Bollettino
Note to readers: we are retiring "remora." The Vatican issues daily bulletins of the doings of the pope, and all his little munchkins in Emerald City, and we've decided to borrow that as our name for our own daily bulletins. Dope will continue to be dope. Thanks.
War and language
Tony Blair -- or a man claiming to be Tony Blair -- readers will recall, I hope, that the real Tony Blair, according to some reports, might be struggling with his bonds in a remote castle in Scotland -- calls the upcoming battle for Baghdad crucial. U.S. commanders, including General Franks, our liberator in chief, a man whose press conferences have quickly devolved into those exercises in denial the military specialized in in Vietnam, claim that the speed Americans are making is success in itself. War, according to this scenario, is a kind of motor-race, and we are simply leaving behind, with superb disdain, those "pockets of resistance" that might exist behind the lines due to fear, according to the inestimable Franks. It is fear that has kept Iraqis from showering us with blossoms, fear that has kept them away from the 24 hour florist shops of Basra, Um Qasr, Najaf, and Mosul, which are guarded round the clock by feared units of S. Hussein's terrorist units, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Legion, Lmt., a non-profit terrorist organization incorporated in Delaware.
But consider an absurd idea: that the Iraqis might have another definition of the war. They might even consider that the invasion of their territory is not, uh, liberation.
I know. You will say, who are these people? I mean, who really cares what the Iraqis think? Some of them have been so ignorant as to compare the U.S.'s showing of unlawful prisoners of sorta-war -- the Taliban and such -- and the way they were masked and manacled -- treated to all the comforts of home, in our prisons in Cuba, if home is a small place, nine by nine, kept perpetually dark, and speaking is forbidden there -- with their own showing and treatment of U.S. Pows, which is a war crime according to the Geneva convention. This is the kind of evil moral equivalency, promoted by relativism and deconstruction, that has spread from our universities overseas. This is what happens when you don't root it out here.
Perhaps it is all one of those big funny cultural things. First we bomb them, then we love bomb them -- with the precious gift of Freedom. When you care enough to send the very best, send Freedom -- it is best served with a big Abrams tank, we understand. Talk about gourmet!
Consider the lowly casualty. It has now become the newscaster norm to consider the combat casualty as a thing defined by the government, and its military branch. So the Edinburg News, today, reports on the first British casualty in combat
"A SOLDIER from the Black Watch has been killed in action in southern Iraq, the second Briton killed in combat in 24 hours.
The unnamed soldier, from the 1st Battalion Black Watch, which recruits in Scotland, died near Al Zubayr, 15 miles west of Basra, Iraq�s second city, where British forces have been engaged in heavy fighting."
Later in the story, however, we are told that "the total number of British deaths in the war so far is now 18." Now, granted, some of those deaths were the result of friendly fire, but some were the result of potshots taken by Iraqi guerrillas. Potshots don't count as combat, however. They are way outside the rules. Combat only occurs when the coalition forces engage in coordinated attack, n'est-ce pas? Eventually some genius will come up with the idea that Iraqis are suffering from mass Stockholm syndrome.
We can't wait.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Remora
This weekend LI talked with a friend who, incautiously, quoted us when talking with another friend about the war. The latter friend said, where does he get his information?! The implication being that we pulled it out of ... the bowels of our imagination. Well, fantasy is something we love to indulge in. But middle age has rather put the kebosh on day dreaming. So we usually look around for info in the usual places.
Information is proving to be a difficulty in this war. The American and British press seem determined to do their patriotic best, whether it is questioning whether Saddam the nefarious is using a body double to do his rousing work (a question that should be directed, we think, at Tony Blair -- surely the real Blair is even now struggling with a duct tape over his mouth and a rope around his wrists in some isolated Scottish castle, much like the kidnapped wife in that Danny DeVito flick, while the Blair substitute, created by Richard Perle out of primitive proteins in some dank basement in Transylvania, is leading the U.K ever closer to 51st state status) or depending on the military to tell us whether the Iraqi tv's broadcast of two downed American helicopter pilots is really two downed American helicopter pilots, or a film cleverly concocted in Baghdad's famous branch of Dreamworks studio. The servility is overwhelming. When General Franks gives his press conferences, the press people now report, with appropriate indignation, that he is greeted with sceptical questions by some of the foreigners present. Shocking.
So the fabulous Iraqi battalion, division, or whatever, consisting of 8,000 men, has surrendered to "coalition" forces at least six times in the press, each time to sort of dwindle away to a bunch of shoemakers and their german shepherd. One of these days a real Iraqi division will surrender to the Americans, and nobody will believe it. So, too, on a day when the stock market loses 300 some points, we have radio newscasters asking journalists sited in Kuwait City, the war seems to be going well from here. What does it look like from there?
What it does look like is a copy of the war that will happen after Saddam H. is history. Treacherous attacks by a subaltern people who don't appreciate the marvels we simply ache to shower them with -- food, democracy, privatized telephone service with 10,000 hours of free long distance calls -- that will eventually wear away the the surface of the military nerve, in the form of the shooting of this or that civilian, and provoke backlash, in the form of the ambush of this or that heroic American, and so on. You know the drill. The huge surprise, so far, is that the American troops haven't had their floral moment -- the Washington Post is getting quite snippy about it. Where are those Iraqi women-'n-children giving our boys the traditional bouquets in Basra and, oh, one of those other desert towns that nobody is going to remember anyway? We can announce, I think, that the problem is that many of those flower arrangements were ordered from busted dot com companies. Seems that Saddam tyrannically prevented the Iraqi masses from accessing the Nets. Hence, behind the times Iraqi women-n-children are ordering their flowers from Grocery.com and Van.com and other now defunct companies. The sorrow and the pity, as they say.
But let's take a breath and remember that our victory is assured, as Blair (II) would put it, and little is really said about who will govern our new staging area for democracy. Michael Young, in Reason, profiles two of American's budding proconsuls. One, Barbara Bodine, our woman in Yemen, gets Young's qualified approval. But of Garner, Young has this to say:
"If Bodine's prospective appointment is designed to reassure the Iraqis of the benign nature of a US occupation, her boss, Jay Garner, will prove a harder sell. Garner famously signed onto an October 12, 2000 statement by the archconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which praised the Israeli army for having "exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority that deliberately pushes civilians and young people to the front lines."
The statement noted: "What makes the US-Israel security relationship one of mutual benefit is the combination of military capabilities and shared political values�freedom, democracy, personal liberty and the rule of law." That Garner himself benefited from the security relationship is well known: As president of California-based defense contractor SY Technology, he oversaw the company's work on the US-Israeli Arrow missile defense system."
Young also reports that on every missile fired into Iraq for its liberation, Garner's company gets a little tooth fairy money. Putting him, it must be said, in the company of the Bush administration's nearest and dearest as far as war profits are concerned.
We did wonder, though, what Young meant by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Was this latent anti-semitism? Turns out that there really is such an organization. Here's a link.
This weekend LI talked with a friend who, incautiously, quoted us when talking with another friend about the war. The latter friend said, where does he get his information?! The implication being that we pulled it out of ... the bowels of our imagination. Well, fantasy is something we love to indulge in. But middle age has rather put the kebosh on day dreaming. So we usually look around for info in the usual places.
Information is proving to be a difficulty in this war. The American and British press seem determined to do their patriotic best, whether it is questioning whether Saddam the nefarious is using a body double to do his rousing work (a question that should be directed, we think, at Tony Blair -- surely the real Blair is even now struggling with a duct tape over his mouth and a rope around his wrists in some isolated Scottish castle, much like the kidnapped wife in that Danny DeVito flick, while the Blair substitute, created by Richard Perle out of primitive proteins in some dank basement in Transylvania, is leading the U.K ever closer to 51st state status) or depending on the military to tell us whether the Iraqi tv's broadcast of two downed American helicopter pilots is really two downed American helicopter pilots, or a film cleverly concocted in Baghdad's famous branch of Dreamworks studio. The servility is overwhelming. When General Franks gives his press conferences, the press people now report, with appropriate indignation, that he is greeted with sceptical questions by some of the foreigners present. Shocking.
So the fabulous Iraqi battalion, division, or whatever, consisting of 8,000 men, has surrendered to "coalition" forces at least six times in the press, each time to sort of dwindle away to a bunch of shoemakers and their german shepherd. One of these days a real Iraqi division will surrender to the Americans, and nobody will believe it. So, too, on a day when the stock market loses 300 some points, we have radio newscasters asking journalists sited in Kuwait City, the war seems to be going well from here. What does it look like from there?
What it does look like is a copy of the war that will happen after Saddam H. is history. Treacherous attacks by a subaltern people who don't appreciate the marvels we simply ache to shower them with -- food, democracy, privatized telephone service with 10,000 hours of free long distance calls -- that will eventually wear away the the surface of the military nerve, in the form of the shooting of this or that civilian, and provoke backlash, in the form of the ambush of this or that heroic American, and so on. You know the drill. The huge surprise, so far, is that the American troops haven't had their floral moment -- the Washington Post is getting quite snippy about it. Where are those Iraqi women-'n-children giving our boys the traditional bouquets in Basra and, oh, one of those other desert towns that nobody is going to remember anyway? We can announce, I think, that the problem is that many of those flower arrangements were ordered from busted dot com companies. Seems that Saddam tyrannically prevented the Iraqi masses from accessing the Nets. Hence, behind the times Iraqi women-n-children are ordering their flowers from Grocery.com and Van.com and other now defunct companies. The sorrow and the pity, as they say.
But let's take a breath and remember that our victory is assured, as Blair (II) would put it, and little is really said about who will govern our new staging area for democracy. Michael Young, in Reason, profiles two of American's budding proconsuls. One, Barbara Bodine, our woman in Yemen, gets Young's qualified approval. But of Garner, Young has this to say:
"If Bodine's prospective appointment is designed to reassure the Iraqis of the benign nature of a US occupation, her boss, Jay Garner, will prove a harder sell. Garner famously signed onto an October 12, 2000 statement by the archconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which praised the Israeli army for having "exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority that deliberately pushes civilians and young people to the front lines."
The statement noted: "What makes the US-Israel security relationship one of mutual benefit is the combination of military capabilities and shared political values�freedom, democracy, personal liberty and the rule of law." That Garner himself benefited from the security relationship is well known: As president of California-based defense contractor SY Technology, he oversaw the company's work on the US-Israeli Arrow missile defense system."
Young also reports that on every missile fired into Iraq for its liberation, Garner's company gets a little tooth fairy money. Putting him, it must be said, in the company of the Bush administration's nearest and dearest as far as war profits are concerned.
We did wonder, though, what Young meant by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Was this latent anti-semitism? Turns out that there really is such an organization. Here's a link.
Monday, March 24, 2003
Remora
"...they have a large exposed rear and exposed flanks..."
-- NPR War correspondent.
Ah, those large exposed rears! For a second, I was thinking that NPR had finally gotten around to reviewing one of my favorite movies, Kelly the Coed: part 5 -- in which the exposure of the rear is an essential, uh, plot element. I mean, isn't it about time Fresh Air took on Vivid Videos? But Alas, the war goes on...
"...they have a large exposed rear and exposed flanks..."
-- NPR War correspondent.
