piss factory

LI was buying groceries the other night, when we overheard a conversation between the guy ahead of us and one of the cashiers, a man who had some illness that made his movements angularly spastic and gave that uncertainty of pitch to his voice to make one suspect that his brain is somehow diminished; although, in reality, it isn’t, and he eventually does with his body what we can do with ours, although following a different nervous routine to do it. The two were talking about a common acquaintance, and it soon became obvious that the cashier and the customer had met when the cashier and the customer’s wife worked up in Round Rock, at the Dell factory. The cashier said he had been “delled” – fired for something.

We are interested in mentions of Dell, because more than once we’ve thought about applying for a line job there ourselves. Ten bucks an hour, and all the bad vibe labor atmosphere you could swallow – as many people who have worked at Dell have assured us. In general, we have a certain nostalgia for factory work, although nobody in our family (save a stray uncle) ever really went from (as Springsteen put it) the mansions of pain to the mansions of fear, or something like that. Any lefty is automatically interested in manufacture – wasn’t this, at one time, the key to our world, the commonality among the constituency? The key has been withdrawn, the constituency fucked over. Take the Amtrack from New York City to New Haven and it is like a Disney train touring the gutted factory exhibit. Anyway, we found the new Granta issue about factories interesting. Here’s the first graf of Luc Sante’s essay:

“I was fated to work in a factory. I was born in a Belgian textile-factory town, and my ancestors had worked in the mills for at least two or three centuries before I came along. Almost all of them were employed by Simonis, once the most prominent of many local makers of worsted cloth, now the world's leading manufacturer of billiard-table baize. It is very nearly the last survivor of a once-crowded industrial hub. My father managed to avoid working in the textile plants, but he couldn't help being employed by ancillary businesses; there wasn't anything else. When I was born he had been working for about five years in an iron foundry that made equipment for the plants. When the industry collapsed a few years later the foundry, like so many other local businesses, fell with it. We emigrated to the United States, where the initial promise of new and fulfilling employment soon gave way to uncertainty, then near-despair. Eventually my father was hired by yet another factory, which manufactured pipes and rods from a hard, resilient, slippery synthetic that for household applications is trademarked Teflon. He worked there until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. Immediately thereafter he began displaying symptoms of Parkinson's disease, unprovably but almost certainly the result of twenty-seven years' daily exposure to ambient powdered fluorocarbons. Dementia followed a decade later. His death at eighty came as a consequence of his refusing food and drink for a week, a mode of death known in nursing-home jargon as 'Alzheimer's suicide'.”

Sante’s description of working to pay for college at a plastics factory reminded me of one of my brother’s first gigs. He was around eighteen, and we were roommates – his first place outside my parents’ house. He’d gotten a job at a factory that made something – could it have been containers? I forget, now – that required immense amounts of cutting. Unfortunately, the workers, in order to endure the grinding tedium of the place, were almost always either stoned or drunk. This had a deleterious effect on their reaction time when it came to removing a limb or a hand from the way of a cutter – hence, your general OSHA meltdown. That job put me in a sweat – the more my brother worked there, the surer I was that he was going to become a victim. Luckily, he began to believe the same thing, and so he quit.

The bloody sacrifices of brain and body that have gone into building up an American governing class that has turned out to be as untrustworthy, incorrigibly rapacious, and utterly devoted to endless military aggression as has ours, in the age of Bush, makes for melancholic reflection. Unless you have strict periods in which you guillotine certain members of the ruling class to put the fear of God into them, they are useless -- apparently there is some pre-set program inside them that incites them, lemming like, to historic disasters. Perhaps it is the vast bad karma that floats up from all the cramped muscles, the boredom, the monkey-fying of the brain, the global effect of the system upon numberless bodies.

Two other grafs. This is after Sante’s description of working in the plastic factory:

“I was about to be sprung from my class status. My father worked in a factory, my parents owned a tiny house and a secondhand car, they were socially awkward and didn't speak very good English; I didn't really know what a rise in status would entail. I had no desire to work in finance or to join any clubs. All I knew was that I would be avoiding the sort of life to which my parents had been sentenced. Nevertheless, I referred to myself as working class, and was even more insistent about it in college, when I met kids from fancy backgrounds. This was partly in emulation of my proudly Socialist father, partly because I was an outsider in so many ways that I had no choice but to be defiant about it, and partly because it was 1972. Revolution, the great panacea of a few years earlier, had definitively been scratched, but hopes had not yet crumbled.

Neither had a certain romantic notion of the working class. The United States was famously supposed to be classless, of course, but then almost everybody knew better. In 1972 the working class (along with a few other more or less murky categories, such as 'street people' and 'our brothers and sisters in prison') was still being floated among middle-class would-be revolutionaries as an edifying model for imitation and as a permanent source of guilt. It was a bit complicated, because 'hard-hats', unassailably working class, had beaten up antiwar protesters on the streets of New York City and been hailed as pillars of the Silent Majority by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But there remained the lingering aura of the Wobblies, of the miners' strikes and auto-workers' strikes of the 1930s, as well as a cascade of images from the Paris Commune and the October Revolution and the Long March. We imagined basking in the radiance of that aura when we wore our blue chambray shirts and listened to the MC5, not suspecting that within a decade or two so much of American industry would be exported or terminated. Then the remnants of the working class would either be handed neckties and told they were middle class, or forced into fast-food uniforms and told they didn't exist.”

Note: the website has accidentally reproduced Sante’s article twice. Read it.

Here lies the Coalheaver

Having fallen out of love with the daughters of Urthona, LI has been curious, lately, about this place. America: did it ever harbor the fine, high promise of lifting the man forged manacles of an artificial and perverting social necessity from the human soul – did we ever have territories to light out to, or was it all gamed from the get go? We decided that it was time to read Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine is a puzzle. We’ve been reading the American Crisis. Talk about your embedded reporter – Paine joined the Continental Troops in New Jersey and watched Howe’s troops march from New York City to Philadelphia, capturing the latter in 1777. As he puts it, beautifully, in the American Crisis, I:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.”

Now that is language for you. If there is any use to polemics, it is that they aid the “mind growing through a crisis” – they record that experience in garish knife strokes grooved into the mind, so it glows through the posterior amnesia that we’d like to settle down over the pains and gaps of the past, over the sheer excessive loss, over our overwhelming stupidity. It is curious to think that Paine should know this so well in 1777 – or so well in 1776, when he wrote Common Sense. Paine, after all, was a very recent immigrant from England, and had, until then, made a series of blunders both in Thetford, the village in which he grew up, and London, to which he immigrated in the vain hope of promoting himself, which included a failed marriage, various failed businesses, and little formal education. How he got his voice and his conviction is a bit of a mystery – or at least, to us, the inheritors of the monuments of the privileged classes and their shills, insofar as working class cultural zones open and close in history and leave dark tracks outside the main course of it layed down for those who know how to see it, or want to see it. Not that there is a complete divergence – quite the contrary, at crucial moments the natural order of things is shaken by lumpen or working class energy all the way to the top. But the top has amazing powers of recuperation, generates amazing tentacular re-births, and has to be chopped into bits by every succeeding generation all over again.

At Thomas Paine org there is a set of online bios, including one by Robert Ingersoll and one by Thomas Alva Edison. Conway’s bio, done in 1890, is very quaint. In this passage, a working class cultural zone is briefly glimpsed. The twenty seven year old Paine moves to the small English village of Lewes to take a government position there:

"Paine" was an historic name in Lewes also. In 1688 two French refugees, William and Aaron Paine, came to the ancient town, and found there as much religious persecution as in France. It was directed chiefly against the Quakers. But when Thomas Paine went to dwell there the Quakers and the "powers that be" had reached a modus vivendi, and the new exciseman fixed his abode with a venerable Friend, Samuel Ollive, a tobacconist. The house then adjoined a Quaker meetinghouse, now a Unitarian chapel. It is a quaint house, always known and described as "the house with the monkey on it." The projecting roof is supported by a female nondescript rather more human than anthropoid. I was politely shown through the house by its occupant, Mr. Champion, and observed in the cellar traces of Samuel Ollive's -- afterward Paine's -- tobacco mill. The best room upstairs long bore on its wall "Tom Paine's study." The plaster has now flaked off, but the proprietor, Mr. Alfred Hammond, told me that he remembers it there in 1840. Not far from the house is the old mansion of the Shelleys, -- still called "The Shelleys," -- ancestors of a poet born with the "Rights of Man," and a child of Paine's revolution. And -- such are the moral zones and poles in every English town -- here in the graveyard of Jireh Chapel -- is the tomb of William Huntington S. S. [Sinner Saved] bearing this epitaph:

"Here lies the Coalheaver, beloved of God, but abhorred of men: the omniscient judge, at the grand assize, shall ratify and confirm that to the confusion of many thousands; for England and its metropolis shall know that there hath been a prophet among them. W. H : S. S."
While Paine was at Lewes this Hunt alias Huntington was a pious tramp in that part of England, well known to the police. Yet in his rubbish there is one realistic story of tramp-life which incidentally portrays an exciseman of the time. Huntington (born 1744), one of the eleven children of a day-laborer earning from seven to nine shillings a week in Kent, was sent by some friends to an infant school.

