Bollettino

(fifth in the series)

I don’t know a lot about Iraq. I can’t name one single Iraqi singer or song. I don’t know the name of one Iraqi tv show, actor, or novelist.

I share space in this cloud of unknowing with 99.9% of the American public.

However, I have read a few library books. I have read a few magazine and newspaper articles. I have a fair memory. I have Google. And, mostly, I have a pretty good nose for sophistries, the lacuna in stories, and special pleading.

Now, in the current occupation of Iraq, there is one general and significant difference between the Iraqis and the Americans: the Americans can withdraw. When the Americans go, the Iraqis will have to live with whatever situation (in the creation of which they have mostly acted as junior partners) is left behind. Since the point of this series is to envision withdrawal, I thought it best to knock hard against three myths, as I see them, about Iraq.

1. The ungrateful/abused Iraqi

When Fred Barnes, the editor of the Weekly Standard, made his sahib’s tour of Iraq this spring, he came back with stories to delight the senses. Much as Lincoln Steffens, setting foot on Ukranian soil in 1930, was ravished with the scents and sounds of the future, so, too, Barnes, coming upon newly painted school houses, electric wiring, and entrepreneurial Iraqi exiles, saw that “Iraq worked.” There was, however, a big green fly in the ointment – the Iraqis. Frankly, Barnes revealed, after all we’d done for them, they weren’t grateful.

Sahibs hate a vulgar streak of ingratitude among the bearers.

The liberal hawks have been, well, more liberal. Liberals are a nurture, not nature kind of people. The liberal idea is that the Iraqis are abused. David Aaronovich might not have started this theme, but he went through it pretty early in the game, right after it appeared that there was an insufficiency of flowers greeting the liberators. Why the hesitancy? Surely it is because Saddam, the bad father, beat the Iraqis, the good children, until they hid from the social workers under the looted furniture.

These are the most overt acts of rhetorically infantilizing the Iraqis. More subtle versions were on display throughout the Mission Accomplished months last year. NPR was especially prone to radio shows about U.S. soldiers teaching the poor, clueless Iraqi security people, with their adorable stumbling English (imagine, they didn’t know English!) all about democracy. Never mind that the security people in the Bronx and L.A. might have benefited from similar lessons – the real irony here, of course, is that the classroom should have been reversed. The Iraqis should have been teaching the American GIs how to enter an Iraqi house, how to distinguish one Iraqi holiday from another, etc., etc. As we now all too painfully know. At the time, though, the Iraqis were seen as something like the Noble Indian, to whom we were imparting the benefits of the alphabet. The Noble Indian, however, had the decency to vanish, inexplicably, into the reservation; we can now call them Native Americans and feel proud of our sensitivity in a Kevin Kostner-ish kind of masculine way. The Iraqis, on the other hand, have vulgarly survived.

This is all an echo of what Said wrote about in Orientalism: ‘Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient with Occident, maily by asserting the technological political supremacy of the West. History in such a union is attenuated if not banished.”

So perhaps it is necessary to say some things about Iraq such as even I, an ignorant American, such have been able to gather over the last couple years.

For instance, Iraq has been a nation longer than either Israel or Saudi Arabia. Its unity has suffered the shock, in the last three decades, of three devastating wars. At the same time, Iraq has gone through periods of quite exceptional prosperity – especially in the seventies, when the price of oil surged. That price of oil benefited the country partly because the Iraqis were the leading contributors towards the constitution of the Middle East’s only successful international organization, OPEC. Even under a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were able to put their infrastructure back together after the first Gulf war faster than the Americans have been able to do it in the past year.

They are not, in short, savages, either noble or ignoble. Nor are they abused children or ungrateful teens. According to people in the oil business, in fact, the Iraqi Ministry of Oil was one of the most competent in the world before the sanctions.

The image of Iraqis as a people who cannot do things for themselves count, since they serve as a sub rosa justification for the complex economic arrangement that the CPA has arrived at with its country. On the one hand, there is the enormous American generosity – a flow of funds unmatched since the Marshall plan. On the other hand is who controls the funds – the CPA. It is the defense department that still, a year on, has final say on all the major contracts. It is as if a man came to your house, tied you up, gave you birthday presents, and played with them before your eyes.

There is one gift, however, above all the others, that the Bush administration got right. That gift is debt relief. In fact, if Iraq could get out from under the crushing burden of the debts contracted under Hussein, as well as the war reparations, the country wouldn’t need American beneficence. Like any country endowed with a vast natural resource that the state contracts out, Iraq could once again borrow the money it needed to rebuild the infrastructure in the way its government wanted. It shouldn’t be necessary to lecture conservatives on the vices of welfare, but apparently, in the case of Iraq, they have made a large exception to all conservative principles.

If we are envisioning an exit, then, the first thing to envision is the transfer of economic power to an Iraqi government.

Next post: The Kurds.

Bollettino

A wise and a good man may indeed be sometimes induced to comply with a number whose opinion he generally approves, though it be perhaps against his own. But this
liberty should be made use of upon very few occasions, and those of small importance, and then only with a view of bringing over his own side another time to something of greater and more public moment. But to sacrifice the innocency of a friend, the good of our country, or our own conscience to the humour, or passion, or interest of a party, plainly shews that either our heads or our hearts are not as they should be. – Jonathan Swift.

(Read previous three posts. Fourth in a series)

In order to envision the exit from Iraq, as we said, it is important to have a clear view of why we invaded in the first place.

It is also important to have a clear view of why the occupation went so badly awry.

When America invaded Iraq, we think there were two basic principles, enshrined in the Rumsfeld strategy, that guaranteed the disasters of occupation that followed.

1. The unwillingness to commit a sufficient number of troops; and
2. The plan to implement economic “shock therapy” in Iraq at the point of a gun.

1. If one X rays the unwillingness to commit troops, two things strike the impartial observer. The first is that to raise the number of soldiers from the United States alone, given the American troop commitment world wide, would have meant implementing some kind of draft, or major call up of the Reserve, in 2003. This, in turn, would have meant that Bush would have to make the case for sacrifice to the American public. That case was iffy at best. It was in Bush’s interest to wage this war in such a way that the American public’s involvement would be kept at a spectatorial distance.

However, if American troops weren’t available, how about foreign troops? Here, Rumsfeldian politics kicked in. The Defense Department analysis of the first Gulf War was that foreigners – other Coalition members, like the Saudis and the French – had too much influence on the decision making that went on during that war. Rumsfeld was determined to control Iraq from the Pentagon, and he sacrificed a real commitment of international troops for that end. Why was he determined to control Iraq? It was not only because the war was waged as part of the grand strategy we outlined in the previous post. It was also because:

2. The ideology of the decision makers was such that Iraq was considered a test case for the Forbes end of the Republican party.

As the first American proconsul in Iraq, Jay Garner, has testified, the main concern of the Americans around the newly minted CPA was not to hold elections, or to secure the country, but to radically change the economy. Privatization was the name of the game. The grand strategy was all very well, but Iraq, as a specific prize, became irresistible for the same conservative ideologues who have desired, for the past thirty years, to inflict such wonders as the flat tax and privatized Social Security on the American public. After thirty years of frustration, here was an opportunity not to be missed.

What was missed was the lessons of the very recent past. In Poland and Russia, where shock therapy has been tried, one thing became evident – the sudden transformation of a socialist system into a radically privatized system causes an immediate spike in unemployment, and a lessening of the living standard for the majority of the population. I will leave undiscussed, here, whether in the long term the majority gains from these policies. I don’t care, in this instance. What concerns the argument is that Rumsfeld wanted to preside over an occupation with a force half to a third of the size that military men advise, while zapping the economy in such a way that, among a heavily armed population, the unemployment of young men would rise, and the living standards of average families would fall.

To put it briefly: this was insane.(1)

It is interesting to speculate what Nixon would have done, in 2002, given Rumsfeld’s analysis of the Middle East. Nixon was an order of magnitude smarter than Rumsfeld. Nixon would have seen at once the flaw in the Neo-con plan. The kind of regime change they wanted to effect in Iraq was, in Nixon’s time, effected by proxies. Whether it was a Marxist Chilean president or a lefty Guatamalan, one thing about America was that we preserved our distance while exercizing our power. Nixon would immediately have looked for a way not to involve American troops in the overthrow of Saddam.

Thank God Nixon is dead. Rumsfeld’s stupidity – and the man is stupid in that peculiarly bureaucratic way that Gogol’s portraits of bureaucratic chiefs captured – Rumsfeld, one feels sure, would have risen high in the Czar’s service – has accidentally produced a situation that is much happier for the Iraqis, although not, in the short term, for the Americans. We think, given certain modifications of Rumsfeld’s grand strategy, even the American interest can be served if we conduct our exit correctly.

In our next post, we will go through some myths about Iraq.

1. I want to be straightforward in these posts. However, I must put in an aside here. There is a defense of Rumsfeld that has gone the rounds of the conservative commentators that goes like this: compare our situation in Iraq to the situation in Germany in 1945, or the situation that Lincoln faced in 1860, etc. etc. In these situations, there were enormous initial problems. But we admire Lincoln and Truman today because those situations were corrected.

There is a problem with this way of looking at history as composed of self contained individual events, like pearls on a string: it isn’t human. It is recommended by the Tramalfadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. However, I don’t have a tramalfadorian brain, yet.