Ah, those large exposed rears! For a second, I was thinking that NPR had finally gotten around to reviewing one of my favorite movies, Kelly the Coed: part 5 -- in which the exposure of the rear is an essential, uh, plot element. I mean, isn't it about time Fresh Air took on Vivid Videos? But Alas, the war goes on...
LI has redounded a bit too much lately, about Iraq. Let's turn to the toast economy, shall we?
HealthSouth's collapse, last week, was masked by the war -- as, for that matter, were the tax shenanigans of the D.C. Bush-ites, the busy troops bringing us the Great Giveaway. HealthSouth is serious business. These great structures, with their CEO Humpty Dumpties sitting on them, redefining the language of profit and loss, cause a lot of collateral damage when they have their great falls. One of our best friends here, S., is a physical therapist working at a Health South Hospital. She is pregnant, she is a recent homeowner, and she is just the kind of person who is put at risk by the likes of the CEO of Health South, Richard Scrushy.
To rehash the story:
Last year, Health South made one of those surprising earnings announcement that almost invariably indicate the midnight scuttling of rats in the accounting department. At the beginning of last year, as the death bell for Enron was ringing out the dead in the energy and telecom sectors, scary news was being heard from the health sector. Forbes, in October, summed up the year's spiral for Health South like this:
"Healthsouth Chairman Richard Scrushy was complaining about Medicare reimbursements when we wrote about him earlier this year. He's still complaining, but he's got bigger problems. A raft of shareholder suits charge that Scrushy and another director sold $100 million worth of shares knowing that a clarification in Medicare billing rules on group therapy would reduce annual operating earnings at the rehab hospital chain by $175 million.
HealthSouth's stock has plunged 75% since the earnings reduction announcement Aug. 27.But maybe it's bondholders who have the real beef. The suits claim that HealthSouth knew about the Medicare billing clarification as early as May 17. Scrushy insists he had no knowledge of it until August. Interesting, that May 17 date. That's when HealthSouth sold $1 billion in debt to investors, extending notes that would have expired in 2003 for an additional ten years. The company got a 7 5/8% rate. Not bad, given that the bonds have since fallen to 69 cents on the dollar, which if negotiated today would mean a 14% coupon for HealthSouth. In short, HealthSouth got a good deal issuing that debt when it did."
Ah, innocence. One ponders another CEO's parental concern with his stock options outweighing his concern for his company. But wait! There was a twist with this announcement. Rather than confessing to a possible fraud, the confession itself was part of a larger fraud.
The HealthSouth saga was, as is so often the case, all about the CEO, Richard Scrushy. Scrushy swung a member of elephantine proportions in his home town of Birmingham, Alabama. He'd gotten his name on various University of Alabama buildings. He was celebrated in the newspaper as an entrepeneurial sage. Like Stephen Hilbert, the CEO of CONSECO of Indianapolis, another grounded high flier with a taste for younger, prettier wives, located in an out of the way burg that was perfect for camoflaging on-going revenue stripping, Scrushy was famed for a variety of tasteless moments. There's one of those NYT portraits of the guy, by Simon Romero that drypoints with just that hint of acid the true bizarreness that can be overlooked in a Southern town if you are willing to throw around one hundred million dollars:
"For a city that had grown accustomed to Mr. Scrushy's public persona in recent years, the disclosure of the problems at HealthSouth came as a jolt. Mr. Scrushy (pronounced SCROO-shee) was known as much in Birmingham for his extravagant tastes, which included a Hummer oversize S.U.V., a luxurious Florida estate and a lead singing role in his own country music band, as he was for his philanthropy."
Romero's article -- and by the way, that it is Romero's and not Kurt Eichenwald makes us wonder if something is up there on the NYT business page --today frontloads a few pretty shocking grafs, bad news for Scrushy:
"At least one official is said to be planning to submit documents, including copies of invoices and receipts, that would show how Richard M. Scrushy, HealthSouth's former chairman, oversaw the creation of a sophisticated electronic surveillance system that may have intimidated senior officials into keeping quiet.Last week, the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Weston Smith, HealthSouth's former chief financial officer. Mr. Smith is cooperating with investigators in their effort to show how Mr. Scrushy pushed senior executives to inflate earnings to prevent a decline in HealthSouth's share price. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating."
But worse is in the meat of the article, the twist in Scrushy's summer confession:
"The S.E.C., in the case it filed last week, said that the controversy over the Medicare rule was simply a ruse and that Mr. Scrushy, along with several other HealthSouth executives, had been inflating and distorting the company's financial results almost since its inception. The company is accused of inflating earnings by $1.4 billion and assets by $800 million from 1999 through mid-2002, although the fraud is said to have taken place for a much longer time. Like other health care companies, HealthSouth routinely adjusted its revenues to estimate how much it would be paid by insurers.
But Healthsouth used those adjustments to manipulate its earnings, according to the S.E.C. complaint, and falsified records to deceive the company's auditors.After years of falsifying earnings, Mr. Scrushy had been looking for a way to reduce Wall Street expectations so he would not have to inflate profits as much in the future, the regulators said."
Wow. You have to wonder about the brass, or the desperation, of a guy like this. Meanwhile, Alabama has to face up to the costs of erasing Srushy's name on various and sundry public buildings. Surely there's a market in this -- selling governments erasable tags, good for stadiums and college facilities. If your donator CEO goes belly up, just flick a switch and presto-chango! The name changes to Smith or something. Until you program in the next CEO's name.
Remora
The US government, and the British government, in their wisdom, have decided that it is all right for US photographers to show Iraqi troops surrendering, and it is all right for US journalists to interview Iraqi POWs, but that it is a war crime for Iraqis to do the same thing. The broadcast of Iraqis interviewing -- or rather mistreating -- obviously scared prisoners has been shown through out the Arab world by Al Jazeera,and you can see it here, from the Netherlands RTL4. It is not pleasant watching. However, censorship, in this case, is merely feeding the Beast -- a point deliberately misunderstoon by our patriot censors who are bravely manning the media, feeding us figures that don't match the images. When the NYT asked ABC news about the Al Jazeera broadcast, here was the reply -- supply your own satire:
David Westin, the ABC News president, said he decided ABC News should not show those pictures. "I don't think there's any news value in it," he said.
Among other censorship news: the widely reported figure of 8,000 Iraqi troops surrendering in the first days of the conflict has dwindled to 2,000 troops in further re-telling. Here's the NYT take:
"The first few days were intense, but perhaps the easiest part of a complex war. Many of the Iraqi soldiers the allies confronted were ill motivated and ill trained. Some surrendered, and many simply vanished. Even so, some of the celebrated capitulations have turned out to be less than advertised. American officials were quick to announce the surrender of the commander of the 51st Iraqi Division. Today, they discovered that the "commander" was actually a junior officer masquerading as a higher-up in an attempt to win better treatment."
The US government, and the British government, in their wisdom, have decided that it is all right for US photographers to show Iraqi troops surrendering, and it is all right for US journalists to interview Iraqi POWs, but that it is a war crime for Iraqis to do the same thing. The broadcast of Iraqis interviewing -- or rather mistreating -- obviously scared prisoners has been shown through out the Arab world by Al Jazeera,and you can see it here, from the Netherlands RTL4. It is not pleasant watching. However, censorship, in this case, is merely feeding the Beast -- a point deliberately misunderstoon by our patriot censors who are bravely manning the media, feeding us figures that don't match the images. When the NYT asked ABC news about the Al Jazeera broadcast, here was the reply -- supply your own satire:
David Westin, the ABC News president, said he decided ABC News should not show those pictures. "I don't think there's any news value in it," he said.
Among other censorship news: the widely reported figure of 8,000 Iraqi troops surrendering in the first days of the conflict has dwindled to 2,000 troops in further re-telling. Here's the NYT take:
"The first few days were intense, but perhaps the easiest part of a complex war. Many of the Iraqi soldiers the allies confronted were ill motivated and ill trained. Some surrendered, and many simply vanished. Even so, some of the celebrated capitulations have turned out to be less than advertised. American officials were quick to announce the surrender of the commander of the 51st Iraqi Division. Today, they discovered that the "commander" was actually a junior officer masquerading as a higher-up in an attempt to win better treatment."
Saturday, March 22, 2003
Remora
Peter Dixon, 34, photographer, lives in London: "Just because war has started doesn't mean that my opinion has changed. The war is still illegal. Marching today is even more important than before. What else can we do?"
--Guardian, Anti-war protesters take to the streets.
LI has been revolving Peter Dixon's question in our little pointy head since participating in the last Austin Anti-war rally Thursday. And we have been sharpening our big idea, which is that the antiwar campaign must either doom itself to irrelevance by playing the game of the politics of expression (hey, we are trying to get into punditspeak, where pronunciations are always from on high, and use the modals of necessity -- must and should, as if we were all Nemesis, Jrs. down here) or turn into a movement against the upcoming occupation.
We went to the Stop the War coalition website, which is the Net hq for the people that organized the huge demonstrations on February 15. Unfortunately, our feeling is that the SW people have only one campaign strategy, which is to repeat February 15. That might work in the UK, but it certainly won't work in the U.S.
Why shouldn't the focus be on stopping the war, you ask? Because this war is moving with extraordinary rapidity, and will stop itself -- at least the first phase -- pretty soon. If you simply want the war stopped, it will soon be stopped.
No, what we don't want is what is forecast in Nicholas Hoffman's column in the New York Observer, which turns the jaded eye of some Joseph Conrad character upon the probable effects of the war. Oddly enough, the horror and nightmare Hoffman evokes is synonymous with Robert Kaplan's idea of sweetness and light, as adumbrated in this month's Atlantic. Robert Kaplan is one of the intellectual architects of the war, and he cuts through the facade of propaganda about the war thrown up by figures of fun like the ineffable Hitchens. We are going to do a post on that Kaplan article -- it is so deliciously open about Bush's foreign policy, which is a sort of Sadism as dreamt up by a backwoods evangelical.
...
To stop the occupation, the antiwar movement, at least that bit of it that shows itself in Austin, Texas (which we assume is a sample of the larger, national movement) is going to have to stop concentrating exclusively on the same demographic Fox comedy shows are aired at: the young and the restless. The speakers at the rally we went to referred repeatedly to their students. They are recruited from academia; they are wholly honorable in their sentiments; but just because they occupy a niche in this country where radicalism can be comfortable, they are limited by their vocabulary and attitudes to what they are used to. So, for instance, the broadcast to the wrong niche. The youth of America might be important consumers of CDs and blue jeans, but they are no longer the chosen vehicle of the kind of efficient political movement that can actually stop the occupation. Polls show that, just as in the Vietnam war and the Korean war, the demographic with the strongest aversion to this war is the Retirement set --- that's right, people above 55. Some of them made it to the rally Thursday, but they were not at all enlisted by the speakers.
This is from a WP poll published on March 4th:
"The poll also found that some of the strongest doubts about a war with Iraq are coming from a seemingly unexpected source: older Americans, who were far less likely to support taking military action than young adults -- a dramatic illustration of how President Bush's policies have reopened divisions in the electorate that were largely absent immediately before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 17 months ago. At the same time, large majorities of Democrats and minorities expressed opposition to taking military action against Iraq."