"And here I remember to have heard my mistress reprove me for something wrong, telling me that God Almighty took notice of children's sins. It stuck to my conscience a great while; and who this God Almighty could be I could not conjecture; and how he could know my sins without asking my mother I could not conceive. At that time there was a person named Godfrey, an exciseman in the town, a man of a stern and hard-favoured countenance, whom I took notice of for having a stick covered with figures, and an ink-bottle hanging at the button-hole of his coat. I imagined that man to be employed by God Almighty to take notice, and keep an account of children's sins; and once I got into the market-house, and watched him very narrowly, and found that he was always in a hurry by his walking so fast; and I thought he had need to hurry, as he must have a deal to do to find out all the sins of children. I watched him out of one shop into another, all about the town, and from that time eyed him as a most formidable being, and the greatest enemy I had in all the world."

I've seen that exciseman. He operates as a narc, a counter-terrorist agent, and an advisor to Donald Rumsfeld.

Paine obviously comes out of the same roots that brought forth William Blake – and Shelley.

LI will have more to say about him in another post.

The masons are in retreat

It seems like a good day to recall Pius IX.

Pio Nono, it is said, was a great favorite of the present Pope’s (present, as of today). This is no doubt why, in 2000, his beatification was set in motion. Commonweal at the time published an article (“No No Pio Nono” ) that began straightforwardly enough:

“Is Pope Pius IX, who occupied the throne of Peter from 1846 to 1878, with God? We certainly hope so. But is this author of the notorious "Syllabus of Errors" (1864), diehard defender of the papacy's temporal rule, unyielding foe of freedom of conscience, speech, thought, and religion, of Protestantism, ecumenism, and the separation of church and state, a figure to be singled out for public veneration by the Catholic church? Is this a man whose life and character should be celebrated and held up for imitation? And should he be yoked, in memory and honor, with Pope John XXIII who called the Second Vatican Council, in part, to heal the wounds that Pius spent much of his pontificate inflicting on the church and European society?”

In the same year, the Massachusetts Review published an article on the continuity between Pius IX and John Paul II: :A Nineteenth-Century Church for the New Millennium: The Legacy of Pius IX and John Paul II” by Bob Swacker and Brian Deimling. Pius IX was elected Pope two years before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto. He was, supposedly, a liberal. He turned out to be the most recalcitrant of reactionaries, and in nothing so reactionary as in his clinging to temporal power in Rome, however shrunken the territory. It was Pius IX who made the doctrine of papal infallibility official, thus setting up a paradox of performativity that even Austin could not untangle.

Here’s a nice summary of Pius IX’s work:

“Pius's great work was the Vatican Council he convened in 1870. Here was his chance to do battle with Voltaire, Locke, Marx, Mazzini, Darwin and all the others whose perfidious beliefs and theories challenged his worldview. He spent his entire papacy with the council's planning, building up the papacy to set this council apart from the counciliar tradition m which the bishops discussed and debated doctrinal questions. The Vatican Council would be completely dominated by the Bishop of Rome.

Pius had backed out on Mazzini in the 1848 nationalist attempt to unify Italy. A dozen years later he stood against Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel when a united Italy was proclaimed, because it included the Papal States and had its eyes on Rome. When King Victor Emmanuel's popular plebiscite on the incorporation of Rome into Italy as the new capital (since 1862 it had been Florence) won 153,681 to 1,507 Pius petulantly retreated to the 108.7-acre Vatican enclave as a "prisoner." He lashed out, calling on Italians to boycott the new Italian government. (Neither he nor his successors left the grounds until the 1929 Lateran Accord with Mussolini "liberated" them and gave the Catholic Church educational access to the Italian public school system and Vatican control over public morals m Rome, as well as a significant indemnity. The price was a begrudging papal acceptance of the political reality of Italy.)

Always a supporter of religious freedom for Catholics, Pius signed an 1851 Concordat with Isabella II of Spain and a similar agreement in 1855 with Austria's Franz Josef opposing religious rights for anyone except Catholics. His opposition to democracy and republicanism provoked reaction in Western Europe where democratic impulses were gaining ground, and also in the United States where his opposition to public schools and the social work of Protestant benevolent associations intensified Nativist sentiments and anti-immigrant hostility. Needless to say, the pope opposed socialism and trade unionism.”

John Paul II obviously saw his own reflection in this predecessor, but the unfortunate constraints of modernity have kept the Church from pursuing the goal of religious and moral monopoly with quite Piux IX’s vigor.

When Andre Gide wrote the Cellars of the Vatican, he infused into it the pantomime conspiracy of Masons against Catholics – a conspiracy that was, nevertheless, firmly believed by Catholics in the nineteenth century. For Americans, who think of Masons as, vaguely, Shriners without the funny hats, or at best as the inspiration for the Magic Flute, this is preposterous – it is like supposing a conventicle of the Optimist Society pulled the strings to bring about the Cold War. But Pius IX’s supporters – his name rallies the anti-modernist faction in the Church – is still wary of those Masons.

And of course, Pius IX did have a problem with the Jews…

Piux IX died in 1878. Dead, he could be moved from the Vatican. When, however, his body was being transferred in a coffin on July 12, 1881, the procession was attacked by a Roman mob bent on tossing the late pontiff’s remains into the Tiber. They were repelled, eventually, which is why the remains could remain perfectly sweet, according to a report made to his beatification committee in 2000, as is befitting a saint.

Pius IX has good reason to smell sweet in 2005. The rise of anti-semitism is going along swimmingly. In Russia, an attack on an art exhibit that the Orthodox Church viewed as blasphemous has resulted in a fine – given to the artists. The United States, so influenced, at one time, by democracy, is settling down in a mix of oligarchy and theocracy, and has embarked on a crusade in the Middle East with very Christian overtones. Everywhere, the enemies of the church – Voltairism, tolerance, science – are in retreat. The Masons are fleeing.

Trying to make my comments section work on both Mozilla and IE6, LI inadvertantly erased all the comments. It has been a blogger hell morning. Sorry. The comments section should work, however, on all browsers.

A couple of days ago, LI took our inner Mencken out for a stroll over a conservative blog, Right Reason. One of the guys who produces Right Reason, Max Goss, actually noticed -- which pleases our vanity, we must admit, even as it has become a bit of a bemusement how, properly, to respond. Goss makes four points about our post, but doesn't address the central issue in it, re the contemporary conservative drift from the central theme of conservatism. We think that there is one justified complaint running through all of Goss's objections, which is that we used a disproportionately defamatory tone when writing about the weblog, without really quoting from it. As he says,

4. "Right Reason is the perfect blog for the era of big government conservatives: it is bold, brassy, and speaks in talk radio vulgate for the vulgar." Here I am simply at a loss. Which posts resemble the speech of, say, Michael Savage?"

That said, we think Goss doesn't quite get LI's objection to what we have labeled the "factionalism" on display at RR. We don't object to a conservative analysis of, say, central elements in analytic philosophy -- or to simply making observations about analytic philosophy. Between that, however, and the question, "is analytic philosophy conservative?", there is a world of difference. The later question thrusts politics -- and identity politics, at that -- into a pre-eminence in a domain properly defined outside the political sphere that violates the precepts of the whole conservative tradition, which is about preserving the separation of politics and other domains of culture.

