Notes

We have been researching our ever more Moby Dick like essay on James F. Stephen, which is the reason we could be seen, Thursday, in a down town coffee house reading the seemingly dry as toast political history of Great Britain, The British Revolution, 1880-1939, by Tory historian Robert Rhodes James. The book, published some time in the 70s, turns out to be quite unexpectedly readable. It is rather depressing that Rhodes, who from his author picture is the typical dried up prune of a nerdy Tory, has such ease as a writer -- it implies a whole background acquaintance with English prose that just isn't there anymore. It has disappeared in our lifetime. The environmental disaster of extinction has gotten prolonged and constant exposure in the news for the last thirty years; but the cultural disaster of the extinction of a prose capable of subtly incorporating the whole range of English literature, the repertoire, in its easy narrative of facts, is not exposed at all in the press. In fact, the press is one of the toxins that has killed this particular talent off. It is all quite startling. It is like a whole generation of piano players losing their knowledge of scales.

Anyway, James provides a number of really good quotes from Victorian and Edwardian worthies. Here's Lord Roseberry, briefly prime minister after Gladstone and a key architect of the latter phase of British imperial expansion, describing Northcote, Disraeli's successor, for a brief time, as the head of the Conservatives:

"Where he failed was in manner. His voice, his diction, his delivery, were all inadequate. With real ability, great knowledge, genial kindness, and a sympathetic nature -- all the qualities, indeed, which evoke regard and esteem -- he had not the spice of the devil which is necessary to rouse an Opposition to zeal and elation.... When Northcote warmed there was, or seemed to be, a note of apology in his voice..."

Isn't this a perfect description of Daschle? And, cutting out the sentence that begins "with real ability," isn't this Lieberman? Indeed, it is the spice of the devil that is missing from the entire Democratic leadership.



Celebrators of the imperial process

Niall Ferguson, the Tory answer to � well, to whom? To Ferdinand Braudel? Anyway, Niall Ferguson is the news in Britain this Sunday. He has a BBC series on Empire, and a book, named Empire, too, to go along with it. Now, we find Ferguson a fascinating figure. We disagree with his cases - for instance, his case against Keynes book, the Consequences of the Peace - but we think his willingness to adventure counter-factually through the conventional wisdom of historians is bracing. The Times is all about Ferguson this week. Sunday, the Times published a number of reviews of the book and the series. Andrew Roberts, who compares Ferguson, rather nonsensically, to Errol Flynn, states Ferguson's case like this:

"AS THE subtitle of this book suggests, Niall Ferguson makes big claims for the British Empire. Not only did these small rainy offshore islands turn the world capitalist, he argues, but they also made huge tracts of it speak English, play team sports and adopt our land-tenure system and common law. Moreover, what he calls "Anglobalizsation" was a Good Thing, and was achieved with far less blood being shed than would have been done by our Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian or - God forbid- German competitors."

The benignity of Empire is the theme of the season. We think it is a deeply pernicious and misleading theme. Another review of the book, this time by FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO, strikes a discordant note - in fact, seems to be about another book entirely:


"In Niall Ferguson�s view, one of his well-selected pictures seems fairly to sum up the British Empire: a German caricature of 1904, in which Britons cheerfully torture a black man. A capitalist forces whisky down the victim�s throat, while the rack, manipulated by a soldier, extrudes gold from his rectum. Nearby, a churchman sermonises myopically. The empire, Ferguson explains in his book written to accompany the Channel 4 series which started last Thursday, originated in piracy, unrolled in slavery, practised outrages and atrocities and struggled to �play the role of world policeman with a straight face�. The �civilising mission� was a sham: empire induced savagery in its servants. The British came to India, for example, as predatory conquistadors � barbaric exploiters of a society more prosperous and, by many standards, more impressive than their own.

All this candour is surprising after an introduction that promises a robust defence of the morality of empire. Eventually, the author wrenches his rabbit from the hat. The British Empire may have been bad in some respects; but for the world of the late 19th century and much of the 20th, the alternatives were worse: German or Russian or Japanese hegemony. The balance of investment and exploitation favoured the exploiters only a little. By espousing free trade and repudiating slavery the British enriched the world and enhanced humanity. Their legacy includes liberal capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and �finally, there is the English language itself�.

As a case for the defence, it is disappointingly predictable: the vaunted legacy surely owes more, in any case, to America�s empire than to Britain�s."

Well, which version of Ferguson's version of Empire is right? And what kind of justification is it that, in the event, the Brits were better than the Spanish or the Germans?

It seems to us that the question is being posed in such a manner as to skew the issue. The question of the British effect on India is not a matter of whether the Portugese would have been better for India, but whether the Moghuls would have. Also, there is a problem with the penchant for historical battles, and turning points, etc. The turning point in India, to use the great British colony once again, was not decided at the end of the seven years war. It was decided every year after the seven years war. It was decided, with bloodshed and mythology, at the end of the Sepoy mutiny, in 1859. Whether India, like Russia, could have governed itself, imported technology, created a framework within which to palliate the great famines of the latter half of the 19th century is something we will never know. But it definitely loads the dice to make this question turn on the alternative between the Brits and the Germans, or the Japanese, or the French.

The European edition of Time magazine casts a surprisingly skeptical eye on Ferguson's empire nostalgia. This graf seems to make the case, although with an example that seems, really, to trivialize the record, disparate as it is, concentrated in thousands of separate records, of atrocity:


"But Ferguson's Empire balance sheets show some creative accounting. Though he dutifully frowns on the horrors of slavery or, say, the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, in 1898 (in which 10,000 Muslims were annihilated in five hours by Lord Kitchener's Maxim guns), few such moments make it into the debit column. "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish," Ferguson writes. "It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity." There might have been, he admits, but he clearly doubts it."

Finally, this is Peter Conrad weighing in in the Guardian on one of Ferguson's nuttier claims:

"Ferguson presents the loss of Empire as an act of supreme altruism, 'authentically noble'. Britain bankrupted itself in a war against alternative Empires - German, Japanese, Italian - whose treatment of their subject populations was manifestly less humane. 'Did not that sacrifice,' he asks, 'alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?' I am not sure that he establishes the moral superiority of the home team. Of course, Christianity put a hypocritical, cozening gloss on imperial venality by claiming that the Empire had a redemptive, civilising mission.But despite this piety, British colonies depended on slavery; no wonder the nabobs were offended when the Japanese, after the fall of Singapore, enslaved British soldiers and put them to work building a railway through the jungle. Hitler admired the Empire and offered to let the British keep it if they smiled on his own imperial ambitions in eastern Europe."

Remora

LI hopes the last post wasn't too obscure. We were simply speculating, in our dillantantish way, about what a cut in dividend taxes would mean in terms of changing the landscape of investment. The NYT carries a column on just that subject today, by Hal Varian. Varian starts out poorly, with the wrong set of figures:

"First, we really have become a nation of shareholders. According to "The Rise of the Equity Culture," a paper by the M.I.T. economist James Poterba, the number of individuals owning corporate stock has increased by nearly 60 percent in a decade, with about half of American households now owning stock, either directly or indirectly."



Well, if half of American households own some stock "directly or indirectly" -- indirect ownership, presumably, means that somebody bought it for them and is waiting until a major holiday to give it to them -- or maybe it means that the stock was bought whilst the homeowner was in a somnabulistic fugue -- in any case, these are not the important figures for the potential change to be wrought by the tax cut. While it is possible that small individual portfolios will shift towards stocks that pay dividends, the key stimulus to change for these individuals will continue to be stock price. The gain accrued by the increase of equity value will far exceed any gain from a dividend benefit. The question is, will the two coincide. And that question is not going to be answered by finding out whether Martha and George X , secretary and shoe salesman, are going to shift their one hundred shares of Home Depot stock to fifty of Sears for the nice dividend. No, the real question is whether those who hold a significant amount of stock -- that much smaller percent of stockholders who hold the gross majority of equity -- will also shift from non-dividend paying stocks to dividend paying stocks.

One way of understanding the difference in the figures is to use the difference in the payout from the dividend tax cut to map the concentrations of stockholding. The Brookings Institute has a nice little pdf paper up on the tax cut. Here's a quote from it, concerning ways of measuring the effect of the cut across income percentiles:

"A second measure is the distribution of the tax cut
across income classes. Table 1 shows that households
with income above $200,000 receive more than one third
of the entire tax cut in 2003. A third measure
reports the tax cuts in dollar terms, and is often the
most striking. Returns with income above $1 million
would receive an average tax cut of almost $89,000.
Those with income below $40,000 would receive an
average tax cut of $125 and those with income between
$40,000 and $75,000 receive an average tax cut of $703.
As the program becomes permanent, middle-class households would
lose much of their share of the tax cut with the resources
transferred to high-income groups."

Now, we admit that this is not a roadmap to market-maker heaven. To break up the stockholders into income percentile ignores the aggregation of stockholding effected by mutual funds. It ignores institutional investors. Etc. All those things that make up "indirect" holding. Still, we get better numbers by understanding that most of the holders of equity can be safely ignored. They are merely numerous. This isn't a one man, one vote proposition.

Varian is more up to speed when he considers the effect of the dividend cut on the total financial market. He points out that the cut would undercut the rationale for holding tax exempt government bonds:

"What about municipal bonds? Odds are we would see their prices fall, since dividend-paying stocks would be pretty close substitutes under the Bush proposal. This means the cost of borrowing for state and local governments will be driven up � particularly bad news given their precarious economic position.

"One way to estimate the likelihood of the Bush plan's passing is to watch the prices of municipal bonds over the next few months: the more likely the plan is to pass, the lower those prices are likely to go."

