Sympathy for a bitter old man

The pope crap keeps on coming. The media are intent on thrusting the doings of the Vatican in our faces for … forever, it seems. Or at least as long as it took to get O.J. to get out of that white car he was in. Remember, in the long ago, the golden days of Good King Clinton?

In any case, it struck me that, aside from the general vileness of the new Pope’s principles, he might be one of the sadder people in public life. To reach out one’s arthritic, clawlike fingers and snatch the office one wanted – one earned, one deserved! – at a much younger age – now, now when the juice has been squeezed out of the grape, it seems so pitiful. And it isn’t like Ratzinger has had a life. Your ordinary churchman can chuck it all and get a beer and talk with buddies if he wants – he’s living, after all, in some urban crush, the bishop of someplace like New York or Chicago or the like. He can have some female companionship, even if he doesn’t make it sexual. He can go to the movies.

But Ratzinger has spent the finer hours of his life in the Vatican hothouse. Ixnay on the female companionship – or even on having lunch with your favorite Mafia don. It is all brushing surplices with flocks of the inbred Vatican-ites, a bunch of pious poodles who are barely house trained. And in the meanwhile, years of brownnosing the boss. The backlog of resentment must be hard to bear. And then to go on, when the old man finally dies, and make him out to be a saint – when of course you were there for the acidic mood changes, and for all the body betraying the guy with its smells and bruises, you were there to see how he fucked up majorly in this or that way, how you could have done better, how he never resigned and gave you a chance when you were still young enough to enjoy things, how you had to hear years of his praises, his great intellectual capacity, his loving qualities, when how about yours, no, you didn't have a showy philosophy but your grades were generally excellent and it isn't like rising up to judge the faith of the faithful is some job anybody can do, and sure it is easy to display loving qualities when you have your Beria, your Himmler by your side to do the dirty work, sure, you were always there, the convenient dump, the excuse, the man not in the popemobile, and the desire for it rots but it doesn't go away, it is like the fruit of knowledge lodged within you that infinitely browns and wrinkles and ferments but never dissolves, somehow, until all you have is that fruit – it has to create a massive internal corrosion of one’s very capacity to pity, it has to reach out and soil every part of one's life, one can't take a shit without being shrouded in the ceaseless bitterness. All this to get an office in an organization ostensibly dedicated to the God of Love. When they put the funny hat on the guy, he can look around at all the faces and see not one that loves him – mother and father long dead, and no doubt – if he has grandnieces and nephews – those long alien to him. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was the embarrassment in the family, he makes good and they might even drop his name now, a celebrity, and as a connection, something one can brag about in a business so that you make deals that you wouldn't otherwise have the chance to, sure, he's of some use, but funny uncle Benny, as they will have to call him now, and trust him to take a name as ungainly and dumb as that one. One imagines it to be one of those Thomas Bernhard Austrian families – ossified neurotics, museum quality ignoramuses, such as are displayed and splayed and spayed in Bernhard’s Ausloeschung. If you want to understand the level of cretinism, and its breathless spiritual vacuums now on display in the Vatican, go to that novel.

The people

LI’s friend, H., writes from Teheran to congratulate us. Apparently, this blog is being blocked on some Iranian servers. As H. rightly says, what does it say about a state that is afraid of LI? There’s a little pinch in that remark – H. knows how vain we are – but it is also true that LI does not exactly aim to get people out in the streets throwing bombs, or even pies. We aim for more, shall we say, multi-dimensional refusals, little glitches in the smooth operation of society here and there, question marks proliferating, comic strip fashion, above the head, punk rips in the veil of Maya.
…

Texas is much on our minds, recently, because our novel, which is meant to suck in the juices that make this state work, is starting to hum along. Any reader of this thing who is interested in being a guinea pig reader for this thing should drop us an email. In our quest for the genuine Texas, we’ve been reading T.R. Fehrenbach’s marvelous Comanches: Destruction of a People.

Fehrenbach is a columnist for the San Antonio paper. From what I have gathered about him on the Net, he seems to be a sort of Texas version of a Walker Percy character – educated up North, at Princeton, enormously versed in the unfashionable great books, and a ranger outside the walls of academe. His Comanche history bears the impress of both the virtues of education plus disdain for the merely pedagogical and the vices. Chief of those vices is lack of footnotes The reader must make due with the sources listed in the back, and guess from what source sprang, for instance, this paragraph:

‘They did not harm the children further. But the two adult women were stripped naked and subjected to more torture. Hoever, this torment was not so much sadistic as part of a rite of total humiliation, which was important to the Amerindians. The two women were not seriously injured, for the warriors had no intention of killing them. They were to be slaves. Captive women who were frightened with torture and threats of torture made less trouble and quiclkly learned to perform on command. In the final act, both women were raped through the night in full view of the bound children.’

This is about one of the most famous hostage stories in Texas history, the taking of Elizabeth Kellog and Rachel Plummer from the raid on Parker’s fort.

Fehrenbach pulls no punches on the racial or sexual violence that was woven into the frontier story, and censored out of it when it became a myth for children. He is a little less satisfying about the rapes of Indian women committed by the Rangers – although this was not a sanctioned, or ritualized part of Indian warfare, it is a good bet that it occurred pretty frequently. But he does make this comment, which casts an ironic spanner into any attempt to make the American culture somehow superior to the Comanche one on the moral level.

Rachel Plummer was eventually ransomed from the Comanches:

"The position of a returned female captive, however, was always anomalous on the nineteenth century American frontier. The frontier’s puritanical views and rigid racial and sexual shibboleths made it impossible for such unfortunate women to be accepted gracefully back into their communities. They were objects of sincere pity, but they were also considered dirty and disgraced, for they had been the playthings of creatures the Americans regarded as animals. They were embarrassments to their families. Some husbands would not receive them or live with them again. Ironically, most returned women suffered more real shame and huiliation among their own people than among the Comanches. If they came back with half-breed children, their position, and that of the unhappy children, was even more unfortunate… Rachel Plummer died within less than a year after her ransom and return to civilization.”

LI has been fascinated by the Nermernuh, the People, for some time. One of the great passages in American literature is Cormac McCarthy’s account of a Comanche attack in Blood Meridian. We first read that sitting on a porch in Pecos, New Mexico, facing the fading eastern sky and the Pecos River – which ran by the land we were renting – and in that setting, it was awfully scary. And it should be. As Fehrenbach points out, the Comanches, for about a hundred years, pretty much ruled the area east of Santa Fe and west of San Antonio. the Kiowa, who were accepted among them and accompanied them on raids into Mexico, went as far as the Yucatan. The towns and rancherias of northern Mexico were simply devastated by Comanche raids, and the first white Anglo settlers were repeatedly struck by them – and if they hadn’t been supplied by a superior technological force in their rear, viz, Eastern liberal makers of Colts and such, the white Anglo settlers would have been wiped out. Establishing the parasitic relationship between Texas and the Northeast that has endured ever since – Texans despising the North even as they have been unable to create an economy viable enough to stand on its own (as witness the march of money down South to support Texas in the late eighties) or a culture of any innovation beyond the making of colorful new knots in the ropes used to lasso steers.