So, from a simple human point of view: there is a fundamental difference between unprecedented and precedented situations. Lincoln as an improvisor in 1862, going through Generals, is a man we can admire. But if Lincoln was fighting his Civil war ten or twenty years after another Civil War had been fought, we would be much less forgiving of his faults. In fact, we’d think he was an incompetent redneck from Illinois. And we’d be right – in that situation.

Rumsfeld presides over a Department with almost 75 years of institutional memory about various wars and occupations. He ignored it all. We are now paying a price for that piece of arrogance. Conservatives call it tradition – liberals call it progress – Hegelians call it the Spirit – but all agree that events in history are connected. Military men weren’t bs-ing when they said that standard military operating procedure calls for a ratio of a certain number of soldiers to a certain occupied population. Rumsfeld’s over-ruling this is less like Lincoln improvising in 1862, and more like an Intelligent Design scientist challenging the “Darwinian bias” in school biology textbooks in 2003. It is a sign of fundamentalist ignorance. And it shouldn’t be forgiven.

Bollettino

Why are we in Iraq?

(See previous two posts before reading this one, dear reader)

To understand the war in Iraq, we need to understand the reason that we invaded Iraq. The average American can be forgiven for being confused on this point, since, on numerous occasions, Bush himself seems sincerely and visibly confused about why he is occupying this Middle Eastern country.

There are three general reasons mentioned, usually, for justifying the invasion of Iraq:
1. Saddam Hussein’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction;
2. The tie between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein;
3. and finally, the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein.

I think it is easy to show that, even if one concedes that there were WMD, that there were ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that Hussein’s regime was massively inhumane, these could not be the reason we invaded Iraq. Or rather, these reasons alone would not pick out Iraq as the one unique nation we would invade in 2003.

1. The WMDs. By the year 2000, there was one nation our intelligence agencies knew a., possessed nuclear weapons, in violation of international treaty; b., sold or exchanged nuclear materials to our avowed enemies; and c., had close and supportive ties to Islamic terrorists. That country was Pakistan.
In contrast, by 2000, Iraq had been effectually divided between a northern section and a main section for seven years. During this time, if Saddam Hussein had possessed WMD and the willingness to use them, as he had during the Iraq war, he would have. He didn’t. Why? Well, it turns out that he didn’t even have WMD, but even at the time, those who thought he did thought, also, that he didn’t want to face the consequences of using WMD.

Our point is that the bias towards punishing countries for illegally possessing WMD

2. The Al Qaeda tie argument is much simpler.
Grant, for a moment, that Cheney is right, and that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda.
Now, we can reason by subtraction here. Given the above supposition, we know that three countries, at least, had ties to Al Qaeda: Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
The idea of going to war with one of those countries would then seem to depend on the strength of the tie. So do a simple thought experiment: subtract a country, and ask if Usama bin Laden would have been prevented from launching the attack on 9/11 without the aid of that country.
Pakistan is easy. Pakistan’s secret service essentially set up the Taliban. The ISI also supported a network of Islamic warriors throughout Central Asia. Without Pakistan, there would have been no 9/11.
Saudi Arabia is trickier, since less is known. But it is known that the Saudis negotiated to find Osama a place, after the U.S. demanded his expulsion from Sudan. And we also know that large amounts of Saudi money flowed to Al Qaeda. The material symbol of Saudi help is the fact that the majority of the hijackers were Saudi. So there is a case that without S.A., there would have been no 9/11.
Iraq is much simpler. There simply is no record of largescale financial support. There were no training camps in Iraq for Al Qaeda. The ties that Cheney’s crew has publicized, even if true, played a minimal support role in 9/11.
Again, even given the truth, then, of this justification for the war, the bias against Iraq is presupposed by the justification.

3. Human rights. In the build-up to the war, LI said that there were two wars being debated in the press. One was Bush’s war, and the other was Hitchen’s – named for the most ardent advocate of the third justification.

Hitchens war always discretely skipped over a large problem. The war he – and liberal advocates – advocated was to be led by the same people who, in the eighties, allied the U.S. with Saddam Hussein.

Rumsfeld was the most prominent member of this group, but Wolfowitz, too, was a member of the Reagan foreign policy team that came into office with the explicit promise to overturn Jimmy Carter’s human rights foreign policy agenda.

The puzzle, here, is that if the case for the war was really a human rights one, then these people had wonderful conversion stories to tell. Nothing persuades like conversion. Yet, unless I missed it, I have not heard Rumsfeld tell of how he realized that helping a man who was ordering gas attacks on the same day Rumsfeld shook hands with him was a bad and immoral thing. I have never heard Wolfowitz describe his ambassadorship to Indonesia, where he rubbed shoulders with one of the world’s great mass murderers, Suharto, lead to a Damascus experience.
Again, what we have to ask is: why Iraq, then?

I think the clue lies in the people who lead us into this war – Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. LI thinks that the reason we are in Iraq is that far from changing their mind about the tilt towards Iraq in the 80s (which has gone down memory hole – still, it is startling to read that, in the days after the Washington Post reported the gassing of the Kurds, the Reagan White House response was to ask for a tighter arms embargo on Iran – in other words, to award Saddam Hussein even more), Rumsfeld, et al. wanted to pursue it through other means. In other words, they wanted Iraq to play the role Saddam Hussein gave the country in the 80s – a hostile state poised against Iran and Syria – but with someone American friendly in place of Saddam.

That’s it. It is that simple.
Or, rather, it is that simple in this instance. But the reason for wanting a state that would function like Saddam’s did in the 80s takes us to the larger, Rumsfeldian perspective on the Middle East. Their theory goes something like this.

From 53 to 79, American policy in the Middle East could balance our alliance with Israel with our dependence on Saudi Arabia because there was a stable third term between the two: Iran.

After the Shah fell, our Middle Eastern policy was increasingly skewed by, on the one hand, the pull of Israel’s interests (which the Rumsfeldians interpret as, eventually, the full occupation of Palestine – Eretz Israel as the manifest destiny of that nation) and, on the other hand, our need to pacify the Saudis. The end of communism merely hastened the decay, here, by removing our strongest ideological bond to Saudi Arabia. In order to make the Middle East work, what was needed was a spectrum of states, going from Israel, our closest ally, to Saudi Arabia, which was always going to be a troublesome ally. Iraq, in this scheme, works perfectly. It could serve as a pressure point against Iran, and against Syria. It could, in other words, play the role of reversing the destruction of the old American policy from 53 to 79. Eventually, it could help lead to the re-Pahlavization of Iran. All of which would put such pressure on Saudi Arabia as to neutralize its hostility towards Israel. At last, we would reach equilibrium in the Middle East.

This, we think, states the subtending reason that we went to war with Iraq. If we are right, we have a reason for considering Iran, and our relationship with that country, among those conditions that have to be considered in getting out of Iraq. We will not, in other words, get out of Iraq successfully unless we end the remnant of our dual containment policy with Iran.

Bollettino

The Glass Student – or The Man of Glass, in Samuel Putnam’s translation – has a plot that goes like this:

One day two students, traveling to the University at Salamanca, come upon a peasant boy sleeping under a bush by the side of the road. The boy refuses to give his real name, but does express a desire to learn. So the students employ him as a servant. He reads much in Salamanca, then parts from his masters and falls in with a recruiting agent, goes with him as an independent soldier to Italy, tours a sort of grand tour of Europe (which was the equivalent, at the time, of making a grand tour of Hapsburg battlefields0, then returns to Salamanca. There, a woman of easy virtue falls in love with him. Tomas does not return her affection, so she makes him a drink into which she has mixed a love potion. Far from arousing his desire, the potion poisons him to the point where he almost loses his life. After a prolonged illness, he recovers, physically. However, he is now under the firm delusion that he is made of glass. He becomes famous because of this delusion, which is accompanied not only by odd, protective behaviors, but by a sudden access of sharp speaking in public. In short, he becomes a sort of Diogenes, making pithy pronouncements about people and events. Eventually he is cured of the illness, becomes a soldier again, and dies in Flanders.

The interest of this story lies in Rodaja’s madness. Here is Cervantes’ describing the onset of the illness:

“For six months Tomas was in bed, and in the course of that time he withered aways and became, as the saying goes, nothing by skin and bones, while all his senses gave evidence of being deranged. His friends applied every remedy in their power and succeeded in curing the illness of his body but not that of his mind, with the result that he was left a healthy man but afflicted with the strangest kind of madness that had ever been heard of up to that time. The poor fellow imagined that he was wholly made of glass, and consequently, when anyone came near him, he would give a terrible scream, begging and imploring them with the most rartional-sounding arguments to keep their distance lest they shatter him, since really and truly he was not like other men but fashioned of glass from head to foot.”



As a man of glass, Tomas makes his way through Salamanca, loudly telling coaches and little boys with pebbles to stay out of his way. These remarks, which are at first self-protective, gradually turn critical. The comedy of the story is in the fact that it is only after turning into glass that Tomas also becomes ‘sharp’ – that is, he begins to make remarks in the fashion of one of the Cynical philosophers. Remarks that “hold up a glass” or mirror to society. Cervantes’ technique, in the first part of the story is similar to that he employs in Don Quixote – a juxtaposition of madness and high rationality. So Tomas has this reaction, for instance, to storms: “When it thundered he trembled like quicksilver and would run out into the fields and not come back to town until the storm had passed.” Yet he is more than willing to tell off a student who wants to be a point, expose the legal profession to a lawyer, and talk down painters. Remember, given the touchy Spanish sense of honor of the time, the painters, poets and lawyers would certainly find these kinds of things worthy of challenge.



