The election, part 1

Last year, in February, we made a spotty analysis of Iraq’s situation and why Sistani’s call for an election was important. Surveyors of property consult previous plats to orient their plumb lines; purveyors of opinion should follow the same procedure. This, then, is what we wrote back then:

“February 4, 2004:

Summarizing the LI position, it would go something like this: Bush’s argument for war disguised an all to familiar American imperial adventure. As in Latin America, the administration was trying to take out a hostile dictator and replace him with a compliant puppet, under whose benevolent gaze the U.S. could spread its fine mesh of corporate interest, engulfing the resources and wealth of a conquered protectorate.

What Iraq demonstrated is that intervention on this scale, and at this distance, is not going to happen. The Empire has limits. More, the unintended consequence of the intervention was the removal of a truly horrendous regime, and the opening to an at least tentatively democratic one. Good news.

This happened as the result of two happy accidents. The first accident was the sheer incompetence and unpreparedness of the Americans in advancing towards their goal. The idea of stuffing a swindler like Chalabi down the throat of the population was quickly abandoned as impractical. The ‘liberated’ population didn’t follow the script. The looting destroyed vital infrastructure, while the infrastructure itself, after eleven years of sanctions, was incredibly decayed. Misstep after misstep was made by the imperialists, who were most successful, apparently, at building concrete berms to keep out the dangerous wogs.

Meanwhile, happy accident number two was happening. The resistance turned out to be dogged and disruptive. Like the Bush administration, the resistors were guided by a bad intention – a pure power grab – and a much worse history, that of mass murderers. They squared off against the occupiers, and as they did so, they relieved the Iraqi population from the consequences that would have ensued from a successful Bush plan – puppet status, nationwide respectable looting to the advantage of corporations and exiles. This more subtle looting, it turns out, has been forced to prey only on the American taxpayer, who is pumping money on the grand scale into keeping Cheney's retirement benefits very, very real.

The tide turned, we think, with the capture of Saddam H. This capture, in one blow, operated against the Americans and the resistance. The utter bankruptcy of the resistance, and its futility, was finally and conclusively exposed, on the one hand. On the other hand, the last excuse not to resist the Americans was blown away. The Iraqi masses could now operate without fearing the return of Saddam. And their first action was to counter the occupation.

This is why we think the elections Sistani wants are so important. Both the Bushies and the liberals are opposed to them, because they both share a managerial ideology. They both talk about democracy, but they want it organized to the point where their side retains power.

Well, we’d love to see secular democratic socialists retain or return to power in Iraq, but we believe process can't be separated from content; that top down implementation of a secular state evolves top down governance, usually by the military. If you think that insulating a progressive group against real politics works, look around you in the world. It is a fatal and stupid thing to do. It creates a malignant alliance between progressives in the country and their sponsors out of the country. This, in turn, attenuates the rooting of the progressive wing within the country until it represents, to the people at large, one more aspect of a colonialist ethos.

The consequence of a direct election might well be a triumph for a reactionary, theocratic party. But we think that if that party is going to triumph, it is going to triumph no matter how much the NGOs think they can manage the country into their various versions of liberal democracy. Far better to strengthen the parties that oppose theocracy within the country from the beginning, far better to take up the election challenge, have them begin to understand the mechanism of electoral politics, than to try to manage a detour around "petty politics". Which is why we are rather disappointed that people who truly do want to see the triumph of a secular state that measures its surrenders to neo-liberalism against an ideal of social welfare are locked into the scared mode. Sure, Iraq teeters on a blood bath of factional struggle – but, as nobody seems to remember, the Kurds went through the same struggle in the 90s, and seem to have not only survived it, but become much more secular, democratic, etc., etc. Not that we think the two Kurdish warlord parties are the last word in secularism .. however, the opportunity exists, there. Given that the Americans are blindly working towards freeing Iraq of debt and repairing the infrastructure, whoever wins the elections will have a better position than Iraq has had since 1979.

This isn't to underestimate the body count. Actually, it is hard to even estimate the body count in this country -- nobody counts it. However, the alternative body count was worse -- the attrition from sanctions, the hopelessness of Saddam, the blighting of all promise.

Of course, we are probably wrong about much of this, re the real situation in Iraq.”

Now the election is upon us, in two weeks. LI’s post showed a peculiar blindness to the fact that an accidental outcome does not automatically erase the force that brought it about. In fact, that force might refuse to recognize it. So it has proved with the resistance and the Americans. The Americans, who were opposed to elections last February, finally conceded, due to a combination of the insurgency among the Sunni and Sadr’s uprising among the Shi’ites. However, the American concession was not such as to leave either the mechanism of the election or the leadership of Iraq to the Iraqis. A number of decisions were made with the intention of maximizing American influence. These included a large provision for the votes of Iraqi exiles – many of whom live in the U.S. and have as much stake in Iraq as the American descendents of Irish immigrants have in the fate of Ireland -- and the generation of a complex national procedure that was thought, at the time, to guarantee the strong presence of America’s most faithful allies in the country, the Kurds.

On the other hand, the resistance has grown stronger in its reach, and more conscious of its lack of strength. Thus, the resistance has blindly and naturally pursued a strategy that would aggrandize its power. For the resistance to have a chance at gaining nationwide footing, the occupation must continue. Of course, with the destruction of the Iraqi army under Bremer, one could make the case that the immediate evacuation of the Americans would be good for the only organized armed force in Iraq – but we think that severely underestimates the strength of various militias associated with the major Shi’ite factions.

The American dilemma in Iraq is this: after committing the war crime of destroying Fallujah, the Americans have pretty much short circuited any possibility of alliance making among Iraq’s Sunnis. This lands the Americans in a contradictory position vis a vis their global strategy in the region, which rests – and will continue to rest – on alliances with the most fundamental Sunni powers in the region – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This is a real squeeze. While able to finesse the alliance with Israel with the Saudis, repressing Iraq’s Sunnis on the Fallujah scale will, eventually, make very expensive trouble with the Saudis.

So, was support for the election a delusion? Is the election terminally bad?

Delusion, to LI, is the idea that some generalization will absorb the particulars of Iraq’s current situation. War is all about the upending of generalizations – and the generals who make them. When Sistani called for an election, back in 2003, he was absolutely right. Perhaps LI should have been more pessimistic about the material process that would result in an election under occupation. In the end, the election Sistani got was badly structured, while the use of American forces as an instrument to strike against the Sunnis has so distorted the possible election result, that the government we can expect after January will certainly not have the legitimacy that, even given the flawed process, it could have had – and for this, certainly, the Shi’ite leadership is partly to blame. While Allawi’s gamble in allowing the decimation of Fallujah is understandable, though sick (how else was he to stake out political ground?), Sistani and Sadr’s silence was a huge mistake.

These are the vicissitudes of election under occupation. However, we still believe in the election route to the goal of freeing Iraq from the occupation and maintaining, for the moment, its national integrity. This, in spite of the farce of the ballot and the voting process, as described in the Washington Post:

“With the elections to pick a 275-member National Assembly just two weeks away, details are emerging about the Iraq campaign and balloting…. Many of the worries are shared by specialists from international, nongovernment organizations who are in Iraq assisting in preparation for the voting.

Election organizers are still wrestling with questions of how to publicly list names of all candidates, and with difficult details of how the votes will be counted and reported, according to telephone interviews with specialists last week. They said they face the uncomfortable prospect that it is likely to be two weeks before results are known, and the complicating possibility that the declared winners will be challenged afterward under the election rules.

Voters on Jan. 30 will get at least two ballots, one for the national assembly and one for a governate legislature, equivalent to a state legislature, they said. The national ballot will have a line with the name, number and symbol, if there is one, for each of 111 slates of candidates. But the names of the individual candidates that make up each slate will not be on the ballot, the specialists said.

Because of the danger, the slates, even those put forward by the major parties, are not releasing the names of all their candidates.”

All of these factors favor Allawi. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Allawi stay in power after the election, in spite of the fact that he is certainly not the most popular political figure in Iraq. The best we can expect, in that scenario, is that Allawi will have to really deal with those voices that want Iraq to re-assert its sovereignty – which he has ignored, since June, given the support of the Americans. If Allawi continues to act as he has since June, Sistani will either have to move more aggressively against him, or watch the popularity of his umbrella group crumble, to the advantage, most likely, of Sadr.

Looking backwards -- at the history of the war so far -- let's sum it up like this:

One could argue for or against the American occupation in 2003. At that time, the anti-war position was an abstract matter of justice (the protest against the U.S. becoming a huge pirate ship), and a matter, at least for LI, of the hurt done to American interests by the crazy diversion of the war in the first place. However, the reality in Iraq was that the nation was no worse off than under the sanctions. And, as we have emphasized often, with the end of the horrendous Hussein regime (which, as we have also emphasized, would have been a good thing even if it was the bubonic plague which had carried off S.H. -- but, in the latter case, it wouldn't have made the bubonic plague a good thing. Such is the complexity of ethics, and such is the judgement we'd apply to the 'goodness' of the American action). But starting in around November, 2003, we’d say, the occupation has become an active evil in Iraq. The longer the American troops are there, the worse off the Iraqis will be.

This week, I listened to a little debate between a Court Liberal – he’d been freeze dried on the Washington Post op ed page in the Clinton years, and is regularly perked up to make concessions and hew to a “centrist’ position on NPR – and a conservative. The NPR commentator sometimes came in with incisive questions, such as: do you want cream with your coffee?

Hey, I’m exaggerating!