For the last week, LI has been bothered by phone calls from Rome offering us the popeship. You’ve probably received the same phone call on your recorder: a voice says, Frankly, we’re surprised you haven’t called us back. You can now get credit card rates as low as 6 percent, as well as become the pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church, with a world wide congregation of over one billion, if you act now. If you aren’t a woman, have no problem condemning the use of condoms in AIDs infected areas of Africa, and have low credit or even no credit, you can still qualify for our program.”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a credit card.

In other news… Kenneth Emmond notes further gross abuses of the law by Fox’s PAN, as well as, of course, the PRI, even as the American press continues to report, without context, Fox’s contention that no man is above the law in Mexico.

“A recent example of a successful application of the fuero is that of Morelos Governor Sergio Estrada Cajigal. Congress voted in favour of a desafuero, based on evidence suggesting he colluded with narco-criminals in his state, but the Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality and he remains governor.”

Emmond further notes the quid pro quo around the case of “PRI Senator Ricardo Aldana, who is a suspect in the billion-peso Pemexgate scandal.” Oh, and the journalist who was murdered last week was one who was reporting on a local oil smuggling scandal.

Iraq. We haven’t written anything in this space for a while about Iraq. The refusal of the newly cobbled together government to take up the issue of the timetable for the American withdrawal continues to be a stake in the heart of democracy – this is, after all, what they were elected to do: end the occupation. Sadr’s move, as we predicted, will be to squat on this issue until it squeaks. The American media has decided that the narrative is about things getting better in Iraq. It is about Iraqis liking us. And so hotel room bound reporters collate voices from their stringers that are pro-American, and push them through the pipeline.

It would truly be piling tragedy on farce if Sadr ends up as the most respectable voice of Iraqi nationalism, but such is the direction of the situational slope. The hibernating American conscience only wakes up when the American casualty total spikes for a day. Occupation watch published a piece by Jim McGovern (Congressman from Massachusetts) that ends:

Johnson

LI readers should immediately stop reading this fumbling attempt at a post and go to the TLS review (by Thomas Keymor) of Henry Hitchings book on Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. Johnson is, along with Hazlett and Orwell, every freelancer’s hero. But the Dictionary sets him apart, in that space reserved for the more inscrutable sons of God, mysterious in their energies and inimitable in their successes:

“The body of the Dictionary performs the troubled themes of the preface with striking virtuosity. This great work does its primary job as a standard dictionary with constant assurance, and of course part of Johnson’s achievement is to have produced, in less than a decade and with only routine assistance from six amanuenses, a feat that would not be superseded until the OED at last came to fruition in 1928, after the labours of huge teams over seventy-one years.”

It is as if one man built one of the cathedrals. Keymor emphasizes Johnson’s shifting sense of the object of the dictionary – at the beginning, it was to fix the pronunciation and meanings of words in English, but it evolved into a record of the meanings and pronunciations, with an enlarged sense of the sheer ephemerality of the inside of a language – the multitudinous and contingent transformations of its units – that, by some miracle, did not effect the outward unity of the language. Keymor again:

"Johnson’s reputation is that of a bossy prescriptivist, and these are the terms in which his enterprise began. In The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, issued in 1747 to drum up patronage and subscriptions, he writes serenely of the language as an entity amenable to scientific description, and thus, by extension, regulation. His work in progress is one “by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed . . . by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened”. Yet even in this inaugural document there lurks a countervailing sense of language as recalcitrant and wild, or as human and fallen, the work “of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived”. The overall confidence of the Plan has much to do with the predispositions of the person to whom it was addressed, Lord Chesterfield, whom Hitchings rightly calls a “linguistic conservative”, and whose casual exploitation of Johnson’s efforts led in time to one of the Dictionary’s most famously perverse definitions. Here a patron is “a wretch who supports with insolence”, and Johnson sharpened the barb in a personal letter: “Is not a Patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?”. In the preface to the Dictionary, written on the eve of publication, Johnson’s pose is that of the sadder and wiser man. As Hitchings makes clear, practical difficulties of implementation had conditioned his now jaundiced, indeed tragic, sense of the inherent limits of his endeavour, but one should not underestimate the artful ironic patterning at work in the path he traces from innocence to experience. As the Plan quietly intimates, he had always sensed the blocks and binds that he now comprehends to the full, and in the preface he articulates this sense with the piercing lucidity of a mind honed by years of struggle with fine distinctions of meaning. Language is boundless, disorderly, perplexed, uncertain and, above all, “variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it”. No feature of language can be rendered marmoreal, and in this sense even the most extensive and rigorous effort of lexicography can get no further than heroic defeat – a perception beautifully crystallized when Johnson writes (reworking his verse account, from The Vanity of Human Wishes, of the helpless rage of Xerxes at the Hellespont) that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strengths”. The lexicographer reverts to poetry here, for the most part with grim insistence on corruption and decadence, but not without a counterstrain of relish, a sense that instability can equally be imagined as cornucopian energy and teeming life. When he adds that “no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away”, the sense of rising sap is no less important than the autumnal decay. Amidst the unflinching gloom, one of Johnson’s favourite terms for language and meaning is “exuberant”: “growing with superfluous shoots; overabundant; superfluously plenteous; luxuriant”.

LI thinks we will do another post on Johnson, just for the hell of it.

our vices, their crimes

There is an essay on trust and the Mafia by a sociologist, Diego Gambetta, that includes an interesting quote by Tocqueville. Before he travelled in America, Tocqueville went to Sicily. Not much of the manuscript he wrote about this visit survives. But Gambetta quotes this sentence from an imaginary dialogue between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan in which Tocqueville presents viewpoints on corruption. The Neapolitan has been scolding the Sicilian for being ruled by criminal gangs -- mafia. The Sicilian replies: ‘dénaturée par l’oppression, 1’énergie cachée de notre caractère national ne se révèle plus que par des crimes; pour vous, vous n’avez que des vices.

Somehow, that sentence illuminates the relationship between the United States and Mexico. As long as the black market in drugs and labor is a greater churner of revenue than any licit market in Mexico, the political structure is going to be chronically undermined; and as long as the U.S. refuses to accept the market consequences of the vices to which the American people are addicted -- that is, the inevitability of a drugs and illegal labor market -- but tries to "stem" these markets with a regime of punishments, the black market in Mexico will continue to be one of the great, rational roads to riches. Decriminalizing drugs in the U.S. would have beneficial effects not only in the US, but elsewhere.


On another, related note: LI has found a blog devoted to the present situation of Mexican politics run by Michelle Dion, who is currently the visiting Fulbright-Garcia Robles professor at the Centro de Invstigacion y Docencia Economicas, which impresses the hell out of us. We learned, for instance, via Dr. Dion, of an incident in the Congress yesterday that involved a PAN legislator spitting in the face of a PRI legislator.

Unsurprising, actually. In spite of the American press’ presentation of PAN as a harmless, democracy loving party, PAN was started as an openly fascistic party in the thirties.