Once you make the move towards creating an identity politics out of conservatism, the voice will follow. No, not the voice of Michael Savage, the writers of RR surely are smarter than that, but certainly the tiresome voice of academic identity politics which filters down to the Savage level.

What instigated pouring out the vials of opprobrium on RR? It was a post entitled High Culture and Conservatism, which began:

"American political conservatives enjoy an uneasy relationship with high culture.

There are, of course, those who define their conservatism precisely in terms of high culture - of the preservation and transmission from past to future generations of "the best that has been thought and written."
But economic and religious conservatives might wonder what's in it for them. For it is far from obvious that the canonical works of literature, music and visual art are much help, on the whole, when it comes to defending the free market or the altar and hearth. It would be one thing if the canon consisted primarily in the holy scriptures of democratic capitalism and Christianity. But these days it is liable to incorporate Marx alongside Adam Smith and Nietzsche alongside the Bible.

Moreover, the present-day heirs of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot who man the high cultural battlements, notably in the pages of The New Criterion, seem to have welcomed the whole of modernism into the keep. But, for better or worse, the average American political conservative has probably never even quite swallowed The Wasteland or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. So is he at all likely to get much more out of the works of, say, Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning than he does out of Piss Christ or the chocolate-covered Karen Finley? Perhaps he may be forgiven for wondering whether he has much at stake in the struggle to defend traditions that culminate in the likes of abstract expressionism and serialism against the assaults of the postmodernist wreckers. Better, perhaps, to abolish the National Endowments altogether, defund college humanities divisions that seem to do nothing useful anyway, and head down to the NASCAR track, put on a Garth Brooks album, or take in a movie. After all, while Mel Gibson may not have the highest of brows, at least he can be counted on to fight the good fight for God and country, and to keep you awake while doing so."

This hairsplitting -- the economic conservatives, the political conservatives, and the conservatives that drive Candy Red Trans Ams - is very much what LI was talking about. And the idea that we dicker about High Culture with people who have no education in it, on the principle that, I suppose, education is unnecessary for an opinion in these things, was once labelled, by some conservative, the ideology of "trousered apes."

So: that's the bone we have to pick. Still, Max, who was nice enough to reply to us, was right to point out that, with the time and effort that goes into putting up a collective weblog, we were much too hasty in generalizing about it, and that it has more potential than we gave it credit for in our post -- we were attacking it as a stalking horse for all the sins of contemporary conservatism. Sorry, Max.

"clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences, at all."

LI recommends William Logan’s article on Whitman in this season’s Virginia Quarterly Review: Prisoner, Fancy-Man, Rowdy, Lawyer, Physician, Priest: Whitman's Brags. (inexplicably, they don’t have the toc up on their site).

A brag comes, Logan claims, from the Scot’s practice of flyting:

"Whitman's poetry treated American English—I mean the English that Americans spoke—as more than a dialect, not tbe literary English of literary men. Literary English was a censored language, but not all America was censored. Listen:

I'm a Salt River roarer! I'm a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from
the ol' Massassip'i WHOOP! . . . I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turkle. I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin' an' every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o' sunshine. I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight,
rough-an'-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an' back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an' see how tough I am to chaw!

“Come on you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics. Tbat's Wbitman's talk. But it's not Wbitman; it's a brag reputedly by Mike Fink, tales of whom were current wben Wbitman was a boy. (The rest o' me is crooked snags—that might bave been Wbitman's motto.) The Americans sometimes called such boasting a brag; but Scottisb poets in the sixteenth and later centuries knew it as a flyting, a bout of cursing or poetic invective, a slanging match between two poets who swaggered or slandered as they chose. The brag echoed Homeric vaunts before battle, the boasts of Beowulf, the bowls of the sagas. Such word battles must bave reached tbe American binterland early, possibly with Scotcb-Irish settlers who drew upon their literary tradition or the tavern duels on wbich their poets once had eavesdropped.”

I wonder about the “echoing of Homeric vaunts”, here. I imagine it is more likely that the brag comes from the same source – the warrior end of society, its ethos refined among those for whom language is always there, the song on the tongue. American Indians no doubt had their own tradition of the brag, and certainly it overflows in hip hop; and struggles, obscurely, in advertisement, porno, and among salesmen. From Mike Finn to Bush’s “bring it on,” it is both central to the American self perception and the alienated child of twentieth century suburbia, a partaker in American good and evil, the Hiroshima locked inside the Statue of Liberty.

Logan isn’t giving us a radically new look at Whitman in his essay, but he nicely sees that the vulgar tongue is not free of genre – far from it.

The freak show ideology of big government conservatism

My friend Paul wrote me a while ago to recommend that I visit Right Reason. He said that it was a site aiming at becoming a sort of rightwing version of Common Timber. So I visited the site, but was shocked to find that I knew some of the writers. In fact, I had T.A.-ed for one in the long ago.

My acquaintance entailed strong and negative extra-ideological opinions. However, I do believe the writers there that I know are highly intelligent. All the more reason to find the site rather shocking. If you compare an average week of posting on Right Reason with, say, an issue of National Review from 1966, you will find a catastrophic lowering of the intellectual level. In the age of big government conservatism, the freak show faction, which has always played a large role in practical conservative politics, has taken over the brain. Gangrene has set in.

What happened? American conservatism in 1966 was embedded in a struggle with world wide communism – as it saw it – and that struggle gae the movement and its thinkers an aura of some nobility, gave its scope some grandeur, even if you suspected that much of the struggle was delusive. There were reasons to be Manichean, in 1966. Besides which, European and American intellectuals who had been forged in the leftist culture of the thirties and forties and then converted, by way of anti-communism, to some version of Burkean conservatism, infused the movement with an intellectual vigor and scrupulousness that made the National Review, in its heyday, one of the great American journals.

This is all, apparently, gone. In its place, the writers at Right Reason spend their time tirelessly debating such questions as: is analytic philosophy conservative? or high culture? Or Stilton Cheese…

A real conservative would recognize this style for what it is – the kind of factionalism that, from the conservative point of view, inevitably marks the decline of a culture when, as Burke said, the ‘theorists’ gain power. The condemnation of factions runs from Swift to Burke to Disraeli as a constant in conservative thinking; it is a constant derived from the central theme and the central problem of modern conservatism.

The central theme, in conservative thought, is order. And the central problem is progress.

That there is progress in human affairs conservatives do not deny. Rather, they specify its temporal limits. Progress is what happens on a secondary cultural level – the level, for instance, of science, or of opulence. The conservative, having firmly in mind the difference between the real of human nature and the realm of social processes, is always looking for ways to subordinate progress in society – or, rather, limit it to its proper sphere. This is the reason that the ‘classic’ is of peculiar importance for the conservative. The classic takes the immediate struggles which mark the sphere of social process – the sphere in which progress has its mythical justifications – and endows it with that perspective (regardless of the artist’s particular technique) that hints at a higher order which no social process can overturn.

But at Right Reason, such conservatism is dross. This is a conservatism uniquely dedicated to having no standards at all, on the principle that my opinion is as good as your opinion. This is why the posts on “high culture’ are particularly without merit – odd, on a site that includes, as a writer, Roger Kimball.

Perhaps it is appropriate that today’s conservatives are busy erecting a large tombstone over yesterday’s conservatives – in fact, destroying themselves from within. The theology of the visceral, preached by evangelicals, is the dead opposite of conservative – the kind of emotional orgy that has haunted the conservative imagination throughout its history. The embrace of the revivalist meeting is the end of real conservatism, period. Only its zombie like corpse remains.

This doesn’t mean conservatism is really dead – it is simply dead at the top. Right Reason is the perfect blog for the era of big government conservatives: it is bold, brassy, and speaks in talk radio vulgate for the vulgar. Like Emerson (who was, at one time, a litmus test for old line conservatives – the instinctive dislike of Emerson was a sort of party badge of American conservatism), LI believes conservatism is as perennial as the temperament that gives rise to it. The way ideological space has been divvied out during the Bush years, however, it is obvious that the conservative temperament is and will be for the foreseeable future more at home on the left than on the right.

Another fine colonial war you've got us into, Stanley!