Anyway, the debate was about Social Security. The Court liberal didn’t say anything like, the President is lying through his ass. Such remarks get you kicked out of the Court. He did point out that the idea of Social Security going bankrupt in 2040 was at some, ahem, variance, ahem, from the real state of affairs. Then, having the eagerness to compromise that D.C. induces in establishment types, he muttered that the real reform should be done on Medicare. Real reform doesn’t mean – finding ways, in the wealthiest nation in history, to make sure that there is a minimum level of health care for every citizen, guaranteed by the state. No, it means cutting into those nasty entitlements, and making health care that much more harder to afford among the populace.

The conservative then remarked that Bush had a chance to really appeal to young people, who can see just what the prez means. They are eager to daytrade their cool little privatized accounts, unlike the braindead Old.

The NPR guy asked, do you want sugar with your coffee?

And that was the end of that. I did have to laugh. This idea of ‘young people” going out, gung-ho, for eviscerating Social Security so obviously fails the ‘unit of analysis’ test that it could only pass muster in the U.S. press.

While it is true that FICA is paid individually, the benefits do not accrue individually, as even the most casual survey of American households would show. Some scientists have postulated the radical theory that young people come from other human beings. Many of them, it is thought, were born. Moreover, they not only have mothers, sometimes they have fathers too. Furthermore, and sadly, these young people are so ill versed in economic rationality that if Mom and Dad are rotting out there on the sidewalk, due to unavoidable cuts in those retirement entitlements, some of the young people might even cut them a check, or even (horrors!) allow them board in the house! Yes, it is called the family structure.

Now, of course, family in the Bush vocabulary and on NPR exists only in terms of something called “family values,” which can be defined as an allergic reaction to the sight of Janet Jackson’s tits that causes bleeding of the gums, a disbelief in evolution, and voting against same sex marriage. But (due to the perversity of humankind), families also exist as economic units. This, of course, goes against the hardy Bush Economic theory, which sees human beings sort of as individual mountain climbers, all without connections to each other, scrambling up the slopes. The highest, of course, must be the best climbers. By coincidence, some of the highest were born to best climbers. Must be genetic.

In reality, however, individuals don’t act in the economic system like disconnected mountain climbers,. but like connected ones, bound by a complicated series of ropes with all kinds of other climbers. Somehow, I don’t see young people as rejoicing at the thought of being in close proximity to their parents during their parents’ golden retirement years. In spite of the fact that they will be daytrading their FICA money like mad, watching it climb climb climb on the next tech bubble, which is what we know will surely happen.

I was reminded of William Hazlitt’s excellent essay on Bentham. Bentham very much saw human beings as individual climbers. As Hazlitt points out, Bentham’s lack of compromise did give him rather an air of grandeur, rather like Milton. Here’s Hazlitt’s charming passage:

“When any one calls upon him, he invites them to take a turn round his garden with him (Mr. Bentham is an economist of his time, and sets apart this portion of it to air and exercise)—and there you may see the lively old man, his mind still buoyant with thought and with the prospect of futurity, in eager conversation with some Opposition Member, some expatriated Patriot, or Transatlantic Adventurer, urging the extinction of Close Boroughs, or planning a code of laws for some “lone island in the watery waste,” his walk almost amounting to a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand theme of UTILITY—or pausing, perhaps, for want of breath and with lack-lustre eye to point out to the stranger a stone in the wall at the end of his garden (overarched by two beautiful cotton-trees) Inscribed to the Prince of Poets, which marks the house where Milton formerly lived. To shew how little the refinements of taste or fancy enter into our author's system, he proposed at one time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden where he had breathed the air of Truth and Heaven for near half a century into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs. Let us not, however, be getting on too fast—Milton himself taught school! There is something not altogether dissimilar between Mr. Bentham's appearance, and the portraits of Milton, the same silvery tone, a few dishevelled hairs, a peevish, yet puritanical expression, an irritable temperament corrected by habit and discipline.”

Hazlitt had an unformed and unsystematic objection to Bentham’s system:

“Every pleasure, says Mr. Bentham , is equally a good, and is to be taken into the account as such in a moral estimate, whether it be the pleasure of sense or of conscience, whether it arise from the exercise of virtue or the perpetration of crime. We are afraid the human mind does not readily come into this doctrine, this ultima ratio philosophorum, interpreted according to the letter. Our moral sentiments are made up of sympathies and antipathies, of sense and imagination, of understanding and prejudice. The soul, by reason of its weakness, is an aggregating and an exclusive principle; it clings obstinately to some things, and violently rejects others. And it must do so, in a great measure, or it would act contrary to its own nature. It needs helps and stages in its progress, and “all appliances and means to boot,” which can raise it to a partial conformity to truth and good (the utmost it is capable of) and bring it into a tolerable harmony with the universe. By aiming at too much, by dismissing collateral aids, by extending itself to the farthest verge of the conceivable and possible, it loses its elasticity and vigour, its impulse and its direction. The moralist can no more do without the intermediate use of rules and principles, without the 'vantage ground of habit, without the levers of the understanding, than the mechanist can discard the use of wheels and pulleys, and perform every thing by simple motion.”

Hazlitt was on the losing end of the quantifying argument, whose pale descendents are just those atomically loosed young people frolicking about the new National Lottery/Social Security office, buying tickets. We think, however, that Hazlitt’s premonition that the stoniness at the heart of Bentham’s pleasure would bring something bad into the world turned out to be true.

But give Bentham credit for honesty: he would be shocked and appalled at the conjunction of the rhetoric of an unctuous Christian familialism and the parallel attempt to openly shed the economic ties of family.

In our post yesterday, we hung the blame for the collapse of poetry, which is surely one of the salient features of our time, on academia. This is way too easy. Perhaps the blame should be fixed, rather, on the end of walking.

Most adult Americans do not notice the landscape in terms of walking. But those of us who don’t own cars (LI is of that miserable number) have a keen sense of the difficulties thrown up by roads. Absurdly, a system that theoretically shunts people from one place to another at speeds that were impossible before the twentieth century also creates a prison. This prison, like all prisons, simply by containing certain spaces renders them unfit for human habitation. It erects areas the passage of which is forbidden on pain of death. The walker is hemmed into certain areas and certain routes, not because these routes are naturally difficult – mountains and jungles and such – but because they are humanly convenient – concrete, asphalt, and lots of metal hurling about at bonecrunching speeds.

Ben Jacks, in the Spring, 2004 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, penned a brief for walking: “Re-imagining Walking: four practices.” Re-imagining might be a portentous word for what, to LI, is simply getting to the grocery store without a bicycle. Before we re-imagine walking, we might want to imagine not-walking. We all know the beneficial consequences of being On the Road. Freedom, for one. The concrete embodiment of the bill of Rights is getting in your car and traveling two thousand miles, alone. Recipe here depends, crucially, on having the right selection of CDs, mixed with a certain random selection of radio stations along the route. At no point is listening to news or talk radio allowed – although Gospel is. We have done this – we do drive. We like driving.

But the death of the walker’s landscapes, obesity, and the withering away of poetry – these , too, might be aspects of the hegemonic transportation grid that we’ve tattooed on the hide of the continent.

Jack'S essay mentions Francesco Careri, an Italian situationist whose stalker’s manifesto is here.

Here’s a sample graf:

“Perceiving the discarded territories, in completing such a route, between that which is secure, quotidian, and that which is uncertain, generates a sense of dislocation, a state of apprehension. This altered state induces a perceptual intensification unexpectedly giving the space a meaning, making "everywhere" a place for discovery, or instead a dreaded place for an undesirable encounter. The gaze becomes penetrating, the ear becomes keen to every sound.”

We’ve recently been around an infant, a little boy. A friend’s kid. The boy showed, from the first, a desire to stand like we’ve never seen in a baby before. He learned to walk early, and does well at it. He likes to stumble through a room, he likes wandering after his Mom, he likes being given a mission – getting his shoes, for instance. Although he fastens on any shoes he finds in his path. Walking is obviously part of a very intense, sensual experience, inseparable, in infancy, from the explosions in the neural pathways, the REM sleep, the marvelous mineral of the tooth, etc., etc. Yet we know that, in all probability, by the time this boy is forty, the walking will be gone. That is, the bliss of it, or the utility of it.

For LI’s money, the best modern walker-artist is Iain Sinclair, the man who walked around the London Orbital. He invented a phrase for how he works: psychogeography. Although Sinclair doesn’t make the connection himself (that I’m aware of), he is the latest in a fugue tradition that Deleuze identified in Mille Plateaux (the ‘schizo out for a walk” section) and that Ian Hacking studied as Mad Travelers. Hacking’s book (Mad Travelers) has been reissued as a Harvard U. paperback. This is from the UVa Press site, which originally published it:

"It all began one morning last July when we noticed a young man of twenty-six crying in his bed in Dr. Pitre's ward. He had just come from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him; he deserted family, work, and daily life to walk as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometers a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison.

Thus begins the recorded case history of Albert Dadas, a native of France's Bordeaux region and the first diagnosed mad traveler, or fuguer. An occasional employee of a local gas company, Dadas suffered from a strange compulsion that led him to travel obsessively, often without identification, not knowing who he was or why he traveled. He became notorious for his extraordinary expeditions to such far-reaching spots as Algeria, Moscow, and Constantinople. Medical reports of Dadas set off at the time of a small epidemic of compulsive mad voyagers, the epicenter of which was Bordeaux, but which soon spread throughout France to Italy, Germany, and Russia.”

Hacking's book is becoming one of those philosophic texts that artists digest in their own bizarre ways -- like Deleuze's work.

