned with the subterranean, the dead, the mole.
It is perhaps a little too facile to say that the Icarian Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of the heights, and the subterranean, the creature of the depths, most naturally meet in a tunnel burrowed under a mountain. A tunnel that is, in its vastness, comparable to some work of nature. But it is the kind of image that I want to put, at least, in the margins of the Nietzschian text, to preside over the question of what Nietzsche saw in his 1881 book that made him speak of a subterranean creature breaking the surface and coming into the light.
…
The Mock community

As the preface is both outside the book and a judgment of what is happening inside it, a good place to start understanding the subterranean is to press on the tension between the lonely beast in the tunnel and the oddly mocking ‘we’. Nietzsche wrote his preface at the same time he was writing the fifth book of The Gay Science, which he claimed in a letter to Peter Gast was written partly in order to establish a symmetry between the two books. He also claimed that he wrote it so quickly that he barely remembered what was in it. The fifth book bears on its face another “we” – Wir Furchtenlos, and the first number concerns “our good cheer”, although the good cheer begins with the very opposite of the good news – rather, it begins with the death of God. In “our good cheer”, the “we” applies to the few who understand this – except the few may be noone at all, no person in the collective, however small, who can encompass the world without God. The shifter in Nietzsche becomes, as it does its enunciative work, as it touches the reader by making the production of the enonce part of a common process, a shapeshifter that escapes the reader, an I escaping the we, and then annihilating itself in an it, in an animal, in a mole, in the spirits of the dead. The dead have no I, in as much as the I only has meaning as a linguistic shifter, because the dead can’t speak. Their I is cancelled.

But of course we, some we, speaks for them, is always speaking for them. Speaking on behalf of the dead is an old community custom. It is literally the law, for the law is intended both to transcend the deaths of the lawmakers and to speak for them.

But this is not Nietzschian “we”. I don’t believe I am mistaken in hearing a tone of mockery in that we that has to do with the coincidence between the shifter and the shapeshifter. It is mockery at the kind of utterance in which the “we” anchors the truth. That anchoring is institutionalized – it is not the we of the intellectual adventurer that anchors the credibility of the philosopher, but his or her post as a teacher of philosophy. If one looks at Nietzsche’s we-s, many are claims to community with the kinds of expertise in which he had no official training, on the one side – and on the other side there was the kind of journalistic we that assumed philosophy, psychology, art as guises for the feuilleton column. The Nietzschian “we” maintains itself – and this is its connection both to the resentment of the reactionaries and the critique of the revolutionaries - between arid academism and newspaper vulgarization in the space of that amateur, the man who understands the world through his experience and reading, or the third life – the one that is spent neither sleeping nor, fully, in waking and its business. These specialists in reading, in an art that has no disciplinary limits or form! These amateurs! The we, then, does signal a community, but it is a community built on mockery.

The fifth book to Daybreak opens with a sort of prose poem, In Great Silence. Here the text presents us with questions that touch on a sort of interweaving: the we, language, silence, and mockery. The we here is Nietzsche and nature. The underground creature, the it, and the dead are all connected to the modernist remove from nature, and its return.
In Great Silence – Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. Although even now we can hear its bells ringing out the Ave Maria – it is that dusky and foolish, but sweet noise at the crossroads of day and night – but only a moment more! Now everything is silent. The sea lies pale and glowing there, it cannot speak. Heaven plays its eternal dumb evening play with red, yellow, green colors, it cannot speak. The small cliffs and bands of boulders, which jut out into the see, as though in order to find the place where it is loneliest, they can all not speak. This terrifying dumbness, which suddenly falls over us, is beautiful and cruel, the heart swells at it – Oh, the slipperiness of this dumb beauty! — How well it could speak, and how evilly, too, if it wanted! Its tied up tongue and the suffering happiness on its face is a deception, in order to mock at your pity. But so be it. I am not ashamed to be the mocked object of such powers. But I feel compassion for you, nature, because you must be silent, even if it is only because of your evil. – Oh, it is becoming quieter, and my heart is swelling up even more: it is shocked before a new truth, for it too cannot speak, it even makes mock when the mouth wants to call out something into this beauty, speak, it even takes pleasure in the sweet wickedness of silence. Speech, and even thought has become abhorrent to me: because don’t’ I hear, behind every word, the error, the fantasy, the spirit of madness laughing? Oughtn’t I do mock my compassion? Mock my mocking?— Oh sea! Oh evening! You are terrible teachers! You teach the human to cease to be human! Should he give in to you? Should he become as you are now, pale, glittering, dumb, monstrous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?