Great. LI hasn't gone into this at any length yet -- oh, the meat and texture of the Bush fiasco! -- but the spending part of the potential Bush budget -- especially the lack of any plan to help states coping with huge budget shortfalls -- is going to bite him in the ass, to use the vernacular.

But we want to concentrate on dividends themselves, right now. In the next post, let's talk about why companies pay out dividends at all.

Remora

Drumbeat of war (on the bottom 60 percentile of incomes)

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has a nice little skewering of the new Bush tax giveaway. Andrew Lee and Isaac Shapiro begin with Bush's defense of the giveback:




In response to criticism that his tax cut plan is skewed towards upper-income taxpayers, President Bush noted in a speech on January 9 that, under his proposal, a family of four making $40,000 would see its taxes fall 96 percent in 2003, from $1,178 to $45. This represents a tax cut of $1,133

Lee and Shapiro point out that
"the tax cuts that would benefit this family constitute less than one-quarter of the overall cost of the bill. In other words, more than three-quarters of the package could be jettisoned and the $40,000 family mentioned by President Bush � as well as most other middle-class families � would receive just as much help."


We were reading Peter Bernstein's wonderful Against the Gods: The story of risk yesterday. We were struck by Bernstein's description of "regret theory." This theory stems from work in behaviorial economics which was summarized in an influential article by Loomes and Sugden in 1982 -- hey, LI is in a scholarly mood this morning. L and S discovered that people have a tendency to over-react to disappointing outcomes of investment decisions. This goes along with a consistent finding among behavior economists, which is that negative factors have a stronger impact on determining the weighting of probabilities than gain. We've talked about Kahneman and Tversky before on this site, who are the most prominent economists associated with studies that buttress this statement. What this means is that the content of the options available to a decisionmaker are so framed by recent patterns that there is a tendency to ignore regression to the mean, in favor of compensating for past mistakes by a retrospective "punishment" of bad decisions. For instance, you invest in a company that makes some innovative x product, and the company goes bankrupt. So you take the rest of your money out of the sector which is concerned with the species of innovative products that the bankrupt company was affiliated with and you invest it in something safe. Well, this decision sounds rational, but it actually overweights the signal given by the bankruptcy, spreading it over the whole sector.

This is the kind of thing signified by the popular wisdom that generals in the current war are always fighting the last war. This theory helps explain a puzzling feature of Bush's dividend tax. The precipitous decline in equity value over the last three years has had little to do with dividends. Studies have even shown -- often shown -- that dividends are an irrational form of outlay -- companies that give dividends often borrow money for the costs of operation and expansion that are equal to the dividend outlay. Now, there is a countercurrent that claims that, just as leveraged buyouts, by burdening a firm with debt, encourage more efficient management, so, too, dispensing dividends takes tempting money out of the hands of a management group that would otherwise invest it unwisely in unprofitable acquisitions. There might be something to this -- but still, the fact remains that the Bush plan seems to pander to the disappointment of investors in the bursting of the tech sector bubble, in a classic bit of regret behavior that has nothing to do with rational scenarios for future economic growth. In fact, it will encourage disinvestment by corporations -- corporations will be advantaged by producing dividends instead of investing in new plant or R & D. The idea that this effect will be countered by the return of investors to the market is doubtful -- investors return to markets, fundamentally, when earnings are good. That is completely unaddressed by the dividend giveaway.

Not, of course, that any of this is going to get in the way of the Bush bulldozer.

Remora

Back in the bad old days of the last election, LI opposed Al Gore for a number of reasons. One of them was purely political. The line of descent from Clinton to Gore pointed to one thing: by electing a rightwing Democrat, the party would naturally go even more to the right, thus ensuring the nomination of an even more rightwing Democrat after Gore. Once the bridge starts falling in the river, you can't hold it up from one side -- to put it as enigmatically as possible.

Well, Gore was elected -- although, as we know, the election was stolen from him. And, showing how much we know, the unelected Prez swung to the left. Gore's statements for the last year have been music to our ears.

However, our fundamental claim still stands -- and Lieberman is proof of it. The editor of Tom Paine, Robert Bosage, takes an acidic look at the man he calls Bush-lite -- although Bush himself could more appropriately be labeled Bush-lite. Perhaps we should label Lieberman Bush-ultra-lite. There isn't an issue on which Lieberman is any good. Oh, except of course his staunch support for the one thing rightwing Dems still stand for -- the right for middle class women on the East and West coast to abort. In the stretches of America where there is nary a doctor to perform the abortion, this right is a mockery. Never mind that. Never mind that there may just be other medical care issues out there -- how about the right of a woman to get decent health care subvented by the state? and the right of a man to get the same thing? No, that isn't going to play in this script.

The long list of Lieberman's idiocies is covered by Bosage. We have a particular dislike for Lieberman based on his longterm defense of the Ceo-accounting biz complex. After all, Lieberman was the guy who threatened to punish the SEC if they made a stink about accounting practices during the boom years in the 90s. In the hullabaloo about corporate looting last year, Lieberman contributed an editorial to the NYT defending the eccentric status of stock options -- that is, defending that accounting procedure which allows not expensing them. His defense of encouraging stock options was pretty comic -- it was that they were a crucial incentive and spur to the average worker. Oh yeah. Bosage does a nice number on Lieberman's general economic policy positions:

"Similarly, Bush�s economic policy -- tax cuts for the wealthy, favors for the Fortune 500 crowd, cutbacks in domestic public investment and corporate-centered trade accords -- is undermining America�s economic prospects. His initiatives are simply out of step with what the country needs as it struggles with global stagnation, growing inequality, an unprecendented corporate crime wave, an unsustainable trade deficit and massive foreign debt.

Lieberman won�t pose a fundamental challenge here, either. As leader of the pro-business DLC, he has championed capital gains tax cuts, corporate trade and domestic austerity. As chair of the committee investigating Enron and the corporate scandals, he won notoriety mostly for defending off-the books stock options while warning Democrats not to engage in �economic class conflict.� In the mid-'90s, Lieberman helped fend off Clinton regulators who wanted companies to account for stock options that gave executives enormous incentives to cook the books, boost short-term stock prices and plunder their own companies. Yet when it became apparent that many were doing just that, Lieberman continued to argue that stock option plans were a way of sharing corporate growth with workers. He did a slight retraction when admitted that it was "disappointing" to learn that the vast bulk were lavished on the top floor, not on the shop floor. His long-standing staunch defense of privilege may have cemented his fund-raising appeal with the $1000-a-plate dinner crowd but it did nothing to help the country deal with the corporate crime wave."

With schools overcrowded, vital public services like sewers, water systems and highways aging and in disrepair, health care costs soaring, and basic public health capacities ailing, Bush�s cuts in vital public investments must be opposed. But Lieberman is a Coolidge Democrat who champions domestic austerity. He would roll back Bush�s tax cuts not to invest in vital needs, but to return the budget to surplus. This leaves Bush arguing for tax cuts and growth and Lieberman arguing for austerity. That�s both bad policy and bad politics.

Remora

Envy and Greed

Let's begin with a little Adam Smith, shall we?

Upon this disposition of mankind, to go along with all the passions of the rich and the powerful, is founded the distinction of ranks, and the order of society. Our obsequiousness to our superiors more frequently arises from our admiration for the advantages of their situation, than from any private expectations of benefit from their good-will. Their benefits can extend but to a few, but their fortunes interest almost every body. We are eager to assist them in completing a system of happiness that approaches so near to perfection; and we desire to serve them for their own sake, without any other recompense but the vanity or the honour of obliging them. Neither is our deference to their inclinations founded chiefly, or altogether, upon a regard to the utility of such submission, and to the order of society, which is best supported by it. Even when the order of society seems to require that we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to do it. -- The theory of moral sentiments


The proto-capitalist writers, from Bernard Mandeville to Adam Smith, are famed, in part, for showing that individual vices can contribute to social virtues. In particular, self-interest, in the guise of avarice, can spur the us to those enterprises which produce a social good larger than could be predicted from the mere viciousness of its original motives. Smith, most people who read him are agreed, was a more sophisticated thinker than Mandeville, and realized that the sublimation of greed in social action could operate upon the original motive to soften it. We've seen that this is no necessary statement of the case -- and we've seen this long before Ken Lay came along. One has only to look at the great English nabobs, looting India during Smith's lifetime, to find evidence that avarice can produce wholly negative results, far outbalancing the goods distributed in the course of the lifestyles of those for whom avarice was successfully assuaged by wealth and grandeur. Still, Mandeville's paradox retains a kernel of truth. In his Fable of the Bees, Mandeville imagines, under the figure of a hive of bees, a society much like that of eighteenth century England. After cataloging the acts of the robber, the gross habits of the vain, etc., etc., Mandeville writes:

Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.

The praise of greed, or the more moderate praise of enlightened self interest, is paralleled, among the capitalist writers of the nineteenth century, by the dispraise of another vice: envy. James Fitzjames Stephen, in his essay on equality in Liberty Equality Fraternity, sounds the usual conservative commonplace; the desire for a more equal distribution of wealth is "nothing more than a vague expression of envy on the part of those who have not against those who have." There have been infinite recyclings of this theme. See, for instance, this article, entitled Envy, on the Acton website, Religion and Liberty, by John Williams. Williams compresses the insights of Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy into a mini-dissertation on the undermining of the fruits of capitalism by the envy of the new class. Intellectuals, who can see their peers, in business, getting rich, are filled with envy, and propose anti-capitalist measures in order to bring businessmen down.

