Poetry is a mysterious thing. It can go underground for a century – as it did in eighteenth century France. In the U.S., poetry has always been capricious. What happened in the twentieth century was in some ways miraculous – yet, after the major poets of the forties generation started dying out, they weren’t replaced. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill – there’s no American poet, at the moment, of a remotely similar stature. There’s a factory mindset that worries about this – it is as if there were some production quota for sausages, lawn mowers and poets.
In the absence of great poets, the American community has great poetry cabals. There’s a very nice article about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas Bartlett. Alas, the article is entitled Rhyme and Unreason, instead of (dream on!) Poetry and Rent-seeking. And double alas, Thomas Bartlett, the author, didn’t seek out any economists for comment. But he nevertheless untangles a wonderfully tangled tale.
The tale in short goes like this. Foetry, a website dedicated to getting to the root of corruption in poetry contests, appeared on the web last year. It was run anonymously. Eventually, that anonymity was penetrated – it turns out the site is run by a librarian named Alan Cordle, who is married to a poet. Cordle felt a burning sense of injustice about the world in which his wife was trying to make it as a poet, and so decided to attack the backscratching and numerous collusions that make poetry contests as fair as a Florida election.
Rent-seeking is a term invented by Anne Krueger to denote behaviors that are advantage-oriented but unproductive. It is an oblique acknowledgement by neo-classical economists that the model of enterprises fairly competing with each other to achieve advantage doesn’t really take into account the enterprises knowledge of the system – that, in other words, the path to profit needn’t be a matter or services, prices, or innovation, but can consist in gaming the system. In fact, the impossibility of creating a system that would block incentives to game the system is the reason that neo-classical economics is the economics of a vacuum in search of a reality. And the term “unproductive” is, shall we say, debateable – for economists, outputs from the government, such as environmental protection, can be seen as “unproductive”, while the output from a small movie company making snuff films can be seen as “productive.”
As you can see, the roots of the notion are embedded in the usual conservative world view that establishes absolute differences between the state and private enterprise, or bureaucracy and management, and so on. The usual unjustifiable intellectual cockledoodledoo. But there is a nugget of sound common sense here, as long as one is not carried away by the normative overtones. Andrew Hindmoor published a nice knockdown of rent seeking in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 1999. He provides a useful summary of the rent seeking concept:
“(i) Rent seeking is extremely common. Within the political arena where attention remains largely focused, examples of rent seeking are manifold.(n4) Interest-groups invest resources in an effort to extract favourable legislation from government. Utilities invest resources in an effort to capture their regulator and so ensure the erection of barriers to entry which will stifle competition. Bureaucrats invest resources in an effort to persuade government that budgets should be increased and political parties invest resources in an effort to capture the monopoly rent of government itself. Whilst efforts to quantify the volume of rent seeking remain in their infancy, one recent study concludes that as much as one-quarter of American gross national product is devoted to rent seeking and rent protection.
“(ii) Rent seeking is pernicious. Rent seeking may be individually rational but it is socially costly because it occurs at the expense of productive investment. Consider the following `clear cut' example offered by Tullock.(n6) In an effort to increase its profits, a struggling American steel company invests resources in an effort to secure a ban on the imports of a rival Korean firm's goods `on the purported grounds that [they are] environmentally dangerous'. Not only will the price of steel rise but money invested in this way cannot then be spent in other more productive ways. Resources invested in an effort to secure an import ban cannot be invested in new machinery which will reduce costs and improve quality.
“(iii) Rent seeking should be eliminated. For Rowley and Tullock, it is an item of political faith that `for those concerned with advancing the nation's wealth, the elimination of rent seeking ... is on a par (almost) with support of the flag, motherhood and apple pie'. It may not be possible to eliminate rent seeking but it is possible to reduce it. Reform is often envisaged as occurring at the constitutional level. Proposals are varied and include the imposition of tighter party discipline, rules limiting the size of government and a requirement that legislation be non-discriminatory.”