On New Years day, LI had dinner with a group of very literate folks in Mexico City. One of them, our friend L., was talking about poetry – we were all trying to think of appropriate poems for New Years Day – and she mentioned that she considered, at one point, translating Dylan Thomas into Spanish. But then she learned (she sadly said) that critics say that Thomas is a bad poet.

I know that feeling: the fear of having bad taste, of some soft spot in one’s intellectual armor. Taste, one imagines, is corrected by the larger experience. There are critics I admire who have condemned Thomas’ poetry – Kenner, apparently, couldn’t stand it, or separate it from the man who made it. We respectfully disagree.

Jan Morris, in a review of a bio of Dylan Thomas in the New Statesman, quotes two disparagers:

“Dan Davin of Oxford University Press thought that Thomas's brain was not of the first class and that he spent "a great deal of noise on perceptions which are either obvious or absurd". Stephen Spender once dismissed his art as "turned on like a tap ... no beginning or end, shape or intelligent and intelligible control". Thomas spoke no foreign language, first went abroad when he was 32, and had a taste for westerns and cheap thrillers.”

One feels, like a chill coming on, that sooner or later someone will roll out Johnson’s judgment on the poems of Ossian: "Sir, a man might write such stuff forever, if he would abandon his mind to it."

In fact, of course, nobody has ever successfully written a Dylan Thomas poem except Dylan Thomas – and even he lost the knack at the end of his life, poor sod. What academics suspect is that Thomas’ poetry is all effect – the marvelous words end up echoing no larger substance. While I have some sympathy for the idea that poems should be separated from their mere effects, a little moderation, please. Academia has now created, in creative writing programs all over the world, poetry that has no effect whatsoever. Striving to be pure, it has become purely forgettable. Too often, very very smart people will confess that they read no poetry whatsoever.For which, frankly, I blame contemporary poets, who should make a collective prison break out of the world of teaching. Do anything else.

I like a poem that, at some point, I can say to myself. That moment of saying the poem to oneself is not all a poem is about, but without it, the poem has no skin, no place where the nerves end. Anatomical dolls are not our idea of beauty.

J.S. Mill, as we know from his Autobiography, was saved from the horrid erudition shoveled on his head by his pa by poetry – specifically, Wordsworth’s. He tried to define poetry in an interestingly wrong headed essay, making, among other distinctions, this one between poetry and fiction:

“Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives; and, in almost all good serious fictions, there is true poetry. But there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as such, and the - excited by poetry; for the one is derived from incidence, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility; in the other of a series of states of mere outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected more or less by representations of the latter kind, and or almost all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest correspond to two distinct and (as respects their greatest development) mutually exclusive characters of mind.

“At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story, merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and, not having been even in the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued, and the story-teller in greatest request and honor? In a rude state like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all nations in the earliest ages. But, in this state of society, there is little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, --that is, essentially stories,--and derive their principal interest from the incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchild-like age, the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry: the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too, with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons whom not merely in books, but in their lives, we find perpetually engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those who do not possess, either in the vigor of their intellectual powers or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative: the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.”

This seems to me to get one of the main things right – the last sentence especially – but the main thing wrong, as well as the anthropology. Children love verse that tells no tale, but sounds funny or interesting, for one thing. As for the rude people's line, our friend at Brooding Persian probably could tell us a little bit about that. The main thing, though, is that Mill gets entangled in the distinction between emotion and incident. This is a familiar and endlessly tugged against trap. I think it is just the wrong way to talk about poetry. Mill is not alone, of course – Eliot has a similar notion, and the distinction has had a long and hale life that continues today. With nefarious consequences, insofar as it empties out what we can say when we talk about a poem.

Myself, I prefer to think of poems in terms of orientation, or maps. Pound's periplum. What does this mean?

Let me explain by way of an illustration. There is a story in Oliver Sacks The Man who Mistook Himself for a Hat. A music professor was examined by Sacks. The professor was, according to all tests, physically blind. The blindness was caused by the deterioration of the retina. Yet the man claimed to be able to see. In order to understand the case, Sacks went to the man’s home. And, indeed, he seemed to get around the house, and to say things about the house, which only a man with sight could similarly do and say. Or so Sacks thought. Then they had dinner, and Sacks noticed, during dinner, that the professor was “singing” the dinner to himself. He had a song, a sort of hum, that he used to orient himself to all the things on the table.

This is what poetry does for me. Bruce Chatwin, in The Song-Lines, recounts (with, perhaps, some exaggeration) that Australian aborigines, who have widely varying languages, are nevertheless able to sing directions to each other, since the directions are encoded in the intonations, and not the words, of their songs. Chatwin cites an anthropologist who was so fascinated by this cultural ability that he began to apply the song-line principle to poetry in Europe, claiming that the Odyssey was a song-line.

Well, the latter seems a little fantastic, but as a principle, this corresponds to part of what I get from poetry. And this orienting moment is what I would call the "poetry" in fiction -- not sentences highly spiced with adverbs, or that drift from specificity into spindrift.

At this point in the post, I wanted to get to Mina Loy, some of whose Lost Lunar Baedecker is published on the web at this site. But I’ll postpone that – since humanity can only bear a certain length in blog posts, n’est-ce pas?
....

As we splutter to set up the LI donation week, or month, we were pleased to get fifty dollars from a donor yesterday. We will soon be putting up more info. Thanks!

Looking around the blogosphere, I see many fine and solid whacks at the Bush administration’s plan to gut social security. On all the standard left leaning sites -- Angry Bear, or Max Sawicky, or Brad DeLong, or Matt Yglesias – arguments are being forged that will surely be at the heart of the Democratic counter-attack. They all conclusively demonstrate that the Bush administration’s figures are outrageously cooked to make social security seem like it is in crisis. They demonstrate that the figures are also internally inconsistent, cranking out returns on private investment that depend on robust growth in the GDP and at the same time cranking out anemic and dire growth in the Social security fund, based on bad or no growth in the GDP over the same period.

Yet, LI has a sinking feeling that this strategy won’t work. Why? Because it hasn’t worked before. Combating a Bush program by saying it isn’t so seems to have had zero success in the past.

Meanwhile, in another world – the real one – there is a real pension crisis. Elaine Chow (Bush’s labor secretary – how’s that for a Trivial Pursuits answer?) unveiled a startlingly sensible plan to deal with the 23 billion dollar deficit in the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Here’s the beginning of the Time’s story from yesterday:

“Overhaul Plan For Pensions Is Outlined. (Business/Financial Desk) Mary Williams Walsh.

The Bush administration outlined an ambitious plan on Monday to shore up America's pension funds and the federal agency that insures them, calling for a sharp increase in premiums for pension insurance and new controls on how companies with poor credit ratings should handle their plans.

Under the plan, the premiums that companies must pay to insure their defined-benefit pension plans would rise for the first time since 1991, to $30 a year for each active worker and retiree in the plan from the current $19. In the future, the premium rate would also be indexed, to rise with wages.

That would make a dent in the record $23.3 billion deficit of the insurance program, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. But the administration also intends to charge even higher premiums to companies with credit ratings below investment grade. Such a move would further increase the agency's revenue and give companies an incentive to keep their pension plans in line with what they can afford to pay.
Companies with below-investment-grade credit ratings would also have to meet a higher standard for funding pension plans.”

In LI’s humble opinion, a successful strategy to fight for social security would begin with an attack, not a defense. The attack would outline the crisis in pensions at all the Fortune 500 companies, mentioning the bigger ones by name. It would rack up the deficits accrued by these companies with the zest of a carny shilling a shooting gallery. It would point out that those deficits were accrued by companies that hired the brightest investment experts. It would point out that, due to unexpected shifts in the investment landscape, the government, i.e. the taxpayer, is ending up paying out for the mistakes of the best and brightest, while millions are getting 10 cents to the dollar on their supposedly secure pensions. And it would then accuse the Bushies of turning Social security over to the same daytraders.

You’ll pay for it three times over, this campaign would intone. Once in the budget deficits the plan entails, putting the country a trillion dollars more in the red. Once in the losses compounded by daytrading your FICA. And once in covering those losses through your taxes. Three strikes and this plan is out.

That, of course, is the most malicious way to look at Bush’s proposal. And the catchiest.

This suggestion will not, we predict, be used by the Democrats. Why? Because it would involve naming, however delicately, real corporations as mismanagers of their workers’ money. It is one thing to fight vaguely named “corporate interests”. Corps smile upon that, and will still shell out for campaign donations. But the rule in contemporary America, with two parties representing primarily the Fortune 500, and only distantly the unwashed, is that you never ever ever name a corporation. You never out it. You never shame it. Unless it is already bankrupt, like Enron, and thus unable to hire your relatives, your friends, your spouse, and, potentially, after your ‘retirement from public service”, yourself, you treat it like the apple of your eye and the best thing that ever came into your community to garner tax benefits, bust your unions, and pay you minimum wages.

Oh well. LI will throw out the idea, anyway.

Polls

Normally, we don’t read David Brooks column in the NYT. However, because the discontinuance of the failed U.S. effort in Iraq is going to depend on how the right paints a smiley face over the retreat, we read Brooks column today – Brooks being a specialist in smiley faced conservatism.

We were surprised to read this, however:


“The newspaper Sabah recently published a poll of 4,974 Iraqis living in and around Baghdad. Nearly 88 percent support military action against the terrorists. A survey by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies suggests that the insurgents' archfoe, the prime minister Ayad Allawi, is the most popular prospective leader in the land.”