Alas, while greed has its heroes, envy has none. Envy is Thersites, beaten by Ajax, mocking Achilles; Greed is J.P. Morgan creating U.S. Steel. So the mythology goes. The usual response to this moral analysis is to deny it. This makes sense: the actual motivation, here, is usually a heightened moral sensibility that baulks at injustice. Such sensibilities are not Nietzschian, and so averse to arguments that defend private vices as the unconscious assistants of public good. Thus, the argument is lost from the beginning. However, using the logic of the capitalist apology, it is unclear why we are to envy, in itself, disqualifies distributive justice -- unless, of course, the social good is invariably aligned with the investment portfolios of the wealthiest. We'd guess that envy, simply by fixing the attention of the embittered intellectuals -- among whom we'd include the average working class reader of newspapers and hearer of tv news -- upon disparities in wealth and the system that preserves and promotes them, is doing us all a service. This is especially true of the Bush dividend tax cut. Here is how conservative ideologues are framing the defense of that cut. This is a news release from Club for Growth:


"Let the class warfare Democrats embrace small and impotent
policy changes-changes that increasingly sophisticated investor
class voters will immediately identify as fraudulent. The
obstructionist Democrats have announced that they intend to fight
against President Bush's genuine GOP growth package and to wage all
out class envy warfare. President Bush has 90 million investor
class Americans on his side who realize that tax rate cuts mean
higher stock values and greater retirement security. "Republicans must not shrink from the battle. Bring on the fight," said Moore.

The Club for Growth, founded by investment banker Richard
Gilder, National Review Publisher Thomas L. "Dusty" Rhodes and
economist Stephen Moore, is a political organization dedicated to
pro-growth economic policies such as cutting taxes, eliminating
wasteful government spending and supporting personal accounts for
Social Security."

LI realizes that the official opposition to Bush -- the Democrats -- are an intellectually crippled bunch. They are paralyzed by rhetoric about envy, and reply with boilerplate about greed. This is a losing strategy, and has lost for them consistently over the last twenty years. What should they do? They should robustly defend the self -- interest -- propounded by envy -- of the have-nots. The have nots, in this case, are being told that 300 billion dollars can be taken out of the system and given, largely, to the wealthiest ten percent. They are not told what this 300 billion dollars -- potentially twice this much, really -- buys. The Democratic reply to the Bush proposal is, pathetically, about the deficit that will ensue if this Saturnalia for the investor takes hold. What the Democrats should do is emphasize that taking money out of the system takes it from somewhere. And they should emphasize that it creates a dead loss, in services, for the have-nots, in a world created by the investment opportunities of the haves -- a world that is not friendly to the working class. There are two options, here: either create the infrastructure to support the social goods necessary to support a prosperous lifestyle for the have-nots -- an infrastructure that would nourish education, health, and income support -- or let the have-nots tough it out in a world increasingly inimical to their interests. The Democrats think that they can take money from people whose agenda is the latter in order to support the former. Well, a house divided will not stand, as the great opponent of the Democratic compromise of 1850 once said.

Remora

From DeQuincey's Miscellaneous Essays, just posted in the Gutenberg Library -- although they still don't have the inimitable essay on The Fine Art of Murder:

Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of
a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable
existence, and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and
his power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a
frailty, by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race
seems to have a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in
which a single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and
landmarks of a memorable felicity; in which the ruin travels faster
than the flying showers upon the mountain-side, faster 'than a musician
scatters sounds;' in which 'it was' and 'it is not' are words of the
self-same tongue, in the self-same minute; in which the sun that at
noon beheld all sound and prosperous, long before its setting hour
looks out upon a total wreck, and sometimes upon the total abolition of
any fugitive memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked,
or a wreck to be obliterated. --

After we posted about industrial accidents, yesterday, we turned to the NYT, and lo and behold: there is an excellent article (part of a three part series) about the vicious record of shop floor mutilation, semi-blackmail, pollution and other malfeasances accrued by a privately held, Birmingham, Alabama based pipe corporation, McWane Inc. See, LI is as in tune to the Zeitgeist as a blind piano tuner is in tune with the note C.

The NYT is publishing this expose in conjunction with a Frontline investigation. We are of two minds about the project. On the one hand, this is exactly what we should be reading on the NYT business page. There is, as any amateur Marx-man could tell you, something depressingly expected about the fact that every big newspaper in America has a business page, and no big newspaper in America has a labor page. To point this out subjects one to the reproach of being one of those nuts who promote class warfare -- this is how Bush, predictably, warded off the complaint that his tax cuts inordinately benefit the rich yesterday. In the meantime, class warfare, like racism and sexism and all the other dreadful isms, goes marching silently on. Which gets us to our other hand -- our other hand is that there is something suspicious and smug in the media every once in a while, with eyes on some journalistic prize, birthing the stray muckraking article -- we suspect this is a salve for their conscience. Once upon a time, of course, such articles were common place.

Enough bitching. LI urges readers to go back to yesterday's article about the McWane company. Today, the second, or is it third, part of the series details the politics of regulatory enforcement -- a politics that works against punishing a big industry for its crimes, and even works against monitoring it when the company repeatedly violates elementary canons of safety.

"Nine workers have been killed in McWane plants since 1995. OSHA investigators concluded that three of those deaths resulted directly from McWane's deliberate violations of federal safety standards, records show. Safety lapses at least contributed to five other deaths, investigators found.

"Yet those deaths rarely received more than cursory attention from state and local law enforcement authorities. The police often did little more than photograph the body and call the coroner. Local district attorneys, if they were informed, generally deferred to OSHA."

As for the comedy of justice, the Laurel and Hardy show that opens when some wretch is hurt, or killed, in one of McWane's plants, the article is pretty rich. We especially liked the nailing of one Mr. Vacco, the Republican attorney general in NY State. Confronted with incontrovertible evidence that a McWane owned factory engaged in the unlawful disposal of hazardous waste, leading to the death of an employee, Mr. Vacco hesitated while the McWane company put the screws to him. He responded to the Times inquiry by claiming that the prosecutors under him were doing the hesitating. But the NYT found a mass of suspicious connections between Vacco and McWane, and a memo suggesting that the McWane's might close the plant if Vacco prosecuted. At first, Vacco used the stonewall line of defense:

"In a recent interview, Mr. Vacco acknowledged contacts between Mr. O'Mara (a McWane operative) and his office but denied having been improperly influenced. He said he had taken a personal interest in the case "to make sure that we did everything by the book." Any lack of action, he added, was not because of political interference but because of "foot dragging" by indecisive career prosecutors. "What happened here is that my assistants couldn't make a decision," he said."

Well, that began to sound a little silly as the NYT dug further. So Vacco revised himself:

"Today, he acknowledges that he could have obtained an indictment for criminally negligent homicide. But he says he was not persuaded by what he called a "tenuous" prosecution theory. "Would there have been a conviction? I don't know," he said. "It would have been a titanic battle."

As for McWane's economic threats, he said, "I don't think that a prosecutor should put his or her head in the sand when making these judgments."

Putting your head in the sand? Just as in the past, when an accident happens and the causes can be traced back to a big company -- whether it is Union Carbide, or Monsanto, or whoever -- the prosecutor's head always comes eagerly out of the sand, and looks around for exculpatory evidence. And usually finds it.

Dope

LI has a review of Bill Minutaglio's City on Fire, (which is about the Texas City, Texas disaster) in this week's Austin Chronicle -- we think. That disaster was caused by the explosion of a monstrous amount of ammonia nitrate, which was being loaded into a French freighter, the Grandchamp, one April morning in 1947. The first paragraph of the first draft of the review was lopped off -- as we expected it would be. But we liked it as a "dope" intro. It goes:

I've been a fan of disaster stories ever since I became so engrossed, at the age of ten, in a history of the Johnstown flood that I suffered a minor panic attack during which I was convinced that the shallow pond at the end of our street was going to rise up and kill us all. The fascinations of disaster are metaphysical. It is in the belly of disaster that accident turns into fate, and in that interminably winding darkness the trivial metamorphoses into the monumental. The stray, tossed match, the hairline fracture in the concrete dam, the inordinate heat of a ship's dark hold on a spring day -- or this: a tiny gray pellet, coated with Carbowax, tinged brown from the addition of clay. A pellet of fertilizer. These, we know too late, too late, are the aberrant, urgent shapes of our death. And so the day, which is marked by events that would otherwise leave no more record than a snail's trail -- drinking coffee, answering the phone, packing the kids off to school -- events that would, as we said, ordinarily leave not a scratch on the tabula rasa of our remembered experience -- are suddenly backlit by a flash of the one fire -- the fire that extends from creation to the last judgement. The fire upon which all structures are built, and into which all structures will fall. The day of judgement blows up in our face. In that eerie light, we find that there is no scale upon which to measure events -- or at least that the scale we ordinarily use, that we have been bamboozled, all our lives, into using, makes no sense."

Well, LI likes to pull out the rhetorical stops every once in a while.

Reading Minutaglio's book, we became curious about the coincidence that the Texas City disaster involved, albeit peripherally, Union Carbide. Union Carbide was at the center of the biggest industrial accident of the century, in Bhopal. This is a continuing story. Briefly, the plant in Bhopal was a pesticide factory. A pesticide, Sevin, was manufactured there. According to Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro's book, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, the original planning for the plant was flawed by a grossly optimistic forecast for the market for Sevin. When the gas cloud emerged from the plant on December 3, 1984, it did so because the plant was being run by a skeleton crew, and the safety features of the plant had been pretty much disabled. The facts in the case are still in dispute, partly because Union Carbide (which was bought by Dow) has a tremendous interest in limiting its liability. This article quotes the New Scientist article that lays out the fundamental flaws that lead to the disaster. Bhopal net is a site dedicated to the survivors of the disaster, and it is full of grotesque but compelling data -- all going to show that a company can get away with murder if it is large enough. They have a page entitled the Dow watch which has this very interesting intro:

"This page started out as a collection of stories about Dow-Carbide's implementation of its famous "Zero Harm" policy. But the harder we looked the more stories we found of people who have been killed, or had their health ruined, by the greed and irresponsibility of these two companies, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, which have now perhaps fittingly become one and the same.