From those constituencies, the older group and the minorities were dramatically under-represented in the march, while the young constituted easily 65 percent of the marchers. I suppose that the older segment was well represented on the platform -- there were gray haired musicians playing Dylan songs from 1962. And that is good. But there was no Spanish-language music, there was no rap, there was nothing to appeal to the East side of Austin. And there were no Rotarians up there. There should be.
This is a delicate moment, and it requires coalitions between libertarians and leftists, conservatives and liberals. And the art of making those coalitions is, alas, untaught among grassroots organizers, who more and more come from a narrow segment of this society: academia.
However, we have to appeal to the Business Week reader. Especially as we move into the occupation phase, the cost of the enterprise will start to wake up the businessman type. But they will be thrown back by their instincts into the prowar camp if they believe being anti-occupation is not serious. If, that is, they believe that it is the equivalent of being cool in a coffee house, or being indignant as a form of emotional refreshment. No, the indignation we need is to the death, in the bone -- one willing to give up being right and righteous, always a nice hierarchizing move, for being efficient.
Peter Dixon, 34, photographer, lives in London: "Just because war has started doesn't mean that my opinion has changed. The war is still illegal. Marching today is even more important than before. What else can we do?"
--Guardian, Anti-war protesters take to the streets.
LI has been revolving Peter Dixon's question in our little pointy head since participating in the last Austin Anti-war rally Thursday. And we have been sharpening our big idea, which is that the antiwar campaign must either doom itself to irrelevance by playing the game of the politics of expression (hey, we are trying to get into punditspeak, where pronunciations are always from on high, and use the modals of necessity -- must and should, as if we were all Nemesis, Jrs. down here) or turn into a movement against the upcoming occupation.
We went to the Stop the War coalition website, which is the Net hq for the people that organized the huge demonstrations on February 15. Unfortunately, our feeling is that the SW people have only one campaign strategy, which is to repeat February 15. That might work in the UK, but it certainly won't work in the U.S.
Why shouldn't the focus be on stopping the war, you ask? Because this war is moving with extraordinary rapidity, and will stop itself -- at least the first phase -- pretty soon. If you simply want the war stopped, it will soon be stopped.
No, what we don't want is what is forecast in Nicholas Hoffman's column in the New York Observer, which turns the jaded eye of some Joseph Conrad character upon the probable effects of the war. Oddly enough, the horror and nightmare Hoffman evokes is synonymous with Robert Kaplan's idea of sweetness and light, as adumbrated in this month's Atlantic. Robert Kaplan is one of the intellectual architects of the war, and he cuts through the facade of propaganda about the war thrown up by figures of fun like the ineffable Hitchens. We are going to do a post on that Kaplan article -- it is so deliciously open about Bush's foreign policy, which is a sort of Sadism as dreamt up by a backwoods evangelical.
...
To stop the occupation, the antiwar movement, at least that bit of it that shows itself in Austin, Texas (which we assume is a sample of the larger, national movement) is going to have to stop concentrating exclusively on the same demographic Fox comedy shows are aired at: the young and the restless. The speakers at the rally we went to referred repeatedly to their students. They are recruited from academia; they are wholly honorable in their sentiments; but just because they occupy a niche in this country where radicalism can be comfortable, they are limited by their vocabulary and attitudes to what they are used to. So, for instance, the broadcast to the wrong niche. The youth of America might be important consumers of CDs and blue jeans, but they are no longer the chosen vehicle of the kind of efficient political movement that can actually stop the occupation. Polls show that, just as in the Vietnam war and the Korean war, the demographic with the strongest aversion to this war is the Retirement set --- that's right, people above 55. Some of them made it to the rally Thursday, but they were not at all enlisted by the speakers.
This is from a WP poll published on March 4th:
"The poll also found that some of the strongest doubts about a war with Iraq are coming from a seemingly unexpected source: older Americans, who were far less likely to support taking military action than young adults -- a dramatic illustration of how President Bush's policies have reopened divisions in the electorate that were largely absent immediately before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 17 months ago. At the same time, large majorities of Democrats and minorities expressed opposition to taking military action against Iraq."
From those constituencies, the older group and the minorities were dramatically under-represented in the march, while the young constituted easily 65 percent of the marchers. I suppose that the older segment was well represented on the platform -- there were gray haired musicians playing Dylan songs from 1962. And that is good. But there was no Spanish-language music, there was no rap, there was nothing to appeal to the East side of Austin. And there were no Rotarians up there. There should be.
This is a delicate moment, and it requires coalitions between libertarians and leftists, conservatives and liberals. And the art of making those coalitions is, alas, untaught among grassroots organizers, who more and more come from a narrow segment of this society: academia.
However, we have to appeal to the Business Week reader. Especially as we move into the occupation phase, the cost of the enterprise will start to wake up the businessman type. But they will be thrown back by their instincts into the prowar camp if they believe being anti-occupation is not serious. If, that is, they believe that it is the equivalent of being cool in a coffee house, or being indignant as a form of emotional refreshment. No, the indignation we need is to the death, in the bone -- one willing to give up being right and righteous, always a nice hierarchizing move, for being efficient.
Reruns
-- Well, to see what LI has been thinking about Iraq, I went back in time -- difficult to do, since my archive is in horrible shape -- to September, 2001. LI was on the case about Iraq at that time -- erroneously, it seems, since LI's assumption was that 9/11 was connected to the Iraqis. But we made a few remarks we still hold to. And we believe the logic of our previous positions fits neatly with our position now, which is that the anti-war movement, if it is going to do anything, better turn into an anti-occupation movement. War is now the fact in the case, whether you support it or not. Occupation isn't, however. And that is the next big struggle. But it will be lost before it has begun if the antiwar movement doesn't show some flexibility.
Anyway, this is from a post made on 9/26/01, and the next post is dated. The firstg post was an extended commentary on a Michael Kelley column about the wickedness of the left. I extract this paragraph:
"I've already had my say about this in earlier posts, but to reiterate: the era since the Cold and the Gulf War ended has not been a glorious one for American foreign policy. The dual containment of Iran and Iraq ignored the reality of change in Iran, and enforced a horrendously immoral -- let's even use Kelly's word, evil -- policy in Iraq, to wit, the refusal to aid or countenance a democratically oriented overthrow of Saddam Hussein for fear that such an overthrow would destroy the country and expand the sphere of Iranian influence, and the consequent turn to the compromise of sanctions, which was premised on the insane proposition that an unarmed populace could be prodded into overthrowing a heavily armed, violent dictator by being systematically starved. With, of course, the codicil that even if the population, by some miracle, was able to successfully bring some tyrannicide to fruition, that it would allow the political fruit of its courage to be wrenched away from it, leaving the structure of the regime alone. Exchanging, in other words, one tyranny for another, in a nightmarish succession of Ba'athist strongmen.
Yeah, let's see, what were the terms Kelly used? "Foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism"? I think I could throw a few more insults on that pile, but that will do for starters.
[edit]
[9/19/2001 10:55:08 AM | roger gathman]
Dope.
One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.
The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.
Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.
For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:
"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.
"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "
Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.
But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!
As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.
-- Well, to see what LI has been thinking about Iraq, I went back in time -- difficult to do, since my archive is in horrible shape -- to September, 2001. LI was on the case about Iraq at that time -- erroneously, it seems, since LI's assumption was that 9/11 was connected to the Iraqis. But we made a few remarks we still hold to. And we believe the logic of our previous positions fits neatly with our position now, which is that the anti-war movement, if it is going to do anything, better turn into an anti-occupation movement. War is now the fact in the case, whether you support it or not. Occupation isn't, however. And that is the next big struggle. But it will be lost before it has begun if the antiwar movement doesn't show some flexibility.
Anyway, this is from a post made on 9/26/01, and the next post is dated. The firstg post was an extended commentary on a Michael Kelley column about the wickedness of the left. I extract this paragraph:
"I've already had my say about this in earlier posts, but to reiterate: the era since the Cold and the Gulf War ended has not been a glorious one for American foreign policy. The dual containment of Iran and Iraq ignored the reality of change in Iran, and enforced a horrendously immoral -- let's even use Kelly's word, evil -- policy in Iraq, to wit, the refusal to aid or countenance a democratically oriented overthrow of Saddam Hussein for fear that such an overthrow would destroy the country and expand the sphere of Iranian influence, and the consequent turn to the compromise of sanctions, which was premised on the insane proposition that an unarmed populace could be prodded into overthrowing a heavily armed, violent dictator by being systematically starved. With, of course, the codicil that even if the population, by some miracle, was able to successfully bring some tyrannicide to fruition, that it would allow the political fruit of its courage to be wrenched away from it, leaving the structure of the regime alone. Exchanging, in other words, one tyranny for another, in a nightmarish succession of Ba'athist strongmen.
Yeah, let's see, what were the terms Kelly used? "Foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism"? I think I could throw a few more insults on that pile, but that will do for starters.
[edit]
[9/19/2001 10:55:08 AM | roger gathman]
Dope.
One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.
The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.
Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.
For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:
"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.
"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "
Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.
But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!
As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.
Friday, March 21, 2003
Remora
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
Thursday, March 20, 2003
Letters
Our friend H. sent us this answer to our question (stolen, of course, from Lenin), what is to be done?
"Since you asked, some short, swift campaign to get the bastards in syria,
jordan and iran to open their fucking borders and let the refugees in and
house them and treat them with dignity."
A friend of ours in Memphis reports on the debilitated intelligence that is driving public opinion:
"I bought a crazed tabloid "newspaper" (Weekly World News) at the supermarket (a first time for every purchase) with the headline "CIA's shocking revelation: Saddam Plans Move to France! . . .he'll be made French ambassador to the US!" I thought this was so brilliantly funny that I was laughing as I came to the register to check out. The cashier looked curiously at me so I explained, holding up the cover. "Well, is he?" said said cashier."
Our friend T. in NYC wrote a literary detective's account of the belligerant's excuses in a letter on St. Pat's day:
"Well, hell, I did have a discontinuous thought re war this weekend. It was a thought as I recalled that Zizek gave an account of a film about a CIA agent sent to get a code breaking gadget from the Eastern Block, a gadget that will allow the West to decipher KGB codes. Arriving in the East, the agent finds everything going wrong; the KGB are onto him. What went wrong, was there a mole? No and no: the mission was a ploy. The CIA already had the gadget, and the agent was sent to make the KGB think that they do not possess it, so that the KGB will continue to use the gadgets.Thus: the "International Community" writ US-UK-Spain asserts that Iraq has gadgets and that anything contrary to that is a ploy. Further asserted by this version of the IC is that until we wage war, Iraq will continue to use such gadgets, and if they are not used, well, this is a further ploy on the part of Saddam; i.e. so long as we think that they have them, they will continue to not use them. There is also an always-already to all this as well: ah ha! Sadaam might not have these gadgets because they are always-already sold to terrorists."
The World Weekly News, by the way, will be crucial to the way we survive this war. Reading the World Weekly News, and then reading the New York Times, has a strange effect -- because so much of the NYT really does read like the World Weekly News. Is that a mere coincidence? Hmm. For instance, read this list of ways you can tell if your neighbor is a time traveller, and then read this report from Baghdad by NYT reporter John Burns about how eager Iraqis are to be liberated by the ever so friendly American missiles raining down on Satan's city. The surrealists recommended automatic writing to free up the poet's soul -- LI recommends the WWN.
