Remora
LI hasn't commented much about Bush's war fever because we find it so depressing. We find it depressing because the United States has no cause to go to war with Iraq. Or rather, its causes for going to war with Iraq would work just as well for going to war with Pakistan -- or even Israel, which, after all, is the nation with the greatest (illegal) nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, and the one nation that has shown, time and time again, that it will take any pre-emptive action it deems necessary to protect itself -- not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of U.S. interests. After all, no law says our interests are aligned with Israel in the Middle East.
We find the peace side preferable, insofar as the argument is against the U.S. mounting an armed force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government. On the other hand, we do think that government should be overthrown. It is unnecessary to rehearse the wickedness of the current government in this post -- we've done it a lot in previous posts. We'd prefer, of course, a velvet revolution, but that isn't going to happen. The Iraqi people deserve a representative government, one that guarantees them their rights -- that goes without saying. Unfortunately, the reality is that there might not be an Iraqi people -- rather, there might be a number of peoples gathered together in this colonial era contraption who want to get out.
Still, US policy up to now has been miserable and criminal. It rests on enforcing an economic blockade to encourage revolt, while at the same time refusing to support any democratic elements that would wish to make that revolt. In other words, we want an uprising of prisoners that would conveniently install another jailor, one to the American taste.
There's an essay in the guardian by David Clark that makes the very good point that it is not a moral option to simply let Hussein stay on, unopposed. The Left's point should be war is not the right way of dissolving the Ba'athist state structure, and should not be that that state structure is a good one, or a just one, or a justified one:
"The political and military risks of a ground invasion may be disproportionate to the nature of the current threat, but there is an equally dangerous fallacy that has gained ground in recent weeks. It is the assumption, latent in much of the anti-war commentary of the British left, that the notion of an Iraqi problem is nothing more than a figment of George Bush's imagination. Many of these voices seem to regard Saddam as a sort of Middle Eastern version of Fidel Castro: an authoritarian, but essentially harmless figure, to be admired, in a sneaking sort of way, for his ability to tweak Uncle Sam's nose. This view took its most egregious form in George Galloway's recent eulogy about Saddam's supposedly Churchillian qualities.
"It is a travesty of the real picture. There was a time when the British left was clear about the nature of the Iraqi regime and the moral obligation to take action against it. In the aftermath of the Halabja massacre, when Saddam murdered 5,000 Kurdish civilians with mustard gas, Jeremy Corbyn MP spoke for most of us when he denounced the regime as "fascist" and demanded the imposition of comprehensive sanctions; "no trade, no aid and no deals while the present repression continues against people in Iraq". Nowadays he signs motions denouncing those very same sanctions as an act of genocide against the Iraqi people."
Christopher Hitchens pitches in, too, in Sunday's Guardian, but Hitchens is so attached to his Jeremiah of the left role that he seems, lately, to be a poseur. It isn't the case, and has never been the case, that any serious figure on the left likes Hussein (while, of course, that was the case when old S. was supported by the Reagan/Bush folks). Why would they like him, particularly? The old third world-ism that developed a crush on any third world dictator that came along with a beret was long passe by the time Saddam murdered his way to the top. Hitchens reports on the use of poison gas in the Iraq - Iran war as though he broke the scoop, but in fact he didn't -- Andrew Cockburn has been there long before him. The other problem with the Jeremiah routine is that Hitchens was much more concerned, in the 90s, with Clinton's fellatio, than with whether the sanctions against Iraq were designed to liberate the Iraqis or to encourage them to, see above, exchange jailors. The immorality of the blockade came down to that. The immorality of the end of Bush I's war came down to that too -- the encouragement of an uprising, the standing aside while it was crushed, the hope that some American leaning Ba'athist would come along, whose gas attacks we'd be quite prepared to allow -- that was what was awful. That is what is still awful. The same people who crafted that piece of criminality are busy, today, making war plans to the greater glory of Bush's presidential chances in 2004. Even Jeremiahs should sometimes figure out a trick or two.
Monday, August 26, 2002
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Note: This is the second part of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Celebrity Biography." The previous post contained the first part.
5. Novalis said that God was a problem whose solution was another problem.
The same can be said for the celebrity - not the flash in the pan, but the super celebrity, the one who transcends her epoch, the one whose enigma is always fresh - the one who can be found listed in People Magazine�s 100 most intriguing people of the century (Special Fall 1997 edition).
6. "Buckalo did let Reselli back out of the Copa deal. The terms of the split were that Roselli would honor his obligation to play the Copacabana each year for seven years, but in all other ways he was no longer under Buckalo�s control." - David Evanier, The Jimmy Rosselli Story.
An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to �belong� to a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.
Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe�s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn�t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here�s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry."
Another legend said that Moliere was denied burial in consecrated ground.
Consumer culture, which raised the entertainer to an industry, was formed, and is still being formed, by the overthrow of that old feudal master morality. This is one of those "long events" Nietzsche talks about which, over the centuries long arc of its happening, threads itself so closely and finely into the way things are that it is all but invisible.
So the contract is more than just money in the CB - it is a sign. A historically rich sign. Follow the performer, follow the contract.
7. Ariel: Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
which is not yet performed me.
Prospero: What now? Moody?
What is�t thou canst demand?
Ariel: My liberty.
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I,ii
The primal scene in show biz is staged between stage mother or manager or agent or director or studio owner or mob boss - all Prospero surrogates - and the performer, always gaining his freedom with his pranks, his shows, his image. And the dialogue between them (Shakespeare�s such a prophet!) always oscillates between the rational register, in which everything is cashed out in unmistakable numbers, and the emotional register, where it is all a question of love: How now? Moody? The money made by entertainers, from football players to TV stars, evokes an emotional response that indicates some genealogically knotty issue, here. Perhaps this is why the numbers never seem to come out right. They are the least blur-able of symbols, but even as they are added up in the CB ("Jimmy was earning up to $5,000 per performance at major venues like Palumbo�s in Philadelphia..."), they don�t add up.
The grosses are, in the end, fetishes - libidinal detours.
Out of the pairing of Prospero and Ariel, we have endlessly repeated variants. The synth-pop trasmutation of it gives us the Human League�s "Don�t you want me." Invert the power structure and you have Judy Garland in A Star is Born (which, ironically, inverts the real structure of her life). Don�t forget, the political economy of love is still very much in question, with its pre-contractual substructure (absolute slavery) and its post-contractual longings (which would be - what? The brotherhood and sisterhood of man? Or ... depending on the kindness of strangers?)
The celebrity�s social function is to embody the history, here, in fear and trembling, through booze and percadan, car wreck and drug bust. The contract is the nexus of love and value, and thus the source of pain and sorrow. The CB of the future, the perfect CB (Mallarme�s Book, to which all things in the world ultimately tend) will track these paradoxes with an infinite understanding of their connotations.
8. "The brave dreams of an invert seldom can be transmuted into real events," Irving Shulman, Harlow: an intimate biography
Consumer culture is a scandal to the Marxists and a stumbling block to the Tories. The Marxists have long forgotten the punk Karl who wrote, "everything that is solid melts into air." The Marxists have seen fire, and they�ve seen fascism, and they�ve grown so old. The Tories are caught between the glorious theory of free enterprise, where every man�s a king, and the moral monopoly of Christianity, where Old Adam has to be knocked on the head with a billyclub if he gets too happy.
Every contradiction evolves a storyline. The storyline on celebrity is put in classical form in Daniel Boorstin�s book, The Image: A guide to pseudo events in America.
The storyline is of a G�tterdammerung.
Boorstin lays it out. Once there were heros. The hero is a "human figure - real or imaginary or both - who has shown greatness in some achievement. He is a man or woman of great deeds."
And then, suddenly, there came a time when the hero was replaced. His replacement was also a mockery - the celebrity. The celebrity, according to Boorstin, is a person who is known for his well-knowness.
There�s no point in going into how a hero can be both real and imaginary, or how imaginary people perform great deeds. Boorstin�s book, which was published in 1961, is not the first to feature the rivalry between the celebrity and the hero. But certainly since the book appeared, the rivalry he describes, and the mournful moral consequence of a society that allows itself, somehow, to worship the idols of the marketplace, has become a structural constant of cultural criticism.
9. Susan Faludi, interviewing Sylvester Stallone for Esquire, writes about the way one of Stallone�s paintings symbolized "the fleeting quality of modern fame, the way celebrity has corrupted, and caused the death of, the classical hero." The painting depicts Hercules as a Christlike figure, bleeding from a bullet wound, with a clock near him. The clock symbolized time. As in, the fleeting quality of time. The image, silk-screened onto T-shirts, was retailed by Planet Hollywood in its Celebrities Limited Edition.
The bitter sense that somehow, in the past, the heroes were rampant, is scrolled around the pages of Nick Tosches Dino: "Like Dean and Jerry, most people would not even read. Ajax was no longer a Homeric hero; he was the Comedy Hour�s sponsor�s foaming cleanser, no longer a contender with Odysseus for the Arms of Achilles but the consort of Fab, which had itself transplanted Melville�s musings on "The Whiteness of the Whale" with the dictum "Whiter Whites without Bleaching."
10. The storyline insinuates itself in the CB. It produces a whole subclass of CBs in which the point is that the hero rivals some usurper, some Hamlet�s uncle, some fake - some supposedly bigger celebrity. Tosches is the master of this. In his three recent books - on Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston - he opposes authentic second tier celebrities against hollow first tier ones. Lewis is pitted against Elvis from the very introduction of the book, which shows Elvis wrapped in a prophetic slumber while Jerry Lee, armed, hammers at the gate of Graceland, demanding entrance. In the boxy Dino , it is Frank Sinatra who proves to be the hollow giant - a man whose heart follows his dick, a man who falls for the ersatz glamour of the Kennedy boys, while Dean lays back, his virtu protected by his disengagement. It is this image of Dean that moves Tosches to write lines like: �as the god-king of mob culture, he had blown aside the Beatles with the breath of his might." In the Devil and Sonny Liston, his most recent book, it�s Cassius Clay that is marked down as a motormouth and a gull, who never notices Liston is fixed - that Clay�s victories are bought.
If the values can be inverted like this, however - if we look back at the sixties and see the Beatles, if we forget where Sonny Liston is even fucking buried, if we ignore the Killer - there must be someone somewhere who is benefiting.
11. "The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whoever, whatever, he really was, Barney Baker�s secrets dies with him, in March, 1974. - Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston
.
In 1679, the French explorer Lasalle left a group of 15 men in the heart of the American wilderness, at a fortress on the Mississippi river named, appropriately, Fort Heartbreak (Crevecoeur). When he returned in 1680, he discovered his men had gotten tired of living at the end of Lonely Street. They had killed his second in command, burned the fort, and left a message in charcoal for their old commander on a punctured boat they�d leaned on a tree: "Nous sommes tous sauvages," it said. We are all savages.
This marauders� Declaration of Independence interpenetrates the more stately one Jefferson penned ninety years later to indicate a certain hidden system of paths through the continent�s dreamlife. Greil Marcus, in his book on Bob Dylan, calls this the Old, Weird America.
The Old Weird America is a sub-imperial braid woven out of New Orleans whorehouse slang, desperate coal miner winters, elevated Okies in L.A. bungalows and all the bandit chances of a casually amoral Volk. It�s art is linked, by ties of dread - the Wilderness keeps growing, the commander is probably dead - to its paranoia. Some of that feeling crops out in the CB - naturally. Because that is where the celebrities come from. It isn�t democracy, it is the Old, Weird America we are seeing up there, in lights. However it is genteelly bent to taste. The rivalry isn�t between the hero and the celebrity, but between the marauder and the image.
12. Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; The Secret Life of Tyrone Power; Peter Lawford: The Man who Kept the Secrets.
Leo Lowenthal, a Frankfurt School Marxist, once wrote, about "popular biographies": "Whatever the biographers proclaim about their heroes, they are heroes no longer. They have no fate, they are mere variables of the historic process."
Lowenthal had that old European idea about fate. For him, it was inextricable from the Hegelian program, Fate (God, this is so old!) is the confrontation of a great figure with the never completely unified moral universe, in which two contrary duties can be equally compelling.
Americans and the ancient Greeks have a more stripped down idea of fate. It is about hunting. It is about who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
A foot for flight he needs
Fleeter than storm-swift steeds,
For on his heels doth follow,
Armed with the lightnings of his Sire, Apollo.
Like sleuth-hounds too
The Fates pursue. - Sophocles, Oedipus the King
The hunt disrupts the usual order of things, the agricultural order, the lists, the official hierarchy, the difference between play and work. The American dream life returns to the archaic order. You have to merge with the flow of the hunt, you have to take secondary details, side-events, pseudo-events, seriously.
It is the private dick�s method. The paranoid method. The method by which great CBs are made. The biographer - the unauthorized biographer - wants a secret. So the biographer�s interests are not wholly consonant with his subjects. And yet the value of the secret depends on the value of the fame. Even killer biographers, like Kitty Kelly and Albert Goldmann, depend upon the fame of their victims (Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon) to preserve the interest in their stories.
That paranoid method has not yet been put to its maximum use. Mailer was always almost there - he was never able to quite write it down. But celebrity itself has now become a conspiracy, a constant flow, from radio, tv, movie screen, HTML, Java Script and out there, to the always stereotypically passive consumer, the one who "doesn't read." I think someday, though, the scream will come from the CB - the consumer will have absorbed too much, all the good objects and bad objects, will have felt inside himself some basic, cancerous transmutation, and will expell it - some consumer, some fan, some biographer - in the pentacostal tongue, the American glossalalia, that will penetrate to the heart of all conspiracies and explain, in paranoid metaphors and exaggerations, just what America means.
13. �That�s the great thing about living in Los Angeles. Anything that happens in the news - great tragedies, scandals - people just think: "what a great idea for a movie!"
Sissy Spacek, Interview Magazine, May, 1977
5. Novalis said that God was a problem whose solution was another problem.
The same can be said for the celebrity - not the flash in the pan, but the super celebrity, the one who transcends her epoch, the one whose enigma is always fresh - the one who can be found listed in People Magazine�s 100 most intriguing people of the century (Special Fall 1997 edition).