Interestingly, the political economy of poetry in the U.S. is very like the political economy of a particularly corrupt third world country. For instance, take the poetry contest. As Bartlett puts it:
“Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.”
So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with contests making a poet’s reputation. The problem comes from the fact that the reputation does not then get out in the world, so to speak. Poetry doesn’t sell. Here’s where the kicker comes in:
“But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.”
The pre-requisites for corruption in a small undeveloped economy are similar. An economy that doesn’t produce enough saleable product – or that has systematic impediments to the production of saleable goods – which, nevertheless, has an inflow of aid for some reason from developed countries. An oversized administrative structure that sucks out the money and energy that could be spend on removing impediments to native growth. A competition for power-brokering positions, rather than for productive positions – as the latter are not as profitable as the former.
Cordle stumbled upon a great trove of insider dealing when he went after the University of Georgia poetry contest, getting a list of judges for recent poetry contests. The University had not published that information before. It turns out Jorie Graham, who is the poet laureate of rentseeking, happened to be a judge the year the top prize was awarded to a Peter Sacks.
As Bartlett puts it:
On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
“Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.”
The story gets much funnier, as Bartlett gets a series of excuses from all participants that are, truly, the stuff of poetry. Or litigation, or both – this being an American story, the end of it is that all sides are mounting up their lawyers. Graham claims that she had reservations about her role in the UGA contest.
But… “Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."
However, the reach of rentseeking as a tool of analysis only goes so far. There is no reason to think Sacks’ poetry isn’t great – LI hasn’t read it. In fact, the universal perniciousness of rent seeking only appears to University of Chicago deluded eyes. Still, there is something enjoyable – something Dunciad like – about this farce.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
the sycophants ball
The Washington Post, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send a staff reporter to interview Phillip Johnson, the gray eminence behind the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. This is interesting. Are they going to start letting the style section do reports on business, now? How about having a sports reporter do the Pentagon beat.
The article, of course, betrays Michael Powell’s powerful eighth grade education in biology, and his charming belief, which probably won him prizes in high school, that a newspaper story doesn’t take sides -- it deals with both sides of the question. He even wrote a very good essay on that in his English class, and Ms. Figworth marked it VERY IMPRESSIVE!
One doesn’t blame poor Mr. Powell – he truly seems prepared, if the question is, say, whether Star Wars one is better than Star Wars three – but the brothelkeeper who sent him on his task. As usual, the Washington Post’s response to the conservative establishment that runs D.C., now, is to fetch the bone. The bone, in this case, is the debasing of American education with nonsense.
We especially loved this sentence:
“Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture.”
Because Powell obviously think that science is a debate, with people taking notes out of their files – yes, it is the debate club! He covered the debate club, once! He knows how to do this!
Oh, the Bush age. How I long for it to end.
The article, of course, betrays Michael Powell’s powerful eighth grade education in biology, and his charming belief, which probably won him prizes in high school, that a newspaper story doesn’t take sides -- it deals with both sides of the question. He even wrote a very good essay on that in his English class, and Ms. Figworth marked it VERY IMPRESSIVE!
One doesn’t blame poor Mr. Powell – he truly seems prepared, if the question is, say, whether Star Wars one is better than Star Wars three – but the brothelkeeper who sent him on his task. As usual, the Washington Post’s response to the conservative establishment that runs D.C., now, is to fetch the bone. The bone, in this case, is the debasing of American education with nonsense.
We especially loved this sentence:
“Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture.”
Because Powell obviously think that science is a debate, with people taking notes out of their files – yes, it is the debate club! He covered the debate club, once! He knows how to do this!
Oh, the Bush age. How I long for it to end.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
intellectual scabs
This is the kind of post my friend T. will frown at. Having already violated my vow, this week, to make this blog a Hitchens free zone, I am now going to post about one of the “friends of Hitchens,” Marc Cooper.
However, instead of concentrating fire on Cooper’s brand of Bush era leftism – four parts surrender, one part reminder of what a groovy radical past Cooper possesses, why he was even against Pinochet! – let’s expand the parameters to a broader question: why did the New Left generation fail to socially reproduce? This is the kind way to put it. Another way to put it is: why did the generation of 1968 produce such ace putzes of the Cooper/Hitchens variety?
