Ah, the smell of the new order in the morning

In 1948 my Daddy came to the city
Told the people that they'd won the war
Maybe they'd heard it, maybe not
Probably they'd heard it and just forgot'
Cause they built him a platform there in Jackson Square
And the people came to hear him from everywhere
They started to party and they partied some more
'Cause New Orleans had won the war
(We knew we'd do it, we done whipped the Yankees)
--Randy Newman

LI has spent a lot of time in apparently silly mooning over American and Iraqi casualties. We are assured, today, by the Secretary of War that the pie is getting bigger in Iraq. Happily, Rumsfeld’s remarks simply amplify those of this year’s winner of the Lincoln Steffens Award. Steffens was the man who went to Stalin’s Russia, I believe in the year of the first terror famine, and came back to the U.S. to proclaim, “I have seen the future and it works.” Karl Zinsmeister, a much less distinguished journalist – indeed, his obscurity is entirely proportionate to his merit, and his little bit of fame only comes from being pointed to by the more rancid warbloggers – has come back from Iraq to tell us, The War is over and we won.”

So, getting down to brass tacks – money, a much more valuable thing than a mere Marine’s life – what does the new age of Bush conservatism (big government is good, state’s rights are bad, the moral monopoly of the state should be extended by a magnitude that would astonish the old Fabians – that kind of new, stand on your head conservatism) tell us about how to spend our tax dollars? Apparently, the sky is the limit for democracy. 400 billion and counting in Iraq. Let’s see. Surely, a mere 200 billion for democracy in Nigeria would be just the ticket. And, because Bush is the environment president, he might want to kick in 200 to 300 billion dollars to save the Amazon. How about a nice 400 billion for democracy in Central Asian “republics” – that would be sweet. Pakistan – so far a paltry 3 billion. Time to put taxpayer’s money in the collection plate – that’s at least worth 200 billion.

Of course, this being the new, improved conservative age, we can put this on the credit card. Along with the two trillion borrowed for those private accounts, why don’t we just add a trillion and a half for the Freedom lovin,’ fun lovin’ eggheads in D.C. Whereever they cast their mighty glances at the map, we should certainly spring out with the billions.

Now, before you protest -- this is nothing like the nasty sixties liberals, who spent taxpayer money in this country like water. Imagine the selfishness! Spending money on poor americans -- what a joke! Everybody knows the government can't eliminate poverty. It can only implement American-style democracy in Mesopotamia, change 500 years of culture in unknown places, and make other minor top down changes. Plus, remember -- those billions aren’t really going to the unworthy inhabitants of any of those countries, but can be nicely shuffled into the pockets of the War industry honchos. There is, in the new conservatism, nothing more inspiring entrepreneurial site than a government parasite having a two martini lunch with a congressman. It inspires the kind of awe that also comes from reading The Wealth of Nations on speed.

It is the decent thing to do for retired and totally incompetent generals, and the riffraff that follows Tom Delay around and hoses him down when he gets too sweaty.

Another change in the DNA structure of conservatism which is startling, but fresh, is the new attitude towards communism. The old attitude would view with suspicion all that Chinese buying of T notes. It would take with a grain of salt the idea that China just wants to keep floating the American consumer market. That market would be there whether China supported the Iraq war or not. However, if you are a second rate military power and you want a window of advancement AND your rival is willing to break its army in a pointless ten year war, you might want to advance the money to promote that endeavor. Or at least, such would be the nasty thinking of the old commie conspiracy people. The new Bush conservatism is all about rolling up our sleeves and paying no attention to such ravings. Would such a thing escape the eagle eye of the great Wolfowitz? The man has training. He can tell a Chablis from Bud lite. And his ideals are sterling pure. Oh, and the war is won. We won the war! We knew we'd do it! Now, where is that extra hundred billion…

Dick Durbin is the Democratic Senator and toy balloon from Illinois. Last week, it was toy balloon day in the Senate. All the Democratic Toy balloons could “squeak up” – as the phrase is on the construction paper placards tacked to the corkboard in the Toy Balloon caucus. They could say that they wanted to stay the course, to reform social security, to support the patriot act, and to make this a more Christian country too – but say it in a moderate way. This way, the toy balloons can show they have new ideas. New ideas are so cool.

Durbin was so filled with the hot air that lifts little toy balloons up that he stumbled onto a truth: that the U.S. is routinely using torture. He compared this to another truth – in big bad countries, the names of which are even known by U.S. citizens who’ve had most of the past cleared out of their minds by taking history classes in high school, they also used torture. Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia.