6. "Buckalo did let Reselli back out of the Copa deal. The terms of the split were that Roselli would honor his obligation to play the Copacabana each year for seven years, but in all other ways he was no longer under Buckalo�s control." - David Evanier, The Jimmy Rosselli Story.
An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to �belong� to a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.
Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe�s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn�t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here�s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry."
Another legend said that Moliere was denied burial in consecrated ground.
Consumer culture, which raised the entertainer to an industry, was formed, and is still being formed, by the overthrow of that old feudal master morality. This is one of those "long events" Nietzsche talks about which, over the centuries long arc of its happening, threads itself so closely and finely into the way things are that it is all but invisible.
So the contract is more than just money in the CB - it is a sign. A historically rich sign. Follow the performer, follow the contract.
7. Ariel: Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
which is not yet performed me.
Prospero: What now? Moody?
What is�t thou canst demand?
Ariel: My liberty.
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I,ii
The primal scene in show biz is staged between stage mother or manager or agent or director or studio owner or mob boss - all Prospero surrogates - and the performer, always gaining his freedom with his pranks, his shows, his image. And the dialogue between them (Shakespeare�s such a prophet!) always oscillates between the rational register, in which everything is cashed out in unmistakable numbers, and the emotional register, where it is all a question of love: How now? Moody? The money made by entertainers, from football players to TV stars, evokes an emotional response that indicates some genealogically knotty issue, here. Perhaps this is why the numbers never seem to come out right. They are the least blur-able of symbols, but even as they are added up in the CB ("Jimmy was earning up to $5,000 per performance at major venues like Palumbo�s in Philadelphia..."), they don�t add up.
The grosses are, in the end, fetishes - libidinal detours.
Out of the pairing of Prospero and Ariel, we have endlessly repeated variants. The synth-pop trasmutation of it gives us the Human League�s "Don�t you want me." Invert the power structure and you have Judy Garland in A Star is Born (which, ironically, inverts the real structure of her life). Don�t forget, the political economy of love is still very much in question, with its pre-contractual substructure (absolute slavery) and its post-contractual longings (which would be - what? The brotherhood and sisterhood of man? Or ... depending on the kindness of strangers?)
The celebrity�s social function is to embody the history, here, in fear and trembling, through booze and percadan, car wreck and drug bust. The contract is the nexus of love and value, and thus the source of pain and sorrow. The CB of the future, the perfect CB (Mallarme�s Book, to which all things in the world ultimately tend) will track these paradoxes with an infinite understanding of their connotations.
8. "The brave dreams of an invert seldom can be transmuted into real events," Irving Shulman, Harlow: an intimate biography
Consumer culture is a scandal to the Marxists and a stumbling block to the Tories. The Marxists have long forgotten the punk Karl who wrote, "everything that is solid melts into air." The Marxists have seen fire, and they�ve seen fascism, and they�ve grown so old. The Tories are caught between the glorious theory of free enterprise, where every man�s a king, and the moral monopoly of Christianity, where Old Adam has to be knocked on the head with a billyclub if he gets too happy.
Every contradiction evolves a storyline. The storyline on celebrity is put in classical form in Daniel Boorstin�s book, The Image: A guide to pseudo events in America.
The storyline is of a G�tterdammerung.
Boorstin lays it out. Once there were heros. The hero is a "human figure - real or imaginary or both - who has shown greatness in some achievement. He is a man or woman of great deeds."
And then, suddenly, there came a time when the hero was replaced. His replacement was also a mockery - the celebrity. The celebrity, according to Boorstin, is a person who is known for his well-knowness.
There�s no point in going into how a hero can be both real and imaginary, or how imaginary people perform great deeds. Boorstin�s book, which was published in 1961, is not the first to feature the rivalry between the celebrity and the hero. But certainly since the book appeared, the rivalry he describes, and the mournful moral consequence of a society that allows itself, somehow, to worship the idols of the marketplace, has become a structural constant of cultural criticism.
9. Susan Faludi, interviewing Sylvester Stallone for Esquire, writes about the way one of Stallone�s paintings symbolized "the fleeting quality of modern fame, the way celebrity has corrupted, and caused the death of, the classical hero." The painting depicts Hercules as a Christlike figure, bleeding from a bullet wound, with a clock near him. The clock symbolized time. As in, the fleeting quality of time. The image, silk-screened onto T-shirts, was retailed by Planet Hollywood in its Celebrities Limited Edition.
The bitter sense that somehow, in the past, the heroes were rampant, is scrolled around the pages of Nick Tosches Dino: "Like Dean and Jerry, most people would not even read. Ajax was no longer a Homeric hero; he was the Comedy Hour�s sponsor�s foaming cleanser, no longer a contender with Odysseus for the Arms of Achilles but the consort of Fab, which had itself transplanted Melville�s musings on "The Whiteness of the Whale" with the dictum "Whiter Whites without Bleaching."
10. The storyline insinuates itself in the CB. It produces a whole subclass of CBs in which the point is that the hero rivals some usurper, some Hamlet�s uncle, some fake - some supposedly bigger celebrity. Tosches is the master of this. In his three recent books - on Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston - he opposes authentic second tier celebrities against hollow first tier ones. Lewis is pitted against Elvis from the very introduction of the book, which shows Elvis wrapped in a prophetic slumber while Jerry Lee, armed, hammers at the gate of Graceland, demanding entrance. In the boxy Dino , it is Frank Sinatra who proves to be the hollow giant - a man whose heart follows his dick, a man who falls for the ersatz glamour of the Kennedy boys, while Dean lays back, his virtu protected by his disengagement. It is this image of Dean that moves Tosches to write lines like: �as the god-king of mob culture, he had blown aside the Beatles with the breath of his might." In the Devil and Sonny Liston, his most recent book, it�s Cassius Clay that is marked down as a motormouth and a gull, who never notices Liston is fixed - that Clay�s victories are bought.
If the values can be inverted like this, however - if we look back at the sixties and see the Beatles, if we forget where Sonny Liston is even fucking buried, if we ignore the Killer - there must be someone somewhere who is benefiting.
11. "The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whoever, whatever, he really was, Barney Baker�s secrets dies with him, in March, 1974. - Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston
In 1679, the French explorer Lasalle left a group of 15 men in the heart of the American wilderness, at a fortress on the Mississippi river named, appropriately, Fort Heartbreak (Crevecoeur). When he returned in 1680, he discovered his men had gotten tired of living at the end of Lonely Street. They had killed his second in command, burned the fort, and left a message in charcoal for their old commander on a punctured boat they�d leaned on a tree: "Nous sommes tous sauvages," it said. We are all savages.
This marauders� Declaration of Independence interpenetrates the more stately one Jefferson penned ninety years later to indicate a certain hidden system of paths through the continent�s dreamlife. Greil Marcus, in his book on Bob Dylan, calls this the Old, Weird America.
The Old Weird America is a sub-imperial braid woven out of New Orleans whorehouse slang, desperate coal miner winters, elevated Okies in L.A. bungalows and all the bandit chances of a casually amoral Volk. It�s art is linked, by ties of dread - the Wilderness keeps growing, the commander is probably dead - to its paranoia. Some of that feeling crops out in the CB - naturally. Because that is where the celebrities come from. It isn�t democracy, it is the Old, Weird America we are seeing up there, in lights. However it is genteelly bent to taste. The rivalry isn�t between the hero and the celebrity, but between the marauder and the image.
12. Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; The Secret Life of Tyrone Power; Peter Lawford: The Man who Kept the Secrets.
Leo Lowenthal, a Frankfurt School Marxist, once wrote, about "popular biographies": "Whatever the biographers proclaim about their heroes, they are heroes no longer. They have no fate, they are mere variables of the historic process."
Lowenthal had that old European idea about fate. For him, it was inextricable from the Hegelian program, Fate (God, this is so old!) is the confrontation of a great figure with the never completely unified moral universe, in which two contrary duties can be equally compelling.
Americans and the ancient Greeks have a more stripped down idea of fate. It is about hunting. It is about who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
A foot for flight he needs
Fleeter than storm-swift steeds,
For on his heels doth follow,
Armed with the lightnings of his Sire, Apollo.
Like sleuth-hounds too
The Fates pursue. - Sophocles, Oedipus the King
The hunt disrupts the usual order of things, the agricultural order, the lists, the official hierarchy, the difference between play and work. The American dream life returns to the archaic order. You have to merge with the flow of the hunt, you have to take secondary details, side-events, pseudo-events, seriously.
It is the private dick�s method. The paranoid method. The method by which great CBs are made. The biographer - the unauthorized biographer - wants a secret. So the biographer�s interests are not wholly consonant with his subjects. And yet the value of the secret depends on the value of the fame. Even killer biographers, like Kitty Kelly and Albert Goldmann, depend upon the fame of their victims (Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon) to preserve the interest in their stories.
That paranoid method has not yet been put to its maximum use. Mailer was always almost there - he was never able to quite write it down. But celebrity itself has now become a conspiracy, a constant flow, from radio, tv, movie screen, HTML, Java Script and out there, to the always stereotypically passive consumer, the one who "doesn't read." I think someday, though, the scream will come from the CB - the consumer will have absorbed too much, all the good objects and bad objects, will have felt inside himself some basic, cancerous transmutation, and will expell it - some consumer, some fan, some biographer - in the pentacostal tongue, the American glossalalia, that will penetrate to the heart of all conspiracies and explain, in paranoid metaphors and exaggerations, just what America means.
13. �That�s the great thing about living in Los Angeles. Anything that happens in the news - great tragedies, scandals - people just think: "what a great idea for a movie!"
Sissy Spacek, Interview Magazine, May, 1977
Friday, August 23, 2002
Thirteen ways of looking at a Celebrity Biography
(Part one)
1. "Rita and her first husband, Eddie Judson, shortly after they eloped, in 1937. He pressed her to sleep with other men if it would help her career." - caption to a picture in Barbara Leaming, If This was Happiness: a biography of Rita Hayworth.
When I flip through a new novel, I first read the description on the inside cover, and the first paragraph. When I pick up a CB, I go right to the photographs.
Usually there will be two or three sets of them in the book. Usually they are in black and white. This says something about my choice of celebrities. I am not of the Britney generation. And I'm nostalgic for the larger than life, black and white divas. Somehow, color is tacky. First we get the family, all unknown faces, badly mounted shots. Then, gradually, one of those faces becomes familiar. A pudgy cheeked little boy with a cap becomes James Dean. Margarita Cansino, at three years and eight months, becomes Rita Cansino, "before she underwent electolysis treatments to alter her hairline," and then Rita Hayworth.
I look for the odd, lewd shot, the one that shows a different level of nakedness � the nakedness of not looking famous, of not having yet achieved, or temporarily discarding, the iconic image. Here�s "a rare shot� of John Wayne without his toupee. And here�s Janis Joplin, naked. John Wayne looks more naked - he has been stripped, briefly, of his recognizability.
2. Captions. The picture stands in the visual order, the caption in the verbal. These two orders come at the world in different ways.
When I look at Rita and her first husband, I see a woman sitting down, smiling, wearing what looks like a camel hair coat. Her hair is a mass of black, pulled back. Not yet the famous hair, the trademark hair. She has made a little pistol with her thumb and index finger. This in itself is interesting and odd � what is she doing? I�ll never penetrate that hermetic gesture, not now. Is she pointing her �pistol� at this man to shoot him, a sort of comic joke between them? Should he have seen the message in this photo? Could he, did he have that much intelligence? There he is, sitting on the arm of the sofa, sitting slightly above her, turned to look at her, a woman who doesn�t look famous at the time the photo was taken, and looks famous now, now that we know this is Rita Hayworth. He, however, looks the same � he was not then, and is not now, famous. He wears a suit, and, oddly, either a scarf or an Ascot tie, left casually unfastened around his neck. I could amass a long list of more and more specific details, here, but the image is systematically fixed, it is all there is of it, it is one of a kind. I�d say that the picture doesn�t change, but of course it did. Fame changed it.
So I read the caption, knowing what I know. What changes with the caption? Not Rita. No, her husband changes. Her husband, not being famous, seems suddenly slightly louche, as if there were something slightly sinister about that scarf or Ascot tie. Is this the ornament that betrays the pimp? And the woman�s gesture - the pistol - is now defensive. She smiles, but she won�t let him get to her. He sits so pretty on the arm of the loveseat, above her, patronizing, even... threatening. He �pressed her� - but surely she resisted.
The caption makes the picture talk to me, as the picture itself doesn�t. The linguistic order, as opposed to the order of the image, is expansive. Whatever frames the possibility of speech, here, is indeterminate. I unconsciously think of the caption as what these two are saying to each other, but that isn�t quite it. It is what they aren�t saying � it is what they are meaning to each other. Something which isn�t said � something which transcends saying. Meaning is easy for the picture, saying is impossible. Linking the picture to that verbal data is the celebrity biographer�s act of supreme fiction. The pictures in the celebrity biography are a sort of abridged version of what the biography is about: becoming-famous.
3. �Who were these serious cocksuckers, these jerk-offs who approached moving pictures as if they were fucking reality, who wouldn�t even know reality if it bit them on the ass?" - Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.
The technical term for a verbal picture, in classical rhetoric, is ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is considered slightly suspect in the world of scholarly biographies. It exists there, if at all, in order to entertain, as a distraction from the real business of analysis.
Not so in the CB - it is ekphrasis-happy.
Since a verbal picture is a picture, it permits - it wants - a caption. This way, the same dynamic between picture and caption can be embedded in the story. The voice of the caption can become, by imperceptible increments, the actual voice of the celebrity. Martin is not being quoted verbatim by my citation from Tosches, but is being, in a sense, invaded. We are overhearing his thoughts as he ponders some bad press. In Tosches� Dino, we overhear his thoughts quite a bit. Tosches extrapolates from quotes he�s culled from other celebrity bios - most notably, Kitty Kelly�s His Way: The unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra. He couldn�t extrapolate "cocksucker" from, say, Dean Martin�s interview with TV Guide - that language is already public, already completely invaded. It is not Dean Martin�s own, whether he spoke it or not. When the celebrity speaks in an interview, we know the words are part of a program. They are publicity. They are, as Jack Nicholson once said, "selling eggs." Cocksucker, though, is oddly authentic.