First, we should briefly review Cooper’s m.o. In the past year, Cooper has bravely unmasked Naomi Klein as a useful tool of Islamofascist terrorists; has sternly criticized the paranoid rantings of the left re Bush; took up the cudgels against world renowned celebrity Ward Churchill and his plan to reduce your mother, dear reader, to sexual slavery; and in various other ways has rightly become the leftist most likely to be linked to by an Instapundit.
His absurd post about Iraq is par for Cooper’s course. Having checked out the tv news and seen that 400 people have been murdered by the insurgents in the past month, Cooper’s humanitarianism is offended. And of course in this mood he can see right through the moral idiocy of calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. He goes right to work, barking at various leftists who advocate just that.
Now, in fact, there is a strict correlation between these deaths and their occurence in those areas where our heroic Uncle Sam has scattered his forces. There is also the little matter of the history of the occupation. Cooper's position seems to be that the occupation was a total disaster, so we should keep on with the occupation. This is worthy of the man. This is how he covers the path that took us to those four hundred murders.
The new tack, as we all must have noticed, is to pretend that now, it is all about supporting democracy. In fact, American newspapers have taken to describing the Bush doctrine, shorthand, as supporting democracy. Which is like describing Bush's social security proposals, in shorthand, as "saving social security.' So we are 'supporting democracy" by transforming our occupying force in Iraq into a weapon used by Talabani's Kurds and SCIRI against their opponents. Let's lift the veil of amnesia a bit. What’s forgotten?
- That, up until the week of the elections, the major coalition of Shiite parties did support a a timetable of withdrawal.
- That even the American propaganda poll, done by the IRI, showed majority support for the timetable.
- That the dropping of that provision was the result of heavy American pressure.
- That the three month lag in governance was the result of the American designed occupation law.
- That the law was designed to maximize the occupier’s power in the country.
- That the law under which the constitution is to be decided in Iraq is an American enforced law, of no real validity.
Cooper’s humanitarianism, while extended to the four hundred killed in one month, is apparently unmoved by the more than one hundred killed in one week by the Pentagon in Western Iraq. This, however, is typical Cooper -- a fine selectivity of indignation. As the Lancet group showed, and as was further shown by the UN study of living conditions in Iraq this week, and what the offensive in Western Iraq showed as well – the majority of deaths in Iraq come by way of American firepower and the semi-criminal attempt, by the COA, to run Iraq as a profit preserve for America's biggest War contractors. A suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of out of work Shi’ites is called a terrorist act by the Coopers of the world. An American plane blowing up a restaurant with a bunch of Sunnis dining in it is called a tactical strike. The insurgents, so far as I know, have not reduced any major city to the totalitarian rule of segregating males and letting them walk in their own neighborhood on sufferance – as the Americans are doing in the ruins of Falluja. Nor have the insurgents dropped bombs from planes on Iraqi cities, nor machine gunned streets from helicopters. This is what Cooper supports.
Now, the truth is, if we hadn’t gone via Harry to the Cooper site, Cooper would not be on our mind. If we want Hitchens, we can get him elsewhere – and Cooper’s much weaker beer. We don’t often look at his weblog. But the larger question is, why did the antiwar movement in this country so politically suck? And why did it never revamp into an anti-occupation movement?
Our own feeling is that this has to do with the ties with the old left – the old communist left from the thirties – having long died out. The anti-war movement in the sixties benefited from the tacit knowledge held by veterans of the thirties. But the knowledge they passed along was, unfortunately, mostly passed to a college educated elite whose basic interests are much closer to the basic interests of Bush’s suburban supporters than they are to the working and lower middle class. In LI’s own terminology – we have been working this out – the difference between the Vietnam era and the Bush era is that the momentum of the movement shifted. There is, definitely, a Movement on the right – in fact, there are converging but separate movements, who have targeted the Republican party as their vehicle.