It often goes unremarked that the roots of fascism are not simply described by the love of force. The most successful anti-mafia program in Italy’s history was implemented by Mussolini. The petit bourgeois distaste for corruption is genuine. Remember, it was, of all people, Jesse Helms who was most vociferous about the corrupt ties between the S&Ls and the Senate in the early nineties – Helms was the prosecutor of the Keating Seven. This isn’t to say that the ultra-right will always, itself, be above corruption – the chance of a legislator being corrupt depends more on the ability of that legislator to accrue a vendible power than on any ideological slant. LI assumes that personal integrity, here, is a very minor variable, and not one that is usually part of the make up of those who become politicians. Institutions forge character, and character accumulates in institutions to press the limits of institutional possibility to ever greater extremes.

However, the appearance of non-corruption is a very important fascistic draw. Since the left sees all too clearly the similarity between gangster organizations and ultra right organizations – Brecht made this the whole basis for dramatizing Nazism – it interprets struggles between fascists and organized crime as a struggle between two equally criminal groups. However, this use of “criminal” extracts the word from its pragmatic context, and so blurs the everyday way people look on such struggles. This is a topic LI will someday return to.

sympathy for marat

First: my source for the rumor about the NYT reporter in Mexico tells me that the reporter in question has gone back to the States. So the curious non-participation of the Times in this story has nothing to do with lack of Spanish. Second, to get a bead on the culture of our governing class – always an excursion into the farther reaches of psychopathology – LI urges our readers to scan the Daily Telegraph’s interview with Jack Welch. It is a marvel: unintentional black humor competes with mouth-aching sucking up to create the perfect caricature of the way we live: reactionary politics teetering on the edge of the unimaginable in the age of Bush. If this article were published in some socialist journal, it would be dissed as an unrealistic Marxist caricature of the uberrich. Ah, but those caricatures are, unfortunately for the rest of us, real, and they ride mankind. Here’s how the thing starts: “Jack Welch is calling for his housekeeper. ``Maria! Maria!'' he cries, until she appears at the kitchen door. ``Maria, can you describe, without giving away any of the details, what we did in there last night?'' he says, pointing towards the dining room of his Boston mansion.
``Last night,'' says Maria, a little nervously, ``I had an evaluation. And, er, it was very nice.''
Welch, arguably the world's greatest corporate leader, is telling me how to get the most out of one's domestic staff. The method is to write a point-by-point memo and talk them through it carefully. ``Everyone who worked for me at GE got one of those. Boom, boom, boom,'' he says. ``Just do it.''

LI immediately got down to it and called our domestic staff (Maria, Snoopy Dogg Dogg, and Tatiana) on the carpet, and boom boom boom we proceded with the strip search and the video (which we will put up later, only $19.95). But to continue...

Having been wrongfooted by this Ruling Class intro, Melissa Whitworth, the interviewer (who seems more familiar with “one’s domestic staff” than with anything so banal as business – she apparently believes that when Welch took charge of GE it was an “ailing US corporation”) digs a lot of fascinating fascism at the micro level out of old Neutron Jackypoo, as he encourages Maria to call him on her off hours:
`This book is not bulls--t,'' he says bluntly. ``It is not about work/life balance in the language of the company brochure: `We'll allow you so many flexi-days, this and that' '' - Welch blows a raspberry - ``It's about real life, and that's what I'm talking about.''
The trick, Welch explains, to managing your cleaner or au pair is to master the communication skills a successful manager would use in the workplace. Just last night, he and his wife went through a written work appraisal with their own staff: Maria and the Welches' driver, Vincente, sat down together and talked things through. ``We wrote down what we really love about them and we said some things that we thought they could improve,'' says Welch. ``But we always start with all the things they do right.''
There are those who claim that capitalism reflects merit – the best rise to the top. How, then, do you explain the porcine nature of Wentworth’s interviewee? I prefer Acton’s explanation – power corrupts, and absolute power over one’s domestic staff corrupts absolutely. The article actually gave us hope that revolution isn’t dead – after reading about Welch’s power point personality, the idea of putting the heads of a few CEOs on pikestaffs takes on a strangely attractive quality.
Excuse us, now, as we explain to Tatiana the finer points of getting down on her knees and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

rumors

The rumor in Mexico, right now, is that they are going to lock Lopez Obrador up in some very remote place – remote, at least, from his political base. Like somewhere along the border – a place where inconvenient politicians and journalists have a habit of getting whacked.

Meanwhile, the great vials of American indignation about the foreclosure of democracy in Mexico remain capped. Harold Meyerson’s op ed piece, in the WP, is great. But where is the attention that was mobilized in the case of the Ukraine or Lebanon, for instance? This is a rhetorical question about a rhetorical problem. The U.S. does not have, never did have, and probably never will have a policy of implanting democracy in foreign places -- unless that democracy can be controlled by the U.S. A cursory glance at U.S. history – from the fixing of Italian elections in 1949, via the CIA’s Jim Angleton (at that time, an O.S.S. officer in Rome) all the way up to the narrowing of options in Afghanistan and Iraq last year and this winter. Another story in the LA Times makes up for the LAT editorial dismissal of the “backwards looking” mayor of Mexico City. Another rumor LI has heard – heard while in Mexico – might explain why the New York Times is more industriously playing the parish weekly (“Alien meets with Saint John Paul in Heaven!”) than reporting the news in Mexico. The NYT’s former reporters, Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, while pro-Fox to the gills, knew their way around the language and the cultcha. I believe they still live there, in the ritzy Chapultepec Heights area. Supposedly, NYT’s main man in Mexico City has a sophomore’s knowledge of Spanish.

Note: In the February, 2005 issue of the Latin American Review, there’s an interesting article by Jonathan Hiskey entitled (snoringly) THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SUBNATIONAL ECONOMIC RECOVERY
IN MEXICO. It is, however, not a sleep inducing piece. Hiskey promotes the study of subregions within developing countries, thinking to find some correlation between recovery from economic setbacks in developing economies and the transparency and legitimacy of electoral-based local institutions. We were struck by this passage:

“Furthermore, the paths followed by the two principal opposition parties in the early years of Mexico's long transition were quite distinct, with
the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica's (PRD) marred by conflict with the PRI, and the Partido Accion Nacional's (PAN) characterized by
cooperation with the ruling party (Bruhn 1996; Bruhn and Yanner 1995;
Guillen Lopez 1995; Lujambio 2001). The very distinct relations between these two opposition parties and the PRI in turn resulted in markedly different transition experiences across Mexico's thirty-one states, depending on the dominant opposition force in a state. In PRD-opposition states,the transition was one where town hall takeovers, street protests, election boycotts, and violent clashes between PRI and PRD supporters followed electoral outcomes that rarely went uncontested by one side or the other. These disputes often lingered long past election day and in many ways undermined the governing legitimacy of whichever party ultimately gained office. In PAN-leaning states, conversely, acceptance
of electoral outcomes and alternation in power at the state and local levels
relatively quickly and painlessly became the norm.