“Keep the dogs hungry and they will follow you.” That, according to journalist Chris Kutschera, was the motto of Sultan Said bin Taimur, who ruled Oman and Muscat, as it was called, from 1932 to 1970. Kutschera’s color piece tells a lot about Oman at the time.

“There were, in all Oman and Dhofar, three primary schools and not a single secondary school. Students who wanted to pursue their studies had to leave their country illegally and start a long life of exile in the Persian Gulf or Kuwait. It was forbidden to build new houses, or to repair the old ones; forbidden to install a lavatory or a gas stove; forbidden to cultivate new land, or to buy a car without the Sultan’s permission.

No one could smoke in the streets, go to movies or beat drums; the army used to have a band, but one day the Sultan had the instruments thrown into the sea. A few foreigners opened a club: he had it shut, “probably because it was a place where one could have fun”, says one of his former victims. Three hours after sunset, the city gates were closed.

No foreigner was allowed to visit Muscat without the Sultan’s personal permission, and sailors on ships anchored at Muscat could not land. Not a single paper was printed in the country. All political life was prohibited and the prisons were full. Sultan Said was surrounded by official slaves in his palace at Salalah, where time was marked in Pavlovian fashion by a bell which rang every four hours. But one day the dogs got too hungry, and they tore the Sultan almost to death.”

The politics of the Arabian Peninsula in the fifties and through the sixties were shaped by a number of rivalries: that between the Saudis and Nassar; that between the Americans and the Russians; and that latent and silent struggle between the declining colonial power of Britain and the Americans. It was part of the last named rivalry that Britain took the side of Oman in its border dispute with Saudi Arabia – which regarded Oman much the way Saddam Hussein regarded Kuwait. Sultan Taimur was an anglophile. Although foreigners, including Brits, were not welcomed to roam the country, British military men provided the real security advice and structure in Oman. It was the British who helped Taimur put down various revolts against his power. What the British couldn’t quench, immediately, was a revolt that sprang up in Dhofar, that region of Oman that bordered The Democratic Republic ofYemen. The original insurgency was simply that of the aggrieved, but it evolved into that third world special, Marxist revolutionaries. The two division of what eventually became known as the “Popular Front for the Liberation of the occupied Arabian Gulf” were named after Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara – names that are a little hoary, now, but that, in the sixties, had enormous magical power. The Marxists wanted to secularize, provide health care and education for women, etc., etc. – all of the things that Western policy in the Middle East was dead against for fifty years. So naturally the British had to do something. What they did was “loan” Oman use of the SAS, and build the Sultan (who had forbidden the use of glasses as an intolerable modern affront) an air force. There’s a nice, Kipling-esque account of the war on this Small Wars site. It would probably be accurate to call the Dhofar war the last classic colonial struggle undertaken by the British.

The impediment to stopping communist subversion in the Persian gulf, it turned out, was the incorrigibly backwards Taimur. So he was overthrown in a coup that is surrounded by the usual Cold War murk – the Brits most likely pulling the strings, but no chain of evidence leading directly to any order. Thus they elevating his British educated son, the present Sultan, Qaboos, and kicked the war into higher gear.

“By July 1970, the province of Dhofar in western Oman was almost entirely in the hands of Communist-backed rebels belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). The Sultan of Oman had failed to recognise the danger and had done little to gain support among the indigenous people of Dhofar. The province was ideal guerrilla country, being dominated by a range of mountains in which the Sultan's Armed Forces found it difficult to operate. On 23rd July, the Sultan's son Qaboos bin Said, seized power in a palace coup to try and save his inheritance. He immediately introduced policies based on British counter-insurgency operations (COIN) and new government agencies were set up, designed to modernize Oman and persuade the ordinary people that the Sultan was worth supporting. Elements of 22 SAS were sent to help the expanded SAF defeat the PFLOAG.”

However, the British ability and willingness to sustain a war in the Arabian peninsula in the seventies was dependent on the rotten financial situation of the British economy, as well as emergencies closer to home, as in Northern Ireland. So Sultan Qaboos turned elsewhere – namely, to the Shah of Iran. Not only was a generation of British military men trained in the Dhofar war – by the end, it became an exercise field for the planes the Americans had sold the Shah .

The Dhofar War

LI’s memory was pinged, recently, when we read a jolly, he’s-a-mercenary-so-he’s-okay interview by Thomas Catan with the head of an agency of hired killers, Alistair Morrison, in the Financial Times. Here’s how the article starts:

“As a waiter leads me to the table where Alastair Morrison is sitting, I brace myself for a bone-crushing military hand grip and a sergeant-major greeting.

I needn't have worried. For a former SAS hardman - famous for storming a Lufthansa airliner in 1970s Mogadishu and liquidating the hijackers onboard - he has a pleasant, soft-spoken way about him. Immaculately dressed in a dark blazer and tie, he sits in a neat, self-contained manner, his back against the wall. I find myself leaning nearly halfway across the table to hear what he is saying.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Morrison pioneered the modern- day private military industry (a term he dislikes), which has since burgeoned into a multi-billion pound global business. "I never envisaged the market growing to this size," he says, shaking his head.”

There are buzzards, which are ugly, carrion eating birds with scrawny necks; and there are buzzard flatterers, which are completely off the scale, zoologically speaking.

Morrison, it turns out, “has been a continuous presence in the industry and a force behind many of the companies now operating in Iraq: Erinys, Hart Group, ArmorGroup and Kroll.” It would take us a little off course to link to articles about each and every one of these companies. Suffice it to say that, of ArmorGroup, the American division now wholly independent and providing our troops in Iraq with their famous armor, with which the troops are unpatriotically dissatisfied, and in England, they are even more tentacularly busy -- this is from the Scotsman:

”A PRIVATE security company headed by former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind is making millions from a contract to protect Foreign Office staff working in Iraq, it emerged last night.

ArmorGroup, the biggest ‘mercenary’ security firm working in Iraq, is one of two companies that have raked in a total of £15m between them for providing round-the-clock cover in the treacherous environment of post-war Iraq during the past year.

Rifkind, the Tory candidate in Kensington and Chelsea, sparked protests from political opponents last month when he took over the chairmanship of ArmorGroup, which has 700 employees in Iraq.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has admitted they are paying the company - along with Control Risks - £50,000 every day to protect its bureaucrats stationed in Iraq, amid mounting concerns about the safety of civilians in the war-torn country.”

However, that Morrison is a white devil and that Catan never posed any questions about the questionable influence of his companies in the government isn’t the point, here. We were intrigued, instead, by this sentence: “He fought in the Dhofar war to defeat communist rebels in Oman, then served in Northern Ireland. He turned his hand to counterterrorism in the mid-1970s, when airline hijackings were almost as prevalent as beige and bell-bottoms.”

What Dhofar war? So we decided to research it, and we found a surprising lack of information about the war. Yet it appears that the war was a first blood experience for many Brits – the present Air Force Chief (who bears a name out of Evelyn Waugh -- Sir Jock Stirrup) served, according to his official bio, “on loan with the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force, operating Strikemasters in the Dhofar War.”

So what was this war against “communist insurgents,” and how did it serve the cause of freedom, justice, and democracy in the Middle East? We will leave that to our next post.

Federalism

When John Adams was defending a tri-partite government, he did so by first surveying the political facts as given to him by history. It seems to LI that this is a good way to start talking about politics. We don’t have to invent ideals at the beginning and apply them, because we already have a history of applied ideals. What we do have to see is how the application of those ideals has worked. If we find a discrepancy between the animating principles of an ideal and its consequences, we should then ask whether either the animating principles are wrong, or whether they disguise some other, real principles, or whether the application is wrong.

The case for federalism rests, for some people, on the idea that the smaller the scale of government, the larger the voice of the people in directing it. In other words, there is a correlation between scale and democratic participation.

So much for theory. But when we survey the political facts on the ground in America, we find something startling. Given that one’s vote should count more on a small scale than on a large scale, we would expect the smallest elections to have the largest turnouts, and those elections dealing with more national officers to have the smallest turnouts. But it is precisely the opposite that happens.

In fact, local politics – of the city or the state – turns out to be the venue in which a determined minority has the most say, since it is also the politics that seems to evoke the most indifference among the governed.