On the left, the movement is in severe crisis. The Democratic Party continually seeks to exert control over any movement, and has successfully inducted into its orbit the leaders of the Vietnam era. Kerry was, in many ways, typical – a mamby pamby liberal, vain, an instinctive comformist, a showboater, a laughable acolyte at the alter of JFK, elevated by way of the usual path – in the Democratic version of the Beatitudes, it is said that the mediocre will inherit the earth – whose role as most electable was a judgment of the Party professionals – Cooper’s kind of people.
The journalistic camp followers of the Cooper type play the role of movement breakers – intellectual scabs. The scab ideology comes out, among them, as “criticism” – they are all honest to god Orwells, speaking truth to power. In reality, they are speaking half truths in order to render powerless. And they do a good job of it, week after week. This interruption in the progressive line in America – a line that goes back to the abolitionists, and through the Wobblies and to early civil rights activists like Du Bois and Ida B. Wells up through the fifties – has impacted the ability to organize the clear discontent with Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. That is all around. When we go and have our little lunch here – lately, we’ve been going to the new, anti-union Whole Foods and getting sushi and a cup of coffee, since it is cheap – we usually sit out in the patio area. This is a store that definitely caters to the well to do, as well as the aspiring post punker. And we always overhear the same things -- complaints about what is happening in this country. If we go to the Tex Mex place up the street, which is a frat and sorority hangout, we still hear things like that. Unfortunately, these complaints are always couched in party terms – which is a measure of the success of the intellectual scabs. The little enders and the big enders, as Swift put it in Gulliver’s Travels, take up all the political space – rendering it conveniently tedious. In an electoral democracy, the status quo must make politics boring. Otherwise, it can be used as a weapon to exploit the exploiters.
However, instead of concentrating fire on Cooper’s brand of Bush era leftism – four parts surrender, one part reminder of what a groovy radical past Cooper possesses, why he was even against Pinochet! – let’s expand the parameters to a broader question: why did the New Left generation fail to socially reproduce? This is the kind way to put it. Another way to put it is: why did the generation of 1968 produce such ace putzes of the Cooper/Hitchens variety?
First, we should briefly review Cooper’s m.o. In the past year, Cooper has bravely unmasked Naomi Klein as a useful tool of Islamofascist terrorists; has sternly criticized the paranoid rantings of the left re Bush; took up the cudgels against world renowned celebrity Ward Churchill and his plan to reduce your mother, dear reader, to sexual slavery; and in various other ways has rightly become the leftist most likely to be linked to by an Instapundit.
His absurd post about Iraq is par for Cooper’s course. Having checked out the tv news and seen that 400 people have been murdered by the insurgents in the past month, Cooper’s humanitarianism is offended. And of course in this mood he can see right through the moral idiocy of calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. He goes right to work, barking at various leftists who advocate just that.
Now, in fact, there is a strict correlation between these deaths and their occurence in those areas where our heroic Uncle Sam has scattered his forces. There is also the little matter of the history of the occupation. Cooper's position seems to be that the occupation was a total disaster, so we should keep on with the occupation. This is worthy of the man. This is how he covers the path that took us to those four hundred murders.
The new tack, as we all must have noticed, is to pretend that now, it is all about supporting democracy. In fact, American newspapers have taken to describing the Bush doctrine, shorthand, as supporting democracy. Which is like describing Bush's social security proposals, in shorthand, as "saving social security.' So we are 'supporting democracy" by transforming our occupying force in Iraq into a weapon used by Talabani's Kurds and SCIRI against their opponents. Let's lift the veil of amnesia a bit. What’s forgotten?
- That, up until the week of the elections, the major coalition of Shiite parties did support a a timetable of withdrawal.
- That even the American propaganda poll, done by the IRI, showed majority support for the timetable.
- That the dropping of that provision was the result of heavy American pressure.
- That the three month lag in governance was the result of the American designed occupation law.
- That the law was designed to maximize the occupier’s power in the country.
- That the law under which the constitution is to be decided in Iraq is an American enforced law, of no real validity.