It is necessary to stage some invasion if we are going to be intimate with the celebrity. We are presumed to be not famous, our faces never figuring in the pictures. But we have no solidarity with the other not famous � they compete with us. Why them? So the CB, promising us intimacy, restores some fairness. The real story, the man as he has never been seen before. The man behind the mask.
Tosches� technique, in a novel, would be called interior monologue. Because modernist novels started using it in the 20s - Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf - the academic might suppose that the celebrity biography took this technique from the novel. I think, however, that both genres got it from the where captions and pictures come together - the newspapers and the movies.
4. "Here�s the deal: No one knows, and no one with any integrity has ever spoken. About anything" - Loni Anderson, My Life in High Heels, about her alleged fight with Burt Reynolds on the eve of their wedding.
In philosophical relativism, the truth of an expression depends upon a given system�s norms for selecting true statements. Truth isn�t necessarily about picturing facts, unless, within the system, we make it a rule that the truth is necessarily about picturing facts. Coherence trumps correspondence, to use the jargon.
The C.B. is a limit case of relativism. Here, the relation between tabloid truth and the sources of verifiable fact are shadowy, at best. Was Errol Flynn a Nazi Spy, as Charles Higham maintains in Errol Flynn: The Untold Story? Or is Higham a fraud, as Tony Thomas says, in Errol Flynn: The Spy who never was? On her wedding night, did Jean Harlow naughtily wave a giant dildo under her husband�s nose, mocking his penis, which measured about the size of her pinkie? Or was Irving Shulman fantasizing in Harlow: An Intimate Biography, as Jean�s friend Adela Rogers St. Johns forcefully maintained (by "forcefully maintained, I mean she whacked Shulman on the head with her purse on TV, according to David Stenn in Bombshell, Jean Harlow�s most recent biography. As we know from Freud, the purse is a symbol of the vagina. So if Shulman is lying about Harlow�s husband�s dick, how appropriate that he get whacked with Harlow�s friend�s pussy � okay, pussy substitute). Did Sonny Liston throw his first fight to Cassius Clay, as Nick Tosches charges in his just published The Devil and Sonny Liston? Or did Sonny�s lineman, Joe Polino, put a special linement on Sonny�s gloves in the fourth round to blind the challenger, as Nigel Collins says in Boxing Babylon?
It isn�t just that the norms, in this genre, are vague - you get a feeling that they are a sap�s game. There�s another game going on, another history. It�s Chinatown, Jake.
(Part one)
1. "Rita and her first husband, Eddie Judson, shortly after they eloped, in 1937. He pressed her to sleep with other men if it would help her career." - caption to a picture in Barbara Leaming, If This was Happiness: a biography of Rita Hayworth.
When I flip through a new novel, I first read the description on the inside cover, and the first paragraph. When I pick up a CB, I go right to the photographs.
Usually there will be two or three sets of them in the book. Usually they are in black and white. This says something about my choice of celebrities. I am not of the Britney generation. And I'm nostalgic for the larger than life, black and white divas. Somehow, color is tacky. First we get the family, all unknown faces, badly mounted shots. Then, gradually, one of those faces becomes familiar. A pudgy cheeked little boy with a cap becomes James Dean. Margarita Cansino, at three years and eight months, becomes Rita Cansino, "before she underwent electolysis treatments to alter her hairline," and then Rita Hayworth.
I look for the odd, lewd shot, the one that shows a different level of nakedness � the nakedness of not looking famous, of not having yet achieved, or temporarily discarding, the iconic image. Here�s "a rare shot� of John Wayne without his toupee. And here�s Janis Joplin, naked. John Wayne looks more naked - he has been stripped, briefly, of his recognizability.
2. Captions. The picture stands in the visual order, the caption in the verbal. These two orders come at the world in different ways.
When I look at Rita and her first husband, I see a woman sitting down, smiling, wearing what looks like a camel hair coat. Her hair is a mass of black, pulled back. Not yet the famous hair, the trademark hair. She has made a little pistol with her thumb and index finger. This in itself is interesting and odd � what is she doing? I�ll never penetrate that hermetic gesture, not now. Is she pointing her �pistol� at this man to shoot him, a sort of comic joke between them? Should he have seen the message in this photo? Could he, did he have that much intelligence? There he is, sitting on the arm of the sofa, sitting slightly above her, turned to look at her, a woman who doesn�t look famous at the time the photo was taken, and looks famous now, now that we know this is Rita Hayworth. He, however, looks the same � he was not then, and is not now, famous. He wears a suit, and, oddly, either a scarf or an Ascot tie, left casually unfastened around his neck. I could amass a long list of more and more specific details, here, but the image is systematically fixed, it is all there is of it, it is one of a kind. I�d say that the picture doesn�t change, but of course it did. Fame changed it.
So I read the caption, knowing what I know. What changes with the caption? Not Rita. No, her husband changes. Her husband, not being famous, seems suddenly slightly louche, as if there were something slightly sinister about that scarf or Ascot tie. Is this the ornament that betrays the pimp? And the woman�s gesture - the pistol - is now defensive. She smiles, but she won�t let him get to her. He sits so pretty on the arm of the loveseat, above her, patronizing, even... threatening. He �pressed her� - but surely she resisted.
The caption makes the picture talk to me, as the picture itself doesn�t. The linguistic order, as opposed to the order of the image, is expansive. Whatever frames the possibility of speech, here, is indeterminate. I unconsciously think of the caption as what these two are saying to each other, but that isn�t quite it. It is what they aren�t saying � it is what they are meaning to each other. Something which isn�t said � something which transcends saying. Meaning is easy for the picture, saying is impossible. Linking the picture to that verbal data is the celebrity biographer�s act of supreme fiction. The pictures in the celebrity biography are a sort of abridged version of what the biography is about: becoming-famous.
3. �Who were these serious cocksuckers, these jerk-offs who approached moving pictures as if they were fucking reality, who wouldn�t even know reality if it bit them on the ass?" - Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.
The technical term for a verbal picture, in classical rhetoric, is ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is considered slightly suspect in the world of scholarly biographies. It exists there, if at all, in order to entertain, as a distraction from the real business of analysis.
Not so in the CB - it is ekphrasis-happy.
Since a verbal picture is a picture, it permits - it wants - a caption. This way, the same dynamic between picture and caption can be embedded in the story. The voice of the caption can become, by imperceptible increments, the actual voice of the celebrity. Martin is not being quoted verbatim by my citation from Tosches, but is being, in a sense, invaded. We are overhearing his thoughts as he ponders some bad press. In Tosches� Dino, we overhear his thoughts quite a bit. Tosches extrapolates from quotes he�s culled from other celebrity bios - most notably, Kitty Kelly�s His Way: The unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra. He couldn�t extrapolate "cocksucker" from, say, Dean Martin�s interview with TV Guide - that language is already public, already completely invaded. It is not Dean Martin�s own, whether he spoke it or not. When the celebrity speaks in an interview, we know the words are part of a program. They are publicity. They are, as Jack Nicholson once said, "selling eggs." Cocksucker, though, is oddly authentic.
It is necessary to stage some invasion if we are going to be intimate with the celebrity. We are presumed to be not famous, our faces never figuring in the pictures. But we have no solidarity with the other not famous � they compete with us. Why them? So the CB, promising us intimacy, restores some fairness. The real story, the man as he has never been seen before. The man behind the mask.
Tosches� technique, in a novel, would be called interior monologue. Because modernist novels started using it in the 20s - Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf - the academic might suppose that the celebrity biography took this technique from the novel. I think, however, that both genres got it from the where captions and pictures come together - the newspapers and the movies.
4. "Here�s the deal: No one knows, and no one with any integrity has ever spoken. About anything" - Loni Anderson, My Life in High Heels, about her alleged fight with Burt Reynolds on the eve of their wedding.
In philosophical relativism, the truth of an expression depends upon a given system�s norms for selecting true statements. Truth isn�t necessarily about picturing facts, unless, within the system, we make it a rule that the truth is necessarily about picturing facts. Coherence trumps correspondence, to use the jargon.
The C.B. is a limit case of relativism. Here, the relation between tabloid truth and the sources of verifiable fact are shadowy, at best. Was Errol Flynn a Nazi Spy, as Charles Higham maintains in Errol Flynn: The Untold Story? Or is Higham a fraud, as Tony Thomas says, in Errol Flynn: The Spy who never was? On her wedding night, did Jean Harlow naughtily wave a giant dildo under her husband�s nose, mocking his penis, which measured about the size of her pinkie? Or was Irving Shulman fantasizing in Harlow: An Intimate Biography, as Jean�s friend Adela Rogers St. Johns forcefully maintained (by "forcefully maintained, I mean she whacked Shulman on the head with her purse on TV, according to David Stenn in Bombshell, Jean Harlow�s most recent biography. As we know from Freud, the purse is a symbol of the vagina. So if Shulman is lying about Harlow�s husband�s dick, how appropriate that he get whacked with Harlow�s friend�s pussy � okay, pussy substitute). Did Sonny Liston throw his first fight to Cassius Clay, as Nick Tosches charges in his just published The Devil and Sonny Liston? Or did Sonny�s lineman, Joe Polino, put a special linement on Sonny�s gloves in the fourth round to blind the challenger, as Nigel Collins says in Boxing Babylon?
It isn�t just that the norms, in this genre, are vague - you get a feeling that they are a sap�s game. There�s another game going on, another history. It�s Chinatown, Jake.
Remora
LI's brothers live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For their affection and votes, two men were running for the House of Representatives in the Republican Primary this year: Bob Barr and John Linder.
LI knew who the right choice was there, all right. It was Barr, all the way.
Barr, though, was defeated, and polite liberalism everywhere seems to find this only proper. Here's the WP editorial about it:
"There was no nastiness or acid-dripping one-liner that was too much for Bob Barr. He proudly broadcast a commercial depicting himself as a bulldog. Voters in the 7th District, though conservative, had no use for a spotlight-craving politician who lives for the insult."
Living for the insult isn't such a bad thing to do if you are good at insulting. Bob Barr was to conservativism what Gorgeous George was to wrestling -- a man who made a minor art form out of a fixed and venal venue. To call Linder, his opponent, non-descript is to exaggerate. Apparently at one point, Linder, in a debate with Barr, alluded to his 39 year marriage. Well, that is about the sum of the man's accomplishments -- he is able to perform monogamy.
Barr and Linder shared rightwing records, but the good thing about Barr was that he was, eccentrically enough, a civil libertarian. He sponsored a bill with Barney Frank to abolish drug forfeiture law, and it even passed. It was later vetoed by Clinton, ever afraid of not appearing tough on crime, even if that means countenancing the transformation of police departments into banditti. And banditti, moreover, who prey on blacks -- racial profiling being, in one of its aspects, the expropriating of 'inappropriate' sums of money from black men on our nations highways, from New Jersey to Louisiana. Barr was, like Linder, a good second amendment man -- and LI does have a weakness for that second amendment. But the love affair with the pistol does seem to have awakened him to some of the more onerous encroachments of the government on our civil liberties. There was a story in the American Prospect, last year, about the alliance between Barr and the ACLU to modify the more barbarous strippings of our freedom proposed, in the name of the Heimat, by the Bush coup team:
"The day after the attack, Halperin [with the ACLU] began e-mailing his colleagues. By the time they called their first press conference on September 20, they had a name (Organizations in Defense of Freedom), a 10-point statement of principles, and even spin-offs (such as Computer Scientists in Defense of Freedom). They also had a secret weapon: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, scourge of the liberals, conservative guru par excellence. "The Bush administration said, 'We've got a bill that we've gotta pass right away,'" recalls Norquist. "As soon as I heard that, I began to get worried."...
"Almost immediately, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill began to sound a lot like Ted Kennedy. "Why is it necessary to propose a laundry list of changes to criminal law generally and criminal procedure generally and cast such a wide net?" Republican Congressman Bob Barr demanded in the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on Attorney General John Ashcroft's antiterrorism proposals. "And why is it necessary to rush this through?"
It strikes LI as nutty that some liberals think electing Linder is a victory. It isn't. It seems like a victory only if you confuse partisan wrangling -- for instance, Barr's prominence as a Clinton impeacher -- with real political goals. If you do, you will always have a home with the DNC.
LI's brothers live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For their affection and votes, two men were running for the House of Representatives in the Republican Primary this year: Bob Barr and John Linder.
LI knew who the right choice was there, all right. It was Barr, all the way.
Barr, though, was defeated, and polite liberalism everywhere seems to find this only proper. Here's the WP editorial about it:
"There was no nastiness or acid-dripping one-liner that was too much for Bob Barr. He proudly broadcast a commercial depicting himself as a bulldog. Voters in the 7th District, though conservative, had no use for a spotlight-craving politician who lives for the insult."
Living for the insult isn't such a bad thing to do if you are good at insulting. Bob Barr was to conservativism what Gorgeous George was to wrestling -- a man who made a minor art form out of a fixed and venal venue. To call Linder, his opponent, non-descript is to exaggerate. Apparently at one point, Linder, in a debate with Barr, alluded to his 39 year marriage. Well, that is about the sum of the man's accomplishments -- he is able to perform monogamy.
Barr and Linder shared rightwing records, but the good thing about Barr was that he was, eccentrically enough, a civil libertarian. He sponsored a bill with Barney Frank to abolish drug forfeiture law, and it even passed. It was later vetoed by Clinton, ever afraid of not appearing tough on crime, even if that means countenancing the transformation of police departments into banditti. And banditti, moreover, who prey on blacks -- racial profiling being, in one of its aspects, the expropriating of 'inappropriate' sums of money from black men on our nations highways, from New Jersey to Louisiana. Barr was, like Linder, a good second amendment man -- and LI does have a weakness for that second amendment. But the love affair with the pistol does seem to have awakened him to some of the more onerous encroachments of the government on our civil liberties. There was a story in the American Prospect, last year, about the alliance between Barr and the ACLU to modify the more barbarous strippings of our freedom proposed, in the name of the Heimat, by the Bush coup team:
"The day after the attack, Halperin [with the ACLU] began e-mailing his colleagues. By the time they called their first press conference on September 20, they had a name (Organizations in Defense of Freedom), a 10-point statement of principles, and even spin-offs (such as Computer Scientists in Defense of Freedom). They also had a secret weapon: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, scourge of the liberals, conservative guru par excellence. "The Bush administration said, 'We've got a bill that we've gotta pass right away,'" recalls Norquist. "As soon as I heard that, I began to get worried."...