Adams noticed this too, even if he didn’t put it in terms of indifference. He put it in terms of an owed deference. He has a long defense of inequality in which this regularly occurring phenomena is looked at, by him, as one of the ways politics can reflect the natural order:

Let us now return to M. Turgot's idea of a government consisting in a single assembly. He tells us our republics are "founded on the equality of all the citizens, and, therefore, 'orders' and 'equilibriums' are unnecessary, and occasion disputes." But what are we to understand here by equality? Are the citizens to be all of the same age, sex, size, strength, stature, activity, courage, hardiness, industry, patience, ingenuity, wealth, knowledge, fame, wit, temperance, constancy, and wisdom? Was there, or will there ever be, a nation, whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer of all mankind must be in the negative. It must then be acknowledged, that in every state, in the Massachusetts, for example, there are inequalities which God and nature have planted there, and which no human legislator ever can eradicate. I should have chosen to have mentioned Virginia, as the most ancient state, or indeed any other in the union, rather than the one that gave me birth, if I were not afraid of putting suppositions which may give offence, a liberty which my neighbors will pardon. Yet I shall say nothing that is not applicable to all the other twelve.

In this society of Massachusettensians then, there is, it is true, a moral and political equality of rights and duties among all the individuals, and as yet no appearance of artificial inequalities of condition, such as hereditary dignities, titles, magistracies, or legal distinctions; and no established marks, as stars, garters, crosses, or ribbons; there are, nevertheless, inequalities of great moment in the consideration of a legislator, because they have a natural and inevitable influence in society. Let us enumerate some of them:--1. There is an inequality of wealth; some individuals, whether by descent from their ancestors, or from greater skill, industry, and success in business, have estates both in lands and goods of great value; others have no property at all; and of all the rest of society, much the greater number are possessed of wealth, in all the variety of degrees between these extremes; it will easily be conceived that all the rich men will have many of the poor, in the various trades, manufactures, and other occupations in life, dependent upon them for their daily bread; many of smaller fortunes will be in their debt, and in many ways under obligations to them; others, in better circumstances, neither dependent nor in debt, men of letters, men of the learned professions, and others, from acquaintance, conversation, and civilities, will be connected with them and attached to them. Nay, farther, it will not be denied, that among the wisest people that live, there is a degree of admiration, abstracted from all dependence, obligation, expectation, or even acquaintance, which accompanies splendid wealth, insures some respect, and bestows some influence. 2. Birth. Let no man be surprised that this species of inequality is introduced here. Let the page in history be quoted, where any nation, ancient or modern, civilized or savage, is mentioned, among whom no difference was made between the citizens, on account of their extraction. The truth is, that more influence is allowed to this advantage in free republics than in despotic governments, or than would be allowed to it in simple monarchies, if severe laws had not been made from age to age to secure it. The children of illustrious families have generally greater advantages of education, and earlier opportunities to be acquainted with public characters, and informed of public affairs, than those of meaner ones, or even than those in middle life; and what is more than all, an habitual national veneration for their names, and the characters of their ancestors described in history, or coming down by tradition, removes them farther from vulgar jealousy and popular envy, and secures them in some degree the favor, the affection, and respect of the public. Will any man pretend that the name of Andros, and that of Winthrop, are heard with the same sensations in any village of New England? Is not gratitude the sentiment that attends the latter, and disgust the feeling excited by the former? In the Massachusetts, then, there are persons descended from some of their ancient governors, counsellors, judges, whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, are remembered with esteem by many living, and who are mentioned in history with applause, as benefactors to the country, while there are others who have no such advantage. May we go a step farther,--Know thyself, is as useful a precept to nations as to men. Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most. The present subject is one of those which all men respect, and all men deride. It may be said of this part of our nature, as Pope said of the whole:--

"Of human nature, wit her worst may write, We all revere it in our own despite."

Unlike Adams, we are not at all happy with the inequalities of wealth and birth. But like Adams, we do see that this is a subject that “all men respect.” This is the reason we have never been particularly moved by the argument for smaller scale government, since it seems to us that this move magnifies, rather than mitigates, oligarchical power.

Given that general case, progressives in the 20^th century have mostly mounted their programs with reference to national entities – the federal government. On the national scale, a progressive organization can summon resources that are sometimes unavailable on the local scale – plus, of course, there is the little fact that the ‘respect’ Adams speaks of is reinforced by real fear – of job loss, of public shaming, of police power, etc., etc. This progressive strategy has, unfortunately, developed a sort of pro-government, meaning Federal government, instinct in progressives. It is the instinct of the homeowner for his home. Which is all well and good – but when the homeowner is kicked out of his home, continuing to act as the homeowner isn’t a forgiveable foible – it is pathology.

We think this is why progressives are so flummoxed by the Bush culture, and thrash about trying to ‘frame’ issues. Really, the issues are framed for you. And the issue that has been framed for the progressives, that stares your Democratic party consultant in the face, is that the government, at the moment, equals the Republican party. Which signals rhetorical opportunity. Since the Repubs have sowed anti-governmental propaganda ever since white Little Rock residents were forced to send their kids to school with blacks. And the Repubs have been the minority party since Roosevelt’s day. They are now the majority party. They are now the government. They are now enjoying the usufructs of being the government – spending money like drunken sailors, destroying rules they don’t like among various states, looking for ways of shunting FICA tax dollars into the pockets of their cronies, etc, etc.

So it is time for progressives to start using anti-government rhetoric, because the government is using anti-progressive power. Simple. This is the program. It isn’t the Republicans, or Bush, who want to steal your social security – it is the Government. It isn’t Tom Delay or the President (whose heart was rung by a white Floridian dying in his brother’s state in ways that the death of ten Democratic voting Indians would never match) who wants to stand between you and your loved ones’ desire not to be reduced, by massive surgery and interminable feeding tubes, to a mass of simple vital signs in Hospital hell for decades – it is the Government. It is the Government that is sending Americans off to die pointlessly in the Middle East, the Government that is siding with credit card companies in an attempt to reduce you to peonage, the Government that is encouraging the depredations of the corporations upon your well being, your environment, and your property.

That’s the deal. Switch strategies accordingly.

Last week, our friend T. – who usually holds down the extensive NYC bureau, with its sweeping views of Central Park, its extensive armentarium of computers put together by God’s little elves, and its News Corp-like budget – supplied the posts while we were gone. We liked the posts; for a long time, we’ve been trying to get T. to put together a web site, or log, or something. Alas, unlike the perpetually underemployed crewe, here, T. actually has a real job, and real prospects.

T. left us with one last post on the Tiger Lillies.

Diana Vreeland in Harper’s Bazaar had a column “Why Don’t You?”

In that spirit: Why don’t you go out and buy some Tiger Lillies CDs. You really ought to.

When R. gave me the keys to LI’s front door, he encouraged me to what I would – profess Paraguayan nationalism, exhort LI’s readers to arms, overturn the laws of every prophet – so I will take this one shot of unmediated endorsement: go, go now and go later to tigerlillies.com and buy something. The Tiger Lillies are perfectly astounding. Songs about pimps, songs about pushers, songs about thieves, an entire album (Farmyard Filth) about sex with animals! If they are known, it might well be due their participation in Shockheaded Peter – the play based on Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter: songs about misbehaving children! Not much chance to see them play live in these States unless you live in or about NYC or San Fran, but if you live in the UK or Russia, there are many opportunities to see them every year (my wife and I will see them in London when we visit that town in May). If you live in such places, go to a goddamned show dammit! While Limited, Inc. may not endorse the band officially and fully, I know that I got its ear when I played many many songs during the drinks and the times we shared together last summer.

"Why don't you . . . Turn your child into an Infanta for a fancy-dress party?" - DV

“Never fear being vulger, just boring.” – Diana Vreeland. If you are not familiar with her, then you are not familiar with one of the great aphorists of the English language. “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” is a favorite; one of the finer statements on ‘beauty’ that these eyes have ever passed over.”