Cooper’s humanitarianism, while extended to the four hundred killed in one month, is apparently unmoved by the more than one hundred killed in one week by the Pentagon in Western Iraq. This, however, is typical Cooper -- a fine selectivity of indignation. As the Lancet group showed, and as was further shown by the UN study of living conditions in Iraq this week, and what the offensive in Western Iraq showed as well – the majority of deaths in Iraq come by way of American firepower and the semi-criminal attempt, by the COA, to run Iraq as a profit preserve for America's biggest War contractors. A suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of out of work Shi’ites is called a terrorist act by the Coopers of the world. An American plane blowing up a restaurant with a bunch of Sunnis dining in it is called a tactical strike. The insurgents, so far as I know, have not reduced any major city to the totalitarian rule of segregating males and letting them walk in their own neighborhood on sufferance – as the Americans are doing in the ruins of Falluja. Nor have the insurgents dropped bombs from planes on Iraqi cities, nor machine gunned streets from helicopters. This is what Cooper supports.
Now, the truth is, if we hadn’t gone via Harry to the Cooper site, Cooper would not be on our mind. If we want Hitchens, we can get him elsewhere – and Cooper’s much weaker beer. We don’t often look at his weblog. But the larger question is, why did the antiwar movement in this country so politically suck? And why did it never revamp into an anti-occupation movement?
Our own feeling is that this has to do with the ties with the old left – the old communist left from the thirties – having long died out. The anti-war movement in the sixties benefited from the tacit knowledge held by veterans of the thirties. But the knowledge they passed along was, unfortunately, mostly passed to a college educated elite whose basic interests are much closer to the basic interests of Bush’s suburban supporters than they are to the working and lower middle class. In LI’s own terminology – we have been working this out – the difference between the Vietnam era and the Bush era is that the momentum of the movement shifted. There is, definitely, a Movement on the right – in fact, there are converging but separate movements, who have targeted the Republican party as their vehicle.
On the left, the movement is in severe crisis. The Democratic Party continually seeks to exert control over any movement, and has successfully inducted into its orbit the leaders of the Vietnam era. Kerry was, in many ways, typical – a mamby pamby liberal, vain, an instinctive comformist, a showboater, a laughable acolyte at the alter of JFK, elevated by way of the usual path – in the Democratic version of the Beatitudes, it is said that the mediocre will inherit the earth – whose role as most electable was a judgment of the Party professionals – Cooper’s kind of people.
The journalistic camp followers of the Cooper type play the role of movement breakers – intellectual scabs. The scab ideology comes out, among them, as “criticism” – they are all honest to god Orwells, speaking truth to power. In reality, they are speaking half truths in order to render powerless. And they do a good job of it, week after week. This interruption in the progressive line in America – a line that goes back to the abolitionists, and through the Wobblies and to early civil rights activists like Du Bois and Ida B. Wells up through the fifties – has impacted the ability to organize the clear discontent with Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. That is all around. When we go and have our little lunch here – lately, we’ve been going to the new, anti-union Whole Foods and getting sushi and a cup of coffee, since it is cheap – we usually sit out in the patio area. This is a store that definitely caters to the well to do, as well as the aspiring post punker. And we always overhear the same things -- complaints about what is happening in this country. If we go to the Tex Mex place up the street, which is a frat and sorority hangout, we still hear things like that. Unfortunately, these complaints are always couched in party terms – which is a measure of the success of the intellectual scabs. The little enders and the big enders, as Swift put it in Gulliver’s Travels, take up all the political space – rendering it conveniently tedious. In an electoral democracy, the status quo must make politics boring. Otherwise, it can be used as a weapon to exploit the exploiters.
Friday, May 13, 2005
a pleasure-self post
“The Hadza of northern Tanzania publicly marked a boy’s first nocturnal emission by decorating him with beads in exactly the same way as they decorated a girl with beads at the time of her first menstruation.” Charles Stewart, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.