So we went to Al-Sabah. Admittedly, the site LI went to was obviously translated into English, which made the article summaries seem amateurish. However, the English doesn’t seem to be the problem in the way Al-Sabah does polls. Here’s a report on an Al-Sabah poll:

“MOST IRAQIS PREFER CENTRAL GOVERNMENT: POLL
Baghdad , As-Sabah, Sept8 , Page1


The general polls held by different parties and centers interested in studying the directions of the Iraqi public opinion indicated that the majority of Iraqi people %84 , 56prefer strong central government in Baghdad while %56 , 26prefer a government in Baghdad consisted of representatives of different regions , nationalities , tribes and Iraqi sects.The polls added that %55 , 7support granting great authorities for the Iraqi regions . Finally about63 , 3are willing to dissolve the central government and connect Iraqi regions with treaties .The polls are further indicated that the majority of Iraqi people %06 , 56prefer an integrated Iraq . Meanwhile,80 , 7said that Iraq is an Arab country on the1 st position . The majority of Iraqi people held the government grand responsibility in interesting in the citizens' causes.”

The confusions of that paragraph are nothing compared to the confusions surrounding who runs Al Sabah. Last February, most of the team running Al Sabah resigned. They were protesting the takeover of the newspaper by a CPA hired consultant, Harris communications.

“When on February 14, 2004 Harris took over from its predecessor SAIC, Al-Sabah was ready to stand on its own feet. In the last days of SAIC in Baghdad, a new printing press was bought to replace the 35 years old machines of the former regime.
With that printing press Al-Sabah could start its life without any further financial support.

Pseudo-independence

To our surprise Harris Corp did everything to prevent Al-Sabah from becoming independent and tried to sell us the idea that Al-Sabah would be independent as part of the IMN. On paper, Iraqi television and radio have been declared independent through decree 66, and with them, on Harris' request, Al-Sabah. In reality the so-called Iraqi Public Service Broadcasting will be not only dependent on foreign funding but run by a foreign company that has refused from the beginning any transparency in its dealings with Iraqi entities.

Al-Sabah newspaper can also not accept to be under the control of a Board of Governors appointed first by governor Bremer, and later Iraq's prime minister, let alone accept, as decree 66 stipulates, that the Director General of the IMN will also be the formal editor in chief of Al-Sabah.”

The flurry of stories about the U.S. funded Al Sabah died down, however. Forgetting is always a stage on the way to healing. And healing, here, is promoted by blowing back a U.S. government founded and funded propaganda organ as a real newspaper, and spreading news from it in the U.S. via the biggest newspaper in the U.S., the NYT.
There is some dreadful rock song in the back of my mind which contains the lyrics, Smiling faces. Ah, I’ve found it – Joan Osborne! What am I saying, dreadful.

And the lyrics go:

I tell you, you can't see behind smiling faces
Smiling faces sometimes they don't tell the truth
Smiling faces, smiling faces
Tell lies and I got proof

Via a clever blog we are adding to our links (the King of Zembla), we came upon this article from Newsweek about the “Salvador option” in Iraq – train death squads, murder selectively and unselectively. In general, the plan, as Newsweek describes it – including the incursions into Syria – is to act like Americans have traditionally acted in Central America.


LI put it like this, back in November of last year:

“Given that the model in Iraq is the same model the U.S. has pursued in Central and South America, LI’s hope, floating somewhere in the distant future, is that Iraq will go through the furnace of the American occupation with its major industry and structure intact – a state owned petroleum company at the center of it – and resolutely and democratically break with the logic of neo-liberalism. It is a continuing astonishment to LI that Vietnam (or, on the right, WWII) have been the template comparisons for a black bag op that has all the indices of the usual slimy Latin American intervention, right down to Negroponte, the mollusk pulling the strings from the American embassy. In fact, we are pretty confident that the most successful American reconstruction project in Iraq will be the CIA’s cheerful attempt to get the torturers rolling again with its hands on aid to the Mukhabarat.”

...

This morning we read Nick Cohen’s usual romp n stomp against the Stop the War people for not denouncing the killing of one of Iraq’s major labor leaders. Of course, glancing around the Net we found a different story, best told by the U.S. Labor Against the War site, which, contra Cohen, condemns Hadi Salah’s murder even as it preserves Hadi Salah’s message, compassionately suppressed by Cohen.


“The ultimate source of violence in Iraq is the US occupation. The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions calls for the end of the occupation and the US war. Salih's murder does not bring this end one step closer. Instead, it seeks to terrorize Iraq's labor movement, and other parts of its civil society, to keep them from seeking any peaceful means of gaining political power in the interest of its working people.

In the past three months, IFTU members and rank-and-file workers have been murdered and kidnapped as they tried to carry out normal union activity, or simply do their jobs. On November 3, four railroad workers were killed, and their bodies mutilated. On December 25, two other train drivers were kidnapped, and five other workers beaten. On the night of December 26, the building of the Transport and Communications Workers in central Baghdad was shelled. Together with the assassination of Hadi Salih, these horrifying crimes are making Iraq as dangerous a place for union activists as Colombia.”

It is interesting to watch the coalition between certain left intellectuals and the most reactionary elements in the U.S. and Britain. The intellectuals have zero power of leavening the reactionaries with progressive ideas; rather, the larger mass exerts its inevitable gravitational pull, and down the lefty spirals, in a serial surrender of one conviction after another, like a shot pigeon losing feathers.

LI, having a soft spot in our lungs, er, our heart for unfairly treated corporate behemoths – takes up the case of two victims today: W.R. Grace and Dresser.

W.R. Grace is mentioned by an article in this week’s Chemical Market Reporter, in an article hailing – or salivating over -- the coming breakthrough in Tort “Reform” legislation, in which little litigants everywhere will be forced to cram their iron lungs, their expensive pills, and their seedy little declining lives, as well as those of their worthless children, up their asses. These people have the gall to expect justice in a system that is built for profit. But as the CMR explains, breathlessly:

“Over 70 companies have been forced into bankruptcy by asbestos, including W.R. Grace & Co., and the problem seems to be growing as new claims continue to pour into the legal system.”

Now, that must hurt Bush-ites everywhere. Remember Reagan’s favorite entrepreneur, J. Peter Grace? Remember the award for ceos – the Grace award – given for outstanding service in the ripping off of the citizenry? Remember the town of Libby, Montana? That state that went whole heartedly for Mission Accomplished in the last election?

Here’s the first three grafs of a review of a book about Libby, written by a Mother Jones staffer, Andrea Peacock.

“It's never been easy to make a living in Libby, Mont. Citizens in this town of 12,000, tucked into the dense, damp conifer forests of northwestern Montana, have long scraped by on seasonal logging jobs and other sporadic work. So in the 1920s, when local entrepreneur Edward Alley discovered that a nearby vermiculite deposit yielded an efficient, lightweight insulation and fireproofing material, Libbyites were thrilled.

For decades, the mine -- dubbed Zonolite, like the brand-name insulation it produced -- offered the best jobs in town. Townspeople bragged that their local product had "a hundred and one uses"; they put it in their garden soil and their Little League ball fields, and said it could even be used to make mold-resistant whole-wheat bread. When the Zonolite mine was sold to the multinational company W.R. Grace in 1963, not much changed for the Libby workers. Vermiculite mining and processing was hard work, and terribly dusty, but the mine jobs continued to pay better, and last longer, than anything else around.

In the 1970s, some current and former mine workers started to notice some shortness of breath; gradually, they became tethered to oxygen tanks and bound to their homes. Some developed rare, excruciating cancers. Worse, their wives, kids, and even some Libby residents with no connection to the mine started to develop similar symptoms. Only a few doctors recognized the lesions on their patients' lungs for what they were: the signature symptom of asbestosis. It took dozens of painful deaths for Libby residents to admit that "their" company, W.R. Grace, had knowingly allowed its mine workers, its mine managers, and their families and neighbors to be poisoned with tremolite, a particularly nasty form of asbestos contained in Libby's vermiculite deposit.”

The disaster at Libby was revealed by a series of Seattle Post-Intelligencer articles . Excuse me for mentioning a po-dunk newspaper from Seattle – we should be keeping our eye on sophisticated news analysis of trial lawyers and such, as is purveyed by the Washington Post’s excellent Peter Baker, who has taken the simple expedient of not mixing tawdry stories of asbestos death with the really important news about the funding of political parties. I mean, that’s like mixing up Jerry Springer and some PBS news show! Let’s keep these things separate.
But LI, redneck to the last, doesn’t understand that program. We think that when, say 500 or so people die in a town due to a danger covered up by that town’s major employer, W.R. Grace, we should even look outside established news sources towards the po-dunk and the kooky. The editors of the WP must laugh to think that 500 or so people drowning in their lungs could even compare, in tragedy, to 70 corporations going bankrupt – why, the latter is tragedy on a national scale.

That is why we are blessed with a president who knows what is fair and what is “unfair.’ And when something is unfair, we must reform it. Reform is such a nice word. We are eager to see the Bank Robbery Reform act get through congress this year, too – you know, the one that doesn’t punish bank robbers for the unfortunate collateral casualties caused in the course of their profitable activities. It is, as our President would say, unfair to blame them – plus, look how many bank robbers have to spend thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves in court!