The truth is, the idea of the story is better than the story. Why are we talking about the Glass Student? Because we have been looking for an emblem with which to illustrate what we are doing, here. And what, by extension, the public intellectual does in the age of the declining liberal democracy. On this weblog. LI is at once so imminently fragile – fragile so that any stray event can shatter us – and at the same time impelled by some demon, in this condition, to make sharper and sharper comments. It is as if there is a double and opposite process going on, in which the level of our frangibility serves as the very condition of our speaking at all. This, at least, is the first allegorical level of the glass student that we’ve been pondering.



The second level is that the fragility is false, a delusion, and the words are pointless. This is where allegory becomes comedy. This is the comic dilemma of a public intellectual when the grand scheme of liberatory oppositions collapses. When, that is, the univocal has become the universal. LI has been posting in this spot for three years, and watched a whole culture of commentary grow up on the web, blog by blog. And our impression is that blog culture is evidence of the serious and incurable narcissism and egotism that are seemingly the defining characteristics of the comfortable of our time. It is as if, in Hegelian terms, the culture has stepped back – increasingly, self reflection is blocked as the ability to imagine the other has become either so distorted by patronizing academic jargon, with the terrible euphemisms that wipe out the Other as a historical entity, or has vanished as a determinant, at all, from our current consciousness. The disproportion between the anger at the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib and the acts the pictures show is evidence of this on a concrete level. But take, on a much humbler level, what we are doing here. We predict, we analyze, we go on and on, ransacking our reading, our mental activity, etc. etc. – to our own immense satisfaction. Yet we have glimpsed, out of the corner of our eye, so to speak, the ridiculousness of our bellowing, the complete vacuum that swallows our protests, the sheer pointlessness of thinking that, by piling words up, we are ‘doing something’.



We aren’t. This isn’t just a waste of time – the sheer emptiness of our opinions is a sort of dissipation of our life itself, a sort of slow motion, slapstick death.



Well, there you are, then.



So it is under the sign of the Glass student that we want to dedicate the next three or four posts to imaging getting out of Iraq. It is, according to established American opinion, unthinkable to get out of Iraq right now. That’s a performative unthinkability – the more it is unthought, the more power is given to those who are ‘authorized’ to do the thinking. So the first step in getting out of Iraq is to imagine getting out of Iraq.



First, then, we want to understand why we are in Iraq in the first place. Then we want to talk about the opposition to the war, in this country, and in particular explore how the the Democratic party has played the role of co-conspirator in the war, and evidently will continue to play that role. Third, we will explore what we think (again, bellowing like the Glass Student) could make withdrawing from Iraq a (as the marriage counselors say) “positive experience” – starting from the angle that any withdrawal from Iraq should be coupled with détente with Iran,



This is what we will do, if we have time.

"Larvatus prodeo." – Descartes' motto.
“I advance, masked.”





In 1641, Descartes published his Meditations. The book contains a reference to a man who “imagines” he is made of glass. The reference is embedded in the first of the meditations, the one dedicated to doubt: And how could I deny that these hands and this body belong to me? If only, perhaps, by comparing myself to those insane people whose brains are so troubled and obscured by the black vapors of bile that they are constantly assuring people that they are kings, when they are actually poor; or that they are arrayed in gold and purple, when they are nude; or who imagine themselves to be pitchers, or to have bodies of glass?”
(“Et comment est-ce que je pourrais nier que ces mains et ce corps-ci soient à moi? si ce n'est peut-être que je me compare à ces insensés de qui le cerveau est tellement troublé et offusqué par les noires vapeurs de la bile qu'ils assurent constamment qu'ils sont des rois lorsqu'ils sont très pauvres; qu'ils sont vêtus d'or et de pourpre lorsqu'ils sont tout nus; ou s'imaginent être des cruches ou avoir un corps de verre?”)

Some have imagined that the man made of glass might be a reference, or a memory, of Cervantes’ novella, the Glass Student. It is, at least, nice to think so. In fact, given that Cervantes story had been out for three years in 1619, Descartes great year and the one that shaped his Discours, one hopes that he read it in one of the tents he lived in when he served in the troops of Maximilien of Bavaria. It was in that year that, as we know from the Discourse, Descartes was “lying on a stove” … but here is how a very comprehensive biography describes him:

“So in 1619, Descartes engaged himself with the troops of Maximilian of Bavaria. But he didn’t participate in the terrible Thirty Years War. The Catholic Army to which he belonged took its winter quarters on the banks of the Danube. We can easily imagine Descartes quartered on some civilian “in an oven,” meaning in a room well heated by one of those porcelain ovens which were beginning to become common, served by a domestic in livery, and entirely delivered over to pure reflexion. On the 10 of November, 1619, marvelous dreams alerted him to the fact that he was destined to unify all the disciplines by an admirable science, of which he would be the inventor. Descartes therefore abandoned the military life and returned to France, going through Germany and Holland. In the course of his journey he had occasion to defend himself victoriously with a sword on board a crossing boat, against some sailors who aimed at stripping him and murdering him.”

The French have always remembered that Descartes was a soldier first. It is, in fact, possible to see the method of doubt as a sort of metaphysical tactical assault, with the tactics threatening to entirely overthrow the grand strategy of the mind in search of certitude. What we like to think, however, is that Descartes – who was using his soldiering as a way of escaping the books of his early schooling – might still have picked up a book that tells the story of another soldier – one Tomas Rodaja, the “glass student.”

Cervantes ““El licenciado Vidriera” has, according to an essay by George Shipley, been both one of the most commented on and one of the most disparaged of Cervantes novellas. Shipley tends towards disparagement himself. After re-reading the story, we understand why. But we also understand why we have been thinking about the “glass student” all week.

To be continued...

Bollettino

LI recently wrote a review of Niall Ferguson’s latest book, Colossus, for the National Post. In the review, I gingerly tiptoed around one of the obvious flaws in the book – Ferguson knows little and cares less about American history. This is fine with me. Let each do the work he loves.

Ferguson has never made any bones about the fact that he wants to be the AJP Taylor of the Right. Unfortunately, he seems headed for being the Toynbee of the Right -- hot, donnish air spread over big and vacuous ideas. He is exploiting his serious status as a historian (a man who knows things) to build a shaky and unworthy career for himself as a pundit (a man who quotes men who know things). He should really try to refrain from drawing conclusions from American history until he has an undergraduate level familiarity with it. But there he is, again, in Slate, blithely going on about, of all things he doesn’t know about, John Quincy Adams.

Here, astonishingly, is what he says about JQA:

“The lineal antecedent of the Bush administration's current policy is revealed here to be John Quincy Adams, "the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century." (Although Americans are generally wary of the hereditary principle, they do like it to apply in the realm of foreign policy.)
According to Gaddis, Adams' strategy—partly inspired by one of the first nasty "surprises" in American history, the torching of the White House by the British in 1814—had three distinctive components. It allowed for pre-emption, on which basis South Florida and Texas were annexed; unilateralism, hence the Monroe Doctrine instead of an Anglo-American condominium in Latin America; and American hegemony, which came a lot later, but which Adams and his contemporaries fondly imagined.”

This is, well, whacky, and only a man who draws his American history through the very narrow straw provided by books by foreign policy scholars would have written something that is both so weird (South Florida? Does Ferguson know where Florida is? He had the same problem in his book) and that so misstates Adams contribution to American’s expansionist policy. The misstatemeht is symptomatic of Ferguson's real disinterest with American history. Ferguson has never had much time for race as a historical category. Sure, he mentions it in Empire, but he much prefers to talk about markets. That, plus Ferguson's tendency to make lawyer like arguments -- he loves to weed through his facts -- show through in the way he does American history.

Historians get a feel for facts. For instance, even if an American historian knew little about Adams and Texas, he'd suspect the annexation story and the South Florida story for the same reason: Adams was prominently and famously anti-slavery. Annexation, in the pre-civil war days, was driven largely by the South - in search of new territories, and seeking to enlarge the sphere of slave economies. These things came together in Adams famous opposition to annexing Texas. Adams knew very well that the Texas revolt was caused in part by the fact that the Americans in Texas were bringing their slaves into a state in a nation that had abolished slavery. All of which adds up to what Adams really did – which was to prevent a pre-emptive annexation of Texas by Andrew Jackson. Actually, the last is a bit speculative, but the latest historian of the Texas revolution, H.W. Brands, in his book Lone Star Nation, makes a pretty good case for it. The speculative part is that Jackson was moving towards annexation. The part that isn’t speculation is that Adams clearly blocked the annexation of Texas to the U.S., and he did it because of slavery. An excerpt from Adam’s speech on the subject:

“Annexation, had been put off with a sort of Return Jonathan refusal. He had been told with Solemnity of face that there was a doubt of the Constitutional power of Congress and the President to accept the proposal and moreover that they could not think of it now because it would risk a war with Mexico, and violate the sacred Faith of Treaties. But Mr. Jefferson had shewn how a Constitutional Camel could be Swallowed for the sake of Louisiana by palates accustomed to strain at a gnat, and the Chairman of the late Committee of Foreign Affairs professed his readiness to swallow another for the sake of Texas. And as to the war with Mexico, one President had told Congress seven months before that it would be justifiable, and his successor, even while alleging this pretence of War and the Sacred Faith of Treaties, was about to tell Congress not only that he himself agreed with his Predecessor that War would have been justifiable the Winter before, but that...both Houses of Congress had been of the same opinion, and that it was now not only more justifiable but indispensable because the last magnanimous Appeal to the Justice and the fears of Mexico, heralded by a Courier from that Department of State, with the indulgence of one week for an answer, had totally failed.”