"Almost immediately, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill began to sound a lot like Ted Kennedy. "Why is it necessary to propose a laundry list of changes to criminal law generally and criminal procedure generally and cast such a wide net?" Republican Congressman Bob Barr demanded in the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on Attorney General John Ashcroft's antiterrorism proposals. "And why is it necessary to rush this through?"
It strikes LI as nutty that some liberals think electing Linder is a victory. It isn't. It seems like a victory only if you confuse partisan wrangling -- for instance, Barr's prominence as a Clinton impeacher -- with real political goals. If you do, you will always have a home with the DNC.
Thursday, August 22, 2002
Note: LI looks around the world, or its representation, today, and what do we see? Breaking news on Enron (from the flipping of one of Andie Fastow's crucial boys to the odd, unremarked arrest of the past chairman of Wessex Water, an Enron spin-off, for bribery), global warming (ignored by coup leader Bush) on the agenda in Johannesberg, and the ever present Iraq war. But instead of politics -- it is much too hot for politics -- we are thinking of putting up an old essay we wrote for Feed on Celebrity Biographies. Feed's editors, as a matter of fact, didn't like the piece, so after several tries we parted ways, with LI out of pocket to the extent of having spent the time to do the thing. Anyway, the CB essay is entitled, 13 ways of looking at a Celebrity Biography. At some point today, we are gonna put it up.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Remora
Remora
LI is surprised, this morning, that the Bush administration came through on an old American promise, and released documents on the 1970s Terror in Argentina.
LI has no doubt they were sifted to remove various inconvenient names -- such as Kissinger's -- but it is one of the few applaudable American actions of the past couple of months. Here are two grafs:
"One embassy dispatch, for example, cites an Argentine source who says that captured leftist fighters, known as Montoneros, were all dealt with in the same way, through "torture and summary execution."
"The security forces neither trust nor know how to use legal solutions," the dispatch quotes the source as saying. "The present methods are easier and more familiar."
Now, LI has always thought that the great mystery of the Argentina terror was whether the Monteneros weren't ultimately led by an agent provacateur. This is the thesis put forth in a great book of political reportage, "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War," by Martin Edward Anderson. The leader of the Monteneros, the sinister Mario Firmenich, survived the military repression, and is now, we believe, languishing in jail, an odd scapegoat in the accord that basically allowed the fascist apparat in Argentina to escape, unscathed, with its crimes. According to Jorge Castaneda's history of the Latin American left, the money accrued by the Montonero's policy of systematic kidnapping went to Cuba, and thence to the Sandinistas, with Castro acting as a broker. There's a strange parallel in the course of action taken by the right and left in Argentina, with the right proceeding to install a cocaine-ish military regime in Bolivia and aiding the Contras with weapons and training, and the left helping the Sandinistas even up to training their secret police. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the guerrillas proudly proclaimed their responsibility for acts of violence some of which they certainly did not commit. Firminich seemed to have a passion for the planning and committing of acts that were, from the perspective of either damaging the regime or rousing the people, so grossly misplanned, and so criminal, that they seem congruent with the military's own on-going effort to legitimate its counter-terror to the population. And that population, of course, went about its business purposely not noticing the disapppearance of this or that person, or the body parts washing up on the banks of the La Plata. For what was special about Argentina was that the crimes were known as they were being committed.
Moral is, of course, don't think that the good middle class will necessarily rise up in revolt if some of its sons and daughters, and many of its troublemakers, are bloodied. In fact, in the U.S., how many have risen up, so far, and asked questions about the illegal detention of at least a thousand people since 9/11? Count em on your fingers. This is not even an issue going into the November election. And if these arabic named guys and gals disappear, does anybody imagine the American population drawing back in revulsion?
Now, Anderson's thesis would be absurd in the world as it is portrayed in your average daily paper. That is the newspaper, by the way, that publishes, with the utmost credulity, scare stories fomented by the Attorney General's office about the capture of terrorists with dirty bombs in the A section -- and publishes retractions of those stories months later, in the C section, if at all. But the figure of the agent provocateur is all too common in the political netherworld -- as Joseph Conrad shows in Under Western Eyes. And in Argentina, the idea that the Montonero high command could have been working on an agenda that converged with the military agenda has floated around for some time. In a memorial notice to the great Argentina journalist Rudolfo Walsh, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald recently discussed the possibility that his ambush and assassination was a set-up:
"At the moment of his death, Walsh, disguised as an old-age pensioner, was on his way to a meeting with Jos� Salgado, the Montonero and police officer who - in July 1976 - placed in the Central Police Department the bomb which killed 20 policemen and maimed some 60 others. Strangely enough, Walsh - who was a high-ranking member of Montoneros intelligence - did not know on that fatal morning Salgado had been captured months previously, tortured beyond recognition and executed. In other words Rodolfo Walsh was set up by his own Montoneros whose leadership may have been working with and for the armed forces. The point has never been clarified, but there can be no doubt some terrorists were serving both masters and not everyone was as committed to their ideals as Rodolfo Walsh was."
That Walsh, a moralist in the tradition of Kraus and Peguy, and a journalist in the mould of Seymor Hersch, could countenance Salgado, tells us something about the state of terror then existing. Walsh's daughter, incidentally, was killed in a shootout with the cops the year before Walsh was bushwacked. Walsh's career is not known in the U.S. -- he hasn't been translated -- so for our American readers, here's a summary of his career:
"He is credited with being the father of investigative journalism in Argentina. In 1957 he published Operaci�n Masacre - based on an interview with a survivor - which tells the real story of how a group of 34 men, most of whom had no connection with a recent revolt against the Aramburu dictatorship, were taken to a garbage dump in Jos� Le�n Su�rez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and summarily executed in a hail of machine gun fire. "All Peronists", said Per�n, "are indebted to the author of Operaci�n Masacre", but Walsh was now a marked man and anonymous death threats became part of his life.
"In 1969 he published �Qui�n Mat� a Rosendo? which tells how trade-unionist, Rosendo Garc�a, died in an Avellaneda pizzeria in a shoot-out between rival unionists, Raimundo Ongaro and Augusto �Wolf� Vandor (2). In 1973 he published �El Caso Satanovsky� which tells the sordid tale of the murder of a leading lawyer who was litigating against the military government. None of these cases were ever solved and Rodolfo Walsh became an unpopular name for many powerful people for having investigated them."
LI wonders whether the full story of what happened in the seventies in Latin America will ever be uncovered. But certain things can be uncovered by the determined individual investigator. Although I could not find a photo of Jose Salgado, I did find a picture of a kid -- Alfredo Daniel Salgado -- whose clear and present danger to the State was snuffed, no doubt by an airplane trip, or the bloody necessity of torture. The Sinolvido site, by the way, contains photos of 3,000 of the disappeared. The high school album.
Remora
LI is surprised, this morning, that the Bush administration came through on an old American promise, and released documents on the 1970s Terror in Argentina.
LI has no doubt they were sifted to remove various inconvenient names -- such as Kissinger's -- but it is one of the few applaudable American actions of the past couple of months. Here are two grafs:
"One embassy dispatch, for example, cites an Argentine source who says that captured leftist fighters, known as Montoneros, were all dealt with in the same way, through "torture and summary execution."
"The security forces neither trust nor know how to use legal solutions," the dispatch quotes the source as saying. "The present methods are easier and more familiar."
Now, LI has always thought that the great mystery of the Argentina terror was whether the Monteneros weren't ultimately led by an agent provacateur. This is the thesis put forth in a great book of political reportage, "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War," by Martin Edward Anderson. The leader of the Monteneros, the sinister Mario Firmenich, survived the military repression, and is now, we believe, languishing in jail, an odd scapegoat in the accord that basically allowed the fascist apparat in Argentina to escape, unscathed, with its crimes. According to Jorge Castaneda's history of the Latin American left, the money accrued by the Montonero's policy of systematic kidnapping went to Cuba, and thence to the Sandinistas, with Castro acting as a broker. There's a strange parallel in the course of action taken by the right and left in Argentina, with the right proceeding to install a cocaine-ish military regime in Bolivia and aiding the Contras with weapons and training, and the left helping the Sandinistas even up to training their secret police. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the guerrillas proudly proclaimed their responsibility for acts of violence some of which they certainly did not commit. Firminich seemed to have a passion for the planning and committing of acts that were, from the perspective of either damaging the regime or rousing the people, so grossly misplanned, and so criminal, that they seem congruent with the military's own on-going effort to legitimate its counter-terror to the population. And that population, of course, went about its business purposely not noticing the disapppearance of this or that person, or the body parts washing up on the banks of the La Plata. For what was special about Argentina was that the crimes were known as they were being committed.
Moral is, of course, don't think that the good middle class will necessarily rise up in revolt if some of its sons and daughters, and many of its troublemakers, are bloodied. In fact, in the U.S., how many have risen up, so far, and asked questions about the illegal detention of at least a thousand people since 9/11? Count em on your fingers. This is not even an issue going into the November election. And if these arabic named guys and gals disappear, does anybody imagine the American population drawing back in revulsion?
Now, Anderson's thesis would be absurd in the world as it is portrayed in your average daily paper. That is the newspaper, by the way, that publishes, with the utmost credulity, scare stories fomented by the Attorney General's office about the capture of terrorists with dirty bombs in the A section -- and publishes retractions of those stories months later, in the C section, if at all. But the figure of the agent provocateur is all too common in the political netherworld -- as Joseph Conrad shows in Under Western Eyes. And in Argentina, the idea that the Montonero high command could have been working on an agenda that converged with the military agenda has floated around for some time. In a memorial notice to the great Argentina journalist Rudolfo Walsh, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald recently discussed the possibility that his ambush and assassination was a set-up:
"At the moment of his death, Walsh, disguised as an old-age pensioner, was on his way to a meeting with Jos� Salgado, the Montonero and police officer who - in July 1976 - placed in the Central Police Department the bomb which killed 20 policemen and maimed some 60 others. Strangely enough, Walsh - who was a high-ranking member of Montoneros intelligence - did not know on that fatal morning Salgado had been captured months previously, tortured beyond recognition and executed. In other words Rodolfo Walsh was set up by his own Montoneros whose leadership may have been working with and for the armed forces. The point has never been clarified, but there can be no doubt some terrorists were serving both masters and not everyone was as committed to their ideals as Rodolfo Walsh was."
That Walsh, a moralist in the tradition of Kraus and Peguy, and a journalist in the mould of Seymor Hersch, could countenance Salgado, tells us something about the state of terror then existing. Walsh's daughter, incidentally, was killed in a shootout with the cops the year before Walsh was bushwacked. Walsh's career is not known in the U.S. -- he hasn't been translated -- so for our American readers, here's a summary of his career:
"He is credited with being the father of investigative journalism in Argentina. In 1957 he published Operaci�n Masacre - based on an interview with a survivor - which tells the real story of how a group of 34 men, most of whom had no connection with a recent revolt against the Aramburu dictatorship, were taken to a garbage dump in Jos� Le�n Su�rez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and summarily executed in a hail of machine gun fire. "All Peronists", said Per�n, "are indebted to the author of Operaci�n Masacre", but Walsh was now a marked man and anonymous death threats became part of his life.
"In 1969 he published �Qui�n Mat� a Rosendo? which tells how trade-unionist, Rosendo Garc�a, died in an Avellaneda pizzeria in a shoot-out between rival unionists, Raimundo Ongaro and Augusto �Wolf� Vandor (2). In 1973 he published �El Caso Satanovsky� which tells the sordid tale of the murder of a leading lawyer who was litigating against the military government. None of these cases were ever solved and Rodolfo Walsh became an unpopular name for many powerful people for having investigated them."
LI wonders whether the full story of what happened in the seventies in Latin America will ever be uncovered. But certain things can be uncovered by the determined individual investigator. Although I could not find a photo of Jose Salgado, I did find a picture of a kid -- Alfredo Daniel Salgado -- whose clear and present danger to the State was snuffed, no doubt by an airplane trip, or the bloody necessity of torture. The Sinolvido site, by the way, contains photos of 3,000 of the disappeared. The high school album.
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Dope
LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?
Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.
So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:
"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.
This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.
Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."
This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.
But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.
LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?
Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.
So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:
"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.
This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.
Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."
This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.
But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.
Friday, August 16, 2002
Dope
LI heard from an old friend the other day, Tom S. Tom, it appears, is coming to Austin and wants to see his old drinking buddy. We immediately became soggy from nostalgia.
It was, what, twelve years ago? Fifteen? Yes, LI was as thin as a malnourished radish, an outlier in the U.T. Philosophy department. We had already decided that the academic life wasn�t for us. Or the academic life had made that decision � kicked out or quit, life�s eternal question, no? Our friend Janet Flesch, who was also in the department, was teaching an advanced philo class, and Tom was one of her students, which is how we met.
There�s that wonderful phrase of Goethe�s: elective affinities. Friendship is about alchemistry, the obscure movement of sensibilities, and the metallic symbols thereof. Right. The transmutations of base metals. Nietzsche and alcohol.
There is a certain personality that receives Nietzsche like evolution received that comet 65 million years ago � he gets rid of everything clumsy that has been crawling around, fearsome and stupid, on the planet of one�s life. LI admits, without shame, to that impact. We think Tom was undergoing something similar. Now, back then, LI was quite a sharp talker when it came to the Gotterdammerung. On the other hand, as much as we liked to drink, we were saddled with the above mentioned malnourished radish frame. We were 29, 30, and weighed 130 � and we�ve put on, on a good day, when we are soaking wet, at least ten pounds since then. So we would sit with Tom and his friends in a bar that, at the time, the University of Texas was kind enough to offer its over 21 year old students. A bar that is gone with the wind, assisted by the Puritanism of the Texas legislature, nowadays. We would drink until we were swimming on dry land. Then, in a haze in which we could actually see light make that transition from particle to wave and back � light was doing this all around us, it was actually getting to be a drag -- we would say goodbye to Tom�s table and try to make it out of the building. Usually at this point the architectural peculiarity of the building intervened � it was designed to become a maze for visionaries and drunk people, leading them to the nearest convenient bathroom. There we would stay, evacuating, at intervals, unnecessary nourishment in some beautiful stall, with informative graffiti about ethnic groups, available women, and the sexual derring do of various fraternities, all that oral ministration to random penises, illustrated with magic marker, until a university cop would knock on the door of the stall, gallantry offering assistance.