"-Lack of body hair -- Modern humans are less hairy than cavemen and evolution experts predict people of the future will be even less hairy.
-Great stock tips -- While time travelers may conceal their wealth and pose as ordinary middle-class suburbanites, their ability to "guess" which stocks are will go through the roof may strike you as uncanny.
-Missing pinky toe -- Scientists say that as man continues to evolve, our pinky toes will gradually disappear over the next thousand years.
-Slips of the tongue -- May refer to current events or people in the past tense, for example, saying, "Boy, George Clooney sure was a great actor."
-Pet dog belongs to an unknown "mystery" breed -- Your neighbor will probably counter that the unusual-looking pooch is "just a mutt."
Our friend H. sent us this answer to our question (stolen, of course, from Lenin), what is to be done?
"Since you asked, some short, swift campaign to get the bastards in syria,
jordan and iran to open their fucking borders and let the refugees in and
house them and treat them with dignity."
A friend of ours in Memphis reports on the debilitated intelligence that is driving public opinion:
"I bought a crazed tabloid "newspaper" (Weekly World News) at the supermarket (a first time for every purchase) with the headline "CIA's shocking revelation: Saddam Plans Move to France! . . .he'll be made French ambassador to the US!" I thought this was so brilliantly funny that I was laughing as I came to the register to check out. The cashier looked curiously at me so I explained, holding up the cover. "Well, is he?" said said cashier."
Our friend T. in NYC wrote a literary detective's account of the belligerant's excuses in a letter on St. Pat's day:
"Well, hell, I did have a discontinuous thought re war this weekend. It was a thought as I recalled that Zizek gave an account of a film about a CIA agent sent to get a code breaking gadget from the Eastern Block, a gadget that will allow the West to decipher KGB codes. Arriving in the East, the agent finds everything going wrong; the KGB are onto him. What went wrong, was there a mole? No and no: the mission was a ploy. The CIA already had the gadget, and the agent was sent to make the KGB think that they do not possess it, so that the KGB will continue to use the gadgets.Thus: the "International Community" writ US-UK-Spain asserts that Iraq has gadgets and that anything contrary to that is a ploy. Further asserted by this version of the IC is that until we wage war, Iraq will continue to use such gadgets, and if they are not used, well, this is a further ploy on the part of Saddam; i.e. so long as we think that they have them, they will continue to not use them. There is also an always-already to all this as well: ah ha! Sadaam might not have these gadgets because they are always-already sold to terrorists."
The World Weekly News, by the way, will be crucial to the way we survive this war. Reading the World Weekly News, and then reading the New York Times, has a strange effect -- because so much of the NYT really does read like the World Weekly News. Is that a mere coincidence? Hmm. For instance, read this list of ways you can tell if your neighbor is a time traveller, and then read this report from Baghdad by NYT reporter John Burns about how eager Iraqis are to be liberated by the ever so friendly American missiles raining down on Satan's city. The surrealists recommended automatic writing to free up the poet's soul -- LI recommends the WWN.
"-Lack of body hair -- Modern humans are less hairy than cavemen and evolution experts predict people of the future will be even less hairy.
-Great stock tips -- While time travelers may conceal their wealth and pose as ordinary middle-class suburbanites, their ability to "guess" which stocks are will go through the roof may strike you as uncanny.
-Missing pinky toe -- Scientists say that as man continues to evolve, our pinky toes will gradually disappear over the next thousand years.
-Slips of the tongue -- May refer to current events or people in the past tense, for example, saying, "Boy, George Clooney sure was a great actor."
-Pet dog belongs to an unknown "mystery" breed -- Your neighbor will probably counter that the unusual-looking pooch is "just a mutt."
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Dope
...and of no avail, O my master, is a twice told tale!
So the inspection period is over, and we can see it for what it is: a tale out of the Arabian Nights.
Yesterday we leafed through Robert Irwin's Companion to the Arabian Nights. A.S. Byatt refers to Irwin's book as gripping, which it is, indeed. Byatt's essay on the Mille et Une Nuits, by the way, begins like this:
"The best story ever told? Perhaps the story of the two brothers, both kings, who found that their wives were unfaithful, took bloody vengeance, and set out into the world to travel until they found someone less fortunate than they were. They encountered a demon who kept a woman in a glass chest with four locks; she came out while he slept and showed them 98 rings she had collected from chance lovers and insisted on having sex with the princes to make it a round 100. The princes decided that the demon was more unfortunate than they were and returned to their kingdoms. There the elder brother, Shahrayar, still angry over his wife's betrayal, instituted a reign of terror, marrying a virgin each day and handing her to his vizier for execution at dawn. The vizier's daughter Shahrazad, a woman both wise and learned, beseeched her father to give her to the king. On the wedding night, the bride asked that her younger sister, Dinarzad, might sleep under the bed, so that when the king had "finished with Shahrazad," the younger girl, as the sisters had agreed, might ask Shahrazad to tell a story to while away the time until dawn. When dawn came, the story was not finished, and the curious king stayed execution for a night. Shahrazad continued to tell tales, which gave rise to other tales, all of which were unfinished at dawn. The king's narrative curiosity kept Shahrazad alive, day after day. She narrated a stay of execution, a space in which she bore three children. And in the end, the king removed the sentence of death, and they lived happily ever after. "
Byatt, wonderfully, makes the following comment: "... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends."
One of the wonders of the Net is the hypertext Burton's Arabian Nights. It isn't quite finished yet. It can be found here.
It includes Burton's footnotes, which are one of the bizarries of literature.
Irwin, in his chapter on the translators of the Nights, records the origin of Burton's project. He was originally a friend and informant of Payne. John Payne's translation was intended to replace Lane's, which was much beloved by the Victorians. Lane bowdlerized the text. He was also, apparently, a pretty eccentric guy -- the Arabian Nights, to Lane, were a mere supplement to his great work, the Arabic-English lexicon. According to Irwin, "Lane became so steeped in this great work that he used to complain that reading English writing hurt his eyes." In any case, Payne's translation was stuffed with copious ethnological notes. Burton, deciding that he, too, would have his notes, made them even wilder than Payne's. They included his racial theories, autobiographical reflections, and much, much comment about sex. For instance, here is the part in the framing story where the wife of the shah lewdly disports herself, so to speak:
"Thereupon Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. They walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water; then they stripped off their clothes and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight."
As Irwin points out, nothing in the Arabic justifies the big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes remark. But Burton isn't done yet. There is a footnote for this slobbering blackamoor. It reads:
"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the "deed of kind" takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Ims�k = retention of semen and "prolongation of pleasure," I shall find it necessary to say more."
He does find it necessary to say as much as possible.
Irwin, to my sorrow, points out that some of the great tales (Ali Babba and the forty thieves, Aladdin and his lamp) were probably created out of thin air by the French translator, Galland -- himself worthy of a post. He also points out that the second French translator was a friend of Proust's, Joseph Charles Mardrus. Mardrus's wife, apparently, "presided over a coterie of literary lesbians." Her salon was frequented by Marcel. There is a French critic who has pointed out that A la recherche... takes two texts as models -- Saint-Simon's journals, and the Mille et une nuits. Indeed, the idea of the insomniac tale, the tale that emerges in some interval of wakefulness and is told in lieu of sleep -- a dream substitute -- with a dreamlike branching of other tales, is one of Proust's leit-motifs.
Now, how would Sheherazade have told the tale of this war? I imagine something like this, taking its cue from the cruel morality of the barber's brothers tales:
The tale is about a powerful wicked king and a less powerful wicked king, who had once been allies. The powerful wicked king desired to depose the less powerful. However, he desired an excuse. So he made it his excuse that the less powerful king had arms. Indeed, the more powerful king knew of these arms, since his kingdom had sold them to the less powerful king. Ignoring this past history -- for are not the deeds of the powerful memorable only as the powerful would have us remember them? -- the more powerful king claimed that the less powerful king's weapons were a menace to peace. To show he was reasonable, the more powerful king suggested that a simpleton find the less powerful king's weapons and destroy them. And so, it was thought by the more powerful king's courtiers and flatterers, the less powerful king would be trapped, and war -- upon which king's fasten, as flies fasten on dying animals -- would be the result. But alas, man proposes and God disposes! For the simpleton, whose name, Blix, was like the movement of the eyelid, a thing so minute and quick that it is ignored by all men -- as indeed was Blix himself -- he began to succeed in finding and destroying the lesser king's weapons. The more powerful king was wroth at this, and so were his courtiers and flatterers. And so he thrust aside the simpleton, invaded the lesser king's kingdom, slew him and looted it of all its goods. For the justice of powerful kings consists only in this, that the evil in their hearts find a path through the world of men.
...and of no avail, O my master, is a twice told tale!
So the inspection period is over, and we can see it for what it is: a tale out of the Arabian Nights.
Yesterday we leafed through Robert Irwin's Companion to the Arabian Nights. A.S. Byatt refers to Irwin's book as gripping, which it is, indeed. Byatt's essay on the Mille et Une Nuits, by the way, begins like this:
"The best story ever told? Perhaps the story of the two brothers, both kings, who found that their wives were unfaithful, took bloody vengeance, and set out into the world to travel until they found someone less fortunate than they were. They encountered a demon who kept a woman in a glass chest with four locks; she came out while he slept and showed them 98 rings she had collected from chance lovers and insisted on having sex with the princes to make it a round 100. The princes decided that the demon was more unfortunate than they were and returned to their kingdoms. There the elder brother, Shahrayar, still angry over his wife's betrayal, instituted a reign of terror, marrying a virgin each day and handing her to his vizier for execution at dawn. The vizier's daughter Shahrazad, a woman both wise and learned, beseeched her father to give her to the king. On the wedding night, the bride asked that her younger sister, Dinarzad, might sleep under the bed, so that when the king had "finished with Shahrazad," the younger girl, as the sisters had agreed, might ask Shahrazad to tell a story to while away the time until dawn. When dawn came, the story was not finished, and the curious king stayed execution for a night. Shahrazad continued to tell tales, which gave rise to other tales, all of which were unfinished at dawn. The king's narrative curiosity kept Shahrazad alive, day after day. She narrated a stay of execution, a space in which she bore three children. And in the end, the king removed the sentence of death, and they lived happily ever after. "
Byatt, wonderfully, makes the following comment: "... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends."
One of the wonders of the Net is the hypertext Burton's Arabian Nights. It isn't quite finished yet. It can be found here.
It includes Burton's footnotes, which are one of the bizarries of literature.
Irwin, in his chapter on the translators of the Nights, records the origin of Burton's project. He was originally a friend and informant of Payne. John Payne's translation was intended to replace Lane's, which was much beloved by the Victorians. Lane bowdlerized the text. He was also, apparently, a pretty eccentric guy -- the Arabian Nights, to Lane, were a mere supplement to his great work, the Arabic-English lexicon. According to Irwin, "Lane became so steeped in this great work that he used to complain that reading English writing hurt his eyes." In any case, Payne's translation was stuffed with copious ethnological notes. Burton, deciding that he, too, would have his notes, made them even wilder than Payne's. They included his racial theories, autobiographical reflections, and much, much comment about sex. For instance, here is the part in the framing story where the wife of the shah lewdly disports herself, so to speak:
"Thereupon Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. They walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water; then they stripped off their clothes and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight."