notes on paris

So: I walk down rue Rambuteau past the Beaubourg to a Lebanese sandwich stand; I buy a chicken Shawarma to go; I notice, with pleasure, that they have put the fries inside the sandwich, like I like it; I pay for it and press on with my quest to find a bike stand, all the while eating my sandwich and feeling an immense satisfaction that I am walking, this morning, in Paris.



Heres’s the thing: I am, for once in my life, impressed with myself.



Here’s the other thing: I realize that this feeling is quite absurd. I have stuffed my mouth with sandwiches in other villes – in Santa Fe, Austin, New Haven, New Orleans, Atlanta. But Paris is different. The difference, no doubt, is due to the fact that I stuffed my head with literature and Paris since I discovered serious novels and masturbation, when I was 13. Or perhaps I discovered serious novels second. If I hadn’t read Pound, Baudelaire, Stein, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Balzac, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the ordinary sights beat down upon me like emblems I have somehow re-discovered, emblems of the thing I tried to build up in myself, painfully and – after a while – more out of habit than of any intention. That thing – the cultivated man.



Perhaps if I was a certain type of singer and came to Austin, I would feel the same way, walking past Antones, as I do biking past the Hotel de Ville. And in Austin, I did feel a certain well being on a Saturday afternoon when I sat down with a book, or some editing work, in Whole Foods and drank my coffee and looked about me and almost feel in love with the health and wealth of my fellow Americans, stocking up all around me. I loved their air of ambition, sitting at the tables in that part of the store where we all came to eat lunch, - whether aspiring for serenity through Native American massage or aspiring for hits creating a website for some upscale sports shoes store. But really, for the most part of the past eleven years that I spent in Austin, I mainly felt that something had gone seriously wrong with me and the country, and much as I tried to love my aspiring neighbor, I fell into the bad habit of condemning him for the rape of Falluja in my heart. Me and the country were both going through a personality change that felt like a nervous breakdown. The Bush years scraped its fingernails on the blackboard 24/7, and I couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t wait to poison myself with the next day’s headlines. I responded to all this with a piece of internal terrorism all my own: I blew my brain up. So the happy ambitious people bugged me, seriously. For the one thing they didn’t aspire to was getting the country back.



My own personal breakdown was compounded by the multiple ways I failed as a writer during the Jr. years. I failed, most notably, in the one critical test that any writer must pass: I failed to get anyone interested enough in my writing to pay me money to get more of it. Besides, that is, the freelance dribs and drabs. Samuel Johnson, who had the soul of a union boss, famously said that nobody but a blockhead ever wrote but for money. This is a pretty exact statement of the case. This doesn’t mean the blockhead writer is necessarily bad, but it does mean he or she is a blockhead. That was the group I fell into. I could even feel the block attached to my neck some days, and some months, whole months, I’d have a crick in my neck. Block heads are bad for the neck and back.

I can’t say I fled to Paris to escape the seasons of down and out. No, my life got better, and my head was freed, before Paris. This was because I fell in love and finally figured out – or, rather, some collective unconscious inside me, emanating from the dearest wishes of every cell, be it of toenail, spleen, or heart, figured out - how to be loved. To be loved may be a passive form of verb, but I can assure you it is existentially active. Don’t mistake the accidents of grammar for descriptions of the world – otherwise, you are so fucked.

