Inspissated cockledoodledoo

LI used to ‘do’ Christopher Hitchens more. After a while, though, it got boring. The man’s defense of the indefensible, his substitution of belligerence for logic, his wavering between complete lies and half truths, became a circus sideshow that indicted those who hooted at it as much as those who cheered it – after all, why were us squawkers still watching? My friend, T., kept pointing this out forcefully. After all, why waste one’s time on Hitchen’s inspissated cockledoodledoo when there were more pressing matters to worry about? Existence itself, my next meal, sex and the lack of it around these parts, etc., etc.

But the sideshow still runs, and is still, occasionally, funny in that “watching-Friday-the-thirteenth” way – watching, that is, the killer resurrect in the midst of ever more bogus S/FX. So we read, with vast amusement, the copping of old Cold War themes in his essay on Abu Ghraib (and how the horrible left is using it as a propaganda tool against the good old Americans) in Slate. We particularly liked this one:

“Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.”

Remember how the Russians used to ‘whisper’ about the Lubyanka? Of course, oppressed people were always whispering to reporters back in the day. That the whispers of the Iraqis wouldn’t, really, be understood by Hitchens, who doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t matter. Apparently his translators mimicked the whipering. And the hands being cut off – not like today’s prisons in Iraq. Sure, in Samarra, where the Iraqis are whispering again, to a real reporter, Peter Maass, there might be a little electric prodding to the genitals. There might be the tying to the ceiling – the famous airplane – pulling the arms out of the socket. But of course, it is only used on the ‘sudden flood of ex-cons” – Saddam Hussein’s natural constituency. Funny how debasing the enemy into the purely criminal is part of the organization of torture in Iraq. It is also funny that nowhere in Hitchens essay is there any mention of the, uh, heart attacks suffered by various prisoners of the Americans. Maybe the whispering about that was just too low for him to hear.

Anyway, now we get to the new, improved prison complex – prisons as humane as the ones we have in Ameriiiicaaa:

“Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.

“Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors.”

Wow. Their superiors uncovered this, eh? Makes one wonder what Stalin would have found out if he’d just ordered a thorough investigation of what the police were up to. The father of all the Russias might have found, to his disgust, that those labor camps weren’t really rehabilitating his dear children. And the Pentagon bigwigs might have found out that instead of the ice cream and veggies that they had strictly ordered the guards to give the low-lives, the guards were, on their own, staging these orgies. One is just pleased as punch that the superiors uncovered the lot of em. As for the hangings – that is certainly right, and progress we should all be proud of. The body in the bag that Grainer was famously making the thumbs up sign over was beaten to death. Or died of a heart attack -- Ba'athist scum are notoriously prone to heart attacks.

Quite wonderful, actually, how civilization marches on.

Hitchens, who has taken to thinking that his father’s position in the Navy makes him an expert on the army, must be pleased that there are no more messy hangings going on, since it is so against the regulations. He might, however, want to watch some of that American funded Iraqi tv. The popular show in which terrorists confess – and sometimes, after confession, their bodies are found by roadsides. The lot of them were Saddam’s natural constituency, and we don’t want to waste a lot of sob sister sympathy on these impediments to democracy as the Hitchenses see it in the Middle East.

ps: ps – We at LI often feel bad about the number of people coming to this site looking for “sex” “girles” “breasts” and the like. We’ve offered pretty slim pickings. But today we can recommend a link to those surfers: take a look at the hot analingus action over at the NYT, when not one but two reporters stick their tongues and noses as far up the rectum of our Secretary of War as is permitted by the Supreme Court. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s article begins in the time honored fashion of the breathless Teen Mag piece about some Britney-ette:

"Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."

Notice how that intimation of intimacy, that dropped “you” in the “ask…” functions. On the one hand, you, too, lucky citizen, could have the earthshaking opportunity to interview the great man! Oh, doesn’t it do something to you that makes you run to the bathroom to change your shorts! But on the other hand – sucker, you don’t have a chance in hell getting within touching distance of Donnie. That’s reserved for NYT reporters, who are specialists in the tongue massage.

Not that they aren’t critical. Why, they went out and found a congressman who put it that some criticize Rumsfeld for not kowtowing in Congress!

As for clichés, we got your clichés right here. For instance, Paul Wolfowitz is a “lightning rod” of controversy. Interesting choice of words, given that this week, the price of going into Iraq has risen to 300 billion dollars, just a tad more than the 10 billion Wolfie projected two years ago. I guess lightning rod means, in Timespeak, dysfunctional liar. But given the adorable Rumsfeld bottom to which our reporters are attached, I suppose these are minor things.

One boner deflator warning, however: the article is about how Rummy is going to finish out his term. Meaning, for those of you outside the NYT orgy – those fans, those “you”’s outside the magic circle – another, what, two thousand, three thousand soldiers dying, adorably, for Rumsfeld’s crackpot ideas. Isn’t that sweet! As for the colored others, well, let’s not even count them.

Another triumph for the free press everywhere!

Nine murdered, runaway bride still running

So, nine American soldiers die in Iraq over the weekend. Not one of those soldiers will get a thousandth of the news attention that a woman who didn’t want to get married in Duluth, Georgia, has already received. Not that the press doesn’t support our troops, but really – these guys are so low income. Suckers. Downers. CNN spending time figuring out how these senseless deaths were caused by the manipulations of a brainless Prez? Please. No doubt, the military got busy right away cutting off benefits to the wives and kids. Money goes to the virtuous – to the stockholders of the weapons companies, the private military contractors, the consultants, and the wonderful, inbred round of retired legislatures and generals who sit on boards and hold down important positions in the Death industry and will devise ways to keep America, in big ways and small, a vicious and uncompanionable country. And the great deferrers who so bravely lead them have, stoically, kept a stiff upper lip. Rumsfeld’s automatic pen was busy. Wolfowitz, of course, is getting ready to sink his fangs into the World Bank. In fact, they are all so brave and true and busy that they haven’t given a thought or a shit about those nine deaths, and never will. Although we can always hope that Rumsfeld experiences a death scene much like the one in Richard III, when the King’s victims visit him:

Ghost of CLARENCE
"Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
I, that was wash'd to death with fulsome wine,
Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrayed to death!
To-morrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword: despair, and die!”

How many victims in the end? Two thousand Americans? one hundred thousand Iraqis?

So what are the headlines on Monday and today? 100 Iraqi insurgents die. Where did this wonderful death count come from? That totally trustworthy institution, the U.S. Military – which is to death counts as WorldComm was to accounting. How do we know that the Iraqis weren’t, say, wedding party guests, kids, and the numerous others that the U.S. military has an unfortunate tendency to eviscerate, scorch to death, disembowel, etc., in the course of its mission – helpin’ freedom loving Iraqis love perpetual subjugation? We can take that on trust. After all, we are getting information from embedded reporters, who pride themselves on not merely spewing out Yankee propaganda. No, they gild the propaganda with their own feeble artfulness.

LI unpatriotically suspects that somehow, the glorious U.S. press, which is always fiercely sniffing out the truth of things, might have lain down a little on the job this weekend. And of course, there is the U.S.’s love affair with imprisonment. Prison, in the age of Bush, is next to godliness and freedom loving. Which is why we are, unsurprisingly, gifting Iraq with our unique obsession:

“BAGHDAD, May 9 -- The number of prisoners held in U.S. military detention centers in Iraq has risen without interruption since autumn, filling the centers to capacity and prompting commanders to embark on an unanticipated prison expansion plan.

As U.S. and Iraqi forces battle an entrenched insurgency, the detainee population surpassed 11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October, when aggressive raids began in a stepped-up effort to crush the insurgency before January's vote.”

Among the things we really ought to list in "America the Beautiful", right next to the purple mountain's majesty, is the the second greatest prison population in the world, much of it made up by that most dangerous of villains, the pot smoker. So isn't it natural we'd want to share with our little buddy, Iraq?

Smoke on the water

LI mentioned punitive liberalism in our last post. In the Reformer, a British journal, the Spring issue is headlines articles about civil liberties and the “therapeutic” state – a state that is no longer big brother, but is simply your best friends intervening to make sure you are no longer a menace to yourself. In the friendliest way possible. With big Tony Blair smiles. The Reformer is obviously oriented towards the classical liberalism of Mill. LI does not subscribe to the classical liberalism of Mill. Or at least we are inspired by that thematic in Mill that made him ever more sympathetic to socialism. But the British journal isn’t into Cato kneejerk libertarianism. There’s a nice recognition, for instance, that environmental harm is a serious issue, rather than a conspiracy made up by junk scientists – the favorite rightwing meme.