Notice, however, that Kagan, Ferguson's interlocutor, doesn't correct him. As AJP Taylor once said, foreign policy mandarins know little about their own country, and a little more about other countries -- which is a distinct limitation on their policy formulations.

That's surely the case here.

Now, one might say, in Ferguson's defense, that Adams did, after all, construct what is known as the Monroe doctrine. But this simply reinforces the point about how complicated the American expansionist idea was, and how even in practice it was even attended with sometimes crippling tensions. While Adams, like many Americans, probably did assume that the U.S. would, at some point, take over the whole of North America, in fact his career is about the gradual dissolution of this idea, rather than its triumph. Ignorant of the way dialectical tug in American history, Ferguson justs sees an analogy with the British Empire. If that analogy wasn't there, frankly, Ferguson wouldn't be interested.

Ferguson should get safely back to his field in pronto time. The next time he writes for Slate, they might match him with someone who knows something about American history.

Bollettino

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, pointed us to this very illuminating Salon article on Ahmed Chalabi by an enterprising journalist named John Dizard. It is worth seeing the ad (for the one day’s free membership!) to read the article, which provides an x ray of the motives of Bush’s Pentagon pump house gang. Our idea about the obsession with Iraq on the part of the Wolfowitzies was that, in part, Wolfowitz wanted to impose a coherent policy on the Middle East that would make it easier to accommodate our policy towards both Israel and Saudi Arabia. If Dizard is to be believed, however, the motives were much shabbier and stupider – basically, the idea was to find a way around forcing Israel to cede the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Dizard gets some great quotes. Here’s one from Douglas Feith’s former law partner, who happens to have been Chalabi’s nephew’s partner, too, L. Marc Zell:

“Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.”

And here is Dizard’s analysis of the neo-con set of motives:

“Why did the neocons put such enormous faith in Ahmed Chalabi, an exile with a shady past and no standing with Iraqis? One word: Israel. They saw the invasion of Iraq as the precondition for a reorganization of the Middle East that would solve Israel's strategic problems, without the need for an accommodation with either the Palestinians or the existing Arab states. Chalabi assured them that the Iraqi democracy he would build would develop diplomatic and trade ties with Israel, and eschew Arab nationalism.”

If that really sums up the grand Wolfowitzian strategy – they truly are nuts.

This is hard for even someone as cynical as LI to swallow, but Dizard makes a good case. If this was, indeed, the motive, than it would explain the otherwise puzzling loyalty to a man whose greatest accomplishment was escaping Jordan in the trunk of a car to enjoy the fruits of his numerous swindles in other, less threatening, climes. But Dizard does provide a reason for one of the most puzzling aspects of the war: why it was waged when it was waged in the first place. LI had imagined, when Bush was elected on a non-interventionist platform, that he was a traditional Republican in the semi-isolationist mode. It never crossed our mind that he imagined he was Woodrow Wilson’s retarded brother. How he went from the Taft wing to the Daffy wing of the party is a big puzzle, and Dizzard provides some of the key background information.

Dizard’s article doesn’t just nail the neo-cons. It gave LI a small dialectical shock, too. The policy of rapprochement with Iran that Chalabi and his minions are pursuing in Iraq is, obviously, a good thing for Iraq. It is hard to imagine an Iraq that wouldn’t try to seal some type of alliance with Iran. It is a natural fit, and we have always maintained that an autonomous Iraq can be expected to take that direction. A democratic Iraq is not going to spontaneously embrace Israel.

According to Dizard:

“The crux of the conflict is Iran, and whether the U.S. should try to make a deal with the Islamic Republic to enlist its support for peace in Iraq. Before and immediately after the war, the neoconservative position was that U.S. empowerment of the long-disenfranchised Shia community would make possible an Iraqi government that would make a "warm peace" with Israel. This in turn would pressure the rest of the Arab world to make a similar peace, without the need to concede land to the Palestinians.
This was, of course, a pipe dream: The Shia community in Iraq, like the Sunni community, is overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and the entire range of its leadership has close ties with Iran. Belatedly realizing that Chalabi's promise to build a secular, pro-Israel Shiite government is not going to come true, in the past couple of months the neocons in the Defense Department have tried to come up with a new plan. Feith, Wolfowitz and others are backing away from the Shia, due to their ties to Iran as well as Chalabi's deceptions. They are trying to cobble together a coalition of rehabilitated Sunni Muslim Iraqi Army officers and Kurdish leaders backed by their militias that would have Shia participation, but in a reduced role. For proponents of this strategy, the front-runner to be prime minister of the next version of the transitional government is Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, the founder and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.”

One should read the Dizzard article, and then read this mish-mash of lukewarm Democratic centrism by Lawrence J. Korb in the LA Times, today. If you want to know why Kerry is well on his way to losing the election, the Korb article provides the mindset. We particularly like this graf:

“The Bush administration has still not explained why it was mistaken about the primary reasons for going to war. Even in the face of recent setbacks, it has yet to acknowledge that creating a stable Iraq will be a long, difficult and costly endeavor and cannot be accomplished by an artificial deadline like June 30. The president has not recognized that we may have to live with an Iraq that is not a Jeffersonian democracy.”

The supposed sarcasm of the last sentence discloses, in actuality, a deep gullibility. When Howard Dean had his moment of genius about the war, it was in enacting what Husserl called an “epoche” – a bracketing of suppositions in order to understand a phenomenon. Dean bracketed the rhetoric about democracy and freedom, and looked at the “thing itself” – and he found, not democracy and freedom, but the usual shabby American colonial venture, circa 1953, in Iran, and 1956, in Guatamala. The same rushing in of corporate interests, the same lack of interest in setting up representative bodies, the same exercise in re-naming (in order to secure freedom of press, for instance, we have to close newspapers or “direct” the ones our corporations are contracted to “manage” ; in order to save Falluja, we have to destroy Falluja, etc.)

Democrats aren’t necessarily averse to these projects – in fact, they have often benefited handsomely from them. As David Brooks points out, admiringly, in his column in the NYT today, Kerry is campaigning on a Joe Lieberman like platform about Iraq. Korb’s little essay in the LAT ends, predictably, with a Kerry-esque flourish:
“Not learning from our mistakes in Vietnam would be the real disservice to our troops and the country. In fact, learning from those mistakes might be the best, if not the only, way to understand how we got into the current mess in Iraq and how we might get out of it.”
Of course, we have to learn. We have to learn and learn. We have to process. We have to process and process. We can’t promise anything, or plan anything, that would come down to: Getting Out of Iraq. Rather, the Kerry plan entails staying there and learning and processing and internationalizing and just having the most marvelous learning and processing time. Of course, regrettably, collateral casualties (you know, butchered Iraqis, butchered American soldiers) will be incurred in the learning process, but education comes at a steep price.

ps -- for confirmation of the appalling state of the Dem establishment, read Harold Meyerson's op ed piece in the Washington Post today. We loved the verbs in this sentence: "
Kerry's views on Iraq reflect those of the Democratic foreign policy elites, who largely maintain an embattled Wilsonian optimism about the prospects -- or at least, the necessity -- of shaping Iraq into a unified, pluralistic democracy." Shaping, eh? Perhaps those Democratic foreign elites ought to analyze the grammar of the word -- on the one side, the active, muscular, thinking force -- on the other side, the inert mass. Sound like colonialism yet?

Meyerson -- whose thesis is, basically, that Kerry is no flip flopper -- as if this was what mattered -- then present the dissident foreign policy view. Surprisingly, this dissident view doesn't entail having any confidence in a people to self organize -- doesn't entail applying the lessons of the Civil Rights movement in this country to Iraq -- doesn't entail any of the traditional methods used by the left in the past, including unionization, consciousness raising, and the like. I mean, doing things like that implies that the inert mass might not be so inert.

No, the new thing is to just segregate the inert mass into separate little cultural piles. Here's Meyerson, showing that the D.C. Dems are as brain-dead as the Pentagon pump house gang:

"A relative handful of the party's foreign policy mavens -- most prominently, Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia -- have a more chastened perspective. Heirs of such Vietnam-era realists as Sen. J. William Fulbright and political scientist Hans Morgenthau, they argue that Iraq is more nearly three countries than one -- a Shiite south inclined toward some form of Islamic rule, though not necessarily a theocratic republic; a democratic Kurdish north; and a Sunni-dominated middle with large non-Sunni minorities. No region will accept the domination of another, and striking a politically acceptable balance between majority rule and minority rights under these circumstances is all but impossible. You can't do nation-building, they conclude, when the nation doesn't want to be built.