Toy balloon Durbin certainly should have hushed his valve. The bad boys with the needles came after him. As a Democratic toy balloon, Durbin knows that mostly he is to be seen and not heard. And he has been a good toy balloon, too, but now this happened. So after sorrowfully pondering what a mean thing he’d said about torture – the victims of American torture prefer American torture over other forms of torture 100 percent, and especially the ones who are beat up by CIA thugs and die of heart attacks in interrogation centers – they just love it! – he tearfully repented last night. All the other toy balloons are so happy. As they say, loose squeaks can make people think you aren’t a toy balloon! Because they are the party of toy balloons, damn it. And filled with pride in the courage of people like their former toy balloon candidate, they want the voters to know that they have the amazing ability to be shaped into the form of any animal or vegetable that the balloon blowers choose. Such funny toy balloons! Look, look.

Now we can get back to torturing those people in Guantanamo from a centrist perspective.

Why have I never read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars before?
This is obviously the summer to read it. It isn’t written in cinemascope, and Peter O’Toole doesn’t star in it. Actually, it is more like the English equivalent of the advice from the guerilla war experts to come – Giap or Mao. Lawrence thinks through the way to fight an organized state enemy in the desert on behalf of a non-organized entity, vaguely given the title of the “Arab Revolt.” I am sure his thought processes have gone through the minds of the insurgents in Iraq, unconscious as they no doubt are of the precedent. Lawrence figures out how to make a strength out of weakness – out of the inability to give battle. ‘We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of the vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked. The attack might be nominal, directed not against him, but against his stuff; so it would not seek either his strength or his weakness, but his most accessible material.” For Lawrence, railroads. In Iraq, oil pipelines. And this: “Battles in Arabia were a mistake, since we profited from them only by the ammunition the enemy shot off.”
But setting aside the excellence of the remarks on the landscape of struggle, there are also amazing passages of pure writing. I think that Lawrence’s account of the consequences of the murder of one of his men should be much better known – although perhaps I simply mean that I should have known it earlier. I was talking with my friend A.C. about this last week. He definitely knew the book, and he glommed onto the part about the murder in such a way that I thought, well, this must be a locus classicus.
Anyway – for those of you who haven’t read the book, what happens is this. Lawrence is suffering from a fever. He is out on an expedition with a pared down force. One of the men, Hamed, gets into an argument with another man and shoots him dead. There is a bustle in the camp as the victims relatives rush about, trying to find the killer:
“As I lay there I heard a rustle, and opened my eyes slowly upon Hamed's back as he stooped over his saddle-bags, which lay just beyond my rock. I covered him with a pistol and then spoke. He had put down his rifle to lift the gear; and was at my mercy till the others came. We held a court at once; and after a while Hamed confessed that, he and Salem having had words, he had seen red and shot him suddenly. Our inquiry ended. The Ageyl, as relatives of the dead man, demanded blood for blood. The others supported them; and I tried vainly to talk the gentle Ali round. My head was aching with fever and I could not think; but hardly even in health, with all eloquence, could I have begged Hamed off; for Salem had been a friendly fellow and his sudden murder a wanton crime.
Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages. There were other Moroccans in our army; and to let the Ageyl kill one in feud meant reprisals by which our unity would have been endangered. It must be a formal execution, and at last, desperately, I told Hamed that he must die for punishment, and laid the burden of his killing on myself. Perhaps they would count me not qualified for feud. At least no revenge could lie against my followers; for I was a stranger and kinless.
I made him enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain. At the end it shrank to a crack a few inches wide. The walls were vertical. I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments' delay which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest. He fell down on the weeds shrieking, with the blood coming out in spurts over his clothes, and jerked about till he rolled nearly to where I was. I fired again, but was shaking so that I only broke his wrist. He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying on his back with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body shivered a little, and I called the Ageyl, who buried him in the gully where he was. Afterwards the wakeful night dragged over me, till, hours before dawn, I had the men up and made them load, in my longing to be set free of Wadi Kitan. They had to lift me into the saddle.

bolivia and the dirty dream

There is the American dream and there is the dirty American dream. The latter has been generally maintained by subaltern torturers and Fort Benning alumni in Central and Latin America. So we find it entirely appropriate that Rumsfeld is considering moving General Ricardo Sanchez to the command of the American army’s Latin division. Sanchez’s wonderfully innovative practices in the fields of German Shepherd unleashing, heart attack induction, and forced orgies has, after all, made Abu Ghraib a byword of America’s solidarity with the freedom lovin people of Iraq. And the Bush administration’s management strategy of promoting those who’ve done the most damage to America’s interests and prestige to ever higher posts made it Sanchez’s promotion almost inevitable.