Claire Fox’s essay on smoking bans was particularly nice. We liked this graf: “It is through the prism of passive smoking that we have seen the issue of freedom –a key tenent of liberal democracy – redefined and indeed degraded. Instead of fighting for a free society, we now have a demand for a smoke free society. Mike Storey, Lib Dem leader of the Liverpool County Council (the first local authority to vote for a ban) told his party conference – with no hint of irony – that a ban which allows no room for choice, and can result in 1,000 pound fines (with jail for those who refuse to pay) is really “about the liberty of the individual to breathe the air and not have to have their [sic] health put at risk by the illiberal actions of others.” We would have enjoyed the issue even more if it were recognized that the great generator of the discourse that allows the state to exert such moral monopolies over the bio-chemical lives of its citizens is and has been the drug war; that the rhetoric about smoking is the same rhetoric that has been used to ban marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc., etc.; that the bans were pernicious and unjustified in their very origins; that the last sensible drug policy adopted by a Western government was, in fact, that adopted under classical liberal principles by the British raj in India, which refused, in the 1890s, to ban ganja smoking among Bengalis (as some reformers were calling for them to do) on the sensible ground that it wasn’t those reformers business; and that the radical illogic of drug banning spreads the harm of precedent – the law being the vector, here, bearing harm to all parts of the body politic.

news from austin

A friend wrote to tease me about the protests against Ann Coulter here in Austin. I didn’t even know Ann Coulter was coming to Austin. I feel about Ann Coulter and her movements the way Sherlock Holmes felt about the heliocentric theory, when Watson introduced him to the subject in Study in Scarlet:

“My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found
incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory
and of the composition of the Solar System. That any
civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not
be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to
be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly
realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my
expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my
best to forget it."

But if I was young and full of cum and a liberal undergrad at U.T., I’m sure that I would have thought protesting A.C. was just the thing to do. One has to teethe, no? And a little tussle with the cops, some shouting, and apparently one arrest – excitement was had by all.

No, the real news from Austin is that the smoking ban passed. I voted against it, of course. But I expected it to pass. The anti-smoking people did a really good job canvassing for that. And the pro-smokers did a piss poor job campaigning against it. Basically, there is already a ban on smoking in most work places. This ban would extend it to places where you drink and try to pick up your sexual preference (and if that doesn’t work, you listen to music). The pro-smokers should have emphasized the fun aspect of this. Instead, they mounted a dreary, geeky campaign about choice. Well, liberty will move the libertarians among us, all four of them – but to really block this ban, one needed to move the people who actually go to the clubs. And they would be moved only if it was obvious that this was a case of making good and sure that somebody else wasn’t having fun – a perennial preoccupation of punitive liberalism. This campaign, in other words, required mockery and song, but it didn’t get it.

The other issue that was much discussed and thrown about was the possibility that the state will rent some public roads to tolling companies. Or that tolling companies will build the roads. It is hard to know which it is to be. If the latter, it is a terrible idea. If the former, I don’t know. Extracting a charge from cars on the highway does have its good points – especially if, like me, you ride a bike. Seriously, although the highway system in the U.S. proves, once again, that sector specific socialism works, I’ve always held that there are no absolutes in the political economy. The social cost of allowing the state to spread the cost of infrastructure around is, evidently, to be measured in environmental damage here. And, as time goes by, in an unbreakable bond to an exhaustible resource accessed most easily under other skies. How to make that that social cost visible? LI is not against privatizing, with strict regulation, certain resources in order to make the cost of them real in every case. There are certain aberrant phenomena in this country – for instance, the million person lollapolooza in the desert known as Las Vegas – which are, in the long run, unsustainable. That the fastest growing city in these states is located in the area with the most rapidly dwindling supply of water implies something has gone wrong in our vaunted system of allocating resources.

I put down these stray thoughts as markers for a later post.

I’ve been waiting for two years for Tony Blair to get his comeuppance. So this morning, I should be filled with glee.

I’m not. I’m filled with pity.

The repudiation of Blair was all about the war. A concentrated effort will be made to reverse the obvious among the American pundocrats in the next couple of days, but the fact is that, even if we put the anti-war shift away from Blair’s Labour at around 4 percent, that missing percentile torpedoes Blair’s ability to govern – as he is used to governing.

The polls don’t get to the multiplier effect. A list of voter priorities is not a map of voter mood. Every other issue was infected by the feeling that Blair practiced blatant deceit and high-handedness in maneuvering to bring Britain into the War.

What was the point? The U.S. was going to invade with or without Britain. In the event, Britain got nothing. No say in the running of “coalition” Iraq – the English had to sit back and watch flunkouts from the Heritage Foundation destroy Iraq as a unified whole from their place in Saddam’s Palace without having the power to intervene with a firm nanny’s smack. They enabled Bush-ites to design the war as a no-sacrifice political show. Even though that didn’t completely succeed (true, nobody cares about the number of Iraqi dead sacrificed to the neocon dream, but even a country of Sleeping Beauties – the out of it America of the Bush age – has a rumbling that things haven’t been working out right, there), Britain, by providing enough troops to subdue the South, actually gave the Bush administration the leeway to do what it likes to do best – put sacrifice off until tomorrow, while posturing today. If the U.S. had had to throw in another fifty to one hundred thousand troops in Iraq, Sleeping Beauty would be halfway out of her coma. So Blair’s policy didn’t even have the minimum effect he ostensibly wanted, keeping America integrated into the circle of international interests shared by the Great Power democracies. On the contrary, Bush’s nosethumbing at civilization became a great amusement for his more yahoo followers, while the NYT set had to be content with assuring us that Colin Powell was gravely concerned.

There is a part of me that will forever be an oatmeal bread Fabian. That part of me, the part that reads Polly Toynbee and nods its head, was not wholly out of love with Blair. True, the horrible civil rights record is not good – the sucking up to the worst kind of capitalist is even worse – but Labour made those incremental improvements in the lot of the working class that Toynbee is always writing about. It seems like all commas and subclauses, this program here and that program there, but that is the way Fabian progress looks.

However, my pity is more personal than political. Blair was battered for the war very personally, his nose was held to the blood spilt – once again playing the surrogate for Bush. And Blair seems like a person who can be very hurt by being disliked. The eagerness and chipperness in trying to make himself likeable is what makes him so damned annoying, and made the lap dog comparison woundingly apt – but, insofar as his surface insincerity is truly sincere, it also makes his wounding a sad spectacle.

ps – readers have complained that LI has neglected the week’s hot story – you know the one, Paul Abdul claiming to have been kidnapped by OJ Simpson so she could avoid marrying her secret American Idol sweetheart in Duluth Georgia, while the investigation among the Duluth Georgia police department reportedly finds that nine out of ten of the finest slept with Michael Jackson while he abstained from abusing them. Some talk of “playing with the badges” has surfaced. Well, we are taking the high road on this story. We are ardent fans of the alter-American Idol show – the one in which demi-virgins from Bachlorette are sacrificed on a Gilded dollar sign altar by Pat Robertson wearing the leathermask from Texas Chain Saw massacre – which is shown on the alter-Fox station in Austin, Texas. The singing American Idol show has a little too little bloodshed and corrupt evangelists for our taste. Also, no mudwrestling. We can’t abide no mudwrestling. Kudos kudos kudos to ABC for pulling its investigative team off the totally boring 8.7 trillion dollar Medicare deficit story – directly attributable to our lovable Mr. Mission Accomplished in the White House -- to jump on this much more interesting story. Red State America deserves no less – and no more.

Greater evils, election time

Pity the Brits today. An election between a man who is marginally more evil than Bush (the margin consists of his much greater intelligence—Blair is Iago to Bush’s Ubu Roi) and a conservative leader who is campaigning to bring the paramilitary right back to the fold. Howard is simply another sign of the disaster Margaret Thatcher wreaked, like some medieval comet shedding plagues, on a party that at one time boasted Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan. The socialist side of the British political economy, one should always remember, owes a lot to Conservatives – from the willingness to break with the liberal/free trade orthodoxy in Lord Salisbury’s era to Macmillan’s normalization of the welfare state.

A Macmillan would recognize the opportunity that Blair has given the Conservatives to repair the social compact by opposing, wholeheartedly, the ill conceived alliance with the U.S. to invade and subjugate Iraq. A Macmillan would also recognize that a conservative defends those instruments of social cohesion that have passed the test of time – and thus would be for strengthening National Health, for instance, not looking for illusory savings. A Macmillan would recognize that, given the country’s enormous wealth, the cost of a higher education should be going down, with solid state support for taking the financial burden from the student and his or her family – for surely there is a direct relationship between conservatism and the expanded property-holding possibility given by higher education. A Macmillan wouldn’t be captured by the silly tinker toy called ‘conservatism’ in the United States, which consists of enormous handouts to corporations, a permanent state of war justifying a permanent inflation of the Department of War, and a taxphobia that is less a reasoned position than a cause for psychotherapeutic intervention.