A golden age. Ah yes, I remember it welllll�
LI heard from an old friend the other day, Tom S. Tom, it appears, is coming to Austin and wants to see his old drinking buddy. We immediately became soggy from nostalgia.
It was, what, twelve years ago? Fifteen? Yes, LI was as thin as a malnourished radish, an outlier in the U.T. Philosophy department. We had already decided that the academic life wasn�t for us. Or the academic life had made that decision � kicked out or quit, life�s eternal question, no? Our friend Janet Flesch, who was also in the department, was teaching an advanced philo class, and Tom was one of her students, which is how we met.
There�s that wonderful phrase of Goethe�s: elective affinities. Friendship is about alchemistry, the obscure movement of sensibilities, and the metallic symbols thereof. Right. The transmutations of base metals. Nietzsche and alcohol.
There is a certain personality that receives Nietzsche like evolution received that comet 65 million years ago � he gets rid of everything clumsy that has been crawling around, fearsome and stupid, on the planet of one�s life. LI admits, without shame, to that impact. We think Tom was undergoing something similar. Now, back then, LI was quite a sharp talker when it came to the Gotterdammerung. On the other hand, as much as we liked to drink, we were saddled with the above mentioned malnourished radish frame. We were 29, 30, and weighed 130 � and we�ve put on, on a good day, when we are soaking wet, at least ten pounds since then. So we would sit with Tom and his friends in a bar that, at the time, the University of Texas was kind enough to offer its over 21 year old students. A bar that is gone with the wind, assisted by the Puritanism of the Texas legislature, nowadays. We would drink until we were swimming on dry land. Then, in a haze in which we could actually see light make that transition from particle to wave and back � light was doing this all around us, it was actually getting to be a drag -- we would say goodbye to Tom�s table and try to make it out of the building. Usually at this point the architectural peculiarity of the building intervened � it was designed to become a maze for visionaries and drunk people, leading them to the nearest convenient bathroom. There we would stay, evacuating, at intervals, unnecessary nourishment in some beautiful stall, with informative graffiti about ethnic groups, available women, and the sexual derring do of various fraternities, all that oral ministration to random penises, illustrated with magic marker, until a university cop would knock on the door of the stall, gallantry offering assistance.
A golden age. Ah yes, I remember it welllll�
Thursday, August 15, 2002
Remora
Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies
When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...
Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.
It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.
In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.
LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.
Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:
"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."
McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.
McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:
Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.
LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...
Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.
Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.
So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.
Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.
The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.
Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies
When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...
Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.
It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.
In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.
LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.
Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:
"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."
McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.
McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:
Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.
LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...
Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.
Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.
So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.
Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.
The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Remora
"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.
Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.
However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.
However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."
LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:
"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.
(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."
This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.
After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:
"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."
Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:
"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."
What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:
"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."
We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.
"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.
Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.
However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.
However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."
LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:
"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.
(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."
This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.
After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:
"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."
Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:
"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."
What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:
"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."
We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Remora
Three Blind Mice
No. Many more blind mice than that. Herds of 'em. The WP has a funny article today about the loosening of support, among the Republicocracy, for diverting Social Security into private accounts to be run by all of us, individually, usin' our God given ingenuity. Apparently as 401(k)s come back filled with pocket lint, and retirement accounts are wiped out, the pilfering of Social Security is not the call to colors it was in the past:
"In some cases, GOP lawmakers such as Reps. George W. Gekas (Pa.) and Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (Miss.) are opposing Bush's proposal after praising it in the past. At least three Republican congressional challengers -- Rick Clayburgh (N.D.), William J. Janklow (S.D.) and Jon Porter (Nev.) -- have disavowed the idea of private accounts. Many other Republicans are playing down previous endorsements of privatizing all or part of Social Security as a way to bolster the system before it goes broke."
Tergiversation, on this issue, is spine-snapping. Witness the sullen Mark Kennedy. Kennedy, along with some 117 other legislators, signed a letter expressing max support for privatizing Social Security. It turns out he wasn't quite in his right mind that day -- like Hamlet, he was wandering distracted about D.C., construing the shapes of clouds. Wouldn't you know it? Some nefarious villain, probably a Democratic operative, obviously thrust the letter into his hands and told him it was about supporting motherhood and pledging to honor the Golden Rule.
"In Minnesota's 6th District, Rep. Mark Kennedy, a GOP freshman locked in a tough reelection fight, has tempered his support for creating private accounts. Although he signed the same letter as Pickering, he is campaigning feverishly to convince voters he has not switched his position.After initially denying to local reporters that he signed the letter, Kennedy now will only say: "I support exploring ways of strengthening Social Security. I don't know what those ways are."
Mr. Kennedy might want to explore the Argentina crisis. There was a, boldly heretical article about Argentina in the Times Sunday paper. Larry Rohter slipped through the neo-liberal police somehow. In his intro grafs, he highlights the fact that the IMF, backed by the US, has approved loans for Brasil and Uruguay, but not Argentina. Why? Well, the brunt of the article is that Argentina is in the doghouse as a deterrent. But Rohter's more subversive point is that the investing class that is punishing Argentina brought on Argentina's woes, in large part, by suggesting the "golden straightjacket" policies Argentina adopted, to such acclaim, in the nineties:
"... a growing number of independent analysts now maintain that many of Argentina's troubles stem from having followed Washington's advice in the first place and that the formula being insisted upon is only making matters worse."
The formula is, as LI readers know: cut back on social spending, achieve budget surpluses, maximize the private sector and cut the public sector to the bone. Etc. The libertarian dream. Otherwise known as the nightmare of reason.
To get back to Mr. Kennedy's voyage of exploration, one of the interesting tidbits in Rohter's article concerns the effects of privatizing social security. Argentina took the Chile route in the nineties and did just that:
"In reality, most of Argentina's deficit is simply the result of arbitrary accounting procedures and not a reflection of wastefulness. By privatizing the social security system in 1994, much in the fashion the Bush administration is now proposing in the United States, the Argentine government could no longer count social security payments as revenues and had to move them outside the budget.Had Argentina not privatized social security at the urging of the I.M.F., it would actually have shown a budget surplus in recent years. Indeed, according to another study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research early this year, government spending in Argentina has remained remarkably steady, at about 19 percent of G.D.P. throughout the 1990's."
This is all the more interesting insofar as the G.O.P., outside of its consensus advice to pee wee countries in the Southern Hemisphere, has become remarkably careless about budget deficits. LI sees nothing wrong with a budget deficit per se, but Bush's seems to have the same structure as R. Reagan's --there's no self-limiting mechanism built into it. It seems to be the start of something that is going to get worse, a lot worse, in fact, if the stock market flatlines. We do wonder what the deficit would be minus the Social security surpluses that they pop like candy up in D.C.
Three Blind Mice
No. Many more blind mice than that. Herds of 'em. The WP has a funny article today about the loosening of support, among the Republicocracy, for diverting Social Security into private accounts to be run by all of us, individually, usin' our God given ingenuity. Apparently as 401(k)s come back filled with pocket lint, and retirement accounts are wiped out, the pilfering of Social Security is not the call to colors it was in the past:
"In some cases, GOP lawmakers such as Reps. George W. Gekas (Pa.) and Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (Miss.) are opposing Bush's proposal after praising it in the past. At least three Republican congressional challengers -- Rick Clayburgh (N.D.), William J. Janklow (S.D.) and Jon Porter (Nev.) -- have disavowed the idea of private accounts. Many other Republicans are playing down previous endorsements of privatizing all or part of Social Security as a way to bolster the system before it goes broke."
Tergiversation, on this issue, is spine-snapping. Witness the sullen Mark Kennedy. Kennedy, along with some 117 other legislators, signed a letter expressing max support for privatizing Social Security. It turns out he wasn't quite in his right mind that day -- like Hamlet, he was wandering distracted about D.C., construing the shapes of clouds. Wouldn't you know it? Some nefarious villain, probably a Democratic operative, obviously thrust the letter into his hands and told him it was about supporting motherhood and pledging to honor the Golden Rule.
"In Minnesota's 6th District, Rep. Mark Kennedy, a GOP freshman locked in a tough reelection fight, has tempered his support for creating private accounts. Although he signed the same letter as Pickering, he is campaigning feverishly to convince voters he has not switched his position.After initially denying to local reporters that he signed the letter, Kennedy now will only say: "I support exploring ways of strengthening Social Security. I don't know what those ways are."
Mr. Kennedy might want to explore the Argentina crisis. There was a, boldly heretical article about Argentina in the Times Sunday paper. Larry Rohter slipped through the neo-liberal police somehow. In his intro grafs, he highlights the fact that the IMF, backed by the US, has approved loans for Brasil and Uruguay, but not Argentina. Why? Well, the brunt of the article is that Argentina is in the doghouse as a deterrent. But Rohter's more subversive point is that the investing class that is punishing Argentina brought on Argentina's woes, in large part, by suggesting the "golden straightjacket" policies Argentina adopted, to such acclaim, in the nineties:
"... a growing number of independent analysts now maintain that many of Argentina's troubles stem from having followed Washington's advice in the first place and that the formula being insisted upon is only making matters worse."
The formula is, as LI readers know: cut back on social spending, achieve budget surpluses, maximize the private sector and cut the public sector to the bone. Etc. The libertarian dream. Otherwise known as the nightmare of reason.
To get back to Mr. Kennedy's voyage of exploration, one of the interesting tidbits in Rohter's article concerns the effects of privatizing social security. Argentina took the Chile route in the nineties and did just that:
"In reality, most of Argentina's deficit is simply the result of arbitrary accounting procedures and not a reflection of wastefulness. By privatizing the social security system in 1994, much in the fashion the Bush administration is now proposing in the United States, the Argentine government could no longer count social security payments as revenues and had to move them outside the budget.Had Argentina not privatized social security at the urging of the I.M.F., it would actually have shown a budget surplus in recent years. Indeed, according to another study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research early this year, government spending in Argentina has remained remarkably steady, at about 19 percent of G.D.P. throughout the 1990's."
This is all the more interesting insofar as the G.O.P., outside of its consensus advice to pee wee countries in the Southern Hemisphere, has become remarkably careless about budget deficits. LI sees nothing wrong with a budget deficit per se, but Bush's seems to have the same structure as R. Reagan's --there's no self-limiting mechanism built into it. It seems to be the start of something that is going to get worse, a lot worse, in fact, if the stock market flatlines. We do wonder what the deficit would be minus the Social security surpluses that they pop like candy up in D.C.
Monday, August 12, 2002
Remora
James Ridgeway, Village Voice's reliably left (if sometimes monotonous) political columnist, suggests something pretty cool in his column today. Ridgeway raps on the practical impunity surrounding the major looters of corporations. This means, rather predictably, wheeling out the very specimen and macrocosm of power used corruptly to avert justice: Ken Lay. Ridgeway hammers on this old theme. But then Ridgeway departs from merely adding his scolding to the unanimous condemnation of mankind and throws out an idea that should be embraced by some Dem, somewhere. This is the kind of idea that could really work:
"Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish. "
Ridgeway could easily have developed his idea a bit with regard to Enron. There was an interesting article last week in the Houston Chronicle about the way in which, in the last month of Enron's run, workers from the old pipeline division -- which was despised by the minions of Skilling, all of whom were New Economy rip-off artists who wanted to run an "asset-less' company, but battened like leaches on the money flow of the pipes (the only real money flow at Enron, except the continuous rain of currency into the pockets of the undeserving exec strata) --- anyway, how in a last burst of kick em in the teeth, these old reliable asset guys were cheated out of their deferred compensations in favor of the energy trader division. This division, by the way, was losing money. Anyway, according to the Chronicle article, Lawrence "Greg" Whalley, "then the chief operating officer of the company," made decisions that systematically skewed distribution of the money that was left in the deferred compensation accounts to those who, in Whalley's lawyer's rich phase, were "continuing to add value" to the company.
Now who were those people who were adding value to the company? Why, they were part of the trading group that was eventually sold to UBSWarburg -- which, coincidence of coincidences, is where Whalley ended up himself. So here we have a company, the heart of which is a money losing deal machine that is still sexy enough to be packaged and sold to another company. [note: the energy trading outfit did look enough like a moneymaker at the time, given the smoke and mirrors of Enron's accounting, to be perceived as a valuable asset -- hence its acquisition. And with the correct management, it might actually be an asset. But the real assets, what Enron sold to raise real cash, were the natural gas pipe lines. Period] Here we have people who were dispersed over the multiple trading divisions (such as the loony broadband division) who have bootstrapped their entire careers and credibility on the cash flow coming from the real assets of the company, the pipes. And we have those same usurping locusts, as the Psalmist might put it, who were systematically infiltrated into top managerial positions, reluctantly deciding that the retiring pipemen -- the guys who made real money -- are going to have to bite it, because Whalley's clique are skipping ship and want to carry home a few mill in Christmas money.
This is exactly parallel to corrupt Teamster union locals that have been taken over by the feds. The same principle of pirates at the top looting people at the bottom.
If Ridgeway's plan were put into execution, it would put a stop to self aggrandizing deals for the scum of the universe... ooops, I mean the up and coming entrepeneur types, like Greg Whalley. As for the Whalley's, one's mind drifts to ... uh, pornographic fantasies of punishment. How about having these hardballing execs prove their ability to 'add value' to their future employers by being stripped of all their assets, including their wardrobes, appropriately draped in street couture (say, urinous old trousers found abandoned under some park bench), their ATM cards and platinum credit cards sheered through, their cars long ago seized and sold, and set loose then on some mean Houston alley at three in the foggy morning. Then let these top dogs ply their ingenuity as they will.