As for poor Dresser – well, it all goes back to another Red State, the reddest – Alabama. Dresser was sued by five lousy employees of U.S. Pipe. This crew of weaklings developed cancers of the colon, asbestosis, and other so called diseases and some of them croaked before Bell vs. Dresser could finish. They had the gall to claim that spraying asbestos products sold by Dresser using equipment by Dresser had something to do with the obviously naturally occuring disease, asbestosis, and got a jury of gulls to believe them. If our president has had to walk the Stations of the Cross (and surely, as a son of Jesus Christ once removed, he has had to take up his cross, as a good Christian), his heart must have been wrung at the ungodly sum of 138 million the jury charged Dresser. And Dresser was only partly responsible, after all – it was their wholly owned and then spun off subsidiary, Harbison Walker Refractories, that mined the asbestos and used it in its products! HW, by the way, kindly put warning labels on its products in 1979 – although they had, admittedly, just a teensy bit of knowledge years beforehand that asbestos led to cancer

Well, company officials must feel pretty rueful. If they had just shelled out enough for a paint job on those peoples' trailors, that should have been enough. These aren’t golden parachute people, after all. As it is, Tort Reform is now more necessary than ever – otherwise, we will be taking money from productive people, people who run derivatives, people who have inherited wealth, blue bloods, Harvard graduates, and giving it to icky people from God knows where who are merely dying from asbestos poisoning. What type of economy would do that?

Enter TITUS, dressed like a cook, LAVINIA, veiled, young LUCIUS, and Others. TITUS places the dishes on the table.

Act 1:

According to the March 6, 2004 issue of Pulse magazine, a British medical journal, 1 in 100 men born in the 1940s will die of mesothelioma. This contrasts with the 1960s, where the incidence was about 100 cases a year. Swift and Treasure, the authors, describe the disease in this graf:

“Malignant pleural mesothelioma is a slowgrowing cancer that starts in the parietal pleura, forming a thick cortex, and then encases the lung. It grows out, invading the chest wall. It often causes pleural effusions and two, three liters of fluid leaves little room to breathe. These changes cause the typical presenting features of worsening breathlessness and growing pain. It commonly presents late with a grim prognosis; survival from diagnosis is usually less than a year.”

Is there a causative agent?

“In nearly all cases this cancer is a direct result of exposure to asbestos.”

In America, the related figure for deaths is estimated (although not by the present administration, but by everyone else) at around 300,000 deaths. A double tsunami.

Act 2

“The feast is ready which the careful Titus
Hath ordain’d to an honourable end…”

“IN THE EARLY 1980S, when plaintiffs began filing asbestos lawsuits against Babcock & Wilcox, the company decided that fighting them would be futile. B&W's insurance adjuster, who had experience handling asbestos injury claims for other firms, knew what kind of impression a certain type of plaintiff could make on jurors. How could they be objective in the presence of someone with mesothelioma, the signature asbestos disease? Victims of this rare and ghastly form of lung cancer are essentially strangled to death by their own lung tissue.

Rather than expecting jurors to see beyond such tragedy, the Ohio-based power-plant builder quietly began offering payments to plaintiffs who agreed not to sue B&W. The payments, based on the severity of the victims' ailments, didn't require them to jump through too many hoops to collect. Even if some less-than-deserving claimants occasionally slipped through, B&W saved substantially by avoiding trial costs and punitive-damage awards. The company found it could settle claims for "nuisance value"--less than $5,000 for nonmalignant lung ailments, and an average of $56,000 for cases of mesothelioma.” - Kiplinger Personal Finance, Jun2002,

In the standard history of this epidemic, the team of Irving Selikoff’s is credited with definitely making the link between the cancer and asbestos back in 1964, with a study of workers in William Carlos William’s town, Patterson, New Jersey. However, as Joseph Ledau noted in Environmental Health Perspectives (March, 2004), the WHO only indicated the hazard of asbestos in 1986. Why the delay?

Because the asbestos industry systematically lied about the issue, and tried in every way to suppress the truth.

A chronicle about the discovery of the dangers of asbestos, and what the industry did about it, is here. Here’s a sample of how the bankrupted Manville treated the problem, taken from Paul Brodeur’s work:

1933
* Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. doctors find that 29 percent of workers in a Johns-Manville plant have asbestosis.
Barry I. Castleman, Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, 4th edition, Aspen Law and Business, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1996, p.26

* Johns-Manville officials settle lawsuits by 11 employees with asbestosis on the condition that the employees' lawyer agree to never again "directly or indirectly participate in the bringing of new actions against the Corporation."
Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial, Pantheon Books, New York NY, 1985, p.114
1934
* Officials of two large asbestos companies, Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan, edit an article about the diseases of asbestos workers written by a Metropolitan Life Insurance Company doctor. The changes minimize the danger of asbestos dust.
Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial, Pantheon Books, New York NY, 1985, p.114-15
1935
* Officials of Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan instruct the editor of Asbestos magazine to publish nothing about asbestosis.
Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial, Pantheon Books, New York NY, 1985, p.116

Brodeur wrote a response to Senator Frist’s comment, last year, downplaying the hazards of asbestos, and included this interesting comment from the unfairly treated Manville company:

“As for Frist's contention that bankrupt companies like Johns Manville, Owens Corning, and W. R. Grace are "reputable," one wonders what he has been reading over the past twenty years. Manville -- one of the most renegade corporations in all of corporate history -- not only knew for five decades that asbestos was killing its workers, but also actively conspired to keep its workers from knowing about the hazard. This conspiracy included lying to workers about the results of X-rays showing that they had developed and fatal lung disease. Manville's corporate lawyer put it this way back in the 1930s. Keep the workers in the dark and "let them work themselves to death.””

Act 3

"It's not fair to those who are getting sued, and it's not fair for those who justly deserve compensation," said Bush, appearing at a performing arts center just north of Detroit. "These asbestos suits have bankrupted a lot of companies, and that affects the workers here in Michigan and around the country."


“Welcome, my gracious lord; welcome, dread queen;
Welcome, ye warlike Goths; welcome, Lucius;
And welcome, all: although the cheer be poor,
'Twill fill your stomachs; please you eat of it.”

There is an unfortunate Islamofascist prejudice against the great American corporations, as if untermenschen aren’t provided with fine homes in which to suffocate to death as they await their appointed ends. This is why Industry wisely paid a lot of money to secure the public from hearing the distressing news about the asbestos linked diseases in the first place. Actually, a Bendix official said it much better than we can:

“The 1966 comments of the Director of Purchasing for Bendix Corporation, now a part of Honeywell, capture the complete disregard of an industry for its workforce that is expressed over and over again in company documents spanning the past 60 years.
"...if you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products, why not die from it."
— 1966 Bendix Corporation letter”

Of course, to the Washington Post, the asbestos issue is all about Democrats getting funding from trial lawyers.

So tiresome to bring in bulky workers, sterterous breathers with those unsightly plastic tubes running up their noses, grunting to inglorious deaths. I mean, these people didn’t even go to a sub-Ivy! So fuck em. Thus, the WP reporter, one Peter Baker, is so giddy at the President’s cleverness (what a framer of issues!) that he doesn’t even bother to report that there is that wee business of Halliburton’s asbestos related claims, which is the direct responsibility of Cheney, until a way down the fold paragraph. As for calling up, say, Brodeur, who has written four books on the subject … pleeeeaaaasssee. That is so 1970s! Those workers look like undemocratic Ukranians, after all!

TITUS ANDRONICUS

Will't please you eat? will't please your
highness feed?

What LI would humbly like to propose is that the President extend his compassion to the poor asbestos industry, for which he feels so much and with such woeful speech (indeed, on the NPR excerpt, he sounded either fearfully muffled by the unfairness of it all to everyone he loves, or completely stoned), by eating a pie full of asbestos fibers. In public. Wouldn’t that be yummy! Such a pretty thing to set before the king. Other D.C. courtiers could pitch in – ice cream on top of it for our fave, grave VP, Dick Cheney, he of the seven billion dollar payout for the damage done! And perhaps the WP's Baker could be sent to cover the event -- and if he is lucky, he could be called up by the President himself, given an official jokey nickname, and be served a big heaping plateful himself! My, how they could all then laugh at the trial lawyers. Big laughs, big mouthfuls everybody!

“TITUS ANDRONICUS

Why, there they are both, baked in that pie;
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
'Tis true, 'tis true; witness my knife's sharp point.”

LI regrets not speaking Spanish – a correctable fault, but one that we persist in, thus doubling the wrong – or whatever the interest on sins is these days.

Thus, traveling in Mexico – or rather, staying with polylinguistic friends in Mexico – continually brought us into contact with the harsh edge of not understanding. A conversation about politics in the thirties in Cuba – a conversation about a visit to New England – a short series of sounds that was somewhat like a conversation about paying for breakfast in a restaurant – is an experience of the holes in the mesh of the common will -- that common will in which I am usually so vested and surrounded, so utterly dominated by and dominant in (or so the tongue would have me think), as to not even notice it. It made me wonder, once again, at the wonderful imperturbability displayed by Americans vis-à-vis what they think is going on in Iraq, giving their almost universal inability to understand the very language in which what is going on goes on.

However, immersion brings a sub-level of understanding. And a sub-level of distance from one’s total immersion in the experience of one’s native land. There’s an essay in this Fall’s American Scholar by Jamie James, a critic who left New York City for Indonesia in 1999: “Why I don’t live in America,” who expatriated to Indonesia to live with his lover, a man named Rendy. The essay makes several points, that are continually being made, in fact, about the pall of dislike for America that has fallen across the world since the Bush gang pulled its Iraq caper. What interests me, however, is that James never mentions the language. One wonders – does he speak English with the servants he mentions? It is a funny thing about American expatriates that they seem to share, with Americans in general, a sense that language is transparent – it is made of glass and English.

In our hearts, I guess, we are a nation of logical positivists.