Unfortunately, as long as the Thatcherites have their withered, dying talons on the throat of the Conservative party, they will keep squeezing the life out of the thing. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Guardian the other day rather beautifully:

“What's more, Howard's enthusiasm for the war puts him quite out of step with his own followers, as opposed to the quasi-neocons and quisling right who dominate the Tory press, as well as the Tory leadership. Anyone who lives in middle England, otherwise known as provincial England, will be aware of what the polls have regularly confirmed: the Iraq war was markedly more unpopular among ordinary Conservatives than among Labour voters.

One of the most electrifying moments in the past month wasn't directly related to the election. George MacDonald Fraser was talking on the Today programme about the latest of his marvellous Flashman novels. Now an octogenarian, a Tory of Tories, this splendid writer is for ever groaning about the dismal modern age and every woe from political correctness to the metric system. More relevantly, a lifetime earlier he was an infantryman, who saw his best friend killed beside him.
Suddenly there was an explosion on air. He had never in his life felt more ashamed of his country than he had over Iraq, the old soldier said. He could not get out of his head two pictures, one of a small Iraqi boy with his arms blown off by American bombs, and another of our prime minister smirking sycophantically at President Bush's side.

It was riveting, but not surprising. I would have a large bet that if the 60th anniversary of VE-day on Sunday were marked by a poll of MacDonald Fraser's surviving contemporaries - the men and women who served this country in 1939-45 - an easy majority of them would be opposed to the Iraq war.”

And so the spectacle will continue – a country moving right under a nominally left leadership, opposed by a rightwing party that stands for the worst kind of servility to a foreign power, etc., etc. Sad days.

damned, rammed and sunk

We’ve been thinking of Abiezer Coppe.

The reason we’ve been thinking of Abiezer Coppe is that Infinite Thought, in the course of visiting a May day celebration in some village in England, came across some “prophetic (and poorly-spelled) religious missives [that] were posted on walls around a place that already seemed pretty religious (in a whitebread, exclusivist, entirely British kind of way). Russia will attack Israel, apparently according to Ezekiel 38-39 (The Gog-Magog bit).” She has photos up of the broadsheets here.

Now, unlike the bestselling leftbehind apocalyptic novels put out by rich evangelical types, in which we see the happy merger those two ur-American tropes, the Caucasian utopia and the action hero movie, the older style of apocalyptic lit digs into the pork and corruption of a world that runs over the oppressed and sees its dark ends – the first who shall be last, here, include the rich evangelical types, being fed into the maw of some rich Bosch-style monster. When the World is turned Upside Down, the values that held it right side up will be turned upside down too – which means that profit seekers will suffer, while the idle will be rewarded for their intense study of the lilies of the field; which means that the pure to whom all was pure – the whores, wankers, tramps, schizos, pennyante artists, Sal Army Hall bedwetters, holy toothless fools, runaways, all the tranquillized children in all the foster homes, etc., etc. – will invade, with much hooting, the halls of power; which means the meek housewives who took up steak knives and studied their husband’s backs on all those electric lightbulb sick nights, Raymond Chandler’s heroines, will pack like Amazons and destroy the peace of mind we’ve all purchased by disciplining the libido, and banning the Id. Those mean streets, it turns out, are the streets of the New Jerusalem.

The World Turned Upside Down was the title of the book by Christopher Hill that re-introduced the Levelers, the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Muggletonians to the world. I think it is that book, with its sections from Coppe’s Fiery Flying Roll, that insinuated the man into the subdeb niches – and even into the Norton Anthology of English Lit, for a guest appearance, between Donne and Milton.

Coppe, from Hill’s description, was an exemplary Ranter. He believed in free love, and drinking, and throwing himself under the wheels of luxurious carriages. He was a freelance prophet, not connected to the Diggers or Levelers and their more rational political schemes. When he was examined by the court, he supposedly bawled at them and tried to throw fruit about. He was more like Huck Finn’s father crossed with Ezekiel, if Ezekiel had been transplanted to the much colder climes of Albion. Then, of course, imprisonment, Cromwell’s reign, and the Restoration made him as lonely as a recalcitrant Yippie in the Reagan years, and he wilted away. Anyway, the intro to his most famous pamphlet, copped from the subgenius site:

An inlet into the Land of Promise, the new Hierusalem, and agate into the ensuing Discourse, worthy of seriousconsideration.
My Deare One.
All or None.
Every one under the Sunne.
Mine own. My most excellent Majesty (in me) hath strangely and variously transformed this forme.
And beholde, by mine owne Almightinesse (in me) I have been changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound ofthe Trump.…

And it hath pleased my most excellent Majesty (who is universall love, and whose service is perfecte freedom) to set this forme(the Writer of this Roll) as no small signe and wonder in fleshly Israel; as you may partly see in the ensuing Discourse.

And now (my deare ones!) every one under the Sun, I will onely point at the gate; thorow which I was led into that new City,new Hierusalem, and to the Spirits of just men, made perfect,and to God the Judge of all.First, all my strength, my forces were utterly routed, my houseI dwelt in fired; my father and mother forsook me, the wife ofmy bosome loathed me, mine old name was rotted, perished; and Iwas utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke intonothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mother'swomb) out of which I came naked, and whetherto I returned againnaked. And lying a while there, rapt up in silence, at length(the body or outward forme being awake all this while) I heardwith my outward eare (to my apprehension) a most terriblethunder-clap, and after that a second. And upon the secondthunder-clap, which was exceeding terrible, I saw a great body of light, like the light of the Sun, and red as fire, in theforme of a drum (as it were) whereupon with exceeding trembling and amazement on the flesh, and with joy unspeakable in thespirit, I clapt my hands, and cryed out, Amen, Hallelujah,Hallelujah, Amen. And so lay trembling, sweating, and smoaking(for the space of halfe an hour) at length with a loud voyce (Iinwardly) cryed out, Lord, what wilt thou do with me; my mostexcellent majesty and eternal glory (in me) answered & sayd,Fear Not, I will take thee up into mine everlasting Kingdom. Butthou shalt (first) drink a bitter cup, a bitter cup, a bittercup; whereupon (being filled with exceeding amazement) I wasthrowne into the belly of hell (and take what you can of it inthese expressions, though the matter is beyond expression) I was among all the Devils in hell, even in their most hideous hew.

Laissez faire casualties

LI, in pursuance of an editing job for a client, was reading Mill’s Principles of Political Economy the other day, looking for a certain quote. We found the quote, but we also found Mill’s rather startling defense of the export of food stuffs from countries that were in the midst of famine as dictated by the logic of free trade. Or so it appeared to us. The passage, in the PPE, reads:

“On the subject, however, of subsistence, there is one point which deserves more especial consideration. In cases of actual or apprehended scarcity, many countries of Europe are accustomed to stop the exportation of food. Is this, or not, sound policy? There can be no doubt that in the present state of international morality, a people cannot, any more than an individual, be blamed for not starving itself to feed others. But if the greatest amount of good to mankind on the whole, were the end aimed at in the maxims of international conduct, such collective churlishness would certainly be condemned by them. Suppose that in ordinary circumstances the trade in food were perfectly free, so that the price in one country could not habitually exceed that in any other by more than the cost of carriage, together with a moderate profit to the importer. A general scarcity ensues, affecting all countries, but in unequal degrees. If the price rose in one country more than in others, it would be a proof that in that country the scarcity was severest, and that by permitting food to go freely thither from any other country, it would be spared from a less urgent necessity to relieve a greater. When the interests, therefore, of all countries are considered, free exportation is desirable. To the exporting country considered separately, it may, at least on the particular occasion, be an inconvenience: but taking into account that the country which is now the giver will in some future season be the receiver, and the one that is benefited by the freedom, I cannot but think that even to the apprehension of food rioters it might be made apparent, that in such cases they should do to others what they would wish done to themselves.”

This, to my eye, seems to be heartless tripe. Now, I know Mill is not in the business of doling out heartless tripe. I also know that the case he is considering was contemporary with the writing of the Political Economy. This is from Mill’s autobiography:

“The Political Economy was far more rapidly executed than the Logic, or indeed than anything of importance which I had previously written. It was commenced in the autumn of 1845, and was ready for the press before the end of 1847. In this period of little more than two years there was an interval of six months during which the work was laid aside, while I was writing articles in the Morning Chronicle (which unexpectedly entered warmly into my purpose) urging the formation of peasant properties on the waste lands of Ireland. This was during the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, when the stern necessities of the time seemed to afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate destitution with permanent improvement of the social and economical condition of the Irish people. But the idea was new and strange; there was no English precedent for such a proceeding: and the profound ignorance of English politicians and the English public concerning all social phenomena not generally met with in England (however common elsewhere), made my endeavours an entire failure. Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, and the conversion of cottiers into proprietors, Parliament passed a Poor Law for maintaining them as paupers: and if the nation has not since found itself in inextricable difficulties from the joint operation of the old evils and the quack remedy it is indebted for its deliverance to that most unexpected and surprising fact, the depopulation of ireland, commenced by famine, and continued by emigration.”