Gelb has argued for letting Iraq devolve into three separate states. Galbraith, fearing that an independent Kurdistan would soon be invaded by a Kurdophobic Turkey, calls for establishing one state with a common foreign policy but consisting of three largely autonomous regions in all other matters. The realists acknowledge that there would be dreadful consequences from either kind of devolution -- certainly, women in the Shiite south would have their freedoms and lives ratcheted backward by several centuries -- but that this is going to be the eventual outcome in any case."

Those dirty, wife beating Shia, and democratic Kurds -- surely that is the verdict of contemporary history?
Or ... perhaps it is the verdict of forgetting contemporary history. Galbraith's article, for instance, mentions the first democratic elections held in Iraq, in 1992, in Kurdistan -- but forgets to mention that the two dominant Kurd war lords, dissatisfied with the results, soon went to war, and have since established their separate territories in Northern Iraq. Democracy at its finest! But why remember the facts?

Meanwhile, in Southern Iraq, elections -- which have been held on a local level -- show no strength for a theocratic party ratcheting women's rights back to the stone age, but a lot of strength for lefty parties with a strong stake in civil society.

Meyerson's article is more evidence, if we need it, that the Kerry flip flop which we should be angry about was his devious stance on Iraq. During the primaries, he allowed himself to be presented as a critic of the war. Little did we know his position was about the same as Bush's.

Bollettino

LI wasn’t planning on writing about the Abu Ghraib tortures, but it is too good an opportunity to ask about U.S. prisons to pass up. After all, the outcry has been confined mainly to the Iraq context, and whether the U.S. contractors and reservists exercizing their talents for cornpone sadism are the equivalent of Saddam H.’s vast torture machine. But while Saddam was constructing his prisons, the U.S. was very busily constructing theirs. And while we know very little about whether Iraqis regularly joked about prisoners in Saddam’s system getting their arms threshed into bloody pulps and their genitals electrocuted, we do know that it has been a huge joke, in the U.S., that prisoners routinely get raped in U.S. jails. That a former prison guard from one of our private prisons in Virginia has spread the practice to Abu Ghraib shouldn’t surprise anyone.

In U.S. prisons, discipline, aka torture, is affected not by the guards so much. Being a more self-organizing society than Iraq under Saddam, the guards and the private prison companies had no time for micro-managing torture – they simply put inmates into maximally dangerous situations and waited around for the inevitable assault, the tearing out of eyes, the gang bang sodomy, etc. All funny fodder for our talk shows and movies. According to this Human Rights Watch report, something like 70 percent of the prison population yearly suffers assault. All hilarious stuff, too. But the guards get in their innings:

“In California, for example, not a single local prosecutor has ever prosecuted a guard for prison shootings that have killed thirty-nine inmates and wounded more than 200 over the past decade.”

Of course, this is the active violence that is meted out and condoned by the U.S. system. The part that isn’t considered torture is solitary confinement – which, according to this article for Fortune Magazine, started as a specifically political punishment:

“This use of sensory deprivation was extensive with imprisoned members of the Black Panther party, the Black Liberation Army formations, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the American Indian Movement, white activists, jail house lawyers, Islamic militants, and prison activists. At one time or another, they all found themselves living in extended isolation, sometimes for years on end.”

And here’s a pertinent graf from the same Fortune article:

“Many human rights groups have expressed concern over criminal justice policy in the US, which has increasingly, encouraged the use of control units, security housing units and super-max prisons. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the American Friends Service Committee, the National Lawyers Guild, California Prison Focus, and many other groups and individuals have joined with the World Organization Against Torture in expressing concerns about these units. The World Organization Against Torture is currently writing a report on United States compliance with the United Nations Covenants (CAT) in 1994. Areas of concern where the US does not comply with that Convention include punitive violence and brutality in control unit facilities, the practice of cell extractions, the treatment of the mentally ill and the use of brutality through chemical sprays and dangerous methods of restraint. The existence and scope of these conditions is also in opposition to guidelines for treatment set in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.”

Bollettino

In the nineties, under Clinton, the left Keynsians and the right Keynsians – the liberals and the supply siders – staged a quiet revolution. They revolutionized the standard by which the CPI – the cost of living – was measured. No longer would inflation be considered, as it was by primitive man, an increase in price. Primitive man has a broken club, and he trades 5 clams for it. 3 months before, he traded 2 clams for it. Primitive man scatches his head and makes up a big word: inflation. Today’s economists have to sniff at such foolishness.

Why? Primitive man is forgetting that the shape of the club is getting more pleasing all the time! Yes, one must calculate the relationship between price and quality. As Bill Fleckenstein at MSNBC puts it:

“… you buy a PC with twice as much power, so the government concludes that you really paid only half as much money for it. Hedonics is also the government's way of taking quality improvements and converting them into price declines when calculating the CPI. Sure, that brand-new Chevy you just bought cost 40% more than it used to, but it's a 40%-better car for a variety of reasons. So, the government says, the price didn't really go up. (I have oversimplified these examples, but you get the point.)”

The liberals liked this because, in the 90s, they certainly didn’t want the Fed raising the interest rate. If they were going to have to bite the bullet and balance the budget, they at least wanted an easy money policy. Similarly, the conservatives just loved the idea of not having to pay cost of living clauses in entitlements, balancing the budget on the backs of the increased quality of the goods that the retired and the sick could buy with their reduced money. Economists liked it because it applied the rules of the neo-classical model of marginal utility that they all think founds their discipline as a science.
So the righteous circle – or circle jerk – was formed.

The result is that we are now living in a disconnect between reality and government statistics – and not for the first time. We all know that the stage has been set, with our current administration’s gross overspending, the slipping dollar in an economy that bears a 400 billion dollar yearly trade deficit, and the easy money policy of the Fed, for seventies style inflation. That is, inflation that is not driven by labor costs, but by the sinking costs of money. Yet, according to the statistics, it hasn’t arrived.
That is, according to the reconfigured statistics.

Meanwhile, the great concord of the Clinton era is starting to slip. Because the government can just about make inflation disappear at the drop of a qualitative change, it turns out that there is a lack of at least one external control on federal spending. Moreover, there eventually comes a point when reality kicks in. When consumers are paying higher prices while their economic gurus are claiming that, in actuality, these prices are an illusion, the consumers are eventually going to revolt. In a move that particularly appeals to economists, since it involves three plus variable equations that can only be done by econometricians, even when quality can’t be appealed to, you can appeal to the quality chain. The price of baseballs is going up? But isn’t this a perfect opportunity to switch to tennis balls, the prices of which aren’t going up? And so there is no inflation in the ball market, really. Or so our inflation fighting pals in the Gov. are are determined that we think. They are, in fact, about to bust the back of medical costs by waving just such magic procedures over them, and showing that medical costs are actually at a standstill.

There is a small problem with this: Americans are not inclined, generally, to contemplate appearance and reality while shelling out their money for more expensive stuff. They have a problem with the three variable plus equations. Linear, narrow minded folk, they think the cost of living is about the cost of living. They aren’t with the program.

Gold bugs, who go at economics with sawed off shot guns and usually skew to the right, are pretty incensed, right now, about the CPI shenanigans. This analysis of the CPI is provided by prominent Gold Bug, John Hathaway, at Tocqueville investments, contains three fascinating grafs about the CPI:


“Several years ago, the very important housing component of the CPI was increasing at an annual rate of 4%. Today, that number is 2.2% and heading lower. Housing is weighted at 40.85% of the total CPI. How is it falling when house prices are rising? Simple. The BLI calculates this important component on the basis of “imputed rent” rather than the capital cost of buying a new home. Imputed rent synthesizes the cost of home ownership into a rental factor putting all citizens, both renters and homeowners, on the same footing. The BLS gathers the information for imputed rent, or the “Owners’ Equivalent Rent Index” by asking “each homeowner (surveyed) for their estimate of the house’s implicit rent and what the occupants would get for their rent …. if the owner did rent their home.” (US Department of Labor Program Highlight-Fact Sheet No. BLS 96-5.)

It should be noted that in light of the Federal Reserve’s highly expansionary monetary policy, single-family owner-occupied housing has enjoyed an unprecedented new construction boom. Mr. Banerji observes that a felicitous (for the CPI) consequence of the single family housing boom has been a rise in vacancies and a decline in rental rates for apartment properties. Pressure on the rental market appears to go a long way towards explaining the mystifying decline in the housing component of the CPI. Could it be that the sagging apartment rental market also explains rising bond and equity markets?

There is still more to the tale. Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum: “Rose is a rose is a rose” speaks to the mutation of a word’s meaning over decades or centuries of usage. We can surmise that Big Brother is alive and well at the BLS where a computer is not a computer is not a computer. In other words, added features, memory capacity, and random bells and whistles are not captured in the straightforward list price of a computer. To expunge all continuity of meaning, the BLS brought forth “hedonics”, the science of measuring the value of a product or a service after allowing for qualitative improvements. A laptop with twice the memory as last year’s model sold at the same price this year is counted as a 50% price reduction. This sort of analysis was applied initially to computers and IT equipment. More recently, a broad range of consumer goods including electronics and automobiles has been subjected to hedonic measurement. Health care has been a particularly ill behaved sector of the CPI. Hospital services, nursing homes and adult day care, for example, increased 141.4% over the period 1990 to 2003, versus an average of 46% for all items measured. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Bureau of Economic Analysis is considering adjusting prices of medical services for quality changes (Grant’s Interest Rate Observer-1/30/04.)”