We’re writing this under the influence of chiliquiles, eggs, and Indios beer, in the Mexico City Airport. Like every public structure in Mexico, the airport is more than willing to sacrifice convenience to vastness. Of course, shuffling city-loads of people from one point to another requires vastness, yet I can’t help but think that the visitas at the Atlanta, D.C., or JFK airport are narrower – there’s a puritanic concentration on getting people through these spaces, filling them with junkfood they wouldn’t otherwise eat at prices they wouldn’t otherwise pay, putting t-shirts, fat paperbacks, or magazines in their hands and trundling them, in numeric order, into the belly of various money-losing jet-liners – which mechanism, translated into Mexican terms, blurs at the edges with the memory of monuments. Yes, there is still something monumental here, from the point of view of which all rituals are variations of one ritual…

However, reader beware: I might be under the influence of the Museum of the ViceRoyal Period in Tepotzotlan, a former Jesuit seminary which I visited with my friend (and colonial expert) M., yesterday. M. has a personal relationship to the pale, satiric or placidly pious faces of the worthies that peer out of all those seventeenth and eighteenth century portraits – or, rather, allow themselves to be peered upon, since the painted features, even in the simulacrum of religious fervor, belong to the queen side of the phrase, “a cat may gaze upon a queen.” Queens, however, reserve the privilege of gazing vulgarly upon cats in times of their own choosing. So do saints, bishops, and Jesuits.

Still, M. peered with fierce disapprobation at Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, who spent his time in the New World combatting the power of the aforesaid Jesuits, who, for M., are an adventuring, erudite order – at least in Palofox’s time – composing theories of the pyramids in one part of the world, teaching the Chinese the rules of Renaissance perspective in another part, and in still a third dying, in extra pictorial agony, nailed to crosses by the shores of the Japanese inland sea. But the heroic is, perhaps, understood differently by M. and Bishop Palofox – the latter might have thought heroes are always, in the end, pagan Greeks at heart.

I mention this museum in relation to the airport because the central glory of it – the museum, that is – is a chapel of a richness (in faces, effigies, attitudes, cherubim, allegories) and a supererogation (of golden gilding) that the traveler’s description must necessarily be an abasement, the stuttered, banal recounting of a glorious dream. One walks down the central aisle from the door to the altar, and a strange thing happens – for there are more eyes on the walls, more eyes on the mounting levels, more faces, more activity, as one niche yields to the other, as one wall falls away to reveal another equally resplendent, until, at a certain point the message is felt, rather than intellectualized – one’s floorbound-ness itself, one’s extra-pictorial body, is a sort of subtraction of glory in this ever ramifying crowd. The obvious cure for this is to surrender completely.

Which is one of the crushing effects of a certain kind of power. Myself, I am only trying to give you the background to my impression that the Mexico City Airport knows, in its spaces, that the world is not made for your convenience.

Now it is time to board. I’ll transcribe this later.
…
So much for over-generalization. The Houston Airport taught me all about surrender, as well as inconvenience. The lesson was brought home by the contingent of the Customs Department there, who run an operation on lines that would shame the variously intoxicated teens running the night shift at a country Dairy Queen. I’m talking about a custom official typing my numbers into a computer with one finger, and numerous aiding glances at the piece of paper before him, and then letting me proceed – making sure that he held me just long enough to miss my connecting flight – after a search of my bags so perfunctory I could have easily smuggled Osama Bin himself by the guy. I’m talking about one of them telling the black guy from Miami, who sensibly asked what was the point of delaying us for no apparent reason, with a drawling threat to really make him miss his flight to Miami, working himself up to such a redneck frenzy that another Customs officer had to intervene. Oh well. I got some chicken, I got a beer, I opened the Times and noticed Tom Friedman describing the insurgents in Iraq as ‘desperate’ – an adjective he has employed for insurgents since August 2003 – and, settling back in my chair, heard the nattering, behind my back, of the tv. This is the George Bush Airport, and the tv was set, appropriately enough, to some swinish cable news station feeding the masses sour rightwing pap. I’d almost forgotten, during the last two weeks, that we live in the age of Bush. The cable newspeople were worried about the U.N. taking over relief efforts for the tsunami victims, since the U.S. was throwing in its 300 million. The U.S., apparently, should use this as a big opportunity to win friends among the orphaned beneficiaries of our charity and impress people with being against natural disasters and all. Presumably, once the tsunami survivors take our K rations we have the right to tattoo the stars and stripes on their foreheads of something. A regular win/win situation, looked at rightly.

I wasn’t quite ready, yet, for the mindmeld of cretins. But what the hell. I’m back, back, back in the U.S.A.

LI will be largely on hiatus until Jan. 6. We are off to Mexico. Our advise is still the same for the celebration of these Holidays that were so unjustly hijacked from the Romans and put in the service of a rather pallid myth by the extraordinary cult that, much to Mr. Gibbon's regret, undermined the Empire: that is, be a true conservative and return to the Saturnalian fundamentals. Have sex, let slaves be masters and masters slaves, turn the world upside down. Your slogan should be: what would Heliogabalus think? Or, to quote Artaud: "I do not like poems or languages of the surface which smell of happy leisures and of intellectual success – as if the intellect relied on the anus, but without any heart or soul in it. The anus is always terror, and I will not admit that one loses an excrement without being torn from, thereby losing one’s soul as well..."

Next year should be a good one for us. We look forward to thefts on the American scene -- especially the trillion some dollar robbery of Social Security -- whhich will rival in savagery Russia in the nineties; we look forward to the New York Times explanation of the election results in Iraq (today the NYT cautiously ventured that perhaps the winning of the hearts and minds of Fallujans was not accomplished by knocking down their houses, spreading shit in their streets, and torching their mosques, while refusing to provide them with any shelter or food as they wend their laissez faire way through the Sunni triangle, comforted by the fires of liberty the Bush gang has lit across the landscape -- there really is nothing funnier than watching the American media delicately handle reality after their various ideological orgies -- and then watching them quickly embed themselves in the imperialist fantasy once more, to grub and snooze); we look forward, on the environmental front, to the Bush gang's less noted but always frothy fantasies -- for instance, the recent support given by the Americans to the Saudi demand that any environmental policy that was directed towards minimizing the use of petroleum in any way be compensated for by payments from the G-8 to the petroleum producing countries -- in other words, fining any conservation effort and sending the fines directly to the House of Saud, a policy which went unremarked, in general, since we know these people are insane anyway. Oh pioneers! we foresee a luridly amusing landscape opening up for us in the land of the free and the home of the brave!
A bientot!

The making of the enemy.

“The question of the qualification of the enemy is at the heart of the modern law of war. Without a doubt, since antiquity one has distinguished the private enemy (inimicus) from the public enemy (hostis), and that last from the brigand and the criminal. The distinctions were taken up by theoreticians of the rights of man in the 18th century. The question, thus posed, is not only who is one’s enemy, but what type of enemy one is dealing with.”

LI is a sucker for the magisterial opening line – and these lines by Michel Senellart are nothing if not magisterial. They introduce an article, “The Qualification of the enemy in Emer de Vattel” in the July Astérion, which devoted an issue to the civilizing of warfare in the eighteenth century.


“I want to examine, in this article, the way in which the division between a combattant force and a non-combattant population was established in the law of modern war, and what consequences ensued. This distinction, as we know, is the foundation of the laws of war formulated for the first time by the Brussels conference in 1874 and then that of the Hague in 1899 and 1907, with the view of “serving the interests of humanity and the progressive demands of civilisation.” It cannot be separated from another distinction, the object of bitter controversies, between legitimate and illegitimate combattants. It is in the work of jurisconsul Emer de Vattel (1714-1767), author of a celebrated treatise on human rights (droit des gens), that their articulation appeared most clearly. However, it gave rise to two opposed readings, the conflict between which manifested the tensions inherent in the modern law of war.”

A timely enterprise, this, given that inimicus and hostis are so inextricably mixed up in Iraq. An unintentionally hilarious article by the Washington Post’s Josh White, yesterday, explained that Americans in Samarra are facing a ‘wall of silence” erected by the inhabitants, who are refusing to finger insurgents. Shades of the Viet Cong terrorizing villagers and bogging down the goodhearted American effort – White begins with the ritualized search of a quarter of the town:

“SAMARRA, Iraq, Dec. 22 -- The soldiers kicked the wooden doors open and swarmed through the houses, rolling up rugs, looking through cabinets, searching boxes, pushing aside couches. Within minutes, they had lined up the Iraqi men they had found inside. The men were taken outside and made to squat in the late-night darkness, their breath streaming out in faint, wispy clouds as their hands pushed flat against a concrete wall.”

He then moves on to the wall of silence problem, which he attributes solely to the vicious enemy:
“The Sunday night raid was what soldiers here call a "dry hole." They received an intelligence tip, and it led to nothing. They broke down doors and interrogated people who appeared to have no connection to the war the United States is waging. The soldiers paid the families in U.S. dollars for the broken door jambs and the splintered cabinet doors that hung askew.
The frustrating dead end was a symptom of what officers here agree is a virtual intelligence meltdown in Samarra, a city 65 miles north of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle, an area where the insurgency runs deep. Rebels have intimidated the local population, launching attacks from neighborhoods where residents now fear the consequences of helping the American occupiers.”
One of the deep structural factors in racism is the unwillingness to recognize the Other’s imagination even to the degree of recognizing the other’s humiliation by the culture of violence and subordination visited upon him beyond the Pavlovian exterior marks that come with electroshock and reward. Sense, in the Other, doesn’t develop into sensibility. That the Samarran men might resent having to squat uncomfortably while American kids, basically, search their houses (exposing those houses to, among other things, theft) simply never occurs to White. Just as, in Jim Crow days, the segregationist White made up for stealing the civil rights of the adult Black by making a cult of the cuteness of black kids, so, too, White’s story ends, predictably, with the Samarran children who witnessed the humiliation of their parents being given treats by the soldiers:
“Schacht, the battalion commander, said the campaign to win the Iraqi people over -- one that is proving more successful with the children here, who are plied with candy and soccer balls -- is moving slowly. The lack of cooperation among residents is making his job tougher, he said.”
Vattel, according to Senellart, “marks a progress from Grotius” insofar as his forumulation of the rules of war – a formulation that amounts to, in some ways, a distribution of roles, a dramaturgy in which the enemy and the citizen are sorted out – depends not on morality, but “from his conception of war as a inter-state relationship. He thus ties the spirit of humanity to the historic process of the centralisation of power.”