In both the PPE and the Autobiography, there is an odd coolness of tone – especially as it contrasts with the lively heat generated by contending against the principles of Protectionism. It is as if the dead of Ireland could be considered with one’s riding boots on, in contrast to the Ur-English proposers of raising the tariff on flax. It is always a little hurtful when one’s intellectual heroes fall for their age’s most vulgar prejudices.

However, on re-reading the PPE passage, one is struck by its lack of Mill’s habitual clarity: this is a defense of free trade that is so full of conditionals as to be a sort of economic fiction. In particular, we feel there is a touch of willful blindness in a lifelong employee of the India House writing ” If the price rose in one country more than in others, it would be a proof that in that country the scarcity was severest, and that by permitting food to go freely thither from any other country, it would be spared from a less urgent necessity to relieve a greater. When the interests, therefore, of all countries are considered, free exportation is desirable.” That equality among the interests of all countries would, of course, be the ruin of colonialism – that is, if it were taken to a political level. And if it is not taken to a political level, one wonder how the prices rising in the afflicted country are going to be paid. The paradox of famine is that the demand for food that rises the prices stems from the condition that has visited, with catastrophic effect, the agricultural sector in the country. Demand, in other words, is way out of kilter with income.

Mill knew this. In fact, while he was writing the mammoth PPE, he was also (as an ever energetic Victorian) writing a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle about the situation in Ireland. Mill’s articles could be boiled down to a negative and a positive component. The negative component was his concern about how the Government was going about dispensing money. First, he did not like the idea of public works projects in order to maintain the poorest Irish, since, in Mill’s view, the public works were inefficient – simply adding useless capacity to transport and such – and had the vicious effect of attracting agricultural laborers off the land. Second, he did not like the Government’s choice of landlords as the preferred vehicle for putting money in Ireland. He thought that loaning money to a class that had evidently made a mess of their business in Ireland was expanding a problem, rather than solving one. The positive component in Mill’s articles was the advocacy of a program similar, in nature, to the FHA – loaning money, on easy terms, to peasants in order for them to buy ‘wasteland’. Mill thought the tenant farmer system was at the bottom of Ireland’s ills.


Mill’s negative view of Government expenditure was echoed in the Great Depression by the right, which certainly saw no use in Roosevelt’s many public work projects. Of course, in Japan and Germany, at the same time, the massive outlay for public works projects, plus ending the gold standard, plus a policy of controlled reflating, was ending the Depression much quicker than it ended here. The same was true for Britain, which was even making a success of protectionist policies that formed its Commonwealth into a super-regional trading bloc – one of the reasons that England, in the late thirties, experienced a housing boom. Plus, of course, Conservatives and Labor had already provided a minimum social insurance plan. The conservative complaint is really a class complaint, anyway – conservative anxiety is always aroused when the instruments of power seemed to be used to help the powerless. It has nothing to do with the size of the government. The scale of government really has as little to do with the particulars of the alternatives between sides in the hegemonic ideology of post industrial capitalism as the scale of employment does – the size of government seeks its level as a share of the GDP independently of the opinions of lawmakers about big or small government.

Still, one gets back, with Mill, to this moment in which the imagination turns to stone. Wordsworth might have awoken him to life, but it was a very English life. The life of the Irish, and their deaths, was not a spirit easily roused from the mere data. There are a few passionate outbursts in the articles about the condition of Ireland. But the marmoreal utopianism of the Free Trade passage in PPE rests, like a gravestone, not only on the million slain by the Potato famine, but on the millions to come who will die in India due to Britain’s use of terror famine tactics there – free trade, one should always remember, has as many notches in its belt for as many bodies as Soviet style collectivization.

Rolling over in our sleep

LI has long contended that the proper analogies for the Iraq war should be sought in U.S. foreign policy in Central and South America, with its heavy emphasis on the electric wire to your balls and support for a compliant elite, sitting on all those extractable raw materials, rather than in WWII or in Vietnam.

Oct 24, 2004 – LI

“The Lord Raglans of the Rumsfeld gang – the Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchezes – have, if anything, been even more coddled by the press, which does love a man in uniform, and since getting their fingers burned in the Vietnam war have reliably laid down a covering fire of delusions for the U.S. government as it has supported death squad democracy in Central America and, now, Iraq. It is rather embarrassing for the newspapers to have to confront the obvious screwups of our politicized and incompetent high command – Franks inability to hurt Al Qaeda when it was concentrated in Afghanistan, and Sanchez’s mindblowing underestimation of the insurgency last fall – so the reporters prefer to do in depth reports on these things a year or two after they have happened. News may upset the bourgeois reader, but never his prejudices. And so the world is cut out for us on a paperdoll pattern.”

Read Peter Maass’ excellent article in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine. LI has found surprisingly little comment about it – but then, we are all so tired of the war. Being tired, there is a simple solution -- re-file Iraq in the national dream life from the drawer in which the dreams are remembered to the drawer in which the dreams are forgotten. Every night the body politic goes to sleep and rolls over on another two or three American bodies, and fifteen to twenty Iraqi ones:

“The officer in charge of the raid -- a Major Falah -- now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.'s. One of Falah's captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain's fists and boots on the detainee's body, and we heard the detainee's pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.

Bennett had seen the likes of this before, and he had worked out his own guidelines for dealing with such situations. ''If I think they're going to shoot somebody or cut his finger off or do any sort of permanent damage, I will immediately stop them,'' he explained. ''As Americans, we will not let that happen. In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.'' It was a tactical decision, Bennett explained: ''You only get so many interventions, and I've got to save my butting in for when there is a danger it could go over the line.'' But even when he doesn't say anything, he explained, ''they can tell we're not enjoying it. We're just kind of like, 'O.K., here we go again.'''

Iraqification. It is a glorious sound, no? And this is a glorious phase in helpin’ the liberty lovin’ show that they love liberty in the approved American way. We have the right people in place: the U.S. has been using, as its liaison with the squad Maass followed, a certain Jim Steele, formerly the prime U.S. link with death squads in El Salvador.

This is the Samarra detention center that Maass visited:

“We walked through the entrance gates of the center and stood, briefly, outside the main hall. Looking through the doors, I saw about 100 detainees squatting on the floor, hands bound behind their backs; most were blindfolded. To my right, outside the doors, a leather-jacketed security official was slapping and kicking a detainee who was sitting on the ground. We went to a room adjacent to the main hall, and as we walked in, a detainee was led out with fresh blood around his nose. The room had enough space for a couple of desks and chairs; one desk had bloodstains running down its side. The 20-year-old Saudi was led into the room and sat a few feet from me. He said he had been treated well and that a bandage on his head was a result of an injury he suffered in a car accident as he was being chased by Iraqi soldiers.”

And here are a few grafs showing freedom lovin’ at its best:

“The Saudi I interviewed seemed relieved to have been captured, because his service in the insurgency, he said, was a time of unhappy disillusion. He came to Iraq to die with Islamic heroes, he said, but instead was drafted into a cell composed of riffraff who stole cars and kidnapped for money and attacked American targets only occasionally. When I asked, through an interpreter, whether he had planned to be a suicide bomber, he looked aghast and said he would not do that because innocent civilians would be killed; he was willing to enter paradise by being shot but not by blowing himself up. He gladly gave me the names of the members of the cell. One was a Syrian who had been arrested with him.

That evening, as I was eating dinner in the mess hall at Olsen base, I overheard a G.I. saying that he had seen the Syrian at the detention center, hanging from the ceiling by his arms and legs like an animal being hauled back from a hunt. When I struck up a conversation with the soldier, he refused to say anything more. Later, I spoke with an Iraqi interpreter who works for the U.S. military and has access to the detention center; when I asked whether the Syrian, like the Saudi, was cooperating, the interpreter smiled and said, ''Not yet, but he will.''

Blake's bird continued

There is one myth about perspectivism that must be dispelled before one can make any sense of it.

It is of the essence of perspectivism that, among all possible perspectives, there is no single one that can encompass all the information found in every perspective. In other words, perspectivism claims that there is no God’s eye perspective. The myth takes that to mean something like: there are no universals. The two claims aren’t equivalent. It may well be that there are invariants across perspectives. But this does not mean that you can make, out of those invariants, a sort of uber-perspective. There are no back doors to the God position.

Furthermore, these invariants aren’t necessarily “truths”. I suspect that there are invariants that are fictions. Now, it is at this moment that someone inevitably pops up, a smirk on his face, and says, aha, how can you talk about truths and fictions if everything is just a perspective? This objection comes down to saying that truth is an extra-perspectival process. To which the reply, properly, is: so what? If it is true (that the truth is extra-perspectival), it amounts to saying that there is an invariant across perspectives. And if it is false (I believe it is false), this means, merely, that truth claims are judged on their relation to perspectivally specified frames of reference. In both cases, truth is not grounded in reality, but in procedure. What is at stake here is not really the truth, but something that is more like the reputation of the truth. The reputation of the truth is that it is a good. The reputation of the truth takes the truth to be more than it is – a selection procedure for statements. One of the hallmarks of modernity is the divorce between truth and its reputation. That divorce has been taken hard by foundationalists.