As Irwin points out, nothing in the Arabic justifies the big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes remark. But Burton isn't done yet. There is a footnote for this slobbering blackamoor. It reads:
"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the "deed of kind" takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Ims�k = retention of semen and "prolongation of pleasure," I shall find it necessary to say more."
He does find it necessary to say as much as possible.
Irwin, to my sorrow, points out that some of the great tales (Ali Babba and the forty thieves, Aladdin and his lamp) were probably created out of thin air by the French translator, Galland -- himself worthy of a post. He also points out that the second French translator was a friend of Proust's, Joseph Charles Mardrus. Mardrus's wife, apparently, "presided over a coterie of literary lesbians." Her salon was frequented by Marcel. There is a French critic who has pointed out that A la recherche... takes two texts as models -- Saint-Simon's journals, and the Mille et une nuits. Indeed, the idea of the insomniac tale, the tale that emerges in some interval of wakefulness and is told in lieu of sleep -- a dream substitute -- with a dreamlike branching of other tales, is one of Proust's leit-motifs.
Now, how would Sheherazade have told the tale of this war? I imagine something like this, taking its cue from the cruel morality of the barber's brothers tales:
The tale is about a powerful wicked king and a less powerful wicked king, who had once been allies. The powerful wicked king desired to depose the less powerful. However, he desired an excuse. So he made it his excuse that the less powerful king had arms. Indeed, the more powerful king knew of these arms, since his kingdom had sold them to the less powerful king. Ignoring this past history -- for are not the deeds of the powerful memorable only as the powerful would have us remember them? -- the more powerful king claimed that the less powerful king's weapons were a menace to peace. To show he was reasonable, the more powerful king suggested that a simpleton find the less powerful king's weapons and destroy them. And so, it was thought by the more powerful king's courtiers and flatterers, the less powerful king would be trapped, and war -- upon which king's fasten, as flies fasten on dying animals -- would be the result. But alas, man proposes and God disposes! For the simpleton, whose name, Blix, was like the movement of the eyelid, a thing so minute and quick that it is ignored by all men -- as indeed was Blix himself -- he began to succeed in finding and destroying the lesser king's weapons. The more powerful king was wroth at this, and so were his courtiers and flatterers. And so he thrust aside the simpleton, invaded the lesser king's kingdom, slew him and looted it of all its goods. For the justice of powerful kings consists only in this, that the evil in their hearts find a path through the world of men.
Dope
What is to be done?
The first stage of the antiwar movement is clearly over. We receive emails that urge us to demonstrate on the first day of the war, and we have to ask: what kind of gesture is that? It�s an oddly ineffectual and resigned move � surely the emails should have been pouring in to have us demonstrate during the last three days, or the last week.
In any case, we expect that the conventional wisdom is right, and that the fighting against Saddam H. will be a matter of the demonstration of overwhelming American power and the quick collapse of his forces. If the conventional wisdom isn�t right, then Americans will have a very hard time justifying this war over the course of the next two weeks � for the only reason I can think of that would explain the prolonged resistance of a country that has been at war, or under sanctions, since 1979, to an invading force of the size and quality of the Americans is that the resistance is popular.
My friend, Alan, at his Gadfly site, has posted a comment that the only thing left to do is pray. Well, we�ve heard that comment from others, and we have to say�. What are we praying for, exactly? Peace? A swift end to the disorder? Big, happy oil contracts for Haliburton?
I�m anti-prayer, myself. This site, at least, thinks that the next stage is to oppose American pillaging of Iraq; to oppose the dissolution of the current governmental structures in Northern Iraq; to oppose the appointment of an American head of Iraq after Saddam is defeated; and to support an accelerated withdrawal of American troops from Iraq so that they are not in the country for two years is also a goal. Make that six months, max.
In the last Gulf War the protests were in some disconnect with the real inhumanity of the American assault on the Iraqi army and population, which suffered much greater casualties than we knew at the time. The protests, in other words, went mushy from lack of info. So the short range goal seems to me to be to use the internet to get around corporate media�s willingness to obscure the real nature of the war in order not to shock prayerful Americans out of their various private raptures. This is where antiwar blogs can be of some service. So we will try to plug into and link to as much uncensored information as possible.
What is to be done?
The first stage of the antiwar movement is clearly over. We receive emails that urge us to demonstrate on the first day of the war, and we have to ask: what kind of gesture is that? It�s an oddly ineffectual and resigned move � surely the emails should have been pouring in to have us demonstrate during the last three days, or the last week.
In any case, we expect that the conventional wisdom is right, and that the fighting against Saddam H. will be a matter of the demonstration of overwhelming American power and the quick collapse of his forces. If the conventional wisdom isn�t right, then Americans will have a very hard time justifying this war over the course of the next two weeks � for the only reason I can think of that would explain the prolonged resistance of a country that has been at war, or under sanctions, since 1979, to an invading force of the size and quality of the Americans is that the resistance is popular.
My friend, Alan, at his Gadfly site, has posted a comment that the only thing left to do is pray. Well, we�ve heard that comment from others, and we have to say�. What are we praying for, exactly? Peace? A swift end to the disorder? Big, happy oil contracts for Haliburton?
I�m anti-prayer, myself. This site, at least, thinks that the next stage is to oppose American pillaging of Iraq; to oppose the dissolution of the current governmental structures in Northern Iraq; to oppose the appointment of an American head of Iraq after Saddam is defeated; and to support an accelerated withdrawal of American troops from Iraq so that they are not in the country for two years is also a goal. Make that six months, max.
In the last Gulf War the protests were in some disconnect with the real inhumanity of the American assault on the Iraqi army and population, which suffered much greater casualties than we knew at the time. The protests, in other words, went mushy from lack of info. So the short range goal seems to me to be to use the internet to get around corporate media�s willingness to obscure the real nature of the war in order not to shock prayerful Americans out of their various private raptures. This is where antiwar blogs can be of some service. So we will try to plug into and link to as much uncensored information as possible.
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Remora
This just in ... it is hilarious!
As we've pointed out, there is a gap of about 120 billion dollars between what the U.S. wants to do in Iraq and the way it says it wants to pay for it. Now, Bush, having floated himself through the nineties in Texas via cigarette money (a strategy that has collapsed, now, as Texas faces about a nine billion dollar shortfall) has obviously decided to paper over his problems in the same way. Thus, the surprise announcement by the Justice Department today:
"U.S. Seeks $289 Billion in Cigarette Makers' Profits
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, March 17 � The Justice Department is demanding that the nation's biggest cigarette makers be ordered to forfeit $289 billion in profits derived from a half-century of "fraudulent" and dangerous marketing practices.Citing new evidence, the Justice Department asserts in more than 1,400 pages of court documents that the major cigarette companies are running what amounts to a criminal enterprise by manipulating nicotine levels, lying to their customers about the dangers of tobacco and directing their multibillion-dollar advertising campaigns at children."
Just when you think the Bush administration has pushed the limits of fraudulence, they try a trick like this. The same administration, mind you, that has made a crusade out of cutting back liability and jury awarded settlements for job injuries.
The foulness that emanates from this White House is becoming a Ripley's believe it or not item. LI believes that Bush has now set the piece in place for his second line defense of the tax-cuts-plus-war budget. Watch this thing play out.
This just in ... it is hilarious!
As we've pointed out, there is a gap of about 120 billion dollars between what the U.S. wants to do in Iraq and the way it says it wants to pay for it. Now, Bush, having floated himself through the nineties in Texas via cigarette money (a strategy that has collapsed, now, as Texas faces about a nine billion dollar shortfall) has obviously decided to paper over his problems in the same way. Thus, the surprise announcement by the Justice Department today:
"U.S. Seeks $289 Billion in Cigarette Makers' Profits
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, March 17 � The Justice Department is demanding that the nation's biggest cigarette makers be ordered to forfeit $289 billion in profits derived from a half-century of "fraudulent" and dangerous marketing practices.Citing new evidence, the Justice Department asserts in more than 1,400 pages of court documents that the major cigarette companies are running what amounts to a criminal enterprise by manipulating nicotine levels, lying to their customers about the dangers of tobacco and directing their multibillion-dollar advertising campaigns at children."
Just when you think the Bush administration has pushed the limits of fraudulence, they try a trick like this. The same administration, mind you, that has made a crusade out of cutting back liability and jury awarded settlements for job injuries.
The foulness that emanates from this White House is becoming a Ripley's believe it or not item. LI believes that Bush has now set the piece in place for his second line defense of the tax-cuts-plus-war budget. Watch this thing play out.
Dope
As I've said before in a previous post, I can only retain my sanity in these maddening times by using second hearing -- which is rather like second sight, except that it goes backwards. I've been hearing the War through Burke -- but Bush's address last night overwhelmed the rather ornate and beautiful structures of Burke's thought. One needs something more scabrous. I looked up a piece Swift wrote, on the art of political lying.
In that Swiftian way, he begins by admiring the devil for inventing the lie, but then registers an objection: the devil's lies, as is often the case with the initial run of a product, were full of glitches. Luckily, man has added an infinite amount of features to the devil's machine, making it much more useful for all ocassions And among the most useful of those occasions is the government of man, herds of which can be entranced by very simple lies, sworn to vehemently by a bunch of cut-throats who are otherwise known as "men of peace," "presidents," "undersecretaries of defense," "editiorial writers" and such others (known, since school days, to be lackies, taletellers, cheats, braggarts and snobs) who are attracted to power but who lack the courage to assault the innocent in the street by night; and so, to the temproary applause of the cowed populace, devise mass murders in their offices by day. About the political lie Swift has this to say:
"But the same genealogy cannot always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by a rabble. Sometimes it is pronounced a monster, and licked into shape: at other times it comes into the world completely formed, and is spoiled in the licking. It is often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it; and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth, and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here it screams aloud at the opening of the womb, and there it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which, although too proud and great at present to own its parents, I can remember its whisperhood. To conclude the nativity of this monster; when it comes into the world without a sting it is stillborn; and whenever it loses its sting it dies.
No wonder if an infant so miraculous in its birth should be destined for great adventures; and accordingly we see it has been the guardian spirit of a prevailing party[2] for almost 20 years. It can conquer kingdoms without fighting, and sometimes with the loss of battle. It gives and resumes employments; can sink a mountain to a mole-hill, and raise a mole-hill to a mountain: has presided for many years at committees of elections; can make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish foreign ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of the nation. This goddess flies with a huge looking-glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin. In this glass you will behold your best friends, clad in coats powdered with fleurs de Us and triple crowns; their girdles hung round with chains, and beads, and wooden shoes; and your worst enemies adorned with the ensigns of liberty, property, indulgence, moderation, and a cornucopia in their hands. Her large wings, like those of a flying-fish, are of no use but while they were moist; she therefore dips them in mud, and, soaring aloft, scatters it in the eyes of the multitude, flying with great swiftness; but at every turn is forced to stoop in dirty ways for new supplies."
But what am I doing? This is not satire, but pure fact, and as such surely seditious in the best traditions of our wondrous attorney general.
Storm, clouds, and crack your cheeks.