James Ridgeway, Village Voice's reliably left (if sometimes monotonous) political columnist, suggests something pretty cool in his column today. Ridgeway raps on the practical impunity surrounding the major looters of corporations. This means, rather predictably, wheeling out the very specimen and macrocosm of power used corruptly to avert justice: Ken Lay. Ridgeway hammers on this old theme. But then Ridgeway departs from merely adding his scolding to the unanimous condemnation of mankind and throws out an idea that should be embraced by some Dem, somewhere. This is the kind of idea that could really work:
"Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish. "
Ridgeway could easily have developed his idea a bit with regard to Enron. There was an interesting article last week in the Houston Chronicle about the way in which, in the last month of Enron's run, workers from the old pipeline division -- which was despised by the minions of Skilling, all of whom were New Economy rip-off artists who wanted to run an "asset-less' company, but battened like leaches on the money flow of the pipes (the only real money flow at Enron, except the continuous rain of currency into the pockets of the undeserving exec strata) --- anyway, how in a last burst of kick em in the teeth, these old reliable asset guys were cheated out of their deferred compensations in favor of the energy trader division. This division, by the way, was losing money. Anyway, according to the Chronicle article, Lawrence "Greg" Whalley, "then the chief operating officer of the company," made decisions that systematically skewed distribution of the money that was left in the deferred compensation accounts to those who, in Whalley's lawyer's rich phase, were "continuing to add value" to the company.
Now who were those people who were adding value to the company? Why, they were part of the trading group that was eventually sold to UBSWarburg -- which, coincidence of coincidences, is where Whalley ended up himself. So here we have a company, the heart of which is a money losing deal machine that is still sexy enough to be packaged and sold to another company. [note: the energy trading outfit did look enough like a moneymaker at the time, given the smoke and mirrors of Enron's accounting, to be perceived as a valuable asset -- hence its acquisition. And with the correct management, it might actually be an asset. But the real assets, what Enron sold to raise real cash, were the natural gas pipe lines. Period] Here we have people who were dispersed over the multiple trading divisions (such as the loony broadband division) who have bootstrapped their entire careers and credibility on the cash flow coming from the real assets of the company, the pipes. And we have those same usurping locusts, as the Psalmist might put it, who were systematically infiltrated into top managerial positions, reluctantly deciding that the retiring pipemen -- the guys who made real money -- are going to have to bite it, because Whalley's clique are skipping ship and want to carry home a few mill in Christmas money.
This is exactly parallel to corrupt Teamster union locals that have been taken over by the feds. The same principle of pirates at the top looting people at the bottom.
If Ridgeway's plan were put into execution, it would put a stop to self aggrandizing deals for the scum of the universe... ooops, I mean the up and coming entrepeneur types, like Greg Whalley. As for the Whalley's, one's mind drifts to ... uh, pornographic fantasies of punishment. How about having these hardballing execs prove their ability to 'add value' to their future employers by being stripped of all their assets, including their wardrobes, appropriately draped in street couture (say, urinous old trousers found abandoned under some park bench), their ATM cards and platinum credit cards sheered through, their cars long ago seized and sold, and set loose then on some mean Houston alley at three in the foggy morning. Then let these top dogs ply their ingenuity as they will.
Friday, August 09, 2002
Remora
I've just finished reviewing a book about Haiti. Maybe for that reason, I am sensitive this morning to the more egregious gestures of little Caesar-ism to which our present benighted administration is addicted. So I read the WP story about Bush's "economic forum" with a lot of sour amusement. This forum is apparently based upon the premise that of any two or more points of view, one of them is right; the right one, of course, is Bush's. This is a law of nature in Crawford Texas, it appears. As such, it would surely be ratified by our Supreme Court -- which has always displayed a touching concern for George Bush's feelings -- should it be taken before those august vampires.
"Bush Economic Forum to Exclude Critics, Officials Say" by Mike Allen
Bush, who sounds more and more like a ventriloquist's dummy -- hearing him, for instance, commemorate the nine rescued miners, I seriously wondered if he'd been exploring the wonders of hooch that morning -- has billed this summit, at Baylor University in Waco, as a call to Americans in all walks of life. Especially favored are those whose walks have included contributions to the Republican party in amounts of 100,000 dollars or more. Just your average Joe or Jane, don't you see? It is almost Dylan-esque: "Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land/ and don't criticize what you don't understand..." Indeed, this is the message of the last graf of the story:
"A media guide says the participants on the eight panels will have "diverse points of view," but the White House official acknowledged that there are limits. "I don't think there's any point in picking someone who has the opposite point of view," the official said."
Why is it that the Bush administration always exudes this air of a cheap coup? Maybe it it because they came to power on a cheap coup.
No, that's not true. That's a cheap jab.
The coup was very, very expensive. In fact, we all seem to be paying for it.
I've just finished reviewing a book about Haiti. Maybe for that reason, I am sensitive this morning to the more egregious gestures of little Caesar-ism to which our present benighted administration is addicted. So I read the WP story about Bush's "economic forum" with a lot of sour amusement. This forum is apparently based upon the premise that of any two or more points of view, one of them is right; the right one, of course, is Bush's. This is a law of nature in Crawford Texas, it appears. As such, it would surely be ratified by our Supreme Court -- which has always displayed a touching concern for George Bush's feelings -- should it be taken before those august vampires.
"Bush Economic Forum to Exclude Critics, Officials Say" by Mike Allen
Bush, who sounds more and more like a ventriloquist's dummy -- hearing him, for instance, commemorate the nine rescued miners, I seriously wondered if he'd been exploring the wonders of hooch that morning -- has billed this summit, at Baylor University in Waco, as a call to Americans in all walks of life. Especially favored are those whose walks have included contributions to the Republican party in amounts of 100,000 dollars or more. Just your average Joe or Jane, don't you see? It is almost Dylan-esque: "Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land/ and don't criticize what you don't understand..." Indeed, this is the message of the last graf of the story:
"A media guide says the participants on the eight panels will have "diverse points of view," but the White House official acknowledged that there are limits. "I don't think there's any point in picking someone who has the opposite point of view," the official said."
Why is it that the Bush administration always exudes this air of a cheap coup? Maybe it it because they came to power on a cheap coup.
No, that's not true. That's a cheap jab.
The coup was very, very expensive. In fact, we all seem to be paying for it.
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Remora
The career of a phrase.
Suppose, reader, that you are a brain surgeon. As you come into the operating theater, you lean over your patient, who is about to go under, and you tell him that, under the circumstances, if he pays you a fee on top of the fee you are getting to operate on him -- say about 100% of that fee -- he will promise to align his interests as a doctor with yours as a patient. Or suppose that you are a fireman. You mount the ladder, you meet the hollering woman in the fourth floor apartment, the flames are licking the curtains, and you tell her that for a fee -- say 100% of your current salary -- you will align your interests with her interest in being saved up to and including the promise to try not to drop her on the way down. Or say you work in an assembly line. You go to your foreman and propose that for a fee -- say 200% of your current salary -- you promise to align your interest with that of the company's, insofar as that involves making sure all the car parts are correctly fitted into place.
If you did that, you would lose your licence, as a surgeon, be fired and sued, as a fireman, or simply be dismissed, as a factory worker.
Ah, but if you are a CEO -- if you breathe and eat in that top level strata -- ah, then you are the type who might not really do anything for your salary. You might take your 2 mil a year and go to sleep behind your desk. Or you might take information you are privy to and give it to your competitors. Who knows with you CEOs? Marvelous, god like creatures, you rain and shine on all alike according to your inscrutable will. Or at least that seems to be the theory behind that supremely dumb phrase, "aligning the interests of management with those of the shareholders." If you read the business section, or even the front page of the newspaper, nowadays, you see that phrase thrown around with the utmost airiness, as if it is the most self evident thing in the world. The CEO, or CFO, or whatever, must be given stock options. Why? To align his interest with the shareholders. Here's an example of this kind of madness. It comes from my search for the phrase on Google. It comes from 1999. I wonder if Baxter International, or Deerfield Illinois, knows that they still have this announcement up on the web:
"DEERFIELD, Ill., May 4 -- Baxter International Inc. announced today that
142 senior managers have borrowed a total of $200 million in personal loans
to purchase 3.1 million shares of Baxter stock. The shares were purchased
at Baxter's closing price yesterday of $63.625 per share under a voluntary
plan that directly aligns the management team with Baxter's shareholders.
This shared investment plan was approved by Baxter's board of directors
earlier today.
This is the second time Baxter has implemented a shared investment plan.
In 1994 Baxter became one of the first companies in the world to use this
innovative approach to directly align management's interests with Baxter
shareholders. In that plan, 63 senior managers participated. Since that time,
several companies have implemented similar plans."
I put the phrase in italics, for those of you whose eyes glaze over when perusing the PR of obscure corporations. Baxter, in the annus mirabilis of 1999, was innovating all kinds of alignments of interest between management and shareholders. Here, for instance, is what they did for outgoing CEO Vernon Locke:
"In 1999, as Baxter International Inc.'s Vernon Loucks relinquished his CEO duties after 18 years, directors handed him a special stock-option grant of 950,000 shares "for the specific purposes of motivating" him "to implement a smooth transition of his responsibilities."
Ah, Vernon's successor is a man of sterner ethical character. In a Business Week report on executive compensation for 2001, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr, the current CEO, practically put himself on a diet of bread and water:
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr., CEO of Baxter International (BAX ), voluntarily cut his bonus by 40%, even though his company's stock climbed by 20% in 2001. The reason: Defective Baxter dialysis machines were linked to the deaths of more than 50 people. Kraemer, who earned total cash compensation of $1.6 million plus a grant of 600,000 options, says somebody had to pay the price for the dialysis machine deaths: "Fifty people died. If you have a problem, the buck stops somewhere, and it stops here."
Cutting your bonus -- your bonus, mind you -- down by 40%, while you receive your grant of 600,000 options is practically Christ-like in the world of CEOs, apparently.
So, to sum this sad and shabby tale up: never has piracy, never has the discreet looting of publicly held entities, been so delicately handled as it was in the 90s, and as it still is today. See how Baxter -- that ambiguous entity, that ontological anomoly -- practically glows with satisfaction. Begging their execs, who are probably paid quite a bit more than I am, to borrow money from their cash reserves, no doubt at a very reduced interest rate, and no doubt with some expectation that, if things turn south, all will be forgiven these shareholder aligning managers. Isn't it great to be king? Isn't incentive a wonderful thing, and isn't it to be extolled in 2 million to 4 million dollar houses from the Long Island to the Redwood Forest, as the unfortunately dis-incentivized Woody G. once sang? AH, here at last, we have found what we have been sailing the sea for lo these many years. The thing Marx couldn't imagine. The thing that makes all the U. of Chicago econ department light up like a Christmas tree. The very reductio ad absurdam of managerial capitalism.
LI is thinking of trying to do a more extensive search for the phrase, and selling an essay on that search, to some magazine, thus aligning our interests with those of John Q. Public. If you want to loan us money in the process -- say 50 million dollars -- please write me at RGathman@aol.com.
Hey, I might just accept your loan if the terms are good enough.
The career of a phrase.
Suppose, reader, that you are a brain surgeon. As you come into the operating theater, you lean over your patient, who is about to go under, and you tell him that, under the circumstances, if he pays you a fee on top of the fee you are getting to operate on him -- say about 100% of that fee -- he will promise to align his interests as a doctor with yours as a patient. Or suppose that you are a fireman. You mount the ladder, you meet the hollering woman in the fourth floor apartment, the flames are licking the curtains, and you tell her that for a fee -- say 100% of your current salary -- you will align your interests with her interest in being saved up to and including the promise to try not to drop her on the way down. Or say you work in an assembly line. You go to your foreman and propose that for a fee -- say 200% of your current salary -- you promise to align your interest with that of the company's, insofar as that involves making sure all the car parts are correctly fitted into place.
If you did that, you would lose your licence, as a surgeon, be fired and sued, as a fireman, or simply be dismissed, as a factory worker.
Ah, but if you are a CEO -- if you breathe and eat in that top level strata -- ah, then you are the type who might not really do anything for your salary. You might take your 2 mil a year and go to sleep behind your desk. Or you might take information you are privy to and give it to your competitors. Who knows with you CEOs? Marvelous, god like creatures, you rain and shine on all alike according to your inscrutable will. Or at least that seems to be the theory behind that supremely dumb phrase, "aligning the interests of management with those of the shareholders." If you read the business section, or even the front page of the newspaper, nowadays, you see that phrase thrown around with the utmost airiness, as if it is the most self evident thing in the world. The CEO, or CFO, or whatever, must be given stock options. Why? To align his interest with the shareholders. Here's an example of this kind of madness. It comes from my search for the phrase on Google. It comes from 1999. I wonder if Baxter International, or Deerfield Illinois, knows that they still have this announcement up on the web:
"DEERFIELD, Ill., May 4 -- Baxter International Inc. announced today that
142 senior managers have borrowed a total of $200 million in personal loans
to purchase 3.1 million shares of Baxter stock. The shares were purchased
at Baxter's closing price yesterday of $63.625 per share under a voluntary
plan that directly aligns the management team with Baxter's shareholders.
This shared investment plan was approved by Baxter's board of directors
earlier today.
This is the second time Baxter has implemented a shared investment plan.
In 1994 Baxter became one of the first companies in the world to use this
innovative approach to directly align management's interests with Baxter
shareholders. In that plan, 63 senior managers participated. Since that time,
several companies have implemented similar plans."
I put the phrase in italics, for those of you whose eyes glaze over when perusing the PR of obscure corporations. Baxter, in the annus mirabilis of 1999, was innovating all kinds of alignments of interest between management and shareholders. Here, for instance, is what they did for outgoing CEO Vernon Locke:
"In 1999, as Baxter International Inc.'s Vernon Loucks relinquished his CEO duties after 18 years, directors handed him a special stock-option grant of 950,000 shares "for the specific purposes of motivating" him "to implement a smooth transition of his responsibilities."
Ah, Vernon's successor is a man of sterner ethical character. In a Business Week report on executive compensation for 2001, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr, the current CEO, practically put himself on a diet of bread and water:
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr., CEO of Baxter International (BAX ), voluntarily cut his bonus by 40%, even though his company's stock climbed by 20% in 2001. The reason: Defective Baxter dialysis machines were linked to the deaths of more than 50 people. Kraemer, who earned total cash compensation of $1.6 million plus a grant of 600,000 options, says somebody had to pay the price for the dialysis machine deaths: "Fifty people died. If you have a problem, the buck stops somewhere, and it stops here."