Continuing LI’s Menckenish ecumenicalism (now there’s a phrase, and that’s the only defense I can make of it), on this Good Friday we have searched out some article that can warm our somewhat tepid belief. We found one in the Winter Issue of Common Knowledge: The Presence of Objects by Caroline Walker Bynum – link here to Bynum’s President’s Address to the AHA. The article begins with a small but startling artifact found cemented in the wall of a church in Sternberg, Germany. It is a block of stone with footprints in it. What miracle is attested by those footprints? Well, it seems in 1496, a Jewess stole the eucharist and attempted to drown it. Her attempts were unavailing, and the divinity sunk her feet into stone. It seems, in fact, that the Jews around Sternberg were always bludgeoning eucharists, making them bleed, and in general showing their hard heartedness. A corrupt priest, it was said, delivered a lot of consecrated hosts to the Jews to redeem items pawned by his concubines, and of course they started sticking these things with knives, as was their habit. Hard hearted, these folks. To test just how densely the fibers of their hearts were contracted, the church had sixty five of them tortured, burned twenty seven of them on a hill still known as Judenberg, and expelled the rest.

Such is the history of the Catholic church in a less than life lovin' mode. But these things happened long ago (although certain Catholic bishops, notably the one appointed by the Church to serve the Argentine military, have hopes of reviving Jew-baiting any day now). Bynum’s inventory of objects in the Sternberg church include, quaintly, the heavily scored table at which the Jews assembled to attack the hosts, the iron pot that the concubine got back after the delivery of the hosts, and even a container in which the hosts were stored. The question, of course, is what is one to make of these things now?

In Sternberg, the answer has been, partly, to enroll these objects in the indictment both of the small, distant massacre of the Jews in 1492 and the larger one in the 1933-1945 period. Bynum reports that, in Sternberg’s economic history, the 1492 massacre was no small thing – it made Sternberg the site of a pilgrimage. Sternberg was not alone – it was a common late medieval motif, this of desecrating Jews and miraculously rescued hosts. According to Bynum’s reconstruction, the story of the desecrating Jews as a cause of a pogram is an innovation – in an earlier epoch, the chronicles would recount things like: visitation of grasshoppers, Jews all killed. Afterwards, the desecration story would be woven – not so much to excuse killing Jews, a self explanatory Christian act, but to attract pilgrims, an profitable source of income.

Bynum’s survey leads into Bynum’s argument – that the mass of anti-Jewish objects created in Germany between the 14^th and 16^th centuries should not be destroyed. They should be preserved both to be studied and as probes, as it were, of past cultures. With this argument, LI agrees, even if Bynum’s argument about the aura of objects (Bynum adduces her mother’s old wooden pie rollers) seems, partly, to be the rationalization of an inveterate pack rat impulse.

Now, I could imagine someone pointing out that the Church is no longer a center of anti-Semitism, and has repented quite extensively of its past role. That's true. And, of course, it is also true that the Church is much bigger than its bigotries. To think that it isn't is the mistake, ultimately, of such as Mencken -- it is a foreshortening of the imagination, the critic's vice.

On the other hand, one must remember that the motive for repentence (of certain of those bigotries) came from outside the church – the horror at intolerance, the horror at anti-semitism, were sentiments generated by liberal, secular thinkers, promoted by their controversial disciples, transmitted via outlaw organisations and bohemian enclaves (well, sometimes), and fought against, bitterly, by the Church for two hundred years. Liberal secular thinkers did the Church a favor – in a sense, they brought it much closer to the teachings of Jesus. Moral is: don’t give up now, liberal secularists.

The sedulous flycatcher

There was a faction, after the Bush victory in November, that urged a more compassionate approach to heartland America, outreach on divisive social issues, and even the well tempered expression of faith, on appropriate occasions. LI says to hell with that. Ourselves, we believe that the liberal/left strategy should be one of the fiercest and most unmitigated contempt for the logrollers from the confederacy who are now straddling our necks and digging in their spurs. You will find, here and there, expressions of mild surprise that the rightwing set seems to want to expand the federal government in several ways, and seems headed, as an objective correlative of their real politics, for eight solid years of record deficits. The idea that conservatives once foolishly elevated to power would deny the human impulse to self-aggrandizement to which all conservative theology admiringly refers in the chaste pursuit of small government is, itself, a cause for some amazement: are the depths of human gullibility ever to be plumbed? When a man seeks to reform our vices by throwing himself into the profession of pimp, suspect the purity of grasping heart. And so it is with the chorus of neo-conmen in Congress, who sweat to think that somewhere in America, someone is having some pleasure that they haven't passed a law to suppress -- a fear that ranks with one that sometimes renders them flaccid in the arms of their mistresses, the mighty panic of having, somehow, somewhere, offended a business lobbying group.

LI has little to say about the Schiavo ordeal except that the eructation of Tom Delay on the American scene was diagnosed, in its essence, for all time by H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Trial, and his obituary of William Jennings Bryan. From that obituary, we would like to lift a phrase that is even more apposite for a man who sprayed DDT for a living before he decided there had to be an easier way to make a buck and went to that Valhalla of chislers, egomaniacs, and penny ante geniuses, D.C. – the “seduluous flycatcher.” We rip it from perhaps the most marvelous passage ever to open an obituary:

“Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan’s last secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous flycatcher in American history, and by long odds the most successful. His quarry, or course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis.”

And then there is this description of Bryan at the Scopes trial, which pretty much captures the Delay persona as it trails clouds of talk radio heartburn.

“One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe.”

Maggie Valley is a resort town in the mountains of North Carolina. It is distinguished by one dance hall, seasonally shuttered (the Stompin’ Ground), one main drag, Soco Road, upon which the Stompin Ground is strategically located, numerous rental cabins, four or five hotels including the Four Seasons, also on Soco Road, one now defunct amusement park (Ghost Town), which is for sale, according to the billboard on the property formerly occupied by the enterprise, and a ski resort, the Cataloochee, with a beginners, an intermediate, and a best slope – the best slope being accessed by a ski lift going up (the eye estimates) maybe two thousand and a half feet. It was open Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week. Then it was closing for the season. The employees there say that the busier season, in Maggie Valley, is the summer, anyway.

I headed for Maggie Valley with my brother last Thursday. My other brother had already rented a cabin (with, as he was eager to point out on the phone, a porch jacuzzi), and the aim was to ski Friday and hike Saturday. The resort was on the verge of packing it in, but it looked like there had been snow and sleet in the mountains, so we were figuring that the pack wouldn’t be all artificial.

Since we were going to be staying in a cabin, we packed a few things into my brother’s car, including a bag of kindling and logs – for the fireplace. Then we set out, ate at a steak place, and made the drive from Atlanta in three and a half hours. During two and a half of those hours, I was feeling a bit of pain in my chest. I decided it was heart burn, although to tell you the truth, I have never quite understood the nature of heart burn, that evocative and mysterious term stamped into my brain from an early age by the very successful tv ad campaigns mounted by various patent medicine companies who, from the days of radio to the days of cable, have underwritten so much of the mental referential undergrowth for those raised during that period when tv consisted of the big three and a few public stations. So, we approach Maggie Valley at around ten at night. We are both looking for signs of snow, but it is, of course, dark. We find the cabin, and my other brother in deep repose mode in the Jacuzzi, a snifter of rum in his hand. We unpack, watch a movie (Apollo 13) and I notice that this heart burn is spreading and giving me a frightening empathy with the astronauts encaged in their apparently doomed lunar lander module. I am lying there, understanding the close bond between me and my heart. And, this night, I am not liking it. Still, it is merely severe heart burn. We all agree to go to sleep, what with the big day ahead of us.

At around three, I am filled with intimations of my mortality – intimations in spades that have spread into my shoulder and down my side. A small child’s plastic figurine – an elephant, a giraffe – is being stuffed, by invisible fingers, into one of my aorta. It is not very much fun. So I drag myself up the cabin’s hallway to one of my brother’s door, knock, and when he drags himself out of bed, I explain that I might be dead tomorrow morning. This alarms him. Luckily, my brother has seen enough medical shows on tv to prescribe for these situations: take two aspirins and call him in the morning.