"So many stories, yet they almost all follow the same pattern. A dangerous process, an untested chemical, a carelessly run plant. People die, or have their lives ruined. The company attempts to cover up the disaster, denies responsibility, stalls and impedes legal processes, lobbies against changes in the law which would limit its activities or force it to spend more on safety. Innumerable are their lies, their cold-hearted attempts to bury evidence which could have saved the lives of their victims. From the Hawks Tunnel silicosis disaster of 1930 to the Vinyl Chloride cover-up that began in 1954 and lasted fifty years, taking in along the way Hiroshima, napalm, dioxin and Bhopal."

The site has a very interesting bit about a disaster I, at least, had never heard of: the Hawk Tunnel disaster. Here's a bit of American history to mull over. This testimony is given on a website devoted to Muriel Rukeyser, who wrote a book about the incident. The majority of the killed were African Americans. Many of them, dead, were thrown into a river or piled into a mass grave, so that estimates of the numbers of deaths are imprecise. For similar reasons, nobody really knows how many were killed in the Texas City, Texas disaster, since the Bottoms, the black section, was wiped out. Black lives, in Senator Lott's Golden era, were a dime a dozen. This comes from the testimony of PHILIPPA ALLEN before a Congressional committee in 1936:

I have spent the last four summers in West Virginia; and during the summer of 1934, when I was doing social work down there, I first heard of what we were pleased to call the Gauley tunnel tragedy, which involves about 2,000 men.

According to the estimates of contractors, 2,000 men were employed there over a period of about 2 years in drilling 3.75 miles of tunnel to divert water from New River to a hydroelectric plant at Gauley Junction. The rock through which the workmen were boring was of a high silica content. In tunnel no. 1 it ran from 97 to 99 percent pure silica, and the contractors neglected to provide the workmen with any sort of safety device.None of the workmen, who have lived around Gauley Bridge all of their lives, were aware of the risk they were running, despite the fact that sandstone outcroppings can be seen all over the roads. These were robust, hard-muscled workmen, and yet many of them began dying almost as soon as the work on the tunnel started. With every breath they were breathing a massive dose of silica dust. That was the true explanation of it.

It usually takes from 10 to 20 years to develop fully in a man's lungs this condition, but the medical men said that these men were working under extremely dusty conditions and the doses they received were massive indeed.Silica dust is deadly in large doses. Every worker examined by a physician after working in the tunnel any length of time has been found to have this dreadful disease. It is a lung disease that cannot be arrested, once it is started. Ultimately, the victim strangles to death.

When I tried to tabulate the number of workmen who had died as a result of this condition, I found it impossible to do so for several reasons: First, because before it was generally known what was really killing these men company doctors had diagnosed the numerous deaths as pneumonia, to which silicosis-infected lungs are susceptible; second, the undertaker who handled many of the burials testified in court that his records had been destroyed; third, after suits were started and everybody knew that rock dust was causing this dreadful state of things and killing the men on the tunnel job, workmen left their jobs there and scattered all over the country.This tunnel is part of a huge water-power project which began in the latter part of 1929 under the direction of the New Kanawha Power Co., a subsidiary of the Union Carbide & Carbon Co. That company was licensed by the State of West Virginia Power Commission to develop power for public sale, and ostensibly it was to do that; but, in reality, it was formed to sell all the power to the Electro-Metallurgical Co., a Subsidiary of the Union Carbide & Carbon Co., which was by an act of the State legislature allowed to buy up the New Kanawha Power Co. in 1933.

I should like to state that I am now making a very general statement as a beginning. There are many points that I should like to develop later, but I shall try to give you a general history of this condition first.I found when I went to Gauley Bridge that men were still dying like flies in 1934. These were men who characterized themselves as generally following the mines as a trade. Mining in West Virginia is unsteady, and these men went into this tunnel work because they thought it offered opportunity for steady work at better wages, and that it was work which did not posses the hazards they had met in mining coal, such hazards being poisonous gases and falling rocks.Of the 2,000 men employed there over a period of nearly 3 years, many have been examined by private doctors. Men began to succumb to the bad condition within 1, 2, or 3 years after they started to engage in the work. It seems that but few of the 2,000 men affected will escape."

The Land was ours before we were the Land's.

Remora

LI believes that the first question about taxes should be: what are they buying? In the case of the current administration, there seems to be a desire to buy quite a lot, including a war. On the other hand, there is also the Enron philosophy to which Bush and Cheney subscribe. That is, they believe the company exists to reward its upper tier management -- or, in the case of a company nation, its upper class. So they seem willing to employ certain Enron accounting tactics to do this. Enron would give bonuses to its management based on projected profits -- profits that most often didn't materialize. Thus, Rebecca Mark, for instance, was rewarded with tens of millions of dollars for running projects that lost billions of dollars. In the same way, the Bush administration has apparently decided to destroy any progressivity in the tax system to reward the already inordinately rewarded top tier of the wealthy in this country. The proposal to end the dividend tax is a trademark Enron deal. It will lose the country billions of dollars, it will reward an investing class billions of dollars, and it will produce very little wealth for the rest of us. In fact, it will take away wealth from the bottom forty percent. Why?


Well, by now we have a history of de-regulating financial capital and assuring investors of greater returns on their investments by creating a panoply of tax dodges and lowering taxes generally on the upper income percentile. This creates incentives for investing in those enterprises with the greatest immediate returns. These are not synonymous with those enterprises that employ the greatest number of people. Take energy. After the wild ride of de-regulating energy and allowing a de-regulated energy market, what are we finding? That energy companies are still steady, but slow, profit generators. The earnings growth that you can pump out of them is never going to match the earnings growth you can pump out of, say, Microsoft ... unless you screw around with the numbers. To try to grow a power company at twenty percent per year is like trying to grow a rubber plant into a redwood. It ain't going to happen. However, if you encourage investors to expect the kind of returns you get from the de-regulated markets of the nineties, you'll get the same shenanigans of the nineties, as all sectors compete, desperately, to attract investors.

Which is just another way of saying that treating the de-regulation, and the de-taxing, of the financial sector as if that sector invested neutrally is nuts.

The tax policy center has a nice data base that compares the tax brackets from 1940 to 2002. In 1950, which might be the epicenter of New Deal America, incomes above 400,000 dollars paid an 84 % tax. Theoretically, of course.  Still, the attempt was being made to curb excessive wealth. That same income bracket, in 2002, paid (again theoretically) 34%.  Meanwhile, the corporate income tax contribution to the U.S. budget has been steadily dropping. According to this U.S. News article :


"The corporate levy�which raised $151 billion last year, down from $207 billion in 2000 when profits were easier to come by�may be an endangered species in its current form. Last year's take was the lowest since 1994 and accounted for only 7.6 percent of federal revenue, down from 26.5 percent in 1950. Individuals, meanwhile, are picking up a bigger share of the income tax burden. In 1950, corporations kicked in 39.9 percent of the total collected, while individuals ponied up 60.1 percent. Last year, corporations paid 13.2 percent, while individuals forked over the remaining 86.8 percent."



Any progressive party in this country should take account of these stats and ask what happened. That isn't all --- what Bush is proposing, now, is, in an odd way, a response to these statistics. It is a form of conservative progressivism. It would be hard to justify cuttng the corporate income tax rate further -- although of course the conservative argument, out there, is that since the corporate rate has been cut so much that it only amounts to 7.6 percent of federal revenue, why not cut it to zero and let companies use that money to employ people. Still, the affection people at large feel for corporations is much colder than the affection for them felt by the likes of Bush and Cheney. The elimination of the dividend tax is a covert way of achieving a massive tax cut for the people who own corporations.



That said, there are parts of the tax cut that make sense, or would make sense in some form, especially given the losses of the last three years to the retirement funds of average income Americans.



We'll go into this more in our next post.

NYT publishes a helpful Q. and A. about the Bush proposal.


Q. So what's this "double taxation" everyone's talking about?







A. That term can be a little misleading. A company does not raise its tax burden simply by deciding to pay dividends. But companies have to pay their own income taxes before they can pay dividends.



The federal and state governments tax as much as 40 cents of every dollar in a company's profit. If the remaining 60 cents is paid to shareholders as a dividend, the governments may collect about 24 cents more � 40 percent again � as personal taxes. Most companies, of course, retain much, if not all, of their profit to reinvest in their business. But of the share that is paid to taxable owners, as little as 36 cents of every dollar in profit goes into their pockets.



By contrast, interest on debt counts as a cost, and companies pay interest out of pretax revenue. That gives many companies an incentive to hoard cash or borrow rather than distribute profits to stockholders in cash.

Remora

Paul Krugman makes the case, in his latest column, that the Bush administration's fumbled strategy for containing North Korean military capability contravenes basic game theory. Krugman's canned explanation of game theory goes like this:
"During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with Ph.D.'s in economics, like Daniel Ellsberg, wrote background papers with titles like "The Theory and Practice of Blackmail." The intellectual quality of these analyses was impressive, but their main conclusion was simple: Deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior."

One of Krugman's quirks is to show, at every opportunity, a vocational reverence for "men with Ph.D's in economics." He can't help himself. His larger point, however, is plausible: American power is not increased by the increase in belligerence of American rhetoric. That rhetoric, LI is convinced, is strictly for home consumption. In the case of North Korea, the belligerence has been met with an increase of belligerence on the North Korean side. Belatedly, we are discovering that we have upped the stakes without having any serious cards.