As I've said before in a previous post, I can only retain my sanity in these maddening times by using second hearing -- which is rather like second sight, except that it goes backwards. I've been hearing the War through Burke -- but Bush's address last night overwhelmed the rather ornate and beautiful structures of Burke's thought. One needs something more scabrous. I looked up a piece Swift wrote, on the art of political lying.
In that Swiftian way, he begins by admiring the devil for inventing the lie, but then registers an objection: the devil's lies, as is often the case with the initial run of a product, were full of glitches. Luckily, man has added an infinite amount of features to the devil's machine, making it much more useful for all ocassions And among the most useful of those occasions is the government of man, herds of which can be entranced by very simple lies, sworn to vehemently by a bunch of cut-throats who are otherwise known as "men of peace," "presidents," "undersecretaries of defense," "editiorial writers" and such others (known, since school days, to be lackies, taletellers, cheats, braggarts and snobs) who are attracted to power but who lack the courage to assault the innocent in the street by night; and so, to the temproary applause of the cowed populace, devise mass murders in their offices by day. About the political lie Swift has this to say:
"But the same genealogy cannot always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by a rabble. Sometimes it is pronounced a monster, and licked into shape: at other times it comes into the world completely formed, and is spoiled in the licking. It is often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it; and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth, and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here it screams aloud at the opening of the womb, and there it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which, although too proud and great at present to own its parents, I can remember its whisperhood. To conclude the nativity of this monster; when it comes into the world without a sting it is stillborn; and whenever it loses its sting it dies.
No wonder if an infant so miraculous in its birth should be destined for great adventures; and accordingly we see it has been the guardian spirit of a prevailing party[2] for almost 20 years. It can conquer kingdoms without fighting, and sometimes with the loss of battle. It gives and resumes employments; can sink a mountain to a mole-hill, and raise a mole-hill to a mountain: has presided for many years at committees of elections; can make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish foreign ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of the nation. This goddess flies with a huge looking-glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin. In this glass you will behold your best friends, clad in coats powdered with fleurs de Us and triple crowns; their girdles hung round with chains, and beads, and wooden shoes; and your worst enemies adorned with the ensigns of liberty, property, indulgence, moderation, and a cornucopia in their hands. Her large wings, like those of a flying-fish, are of no use but while they were moist; she therefore dips them in mud, and, soaring aloft, scatters it in the eyes of the multitude, flying with great swiftness; but at every turn is forced to stoop in dirty ways for new supplies."
But what am I doing? This is not satire, but pure fact, and as such surely seditious in the best traditions of our wondrous attorney general.
Storm, clouds, and crack your cheeks.
Monday, March 17, 2003
Remora
The WP headline reads: Baghdad Panicky as War Seems Imminent and the first graf reads:
"People cleared stores of bottled water and canned food, converted sacks of Iraqi currency into dollars and waited in long queues for gasoline. Merchants fearful of looting emptied their stores of electronics and designer clothing, while soldiers intensified work on trenches and removed sensitive files from government buildings. Cars stuffed with people and household possessions drove out of the city."
Surely there must be a mistake. Isn't it the Washington Post that has insisted for over a year that Iraqis will greet American soldiers with flowers? I imagine they are simply stocking up on those essential items now, before their streets, buildings, florist shops, kids and pets are flattened by liberating American bombs. It is so hard, climbing through the rubble, to find good orchids.
This weekend we listened to a call in show -- yes, we are going crazy -- about the war. A woman called in and commented that she supported it. She remarked that the government needs to keep us secure from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. She said that 9/11 proved this.
She seemed like a reasonable American citizen. She wasn't bloodthirsty. There is a standard comment that floats around about this time to the effect that no one wants war. Of course that is nonsense. The Bush administration has wanted war since early 2002. But this woman didn't strike me as the warmongering type. The host of the show was resolutely anti-war. But, as is the case with so many anti-war people, he asked her questions about the morality of killing people. He asked her, in other words, about justifying the war morally. This, we think, is merely doing the devil's work for him. The case against the war doesn't begin with the morality of war in general. It begins with looking at the justification of this war in particular. Remarks like this woman's are simply passed off as unobvious. This P.O.V. has been released into the American system for a year by the media and the government, to devastating effect. The goal of propaganda is to make you believe what you are told instead of what you see. Here is what we have seen. We have seen two giant structures, two skyscrapers, collapse. We have seen around 3 000 people killed. And we have seen the Weapon of mass destruction that did it. It was two jet airliners. And we have discovered how they did it -- they were hijacked by men bearing boxcutters. We have seen this, and we have decided not to believe it. We have decided, instead, to believe we are threatened by secret weapons stockpiled in secret places that only the U.S. seems to know about. We have decided that Saddam Hussein is not only our enemy, but a threat that requires the deployment of 200,000 troops, the shock and awe of 3,000 missiles, and a conflict that will, according to all accounts, be extended to a two year occupation of Iraq.
The 19 hijackers cost around 1 million dollars, to wine, dine, and train. If our new doctrine is that American security over-rides international law, let's forget the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse. Any country that is both hostile to the United States and can cough up 1 million dollars is, according to this doctrine, justifiably a target.
This is madness. It is blindness. This war will not end when the press expects it to end, will be paid for out of the skin of the Iraqi people, will destroy the few shoots of civil society that exist in Northern Iraq, will entail an occupation that can only be a temptation, an overwhelming temptation, to the periodic staging of guerilla attacks, and, no doubt, the politiicization of those attacks as the Republicans try to jingo their way to re-election in 2004. The war is a crime, the excuses a sham, the warmongers a junta bound together by bad intents, and led by a man of outstanding ignorance. This is, I think, the beginning of a very bad cycle.
"It may easily be observed," wrote David Hume, "that, though free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who partake of their freedom; yet are they the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces: And this observation may, I believe, be fixed as a maxim of the kind we are here speaking of. When a monarch extends his dominions by conquest, he soon learns to consider his old and his new subjects as on the same footing; because, in reality, all his subjects are to him the same, except the few friends and favourites, with whom he is personally acquainted. He does not, therefore, make any distinction between them in his general laws; and, at the same time, is careful to prevent all particular acts of oppression on the one as well as on the other. But a free state necessarily makes a great distinction, and must always do so, till men learn to love their neighbours as well as themselves."
Goodnight David. Goodnight ladies. Goodnight sweet ladies. Good night.
The WP headline reads: Baghdad Panicky as War Seems Imminent and the first graf reads:
"People cleared stores of bottled water and canned food, converted sacks of Iraqi currency into dollars and waited in long queues for gasoline. Merchants fearful of looting emptied their stores of electronics and designer clothing, while soldiers intensified work on trenches and removed sensitive files from government buildings. Cars stuffed with people and household possessions drove out of the city."
Surely there must be a mistake. Isn't it the Washington Post that has insisted for over a year that Iraqis will greet American soldiers with flowers? I imagine they are simply stocking up on those essential items now, before their streets, buildings, florist shops, kids and pets are flattened by liberating American bombs. It is so hard, climbing through the rubble, to find good orchids.
This weekend we listened to a call in show -- yes, we are going crazy -- about the war. A woman called in and commented that she supported it. She remarked that the government needs to keep us secure from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. She said that 9/11 proved this.
She seemed like a reasonable American citizen. She wasn't bloodthirsty. There is a standard comment that floats around about this time to the effect that no one wants war. Of course that is nonsense. The Bush administration has wanted war since early 2002. But this woman didn't strike me as the warmongering type. The host of the show was resolutely anti-war. But, as is the case with so many anti-war people, he asked her questions about the morality of killing people. He asked her, in other words, about justifying the war morally. This, we think, is merely doing the devil's work for him. The case against the war doesn't begin with the morality of war in general. It begins with looking at the justification of this war in particular. Remarks like this woman's are simply passed off as unobvious. This P.O.V. has been released into the American system for a year by the media and the government, to devastating effect. The goal of propaganda is to make you believe what you are told instead of what you see. Here is what we have seen. We have seen two giant structures, two skyscrapers, collapse. We have seen around 3 000 people killed. And we have seen the Weapon of mass destruction that did it. It was two jet airliners. And we have discovered how they did it -- they were hijacked by men bearing boxcutters. We have seen this, and we have decided not to believe it. We have decided, instead, to believe we are threatened by secret weapons stockpiled in secret places that only the U.S. seems to know about. We have decided that Saddam Hussein is not only our enemy, but a threat that requires the deployment of 200,000 troops, the shock and awe of 3,000 missiles, and a conflict that will, according to all accounts, be extended to a two year occupation of Iraq.
The 19 hijackers cost around 1 million dollars, to wine, dine, and train. If our new doctrine is that American security over-rides international law, let's forget the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse. Any country that is both hostile to the United States and can cough up 1 million dollars is, according to this doctrine, justifiably a target.
This is madness. It is blindness. This war will not end when the press expects it to end, will be paid for out of the skin of the Iraqi people, will destroy the few shoots of civil society that exist in Northern Iraq, will entail an occupation that can only be a temptation, an overwhelming temptation, to the periodic staging of guerilla attacks, and, no doubt, the politiicization of those attacks as the Republicans try to jingo their way to re-election in 2004. The war is a crime, the excuses a sham, the warmongers a junta bound together by bad intents, and led by a man of outstanding ignorance. This is, I think, the beginning of a very bad cycle.
"It may easily be observed," wrote David Hume, "that, though free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who partake of their freedom; yet are they the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces: And this observation may, I believe, be fixed as a maxim of the kind we are here speaking of. When a monarch extends his dominions by conquest, he soon learns to consider his old and his new subjects as on the same footing; because, in reality, all his subjects are to him the same, except the few friends and favourites, with whom he is personally acquainted. He does not, therefore, make any distinction between them in his general laws; and, at the same time, is careful to prevent all particular acts of oppression on the one as well as on the other. But a free state necessarily makes a great distinction, and must always do so, till men learn to love their neighbours as well as themselves."
Goodnight David. Goodnight ladies. Goodnight sweet ladies. Good night.
Saturday, March 15, 2003
Remora
Not funny, LI. Not original. Not eccentric. Not arty. Obsessive. One-noted. One- fingered. Over and over again.
Yes, we admit it. The war has sucked our very soul into the maelstrom. We see the war as more than simply the attack on Iraq -- we see it as a structure of rule. We see it as a sort of re-coding, a way of transferring and overwriting cellular codes for parasitic ends, for zombie purposes. How it is dead, and deadly, how it is leaden, how it trickles roach powder through the veins, how it perverts the fountains of inspiration and prophecy, how it pursues a cancerous course in the very ore under us and marrow within us, how it is a poison in our eyes, a narrowing of our breath, a sugar substitute in our sex. We see it as a return to deadly habits, a corpse like masturbation, churning with numb fingers the numb blind rod of no sensation whatsoever, De Sade's hoped for end, channeling a gray, waste seed into test-tubes, a sign of some essential deviation at the root, all paste and viagra and winey old men, breathed over by corruption, rich with fraud, succulent with beef fat stolen from every honest table. We see it as Gravity's Rainbow all over again.
How appropriate, as we heard on NPR today, that Stan Brakhage died this week.
Here's a quote from a Brakhage interview:
For me vision is what you see, to the least extent related to picture. It is just seeing -- it is a very simple word -- and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can't see. Children can -- they have a much wider range of visual awareness -- because their eyes haven't been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic. Every semester I start out by telling my students that they have to see in order to experience film and that seeing is not just looking at pictures. This simple idea seems to be the hardest to get through to people.