These distinct paths taken by the two major opposition parties were products of both intemal party strategies conceming relations with the ruling party and a conscious effort on the part of the PRI to target what it viewed as its biggest threat: the PRD. As Victor Alejandro Valle remarked,
"There can be little doubt that this 'selective democracy' [was] the result of the ruling party's calculated generosity toward the PAN, a strategy designed to undermine the threat from the Left" (1999,78). Jorge Alcocer (1994) summarizes the very different approaches to the PAN
and PRD pursued by the PRI in the early 1990s:

The government has followed a two-pronged approach in dealing with its opponents. With the PAN it has maintained cordial relations (even open alliance), and it has either recognized the PAN's legitimate victories or taken drastic actions to remedy grievances, as in the cases of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi.

With the PRD the government's position has been one of aggression: slander campaigns orchestrated by the president's press office; tolerance of continued fraud against the PRD; indifference toward the physical abuse and murder perpetrated by regional caciques. The litany of injuries is long (152-53).

What happened last week in Mexico was the product of this systematic, historically entrenched, but – until now - well disguised, process.

Additional, Montesquieu-ian note: the currently fashionable thesis about the need for legitimate electoral institutions in developing economies is better than the old thesis about the difference between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. However, ourselves, we think that there must be the (theoretic) possibility of curbing such institutions by means of an autonomous judiciary, one that is not an instrument of the executive branch. Unfortunately, such curbing often gets done, in the end, by the military -- a perversion that arises from a legitimate lacuna in governance.

The rule of law in Mexico

The editor of a paper located in a petro town on the Gulf was murdered yesterday. He'd been investigating contraband diversions of oil. This is from the LA Times:

“Mexico is among the more hazardous places in the world for journalists to ply their trade, said Carlos Lauria, coordinator of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. It ranks 11th among countries in the number of journalists slain over the last decade, with nine killed. Iraq, Algeria and Colombia top the list.”

And this is from the Washington Post, last week, concerning the recent vote in the Mexican congress to strip Lopez Obrador, mayor of Mexico City, of his immunity:

“President Vicente Fox has said the case shows that the rule of law is working in Mexico and that anyone who breaks the law, no matter how popular or powerful, will be prosecuted. Fox, who was traveling Thursday to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II, had no immediate comment about the vote in Congress.

Interior Minister Santiago Creel, the leading presidential candidate from Fox's National Action Party, acknowledged Thursday night that there had been many critics of the process but said it was worth the effort. "Mexico is at peace," he said. "It is a country of institutions and laws."

As is well known, a firm hand is required to make sure a country has the institutions and laws – or law enforcement – it needs. We are pleased that Fox and his interior minister are on the case. In furtherance of which, we thought we’d make a quick web survey of mayoral behavior in Mexico. Obrador’s crime was, apparently, disobeying a court order (which there is no proof he even knew about) blocking the completion of a road to a hospital in Mexico City, which is of a nature so serious that the congress had to investigate.

This, apparently, is a jail time crime. Here’s a more fun crime.

Meet Jorge Hank Rhon, the man who is Tijuana’s PRI mayor. While running, last year, the San Diego paper worked up a little profile of him. Deep in the profile were a few things that, were Hank to be running in, say, San Diego, might have been fronted to the first grafs:

“The most persistent accusation involves the 1988 killing of Héctor Félix Miranda, an editor for the Tijuana weekly Zeta; the newspaper has since devoted a page in each edition to accusing Hank of being the mastermind.
With last month's assassination of another Zeta editor, Franciso Ortíz Franco, Zeta is again pointing the finger at Hank as a possible suspect, as Ortíz had been delving into the state's investigation of Félix Miranda's murder on behalf of the Inter American Press Association.

Hank denies any role in either killing and says he does not believe that two of his bodyguards who were convicted in the Félix Miranda case were involved in that assassination. A spokesman for the Baja California attorney general's office said "any political motives that might be linked to Jorge Hank Rhon have not been ruled out," but Hank has not been called in for questioning.”

Hank comes from one of the great PRI families. One that happens to have been investigated, during the Clinton administration, for its ties to narco millionaires. As is not well known (although it should be), the Clintonistas treated the Mexican government with the policy of two eyes shut that it also applied to Yeltsin. Thus, it was an embarrassment when a unit of the Justice department, under Janet Reno, issued a report about the Hank family that put into government sponsored print what everybody already knew. Drug politics -- you can go to jail for selling or smoking marijuana in this country, but the Federal government reserves a large leaway of helping supply Americans with that marijuana if they feel it serves the interest of our allies, whoever they may be. Thus the famed Cocaine Coup in Bolivia under Reagan, and thus the stifled curiosity about who was on the narco payroll in the Zedillo government under Clinton.

This attitude spills over into the American press. That Jorge’s bodyguards got a little over-enthusiastic about shutting up journalists (which might be the logical extension of the Hank family habit of suing journalists in the U.S. for defamation every time the bothersome narco accusation came up) should have been fronted in the SD article about the man -- but a little matter of a corpse here and there was shunted way down to like the tenth graf.

Ah, but in the land of laws and institutions, under the benign rule of Fox, threatening journalists, or killing them, is definitely secondary to those crucial due process hearings that Lopez Obrador so criminally ignored. There are priorities, after all.

This is from the IPI’s review of press freedom in Mexico

“It was a bleak year for Mexico's journalists, who continued to suffer harassment, death threats and violent attacks. In particular, journalists investigating drug trafficking and official corruption in the northern states bordering the U.S. were targeted by those seeking to prevent the media from exposing their activities.

Four journalists were murdered in 2004.

On 19 March, Roberto Javier Mora García, editorial director of the daily newspaper El Mañana, was stabbed at least 20 times by an unidentified attacker outside his home in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state. El Mañana is known for its reporting on the Golfo drug cartel and the alleged involvement of local police in drug trafficking activities. None of Mora's belongings were taken, ruling out theft as a motive, police said. On 28 March, police arrested two of Mora's neighbours, Mario Medina Vázquez and his partner Hiram Olivero Ortiz. Police said Medina, a U.S. citizen, confessed to killing Mora in a crime of passion, but Medina later said he confessed under torture. On 13 May, he was killed by a fellow prisoner in Cereso Prison in Nuevo Laredo.

Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, co-founder and senior editor of the weekly news magazine Zeta, was killed on 22 June by unidentified gunmen in the border city of Tijuana, Baja California state. He was driving his car through the city's Marrón district when masked gunmen in a pickup truck pulled up to his car and shot him four times with an AK-47 automatic rifle, police said. His children, who were also in the car, were unharmed. Federal prosecutors linked the murder to the Arellano Félix drug cartel in Tijuana.
Zeta's coverage of drug trafficking and official corruption has made its editors frequent targets of violent attacks. In 1987, the weekly's plant was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Zeta editor and columnist, Héctor Félix Miranda, was murdered in 1988. In 1997, Zeta's publisher, J. Jesús Blancornelas, narrowly escaped assassination when he was severely injured in an attack that left his bodyguard and friend, Luis Valero, dead.