LI agrees with the anger of the gold people – in spite of their odd politics. In fact, we have been expecting inflation as the traditional accompaniment of war for some time now. In WWII, to pre-empt rising prices, FDR instituted rigid price controls and rationing. In the Greenspan era, however, inflation has been spun into nothingness, just as Hathaway describes. But you can only fool investors for so long with these kinds of tricks. Especially when Japan and China, with their trillion dollars of dollars, are going to be holding the bag as the real purchasing power of those dollars makes them worth less and less. For further righteous rightwinger anger at Greenspan, see links here and here.

A less biased account of hedonics, including abstruse equations that make LI’s eyes cross, has been put out by Charles Hulton, with the imprimatur of the NY branch of the Fed. One of Hulton’s examples of a qualitative change that the economists at the BEA take as a deflationary offset to a surface inflationary price change is this: the production of aircraft with a larger capacity to carry customers. It is here that economics becomes, as one hedonics critic puts it, poetry. Or more like the literary criticism of poetry. I have never encountered anyone who believes that the lessening of seat space on airplanes is a positive qualitative change. Yet a hedonics calculus could well posit that this is a positive change in quality – it leads to more customers being able to use airplanes – and thus should accrue some variable value that can be embedded in the equations to give us an inflation rate. As the Gold bugs constantly and correctly re-iterate, the bias in the BEA procedure is to posit qualitative changes as inevitably positive. That there is now a much longer wait at the airports then there was pre-9/11 simply doesn’t get into the BEA computer – but if some mechanical way was found to shorten airport wait time, that change would get into the BEA computer. It is a gamed system.

Most interesting part of Hulton’s article deals exactly with problems of the airplane seat kind: the problem of market power, of interpreting quality from the producer’s point of view as mapping non-controversially over the consumer’s point of view, and the problem of substitution. He quotes an interesting neo-Galbraithian guy named Pakes, who wants to include a variable for market power in the hedonic equations; that complexity – that is, non-linear shifts – should not be considered bad data, to be smoothed out to produce equilibriums, but should rather advance us to another level of equations to gain a finer grained matching to real markets. However, Pakes is not advocating getting rid of hedonics. By no means.

Hulton ends the paper with one of those irritating econometricians gestures, saying that the objection to hedonics is simply that it is new. This implies that the revolt against a method that stands in stark contrast to the whole purpose of figuring out a consumer price index is simply the result of superstition and inertia. This simply isn’t so – it is the result of objecting to the hijacking of a perfectly good index by methods that properly generate a whole other index – call it the Consumer Quality Price Index. Hulton's own superstitions, of course, remains consistent with the general bias of his discipline, the apologetic agenda for capitalism and an upper class p.o.v. that econometrics simply encodes.

Bollettino

Two things to read today.

One is Krugman’s editorial in the NYT. Krugman actually understands what a timeline is. Kerry apparently doesn’t – and don’t ask about the Bush hawks. To advocate one or another ‘fix’ in Iraq – for instance, internationalizing the conflict – at one time, and consider that one now has the answer to the ‘problem’ of Iraq, is to commit the central sin of central planning.

A year of mission accomplished has passed in Iraq. It has passed through Iraqi minds and bodies. And those minds and bodies live there. They can feel in their minds and bodies one thing: they aren’t items at the Pottery Barn. They aren’t broken. They aren’t bought. They aren’t ‘fixable.’ This arrogant and stupid rhetoric points to everything that is wrong with the occupation. Being humans, instead of figurines, events, over time, actually have acquired meaning for these people. Gosh. Hard as it is to believe that the Iraqis could be as fully human as Americans, some of them – I’ve heard on good authority – might even look at the carnage in Fallujah as less a lesson in the justice and goodheartedness of their liberators, and more as a reason for their liberators to go. Gosh. Vamoose. Figure out how to depart. They might even – like Americans, mourning the dead of 9/11 – think their dead are worth memorializing. They might even begin to suspect that one hundred fifty thousand people who do not speak their language, know nothing about their culture, and have only contempt for their humanity, don’t have their best interests at heart.

Second article to look at is in the WP.
Here’s an eyebrow raising graf in Josh White’s article:

“The surge in casualties in the past month has not changed the public's key judgments on Iraq, however. While Bush has clearly lost public support for his policies there, much of that erosion occurred before the current wave of violence. Bush's approval rating for dealing with the situation in Iraq stood at 45 percent in a Post-ABC News poll conducted two weeks ago, unchanged from mid-March but down from 55 percent in January. The president also has not suffered politically from the spiraling casualty count and continues to run even or slightly ahead of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in most polls.”


How’s that for saying, we don’t believe no stinkin’ CBS/NYT polls? Typical of the official newspaper of the hawks, too. Meanwhile, Powell has acknowledged a plunge in American support for the Iraq war. But Powell is as dust in the wind compared to the mighty AEI, a member of which White effusively quotes, as well as the usual retired general. No, no, no, no Iraqis – surely it is a waste of time to quote the Pottery Barn figures. As for antiwar people, are they American? Ditto for Dems from the Byrd side of the party. Quoting such just promotes treason.

Bollettino

According to the media, in the build up to the war on Iraq, D.C. was a regular little hive of the best and the most hawkish, with every little cell planning – wrongly, as it turned out – for “post-conflict” Iraq. Powell’s minions in the press like to point fingers at Rumsfeld for the overwhelming failure to plan the occupation; Rumsfeld’s minions talk of Powell as a softy and – for his work for Dad Bush – pretty much a traitor. However, it wasn’t that the occupation wasn’t planned well – the problem was that it wasn’t imagined well. Or even at all. Its planners had not only never served in uniform – for all of their constant analogizing to Japan and Germany, they apparently never asked a WWII vet what it was really like.

If somebody in the Wolfowitz circle had put down Richard Perle’s latest scorcher in Foreign Policy and taken up Norman Lewis’ diary of serving as an Intelligence Officer in occupied Southern Italy, “Naples, ‘44”, here is what they would have found: looting is so bad that telephone and telegraph wires are constantly cut down for the money that scrap copper brings in, but nobody closes down the flea market where scrap copper is sold; the Germans leave behind mines that periodically destroy buildings, and saboteurs that plant bombs; gangs of traditional criminals – the Camorra and the Mafia – take over vast stretches of territory; vendettas are pursued through massive snitching; the friendliest people will betray you or your information for astonishing reasons; economic aid, which is promised, never comes through, leading to disgust with the occupiers; and everybody fucks constantly.

The latter might not be happening now in Iraq – alas, our journalists are much more hidebound about such things than the journalists of yore. But a little acquaintance with literature should surely have alerted even the most ideologically blinded soul about what lay ahead. Southern Italy was never held out as a showcase analogy by the Rumsfeld crowd – partly because the more pernicious effects of the occupation are still present. Not for Southern Italy the Werkschaftswunder. The mafia, which Mussolini – not one to countenance other centers of power – drove out, were deliberately reintroduced by the Americans. Vito Genovese, if you can believe it, was an “advisor’ to one of the chief American military men – shades of Chalabi!

Lewis is a great capturer of absurd and symbolic action. His account of trying to rescue a peddler caught with copper wire involves him in the Catch 22 of the insane American military bureaucracy. Here’s a bit I cannot resist. Lewis is in court. The judge is trying cases of pilfering. The defendant is a “typical Neapolitan sweat of the kind the pretends to be half-witted to be allowed to get away with his jokes.” The judge earnestly tries to understand what is happening in the court:

Judge: “Didn’t he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?”
Interpreter: ‘just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.
Judge: Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.
Interpreter: He said: “when the Germans were here, we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come, we eat once a week.”
Judge: Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?”
The interpreter translated the judge’s remarks and the old man rolled up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the motions of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.
Judge: I’m losing all patience with him. What does he say now?
Interpreter; With respect, your honor, he says, Americans or Germans, it’s all the same to him. We’ve been screwed by both of them.
Judge: He’s off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.”

The earnest indignation of that Judge has become the weather that hangs over the CPA – an unholy mixture of self-pity, imaginative blindness, and the absolute inability to imagine that one’s motives could ever be impugned. Americans I know are as funny as the Neapolitan clown – but I have also seen the humorless judge types. It is exactly how the upper level managers talk, exactly – that same unholy buncombe, that same shabby disguise of self-interest as team effort, that same feeling of the utter godliness of all of one’s motives, which God kindly proves by granting one loads of money.

One of the reason those New Deal occupations were more successful than this failed effort was that the men in charge had had enough of the self-righteousness cut out of them by the Depression that they could actually listen. No such luck with our contemporary crew, who have gorged like pigs on their own p.r.

Bollettino

A spate of stories in the media have been proclaiming the end of Chalabi – rather like chasing the Lord of Misrule from the scene at the end of a Tudor play. Shall we all get up and get married? Is there a God in Heaven? Certainly this would falsify parts of LI’s predictions about Iraq in the coming months, which we just prognostically emitted the other day. Were we so out of the loop?

While we believe that Chalabi himself is a stand-in for a policy default position of the hawks – that Iraq should be, in effect, an American colony – character does count. There is nobody around who has been groomed to quite such perfection as Chalabi – the man is from the Agency dream book of the 50s. A crook, an opportunist, a liar, and a blackmailer – you don’t get that Somoza combination at your nearest convenience food store. It is much harder to produce a tinhorn dictator than people think. So many of them think only of stealing the silverware. The real thing, the real defender of the Free World, thinks more ideologically, thinks further ahead, thinks of death squads, of selling off mineral rights, of establishing the family in all branches of industry and the state. With one nephew on the IGC with him, and one prosecuting Saddam Hussein, Chalabi has already shown his mettle. Are we going to throw our leading man away?