Not funny, LI. Not original. Not eccentric. Not arty. Obsessive. One-noted. One- fingered. Over and over again.
Yes, we admit it. The war has sucked our very soul into the maelstrom. We see the war as more than simply the attack on Iraq -- we see it as a structure of rule. We see it as a sort of re-coding, a way of transferring and overwriting cellular codes for parasitic ends, for zombie purposes. How it is dead, and deadly, how it is leaden, how it trickles roach powder through the veins, how it perverts the fountains of inspiration and prophecy, how it pursues a cancerous course in the very ore under us and marrow within us, how it is a poison in our eyes, a narrowing of our breath, a sugar substitute in our sex. We see it as a return to deadly habits, a corpse like masturbation, churning with numb fingers the numb blind rod of no sensation whatsoever, De Sade's hoped for end, channeling a gray, waste seed into test-tubes, a sign of some essential deviation at the root, all paste and viagra and winey old men, breathed over by corruption, rich with fraud, succulent with beef fat stolen from every honest table. We see it as Gravity's Rainbow all over again.
How appropriate, as we heard on NPR today, that Stan Brakhage died this week.
Here's a quote from a Brakhage interview:
For me vision is what you see, to the least extent related to picture. It is just seeing -- it is a very simple word -- and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can't see. Children can -- they have a much wider range of visual awareness -- because their eyes haven't been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic. Every semester I start out by telling my students that they have to see in order to experience film and that seeing is not just looking at pictures. This simple idea seems to be the hardest to get through to people.
The War will not be subsidized.
In the dark months of 2001, as the U.S. was starting to campaign against the ever collapsable Taliban, D.C. rang with stories about post-Taliban Afghanistan. Of course, we knew that post-Taliban Afghanistan would be a paradise. US aid money flowing in. Reconstruction everywhere. Unveiled women, everywhere. Peasants and donkeys and chickens, all of them setting up little businesses, or... or franchises, on the American model, as you see it in Florida or one of those Southwest states. And when the war was won -- or when, at least, the Taliban had done its leaking act in Kabul -- the pledges became official. On April 18, 2002, Bush spoke at VMI and said:
"Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls, which works."
In order to achieve these aims, the Bush administration pledged $0.00 in its current budget. That's a little short of a Marshall Plan. That's, in fact, exactly the amount of money an absconding john leaves the whore who's in the bathroom. James Dobbins, who was Bush's envoy to Afghanistan, said about two months after Bush's statement that Afghanistan needs about 500 million dollars per year for the next few years in order to re-build. The Congress looks like it might cough up 250 million dollars this year.
One thing that should be noted about Bush's $0.00 pledge. It did not make headlines. It did not provoke controversy. It did not take up the newsspace taken up by, say, who was going to marry Joe Millionaire. It was noted by Jonathan Alter. It was noted by Josh Marshall. It might have been noted by a few more talking heads. But the country, on the whole, ignored it.
Whether that is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant. The fact is, there is no constituency for giving aid to Afghanistan. And there will not be one for giving Iraq, over the next two years, fifty to one hundred billion dollars.
Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
In the dark months of 2001, as the U.S. was starting to campaign against the ever collapsable Taliban, D.C. rang with stories about post-Taliban Afghanistan. Of course, we knew that post-Taliban Afghanistan would be a paradise. US aid money flowing in. Reconstruction everywhere. Unveiled women, everywhere. Peasants and donkeys and chickens, all of them setting up little businesses, or... or franchises, on the American model, as you see it in Florida or one of those Southwest states. And when the war was won -- or when, at least, the Taliban had done its leaking act in Kabul -- the pledges became official. On April 18, 2002, Bush spoke at VMI and said:
"Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls, which works."
In order to achieve these aims, the Bush administration pledged $0.00 in its current budget. That's a little short of a Marshall Plan. That's, in fact, exactly the amount of money an absconding john leaves the whore who's in the bathroom. James Dobbins, who was Bush's envoy to Afghanistan, said about two months after Bush's statement that Afghanistan needs about 500 million dollars per year for the next few years in order to re-build. The Congress looks like it might cough up 250 million dollars this year.
One thing that should be noted about Bush's $0.00 pledge. It did not make headlines. It did not provoke controversy. It did not take up the newsspace taken up by, say, who was going to marry Joe Millionaire. It was noted by Jonathan Alter. It was noted by Josh Marshall. It might have been noted by a few more talking heads. But the country, on the whole, ignored it.
Whether that is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant. The fact is, there is no constituency for giving aid to Afghanistan. And there will not be one for giving Iraq, over the next two years, fifty to one hundred billion dollars.
Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:
1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.
2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.
3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.
4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.
The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."
Friday, March 14, 2003
Remora
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which � the scientists now tell us � we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who�ve had sex, but their many children. That�s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in �04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I�d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush�s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in �04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies.Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we�ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which � the scientists now tell us � we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who�ve had sex, but their many children. That�s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in �04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I�d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush�s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in �04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies.Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we�ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Remora
LI recommends our long suffering readers turn to Carlos Fuentes piece in the LA Times today. It is as clear as baby's breath: Mexico has always followed the policy of opposing unilateral, unprovoked intervention by the U.S. in Latin America, and it should continue to follow that policy in the Middle East. In other words, gently but firmly dissent from the Bush juggernaut.
"Mexico actively opposed U.S. aggression and intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s; and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Granada in the 1980s. During the Central American wars, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda Sr. built, with French minister Claude Cheysson, the Franco-Mexican accord that gave political status to the Salvadoran guerrillas over the objections of the United States. Then-Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda was the engine behind the Contadora Group -- Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela -- that sought solutions for peace. In these last two cases, Mexico's opposition to the U.S. was riskier than a U.N. vote on Saddam Hussein.
In the face of open aggression and intervention by the Reagan administration against Central America, Mexico worked for a peaceful solution that took the initiative away from Washington and placed it in the hands of the Central Americans. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias' Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 is a testament to that. In all those instances when Mexico has shown its independence, Washington signaled its anger but did nothing against Mexico. It didn't do anything because it couldn't. In the name of what?"
Of course, the below the surface story here is probably intriguing. Fuentes was as shaped and honed by the old PRI system as the widespread graft and one party elections of yore. He was the son of an ambassador, and went to school in D.C. His politics, fashionably soixante-huitarde at one time, have gravitated well to the right. On wonders how much of what Fuentes is writing is a signal sent, discretely, across the border by Bush's friends below it. Even Fuentes, however, sees what the current dust-up is all about:
"Mexico's political independence in the case of Iraq will contribute forcefully to what the world most needs: a counterpoint to U.S. power. The real danger in our time is not the miserable Hussein. It is a unipolar world dominated by Washington. Creating that counterbalance is a political necessity. Future governments, but especially the democratic government of the United States, will end up thanking France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Russia and China for their efforts to create a counterpoint to the United States."
The counterpoint to the U.S., in truth, will come not in the shape of a diplomatic hybrid of varied nations -- it will come in the form of the natural, internal brake exerted by 400 billion dollar deficits, plus 800 billion dollar giveaways. The structure will buckle under that much weight. As usual, it will be the population that doesn't make as much in a year as Dick Cheney will get back in tax refunds that will bear the insupportable costs of foreign policy adventurism. And so disaster shadows us, the flood tide just beyond the horizon.
LI recommends our long suffering readers turn to Carlos Fuentes piece in the LA Times today. It is as clear as baby's breath: Mexico has always followed the policy of opposing unilateral, unprovoked intervention by the U.S. in Latin America, and it should continue to follow that policy in the Middle East. In other words, gently but firmly dissent from the Bush juggernaut.
"Mexico actively opposed U.S. aggression and intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s; and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Granada in the 1980s. During the Central American wars, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda Sr. built, with French minister Claude Cheysson, the Franco-Mexican accord that gave political status to the Salvadoran guerrillas over the objections of the United States. Then-Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda was the engine behind the Contadora Group -- Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela -- that sought solutions for peace. In these last two cases, Mexico's opposition to the U.S. was riskier than a U.N. vote on Saddam Hussein.
In the face of open aggression and intervention by the Reagan administration against Central America, Mexico worked for a peaceful solution that took the initiative away from Washington and placed it in the hands of the Central Americans. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias' Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 is a testament to that. In all those instances when Mexico has shown its independence, Washington signaled its anger but did nothing against Mexico. It didn't do anything because it couldn't. In the name of what?"
Of course, the below the surface story here is probably intriguing. Fuentes was as shaped and honed by the old PRI system as the widespread graft and one party elections of yore. He was the son of an ambassador, and went to school in D.C. His politics, fashionably soixante-huitarde at one time, have gravitated well to the right. On wonders how much of what Fuentes is writing is a signal sent, discretely, across the border by Bush's friends below it. Even Fuentes, however, sees what the current dust-up is all about:
"Mexico's political independence in the case of Iraq will contribute forcefully to what the world most needs: a counterpoint to U.S. power. The real danger in our time is not the miserable Hussein. It is a unipolar world dominated by Washington. Creating that counterbalance is a political necessity. Future governments, but especially the democratic government of the United States, will end up thanking France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Russia and China for their efforts to create a counterpoint to the United States."
The counterpoint to the U.S., in truth, will come not in the shape of a diplomatic hybrid of varied nations -- it will come in the form of the natural, internal brake exerted by 400 billion dollar deficits, plus 800 billion dollar giveaways. The structure will buckle under that much weight. As usual, it will be the population that doesn't make as much in a year as Dick Cheney will get back in tax refunds that will bear the insupportable costs of foreign policy adventurism. And so disaster shadows us, the flood tide just beyond the horizon.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Remora
The response to 9/11 -- that Magna Carta for a heady dose imperialism with the riding whip, according to the Bushies -- is most interesting in the refusal to, well, see 9/11. How many articles begin just like this one, from John Lloyd, in March 7's Financial Times:
"Violence," says Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, "is democratised. War has been privatised. The price of entering a communications network is very low. Terrorists can operate much more easily, do much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began." That technological advances have put mass destruction in the hands of small groups or individuals has become a familiar concern. The mobilisation of tanks and army units around London's main international airport at Heathrow recently was assumed to be against such a threat: several newspapers sketched a lone rocketeer peeking out, SAM missile-launcher on shoulder, from behind bushes on the flight path."
In fact, the technology for what the 19 hijackers did has been available for the last fifty years. The main difference, perhaps, between a 9/11 in 1955 and a 9/11 in 2001 was the size of the plane, and the size of the buildings it brought down. But Nye's comment about terrorists operating "much more easily, do [ing] much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began..." is driven more by a theory that requires this to be the case than what the case is. What we know about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is -- the leadership escaped on horseback. What we also know is that Afghanistan and Sudan were the headquarters -- not Silicon Valley. We know that that this terrorism wasn't state sponsored -- rather, states' paid off Al Qaeda, the way the Byzantine empire paid off wandering Bulgars. And, in the two years since the Al Qaeda operation, not once have I seen, in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine, the merest hint about what, exactly, the charity networks traversing the Middle East are all about. The assumption that Middle Eastern states and Islamic charities exist in the same kind of relation as the Red Cross and Switzerland has never been penetrated -- but from the little LI can gather about the subject, Islamic charity has a much richer history than that, is much more connected to the way people get by in, say, Somalia or Yemen or Egypt, and have gotten by since the Ottomans. Decimating those networks, as we are intent on doing, means replacing them with more state sponsored networks at a time when the revenue of the states is going more into paying past debts than into creating safety nets.