Cutting your bonus -- your bonus, mind you -- down by 40%, while you receive your grant of 600,000 options is practically Christ-like in the world of CEOs, apparently.
So, to sum this sad and shabby tale up: never has piracy, never has the discreet looting of publicly held entities, been so delicately handled as it was in the 90s, and as it still is today. See how Baxter -- that ambiguous entity, that ontological anomoly -- practically glows with satisfaction. Begging their execs, who are probably paid quite a bit more than I am, to borrow money from their cash reserves, no doubt at a very reduced interest rate, and no doubt with some expectation that, if things turn south, all will be forgiven these shareholder aligning managers. Isn't it great to be king? Isn't incentive a wonderful thing, and isn't it to be extolled in 2 million to 4 million dollar houses from the Long Island to the Redwood Forest, as the unfortunately dis-incentivized Woody G. once sang? AH, here at last, we have found what we have been sailing the sea for lo these many years. The thing Marx couldn't imagine. The thing that makes all the U. of Chicago econ department light up like a Christmas tree. The very reductio ad absurdam of managerial capitalism.
LI is thinking of trying to do a more extensive search for the phrase, and selling an essay on that search, to some magazine, thus aligning our interests with those of John Q. Public. If you want to loan us money in the process -- say 50 million dollars -- please write me at RGathman@aol.com.
Hey, I might just accept your loan if the terms are good enough.
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Remora
In the seventies, Christopher Hill published an excellent book about the Protestant radicals who provided the ideological shock troops in the overthrow of Charles I in the English Civil War. The title of the book was World Turned Upside Down, which is the refrain in this ballad of the war:
"Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
Let's talk about Old Christmas being kickt out of Town, shall we? Or rather, let's talk about kicking the bejesus out of Old Christmas, the bill of rights, common sense, the spirit of dissent, the independence of the legislature, the standards of right action, and other assorted matters of spiritual and political import.
We've come to such a pretty pass in this country, re the warmongering attitude, the stripping away of Civil Service protections in place since Chester Allan Arthur's time, and other such trivial supports of the national polity, that LI is forced to turn to the business press for some measure of dissent. Business Week, of all papers, the old Taft Republican Business Week, publishes a column by their Washington correspondent, Howard Gleckman, that hectors congress for surrendering its perogatives, right and left, to the executive. Gleckman presents a list of abdications: the fast track legislation Bush will be signing tomorrow, for instance; or the astonishing anomolies written into the act to make Heimat security a cabinet post. The latter is a really bad piece of legislation anyway -- there is no need for this re-organization, there's no need to add this cabinet post at all, given the Department of Defense, and certainly the composition of the law is outrageous. The discussion of the provisions entitling appointed officials to hire and fire at will has remained at this low level: conservatives: this is just to get the guv'mint out of the grip of civil service unions; liberals: this is an insult to civil service unions. Without any seeming consciousness of the reason why civil service was given a measure of autonomy vis a vis the executive in the first place, i.e. corruption. That's right, when hiring and firing can be done at will by elected officials, guess what? You soon have a system in which hiriign and firing becomes a marketable service. If commentators think that Bush is too high minded, and has employed cabinet members who are too high minded, to engage in corrupt practices (oh my! not our Commander in Chief!), they might want to investigate Ken Lay's ability to get the old head of FERC replaced, in 2001, by a more Enron pliable figure of Pat Wood III -- who moved from his Texas post, the path to which had also been paved by the ubiquitous Lay, to the national post after Lay reportedly threatened the old FERC head, Curtis Herbert, over the issue of deregulating the California Electrical Power market. But this is an issue that goes beyond Bush. It goes back to U.S. Grant, and it is an endemic illness to which democracies are heir. But trust the right to have no consciousness of the political tradition going back to Montesquieu -- which used to be called, in fact, the Burkean tradition, since its font was Burke's suspicion about ideological schemes designed to improve society by way of the government. Burke would likely have been appalled at the Homeland Security re-organization, but then again -- what right winger is even aware of Burke anymore?
Ah, LI is getting into a temper. But to return to Gleckman's column. The juice in it is in the last three grafs, which are directed against the inevitable drift to war against Iraq. Here it is:
"But the real test will come in foreign affairs. The nation is already fighting an undeclared war against terrorism. Not only are U.S. forces at risk in Afghanistan, but they are also fighting in the Philippines and most likely other nations as well.
The need for formal congressional approval for such a shadow war is admittedly murky. But there should be no confusion when it comes to what the White House has led us all to believe is its next step: a war against Iraq. Congress has a responsibility to enact a declaration of war before such an operation begins. Bush's father was wise enough to seek a congressional OK for his 1991 attack on Iraq. Now, the current President Bush should do the same.
There is little sign, though, that he will do that. And, sadly, there is even less indication that Congress will insist upon it. If Bush's Iraqi invasion goes badly, we will all come to regret both the President's power grab and the Congress' acquiescence. And, like LBJ and FDR before him, Bush will learn a costly lesson about the limits of the Imperial Presidency. "
Well, he might learn a lesson. We don't care about Mr. Bush's education. It failed to make a mark on him in the impressionable years, obviously, and we doubt any imminent changes are in the offing. The man's level has been exposed for all of us to see for some time now. We are more concerned with the lack of any good reason for this war. There is no reason to think that war is the best way to accomplish disarming Saddam Hussein, if that is really what the U.S. wants to accomplish. And we are concerned about who will bear the brunt of the inevitable bad consequences of a war fought by the U.S. alone -- in spite of the American press' assurances, via no doubt unnamed sources in the administration, that Europe and several Middle Eastern allies will just be all tickled pink about the deal. We are concerned that the U.S. is following a visibly incompetent leader as he pursues a comic book foreign policy against the "axis of evil."
In the seventies, Christopher Hill published an excellent book about the Protestant radicals who provided the ideological shock troops in the overthrow of Charles I in the English Civil War. The title of the book was World Turned Upside Down, which is the refrain in this ballad of the war:
"Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
Let's talk about Old Christmas being kickt out of Town, shall we? Or rather, let's talk about kicking the bejesus out of Old Christmas, the bill of rights, common sense, the spirit of dissent, the independence of the legislature, the standards of right action, and other assorted matters of spiritual and political import.
We've come to such a pretty pass in this country, re the warmongering attitude, the stripping away of Civil Service protections in place since Chester Allan Arthur's time, and other such trivial supports of the national polity, that LI is forced to turn to the business press for some measure of dissent. Business Week, of all papers, the old Taft Republican Business Week, publishes a column by their Washington correspondent, Howard Gleckman, that hectors congress for surrendering its perogatives, right and left, to the executive. Gleckman presents a list of abdications: the fast track legislation Bush will be signing tomorrow, for instance; or the astonishing anomolies written into the act to make Heimat security a cabinet post. The latter is a really bad piece of legislation anyway -- there is no need for this re-organization, there's no need to add this cabinet post at all, given the Department of Defense, and certainly the composition of the law is outrageous. The discussion of the provisions entitling appointed officials to hire and fire at will has remained at this low level: conservatives: this is just to get the guv'mint out of the grip of civil service unions; liberals: this is an insult to civil service unions. Without any seeming consciousness of the reason why civil service was given a measure of autonomy vis a vis the executive in the first place, i.e. corruption. That's right, when hiring and firing can be done at will by elected officials, guess what? You soon have a system in which hiriign and firing becomes a marketable service. If commentators think that Bush is too high minded, and has employed cabinet members who are too high minded, to engage in corrupt practices (oh my! not our Commander in Chief!), they might want to investigate Ken Lay's ability to get the old head of FERC replaced, in 2001, by a more Enron pliable figure of Pat Wood III -- who moved from his Texas post, the path to which had also been paved by the ubiquitous Lay, to the national post after Lay reportedly threatened the old FERC head, Curtis Herbert, over the issue of deregulating the California Electrical Power market. But this is an issue that goes beyond Bush. It goes back to U.S. Grant, and it is an endemic illness to which democracies are heir. But trust the right to have no consciousness of the political tradition going back to Montesquieu -- which used to be called, in fact, the Burkean tradition, since its font was Burke's suspicion about ideological schemes designed to improve society by way of the government. Burke would likely have been appalled at the Homeland Security re-organization, but then again -- what right winger is even aware of Burke anymore?
Ah, LI is getting into a temper. But to return to Gleckman's column. The juice in it is in the last three grafs, which are directed against the inevitable drift to war against Iraq. Here it is:
"But the real test will come in foreign affairs. The nation is already fighting an undeclared war against terrorism. Not only are U.S. forces at risk in Afghanistan, but they are also fighting in the Philippines and most likely other nations as well.
The need for formal congressional approval for such a shadow war is admittedly murky. But there should be no confusion when it comes to what the White House has led us all to believe is its next step: a war against Iraq. Congress has a responsibility to enact a declaration of war before such an operation begins. Bush's father was wise enough to seek a congressional OK for his 1991 attack on Iraq. Now, the current President Bush should do the same.
There is little sign, though, that he will do that. And, sadly, there is even less indication that Congress will insist upon it. If Bush's Iraqi invasion goes badly, we will all come to regret both the President's power grab and the Congress' acquiescence. And, like LBJ and FDR before him, Bush will learn a costly lesson about the limits of the Imperial Presidency. "
Well, he might learn a lesson. We don't care about Mr. Bush's education. It failed to make a mark on him in the impressionable years, obviously, and we doubt any imminent changes are in the offing. The man's level has been exposed for all of us to see for some time now. We are more concerned with the lack of any good reason for this war. There is no reason to think that war is the best way to accomplish disarming Saddam Hussein, if that is really what the U.S. wants to accomplish. And we are concerned about who will bear the brunt of the inevitable bad consequences of a war fought by the U.S. alone -- in spite of the American press' assurances, via no doubt unnamed sources in the administration, that Europe and several Middle Eastern allies will just be all tickled pink about the deal. We are concerned that the U.S. is following a visibly incompetent leader as he pursues a comic book foreign policy against the "axis of evil."
Sunday, August 04, 2002
Remora
We like the LA Times -- we love LA -- we don't subscribe to the dismissive La La land stereotype -- but it is difficult for defenders of Southern California seriousness (with our pistols a-blazin'!) to read about the Post-nomadic economy, as breathlessly revealed in the Sunday Times, without, uh, wondering who put the marijuana in the arugala.
First comes the bio -- which we have copied faithfully from on-line:
"Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is author of "The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape." He is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Pu"
PU is what you get in Mr. Kotkin and Ms. Susanne Trimbath's take on the new new economy, the one after that recent nasty spate of nomadism -- you remember, reader. There you were, out there with your spear, your seal coat, your tatooed cattle, wandering through desert sands and ice floes and such. Well, no more! Here's what is coming up:
The post-nomadic trend reflects changes that were building up before the stock
market's current turbulence and Sept. 11. As Americans have aged and
become ever more capable of settling where they wish, because of the rise of
digital technology and the dispersal of economic activity, fewer of them than
ever are willing to pick everything up and move in pursuit of quick riches.
Fewer than 15% of Americans change addresses in any given year, down from
a high of 20% in the 1970s. Contrary to popular reporting, most baby
boomers, suggests demographer William H. Frey, "age in place." That is, they
stay where they are. This development suggests that residential property may
be the "gold" of the emerging economy because the home has become more
important to people financially. [LI remark: that homes become the "gold" of an economy as people retain them longer must be a feature of this great new post nomadic paradigm. In the old, stinky paradigm, that houses are built and sold added value to them as investments. But no longer! Mr. Kotkin has discovered that a frozen market is a golden market. Is that great or what? We are all hoping that the Davenport Institute of PU puts him up for a Nobel Prize next year. If they can extract him from his rocking chair, that is -- the man doesn't want to contravene his own paradigm by acting all nomadic, you know).
But post-nomadism is also about values that place greater emphasis on family,
faith and community. At the height of the 1990s stock boom, according to the
Zogby International poll, only one in three Americans defined their "American
dream" in spiritual, as opposed to purely material, terms. By 2000, a spiritual definition was embraced by 42% of Americans. After Sept. 11, the percentage grew to 52% of adults."
When you get poll numbers like that opting for the spiritual, the game is up! Here I'd think that after September 11th, an increasing segment of the population would be reaching for their de La Mettrie, rejecting the afterlife, spewing contempt on the intellectual bankruptcy of the concept of "soul," throwing themselves into libertine lifestyles of finite sensuality, and ever more aware that man is doomed to a brief career of organic vicissitude, after which the worms will go in, and the worms will go out. And what do you know -- Americans start doing American dreamtime as a spiritually defined thing.
We like the LA Times -- we love LA -- we don't subscribe to the dismissive La La land stereotype -- but it is difficult for defenders of Southern California seriousness (with our pistols a-blazin'!) to read about the Post-nomadic economy, as breathlessly revealed in the Sunday Times, without, uh, wondering who put the marijuana in the arugala.
First comes the bio -- which we have copied faithfully from on-line:
"Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is author of "The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape." He is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Pu"
PU is what you get in Mr. Kotkin and Ms. Susanne Trimbath's take on the new new economy, the one after that recent nasty spate of nomadism -- you remember, reader. There you were, out there with your spear, your seal coat, your tatooed cattle, wandering through desert sands and ice floes and such. Well, no more! Here's what is coming up:
The post-nomadic trend reflects changes that were building up before the stock
market's current turbulence and Sept. 11. As Americans have aged and
become ever more capable of settling where they wish, because of the rise of
digital technology and the dispersal of economic activity, fewer of them than
ever are willing to pick everything up and move in pursuit of quick riches.
Fewer than 15% of Americans change addresses in any given year, down from
a high of 20% in the 1970s. Contrary to popular reporting, most baby
boomers, suggests demographer William H. Frey, "age in place." That is, they
stay where they are. This development suggests that residential property may
be the "gold" of the emerging economy because the home has become more
important to people financially. [LI remark: that homes become the "gold" of an economy as people retain them longer must be a feature of this great new post nomadic paradigm. In the old, stinky paradigm, that houses are built and sold added value to them as investments. But no longer! Mr. Kotkin has discovered that a frozen market is a golden market. Is that great or what? We are all hoping that the Davenport Institute of PU puts him up for a Nobel Prize next year. If they can extract him from his rocking chair, that is -- the man doesn't want to contravene his own paradigm by acting all nomadic, you know).