Vattel’s epistemic procedure is obviously contoured by the 18th century context of a modified monarchial power. In fact – and this is LI, not Senellart -- that context hasn’t changed that much – foreign policy in republics is still the province of monarchial governance, since it is rare that the constituency-building necessary to create democratic governance will emerge in the rarified atmosphere of foreign policy discussion.
Senellart pushes his discussion of the readings of Vattel (which are characteristically polarized between a normative version that goes through Bluntschli, and a “decisionist’ version that goes through Schmidt) to another division – between the power of the state and the power of the people, between the state’s organisation of war and the insurrection.

Read the essay.

Go to the History Today for October and read the article by Mark Goldie on John Locke. About John Locke? No, more specifically, it is about the vagaries of Locke’s reputation. This has become quite a little subgenre: the bio of the reputation. Orwell’s reputation has had, we believe, at least two bios. We rather like the idea – it is so reminiscent of the story of Peter Schlemiel’s shadow – the detachment of that purely negative space, and its adventures as it retains a shape to which it is no longer owes the loyalty of absolute physical proximity.

Locke, according to this informative survey, was a secretive soul.

“He was indifferent to biography and reticent, even secretive, about himself. When the philosopher Damaris Masham wrote her memoir of him, she could not report his year of birth, though they had lived together for fourteen years from 1690. Like another of his friends, Sir Christopher Wren, whose epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral invites us to 'look around', Locke's epitaph at High Laver in Essex invites us to 'learn from his writings' rather than engage in 'dubious eulogies'.”
This is the first time we ever encountered the evocative name, Damaris Masham (one isn’t quite sure whether fiction isn’t infecting the past, here – surely Damaris Masham is a wholly fictitious name made up by Neal Stephenson?), and we are noting her for future investigation. Goldie, in accordance with the epitaph’s invitation, shows that the dubious eulogies accorded Locke have come from ideologically diverse quarters. In the eighteenth century, as one might expect, Locke was damned by the tories – rather ironically, since, Goldie notes, “in contemporary America Locke or, rather, an imagined heritage 'Locke', is mascot of right-wing think-tanks.” Contrast with this:
“The first pictorial representation of 'Locke on government' appeared in 1710 in a Tory cartoon attacking the Whig pamphleteer Benjamin Hoadly, where Locke appears on the bookshelf behind Hoadly's desk. In one version, Oliver Cromwell stands over Hoadly's shoulder, with regicide's axe in hand; in another, it is the devil who stands there. Ironically, in the reign of Queen Anne Tory hatred of Locke served to make his name better known as a theorist of politics. One of his critics was the Tory feminist Mary Astell, who attacked Whig philosophy because it deposed monarchical tyrants while leaving husbandly tyranny intact. 'If all men are born free, how is that all women are born slaves?'”
We imagine Locke was the kind of leveler that Swift would have targetted (perhaps there is some anti-Lockian tone in the Modest Proposal), but Goldie concentrates more on Locke’s reputation among political types. Although there are artistic touches.

For instance,
“Lord Cobham transformed his estate at Stowe near Buckingham into a rural allegory of the fate of political liberty under the rule of perverted Whiggery. In his Elysian Fields he built a sturdy Temple of Ancient Virtue and a ruinous Temple of Modern Virtue. The ensemble culminated in the Temple of British Worthies. Here he placed busts of Elizabeth I, William III, John Hampden, Milton, and Locke. To these he added the Black Prince, a model for the current Prince of Wales, Frederick, who, it was hoped, would restore liberty when his father died. [circa 1730] Lastly came King Alfred, whom Cobham called the 'founder of the English constitution'.

The article goes on to explicate, entertainingly, the tangle between Locke and whiggism and anglican latitudinarianism, and the creation of a right and a left schools of Lockeans.

Tomorrow, if we have time, we will discuss this important article that appeared in Asterion. We recommend the whole issue. And after that – we are taking off for two weeks. Going to Mexico. Adios, have a good holiday including lots of sex – we recommend, between consulting adults, violating those precepts of good Christian sex and discovering the Saturnalia of pleasure that lies right on the surface of your skin. Best done under the blinking illumination of the Christmas tree lights. Santa gives Saturnalia a thumbs up!

Shakh Mat

Chess came to Europe through Persia. The pieces were re-configured, the moves changed, from the Indian original. Europeans also inherited the phrase, check mate, from the Persian phrase ‘the shah is dead’ – Shakh mat.

LI has no inside information, but we believe that Sistani, at one time, must have been a hell of a chess player.

After reading our last post, a friend asked us what analogy we were drawing between the Pazzi conspiracy and Iraq.

We cited Machiavelli because, a., the events he records in the History of Florence – the shifting combinations that play across the Florentine political landscape and that involve self organising norms rather than set principles – are broadly similar to the shifting combinations in Iraq; and b., the spirit of Machiavelli – his ability to perceive that history – was an act of imaginative virtue. That is, he considered the combination by considering the perspectives of the players and leaving a large space open for sheer collision – for the accidents of fortune that emerge to shape, obviate, or unexpectedly advance the progress of a project.

It’s only by using that same imaginative virtue that one understands the game Sistani has played, and its brilliance.

After the fall of Baghdad last year, Sistani faced several unknowns. On the one hand, the Ba’athist structure as Saddam had built it was in ruins. On the other hand, the Americans were an unknown force. Were they serious? Would they leave right away? Would they govern?

Sistani’s response to these variables was to wait. What he saw unfold helped him decide about the Americans. They seemed unaware that the Ba’athist structure, while in ruins, was by no means harmless. Allowing the looting to go on – allowing, as Sistani must have known, arms depots throughout the country to be raided, as well as allowing electric power plants to be stripped of their equipment, etc – while guarding the Oil Ministry with comic opera seriousness must have given him a vivid sense of American limits.

As a rule of thumb, if you are dealing with the Americans in a third world country, it is always good to remember that eventually, they will go home. Third world leaders, however, never quite grasp the dimensions of American indifference. While this is a country that jolts enjoyably from moral panic to moral panic, it is also strangely indifferent to the moral panics of the past. At the moment, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Americans debate Iraqi democracy. As soon as the last American soldiers depart from the country, however, the interest will as completely evaporate as, for instance, the interest in a democratic Kuwait that animated Americans in 1991. Since the end of the first Gulf war, approximately .0000000002% of American media attention has been directed to an issue that, at one time, American soldiers were supposedly dying for. LI, for instance, had to look up whether women could vote in Kuwait on Google yesterday, since we had no vague notion from newspapers or radio or Internet. It is a dead issue. Women, by the way, can’t vote. Do you care?

This combination of heated passion and cold indifference is what makes Americans such interesting players.

Sistani’s patience was soon rewarded by the attacks on Americans. The second phase of the war was beginning, and the winning side in the first phase didn’t even know it.

The attacks came from no friends of Sistani’s. However, at that point, friendship was a matter of cancellation – the enemy of my enemy – rather than of affirmation. The Americans were still floating the trial balloon of rule by exile militias, such as Chalabi’s, without seeming to realize that there were much tougher militias out there, trained in Iran. And so the board soon became dotted with different squares.

Sistani’s patience obviously left a gap in the struggle for power. It was here that Sadr made a series of moves that, while seemingly putting Sistani more and more on the spot, actually benefitted him. Sadr attracted the American enmity that Sistani was able to avoid, even as Sistani avoided siding with the Americans. This is why Sistani’s original call for elections, in the summer of 03, increased his stature with its every reiteration.

We think the turning point in Iraq came this spring, when the Americans moved against Sadr in Najaf. If you will remember, the battle against Sadr evoked calls of solidarity from the Sunni groups arrayed against the Americans, while Sistani checked out of the country. But only until Najaf had been trashed by both sides to the extent that he felt he could end his wait. He did this by marching into Najaf – or leading a sort of peace convoy into Najaf. In that one stroke, we think he began the process of making the Americans irrelevant in Iraq.

It isn’t that they don’t have the largest force in the country. And they certainly make up laws and then have their president pass them. What the Americans don’t see, however, is that they have been subsumed, by circumstances, into the tool, rather than the puppet master, of various factions in Iraq. The strongest of which, by virtue of what he did in Najaf (driving the Americans out of a major urban center without firing a shot), has coalesced around Sistani’s plans for Shi’ite rule.