"The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer, or a man who is no less wicked. The way in which the crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble women, as I have already pointed out in the first book." – Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams
Whenever LI hears the phrase “mental masturbation” (and for our sins in writing this blog, we hear the phrase quite a bit), we always wonder what the opposite is. What would be full frontal missionary mental fucking, and how would one achieve it with an organ as marooned as is our poor human brain – which, without the pineal eye that Bataille dreamed would burst someday out of the top of the skull, blinking monstrously in whatever shade of darkness its nerve impulses are couched in, is, in actuality, reduced to living in that darkness familiar from infancy that is enlivened only by the flickers of light coming in from the relatively distant eyes.
Since there is an answer to all questions (although not necessarily a right answer), we turned to the experts. Our readers are probably already familiar with the Zurbriggen and Yost study, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, published in the Journal of Sexual Research last year. Z and Y brought together one hundred plus persons of both sexes, filtered out the bis and the gays, and had these people write down sexual fantasies. Subsequently, they coded the sexual fantasies. Their conclusions are conveniently summed up in the following reader-friendly manner:
“Men's sexual fantasies were more sexually explicit than women's, t(160) = 4.11, p < .001, and women's sexual fantasies were more emotional and romantic than men's, t(160) =-2.69, p =.008. In addition, men's fantasies involved more interactions with multiple partners than did women's, t(160) = 1.97, p = .05. There were also gender differences in fantasized dominance and submission. Men's fantasies included more portrayals of the self as dominant and in power than did women's, t(160) = 2.45, p = .02. Women's fantasies did not include significantly more portrayals of submission than did men's, t(160) = -1.62, p = .11. However, in a repeated measures ANOVA, the interaction between gender and type of power fantasy (dominance vs. submissive) was reliable: F(1,160) = 7.75, p = .006.
Although men were equally likely to fantasize about dominance and submission, women were more likely to fantasize about submission. Other interesting gender differences involved sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire more frequently than did women's fantasies, t(160) = 3.09, p = .002. Although men's fantasies were equally likely to include desire-self and desire-other, paired t(84) = -.58, p = .57, women's fantasies were marginally more likely to include desire-self than desireother, paired t(76) = 1.69, p =. 10. Men also described their partners as experiencing sexual pleasure more frequently than did women, t(160) = 3.24, p = .001.
Although men's fantasies were marginally more likely to include sexual pleasure-other than sexual pleasure-self, t(84) = -1.74, p = .09, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include sexual pleasure-self than sexual pleasure-other, paired t(76) = 2.04, p = .04. In a repeated measures ANOVA, this interaction between gender and sexual pleasure (self vs. other) was reliable, F(1,160) = 7.14, p = .008”
To which one wants to say, Zut alors. But bien sur, this is the way of a man with a woman and a woman and a woman, at least when I shut my how do you say, peepers?
But to tell you the truth, LI felt old and ghost ridden reading Z and Y’s paper. Call us a throwback to that old reprobate, D.H. Lawrence, but we feel something is wrong with handing sex over to multiple digits, pinching and prodding it for gender singularities. So we turned, for a more narrative view, to Charles Stewart’s paper, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute a few years ago, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present. Stewart combines approaches from Freud and Foucault – still not Lawrence’s cup of tea, but much closer to LI’s way of thinking. Although our pleasure-other quotient might well be –1.74, we feel a little more akin to the Umeda, among whom “a hunter intentionally [sleeps] on a net-bag scented with magic pighunting perfume (oktesap) in hopes of receiving the erotic dream that presaged a successful hunting expedition. Such erotic dreams held out the promise of real sexual consummation, which often followed after a kill was made.”
Our own experiments with pighunting perfume are for another time. Stewart’s point is that erotic dreams can act as portents – and indeed, isn’t desire a portent laden structure among the best of us? With Foucault, Stewart sees sexuality in the modern epoch as a matter of subjectivication – that is, it is taken as the truth about the subject. In a society as dedicated to sensation as ours is – where we are supposed to judge the merit of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution on the sensations it evokes of like or dislike among Gallop’s focus groups – sex, being an ultimate of sensation, is going to be a criterion for authenticity.