As any anti-war activist will tell you, our sudden mildness and benignity vis a vis North Korea calls into question the premises of "infinite justice," our war on Iraq, or, uh, on terrorism. In December, as we passed the stage of Iraq's 12,000 page weapons inventory, obligingly censored by the UN -- and with that censorship acceded to by the supine press, which did not question the national security imperative for disguising who sold what to Iraq -- the U.S. claimed, in a bout of heroic speed reading, that it was all a mockery. Of course, the press echoed this sentiment. But the press didn't tell us why it was a mockery. For all the disparaging noises emanating from D.C., nobody has pointed to some specific instance of a tabu weapon in S.H.'s arsenal. Rather, we are fighting the potential tabu weapon. This is an almost infinitely plastic casus belli. Thomas Friedman, another NYT op-eder, pretty much concedes this in his Sunday column. He takes on the anti-war slogan that the war against Iraq is about oil, not justice. It is, Friedman thinks, about oil. And so what? But he backs up and gives two conditions for saying that the war, if it happens, is immoral. Or, as he rather disgustingly puts it, is "seen to be immoral':

"I have no problem with a war for oil � if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation. But when we tell the world that we couldn't care less about climate change, that we feel entitled to drive whatever big cars we feel like, that we feel entitled to consume however much oil we like, the message we send is that a war for oil in the gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival � but our right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral."

What this means is beyond our comprehension. If Friedman seriously thinks that the Bush administration is about to curb SUV use in the USA, he is definitely living on another planet, earth minus Cheney. What it really means is that we have to gear up a lot of meaningless rhetoric about energy consumption. In other words, boiler plate Democratic presidential candidate rhetoric. Meaningless attacks on the administration, unsupported by any desire to really act on the words in any significant way.

His second condition is that we not impose another dictator on Iraq:

"And that leads to my second point. If we occupy Iraq and simply install a more pro-U.S. autocrat to run the Iraqi gas station (as we have in other Arab oil states), then this war partly for oil would also be immoral.If, on the other hand, the Bush team, and the American people, prove willing to stay in Iraq and pay the full price, in money and manpower, needed to help Iraqis build a more progressive, democratizing Arab state � one that would use its oil income for the benefit of all its people and serve as a model for its neighbors � then a war partly over oil would be quite legitimate. It would be a critical step toward building a better Middle East."

This is the crux of the matter. An anti-war stance doesn't have to be a pro-S.H. stance, pace Hitchens ... The more general anti-war point is that Friedman's liberal imperialism is not in the American interest. It simply isn't a good idea to install an American force in Iraq for the next two or three years. It is an invitation to disaster, a la Beirut, 1983. And if the idea is that the implementation of democracy requires such a force -- and that is what the Wolfowitz/Friedman line is all about -- then we are back to a Vietnam era mistake. That is, we justify intervention by making a well intentioned goal that requires more intervention, and that increased intervention subverts our well intentioned goal. Notice that we are conceding that our goal is well intentioned. Actually, we don't believe that the Bush administration does have good intentions -- we believe that they want to use the war for domestic political ends.

So ... war is gently drifting upon us, like bad weather. The headline in the WP today is about massing 100,000 American troops -- although where they are to be staged from is unclear:


"The U.S. military is assembling a ground force for a possible invasion of Iraq that could exceed 100,000 troops and include three to four heavy Army divisions, an airborne division, a Marine division and an assortment of Special Operations forces, according to defense officials and analysts."

Notes

The odds and ends have piled up around LI. We should gesture occasionally to the duty of the blogger to gather esoteric links and recommend them. We have two such links to recommend.

The first is this Prospect magazine article by Bella Thomas, a tv producer. The article penetrates the smug assumption cultivated among Americans by flunkies in the press that our tv programs are the world's progams. This assumption has been alluded to as the explanation for anti-Americanism in the third world -- how are you gonna get em back from the jihad, once they see Jerry Springer? Thomas plausiblibly refutes that theory in favor of her own schema, which goes something like this: when Asia or the Middle East or Sub-sahara Africa experiences the tv boom -- and, according to her, tv sets are more plentiful than telephones in rural China and Egypt -- the first things broadcast to the little boxes are definitely made in the West: the soaps, Dallas, Baywatch, etc. The whole inane litany. But then... Well, here are her thesis grafs:

"In 1998, according to Screen Digest, there were more than 2,600 television channels operating in the world, most of them private. What sort of programmes are these channels transmitting? Two trends stand out. The first is the growth of entertainment programmes in relation to current affairs-such that news programmes themselves have often become a form of "infotainment." Miss Egypt, for example, now reads the news on Egypt's Dream TV. In the transition from the Soviet Union to today's Russia, the broadcasting time for fiction grew by 44 per cent (with cartoons up by 176 per cent); for entertainment by 192 per cent. Transmission time for information programmes fell by 61 per cent.

Second, countries in the first stage of globalisation tend to experience a wave of western programming; but in the second and third waves of globalisation, local versions of western programmes or genuinely local programmes become more visible. Terhi Rantanen, a media analyst at the LSE, says of Russian television that "the novelty value that western programmes and advertisements once had was lost in the 1990s." Increasingly, Russians watch Russian programmes."

This makes sense to LI. America's famous provincialism, we've always thought, isn't really so different than the provincialism to be found in Lyon, or Kiev, or Madras. Naturally, x-s want to watch other x-s on tv. Also, it makes sense that favored narrative types will eventually be shoehorned into the standard American tv narrative. Watchers of Dallas in Morocco have been interviewed by anthropologists, and the anthropologists have found that Dallas looks different to these watchers -- family dynamics are interpreted differently, or even deliberately misinterpreted.

Incidentally, Thomas also records an excellent joke from Egypt:

"In 1980s Cairo, a popular joke used to go around about backward peasants from Upper Egypt, called the Sa'idis. A Sa'idi goes into an appliance store and asks, "how much is that television set in the window?" The owner yells, "get out of here you stupid Sa'idi." He comes back dressed as a Saudi Arabian. The owner yells the same thing-and again, when he comes back disguised as a European. Puzzled, the man asks, "how could you tell it was me?" The shop owner answers, "that's not a television, it's a washing machine."


We'd also recommend an article from Esoterica magazine: UNLEASHING THE BEAST: Aleister Crowley, Tantra and Sex Magic in Late Victorian England BY Hugh Urban

Urban views the Crowley phenomenon under the well worn schema of Bataille's concept of transgression, and helps himself to a dose of Foucault as well. Reading the article, however, we were more impressed by Crowley as an entrepreneur of transgression, rather than as a transgressor in Bataille's dark sense. Veblen seems a more apposite reference than French theory. Urban contends that Crowley has been ignored by academia -- but he doesn't have a story about why this should be the case. We think the story is bound up with Crowley's transgressive persona. What the sex stuff was about was not, as in the case of D.H. Lawrence (Urban, inevitably, quotes Lawrence), serious transgression, but the transgression of seriousness. Alas, there is way too little curiosity about how seriousness, and its complement, unseriousness, are made -- how they operate as forms that mark genres of discourse. In fact, unseriousness doesn't really have a name -- LI must use the negative form of seriousness to demarcate what isn't serious. Ludic doesn't work, nor does frivolous. We are transiting into the real deep structure here, so I'll back up ... don't wanna frighten my ever faithful readers!

To return to Urban's article, the man does highlight the Victorian adjuncts to Crowley's sex-theology. And he refers to a character LI had never heard of, one Paschal Beverly Randolph. Randolph was, like Frederic Douglass, a freed slave (from Madagascar, no less) and an abolitionist. He was also a sex theologian. Here's a graf about him:

"In the course of his wanderings in the Middle East, Randolph claimed to been initiated by a group of Fakirs in the area of Jerusalem, which may have been a branch of the mystical order of the Nusa'iri -- a group long persecuted by orthodox Islam because of their alleged Gnostic sexual rituals. Upon his return to the United States, Randolph began to teach a form of sexual magic that would have a profound impact on much of later Western esotericism. For Randolph, the experience of sexual orgasm is the critical moment in human consciousness and the key to magical power: "true Sex-power is God-power," as he put it. As the moment when new life is infused from the spiritual realm into the material, it is crucial moment one the soul is suddenly opened up to the spiritual energies of the cosmos: "at the instant of intense mutual orgasm the souls of the partners are opened to the powers of the cosmos and anything truly willed is accomplished." [49] The power of sex, then, can be deployed for a wide range of both spiritual and material ends. If one can harness the creative energy aroused by sexual contact, he can realize virtually any worldly or otherworldly goal. Not only can one achieve the spiritual aims of divine insight, but he can also attain the mundane goals of physical health, financial success or regaining the passions of a straying lover. [50] "

Wow. LI will have to find out more about this fellow.

Finally, a bit of correspondance. Our friend, T., in NYC, sends this reflection on Pilate.

"...so the Pilate thing is going not exactly where I thought it might, but it is going.
An indication of a thought: for myself, I have never given Pilate all that much thought; certainly not much beyond "Ecce Homo", or as the only "sympathetic" character in the New Test. (all that via FWN). I've always had a sort of Judas approach to the life of JC (probably a long lingering effect of a youthful affair with Kazantzakis). And so to this: how is a notion of Christianity conditioned by the assumption of either a Christ/Pilate or Christ/Judas "initial position"? I mean to say that depending on the conceptual personae that you hold at attention, I think that you get two very different JCs, and so I wonder what manner of person attends to one or the other? (sure, sure: inessential issues of cause-effect arise, but that is not the angle I want to think about)."