So why do we get people like Nye spouting obvious nonsense, and newspapers like the Financial Times publishing it? Because the idea that it ISN'T necessary to acquire a lot of technology to attack the U.S. -- that you can do as much damage with a passenger airliner as you can do with the most advanced bomb --hurts the self-image of the U.S. We have a vested interest -- we vest 300 billion dollars in it per annum -- that the more James Bondian our weaponry, the more overwhelming our successes. The idea, so far, that you have merely to strap a gasoline tank to you and set fire to it in a crowded bus is one that hasn't sunk into the official U.S. mindset -- so much so that no one draws the connection between the suicide bombings in Israel/Palestine and the potential for same in a U.S. occupied Iraq. Discussion is always getting detoured about how the natives, after we greet them lovingly with our 3 000 smart bombs, will be rushing to the Baghdad florists and candyshops to buy our GIs flowers and candies. It is almost enough to make the smart investor want to invest in some Iraqi Lady Godiva Chocolatier before the fete is over. But hey -- what if the natives are less than appreciative of our smart bombs? What if they grow restless being bossed about, for two years, by Donald Rumsfeld's old senile friend, Jay Garner, the apparent heir to the Iraq satrapy?
We are headed into a situation that is perfect for the kind of fighting that the Spanish did with Napoleon's troops, two hundred years ago -- stringing out 60 to 100 thousand U.S. soldiers over a territory bigger than Yugoslavia, and expecting them to stay there for two years.
Amazing. There's a very nicely turned phrase about a man who overshoots his mark in P.G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather, where Wodehouse comments that he had the look that Samson must have had when he heard the pillars crack. LI definitely thinks we are heading for a Samson moment.
The response to 9/11 -- that Magna Carta for a heady dose imperialism with the riding whip, according to the Bushies -- is most interesting in the refusal to, well, see 9/11. How many articles begin just like this one, from John Lloyd, in March 7's Financial Times:
"Violence," says Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, "is democratised. War has been privatised. The price of entering a communications network is very low. Terrorists can operate much more easily, do much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began." That technological advances have put mass destruction in the hands of small groups or individuals has become a familiar concern. The mobilisation of tanks and army units around London's main international airport at Heathrow recently was assumed to be against such a threat: several newspapers sketched a lone rocketeer peeking out, SAM missile-launcher on shoulder, from behind bushes on the flight path."
In fact, the technology for what the 19 hijackers did has been available for the last fifty years. The main difference, perhaps, between a 9/11 in 1955 and a 9/11 in 2001 was the size of the plane, and the size of the buildings it brought down. But Nye's comment about terrorists operating "much more easily, do [ing] much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began..." is driven more by a theory that requires this to be the case than what the case is. What we know about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is -- the leadership escaped on horseback. What we also know is that Afghanistan and Sudan were the headquarters -- not Silicon Valley. We know that that this terrorism wasn't state sponsored -- rather, states' paid off Al Qaeda, the way the Byzantine empire paid off wandering Bulgars. And, in the two years since the Al Qaeda operation, not once have I seen, in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine, the merest hint about what, exactly, the charity networks traversing the Middle East are all about. The assumption that Middle Eastern states and Islamic charities exist in the same kind of relation as the Red Cross and Switzerland has never been penetrated -- but from the little LI can gather about the subject, Islamic charity has a much richer history than that, is much more connected to the way people get by in, say, Somalia or Yemen or Egypt, and have gotten by since the Ottomans. Decimating those networks, as we are intent on doing, means replacing them with more state sponsored networks at a time when the revenue of the states is going more into paying past debts than into creating safety nets.
So why do we get people like Nye spouting obvious nonsense, and newspapers like the Financial Times publishing it? Because the idea that it ISN'T necessary to acquire a lot of technology to attack the U.S. -- that you can do as much damage with a passenger airliner as you can do with the most advanced bomb --hurts the self-image of the U.S. We have a vested interest -- we vest 300 billion dollars in it per annum -- that the more James Bondian our weaponry, the more overwhelming our successes. The idea, so far, that you have merely to strap a gasoline tank to you and set fire to it in a crowded bus is one that hasn't sunk into the official U.S. mindset -- so much so that no one draws the connection between the suicide bombings in Israel/Palestine and the potential for same in a U.S. occupied Iraq. Discussion is always getting detoured about how the natives, after we greet them lovingly with our 3 000 smart bombs, will be rushing to the Baghdad florists and candyshops to buy our GIs flowers and candies. It is almost enough to make the smart investor want to invest in some Iraqi Lady Godiva Chocolatier before the fete is over. But hey -- what if the natives are less than appreciative of our smart bombs? What if they grow restless being bossed about, for two years, by Donald Rumsfeld's old senile friend, Jay Garner, the apparent heir to the Iraq satrapy?
We are headed into a situation that is perfect for the kind of fighting that the Spanish did with Napoleon's troops, two hundred years ago -- stringing out 60 to 100 thousand U.S. soldiers over a territory bigger than Yugoslavia, and expecting them to stay there for two years.
Amazing. There's a very nicely turned phrase about a man who overshoots his mark in P.G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather, where Wodehouse comments that he had the look that Samson must have had when he heard the pillars crack. LI definitely thinks we are heading for a Samson moment.
Monday, March 10, 2003
Remora
�I have no hope that things will go right or that men will think reasonably until they have exhausted every mode of human folly�.
-- James Froude
The Salisbury Review is a hugely enjoyable enterprise. Every quarter it is filled with weepy forebodings about the future, imprecations of the present, and misty yearning towards the past. The past as scripted by Walter Scott, we believe. The quote from Froude is taken from an article about him in the Winter, 2000 issue. One gets a whiff, here, of a sort of Bertie Wooster Toryism that is relieved, marginally, by the sex appeal of Margaret Thatcher, but reverts to a pottering melancholia as instinctively as the groundhog reverts to his burrow:
"The race to which Victorian England was committing itself in his day � which I suppose is what ordinary people now refer to as the �rat race� � has provided the Labour Party and the Liberals (in all their varieties) with the opportunity to recover every item of clothing stolen from them by the Conservatives over the last 150 years. This competitive society has spawned an education system which is seen by most parents as a means of enabling their children to rise in the volatile social scheme of things. It is the very reverse of the older order which said �Like father, like son�. John Ruskin described it unforgettably in Sesame and Lilies:
But, an education �which shall keep a good coat on my son�s back; - which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors� bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house; in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; - this we pray for on bent knees � and this is all we pray for.�
That's the spirit! A John Coleman wrote the Froude article. An Alfred Sherman writes a paen to the S.R. as a voice crying in the wilderness, which wilderness has overtaken civilization for some time -- 200 years at least. British conservatives are so much more advanced than American ones -- while Americans pine for Victorian virtues, the Brits realize that everything was lost around 1688. Here, let's pour on some prose:
"Conservatism restored is a construct unlike natural conservatism, which in its day entailed hallowing the status quo because it was the status quo, �all that is is right.� By 1982, very little of that was left. The Labour victory of 1945 had changed not only the face of Britain but also the Conservative Party. It had become Butler's party in all but name, a variant of socialism.
...
In 1982, when the Review was founded, was a time of hope, Margaret Thatcher reigned with bold Conservative rhetoric. But decades of disappointment continued to follow. During the following twenty years our awareness of the rigours, of deception grew pari passu with the oppositional stance of the Review, which has of necessity become a voice crying in the wilderness. Margaret Thatcher remains a key figure in British politics of the last quarter of the century, subject to continuous reinterpretation. That she towered above our narrow world like a colossus is beyond argument..."
Change and decay in all I see, cried one of Evelyn Waugh's characters.
In another article, the questionis posed: Is the European Union the new Soviet Union?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. Vladimir Bukovsky, the author of this article, is amazed at the allowance of democratic elections in such places as Poland, and the inexplicable bombing of Milosovic, a good anti-communist if there ever was one. Bukovsky's ramblings were vocalized, according to the article, in the House of Commons, where no doubt they did everybody a lot of good.
Sometimes we need a shot of the real rightwing stuff -- it is so far out that it is sort of hippie-like. This is politics of. by, and for hobbits
�I have no hope that things will go right or that men will think reasonably until they have exhausted every mode of human folly�.
-- James Froude
The Salisbury Review is a hugely enjoyable enterprise. Every quarter it is filled with weepy forebodings about the future, imprecations of the present, and misty yearning towards the past. The past as scripted by Walter Scott, we believe. The quote from Froude is taken from an article about him in the Winter, 2000 issue. One gets a whiff, here, of a sort of Bertie Wooster Toryism that is relieved, marginally, by the sex appeal of Margaret Thatcher, but reverts to a pottering melancholia as instinctively as the groundhog reverts to his burrow:
"The race to which Victorian England was committing itself in his day � which I suppose is what ordinary people now refer to as the �rat race� � has provided the Labour Party and the Liberals (in all their varieties) with the opportunity to recover every item of clothing stolen from them by the Conservatives over the last 150 years. This competitive society has spawned an education system which is seen by most parents as a means of enabling their children to rise in the volatile social scheme of things. It is the very reverse of the older order which said �Like father, like son�. John Ruskin described it unforgettably in Sesame and Lilies:
But, an education �which shall keep a good coat on my son�s back; - which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors� bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house; in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; - this we pray for on bent knees � and this is all we pray for.�
That's the spirit! A John Coleman wrote the Froude article. An Alfred Sherman writes a paen to the S.R. as a voice crying in the wilderness, which wilderness has overtaken civilization for some time -- 200 years at least. British conservatives are so much more advanced than American ones -- while Americans pine for Victorian virtues, the Brits realize that everything was lost around 1688. Here, let's pour on some prose:
"Conservatism restored is a construct unlike natural conservatism, which in its day entailed hallowing the status quo because it was the status quo, �all that is is right.� By 1982, very little of that was left. The Labour victory of 1945 had changed not only the face of Britain but also the Conservative Party. It had become Butler's party in all but name, a variant of socialism.
...
In 1982, when the Review was founded, was a time of hope, Margaret Thatcher reigned with bold Conservative rhetoric. But decades of disappointment continued to follow. During the following twenty years our awareness of the rigours, of deception grew pari passu with the oppositional stance of the Review, which has of necessity become a voice crying in the wilderness. Margaret Thatcher remains a key figure in British politics of the last quarter of the century, subject to continuous reinterpretation. That she towered above our narrow world like a colossus is beyond argument..."
Change and decay in all I see, cried one of Evelyn Waugh's characters.
In another article, the questionis posed: Is the European Union the new Soviet Union?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. Vladimir Bukovsky, the author of this article, is amazed at the allowance of democratic elections in such places as Poland, and the inexplicable bombing of Milosovic, a good anti-communist if there ever was one. Bukovsky's ramblings were vocalized, according to the article, in the House of Commons, where no doubt they did everybody a lot of good.
Sometimes we need a shot of the real rightwing stuff -- it is so far out that it is sort of hippie-like. This is politics of. by, and for hobbits
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...