On 31 August, Francisco Arratia Saldierna, a hard-hitting columnist for El Imparcial, El Regional, Mercurio and El Cinco, among other regional publications, was killed in the city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas state. Saldierna, who had been beaten and tortured, was found outside the local offices of the Red Cross and brought to a nearby hospital, where he died of a heart attack later that day. On 24 September, police arrested Raúl Castelán Cruz, a member of the Golfo drug cartel, who confessed to participating in Arratia's killing.

On 27 November, Gregorio Rodriguez Hernández, a photographer for the daily newspaper El Debate, was gunned down in Escuinapa, Sinaloa state. Rodriguez was dining with his wife and children at a restaurant when unidentified gunmen shot him at least five times. One arrest was made in December, but the motive for his killing remained unclear.

Irene Medrano Villanueva, a journalist for the daily newspaper El Sol de Sinaloa in Culiacán, Sinaloa state, reported receiving several deaths threats via telephone, beginning in December 2003. Medrano believed the threats were linked to a series of articles she published about child prostitution in Culiacán that criticised local authorities for not taking sufficient action against the abuses. On 8 December 2003, Medrano found the word "death" had been painted on her car. Three weeks later, while driving to work, she tried to stop at a stop sign, but her car's brakes did not work and she crashed into a taxi. A mechanic at an auto repair shop told her that the brakes had been tampered with.

On 16 January, after officials from the Sinaloa Public Prosecutor's Office traced the threatening telephone calls to the Office of Mayor Jesús Enrique Hernández Chávez, Medrano publicly denounced the threats in a press conference. The mayor called for a thorough investigation into the matter and for those responsible for the threats to be punished, but refused to speculate who the perpetrators might be.”

Medrano’s work is reviewed more specifically in this letter, sent by the Committee to Protect Journalists.


”The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York­based independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide, is deeply concerned about Mexican journalist Irene Medrano Villanueva, who has been threatened and harassed during the last two months in connection with her journalistic work.Medrano, a reporter with the daily El Sol de Sinaloa, based in the state capital of Culiacán, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, received several death threats after she wrote a series of reports on the proliferation of child prostitution in Culiacán.From August to October 2003, Medrano wrote a series of reports alleging that some local brothels and massage parlors were employing minors and criticizing local municipal authorities for not going after brothels and massage parlors that employ minors.On December 6, 2003, Medrano published the series’ last report, claiming that minors were being recruited in public and private schools to work as prostitutes. Her stories contained testimony from the victims and information from the National System for the Integral Development of Families, the government agency for the protection of minors and families, which also criticized local authorities for not taking action against the abuses. The same day the last report was published, the threats began. An anonymous caller phoned the newspaper and told a security guard that Medrano was going to die. Later that evening, an anonymous man called the journalist at her home and told her that she had signed "her death sentence." On December 8, 2003, after finding that the word "death" had been painted on her car, Medrano filed a complaint with the Sinaloa Public Prosecutor’s Office (PGJE). That evening, an anonymous caller phoned the journalist at home and told her that she was an informer who had caused her own death sentence. The PGJE then assigned Medrano a police agent to escort and protect her for five days.On December 13, 2003, while Medrano was driving to work in the company of the police agent, a car without license plates came from behind, hit her car three times, and fled. On December 14, after discovering that her car’s windshield had been smashed, she called the state police, who inspected her car the next day to search for evidence. Medrano was again assigned a police agent.Feeling pressured, Medrano told CPJ, she then took a few days off from work. While she was driving to return to work on December 28, 2003, Medrano tried to stop in front of a stop sign, but her brakes did not respond and, as a result, she crashed into a taxi. She then took her car to an auto shop, where a mechanic told her that her car’s brake lines had been tampered with.In early January 2004, the threatening phone calls intensified. On January 8, PGJE agents installed caller ID and a recording device on her home phone to trace the threatening calls. On January 12, after an initial call from a public telephone, another threatening phone call was registered. According to Medrano, PGJE agents told her that the calls came from the office of Jesús Enrique Hernández Chávez, the mayor of Culiacán. Because the investigation into the threats is still in its preliminary inquiry phase, the PGJE is not allowed to disclose any information except to the parties involved.On January 16, Medrano denounced the threats in a press conference she held with the support of Sinaloa’s two main journalists’ associations. According to the Mexico City daily El Universal, on January 19 Hernández Chávez came to the PGJE offices in Culiacán to deliver his testimony in writing regarding the threatening phone calls made from his office. The mayor is not a suspect in the investigation, but officials have questioned him since the calls originated from his office, according to local news reports. The Sinaloa newspaper Noroeste reported that Mayor Hernández Chávez has called for a thorough investigation and for those responsible for the threats to be punished. He has also expressed his support for Medrano’s work, according to Noroeste, but has not made any statement to the press regarding the incident, saying he refuses to speculate.”

Fox, however, is unmoved by such irritations on the body politic – he is a straightshooter who goes for the heart of the matter. A little prosty solicitation among fifth graders in Sinaloa? Peanuts. A little journalist killing in Tijuana? Ho hum. Mexico is, after all, a nation of laws and institutions. The interior minister himself, a Pan-ista and future presidential candidate, has assured us of this. We all feel so much better.

Coup? What coup?

saint sartre

The ultrachic grad student who writes Infinite Thought has been writing some nice things about Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason – which is the world’s greatest monument to speed (runner up is Dylan’s Blond on Blond).

We are happy about that. Last week there was one of those thought infections that hit the big blogs. There was a David Brooks column about the difference between the left and right in the good old U.S.A. Brooks made the point that the lefties no longer have a philosopher – he called up some lefty think tanker and asked him, hey, who is your philosopher, and the think tanker evidently couldn’t think of anybody. This got commented upon all over the place. Matt Yglesias wrote a post claiming that liberals are all about policy, nowadays, and have dispensed with the superstitious retention of philosophical mascots.

Now the standard Crooked Timber reaction to Brooks challenge is to reach for “A theory of justice.” Rawls, it is true, does codify a certain dimension of liberal thinking. But if there were one thinker who encoded the fundamental difference between classical and contemporary liberalism, that thinker has to be Sartre.

Sartre? Mr. Cockeyed French supporter of the soviet invasion of Hungary? Yeah, that guy. Contemporary liberalism – post New Deal liberalism – depends on a philosophic anthropology that departs radically from the old contractual myth of the relation of the individual to society. For the classical liberal, the contract – whether construed by Locke or by Rousseau – was the warrant for a political order founded on individual liberty that still maintained a hierarchical order. For the contemporary liberal, however, freedom has another dimension – a dimension of human identity – from which the contract is distantly derived. If, that is, one wants to continue to think in terms of that hoary myth. The dimension of human identity is revealed by human situations. The philosopher who put this all together – sloppily, with massive misreadings of Heidegger thrown in to add some spice, and those bennies to keep him awake at night – is Sartre. Like Freud, whose vocabulary so permeates the way we talk about consciousness that even his critics talk blandly about “repression” and the “unconscious,” that freedom is defined by action, and that it is a measure of situations preceding any economic measure – the Sartrean contention – has become part of folk anthropology. The triad at the end of Being and Nothingness – to have, to do, to be – is the basic triad of contemporary liberalism. This is why the separation of politics and culture is conceptually impossible for contemporary liberalism – that separation reflects the older, contractual view of the individual. Situations cut across the segregated zones of the socius, ultimately putting in question the justification of those segregations. In this, of course, Sartrean existentialism joins the classical Marxist critique of ideology – but without endorsing class struggle as the motor of those segregations and their uses.