Remora

LI saw the movie Chicago yesterday. We are a sucker for musicals. We notice that the New Yorker movie reviewer, Anthony Lane, is referentially lost on this one. Wet behind the ears. He is all about Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Chicago is all about the Three Penny Opera and Caberet. Lane goes into an unfortunate disquisition about the way audiences of yore could accept the musical's premise -- that people break into song and dance in ordinary life -- while audiences of today are much more cynical about that kind of thing. This just goes to show that Lane is reading too many pop sociology articles in the New Yorker. The contemporary audience is one of the most sentimental beasts ever conjured to the circus by fakirs and jugglers, there to be overawed by the most primitive tricks. Trained on happy endings and special effects, and cretinized, since childhood, by the grossly improbable logic of the standard movie narrative, this is not a cynical audience, so much as one expecting situation comedy to lie around every corner -- or a car chase. Theirs is a baby cynicism. Lane should watch MTV to see how, contra his supposition, the musical has taken over everyday life. It was the older audience, which had some vestigial sense of the modes of artifice allowable in art, who accepted the musical's premise for what it was -- a bracketing of, and so, at best, an intensification of, real life.

Speaking of the cynicism of babies, that flip side of the their utter gullibility... Chicago has one scene that is a real knockout. The lawyer, played by Richard Gere, gives a press conference with his client, played by Renee Zellinger. The conference turns into a dance scene with the press as marionnettes and the lawyer as the puppet-master. Watching this, I couldn't help but think of the press and Iraq. Puppetry is an over-used metaphor for control, but LI has nothing against an over-used metaphor if it works. It works in Chicago. It works in that other musical, too: Bush's War against Iraq.


Take the great nerve gas scare. On December 11, Washington Post's Barton Gellman came out with a story, breathlessly attributed to leaks from higher ups, that Iraq had delivered VX, a nerve gas, to an succadaneum of Al Qaeda -- a terrorist group in Lebanon named Asbat al-Ansar.

Gellman was much interviewed for this scoop, no doubt with the approval of WP's management. After all, it was good for the paper. He was on NPR and CNN, throwing off non-sequitors like:

"...there is no evidence that this transaction was approved or known by Saddam Hussein. There is a presumption that it would be very hard to take any of Iraq's secret cache of weapons out of Iraq without the government's knowledge. If the government did cooperate, it's also speculation, but the CIA reported it publicly not so long ago that the likeliest reason that Saddam would do so is if he believed he was in imminent danger of being unseated."


As Don Dwyer, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune pointed out, Gellman's story was gold to the Bush administration. The administration denied it -- but of course, the point was to get the story out there:

"Not surprisingly to Washington insiders, Bush administration spokesmen spent the day Dec. 12 denying the Post's report when other news organizations asked about it. It was thus able to have its cake and eat it too: It had gotten "evidence" of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection out to the American people through a respected reporter at a prestigious newspaper noted for its government reporting, while retaining the ability to deny the whole thing."

Iraq denied it too -- but the Iraqi government's denials are as convincing as their election results.

So -- the story is out there. The tattered honor of WP was gallantly upheld by the WP ombudsman, Michael Getler, who noted a week later that the story wavered between speculation, denial, and credible sources that were incredibly biased towards producing evidence of an al Qaida-Iraq tie in -- and were probably not leaking members of Asbat al-Ansar. But we all know that rumor, that many mouthed creature, perched (as Virgil saw) on the city gates, is what matters. The lawyer in Chicago didn't really care about the plausibility of his news releases, so much as the pervasity of them. So, too, the Bush administration can put the buzz in our ear and no later retraction, especially by an ombudsman, is going to be remembered.. Questions, of course, are for the unpatriotic.

Why, we ask unpatriotically, was Asbat al-ansar the intermediary in this little exchange of terror capital? The Center for Defense Information -- definitely steak tartar people -- has this to say about the group:


"Asbat al-Ansar has had a rather ineffectual history compared to many of the other groups on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), yet its control of a tiny but significant piece of southern Lebanon threatens to return the country to civil war and derail the Middle East peace process."

The Council on Foreign Relations spots them at around 300 members. They share the al Qaida obsession with bringing back the caliphate. Now, if there is one thing Saddam Hussein is not all about, it is bringing back the caliphate. That would be the end of him. So we are forced back to the CIA's idea: Hussein, desperate to strike at the US, has decided to let this little matter of the caliphate lapse, and convey nerve gas through a group that is notorious for internal feuding to al Qaida. The upshot is that either Asbat al-Ansar or al-Qaida has the nerve gas.


The Guardian's Brian Whitacker has the best description of Gellman's story. The Guardian story came out four days after WP gave us the scoop:

"The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed - not for want of effort - to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as "credible", none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.

The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist."

"Sensible" begs Lenin's question: who benefits?

As for the WP -- what has happened in the three weeks since this paper clinched the tie between Saddam and Al Quaeda? There's been an odd silence. Look up Asbat al-Ansar on their search engine and you come up with no recent stories -- although one would expect a rush, as we try to determine if these mad 300 people possess the weapons to decimate D.C. and Falls Church, Va. in one fell swoop. We suspect that the story isn't going to be followed up. It has served its purpose.

Our upcoming war with Iraq is turning into a sad affair for the press -- it is all too reminiscent of the biz press pumping the bubble in '99. With bloodier consequences.

Dope

LI took a bumpy flight to Atlanta last Monday. I went to spend Christmas with my family. My friend S. was patiently along for the ride, and displayed an admirable calm, as well as a blue cowboy hat perched at a jaunty angle on her head, while we dipped into various troughs and got our memento mori moment .

S. was a singleton child -- no other siblings in sight when she was growing up. Merely the one on one with those gradually diminishing household giants, the parents, with their gothic voraciousness, their sudden, irrational ukases, their illogic, their dense weave of habit -- the afterwork tasks, the sitting before the tv, the petrified idioms of their conversation, what they found funny or disgusting or respectable -- and their own consciousness of a forward motion in time that is invisible to the singleton, for whom the parent comes as a complete and finished unit. This is a bit more visible to those who start out either before or after some other human bodies at the table. The weight, the height, the grades and the birthdays make growth and aging a matter of population rather than an (for a long time) incomparable process. The singleton is a maroon. I grew up with two brothers and two sisters, which makes for considerable differences in tactics and strategies. For children in large families, the POV becomes, necessarily, an amalgam; the one on one with the parents is, if sometimes sharp, always subject to sudden switches of focus. For a singleton, the family is a novel. For the children in a large family, it is a newspaper. Furthermore, my family has a tendency to competition and gregariousness that makes us seem, sometimes, very like a tree full of starlings. However, S. enjoyed us; and when she didn't, she sat back and let us gabble on and thought, herself, of other things.

Since Mom died, the family has changed a lot. My father, for instance, found another wife -- or so I suppose, not having been invited to the wedding, or even knowing if there was one -- not knowing, too, what 'finding' means, exactly, here, since finding implies looking, and was my Dad looking? or was the woman looking? -- and has, my Dad, astonishingly enough, spent most of the last four or five years having nothing to do with us. Aggressively. That's a painful desertion, but it has been muted by the fact that we are all of us middle aged. We are, frankly, not going to mope over Dad when we have such other, rich themes to mope over: lack of romantic partners, unsatisfactory romantic partners, money, news, whether God exists, etc. My sister J. lives in Shreveport; she wasn't present for this Christmas. Deidre's two kids were, for me, the highlight of Christmas. Molly is eighteen, Emerson is, what, eleven? (I am, of course, using false names -- ever the discrete one, LI is). I can never remember if Emerson is eleven, twelve or thirteen. In any case, Christmas is about giving gifts to kids. Adults of course like gifts, but they like gifts that derive from less communal holidays, like birthdays, or Valentines day. Gifts, in other words, that are aureoled with a certain intimacy of gift giver to gift getter. Christmas, however, is less about the refinements of love and more about the basic roux. Like Christmas dinner -- which is all hearty, blatant flavors, aiming for the the bovine warmth of the full stomach rather than some epicurian mid-state -- the perfect Christmas gift should acknowledge the child's concupiscence for stuff rather than signal the givers own taste in the choice of it.

The gifts were just right, as Goldilocks says of the little bear's porridge. And, to acknowledge LI's own lust for stuff, we are typing this post on one of them -- a laptop computer.

Dope

What would Pilate do?

Well, LI learned, the other day, that we were not the first to spot the significance of Pilate in the controversy between Mill and Stephen -- a writer for the Economist, Ann Wroe, in her book on the figure of Pilate, alludes both to the controversy and to the colonial background:


"With this contemporary problem [of empire] in their minds, the Victorians turned again with some interest to the trial of Jesus. Had Pilate been justified in crucifying Christ, or not? On one side stood John Stuart Mill, the great liberal thinker, who naturally took the view that the trial itself was a travesty and Pilate's sentence an outrage against freedom of speech and freedom of religion. On the other side stood James FitzJames Stephen, the uncle of Virginia Woolf, who argued that Pilate's moral absolutes would have been different. If a ruler, he argued, was charged to keep the peace, that naturally became his first priority. He was not required to be tolerant of free speech or religion if that meant he would have a riot on his hands. Pilate's first concern was the glory of Rome; his second, the preserving of his own skin, and both depended absolutely on keeping the peace in Jerusalem."

Our notion is that there is much more to be squeezed out of the Pilate example, in this case, than Wroe gives us here; in a sense, the Trial of Jesus encompasses the whole paradox of Christian imperial governance in the age of democracy. However, we must (grudgingly) acknowledge Wroe's precedence (big of us, huh?).

Voltaire refers to Pilate in two crucial places: in his essay on Tolerance, and in his Philosophical Dictionary. The latter reference is in the entry on Truth. Pilate appears in the light of Voltaire's irony as a figure with whom the philosophea were all too familiar: the sympathizers within the state, the hangers-on of the enlightenment. The nobles, officials, churchmen who expressed, as is the way of the circles of the powerful under political tyranny, sympathy for dissent -- an enlightened view of official superstitions -- a discomfort with old institutions - and who, when the time came, would unhesitatingly betray their enlightened friends. Pilate, who, following an old convention, Voltaire obviously sees as a disenchanted old officer, is willing to surrender to establishment pressure rather than stand up against it. He knows the better thing, and does the worse. Truth, then, gets mixed up, from the very beginning, with resistance against the structure of falsehood. It is, in other words, politicized.