I do. In the morning, I do feel better. However, whenever I laugh, my chest hurts. I discovered a fact about myself: I laugh quite a bit. I resolve to stop laughing so much in the future. I say that I think I can go with them to the Cataloochee, but I am not sure that I can ski. Well, we go on up there, and – whether it is the thinner air or some random anxiety I harbor that, if I do have to go to the hospital, I will never for the rest of my life be able to pay off the resulting medical bill – having no insurance, no assets, and a mere thousand bucks in the bank – my heart starts doing the business with the small plastic animal figurines again. So my brothers pursuade me to go to the medical tech people at the resort. One of them, a trim, handsome man, blue eyes, perfect hair, obviously once a ski jockey and now a med tech jockey who wants to get into medical management, takes my pulse, takes my blood pressure, and advises me to go to the urgent care clinic. He also gives me the helpful information that men in their forties have a greater risk of dying from heart attack then men in their fifties and sixties. He explains this factoid, but I am not, unfortunately, in reportorial mode. Therefore, I can't tell you the cause of the differential. So off I go, leaving one brother behind to ski, and with my unfortunate other brother in tow. We wait for a long time at the clinic, which is like a meeting place for every citizen of Maggie Valley that has a sneeze or cough, reviving, to my mind, that old medical term, miasma. And then I wait in a cubicle and get examined by an echelon of the medically trained, from the woman who takes my pulse up to the chief doctor.

I thought I’d get this down. I’m going to use that pain for some character or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/arts/music/21cnd-short.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Sadness has descended on this office once again: Bobby Short, saloon singer extraordinaire, singer of saloon songs, saloon singer, the most high, is dead.
There is a peculiar annoyance that those who live in NYC and love NYC and those that love NYC who do not live in NYC can share intimately: the loathing of Woody Allen's particular version of the island of Manhattan. Mr. Short, of course, appears in a few occasions in WA’s version.

Nevertheless, if you ever had the chance to squat in that small room at The Carlyle during one of Mr. Short's performances, you would know that his presence, his manner, and his style were things grander than Woody's simple sentimentality.

I can imagine at least two types of obituaries: the one that reminds one of what has been lost, and the one that informs one of what one never knew. The obitiuaries that I read today reminded me only of what has been lost.

I can just now hear Mr. Short's sad soulful rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird" - it is beautiful; it is one of the saddest songs that I know. Not quite so much like Nina Simone’s broken version. Nor quite like the Miles/Coltrane version, in its virtuosity. No, his offers a much more soulful sense of loss. His offers a sense of loss that is a sense that no one occasion is for the first nor the last time that one will feel a loss, that the sense of loss is ever present, that loss is ever happening; the sense of the lost ‘thing’ is a self-same sense of wondering what it is that has been lost – what was it and how was it lost at all?

Inconsolably, bye bye blackbird......

It’s a sad day at Limited, Inc. All the staff left early today: boss is out of town. None of them, though, left to get an early start to reveries for St. Patrick; no, theirs are somber drinks tonight: Lil’ Kim was convicted of perjury.

In lieu of an introduction, I will jump to the conclusion:

“For a long time, the chapter I have just written was at the tip of my pen, but I kept rejecting it. I had promised myself that in this book I would display only the cheerful aspect of my soul; but this plan slipped out of my hands, like so many others: I hope that the sensitive reader will forgive me for having asked a few tears of him; and if anyone finds that in all truth I should have cut this chapter, he can tear it out of his copy, or even throw the book on the fire.” Xavier de Maistre – A Journey Around My Room

This is not LI. This is odd.

If R. is to LI what Johnny Carson was to The Tonight Show, then….. I am, as a guest host, seated behind the familiar desk…. who? John Davidson? Joey Bishop? Joan Rivers? Jay Leno? Oh fer fucks' sake! Let us hope, altogether now, that I'm not Jay Leno and that this nightmare analogy might quit my thoughts!

This is odd. The problem of the address. The problem of the typing of a conversation with one’s self.....the bullet in the barrel of the transference gun..…

So, no more about me, let's return to Badiou......today's lesson:
Slavoj Zizek on Badiou, and, later, Derrida. Please open your copy of The Ticklish Subject, and please turn to page 132..... No, I really ought to promise no more Badiou. No, no, and no more Badiou! [but please do go to ‘The Lacanian Subject’, page 158, of this book if you want to get to why LI is not on the side of Badiou; LI, as has been stated previously, remains on the side of Derrida, and Zizek gives one version of an account as to why – or, of course, you can take the path of patience and wait for the return of the founder and proprietor of LI for an account of on which side LI remains, and, perhaps, why it remains so].

No, no more Badiou; this is not to be Art, as Truth or otherwise, any more than it will be an Event, either horizonless or immanent.

Instead, an anecdote: many years ago, when he was a younger man, this correspondent was given this advice by a hard-drinking, long-travelled, scruff-bearded Dutchman at Fanelli’s Bar, on Prince Street: every man should visit a prostitute at least once in his life so that he might know that particular shame that one feels upon leaving her room. Why? Because, in the Dutchman’s jovial opinion, that shame was necessary to any condition that might be called ‘human’.

Whatever one makes of this perhaps not so well-remembered suggestion, whether or not one knows that particular shame, a more general but no less sincere account of where one might find one’s self is offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from the outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be a good man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.” The Crack-up

Shitter. Something has gone wrong. The Event has returned. I suppose that LI has its own gravity.

No time left to sketch an alternate conclusion. This day is nearly done, afternoon is long since past. Raise a glass to Myles na gCopaleen.

Badiou (the end, temporarily)

LI is going to pick up the thread of the Badiou posts next week. Since we are taking a vacation, our friend, T., has agreed to put together a few LI posts. This should shake up this site, which suffers a bit from the arteriosclerosis of our egotism.

Okay, a few more notes.

The sensible is transformed into the Event of the Idea in Art. So it stands written. One wants to know:

1. What is the function of the sensible, here? Here, surely, we have wandered into the very traditional categories of aesthetics, in which one way of working with the sensible – say, measuring the sensation of sound – is taken to be science, while another way of working with it – say, creating an opera with those sounds – is taken to be art. The difference is not, however, in the measuring, surely – in the techniques. Mozart has to measure sound to achieve his goal as surely as an audiologist has to measure his sound to achieve his goal. And then there is the problem of those forms of art – poetry, for instance – in which the model of the sensible doesn’t work too well. A poem could consiste of writing la la la muchly – or a poem can be the Iliad. In order to fit the poem into the sensible model, the sensible is quietly rearranged – where the sensible is the medium for listening to Mozart, the sensible is “appealed to” by the poem – not just by the sound of it, but by the images and the narrative – the mythos – that appeals to the passions. The double place of the sensible in aesthetics, both as what gives us the object and as what the object appeals to, is certainly preserved in Badiou.

2. What does the transforming? The artist? Remember, Badiou’s theses are about contemporary art, in which the artist has a primary function – the death of the artist notwithstanding. Badiou seems uncomfortable with the artist’s survival of that philosophically mandated death – as is LI. But the place where the transformation of the sensible takes place seems to demand some kind of artist. And some kind of audience. The transformation of sandstone into rock formations of astonishing beauty took place millions of years ago in the Southwest U.S., but this was not quite the transformation of the sensible – since the wind, rain, and earth were, presumably, not sensitive, in the philosopher’s sense, to what was happening. However, Badiou makes it clear that the sensitivity of the artist must be just right – the artist must not be a fetishist, must not be too personal, must not be too ethnic, etc. So, there is a gradient here in the artist’s sensibility.

3. finally – Why not just transform the sensible into an Idea? why throw in the event? What does it add, or clarify, to talk about an Idea-event?

LI has to leave it there.

Events

"Thesis 3: The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible. Which means: transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea." - Badiou

We don’t have much time today. So: a few notes about events. Which, in a later post, we will tie in with Badiou.
…

LI has an idea about a certain dissatisfaction we feel with analytic philosophy. Here’s the problem:

In Physics, it is true that what Wenger famously called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences has been borne out by the success of physics. That success – the applicability of mathematics, it turns out, to not only describe relations in nature, but to describe it in such a way that it can be built upon and can make predictions possible. Mathematics is different, in that sense, from any other instrument we know of – it is like a human tracker, it seems to have an intuition for its prey.