Another myth about perspectivism makes it equivalent to that extension of the liberal ethics of tolerance in which it is claimed that cultures are equal. This is, in some ways, a throwback to the Leibnizian notion of monads – those windowless things. It is as if cultures grew up in perfect autonomy and independence one from the other. Nietzschian perspectivism is quite different. In N. perspectivism, perspectives – and for the moment we will treat cultures as different perspectives – are constituted by the assimilation and rejection of other perspectives – a constant will to power. The liberal ethos of tolerance, according to N., could only arise after the liberal culture had sufficiently disenfranchised rival cultures to the extent that it could patronize them. This is a agitated point in Nietzsche’s writing – it is, on the one hand, a point at which a culture has come to the summit of its power, and, on the other hand, it is a point at which a culture manufactures the kind of nihilism – the kind of misunderstanding of its own historical dynamic – which undermines it. Nietzsche was inclined to describe this moment in medical terms. Indeed, Nietzsche is famous for using the metaphors provided by medical terminology – of sickness, health, strength, weakness – to diagnose (another medical metaphor) Western culture. Nietzsche went to the extent of identifying certain of his texts with convalescence itself – they were convalescent acts. Metaphor, here, is supported by metaphor.

Finally, one other brief note about perspectives. Perspectives are very difficult to quantify over. Since the tribe of analytic philosophers have a superstitious belief that knowledge begins with quantifying over its object, they have a hard time with perspectives. Thus, they tend to get impatient with Nietzsche. However, this is a superstition. You cannot, in classic analytic fashion, quantify over electrodynamic fields, as Maxwell described them. Physicists are rightly not worried about that.

The great point to keep in mind is: perspectivism is neither incoherent, nor nihilistic, nor philosophically untenable. And it makes a damn good alternative to foundationalism, which is not, in LI’s opinion, compatible with a scientific picture of the System of the World. I’ll trade the old stuffed Owl of Minerva for Blake’s songbird any day.

Blake's sweet bird

LI’s friend and neverfailing antipode, Paul Craddick, recently threw himself into a defense of Nietzsche on the Maverick Philosopher site. While Paul and Mr. MP disagreed, they both exhibited a dislike for perspectivism. At least, Paul seems to think that emphasizing perspectivism in the body of Nietzsche’s work exaggerates a feature of it:

“I'm sure we'll have occasion to clash again when you write on "perspectivism," because I'm not convinced that the weight of N's work supports the radically perspectival interpretation; or, at least, I'm not sure if one can make an ultimately satisfying case for him definitively holding to either perspectivism or some perspective-centric realism.”

Here at LI, we are ardent perspectivists. So we thought we’d wile away a Saturday post making a few comments.

….

We aren’t going to make an exhaustive survey of perspectivisms past and present. Leibniz is, famously, the inventor of the most ingenious reconciliation of rationalism and perspectivism, in the course of which he invented a sort of modal philosophy. However, this is perspectivism at the baroque end of the Christian apologetic – proving, at least, that there is nothing inherently revolutionary about all varieties of perspectivism. Or even nihilistic.

Enlightenment thinkers were almost all, by an instinctive bias, relativists. Montesquieu’s emphasis on the differences geography and climate make to fundamental features of subjectivity – and the sort of playdo subject favored by the Empiricists – were all derived from the Enlightenment project of reconciling the system of the world as they supposed it conceived by Newton with the political project of justifying the organization of liberties in the commonwealth. It was an immense straddle. One can look at its liberating effects insofar as it created, in Europe, a tolerant sensibility and a lively bourgeois public sphere – or one can look at how easily that relativism could generate apologies for slaveholding, and the attendant and ultimately poisonous pseudo-sciences of race that Lichtenberg percipiently mocked in his letter on physiognomy, when he attacks Lavater’s claim that a Newton could never be born among the “hideous” looking blacks and Moors: "What! exclaims the Physiognomist--could the soul of Newton inhabit the skull of a Negro? an angelic mind dwell in a hideous form?-Unmeaning jargon! the declamation of a child.” Interestingly, the 'science' of race tended towards an absolute pole, abjuring the materialist inclination to relativism that gave it birth. From Lavater there is only a small step towards Gobineau’s remark that the white European is “objectively” the most beautiful racial subgroup. Gobineau, like any editor of the Weekly Standard, then pours scorn on the relativists who claim that there is no objective standard of beauty.

So much for background. LI’s perspectivism is a descendent of the line that goes from Blake to Nietzsche.

In the age of Bush, the Christian right is busy trying to keep Darwin out of the hot little hands of the youth. They should, instead, concentrate on Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Once your fourteen year old reads that, he is gone – soon he’s wearing leather pants and learning to play an electric guitar. As for the abstinence pledge – forget it.

No discussion of perspectivism should neglect Blakes’ couplet:

“How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense World of Delight, clos'd by your senses five?”

We already know that Delight is a special word for Blake. In The Voice of the Devil section, Blake writes:

“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:--
1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:--
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Reason, in Blake’s terms, has a positional essence – it is a formal thing, rather as it is in Kant -- although Kant comes to that formalism much more reluctantly. As the bound of energy, or eternal delight, Reason both participates in and negates life. This, at least, in its proper place. But in the Bibles or sacred codes, Reason is set up as something more than a bound – it is set up as a separate essence, independent of energy. This is the great fiction of oppression – that Reason is life. Since it is, in fact, the bound set on energy, according to Blake, the Life of Reason is death in life, and the God that torments those who follow their energies is the God that lives off death.

Blake, of course, did not see this as the opposite of Jesus’ teachings – quite the opposite. The great renewal, the life more abundant, the life without the law (that fulfilled the law), was what Jesus was striving for. And of course, before his eyes he saw the Kingdom of Heaven in full revolt -- he saw Jesus' successors in the Jacobins, and the dance around the liberty tree.

This is the vocabulary in which Blake’s couplet is couched.

Let’s not extend this post for pages about Blake. LI wants to cite one other passage – this from the preface to Beyond Good and Evil – and then, tomorrow, we will construct our sense of perspectivism.

Nietzsche’s work, since Nehamas’s book in the eighties, has been viewed as the great exemplar of perspectival thinking. That sense of Nietzsche makes its stand on passages like the following:

Let’s not be ungrateful to them [Platonism and the Vedanta philosophy], even as it must also certainly be confessed, that the worst, most boring and dangerous of all mistakes up to now has been a Dogmatic mistake, namely, Plato’s invention of the pure mind [Geiste] and of the good in itself. But now, where it has been overcome, where Europe breathes out from this nightmare and at least enjoys a healthier … sleep – here we are, whose task is the awaking itself, the inheritance of all the force which the struggle against this error has bred [grossgezüchtet]. This meant standing Truth on its head and denying the perspectival, the fundamental condition of all life, in order to speak of minds and of the good as Plato has done; yes, one might ask, as a doctor would, how did this disease attack the most gorgeous animal [Gewächse] of antiquity, Plato? was he really corrupted by the evil Socrates? Was Socrates, in fact, a corruptor of the youth? and did he deserve his hemlock? But the struggle against Plato, or, in order to say it more intelligibly, and vulgarly, the struggle against the force of the Christian-churchly for millennia – because Christianity is Platonism for the people – has created in Europe a splendid tension of the intellect [Spannung des Geistes] as there has never before been on Earth; with such a taut bow, one can now shoot the furthest goal.”

Gratitude and struggle are the things we will be picking out of that quotation, in order to show that the mistake often made by critics of perspectivism is to presuppose that the perspective is stable, that it is pre-given, that it is perfectly defined. In fact, quantifying over perspectives is tremendously difficult – it is the same kind of difficulty encountered when quantifying over events. In our opinion, the mistake is shared by those who claim to be perspectivists, when they come out with the moral rule that one cannot judge another perspective or -- perspective's stand in - culture. They take that rule right out of their ... non-thinking quarters. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Blake's bird knows.

But more on this tomorrow. It is time to get to work around here.

Good news

Notes to our readers.

First, this was up almost all day before LI noticed that Blogger had done it again. Lately, every time we put a text in Blogger, it rumbles it around like a demonic washing machine and puts holes in it. It will take out a sentence there, a paragraph elsewhere, and leave the impression, among our readers, that LI has a serious drinking problem.

Well, we do have a serious drinking problem. But not that serious.

So, this incomprehensible post was supposed to be, one, about Mexico, and two, about the ivory billed woodpecker. Let's go to two first. Here's the story in the nyt science section:

"The ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird long given up for extinct, has been sighted in the cypress and tupelo swamp of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge here in Arkansas, scientists announced Thursday.
Bird experts, government agencies and conservation organizations involved kept the discovery secret for more than a year, while they worked to confirm the discovery and protect the bird's territory. Their announcement on Thursday brought rejoicing among birdwatchers, for whom the ivory bill has long been a holy grail - a creature that has been called the Lord God bird, apparently because that is what people exclaimed when they saw it."