But of course, there is always killing. This is where the erotic dream and the nightmare intersect. Stewart’s notion is that a change in the hermeneutic value of erotic dreams was wrought by Early Christian culture. For “Artemidorus, the dream of sex with one’s mother, for example, was not problematic, but rather a good dream for politicians. This was because the mother represented one’s native country, and to make love is to govern the obedient and willing body of one’s partner. The dreamer would thus control the affairs of the city (Artemidorus, Interpretation of dreams, 1.79). Hippias, a Greek traitor serving as the Persians’ guide in the landing at Marathon, dreamt of sleeping with his mother and interpreted this to mean that he would return to Athens and recover power (Herodotus, History, 6.107).” However, there was no room in the Christian culture for portents deriving from sleeping with your mother.
Although… surely there are spicy enough stories in Genesis to toss up the problematic, here. Not that the Greeks didn’t put the stamp of their own ethical ideas on sexual dreams. “Some ancient doctors understood ‘gonorrhoea’ to be an involuntary emission of semen, and their term for this ailment, meaning literally ‘the flow of seed’, remains with us to this day. Nocturnal emissions were considered a variant of gonorrhoea, and in his survey of acute and chronic diseases CaeliusAurelianus contrasted the two. Gonorrhoea could occur any time, without imagery, while nocturnal emissions occurred only during sleep and as a consequence of imagining sexual intercourse through ‘unreal images’ (inanibus visis concubitum fingat) (On chronic diseases, 5.71.82). Unlike gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions did not necessarily constitute an illness. They simply resulted from desire, which could arise either through regular sexual practice or throughprolonged continence.”
Well, enough – we have a few other things to say about Stewart’s article, but we will reserve our shots until another time.
"The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer, or a man who is no less wicked. The way in which the crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble women, as I have already pointed out in the first book." – Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams
Whenever LI hears the phrase “mental masturbation” (and for our sins in writing this blog, we hear the phrase quite a bit), we always wonder what the opposite is. What would be full frontal missionary mental fucking, and how would one achieve it with an organ as marooned as is our poor human brain – which, without the pineal eye that Bataille dreamed would burst someday out of the top of the skull, blinking monstrously in whatever shade of darkness its nerve impulses are couched in, is, in actuality, reduced to living in that darkness familiar from infancy that is enlivened only by the flickers of light coming in from the relatively distant eyes.
Since there is an answer to all questions (although not necessarily a right answer), we turned to the experts. Our readers are probably already familiar with the Zurbriggen and Yost study, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, published in the Journal of Sexual Research last year. Z and Y brought together one hundred plus persons of both sexes, filtered out the bis and the gays, and had these people write down sexual fantasies. Subsequently, they coded the sexual fantasies. Their conclusions are conveniently summed up in the following reader-friendly manner:
“Men's sexual fantasies were more sexually explicit than women's, t(160) = 4.11, p < .001, and women's sexual fantasies were more emotional and romantic than men's, t(160) =-2.69, p =.008. In addition, men's fantasies involved more interactions with multiple partners than did women's, t(160) = 1.97, p = .05. There were also gender differences in fantasized dominance and submission. Men's fantasies included more portrayals of the self as dominant and in power than did women's, t(160) = 2.45, p = .02. Women's fantasies did not include significantly more portrayals of submission than did men's, t(160) = -1.62, p = .11. However, in a repeated measures ANOVA, the interaction between gender and type of power fantasy (dominance vs. submissive) was reliable: F(1,160) = 7.75, p = .006.
Although men were equally likely to fantasize about dominance and submission, women were more likely to fantasize about submission. Other interesting gender differences involved sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire more frequently than did women's fantasies, t(160) = 3.09, p = .002. Although men's fantasies were equally likely to include desire-self and desire-other, paired t(84) = -.58, p = .57, women's fantasies were marginally more likely to include desire-self than desireother, paired t(76) = 1.69, p =. 10. Men also described their partners as experiencing sexual pleasure more frequently than did women, t(160) = 3.24, p = .001.