The engrossment of such as Yglesias in policy issues, at the moment, reflects the dearth of movement politics on the left side of the ledger, and the dominance of a class of political parasites – the party apparatchik. The party – Labor in the U.K., the Socialists in France, the Democrats in the U.S. – are a sort of institutionalized death drive, sucking out the libidinal energies of the true left and turning them into terms of office for white male non-entities with expensive hair or hair transplants. It isn't that these people aren't going to be there, regardless. The point is to have some gun to point at their heads -- a variety of movements that push them.

Unfortunately, the direction of momentum is backasswards. The mark of this is the way in which the defense of liberal issues is now conducted entirely in terms of economic cost benefit – ultimately, a very silly and defeatist way of looking at the issues involved. The larger demands should be put in terms of a larger definition of freedom – the iron rule of necessity has long been lifted in the West, and its continued effect is wholly the result of preserving, like some saint’s relic, an absurdly archaic slaveholding structure, with the wealthy holding down the role of our Simon Legrees, and the natural producers of wealth being alloted an insanely small portion of it.

Remember -- no slave revolt has ever succeeded by pennypushing.

The congregated roar of corruption

How exhausting it is, the Sunday paper, after the pious filler that has rendered American newspapers almost unreadable for a whole week. What is there to say after the Pope, the Pope's will, the mourners, the Pope's successor, the greatness of the Pope, his gallant struggle against communism, the Pope as a good man, the Pope as a great humanitarian, the Pope salad, the Pope's favorite daytime tv show, the Pope's dressing tips? What is there to say? The Tom Delaying of America (a land of bigotry and superstition, with DDT for all) goes on apace. Other news stories have shyly peeped out from the bottom of A-7: a 300,000 person demonstration in Baghdad, here, a riot in Beijing there. What rivets us is the sad spectacle of the Gringo’s favorite democrat, Vincente Fox, operating just like it is 1988 – that magic time for power in Mexico when the presidential election was resolved by an open fraud, instead of recourse to the usual methods of covert suppressions, bribes, and threats, all of which made up the tissue of the PRI’s electoral power. This has provoked some sighing in Yankee editorial departments. The LA Times writes:


“Once merely disappointing, the state of Mexico's democracy in the era of Vicente Fox has become alarming. It's hard to believe that only five years after the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party's inspiring defeat at the polls, the PRI and Fox's National Action Party are conspiring to bar a popular leftist candidate — Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — from the ballot in next year's presidential election. It's a foolish move that is tarnishing the credibility of the political system and is bound to backfire, enhancing Lopez Obrador's popularity.”

The editorial drenches itself in perfumed empathy for the struggling masses, yearning to be free (as in, free enterprisers). The Mexican poor, according to the orthodox North American interpretation of the law and the profits, have merely to be surrounded by the monuments of privatization to break out of their hovels and start singing If I were a Rich Man in Spanish:

“We should hasten to add that Lopez Obrador, who leads in the polls, is not a particularly appealing candidate for the presidency. Capitalizing on widespread disenchantment with Mexico's experiment with freer markets, Lopez Obrador threatens to take Mexico on a journey back in time, to a more socialist orientation that would seal the fate of his low-income supporters. He offers a great deal of messianic rhetoric backed by ill-advised policy prescriptions, including adamant opposition to privatizing Mexico's oil and electricity sectors, which are in dire need of outside investment. More worrisome is Lopez Obrador's penchant for incendiary demagoguery that seems to echo the likes of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. He also has surrounded himself with pols entangled in corruption scandals.”

Ah, that little word, “outside”, is such an interesting word. If one takes it away, you have: “in dire need of investment.” Money can actually come from a lot of places. The state itself could do the investing, n’est-ce pas? They certainly came up with the bucks for the banking billionaires, with Fox’s compassionate support – 62 billion, in fact, to float them after the collapse of their schemes at the end of the nineties. It is in these little, teeny words that creep and creep in, little scratches and noise on the logical surface, that you can hear, if you are a backwards looking socialist, the distant underground sound of class warfare.

The congregated roar of the Mexican congress has upheld the rule of law, at least as it applies to a third of a mile of road. A golden future beckons – in a century or so, the rule of law might even apply to the massive bribes that went to the PRI and the PAN in the past, or the rampant corruption of police departments in the North that allow both for the serial killing of poor women and long term cooperative ventures with the narco-rich. One wonders how the honorable dino-legislatures from Tijuana voted, and who they had dinner with afterwards. Since the LA Times is so sure that a little foreign investment will just hit the spot to help “unseal” the fates of the poor, we wondered how the Mexican poor were doing under the liberty loving rule of neo-liberalism. Here’s a nice summary from an article, in February of this year, by El Universal.

Two stories that raised questions about Mexico's economic sovereignty made headlines here last week. One was a corporate control story about bankers; the other was more of a human interest story about migrant workers. At bottom, the stories were both about global financial flows and they told us much the same thing. The bankers: A few days ago, the directors of the Spanish bank Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), owners of 60 percent of Mexico's largest bank, Bancomer, let it be known they would spend US4.1 billion to buy out the mostly Mexican shareholders who owned the remaining 40 percent. The buyout would leave BBVA as the bank's sole owner, removing Bancomer shares from public trading on the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BVM). BBVA's move would leave foreign capital in control of some 90 percent of the Mexican banking system: Currently, the major players are the Spanish bank Santander Central Hispano, the British Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC), the California-based Bank of America and the New York-based Citibank, sole owner of the country's second-largest bank, Banamex. But Bancomer is the giant; it owns some US50 billion dollars worth of assets, about 25 percent of the value of all banking assets in Mexico. The workers: A few days before BBVA's intentions were publicized, the Bank of Mexico announced that remittances from Mexican workers abroad, money sent home by Mexicans working in foreign countries, mostly the United States, had reached a record US13.3 billion dollars in 2003. This 13.3 billion earned outside the country by mostly low-paid workers exceeded by some two billion dollars all the direct foreign investment received by Mexico in 2003 and amounted to some two percent of the country's 2003 GDP. Above all, the stories about the bankers and the workers both aroused the ever-present uneasy feeling in Mexico that the economy is being kept afloat by flows of investment, wages and entrepreneurial activity that originate elsewhere. There is a nagging worry that a broad based entrepreneurial class neither exists nor is coming into existence in Mexico. Beyond that tiny sliver of the population that controls the powerful holding companies and travels with bodyguards, one is hard pressed to identify a significant part of the population that has the ability to invest in the country, provide jobs and spur development. This worry is not alleviated by the fact that the number of firms listed on the BMV has been steadily declining. In 1998 there were 195 non-financial companies listed on the Mexican bolsa; today there are 170. Aside from the state firms Pemex and Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the Mexican economy is now dominated by foreign companies. The country's largest private-sector company is General Motors. The next four (ranked by sales) are Telmex (Mexico), Wal-Mart (USA), Daimler-Chrysler (Germany) and Delphi Automotive (USA). Of Mexico's 25 largest private, non-financial firms, the corporate headquarters of only nine are in Mexico; eleven are in the United States, two each are in Japan and Germany and one is in Korea. And beyond the oligopolies, the country's stillprofitable maquila sector is virtually wholly owned by nonMexicans who repatriate profits to their home countries. Many in Mexico rightly worry that the Mexican economy is fast becoming a subsidiary of foreign, mostly transnational companies, companies with no particular commitment to the recovery of the country's domestic economy, much less to the movement of large numbers of people out of poverty. And now the southward flow of corn from Kansas and Iowa can be added to those financial flows we spoke of earlier as a source and symbol of the loss of sovereignty. Mexico's campesinos are being gradually displaced by industrialized agriculture, much of it based outside the country, and the broader Mexican economy has thus far been unable to absorb them. As the Mexican campo slowly collapses as a source of livelihood, many campesinos have joined the army, eight to 10 million strong, of Mexicans who are seeking work in the United States. The U.S. economy, it turns out, can happily absorb minimum-wage labor. The Secretariat of Work and Social Forecasting (StyPS) reports that Mexico's formal economy generated only 1,817 jobs last year.”