Voltaire's reading of Pilate comes from the famous passage in John 18:

Pilate said to him, "you are the king?"
Jesus responded, "you say that I am the king; it is for this that I was born and have come into the world -- to witness the truth; let every man who is of the truth listen to my voice." Pilate said to him, "what is the truth?" and having said this, he parted.

Voltaire's gloss on this passage is in the highest vein of his style -- sparse, dry, doublesided:

"Il est triste pour le genre humain que Pilate sort�t sans attendre la r�ponse; nous saurions ce que c�est que la v�rit�. Pilate �tait bien peu curieux."

It is as if Pilate and Jesus were actors in one of Perrault's folktales. But Voltaire soon drives home his liberal point. Conceding that the truth is to say that which is; and conceding that that which was, or will be, can only be said in terms of its probability, and never in terms of its certitude; then to kill a human being for speaking his mind is to kill him on what was, or on a probability; furthermore, it is to kill him without, oneself, knowing the truth, insofar as present certitude is surrounded by a gulf of doubt, is to commit an act of lese majeste with regard to the truth. Voltaire, of course, expresses these things with his usual astringent humor:

" Mais comme vous n�aurez jamais de certitude enti�re, vous ne pourrez vous flatter de conna�tre parfaitement la v�rit�.

Par cons�quent vous devez toujours pencher vers la cl�mence plus que vers la rigueur. S�il ne s�agit que de faits dont il n�ait r�sult� ni mort d�homme ni mutilation, il est �vident que vous ne devez faire mourir ni mutiler l�accus�. S�il n�est question que de paroles, il est encore plus �vident que vous ne devez point faire pendre un de vos semblables pour la mani�re dont il a remu� la langue; car toutes les paroles du monde n��tant que de l�air battu, � moins que ces paroles n�aient excit� au meurtre, il est ridicule de condamner un homme � mourir pour avoir battu l�air. Mettez dans une balance toutes les paroles oiseuses qu�on ait jamais dites, et dans l�autre balance le sang d�un homme, ce sang l�emportera. Or celui qu�on a traduit devant vous n��tant accus� que de quelques paroles que ses ennemis ont prises en un certain sens, tout ce que vous pourriez faire serait aussi de lui dire des paroles qu�il prendra dans le sens qu�il voudra; mais livrer un innocent au plus cruel et au plus ignominieux supplice pour des mots que ses ennemis ne comprennent pas, cela est trop barbare. Vous ne faites pas plus de cas de la vie d�un homme que de celle d�un l�zard, et trop de juges vous ressemblent."

("Since you will never possess the entire certainty of any state of affairs, you cannot flatter yourself to know, perfectly, the truth.

Consequently, you ought always to lean towards clemency, instead of rigor. If if it is only a question of facts which have not resulted in homicide or injury, it is evident that you should not, yourself, either kill or mutilate. If it is only a question of words, it is still more evident that you ought not to hang one of your kind for the manner in which he moved his tongue. For all the words in the world are only thrashings of the air, at least if they have not excited to murder, and it is ridiculous to condemn a man to death for thrashing the air. So, let's put into one side of the balance all the idle words one has ever spoken, and into the other side the blood of a man, and you will see that blood carries the point. Thus he who they have brought before you, being only accused of some words that his enemies have taken in a certain sense, all that you can do would be to have him say the words in the sense that he himself would have them taken; but to deliver an innocent to the most cruel and ignominious torture for words that his enemies doen't understand, that is too barbarous. Doing this, you are making no more of a case for the life of a man than the life of a lizard -- and too many judges are just like you."

Voltaire prefigures Mill's argument for liberty of opinion from the fallibility of all opinions. However, he's simply funnier than Mill.

Remora

Venezuala.


LI averted our eyes from the news during the past week in this space -- at least officially. Like a robotically connected citizen, outside of this space we did keep a beady-eyed watch over the march of history in the newspapers. One story that hasn't stirred us is the general strike in Venezuala.

Why haven't we been stirred? After all, what word, to a romantic leftist, conjures up more vivid images of liberty, equality and fraternity than the general strike? The favored tool of the working class -- and yes, Virginia, there is a working class -- usually engages our sympathies. This one, however, has engaged our ambiguities.

On the one hand, the picture is this: Hugo Chavez has all the appearances of that scourge of Latin American history, the military populist, of whom Peron is the great, dark exemplar. They arouse the contempt and fury of the propertied class, but one shouldn't infer, from that, that these military energumen are leftists. More often, they offer a corporatist answer to the civil and economic problems of the nation. It is a short range solution that, at the price of stifling liberty, pledges the nation to dependence on an elevated spoils system, usually centering around some exported raw material, or agricultural product. In the meantime, the despotic distribution of power creates a grass-roots motive for social violence. In Venezuala, where everything floats on oil and Chavez is enamored of his own charisma, all these elements are in place.

On the other hand, there's a certain rancid odor wafting above some of the groups opposing Chavez. An odor of the coup, the death-squad, and the sour snobbery of the elite. This snobbery is not a matter of who joins the club -- it is a matter of taking violent coercion as the chosen instrument of governance. It is a matter of freezing class divisions. It is a matter of under-educating, under-investing in, and actively repressing, the lower classes. We've seen this machinery in motion before.

The LA Times has been particularly hip to the turmoil in Venezuala, with a better archive of Venezuala news stories than are on offer at the NYT. The ambiguities of opposition are explored in yesterday's story, entitled Marxists, Management Unite to Oppose Chavez, with the explainatory graf:

"For more than two weeks of a national strike, the opposition has presented a solid front against Chavez, whom it accuses of conspiring to turn the United States' third-largest oil supplier into a communist redoubt like Cuba."


Today, they publish a profile of Raul Baduel, who "commands a fifth of Venezual's 45,000 troops." Baduel is Chavez' friend, and a mystic dabbler:





"The commander of Venezuela's most powerful military force sits behind a large dark wood desk surrounded by Virgin Mary statues and Buddhist prayer strips. The smell of patchouli fills the air. Gregorian chant music floats ethereally."



Gregorian chants, eh? Latin American military men do seem fatally inclined to mystagogic eccentricities. The Autumn of the Patriarch is the strict truth about this type of man.

The opposition, to judge by the rhetoric of one of its websites, seems, in part, mired in the ultra reactionary views that encouraged the death squads in El Salvador and the torture units in Argentina. Here's a graf from Vcrisis:

"Brazil's president Lula Da Silva, after giving the ministry of Economy and Finance to a pro capitalist-US educated businessman, has sent his top foreign policy adviser -- Marco Aurelio Garcia -- to Caracas to offer Brazil's help in solving the political crisis in Venezuela. However, Garcia said he will not meet with any opposition leaders because they are demanding that President Hugo Chavez resign. Da Silva is a co-founder with Cuban leader Fidel Castro of the Sao Paulo Forum, a hemispheric umbrella group for Latin American Marxist and socialist parties, former guerrilla organizations and active rebel groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Peru's Shining Path. Chavez has been a member of the Sao Paulo Forum since the mid-1990s."

The Houston Chronicle published an uncharacteristically thoughtful commentary on the Chavez situation Thursday.  Although the writer, Michael Marx McCarthy [a name that reeks of cognitive dissonance] counts Chavez out a little pre-maturely, his analysis of the post-Chavez landscape seems about right:




"Indeed, while the Chavez-led "Bolivarian revolution" might soon be dead, the president's impact on Venezuela has transcended the visceral association many lower-class supporters feel because of his mestizo skin color and anti-establishment rhetoric. It's important to recognize that the proverbial genie is out the bottle, and Venezuela's poor majority will demand that fundamental social issues be addressed.

During the two-day April coup, which was tacitly supported by the United States, the interim administration of business leader Pedro Carmona looked and acted like a 1950s Latin American civil-military junta, dissolving the National Assembly, throwing out the Supreme Court and unabashedly representing the elite. The opposition still wants the whole system revamped, from the name of the country -- "Bolivarian State of Venezuela" -- to the assembly and constitution. If the opposition again sacks the president, Chavez's supporters -- at least a third of the population, which in April took to the streets and brought their leader back to office -- will not hesitate to bear arms for the first president to offer them a legitimate stake in national politics."


Finally, for a left tilt to the news, Counter-Punch publishes Greg Wilpert's pro-Chavez journalism. However, do we detect a note of hesitancy in his writing? Instead of the usual cocktail of tabloid invective and lefty support, he seems to hesitate about characterizing Chavez' opposition as wholly reactionary. He does view the strike as ultimately a ploy of the management, but who is the managment of a state owned firm?

Dope

What would Pilate do?

We've been losing readers by the handfuls as we've pursued the argument in James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity this week. Or rather, as we have gnawed around the edges of it, like a man on a diet with a salt cracker. Our friend L.S. in NYC has recommended less lentamento -- our slow-motion conceptual strip-tease, he tells us, is gradually putting the patrons to sleep, who have come for some hot action and a little ideational pudenda.

Hey, what can we say? We are using this space to put together a possible essay. And so you will have to excuse, reader-patron, a certain air of sawdust, and fragments, and sketches.

To continue, then -- we are, we promise, going to get to the central paradox in Stephen's conservative imperialism -- that, in the name of the Christendom, Stephen is forced to advocate the government of a bunch of Pilates. And we see this same paradox in Stephen's conservative American heirs, transposed into the American idiom: for the proconsular dreams of such as Paul Wolfowitz, in which the American imperium irresistably spreads democracy, demands, as well, methods that are anything but democratic, and alliances that are anything but libertarian.