It was natural, back in the days when logicians were keen about encoding the axioms of mathematics into logic, that it might be the case that language, whether formal or natural, would, with the proper conceptual tools, do the same thing for philosophers. Thus the infinite worrying of language one finds in analytic philosophy papers – the respect for the (usually English) vernacular rendition of reality. Whereas the applicability of mathematics to nature is, actually, the kind of thing that has proven itself, so far in physics, the parallel applicability of language to reality has proven, in our opinion, a dud. Not that there aren’t wonderful things that have been done in philosophical semantics, but on the whole, it has never given us any more reason to believe that this is the royal route to reality than, say, Hegel, or Gurdjieff.

That said, we do think that event ontology as done in the analytic tradition has made some fascinating suggestions about problems with quantifying over events, about event parts, and about how language filters events through its various luxurious mechanisms. We’d particularly recommend Jonathan Bennett’s Events and their Names for a discussion of most of the major analytic theories – Davidson’s, Quine’s, Kim’s, Vendler’s, etc. Or you can read the first chapter of Speaking of Events, Pianesi and Varzi, (pdf), here. It outlines the sundry views – starting with the view that events are universals (which, on one reading, would make recurring events interesting – if I take a walk every evening, can somebody else take my walk? Which is a nice philosopher’s question). It outlines the more common view that events are particulars. Here’s a typical passage:

“This is the account of those philosophers, such as Jaegwon Kim, who construe events as property exemplifications:

We think of an event as a concrete object (or n-tuple of objects) exemplifying a property (or n-adic relation) at a time. (1973: 8)

Exactly what is meant by the locution ‘exemplifying’ is a delicate issue. Moreover, there is some uncertainty about what is to count as a property in the relevant sense. Presumably running and stabbing count, whereas being self-identical or greater than five do not count, but there are no obvious criteria for making a thorough demarcation (see Kim 1976). At any rate, leaving these issues aside, it is clear that this account tends to multiply the number of events far beyond the thick account of Quine. John’s swimming the Hellespontus, his catching a cold, and his counting his blessings are regarded as three distinct events in
Kim’s account insofar as they involve exemplifications of distinct properties; and clearly enough, identical events must be exemplifications of the same properties (or relations) by the same objects (or n-tuples) at the same time. Likewise, when we speak of Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar, we are not, in this account, speaking of his killing of Caesar: for the first event is the exemplification (by Brutus and Caesar) of the binary relation expressed by the predicate ‘stabbing’, whereas the second event is an exemplification (by the same Brutus and Caesar) of the relation expressed by the predicate ‘killing’. Since these two relations are
distinct, so are the events. In fact, by the same pattern, Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar is to be distinguished also from his violent stabbing of Caesar, his knifing of Casear, his murderous knifing of Caesar, and so on. All of these are to be counted as different events (rather than different descriptions of the same event)
because they are exemplifications of different properties.”

While Badiou does like to yoke together the truths of mathematics and the truths of ontology, his Eventiment is not amenable to this sort of fine grained sifting. Or so it would seem. Partly this is because his work is in the tradition that requires truth to be disclosure – as we pointed out in a previous post. Although perhaps we are committing ourselves too hastily – after all, truth is a fourfold field, for Badiou, and there are different truth processes appropriate for each of those fields. But the “event of the Idea” (as opposed to its non-lieu, one supposes – that moment of procrastination in which LI seems to live) is supposed to give us the truth of Art – which would suggest that art’s truth is performative, a matter of the proper assertion of its authority.

Let’s leave it at that for the moment.

LI urges readers to go to the article about Arthur Ransome in the Guardian. Ransome is in the heroic line of English children’s book authors – but he is rather unknown in the United States. More interesting, from the American point of view, is that he saw the heroic core of the October Revolution and helped the Bolsheviks out in their wholly just war against the White Reactionaries. Applause all around. He also – being a son of the British governing class – informed the British secret service of what he was doing. Well, you can only stretch your character so far…

In a comment on a recent post, LI’s perpetual friend and foil, Mr. Craddick, asked our opinion of the Soviet Union’s level of barbarity. We cheerfully gave it – nobody should ever diminish the evil of the Gulag. However, there is another side to our opinion of the Soviets. That side is that the world does not need superpowers. It does not need leadership. And the U.S., while not a particularly bad country – in fact, a very good country in many ways – is drawn, by the logic of power, into doing bad things as a superpower. This is why we think that the spies that gave Stalin the means to make an atom bomb were essentially right to do so – although it was also right, or justifiable, for the U.S. to punish them as traitors. Fundamentally, we can’t think of any political reason to countenance the seizing of excessive world power by any nation. It has always puzzled us that the right, which doesn’t trust the state to deliver mail, trusts the state with the means of ending the human species. This, indeed, is straining at the gnat and swallowing the ICBM missile. LI’s view is that there is something wrong with a theory of the state that starts out with an anti-statist ideological coloration while having no real philosophy of governance – that is, having no recognition that governance is in question in every organization, and doesn’t, at the fundamental level, divide between public and private entity – that is a derivative difference.

Returning us to our point of origin – the accidentally adventurous Mr. Ransome. In a sense, his reaction to the Russian Revolution – and the reaction of the Bloomsbury crowd – was conditioned by their descent from the people who ran the British colonies. You will find that almost all the Bloomsbury group, and most of the Fabians, were connected, somehow, to the Indian Civil Service. That group had been imbued with the wholly whiggish view (represented by Lord Macauley and Mill, two India House employees) that the state could actually design a society. That, of course, was the whole point of the “India” project, and it is no surprise that, through that perspective, the Russian revolution looked like what the Brits thought they did in India – rationalizing a superstitious society. The descendents of this group think they are doing the same thing in the Middle East. Plus ca change …

LI received a letter from a friend yesterday. We’d asked what he thought about the Badiou posts, and he said he’d comment after he knew where we were going.

Where are we going?

As we said before, the thing that concerns us here is what Badiou could mean, as a philosopher, by claiming that there are four independent domains that generate different truth procedures. These domains are: science, politics, art, and love.

Now, whether or not one thinks that science is defined by its truth procedures, it is easy to figure out what that claim would mean. Whether you take truth to be correspondence to an object – hence, the fight over whether realism, which claims the objects of science are real, or anti-realism, which claims that they are somehow artifices – or whether you take truth to be correspondence – thus, the debate over whether science consolidates its ‘discoveries” in such a way that coherence with previous discoveries and theories is preserved, or whether it proceeds by discontinuous paradigms, each themselves coherent, you can still easily understand what Badiou is talking about.

There is, however, a third school which has a different idea about the truth. This truth is the Capital T truth. In this school, represented by Heidegger in the last century, truth depends on disclosure. A positivist reading of such a claim would say, sure, the chain of evidence has to be clear, and clearly the clues for understanding the truth of an event refer to something that can’t, strictly, be present, so disclosure, as a secondary factor, is important in discovering the truth. But Heidegger was making a stronger point. It is disclosure itself, unveiling, apokalupsis, that never to be preserved moment, which is what makes the truth the truth. In other words, the truth isn’t affirmed by referring its claim to those canons of logic that would make revelation legitimate – no, the moment itself, the presenting of the present, is the truth. Derrida, with that exemplary malice of his, wrote an essay on this moment as the apocalyptic moment, with apocalypse, by various forced etymologies, leading us back to the moment that the bride is stripped bare by the exemplary bachelor, the groom. A bareness that is both instantiated and ceremonially represented by the removal of the veil. It is, in Derrida’s account, a sexual event – or constitutive of the truth of sex, and the irreducible sexual supplement of the truth.

However, let’s suspend our Derrida talk. The important thing is to see that the disclosure notion of truth is the point of convergence for, on the one side, logic, and on the other side, events. This is important for Badiou. The eventimential (which we will call it, dragging a term with a slight change of letters from the French into the English) – the eventimential turn – is how we know that Badiou is not a sixties philosopher, and why a philosopher like Deleuze fascinates and repels him. We seem, here, to have finally jimmied truth out of that depressing job it has been doing since the logical positivists decided to try to make it a mere function in a formal language (which, famously, never succeeded). The truth, since then, has been working like a princess in a hamburger joint. It is exciting to think that the Truth can be rescued from the infinite abjection, not to mention the French fry smell, of such circumstances.

There is also an analytic tradition of interpreting events. We will cover a bit of that in the next post, then go on and finish up this Badiou stuff.