But this is another story…

another 30 and we're done!

There is a crap statistic that is often passed around on the right about taxes, summed up in this headline form Heritage Foundation: “The Top 10 Percent of Income Earners Paid 71 Percent of Federal Income Tax.”
I am always tickled by this meme, because at the same time, when the Right isn’t thundering about taxes, they will also crow about the benefits of the American economy in the age of freemarket globalisation – among which is the enormous increase in wealth of the top ten percent. Or, as the right likes to put it, the normalization of the millionaire next door.

Put these two memes together and it becomes obvious that the wealthiest can pay 70 percent of the U.S. income tax without breaking a sweat. Their enormous engrossment of higher and higher percentages of the national wealth – the latest figures show that the top 1 percent control some 36 percent of the national wealth. This is a stat from the uber-right Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent hold an astonishingly small 25 percent of the national wealth.

These stats should be carved into the liberal mind with a power drill. Because – alas! – the liberal mind keeps thinking that the bottom 90 percent is going to have to pay more taxes for, well, something – Medicare, social security, our wonderful war machine.

The usually level headed Digby quotes with approval a journalist who is proposing a ‘left’ alternative to the Ryan budget to get rid of the deficit. Special gold stars for those who notice what is wrong with this proposal:
“An equally extreme proposal on the left would balance the budget, first, by raising new taxes--on everybody and, most likely, with particular levies on carbon.”

This is simply nutty.

Here’s what an equally extreme proposal on the left would look like: lets balance the budget by raising taxes on the richest ten percent alone. Let’s raise those taxes so that they pay 100 percent of the income tax in America. Let’s drop the federal income tax load to all individuals in the bottom 90 percent to approximately zero.

That’s right, zero.

This would not dent the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. They would still be as rich as fuck. However, if you wanted to do one thing to create instant wealth in households all across America, that one thing would be simply getting rid of the delusion that taxes are like church tithes. They aren’t. America doesn’t need the widow’s mite. America needs the hedgefunder’s billion.

I find it puzzling that liberals have not figured out that the shift in the composition of wealth in this country gives them an extremely popular issue. Instead, liberals think of themselves as the spinach party. I say no in thunder. I say desserts for the masses. I say let us eat cake. Why raise taxes on everybody? There is no reason that the household making 50 thousand dollars should pay a penny more in taxes at any level - their taxes should be heading downward. If we are really going to all "benefit" from globalisation, the simplest way to do so is to redefine what it means to be rich. To be rich should mean not only engrossing an absurd amount of the national wealth, but paying all the national taxes, save for FICA. Every bit. The right has inadvertently shown the way, here. We have merely to follow.
But how about the Galtian thesis. They might move? I'd love it. Then we could get into serious wealth taxes on the assets they have in the U.S. But in fact they aren’t going to go anywhere. Wealth, we are assured, is extremely sneaky peteily fast. But as we all observed in the crisis, when the crunch came, the rich had nowhere to hide. If it wasn’t for Uncle Sam loaning the banks their little dribs and drabs of billions (adding up to 9 trillion loaned at 0.07 interest between 2008 and 2010), the rich would be out there doing real work, cleaning plates and putting the white stripes down the center of roads. When taxes on millionaires were at 90 percent in the Eisenhower era, there's no evidence that millionaires were buffaloing it to Batista’s Cuba and Ireland. They will moan, they will groan, they will find loopholes. Others who want the millions (and realize that when tax time is over, they still have millions) will take their place. Social mobility, quoi? Survival is to the fittest, and we do want to breed the finest, Galt-ian wealthy. Over time, they will buy enough politicians to lower their rates once again, and we will have to revisit this. Such is history.

Taxing the rich isn't complicated. Let's do it under the slogan: ANOTHER 30 AND WE’RE DONE!