The Chalabi is done fad emerged from a Washington Post article last week. According to the article, Chalabi had offended Bush somehow, leading to consequences parallel only to those meted out by Louis XIV to his more rebellious nobles.

Here are the WP grafs that started the whole mini-juggernaut:

“At the top of the list of those likely to be jettisoned is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite politician who for years was a favorite of the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney, and who was once expected to assume a powerful role after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials acknowledged.
Chalabi has increasingly alienated the Bush administration, including President Bush, in recent months, U.S. officials said. He generated anger in Washington yesterday when he said a new U.S. plan to allow some former officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party and military to return to office is the equivalent of returning Nazis to power in Germany after World War II.”

Moreover, our man at the UN with the gluegun in his hand and Iraq in his sights, your friend and mine, a man who needs no introduction even though nobody knows just how the hell he got here, that’s right a round of applause for Mister Lakhdar Brahimi, is not, reportedly, too enthusiastic about Chalabi enthusiast. The NYT had a story this morning that congress might stop stuffing Chalabi’s pocket with the around 400,000 monthly supplement they pay him. Such degradation!
However, in this corner, we still don’t see it. Bush sometimes signals that he has regained his sanity. For instance, he came out foursquare for a Palestinian state. That would seem to be a shot at the Defense department crowd, where they like to say, with a smirk, the “so called occupied West Bank.” But the Cheney-Rumsfeld side is nothing if not persistent, and the recent concession about settlements in the West Bank is surely a stage on the way to an embrace of the Defense Department view. Similarly, that Chalabi has been attacked in the Post will surely be seen as a wound of honor.
But how will Chalabi counter-attack? We will be watching for his three press henchman, Hoagland, Hitchens, and Judy Miller, to do the initial work for him. His big threat is from the U.N. Thus, he has to use his little black bag of Saddam’s papers to reveal the corrupt dealings of the U.N. with the Meat Machine during the sanctions. Our bet is that this story will hit soon, and will spill over into whether we are going to allow a person that Chalabi calls, disdainfully, an “Arab nationalist,” to throw away one of our best and brightest. If, even now, Hitchens isn’t boiling up some screed about the perfidious U.N. and its sanction profiteering, LI will be surprised.
Whatever the weapon will be, however, I would not count a man out who is as adept at the fine arts of fraud and deceit as Chalabi.

Bollettino

We went to see the Omar Faruk Tekbilek ensemble last night at the University of Texas.

Listening to Turkish music is one of those odd habits of our middle age. There is something about it that is very Paul Bowles-ish. Bowles’ typical Westerners, nervous, intellectual, self-absorbed, and (all unknown to themselves) wrapped in such layers of babyfat egotism that they are permanently distanced from experience, usually gain experience in a sudden and fatal shock, all at once. It comes out of nowhere. It leaps at them as they become curious – for these people are always curious. In fact, they have made a virtue out of curiosity. They come from a culture in which curiosity has merged with entertainment. And experience does come to them. It comes from a sandstone landscape for which they are absolutely unprepared. It comes from a kidnapping, it comes from the collapse of all of their presumptions. It comes as a great slap from some archaic strata of being that they are unaware of – think, in fact, to have overcome by succedaneum – since their ancestors, they imagine, overcame it. And are no longer worth thinking about, having completed their task. And then the experience is there. A smelly canvas sack, the cutting off of a tongue, a branding, a selling into slavery. For Bowles’ characters, history is everything that has been put between themselves and such fates – history is the progress that has made such fates unimaginable. Progress has made a world in which all contacts are, on principle, chosen.

This world is in direct opposition to the world of fate. LI has chosen the world of choice. We are liberals, here. But we have the dialectical longing for our opposite that always appears where liberalism appears. Turkish music is the very music of the world of fate. Listening to the Faruk (a man with an amazingly broad face that he shakes so, while singing, that it seems to have become permanently wrinkled in transverse bands, instead of the usual up and down direction of wrinkling ) play the zurna, a raucous pipe that emits a sound that both mocks yearning and evokes it, it is hard not to feel that the Western form of life – that swaddled, babyish life of the mouth and the dick and the screen entranced eye -- is going to disappear. The zurna, which is short, and has a blaring, flanged spout at the end of it, seems to come to life in Faruk’s hands – to be playing him, in fact. Yes, it was as if that slightly mocking sound, that stunted, blaring horn, was possessed of a spirit that in turn possessed the player. The zurna seems to be the master – and a vaguely devilish one.

Bollettino

On December 14 of last year, after the capture of Saddam, LI “played the combinations”. That is, we looked at the effects that could ensue from the capture as combinations of possible worlds, as Leibnitz might have put it.

This is what we said:

“With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play - and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz’s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shiite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed …

In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:

The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won’t.

The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They’ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won’t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.

Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam’s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they don’t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shia elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shia elite in Iraq is something we don’t know enough about to predict.

Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui gate presque toutes les affaires, c’est qu’ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la reussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succes particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.

(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).

This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.”

Time, now, to play the combinations again with the upcoming June 30 handover of power to the Iraqis. First, though, we should recognize that the handover is a complete sham. Iraq will have “limited sovereignty,” as the Bush people put it this morning in the NYT, meaning the new government will neither be able to make laws, nor have any control whatsoever over American forces operating in their own territory. If its legs are made of cloth, there’s a hole in the back for a hand, and its jaws are operated by moving your fingers, it is properly a puppet.

The Bush policy, which has consistently been a mad real life version of what the King's Counselors advice in the Anderson tale of the King and the Invisible Clothes, will be to stridently insist that the puppet is a man. Although it will also draw a wink wink advantage from the puppet being a puppet.

In order to understand the context of the handover, one has to draw the major lesson of this long, terrible two week stretch: – Bush faces practically no domestic opposition. This has truly shocked LI. Kerry’s campaign is justly wounded, perhaps fatally, by the incompetence, wretchedness, and cynicism of the candidate during the last month. Kerry has broadcast, in pretty clear terms, the following message to the voters: under President Kerry, the best we can hope for is the dispatch of even more American troops to be killed in Iraq. To sweeten the thought, he does want to put a UNESCO sticker on every green helmet. Shall we put our hands in the air now, ladies and gents?

If that is an opposition, I say to hell with it. LI, the perpetual naïf, has been stunned that Kerry’s mind meld with Joe Lieberman has not evoked a whimper even from the supposedly independent left side. The Atrioses and the American Prospects don’t care what Kerry says – they simply want him to win. It is a replay of the far fetched scenario of Gore’s campaign – diss your most likely voters, and then try to bully them into not voting for a third party candidate who represents exactly what they believe. So we have the spectacle of Kerry applauding Sharon’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders (never mind that the policy will certainly be paid for in American blood in Iraq), a man who has yet to suggest how we could exit from Iraq, a man who so evidently disrespects the people of Iraq that it has not yet occurred to him that the solution, in Iraq, is to return Iraq to the Iraqis – we have this man, and we, Lefties all, are supposed to queue up to vote for him.

Kerry seems to have quickly jettisoned the Democrat persona he was forced to bear against Howard Dean, and arrayed himself as a Daschle moderate. Daschle’s strategy is to stand very firmly against privatizing Social Security, unless it is done under a Democratic administration. That is about it, in terms of principle and policy, the height and breadth of the Democratic commitment to anything like justice. Consequently, the Dems lose and lose elections. And they cling ever more tightly to their strategy. They do like to indulge in a rhetoric of indignation, but their acts breathe the corrupt air of complete submission. How could they not? These people go to the same country clubs as the Bush people, employ the same DC wonks, play the same trivial games of gotcha. It is painful to see how Kerry’s sex change of a campaign is being coddled on the left side. Very painful. Kerry needed Howard Dean, in the same way the Grandmother, in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,” needed the Misfit: ‘She would have been a good woman,” said the Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

So: Here is one given: the lack of any real opposition to Bush (and supposing, as I am beginning to, that he wins the presidential election, his upcoming victory becoming more and more evident over the next couple of months). And here is an event: the June 30th “handover”. What scenarios can we spin out of that?

The strong signal this week is the ‘appointment’ of Chalabi’s nephew, Salam to head the prosecutorial team against Saddam Hussein. Our December combinations were way too hasty about the trial, and very wrong about the modification of the Bush policy of pushing an autocracy on the Latin American model on Iraq. As has been well publicized, the U.S. has supplied Chalabi and his death squad with all of the records of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Trials are well known instruments for legitimating the usurpation of power. Until recently, LI thought that the Chalabi plan was never going to come off – that the CPA itself, as well as the White House, was too riven by doubts about Chalabi to unite behind him. But things are beginning to take on that familiar, Rumsfeldian cast. Rumsfeld likes nothing better than a fait accompli. The apparent bumbling of the question, who are we turning Iraq over to? – dodged by both Bremer and Bush – might not really be bumbling at all. The full effect of the fait accompli is wrung out of an initial period of uncertainty. This has all the hallmarks of the classic Rumsfeldian M.O. Given the nonexistent state of the opposition to Bush, it is hard to imagine the anointing of Chalabi – as head of some puppet organization – will provoke an outcry among the Dems. His appointment, of course, will be conditioned by just that reference to “limited sovereignty.” Surely, the reasoning will go, Chalabi will not be able to do too much harm, given the limited extent of his power.