Wow, 1800 jobs. Talk about the capitalist wave of the future. Talk about those backwards lookin’ socialists. It is hard to understand why the populace would embrace those demagogic populist types when the wave of the future is so clear it knocks you off your feet, isn’t it?

colosio's bleeding (not so's you'd notice)

As our readers know, LI has farflung correspondants around the world to bring you...up to the minute... information. Sorry, we copied that from the last fund drive on NPR. LI is actually a sad drunk imbibing a two day old malt liquor by the side of 7th street even as we speak. However, our far flung correspondants love us anyway.

So we asked M., in Mexico City, to report on the situation there. Here's what she wrote back:

"I'll try to be brief but concrete as to your question (sorry, I've got to go).
I guess one way to describe what happened is complete breakdown of anything akin to a democratic process... even though that idiot Fox has been telling the press at the Vatican quite the contrary -- that the decision taken by the senate shows that the Mexican justice is truly blindfolded and does not show preferences for anyone). Basically, the PRI and the PAN agreed to quit Lopez Obrador's immunity so he can be tried for minor bureaucratic offenses, and thus not be eligible for candidacy in 2006. The other very serious consequence of this is that Lopez Obrador, overwhelmingly voted mayor of DF in 2006 might be replaced by one designated by this highly reactionary and anti-democratic congress. it still needs to be decided whether he will have to step down or not. In the meantime, he is not "going to work".

There are two important considerations in what happened on Thursday. They are independent of each other, though many people tend to confuse them:1. there are many who don't like Lopez Obrador and do not agree with what he's done for DF. Therefore, they are pleased that he will not have a chance to win in 2006. (In reality, if he does have a chance to run -- once he is tried,etc. -- obviously, he's become a martyr with a huge following.)2. This is not the point. One would want to be able to choose and not have the choice made by others. One would want to be able to -- when faced with ballots with his name and someone else's -- say "no" to him if one believes it is the right thing to do. The way the PRI and the PAn have chosen to get rid of him is in keeping with a whole host of practices which have pervaded Mexican politics since Independence. On the other hand, maybe it's preferable to having the guy killed, which is what happened to Colosio in 94. By the way, Thursday morning, Colosio's statue "bled" in light of the machinations. Someone spattered red paint on it.What to do now? People are very divided. In Polanco you'd think that nothing happened. On the other hand, it was very refreshing for me to go to the unam last night... people were very upset and are organizing marches, protests, etc. I don't know what will come of this but the mood is foreboding.. there are enough people who fear the military might intervene.... I used to think this was too alarmist but I don't anymore. I think anything is possible.

The other thing I might add is that the debates in Congress (in reality, called the legislative house) were televised and t was very embarrassing to see the waging of an ideological war (waged by all sides), demagogic, overly simplified, .... and not be able to scream something in their faces, have to swallow down one's frustrations.

While infantile papolatry still holds sway at the major ‘liberal’ dailies, the coup in Mexico went off like a wet firecracker. Via the King we went to Al Giordano’s Narco News. explains:
On Monday the owners of Televisa and TV Azteca, Emilio Azcárraga Jean and Ricardo Salinas Pliego, respectively, were called to Los Pinos (the Mexican presidential palace). One doesn't need to guess the motive for the discussion.
Next it was the radio broadcasters' turn, and one of them commented: "The President told us: Andrés Manuel must be disappeared!"
Neither station has aired nary a minute of the proceedings now underway in the National Congress (since 10:15 this morning), where the "desafuero" will be debated for many hours and voted on today.
President Vicente Fox, one of the intellectual and material authors of this coup d'etat against Mexican democracy, in an attempt to change the subject, then fled to Rome for the memorial services for the pope.”

Sounds like an Otto Reich special. You remember Reich – the king of soft coups Just as Syria regards Lebanon as too important to leave to the Lebanese, the U.S. sees itself as the natural colonial master of the Southern Hemisphere, and reserves for itself the right to intervene both militarily and with behind the scenes puppet pulling. Instead of blowing Lopez Obrador up, Bush’s ally, Fox, and the PRI, decided to take out his batteries. Fox, whose campaign relied on the same dirty money from the same oligarchs that financed Salinas and Zedillo’s campaigns in previous years, has had the gall to state that “no man is above the law” as he helped arranged this revealing blow against an honest election. As usual, the best reporting on the affair in the U.S. has been at the L.A. Times. Here’s a nice graf from their report:

“In response to Fox's argument, several legal experts noted that in contrast to this case, allegations of massive fraud in Mexico, such as the $140-million Pemexgate scandal, have gone unpunished. In that case, funds earmarked for oil union workers were allegedly funneled to the PRI. Fox himself has been implicated in a campaign spending case dating from the 2000 election, which has yet to come to trial.”

If Lopez Obrador does make a run for the presidency from prison, it will make for some very pretty tergiversation in the American press, which was so gung ho about democracy in the Ukraine. The American press doesn’t like lefty populist types in South America: too much U.S. money is at stake to fuck around. That’s when you roll out the defense of free markets. So nice, those free markets. And you can’t have the Chavez’ of the world mucking about with em. Somehow, Chavez works his magic even though, according to the Washington Post, he’s made his country much poorer. That’s actually pretty funny, considering the stream of billions pumped out of the country by the free marketers that ruled the country like brothel keepers in the eighties and nineties, with nary a bad word from the Post. Funny how those deluded poor keep voting for Chavez, too.