That I would live to see this day. LI, Jr. -- if you can imagine such a beast -- used to dream over reproductions of Audobon prints the way Keats dreamed over Chapman's Homer. Now we are holding our breath for the Carolina Parakeet.

In other news:

Our correspondent in Mexico City, who can’t stand Vicente Fox (and reminded us, in her last email, that we consistently misspell his name as ‘Vincente’), was nevertheless impressed with the TV address in which Fox, for all intents and purposes, backed down, firing his Attorney General. Fox may well have been astonished by the controversy that ensued when he organized the desafuerta of Lopez Obrador. On the regional level, PAN-PRI cooperation to block the PRD is standard operating procedure. Fox’s own idea of democracy might well have so accepted that parameter as to feel wounded and astonished when his own support for democracy was questioned in the aftermath of implementing it on a national level. We will see how events unfold.

Okay. If blogger mangles this, I'll have somebody's guts for garters.

Gulliver's Double

There’s a tradition in the literature about Gulliver’s Travel that extracts the Lockean Gull in Gulliver. The argument goes back to a very fine essay by W. B. Carnochan entitled, Gulliver’s Travels: An Essay on the Human Understanding?

Carnochan’s argument is straightforward: “Lemuel Gulliver, like the mad projector of the Modest Proposal, appears to be a version of the Lockean man.” Carnochan is probably on solid ground in thinking that the perceptual changes on which Swift plays like a jazz xylophonist are suggested by Locke’s theory that the human mind is shaped by sensation – ideas themselves being the end product of an experience that begins
externally (mysterious as that beginning may be) with the encounter of a sense instrument and an object. As is well known, this theory leads elsewhere in the empirical tradition – that moment of non-experience hardening into a thing that can’t be, logically, experienced, meaning that the perceived object must be usurped by the philosopher and put in the mind – some mind. Berkeley suggested God’s. This is a theory that a writer like Swift is bound to squeeze all the absurdities out of. Which is why Denis Donoghue takes the Lockean suggestion one step further,
and claims that what we are seeing, in Gulliver’s Travels, is how easily the Lockean subject falls prey to the Stockholm syndrome. He is continually captured, and continually acclimated so to the point of view of his captors that he begins to adopt it. Historically, there's also warrant for this -
Swift lived in a time when English men and women were always getting captured, by Moors, Indians and other heathen, and were continually shocking their countrymen by converting to pagan or Islamic ways.
In other words, Gulliver’s typical peripeteia is that of a man who goes from one ‘brainwashing” to another – and he gets to it by going through funk, animal fear, and his own tradesman’s capacity for fawning, with the power of the mind, here, being wholly in the power of the powers that be.

Donoghue’s thesis seems to explain a larger pattern in Gulliver’s Travels, until one notices that Gulliver seems much too aware of his brainwashing to be merely one of the brainwashed. At least in the Lilliput section, where Gulliver is critical enough of thread dancing and the like. He is not, however, critical of titles – and no matter how small the Liliputians are, the emperor carries a title as big as Louis XIV’s.

To my mind, the way to get a-hold of Gulliver is to see him as the double of M.B. Drapier.

In the first Drapier letter, the narrator (who is, after all, a fiction) says this:

“I will therefore first tell you the plain story of the fact; and then I will lay before you how you ought to act in common prudence, and according to the laws of your country.”

This is in the clear as water style of Gulliver himself. And yet, Drapier’s
letters are all warnings, and the satire runs to that point. Whereas what is
Gulliver writing for? In the letter from Captain Gulliver that prefaces the
book, he does claim that the book is intended as a warning:

“I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published.

Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you
insisted on the Motive of publick good; that the Yahoos were a species
of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and
Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect:
Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath
produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you
would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished;
Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books; the young Nobility's Education entirely changed; the Physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in Virtue, Honour, Truth and good Sense; Courts and Levees of great Ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; Wit, Merit and Learning rewarded; all Disgracers of the Press in Prose and Verse condemned to eat nothing but their own Cotten, and quench their Thirst with their own Ink. These, and a Thousand other Reformations, I firmly counted upon by your Encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the Precepts delivered in my Book.”

This is a mixture of the satirist’s targets since Aristophanes and Swift’s
fictitious creatures, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, who are very close to making any system of virtue and vice absurd by embodying it in impossible extremities of the disgusting and ... well, it is hard to find one term to describe the Houyhnhnms, although the idea of these equine stoics is both alarming and funny. It is like the most impossibly inbred English aristocracy. And Swift adds a sentence that seems pointed at his own self: “And, it must be owned that seven Months were a sufficient Time to correct every Vice and Folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom.”

Is this Gulliver sticking out his tongue at Mr. Drapier?
And is Mr. Drapier Jonathan Swift as tradesman?

The satirist needs a preliminary sketch, acquaintance with the primogenitive caricature. And that caricature happens to be the self.

But Mr. Drapier, too, exists – in fact, his fictiveness is oddly blurred by his entrance into the all too real exploitation of Ireland, which is forever locked in Swift’s unwavering field of vision, a thing to see, a raree show of instituted vice. He feels about it … well, as LI feels about Bush’s America. Bush’s America degrades my mockery by casting itself into forms of such pitiful tastelessness, hypocrisies that have been exposed for so long that the exposures are growing moss, bluster that wouldn’t frighten a sheep, that mockery has to seek restraint – has to seek other tangents to make indignation feel-able. If not to reform the Yahoos, at least to relieve the writer's own spleen.


Mr. Drapier’s way is simply to tell the plain story of fact.
The meta-story is that the British Prime Minister, out of every venal motive, conspires to allow William Wood the right to coin money for use
in Ireland. The contract costs Wood money, and he proposes to make up
that money and make a profit by chiseling on the composition of the coin
– in other words, creating half pence on the cheap, which could be exchanged for good coin. This was at a time when the matter of the coin
was important – a penny should contain a penny’s worth of metal. A gold coin should contain an amount of gold equal to the worth of the coin.
Of course, the coins were routinely shaved, by everybody. But to coin them
pre-shaved, so to speak, was to go one step beyond. The intro to the edition of the Drapier’s Letters on the Gutenberg site says this:

“The patent was really granted to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who sold it to William Wood for the sum of £10,000, and (as it was reported with, probably, much truth) for a share in the profits of the coining. The job was alluded to by Swift when he wrote:

"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."

Coxe [a Swift commentator] endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.”

One is reminded of Bush’s recent trip to West Virginia, where he flaunted
the unreliability of the notes given by Congress to Social Security in exchange for borrowing FICA money. Since the money was borrowed because Bush wanted to siphon a trillion dollar to the upper ten percent income bracket in the U.S., this is much like John Dillinger mocking the manufacturer of a safe for using cheap metal. Even Roman emperors, even
Caligula, to my knowledge, never went that supererogatory step in evil and
not only stole public funds, but then used the theft to urge even greater theft. But Bush, of course, is a conscienceless automaton, a diseased Texas
weasel who was weaned on fraud, and we know that there is nothing, not a
tumbleweed, behind the twinkle in his eye and the Jesus in his heart. In a
more rational world, or one that had a better sense of humor, he’d be featured on some real crime show, right after the serial bigamist and
the mysterious ten year old unsolved murder.

If you have not read the Drapier’s letter, go to the intro to get some
sense of the controversy, and then go to the fourth letter. That’s the hair-raising letter – a blow against the colonial system, a cry against the infamy, a rush at the system that’s truly in rare company. I suppose Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is the American counterpart, except that King is never bitter. Swift’s letter begins like this:

“Having already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as
Mr. Wood and his halfpence; I conceived my task was at an end: But I
find, that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions,
political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships, lose by
degrees the very notions of liberty, they look upon themselves as
creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger
hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence
proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may
be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Every blow in this letter lands. Gulliver’s Travels – with its Gull for a
mockery – plays a double game with its moral points, making them and denying them in the same gesture. One remembers that the point is the wholesale reformation of Yahoo nature in seven months time. This is Jonah waiting for the fire to consume Ninevah, and being bitterly disappointed that it never comes. Or rather, this is taking that spirit of Jonah and both inhabiting the prophet’s disgust and taking up a position outside it to observe with clinical precision the prophet’s vanity. But Drapier is a character who has been transported beyond vanity. In a passage that was considered treasonable, Swift considers that Ireland is no ‘depending kingdom’ with England, but equal in its freedoms. This casts doubt on the charnel foundation of colonialism, which is currently being implemented in Iraq on just the ground that the Iraqis are incorrigible children and the Americans are paragons to be mimicked. Ireland, after all, was the template for all English colonial ventures to follow. This is the Drapier at his most intense. One wants to say that this is the crescendo of the letter, but the rhythm, here, disallows crescendos:

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the
very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty
of complaining, although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”

The Washington Post pities the collaborators

Anne Applebaum’s column in the Washington Post is mostly ditzy foreign policy neo-conservatism. Sometimes, however, she hits new lows. The protest against commemorating the end of the war against the Nazis is the lowest of her lows.