But post-nomadism is also about values that place greater emphasis on family,
faith and community. At the height of the 1990s stock boom, according to the
Zogby International poll, only one in three Americans defined their "American
dream" in spiritual, as opposed to purely material, terms. By 2000, a spiritual definition was embraced by 42% of Americans. After Sept. 11, the percentage grew to 52% of adults."
When you get poll numbers like that opting for the spiritual, the game is up! Here I'd think that after September 11th, an increasing segment of the population would be reaching for their de La Mettrie, rejecting the afterlife, spewing contempt on the intellectual bankruptcy of the concept of "soul," throwing themselves into libertine lifestyles of finite sensuality, and ever more aware that man is doomed to a brief career of organic vicissitude, after which the worms will go in, and the worms will go out. And what do you know -- Americans start doing American dreamtime as a spiritually defined thing.
Friday, August 02, 2002
Remora
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Blogging without a computer of one's own -- to change Virginia Woolf's title around a bit -- is a difficult enterprise. We come here, to this library, and we plunge into the news, and we see the stray tasty morsel -- the story from Business Week, the Nick Tosches fan site, etc. -- but trying to capture what we want from these sites is totally frustrating. Plus, we can't take off all our cloths in the library -- some screwy policy. And how can we write with cloths on? It feels unnatural.
Plus the lack of coffee.
Plus the lack of beer (after coffee).
But okay. Remember, last week, we nominated some biz journalists for the Glassman award. That prize is named after our favorite fearless forecaster, the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000 and is still ticking away, like a watch that tells the correct time once in a century, at the Washington Post. Yesterday, we were overjoyed to see this conservative pantaloon defending his thesis on the Wall Street Journal op ed page.
It takes the tiniest bit of gall to defend the ideas set forth in that 1999 book in 2002. And there's the pesky problem with the 7 to 8 trillion dollars lost in the popping of the high nineties bubble. But Glassman is having none of it. He's still forecasting that Dow 36,000, although, uh, there's no date set for it now. Rather like the launch of the starship enterprise and various of H.G. Well's scientific romances, Glassman's Dow number is set for sometime in the indeterminate future.
What is interesting is not his popcock prediction, however. It is the political coloring that he gives to investing in the stock market. With Gilder and Larry Kudlow, Glassman is a new economics conservative. Let's quote from the next to last grafs of his piece:
"If anything has changed since our book appeared, it is increasing respect for the debunked strategy of market timing. Robert Shiller, the economist whose book "Irrational Exuberance" appeared in 2000, has been celebrated as a Timer Saint. But Mr. Shiller was bearish while the market was setting new records. His theory was laid out with fanfare in 1996, when, with the Dow at 5427, he said his data "implied an expected decline in the real Standard and Poor Index over the next 10 years of 38.07 percent." But six years later, despite a long bear market, the Dow is up about 60%; the S&P, 40%.
"Our noisiest critics, Paul Krugman in the New York Times and various Slate.com scribblers, willfully distort our arguments. And no wonder. If Americans continue to embrace long-term stock investing, the role of the state as dispenser of retirement benefits will shrink or disappear. And the "war" between capital and labor will be over. Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists have a vested interest in spreading fear and chasing people out of stocks -- even though stock investing is the most reliable route to accumulating wealth."
The "war" between capital and labor is one of those Old Economics things. And it was recognized by Old Economics conservatives. That's why the stereotype of the conservative, from the thirties to the sixties, was of a Taft voting, bondholding Republican. This kind of conservative wanted to stand athwart the stream of history, with a bond paying a secure dividend, and yell halt. While the difference between bonds and stocks -- and Glassman's silliness about what the stock market is about -- has a technical aspect around which Glassman, et al weave their tales, the synbolism of stock conservativism is more important.
That symbolism goes something like this: far from standing athwart the stream of history, the stock conservative wants to surf on it, as ever more technical marvels produce prosperity for all of us. The divide of class was not just a Marxist construct -- traditionally, conservativism has recognized and embraced the governing class -- the owners. Conservatives of the Burkean variety have always believed that this class isn't defined simply by their statistically greater wealth, but by such emergent qualities as leadership, a concern for order, and the guardianship of tradition.
Stock conservatives have a different dream. In this dream, the workers on the other side of the divide take on not only some small share of ownership, but the Burkean role alloted to the owners.
For this to actually occur, the workers have to operate like the owners. For instance, they have to keep their capital in stock, aligning their interests with the interests of corporate America. If they keep their money in bonds, even corporate bonds, their interest are eventually going to be aligned with the Treasury department -- that is, with the government.
This isn't a bad thing for the Burkean school. Burkeans aren't opposed to government tout court -- rather, they claim it as the natural heirs of rule.
If, indeed, the slug of losses mount so that the working class falls away from the role of owner envisioned by the stock conservatives, there will definitely be a shift in the intellectual framework of American conservative expression. The Buckleys will once again come to the forefront.
LI doesn't think this will happen. But LI, unlike Glassman, has no crystal ball in the house...
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Blogging without a computer of one's own -- to change Virginia Woolf's title around a bit -- is a difficult enterprise. We come here, to this library, and we plunge into the news, and we see the stray tasty morsel -- the story from Business Week, the Nick Tosches fan site, etc. -- but trying to capture what we want from these sites is totally frustrating. Plus, we can't take off all our cloths in the library -- some screwy policy. And how can we write with cloths on? It feels unnatural.
Plus the lack of coffee.
Plus the lack of beer (after coffee).
But okay. Remember, last week, we nominated some biz journalists for the Glassman award. That prize is named after our favorite fearless forecaster, the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000 and is still ticking away, like a watch that tells the correct time once in a century, at the Washington Post. Yesterday, we were overjoyed to see this conservative pantaloon defending his thesis on the Wall Street Journal op ed page.
It takes the tiniest bit of gall to defend the ideas set forth in that 1999 book in 2002. And there's the pesky problem with the 7 to 8 trillion dollars lost in the popping of the high nineties bubble. But Glassman is having none of it. He's still forecasting that Dow 36,000, although, uh, there's no date set for it now. Rather like the launch of the starship enterprise and various of H.G. Well's scientific romances, Glassman's Dow number is set for sometime in the indeterminate future.
What is interesting is not his popcock prediction, however. It is the political coloring that he gives to investing in the stock market. With Gilder and Larry Kudlow, Glassman is a new economics conservative. Let's quote from the next to last grafs of his piece:
"If anything has changed since our book appeared, it is increasing respect for the debunked strategy of market timing. Robert Shiller, the economist whose book "Irrational Exuberance" appeared in 2000, has been celebrated as a Timer Saint. But Mr. Shiller was bearish while the market was setting new records. His theory was laid out with fanfare in 1996, when, with the Dow at 5427, he said his data "implied an expected decline in the real Standard and Poor Index over the next 10 years of 38.07 percent." But six years later, despite a long bear market, the Dow is up about 60%; the S&P, 40%.
"Our noisiest critics, Paul Krugman in the New York Times and various Slate.com scribblers, willfully distort our arguments. And no wonder. If Americans continue to embrace long-term stock investing, the role of the state as dispenser of retirement benefits will shrink or disappear. And the "war" between capital and labor will be over. Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists have a vested interest in spreading fear and chasing people out of stocks -- even though stock investing is the most reliable route to accumulating wealth."
The "war" between capital and labor is one of those Old Economics things. And it was recognized by Old Economics conservatives. That's why the stereotype of the conservative, from the thirties to the sixties, was of a Taft voting, bondholding Republican. This kind of conservative wanted to stand athwart the stream of history, with a bond paying a secure dividend, and yell halt. While the difference between bonds and stocks -- and Glassman's silliness about what the stock market is about -- has a technical aspect around which Glassman, et al weave their tales, the synbolism of stock conservativism is more important.
That symbolism goes something like this: far from standing athwart the stream of history, the stock conservative wants to surf on it, as ever more technical marvels produce prosperity for all of us. The divide of class was not just a Marxist construct -- traditionally, conservativism has recognized and embraced the governing class -- the owners. Conservatives of the Burkean variety have always believed that this class isn't defined simply by their statistically greater wealth, but by such emergent qualities as leadership, a concern for order, and the guardianship of tradition.
Stock conservatives have a different dream. In this dream, the workers on the other side of the divide take on not only some small share of ownership, but the Burkean role alloted to the owners.
For this to actually occur, the workers have to operate like the owners. For instance, they have to keep their capital in stock, aligning their interests with the interests of corporate America. If they keep their money in bonds, even corporate bonds, their interest are eventually going to be aligned with the Treasury department -- that is, with the government.
This isn't a bad thing for the Burkean school. Burkeans aren't opposed to government tout court -- rather, they claim it as the natural heirs of rule.
If, indeed, the slug of losses mount so that the working class falls away from the role of owner envisioned by the stock conservatives, there will definitely be a shift in the intellectual framework of American conservative expression. The Buckleys will once again come to the forefront.
LI doesn't think this will happen. But LI, unlike Glassman, has no crystal ball in the house...
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Remora
Dave calls LI this morning to complain about our lack of posts.
What can we say? Here we sit, in the library. Our new computer is supposedly trucking to us as we write. Our old computer, with its invaluable (at least to LI) hard drive, sits at Mac Alliance like the corpse of the family's beloved pooch, with the service people gently urging us to do the needful, bury the damn thing, etc.
But let's send out a brief recommend to this Business Week article on the failed telecosm - or did the "cosm" in George Gilder's once much quoted phrase hint at a Bataille like orgy of waste, an economy of excess that we will all have to live with, now
The first two grafs present the grim picture -- or grim for some.
"Telecom has been a disaster for just about everyone.
Investors have lost some $2 trillion as stock prices
have tumbled 95% or more from their highs. Half a
million workers have lost their jobs during the past
two years. Dozens of debt-laden companies, from
Winstar Communications to Global Crossing, have
collapsed into bankruptcy. And on July 21, the
sector sank to a once-unimaginable low when
WorldCom Inc., the company that embodied the
industry's power and promise, filed the largest
bankruptcy claim in U.S. history.
"Yet a small group of CEOs and financiers managed
to save the family silver before the house burned to
the ground. Philip F. Anschutz, founder of ailing local
and long-distance upstart Qwest Communications
International Inc. (Q ), reaped $1.9 billion from
company stock sales since 1998. Former Qwest
CEO Joseph P. Nacchio sold $248 million worth of
stock before he was pushed out of the scandal-plagued company in June. Global Crossing founder Gary Winnick sold $734 million of his shares before
his company filed for bankruptcy in January. And former WorldCom CEO
Bernard J. Ebbers borrowed some $400 million from his company before he
was ousted in April--and that loan remains to be repaid."
The story connects the dots to the fall guy du jour -- Salomon Smith Barney's own analyst of the year, all around neutral observer, and general pig, Jack B. Grubman. The man with the Midas touch in 1999, although all that was glittering turned out not to be gold -- more like the stuff you pitchfork out of stables. Dross, as Freud knew, was the other side of gold -- too bad the investors Mr. Grubman sold down the river weren't conversant in Freud, in spite of his loss of stock in the last decade, eh?
As for the inventor of the Telecosm, hmm. Poor Old George Gilder is still plugging away at the spectator, and on the Telecosm lounge he purveys some recent email from believers who urge each other to keep the faith, to recognize that new paradigms sometimes take, well, hits. Big hits, in fact. Massive, tsunami size ones. I imagine less, shall we say, sanguine gamblers have abandoned the Telecosm lounge, and the Gilder Technology report, for the more secure predictions that emerge from horoscope charts, haroscopy, and other forms of divination.
Dave calls LI this morning to complain about our lack of posts.
What can we say? Here we sit, in the library. Our new computer is supposedly trucking to us as we write. Our old computer, with its invaluable (at least to LI) hard drive, sits at Mac Alliance like the corpse of the family's beloved pooch, with the service people gently urging us to do the needful, bury the damn thing, etc.
But let's send out a brief recommend to this Business Week article on the failed telecosm - or did the "cosm" in George Gilder's once much quoted phrase hint at a Bataille like orgy of waste, an economy of excess that we will all have to live with, now
The first two grafs present the grim picture -- or grim for some.
"Telecom has been a disaster for just about everyone.
Investors have lost some $2 trillion as stock prices
have tumbled 95% or more from their highs. Half a
million workers have lost their jobs during the past
two years. Dozens of debt-laden companies, from
Winstar Communications to Global Crossing, have
collapsed into bankruptcy. And on July 21, the
sector sank to a once-unimaginable low when
WorldCom Inc., the company that embodied the
industry's power and promise, filed the largest
bankruptcy claim in U.S. history.
"Yet a small group of CEOs and financiers managed
to save the family silver before the house burned to
the ground. Philip F. Anschutz, founder of ailing local
and long-distance upstart Qwest Communications
International Inc. (Q ), reaped $1.9 billion from
company stock sales since 1998. Former Qwest
CEO Joseph P. Nacchio sold $248 million worth of
stock before he was pushed out of the scandal-plagued company in June. Global Crossing founder Gary Winnick sold $734 million of his shares before
his company filed for bankruptcy in January. And former WorldCom CEO
Bernard J. Ebbers borrowed some $400 million from his company before he
was ousted in April--and that loan remains to be repaid."
The story connects the dots to the fall guy du jour -- Salomon Smith Barney's own analyst of the year, all around neutral observer, and general pig, Jack B. Grubman. The man with the Midas touch in 1999, although all that was glittering turned out not to be gold -- more like the stuff you pitchfork out of stables. Dross, as Freud knew, was the other side of gold -- too bad the investors Mr. Grubman sold down the river weren't conversant in Freud, in spite of his loss of stock in the last decade, eh?
As for the inventor of the Telecosm, hmm. Poor Old George Gilder is still plugging away at the spectator, and on the Telecosm lounge he purveys some recent email from believers who urge each other to keep the faith, to recognize that new paradigms sometimes take, well, hits. Big hits, in fact. Massive, tsunami size ones. I imagine less, shall we say, sanguine gamblers have abandoned the Telecosm lounge, and the Gilder Technology report, for the more secure predictions that emerge from horoscope charts, haroscopy, and other forms of divination.
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