If Chalabi is given executive power in Iraq by the Americans, the combinations become very interesting.

On the one hand – Chalabi has been wooing Sistani intensely. On the other hand, Sistani knows that his own legitimacy could be endangered by embracing a man so disliked by Iraqis that in the admittedly imperfect ORI poll conducted in February, Chalabi was the most distrusted politician in Iraq – ranking well over Saddam Hussein himself.

Our guess is that if the Rumsfeldians put their little Mussolini in play, there will be: minimal opposition in this country; and fear and loathing in an Iraq squeezed between the bullying ur-Saddamist remnant and the Americans. Chalabi is no doubt combing the secret police files for things he can hold over Sistani or his associates. No doubt, he will find something. But we wonder if it will really count. So far, Chalabi has demonstrated a masterly understanding of Americans. But he seems genuinely puzzled by Iraqis.

The last time we played the combinations, we were more optimistic. We believed that the CPA’s battle with the Resistance would make the June 30th handover more important than the CPA knew. Imagine the CPA as Wiley the Coyote, and the June 30th date as a big black circle he’d painted on a rock, in the likeness of a railroad tunnel. Image Wiley hearing a whistle sound, and looking at his work in puzzlement, and then being run over by a train that comes through it. This, we thought, loomed as a real possibility, There is a budding civil society in Iraq. We know vaguely of its outline through the imperfect polls and the dumb sociology of newspaper and magazine articles, with their insistence on interviews with the man in the street. This is the movement that the Bush people will have to oppress if they are going to complete their dream of Iraq. Chalabi is the perfect instrument to do the Bush’s dirty work here. To avert that, LI’s hope is that those who were prepared to do organizational work for Kerry desert the sorry man, and organize for a long term anti-war campaign. Because this is going to be a very long and ugly war.

PS -- for a more optimistic view of the 'new' policy in Iraq, read David Ignatius' column in today's WP. LI once interviewed Ignatius, and came away with a very favorable impression. The man worked as a correspondent in Lebanon through the eighties, and has a pretty clear grasp of Middle Eastern reality, unlike his WP op ed colleagues.

Bollettino

Two sites to go to today.

One is Juan Cole’s excellent analysis of the current state of play in the Pentagon operation to make Chalabi our Somoza in Iraq. Cole encountered point man for Chalabi -- Perle -- at a Senate hearing, yesterday. As Cole points out, that Perle was testifying there at all is bizarre, since Perle's ignorance of Iraqi culture -- and Middle Eastern culture in general -- should surely bar him from testifying in a forum meant for expert testimony.

Yesterday, on NPR, they interviewed the man’s nephew, Salam, who is to be, in a bizarre and self-discrediting move, the official prosecutor of Saddam, and not one question was asked about his background. Also, LI was heartened to read Cole’s note because Cole takes the same position LI took since last year about Sisteni’s insistence on elections, and why they should have been held by now.

Second, the IWPR site publishes an excellent battlefield report on Falluja from an Iraqi perspective.


We particularly liked the visit to the sniper -- or the kidnapping to visit the sniper. The whole scene is like something from one hundred fifty years ago, in the Caucasus:

“In front of him, Aqil [one of the journalists] sees a man dressed in loose pyjama pants and a button-down shirt. Only his eyes are visible through his yishmagh.
Beside him is propped a Dragunov, a Russian-made sniper rifle issued only to the elite of the Iraqi military. Everything about the man, the room, and his weapon is spotlessly clean.
In a slow, deep voice, Abu Walid told Aqil that he had been brought here to "let American forces know about our power".
The American casualty figures – 70 soldiers killed throughout Iraq since April – are a lie, he says, "I myself killed maybe 100 soldiers. Every day we destroy at least three vehicles, just in the gateway to Fallujah, in Gurma. Americans are liars."

There is no ideological ax ground in the reportage, by the way. It is simply a narrative from a perspective that has been ridiculously neglected in the past couple of weeks.

Bollettino

Charming little site, crammed with old, rare texts and illustrations. I got this little anecdote from Taine’s The Life and Philosophical opinions of a cat. I thought, somehow, it applied to Iraq. Since we are all applying analogies to that happy country nowadays, I thought I’d apply one of my own. Although I’m still not sure what it means.
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“My paws having become solid, I ventured out into the world and soon became fast friends with a goose, an estimable beast, for she had a warm belly. I loved to crush myself under it , and while I was doing so, its philosophic discourses educated me. She said that the fore-court was a republic of allies, and that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for the leader, while even the dogs, although turbulent, were our faithful guards. I cried with tenderness under the belly of my good friend.

One morning the cook approached us with a benevolent air, stuck out her hand, and exhibited a whole handful of grain. The goose stuck out its neck, which the cook proceeded to grab, grabbing hold at the same time of a big knife. My uncle, an alert philosopher, hurried to the scene and commenced to exhort the goose, who was carrying on most indecorously: ‘dear sister,’ he said, the farmer, after having eaten your flesh, will be that much smarter and will watch that much better over our well being; and the dogs, being nourished on your bones, will be that much more capable of defending us. Under this torrent of words, the goose fell silent, for its head was totally cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out of the neck, which bled. My unclue hurried to the head and carried it away quickly; for me, a little taken aback, I approached the puddle of blood. Without reflecting, I dipped my tongue in it It was good blood, and I hurried to the kitchen to see if I could find any more.

“Mes pattes étant devenues solides, je sortis et fis bientôt amitié avec une oie, bête estimable, car elle avait le ventre tiède ; je me blotissais dessous, et pendant ce temps ses discours philosophiques me formaient. Elle disait que la basse-cour était une république d’alliés ; que le plus industrieux, l’homme, avait été choisi pour chef, et que les chiens, quoique turbulents, étaient nos gardiens. Je pleurais d’attendrissement sous le ventre de ma bonne amie

Un matin la cuisinière approcha d’un air bonasse, montrant dans la main une poignée d’orge. L’oie tendit le cou, que la cuisinière empoigna, tirant un grand couteau. Mon oncle, philosophe alerte, accourut et commença à exhorter l’oie, qui poussait des cris inconvenants : "Chère soeur, disait-il, le fermier, ayant mangé votre chair, aura l’intelligence plus nette et veillera mieux notre bien-être ; et les chiens, s’étant nourris de vos os, seront plus capables de vous défendre." Là-dessus l’oie se tut, car sa tête était coupée, et une sorte de tuyau rouge s’avança hors du cou qui saignait. Mon oncle courut à la tête et l’emporta prestement ; pour moi, un peu effarouché, j’approchai de la mare de sang, et sans réfléchir, j’y trempai ma langue ; ce sang était bien bon, et j’allai à la cuisine pour voir si je n’en aurais pas davantage.’

Bollettino

LI’s friend, R., recently got a job telemarketing a medical software designed to accelerate patientflow to various medical facilities in the Southwest. You can imagine how fun this is. The pay was great too – seven bucks per. Since R. had recently totaled his car, while experiencing an extensive stint of unemployment, he had to peddle to reach his well appointed office – which was a computer on the same table as the community fax machine, and a phone with a cord that didn’t quite reach all the way to his desk (meaning he had to leave the phone on the floor and wheel back in his chair and bend over and press the buttons on the phone to make the calls from the numbers listed on the Excel spread sheets with those same numbers listed before him). Since the bike ride was seven miles – downhill getting there, uphill getting back, R. would get tired going home, so he was always looking for shortcuts. Last Friday, he decided he would peddle to the nearest bus stop and go on the bus to the center of Austin, and from thence he’d peddle home, stopping on the way for a tall one. He took several buses that all ended up not going to the center of Austin, but that gave him much bus experience. So, he told me, “I’m sitting there and a guy comes in and he has a reddish, rather squashed face under a filthy gimme cap, and the bus is crowded. The squashed face guy sits down and looks across at this kid, a boy wearing a soft convenience store robbery type cap slouched in his seat in the inimitably insolent slouch of a teenage boy, and in a loud voice he says, how are you today kid? The kid doesn’t respond, so he says, that bad, eh? Then he looks around for people who might want to converse with him. Seeing nobody up to the task, he decided to utter loud aphorisms that we could all learn from, like: what goes around comes around; and (more obscurely) the terminator terminated.

“After a while, he got off the bus – although one had the impression that he got off at some randomly selected stop. He didn’t look like a man who had business to attend to. The man I was sitting next to kept watching him in fascination, and when he got off the bus he leaned forward and said to the large black man with the gold chain around his thick neck who was sitting there in front of us, did you hear that? The black man said, I heard it. The man said, he said, the terminator terminated. The black man said, I don’t believe that man was packing.”

R. told me this to impress me that the juice of life and the glory of literature was on the bus. He said, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if Van Gogh’s ear had raced down the aisle of that bus at that very moment, like a scared mouse. If you are looking for the very epicenter of American abjection, you will find it on the bus.”
I said, ‘am I looking for the very epicenter of American abjection? I thought I was writing a crime novel.”

These things have reminded LI of two recent reading experiences. Which we will get into in the next post.