Although men's fantasies were marginally more likely to include sexual pleasure-other than sexual pleasure-self, t(84) = -1.74, p = .09, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include sexual pleasure-self than sexual pleasure-other, paired t(76) = 2.04, p = .04. In a repeated measures ANOVA, this interaction between gender and sexual pleasure (self vs. other) was reliable, F(1,160) = 7.14, p = .008”
To which one wants to say, Zut alors. But bien sur, this is the way of a man with a woman and a woman and a woman, at least when I shut my how do you say, peepers?
But to tell you the truth, LI felt old and ghost ridden reading Z and Y’s paper. Call us a throwback to that old reprobate, D.H. Lawrence, but we feel something is wrong with handing sex over to multiple digits, pinching and prodding it for gender singularities. So we turned, for a more narrative view, to Charles Stewart’s paper, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute a few years ago, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present. Stewart combines approaches from Freud and Foucault – still not Lawrence’s cup of tea, but much closer to LI’s way of thinking. Although our pleasure-other quotient might well be –1.74, we feel a little more akin to the Umeda, among whom “a hunter intentionally [sleeps] on a net-bag scented with magic pighunting perfume (oktesap) in hopes of receiving the erotic dream that presaged a successful hunting expedition. Such erotic dreams held out the promise of real sexual consummation, which often followed after a kill was made.”
Our own experiments with pighunting perfume are for another time. Stewart’s point is that erotic dreams can act as portents – and indeed, isn’t desire a portent laden structure among the best of us? With Foucault, Stewart sees sexuality in the modern epoch as a matter of subjectivication – that is, it is taken as the truth about the subject. In a society as dedicated to sensation as ours is – where we are supposed to judge the merit of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution on the sensations it evokes of like or dislike among Gallop’s focus groups – sex, being an ultimate of sensation, is going to be a criterion for authenticity.
But of course, there is always killing. This is where the erotic dream and the nightmare intersect. Stewart’s notion is that a change in the hermeneutic value of erotic dreams was wrought by Early Christian culture. For “Artemidorus, the dream of sex with one’s mother, for example, was not problematic, but rather a good dream for politicians. This was because the mother represented one’s native country, and to make love is to govern the obedient and willing body of one’s partner. The dreamer would thus control the affairs of the city (Artemidorus, Interpretation of dreams, 1.79). Hippias, a Greek traitor serving as the Persians’ guide in the landing at Marathon, dreamt of sleeping with his mother and interpreted this to mean that he would return to Athens and recover power (Herodotus, History, 6.107).” However, there was no room in the Christian culture for portents deriving from sleeping with your mother.
Although… surely there are spicy enough stories in Genesis to toss up the problematic, here. Not that the Greeks didn’t put the stamp of their own ethical ideas on sexual dreams. “Some ancient doctors understood ‘gonorrhoea’ to be an involuntary emission of semen, and their term for this ailment, meaning literally ‘the flow of seed’, remains with us to this day. Nocturnal emissions were considered a variant of gonorrhoea, and in his survey of acute and chronic diseases CaeliusAurelianus contrasted the two. Gonorrhoea could occur any time, without imagery, while nocturnal emissions occurred only during sleep and as a consequence of imagining sexual intercourse through ‘unreal images’ (inanibus visis concubitum fingat) (On chronic diseases, 5.71.82). Unlike gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions did not necessarily constitute an illness. They simply resulted from desire, which could arise either through regular sexual practice or throughprolonged continence.”
Well, enough – we have a few other things to say about Stewart’s article, but we will reserve our shots until another time.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
GET OUT NOW
From Today’s Washington Post:
“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.
Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”
From yesterday’s New York Times:
“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”
I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?
“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.
Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”
From yesterday’s New York Times:
“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”
I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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!
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!
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
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?
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?
Monday, May 09, 2005
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.
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.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
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.
“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.
Friday, May 06, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
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.
“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.
Monday, May 02, 2005
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.''
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.''
Sunday, May 01, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
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.
“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.
Friday, April 29, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
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.”
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.”
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