The next play on the board was, truly, a chess play. The taking of Fallujah was motivated by a combination of several fantasies. One fantasy comes out of the deep wellsprings of American military culture, which has considered winning a war, since 1865, to be the equivalent of taking Richmond. They are always, in other words, looking for Dr. Evil’s hideout. This is a good strategy for, say, winning World War II, and a bad one for winning a guerilla war. Another fantasy came out of the American political advisors. This is a pure Bush campaign fantasy. The way to win hearts and minds is to target an enemy and stomp on it. The idea here is that Allawi, who the Americans were dimly aware was leaking popularity (even the American’s own IRI poll showed him neck and neck with Sadr), needed to be washed in some Sunni blood. The third fantasy was the insurgents’. This is much harder to penetrate. One of the great triumphs of the war against the insurgency, actually, has been to wed the Ba’athist remnant to the qaeda-ist violence of Zarqawi types. Nothing, we think, has more alienated a population that might be inclined to revolt, for nationalistic reasons, but that is repulsed by the attempt to reproduce Saudi cultural norms among the alien fields of Mesopotamia. Qaeda-ists have a blow them up strategy, and would be quite willing to sacrifice the citizens of Fallujah en masse to achieve that orgasm a la plastique by which they imagine they will be enfolded in the bosom of providence.

But one fantasy was absent, here. It soon became clear that this attack on Fallujah was different from the assault in the spring, or the assault on Najaf, in that there wasn’t an echo of support in the Shiite community. Even from Sadr. This is a measure of the disaster enacted in the alliance between a qaedist group that is oriented towards anti-Shiite pograms and a cynical Ba'athist group that is oriented towards retaking power -- and restoring an economic order that, after all, benefited a large class of Sunnis.

The Americans were probably pleased by the lack of Shi’ite support – but it did rather doom their program of cleansing Allawi in the blood of the Sunni. Allawi still bears the mark of collaboration and the mark of weakness. Tyranny is a harsh master -- just as God spews the lukewarm out of his mouth, tyranny makes a similar demand on its potential incarnations. Allawi is in the excrutiating process of being spewed out of the mouth. This will last for some time.

Great rulers are rarely great chess players – but they are often good ones. Sadr, we imagine, is a terrible chess player. The limits of Sistani’s play are coming up. Assuming a Dawa led coalition comes into power in January, the question of how to get rid of the Americans and the insurgents will take on a new twist. Simply having the Americans go is unacceptable – it would replay the stupidity of Bremer’s unilateral disbanding of the Iraqi army. It is, at the present, to the advantage of all players that the Americans have no recognition of their objective irrelevance in Iraq – in this, they have become perfect tools. But tools of force in Middle Eastern history have a latent dangerousness.

It is as difficult to see these things, sitting here in America, as it would be to make a map of New York city from watching repeats of Law and Order on A and E. The American press is fixated solely on the American p.o.v. in Iraq. But one thing that the Americans are structurally unable to consider is that they might have become irrelevant in Iraq. Such is the national vanity, such is the manic wavering between passion and indifference.

The government of the Medici having subdued all its avowed enemies in order to obtain for that family undivided authority, and distinguish them from other citizens in their relation to the rest, found it necessary to subdue those who secretly plotted against them.

This is how Machiavelli, in The History of Florence, begins the narrative of the Pazzi conspiracy.

The Pazzis rivaled the Medicis in wealth and power in Florence. The Pope, who was an enemy of the Medicis, favored them. Lorenzo, in 1466, was the head of the Medici clan. He was, as Machiavelli puts it, “young and flush with power”. Jacobo was the head of the Pazzis. He had a natural daughter – whose marriage to a Medici had been arranged by Lorenzo – and a number of nephews.

Lorenzo, who feared the power of the Pazzis, began against them a campaign of petty affronts. It is by such half measures, such trivial breaks in the normality of the everyday, that power crystalizes. Trotsky found this out very well in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death. The crowd that wasn't there when he was to address them -- the newspaper article that didn't appear -- the supporter who was suddenly arrested by the police -- troubles with the phone. Kafka had a prophetic sense of this, which is why, next to The Prince, the best book on power and politics in the Western canon is The Trial.

Out of small injuries an idea arose among the Pazzi nephews: the idea was that their fortune would be better if Lorenzo was dead. The first instigator of the idea lived mostly in Rome, and communicated with such powers as were, for one reason or another, disposed to dislike the Medici. From that dislike, they projected a latent dislike of the Medici in Florence, an ambiant williness, on the street level, to see the Medici family ruined.

Jacobo wasn’t so sure.

The idea became a plan, nevertheless; the pope was attracted to it, various of the enemies of the Medici were attracted to it, and it took on money and dates, as plans like this have a tendency to. However, when the conspirators got together in Florence, they kept having the problem of bringing together Lorenzo and his brother, Giuliano, in one spot for killing. If the brothers were separated, the Medici had the possibility of countering the Pazzi assassins.

“With this intention they appointed Sunday, the twenty-sixth of April, 1478, to give a great feast; and, resolving to assassinate them at table, the conspirators met on the Saturday evening to arrange all proceedings for the following day. In the morning it was intimated to Francesco that Giuliano would be absent; on which the conspirators again assembled and finding they could no longer defer the execution of their design, since it would be impossible among so many to preserve secrecy, they determined to complete it in the cathedral church of Santa Reparata, where the cardinal attending, the two brothers would be present as usual.”

So, the problem here becomes very specific: how to assassinate two guarded leaders in a church. The Pazzis, at the last moment, were deserted by the man they were counting on to lead the assassination squad, and so had to induce two priests to assail the Medicis. Machiavelli coolly comments: “for if firmness and resolution joined with experience in bloodshed be necessary upon any occasion, it is on such as these; and it often happens that those who are expert in arms, and have faced death in all forms on the field of battle, still fail in an affair like this.”

Indeed. The morning of the 26th, the conspirators get their game going: “The conspirators proceeded to Santa Reparata, where the cardinal and Lorenzo had already arrived. The church was crowded, and divine service commenced before Giuliano’s arrival. Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini, who were appointed to be his murderers, went to his house, and finding him, they, by earnest entreaties, prevailed upon him to accompany them. It is surprising that such intense hatred, and designs so full of horror as those of Francesco and Bernardo, could be so perfectly concealed; for while conducting him to the church, and after they had reached it, they amused him with jests and playful discourse.”

Machiavelli displays that rhetorical touch that makes him so enigmaticly fascinating. A more superstitious (i.e., religious, or American) writer would find the murderers behavior suprising on moral grounds, since after all, human behavior just comes down to good or evil. Machiavelli, however, is more interested in the concealment. The mask is psychologically difficult, so one does want to know how those who successfully mask their thoughts proceed. How do you create the psychological state that would allow you to do this? That is his concern. Instead of good and evil, we are dealing with the norm and its exceptions.

At a signal from the cardinal – the elevation of the host – the attack was mounted. The Pazzi successfully brought down Giuliano. However, the priests only wounded Lorenzo, who made it out of to another part of the church. Meanwhile, other conspirators (the Archbishop de’ Salviati and Jacopo di Poggio) went to the signory – the counsel that officially ruled Florence – thinking that they would destroy the Medici adherents and cow the others. It didn’t work out that way. The counsel and its guards attacked the archbishop and di Poggio’s men. Soon the body of the archibishop was hanging from a window of the signory.

Lorenzo, it turned out, was popular in Florence – Machiavelli makes several ironic comments about the people’s sense of liberty having been suitably put to sleep by the people’s sense of greed, which was fed well by the Medici prosperity. The Pazzis failed to stage a revolt, and so the conspirators each tried to escape as they could. Here’s what happened to Jacobo:

Jacopo de’ Pazzi was taken while crossing the mountains of Romagna, for the inhabitants of these parts having heard what had occurred, and seeing him in flight, attacked and brought him back to the city; nor could he, though he frequently endeavored, prevail with them to put him to death upon the road. Jacopo and Rinato were condemned within four days after the murder of Giuliano. And though so many deaths had been inflicted that the roads were covered with fragments of human bodies, not one excited a feeling of regret, except that of Rinato; for he was considered a wise and good man, and possessed none of the pride for which the rest of his family were notorious. As if to mark the event by some extraordinary circumstance, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, after having been buried in the tomb of his ancestors, was disinterred like an excommunicated person, and thrown into a hole at the outside of the city walls; from this grave he was taken, and with the halter in which he had been hanged, his body was dragged naked through the city, and, as if unfit for sepulture on earth, thrown by the populace into the Arno, whose waters were then very high. It was an awful instance of the instability of fortune, to see so wealthy a man, possessing the utmost earthly felicity, brought down to such a depth of misery, such utter ruin and extreme degradation. It is said he had vices, among which were gaming and profane swearing, to which he was very much addicted; but these seem more than balanced by his numerous charities, for he relieved many in distress, and bestowed much money for pious uses. It may also be recorded in his favor, that upon the Saturday preceding the death of Giuliano, in order that none might suffer from his misfortunes, he discharged all his debts; and whatever property he possessed belonging to others, either in his own house or his place of business, he was particularly careful to return to its owners.”

Machiavelli always tells the moral of his stories before he tells the stories. Our modern habit is to reverse that order. So I retain for last what Machiavelli told first:

“But after the … government became so entirely centred in the Medici, and they acquired so much authority, that discontented spirits were obliged either to suffer in silence, or, if desirous to destroy them, to attempt it in secrecy, and by clandestine means;; which plots rarely succeed and most commonly involve the ruin of those concerned in them, while they frequently contribute to the aggrandizement of those against whom they are directed. Thus the prince of a city attacked by a conspiracy, if not slain like the duke of Milan (which seldom happens), almost always attains to a greater degree of power, and very often has his good disposition perverted to evil. The proceedings of his enemies give him cause for fear; fear suggests the necessity of providing for his own safety, which involves the injury of others; and hence arise animosities, and not unfrequently his ruin. Thus these conspiracies quickly occasion the destruction of their contrivers, and, in time, inevitably injure their primary object.”

We have our own object in bringing up this old story. We see certain lessons from Machiavelli which apply to Iraq. We will draw them in another post.