Here’s Applebaum’s assessment of May, 1945:

“Not every European country will be represented, however, because not everybody feels quite the same way about this particular date. In the Baltic states, for example, May 1945 marked the end of the war but also the beginning of nearly a half-century of Soviet occupation, during which one in 10 Balts were murdered or deported to concentration camps and exile villages. The thought of applauding the same Red Army veterans who helped "pacify" their countries after 1945 was too much for the Estonian and Lithuanian presidents, who have refused to attend. Although the Latvian president will attend the Moscow festivities, she's had to declare that she will use her trip to talk about the Soviet occupation. The president of Poland also has spent much of the past month justifying his decision to celebrate this particular anniversary in Moscow. By May 1945, after all, the leaders of what had been the Polish anti-Nazi resistance were already imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the KGB's most notorious Moscow prison.”

Gee, those poor Baltic states – funny that Applebaum doesn’t mention what they commemorate about the war won, apparently, by the wrong side. For instance, take poor Latvia. In September 2003, in keeping with the Applebaum spirit, the Latvian Defense Ministry helped celebrate Latvia’s contribution to the war – the Latvian SS.

“The SS memorial was unveiled in the Latvian town of Lestene. The event was attended by the country’s government, religious and military officials. Three military orchestras of the Latvian Defense Ministry provided musical background for commemorating 'accomplishments and sacrifices' of the SS and its Latvian division in the name of Führer and Fatherland.”

You might think Latvia’s SS was a mere speck, but no – they managed a nice mass killing, 25,000 Jews, in the Rumbula Forest in 1942, for instance. Applebaum, who does remember the Katyn Forest, doesn’t seem to remember this negligible act of the brave Baltic state. Although we do know what the state thinks of it now, officially. The Latvian government has set up a memorial to the victims of the slaughter of the Riga ghetto, just to placate those pesky Western powers, but its heart belongs to the black shirts

Ah, Applebaum really missed her chance to expatiate on Latvia’s peculiar contribution to the great war for Lebensraum. I wonder why she missed telling the world that Latvia contributed 150,000 SS volunteers to the war effort, more than any other nation occupied by Germany? Surely she could have spared a word for the the wonders performed by Latvians in the cleansing of the Riga ghetto?

Applebaum must be pleased that the pro-stalinist left, who don’t understand the necessity of ridding Latvia of its subversive fifth column, are at least getting theirs. Protestors at Lestene have been arrested, and a Latvian court is considering fining them $14,000. While Applebaum might consider that such scum, seeking to blot the bright history of Latvia, deserve jail time, at least she can take some satisfaction in Latvia’s prompt protection of its historic sites.

tears, gentle tears

The tears that were shed over the elections in the Ukraine, do you remember? The NPR tears, PBS tears, NYT tears. Nothing, nothing was more important than the striving of the Ukranian people to put one of two corrupt dinosaurs in office. It emerged on the front pages and we were all, here in America, holding our breath for the good, pro-American, democratic side to assume its rightful place. It was just like when Tinkerbell died in the fifties and all the kids in America wished her back into life.

And then there have been the recent Rice tears shed over the unjust jailing of a billionaire Mafioso in Russia. Here the tears might be a little more sincere – the Bush administration is pained by the fall of a single hair on a billionaire head as much or more than God is pained by the falling away of a single sinner. And then our intrepid Rice went to Belarus and spread the word about democracy to the benighted people there.

But somehow, we haven’t yet had to bring out the mops to wipe up the NPR, PBS, NYT, and Bush administration tears about Mexico. In fact, probably few American readers of this post will even know that perhaps the largest demonstration in Mexican history took place Sunday. Our man in Mexico, Fox, hid in his little presidential Fox house. Whereas the man that Fox has conspired to kick out of the upcoming presidential race for the very good and democratic reason that he has a fair chance of winning it, Lopez Obrador, made a thunderous speech which, if translated into Ukranian and given in Kiev by a man backed by dirty capitalist money, might actually have garnered some press attention.

… What am I saying? It wouldn’t, even then, since the speech dared to mention protecting the welfare of the poor. If you aren’t willing, as a democrat, to shit on the poor, America is not going to cry for you. As we all know, the poor need shock therapy and more shock therapy. They need ever freer markets in which their ever falling wages can buy ever less in order to be really, really free. Because, as Rice said, immortally, in Moscow, people just want to be free to choose things for their kids – for instance, what infested mudhole to wash their kids clothes in, or what absolutely unsafe American owned factory to send their kids to to make a whole dollar a day.

A friend who was in the demo writes:
Now,as far as the march goes, if a few words can sum it up -- it was HUGE, about 10 times bigger than the govt would admit. The official count is 120,000... now thaT's really a joke, a slap in the face, bullshit. The demonstration was about 1 million +... I was there. I now how many people it takes to fill up the zocalo and then have about 10 km worth of people backed up on Reforma... it was, by less biased calculations the biggest march in Mexican history. It will be written about in history books. And yet, most newspapers are trying to play it down by insisting Lopez Obrador has summoned his batallions... which is not true... there were lots of people there who are not exactly pro-Lopez Obrador... but they are for democracy, for being able to have a vote. The other thing that would sum it up is that it was extremely civil and witty. As you might know, it was a silent march, no shouting, chanting, screaming... which made for interesting slogans and word plays and whole architectural endeavours as means of expression. Some people made a huge Trojan horse out of crates... others dressed in red-stained white sheets, there were funny posters, etc... an abundance of Fox and Salinas masks, etc. It was very exciting and it was an amazing thing to be there surrounded by that mass of people."

the adventures of Herbert O. Yardley

At the end of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyers hears out Huck’s plan to free Jim. Huck's plan is plain. It is a routine escape plan. It will probably work. Huck asks if the plan wouldn’t work. This is what Tom says:

"WORK? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it's too blame' simple; there ain't nothing TO it. What's the good of a plan that ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as goose-milk. Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different; but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got HIS plan ready it wouldn't have none of them objections to it. And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it wasworth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.”

That about encapsulates the spirit of the CIA. It is an organization of Tom Sawyers, Tom Sawyer writ large, Tom Sawyer with a salary and pension plan.

The way a country spies says deep, deep things about the country's cultural values. One reason to keep an eye on spies. Another reason is, of course, that they are ridiculously melodramatic.

Anybody who is truly interested in the art of spying is aware of The Codebreakers. This is the decrypter’s Ars Magna – David Kahn’s masterpiece, one part encyclopedia, one part Poe. Kahn has now written another book. This one is a biography of Herbert O. Yardley. Thomas Powers (the author of one of the great 70s CIA books, Richard Helms: The Man who kept the secrets) reviews it in the NYRB. Here’s a graf:

“Yardley is one of the remarkable men in American history. He is known primarily for his summary dismissal in 1929 by incoming Secretary of State Henry Stimson, a patrician Wall Street lawyer who closed down the Ci-pher Bureau with the casual observation that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail"—a remark, interestingly, which is the only thing remembered about either man. It is often cited as marking the high-water mark of American starched-collar idealism before the downhill slide into great-power realism. But what made Yardley famous is not the thing that makes him interesting. The son of a railroad telegrapher, a man with a lively Jazz Age interest in money, good-looking women, and drinks at five, Yardley not only taught his country how to read other people's mail but wrote two of the enduring American books—the best single intelligence memoir, The American Black Chamber (1931), and perhaps the greatest book in any language on playing cards for money, The Education of a Poker Player (1957).”