Well, that is getting peremptorily to the heart of the matter.
LI doesn't do that.

Rather, this post will be devoted to a brief note on a philosophical-literary genre.

Don't groan. Let's start with the relevance of this note to our Stephen problem. The figure of Pilate occurs, in Stephen's book, in response to John Stuart Mill's example of free thinking being put down -- viz, the condemnation of Christ. But what is an example in a philosophical argument? That is what we are concerned with tonight, comrades. This will be painless. Refreshments will be served at the end.

Okay. The philosophic situation is our name for a story that is adapted to a theory. Descarte's evil demon is one example. Socrates' death is another example, even though it is based on a real event. Like the stories in the Bible, philosophic situations have a peculiar persuasive status. In the Bible, according to Christian theology, every story instances some aspect of the divine presence -- and leads us to the more abstract question of the nature and purposes of the divine will. The philosophic situation, similarly, crystallizes the abstract conceptual issues posited by theory, but the movement in the philosophical situation is torn between the allegorical and the juridical impulse -- between the simple, concentrated display of conceptual forces, and the testing of hypotheses. This tension in the philosophical situation distinguishes it from its cousin, the counterfactual, which is solely defined by the exigencies of argument. The philosophical situation was still half under the rules of art, and could serve as satire, or even, ultimately, as pure fiction. The Enlightenment was the great age of the philosophic situation, from Molyneux's problem to Montesquieu's Persion Letters.

So, enough lit-crit maundering. Let's get to Pilate.

Notes

What would Pilate do?

LI was happy to receive a little email from our friend Alan this morning. He is resurrecting his own blog, Gadfly's Buzz. He also liked, actually liked, our continuing series of posts about James Fitzjames Stephen -- which seem, otherwise, to have decreased our readership significantly, at least according to that little inaccurate site meter thing we keep on this site.

Odd. We find Fitzjames Stephen to be a more and more fascinating figure. After reading his entry in the National Biography (a series started and edited by his brother, Leslie Stephen, who was -- as our readers already know -- Virginia Woolf's Dad, as well as the model for the polymathic dynamo in George Meredith's The Egoist), we realized that, by accident, we are ending the year by tying together many of the themes we've pursued on this site. We've written about Lord Macaulay (5/4/02) and Lord Bacon, wandering into Macaulay's essay about the Trial of Warren Hastings; we've written about Mike Davis' scarifying and much ignored book about the "Victorian holocaust" -- a book that gains its power by simply describing the famines of 1876 and 1877 in India. The description indicts the Raj, by the common consent of today's historians a beneficent entity, for its gross inhumanity(2/16/02) -- and to put a parenthesis in a parenthesis, as is our usual, maddening way of going about things, Davis' work reminds us, again, in this time of imperialist nostalgia, that the British empire is judged on a moral standard that makes heavy use of such omissions as would, transposed to 20th century Russia, clear Stalin of wrongdoing. Take the popular history of the Raj recently published by Lawrence James (Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India). Not only is there no entry in the index for famine (although it does sport a couple of photos of famine victims), but James devotes more space to Lord Curzon's management of state pageantry than to the famines that might have killed as many as two million people in the 1870s. Here is almost the entire substance of James' report on the latter, troubling affair:

"In 1876 and 1877 there had been two successive seasons of inadequate rainfall which had affected a swathe of country stretching from Mysore to Punjab, in which 58 million people faced chronic food shortages [editor's note -- this is euphemism as high art]. The government's efforts to cope with this disaster had failed, partly because of underfunding, partly because of the current laissez faire dogma which forbade interference with market mechanisms, and partly because there was not enough railroads to convey foodstuffs..." This is what is known as understated prose. The reader of James' 670 page tome might be forgiven for never exactly gathering that famine killed a couple of million Indians during the heyday of the British Raj. And, if the reader pauses during James brief, awkward walk through the years of rain shortfalls, he will be reassured that, after all, the faulty response can be laid to a doctrine, laissez faire -- an impalpable thing, to be found in economics dictionaries -- rather than in the human, all too inhuman, policies of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, that were firmly supported by the Conservative government in England -- although not by the liberals under Gladstone, it should be said. James himself provides an image for the kind of history he is creating -- and the kind that is still created about this period. In the early1800s, James claims, colored prints of the Indian countryside started to appear in England, and became popular. But, as he notes, the prints customarily "omitted" the Indian multitudes that thronged in those landscapes. Well, so it was, and so it has been ever since. If, of course, James had emphasized such chronic food shortages -- the fault, of course, entirely of nature, and not at all of a pernicious and rapacious tax system, combined with a systemic neglect of the agricultural structure of the countryside that had been built up over two centuries, and that, by some miracle of nature James doesn't contemplate, had prevented chronic food shortages in the eighteenth century -- if James had emphasized famine, it might be harder to 'adjust the balance,"as James puts it, against the "Marxists" and left wingers who have slandered the Raj.
End of parenthesis...
We've also written about Governor Eyre of Jamaica and his brutal suppression of a black and mulatto uprising (9/09/020. The uprising has become the centerpiece of a revisionist history of the socialist impulse in 19th century England, undertaken by an economics professor at George Mason University, David Levy, in collaboration with Sandra Peart. All of these themes converge in the figure of James Fitzjames Stephen, strange as that might seem. When Stephen went to India in order to reform the law of evidence in the colony, he built on the regulatory structure created by Macaulay. Stephen was a particular friend of Lord Lytton, who went home in some disgrace -- a disgrace compounded of his response to the famine and his failures on the frontier. And, finally, Stephen was officially a part of the prosecutor's entourage in the Eyre affair.
We'll have more to say about the latter in the next post. And then, we promise, we will get to the much delayed Pilate problem.

Dope

Pilate (continued)


Niall Ferguson, the conservative historian, pens an article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday that nicely sums up the conventions of the moment among the trans-Atlantic belligerants. He goes back and forth with the parallel between the British Empire and the U.S -- too much of a historian to find analogies unembarrassing, but too much of a belligerant to fresist it:

"Let's look again at that parallel between the U.S. and the British Empire. Terrorism is a global phenomenon and so, necessarily, is the war against it. One consequence of 9/11 was to shatter forever the illusion that Americans could retreat to enjoy the fruits of their productivity behind a missile defense shield. For terrorism breeds in precisely the rogue states and strife-torn war zones that some Republicans before 9/11 thought we could walk away from. Intervention to impose the rule of law on such seedbeds of terror is far from an unrealistic project. That was precisely what the Victorians excelled at."

The rule of law (which was not, of course, any kind of motive for the expansion of the British Empire -- it is the kind of phrase much favored by those who have put a suitable generation or two between themselves and the pirates who seized the properties they now complacently fold into the law of contracts) was the kind of thing Fitzjames Stephen brooded on, no doubt in a Mr. Rochester way. Law, of course, gives you a rather grimmer idea of human action than economics or logic does -- the latter two being more Mill's specialties. The tone of Stephen's dissent from Mill in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity is shot through with a sense that human beings are essentially difficult. Especially if you meet them out there, doing the rounds in some godforsaken part of Southern India, rather than confine your encounters to the pleasanter purlieus of Chelsea.

Being a religious man -- or, rather, a man attached to the guarding of the Christian religion, and the preservation of all its old ferocities, regardless of his personal appraisal of the plausibility of Christian evidences -- Stephen attacks Mill's libertarianism on two fronts: one is that, frankly, Mill undervalues the role of coercion in human society, and hence would impose limits on the State's coercive power that would countermine the State's great role -- that of disciplining the mass. The other is that Mill's libertarianism is, ultimately, a hedonism contrary in all its parts to Christian doctrine. Even if one feels, reading Stephen's tract, that Stephen, post Cambridge, was that Victorian thing, an agnostic with Calvinist leanings, one also feels that Stephen believes -- as did Nietzsche, at times -- that the disbelief of the rulers in the established creed is no reason not to enforce belief in that creed, by all means necessary. This belief also shows up in one of the great nineteenth century texts -- the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov. Stephen's intro graf certainly intones Dostoevskian themes:

"The object of this work is to examine the doctrines which are rather hinted at than expressed by the phrase "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." This phrase has been the motto of more than one Republic. It is indeed something more than a motto. It is the creed of a religion, less definite than any one of the forms of Christianity, which are in part its rivals, in part its antagonists, and in part its associates, but not on that account the less powerful. It is, on the contrary, one of the most penetrating influences of the day. It shows itself now and then in definite forms, of which Positivism is the one best known to our generation, but its special manifestations give no adequate measure of its depth or width. It penetrates other creeds. It has often transformed Christianity into a system of optimism, which has in some cases retained and in others rejected Christian phraseology."

You can feel the black leather gloves being put on with that phrase, "transformed Christianity into a system of optimism..." As if a creed with a tortured man/god spilling his blood at the center of it promised us a lifetime of teacups and edifiying lectures! Stephen wasn't having any of that nonsense: religion is about the last things, and in that bleak and all consuming light, happiness shrivels up like a dead cockroach.

We mention the Grand Inquisitor with intent -- for part of Stephen's work does, indeed, touch on the same territory treated, much differently, by Dostoevsky. Remember the way Ivan Karamazov's "poem" starts. Jesus comes back to Earth. It is in the time of the great heresy hunts in Spain. Jesus has just raised a dead child when the Grand Inquisitor comes into sight:


"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church -- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks."'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer."

Well, Stephen does not intend to reach these depths -- he would no doubt find them rather repulsive. Yet his book does contain a disquisition on Pilate that is certainly worthy of the Grand Inquisitor -- transposing some of the elements.

TBC