A friend of ours in Mexico City, who has expressed rather vehement disgust with various of the Mayor’s failings (she pointed out to us, when we were down there, some obvious make work road construction – for instance, long orphaned concrete ramps for bike riders that were accessible only via flights of stairs and/or the highway), is also disgusted with the move to impeach him.

Now, back to the ever fascinating topic of both beatifying the late pope and giving him a lifetime Oscar for best performance in medieval clothing.

In this, the fifth year of mourning the pope – or is it just LI? We’ve found the usual papers (the NYT, the WashPost) particularly boring lately, like some subdeb Elizabethan pageant play. The news from the war, which is washed through the mind detergent of American propaganda to make it as sweet as Momma’s sheets, pokes out the occasional factoid – the blown up American soldier in Anbar province, the general who claims that the insurgency is on its last legs just before two concentrated attacks on Abu Ghraib prison, the number of prisoners now being held captive by the Americans mounting to over 12,000, the dissipation of legitimacy as the American designed pre-constitution in Iraq did its job and effectively crippled the government before it began – yes, these things poke out as the usual imperial cruelties. But the blood has rushed to the head one too many times. There is a beautiful line by Thomas Paine, which we culled from the biography. Paine was deeply interested in the letters of Junius, which inflamed England in the 1770s. His ‘"brilliant pen," he [Paine] afterwards wrote, "enraptured without convincing; and though in the plenitude of its rage it might be said to give elegance to bitterness, yet the policy survived the blast."

The shoddy material out of which Bush had designed his ad hoc power plays could be blasted by a pea shooter – which is a weapon much too mighty for the American press to manipulate. Pea shooters are partisan, and to be avoided. Rather, one treads a margin slightly to the left of Fox news, and more than slightly right of reality. And the policy still stands. And stands. Hence, perhaps, our ennui.

So instead of the NYT, we went to the Financial Times and read Adrian Turpin’s fascinating April fool’s day account of the Koestler Para-psychology unit at the University of Edinburgh

Here’s a description of the faculty:

“Caroline Watt, acting head, is a thoughtful, quietly spoken psychologist whose work includes studies on the childhoods of people who claim paranormal experiences and an investigation of ghostly incidents in Edinburgh’s underground vaults. One of three research fellows, Peter Lamont, is a former professional magician and the world expert on the Indian rope trick. Much of his work is about the history of deception. Fiona Steinkamp works part time. A philosopher, one of her interests is the possibility that humans can predict the future. Dr Paul Stevens, by contrast, trained as a physicist. His current research involves testing people to see whether their bodies react to the emotional state of a person in another room, then comparing this to the effects of very weak, low-frequency magnetic fields. Stevens is a science-fiction fan but engage him in debate and you realise he doesn’t have a credulous bone in his body. Together this small team supervises eight postgraduate students.”

How LI missed out on becoming a part of this team is a mystery to us. We’d be perfect for investigating the haunting of underground places.

The article does a nice job of condensing two decades of controversy about psi. Psi experiments are always, shall we say, unusual. This early experiment seemed allegorical, to our jaded eye, of the way contemporary capitalism works:

“The first Koestler professor arrived from America in December 1985. Robert Morris was a psychologist who had worked at Duke University in North Carolina under the famous paranormal researcher J.B. Rhine in 1960. There he had taken part in some unusual studies. In one, rats were tested for their psychic ability. Having heard stories of dogs that ran to their master every morning except on the day they were due to be put down, Morris decided to see whether a similar phenomenon could be observed in the lab.

"Sixteen rats were each released for two minutes into an 8ft x 8ft box marked with a grid of small squares. Notes were taken of how many squares each rat entered - a measure of how active they were. After this, eight of the rats were selected at random to be killed. “Half of the animals that lived were active enough to leave their original square,” Morris concluded, “whereas none of the animals that died showed such activity.”

That certainly sounds like the last part time job I had.

bellow is dead

The passing of a mere pontiff is, after the hustle and bustle is done, as nothing compared to the passing of Saul Bellow – Bellow was a real genius. Was he, as Roth said, one of the two great American novelists of the 20th century (the other being Faulkner?). We’d say no. We don’t think American literature maps out like this, with novelists making their marks over their whole career. That is a credible way of approaching, say, Dickens, or James, or even Woolf – but it breaks down in the U.S. in the twentieth century. In one way, that is the crack up that Fitzgerald complained of – the quiet but devastating segregation of art and career. Every garbageman in America has a career, which is why the American novelist often operates out of sheer envy – it is envy that sharpens the eyesight.

There is nothing in Bellow that is as good, we think, as Invisible Man, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Blood Meridian. But – and this is where the Faulkner comparison comes in -- Bellow really created an oeuvre, unlike Pynchon, Ellison, McCarthy, et al.

There is one thing about Bellow that we haven’t seen mentioned: Bellow operated as a counterweight to the suburbanization of the U.S. The hustlers that ring the changes in his novels are all incredibly urban – urban to the pores. They none of them long for the nirvana of the suburbs – the nirvana of being attached to the main only by highly guarded access routes: the highway, tv, the internet. Bellow’s people actually like the way the body can absorb the images of the crowd, they like the anecdote, they like character, they feel that this is living. Recently, we had to review the latest novel by Jonathan Safron Foer, a terrible mess that follows an implausible eight year old around New York City as he “investigates” a small mystery left to him by his dad, who was a victim of the 9/11 attack. I liked Foer’s first novel, which just skirted sentimentality by ingenious exaggeration. His second, though, achieves the intellectual level of a socially responsible book for the children of divorced parents, ages 5 to 8. It is, in other words, an utter disaster. Not content with simply milking 9/11 for easy tears as thin and tasty as those shed over some Hallmark get well card, Foer also goes on to milk the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima. All the people that died, man. And all the cute kids they left behind. Don't those kids deserve hugs?

But what is most interesting about it is Foer’s complete and utter lack of interest in careers, in hustling, in deals. This is the genuine mark of suburbia – employment is what you go home from, you get away from. It is so boring to Foer. So boring that this happens: at a certain point in Foer’s novel, he asks us to believe that a character who only communicates by gestures and by two words tattooed on his hands rises through the ranks at a jewelry business in the fifties to become the owner of one. Except he doesn’t ask us to believe that – he throws the information in, in a couple of sentences, like catch up info in a daydream, so he can get on to the main business at hand: the utter cuteness of his main character, and how utterly bad it is that human beings die in bombings. So we are not left to ponder the idea that, in a business drenched in talk and dealing, a man who operates at, shall we say, a disadvantage rises effortlessly through the ranks. We aren’t left to ponder the world outside the airless vacuum of the progressive children’s story.

This is where Bellow has such authority – he does know how people rise through the ranks in America. He knows that it happens in broadly the same way in academia as in construction, or organized crime – he knows that there are betrayals everywhere, that there is sex everywhere, that there’s a hunger extending beyond the dinner table or the table at the best restaurants. He knows that money is power and joy and guilt, that it builds up from boys' treasure hunts to the moments of panic and exhilaration that put one person on the street and another in a spectacular office in a skyscraper. And he is after all that.

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.