The fakery about shrinking big government begins, probably, with spying – which elicits supportive hardons from the same people who don’t want big government poking its nose into, say, worker safety issues (say, there is enough poking in that sentence to create a mini-Freudian meltdown. But let us soldier on…)

Yardley is one of those impossible men who should have been fictitious – a character in a radio series, or Li’l Orphan Annie:

“But Yardley remains the great figure of American codebreaking and it was probably inevitable that David Kahn, the great historian of American codebreaking, would set out to write his biography. From the outset he was challenged by the second major barrier to writing Yardley's life—lack of materials. When Yardley speaks in his books—there is a third covering his adventures in China in the 1930s—all is illuminated, but where the books stop the life grows dim. At his death, Yardley left no papers—odd for a writer—but when intelligence figures die it is not uncommon for personable men to arrive promptly at the widow's door with an offer to help. Typically the visit ends with every scrap of paper going out the door before the sun goes down. Kahn offers no guess about the fate of Yardley's missing papers, and repaired the deficiency in the only way—by scouring every plausible archive, talking to the bare handful of survivors, and trusting to luck. His big finds were the files of Yardley's literary agent, George Bye, preserved in the library of Columbia University, and the letters Yardley sent home from China during the year and a half he worked for the legendary chief of Kuomintang intelligence, Dai Li.
The man who emerges in Kahn's briskly paced portrait is gifted, complex, resourceful, and often disappointed. Yardley's life included more periods of drinking than not, some interesting women, and many spurned efforts to resume the work he knew and liked best. He bounced back from the loss of his codebreaking job with The American Black Chamber, hung around Hollywood long enough to earn $10,000 for doing nothing, wrote some forgettable novels, did some radio work, dabbled in real estate, and finally got back into the great game, attacking Japanese codes for officials in China. During after-hours in the Chungking Hostel he taught the young reporter Theodore White two useful survival arts—how to play poker and how to ride out an air raid…”

As for my own after-hours time at the Chungking Hostel… well, that’s another story for another time.

wring the necks of the dying swans

The Washington Post published an almost perfect parody of the upper class voice in Mexico today. Rossana Fuentes Berain writes about Lopez Obrador as she would about an errant maid who had misplaced her best undies. Truly, this is undying dying prose:

“Where a Lopez Obrador presidency could really be a problem is in the matter of unfinished structural reforms -- in energy, labor and fiscal affairs. His political shortsightedness could stall long-overdue action in these areas, with unfortunate effects on Mexico's competitiveness with China and other countries.

"In a perfect world, this and Lopez Obrador's disregard for the law, as shown in the current case against him, would be enough for the electorate to reject him. In the real world, where there is deep discontent in many parts of the population, he must be regarded as a serious candidate. These are difficult times. We need to weather them and to keep our eyes on the main prize: a long-term North American compact.”

The “current case against him” is a PAN meme that will be kept upfront for the American audience, which is uninterested in, say, the work of the Mexican congress last week in granting immunity to a member who was accused of siphoning millions from PEMEX for the PRI electoral campaign, or the never dealt with accusations that Vincente Fox benefited from massive illegal contributions to his presidential run in 2000.

However, it is the utter contempt for the betail – you know, the campesinos and their stupid little hovels – that rings through these two sentences: “In a perfect world, this and Lopez Obrador's disregard for the law, as shown in the current case against him, would be enough for the electorate to reject him. In the real world, where there is deep discontent in many parts of the population, he must be regarded as a serious candidate.”

There is a world in those sentences. It was in that world that every counter-insurgency in the twentieth century in Latin American proceeded by slaughtering peasants. It is in that world that the rich in Venezuela, in the 1980s and 1990s, succeeded in looting a perfectly fine economy and nearly sinking it. In that world, Pinochet’s use of stadiums, while unfortunate, reflect the less than perfect world we live in. In that world, the ‘reforms’ of Menem in Argentina (the massive looting of public infrastructure by private investors) are necessary to ‘emerge’ into the first world – an emergence signaled by trips to LA and NYC, to Las Vegas and Washington D.C., for clothing, apartments, cars, yachts and such. In that world, Salinas’ economic “reforms” were long overdue, and the consequence of them was an unlucky accident. In that world, spending billions of public dollars to support the malfeasance of Mexican billionaires who looted their own banks is just good business. In that world, no questions should be asked about the provenance of the money that is used to buy the telephone company, or the cement plant, or the ranch. It comes from… well, somewhere. In that world, no need to worry about the fact that Mexico’s top businesses are now firmly in the hands of non-Mexican businesses. No need to worrry about the dinosaur tread of the PRI, coming to a border town near you. No need to worry about what the Fox regime seems to have been -- a clumsy interlude sponsored, towards the end, by the right wing of the PRI.

the soldiers in the trenches

The anti-Japanese riots in China – however they might have been instigated by the government for its own purposes – demonstrate the attraction of historical traumas. Attraction, that is, as a site for ceremonies of memory, for obsession, for re-enactment, for anxiety, and for that element of forgetting that goes into what one chooses, at any particular moment, to imbue with the energy of recollection. Memory has an opportunity cost.

There’s a review, in History and Theory (Winter, 2005) of UNDERSTANDING THE GREAT WAR, by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker. According to the author of the review, Ann Louis Shapiro, who teaches at the New School, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker have taken it upon themselves to “demolish” the historiography of World War I. Underneath the rhetorical heat, that means two things: a., expanding the focus of the war to the civilian populations that were entrained in it – not as spectators but as participants; and b., understanding how the soldier in the trench became the ‘protagonist’ of the war.

According to Shapiro:

The architecture of this narrative, with its iconic anecdotes and mythologized references, was laid in place early in the postwar period. In part, the rapid embrace of a relatively codified narrative was the result of the popularity and authority of war novels that provided canonical understanding of chaotic and unprecedented, even unassimilable, events. In France, Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, published in 1916, and Les Croix de bois by Roland Dorgelès, published in 1918, provided templates for interpreting the war for soldiers and civilians alike. Le Feu was read aloud in military hospitals and in the trenches (apparently even
among German soldiers), and soldiers wrote to Barbusse to tell him that his book had helped them “to see anew and feel more clearly their own memories,” noting that it was the novel that allowed them to see the war fully,3 while a mother whose sons were at the front wrote to say that “it seemed as if her child’s very
life had been made to pass before her eyes.”4 Perhaps most telling, the military doctor/novelist Georges Duhamel noted in 1933 that “if his former patients were to read today their own stories, they would rarely recognize them,” having deliberately adapted their memories to conform to the version presented by Duhamel in his war fiction: “If one is offered a good mirror,” wrote Duhamel, “one will not refuse.”5 Such war novels, including Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front, were, in effect, fiction/memoirs, testimonies of former soldiers that served both as personal exorcisms and documents that ostensibly might provide a corrective to discredited official accounts. They reflect, collectively, a pervasive belief that only eyewitnesses could apprehend and convey the reality of a war that was, in its details, ineffable and beyond words—a reality that emerged exclusively from “that great confessional” of the trenches.”

Of course, there is something a little confused about a process that is labeled postwar and that begins in 1916 – which is midwar. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the image of the “mirror” does have a distorting effect upon memory – a mirror registers images, while memory seeks to grasp sequences. Or at least sequences are given to memory to grasp. That the sequences have no particular pre-determined aspect is what must be overthrown by art and politics and societal norm, which all reject that degree of freedom.

What is interesting, here, is what one discovers if the soldier in the trench isn’t the protagonist – if he is a part of a larger collective that is not primally divided between soldier and civilian. This is where the war was experienced as “the matrix event of the twentieth century”, to quote Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker. So far, so good. However, we wonder whether we really require a demolition job to achieve this end. We especially find the introduction of dubious categories from therapy suspicious:

“Because of what was effectively a “hyperamnesia” with regard to the trench soldiers and a “general amnesia” with regard to everyone else, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker argue, historians have been unable to move past persistent blind spots that have occluded understanding of the causes of the war, its duration, and its cultural/historical consequences.”

This sounds all to much like repressed memory syndrome, about which the best one can say is that it gave various therapists a chance to release their own nightmares upon the already scribbled upon tabula of their various unfortunate patients.

We are on firmer ground when, dispensing with the amnesia vocabulary, we get to the positive acts and excitements of the war:

“The approach of Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker is synthetic, drawing upon research mostly from the past ten years, organizing and reassembling it so as to demonstrate the consequences of the particular kind of warfare that emerged in the Great War. More specifically, they argue that the most significant effects of
the war are revealed when the experiences of civilians are fully restored to the narrative in all their detail. By examining the varied experiences of civilian populations, they seek to draw new meanings from a familiar history and reassess the ways in which the war bled in to the history of succeeding decades. They
divide their study into three sections—violence, crusade, mourning—the topics most notably underexamined in the dominant narrative of soldiering. Foregrounding these themes, they draw several large conclusions: that the radical extension of violence to civilians and others—in short the brutalization of behavior during the war—set the template for succeeding totalitarian regimes; that soldiers
and civilians shared, with religious fervor, a culture of war that presaged its outbreak and caused whole populations to acquiesce for years in a pointless slaughter; and that the scale of death and suffering produced a pervasive but unacknowledged experience of “interminable mourning” that was transmitted
across generations, with (only vaguely specified) effects into the postwar period, especially among the defeated nations.”

This schema (save the interminable mourning, a controvertible unit of analysis) could very well be extended to modern Chinese history. The imbrication of civilian and soldier was institutionalized in China, via the Communist party, to a degree that was matched only by Nazi Germany. But in the case of China, the war with Japan was never, psychologically, dealt with – it was merely abruptly replaced by a devouring class war, and Mao’s ferocious attempt to preserve a peasant-socialist autarky.

Jesus’ politics.

As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about. But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Pat Robertson, are going straight to hell. It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulcres, filthy on the inside. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is, of course, Limited Inc’s burden that, as an atheist, we are probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just our luck. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the collectivity of Congress, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.