Latin America has been stirring beneath the American dirty dream. This must worry the Bush people – this is a white house staffed, after all, with men and women who, in the eighties, rubbed epaulets with Ollie North and various contra drug dealers in the crusade against New World Communism. Others from that crusade – the editorial writers at the Washington Post, for example – have been openly fretting about Bolivia. The blood-in- our-mouth editorial in the WP today, with its distinct threat that the U.S. should support the separation of the Eastern province in Bolivia (where the gas is) if the Indians there get too uppity, and its casting of Evo Morales as the next Latin American matinee terrorist, after Chavez, is evidence that the old and vile boys on the Potomac are wondering what is up with Bush’s hardliners – too distracted by Iraq to manipulate a few Bolivian generals into whipping up a corrective massacre or two, it looks like.

Isaac Biggio’s analysis of the current events in Bolivia is well worth reading. He is particularly interested in the autonomy movement in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department – a department that is much wealthier than the Indian cities, like El Alto. After exploiting the Indians for four centuries and using the U.S. to siphon massive amounts from Latin America into the international financial market, Bolivia’s elite sees the possibility of failure looming – and is responding by making separatist noises that Biggio thinks could echo throughout Latin America, where more and more countries are deviating from the Dirty Dream.

‘The separatism of the rich regions could also have consequences well beyond Bolivia’s borders. In Ecuador, for example, the idea that the territories most inclined to free enterprise could separate themselves from the mountainous, hostile Indian zones could induce a piecemeal nationalism.”

So -- after the Bush failure to put a little trojan horse in the OAS to justify some further coup attempt in Venezuala, the talk about General Sanchez should send a signal to the Dirty Dream's benifiaries in Latin America -- don't worry, help is coming. If it requires tactics a little more extreme than Abu Ghraib -- the dirty war in Argentina, prompted in part by Kissinger, comes to mind -- so be it. Freedom lovin' is hard work.

PS – Some Bolivian blogs:

MAPP’s Bolivian blog leans towards the moderate. It is a good source of Bolivian news:

A more lefty view is presented on this blog.

The Narconews, as always, provides gringos with the best periscope to peer into the region. The story of the Gas War so far is presented here.


Barrio Flores is a thoughtful Bolivian American who asks good questions about the nationalization issue. Tourists of the revolution -- and this includes LI - would do well to ask some questions, too. It needs to be said: no LDC has yet discovered how to leverage a dominant primary product export into the foundation of growth economy and a just society. If nationalisation arrives in Bolivia as an instrument of justice, instead of as the best thought out plan for getting the best deal in the marketplace, it will fail to deliver.

the metaphysical roots of the Bush culture part 2

To take up the threads from our last post – Simmel writes about the benefits that arise from an apparent weakness of the tertium figure. The weakness is the inability to preserve the aura of sentiment around a idea. Nietzsche might well call this the leveling effect of the mediating figure – the ignobility that comes from the economic moment, the transformation of an idea into a unit of exchange, rather than an indescribable moment of power. The power, the “mana”, the Ur-generosity, is systematically sapped from the inspiration. It is disgraced – that is, it no longer is in the order of grace, but of reason; and by and by gives rise to a system of substitutes that refers, always, to some primitive leader or utterance. The inspiration is delegated, but not completely lost. Such delegative structures often generate myths of return – the return of Jesus Christ, the return of the literal Constitution, the return of pure socialism, the return of family values.

The third party becomes the image of objectivity through the paradoxical force of the indifference that undermines him as a partisan, a potential part of a dyad. Tertiary prestige depends on breaking the prisonhouse of the couple, the emotional bonds of contending parties, not by an act of violence but by an incapacity for the sentiment of violence. There is, of course, something very inhuman about that, insofar as humans consist of those fuzzy sets of the individuals and aggregated couples described within Simmel’s taxonomy. And when objectivity finds its spokesmen in human beings – as must necessarily be the case in this sublunar world – the latent feeling of repulsion accumulates until it gives birth to another feeling: suspicion that an agenda is being advanced under a mask; that the third party is a manipulator tracing a secret path to power. Such is Iago, such is Shylock.

Such, too, were the excisemen of England, or at least as Tom Paine saw them. In last spring’s Social Epistemology, William J. Ashworth poses a question: what cultural motives would lead to valuing objectivity? His partial answer is in his essay, “Practical Objectivity: The Excise, State, and Production in Eighteenth Century England.” It is a nice stab at giving us an unnoticed locus for the rise of objectivity as a value: the tax system. This is the kind of thing to give you Randians out there the fantods.

As Ashworth points out, the success of the English tax system was the primary condition for the success of English imperialism. Other systems in other empires – Spain, France – by privatizing the extractive institution of taxing, while retaining state prerogative over allocutive institutions, made themselves vulnerable in competition with a state that could successfully monopolize taxation (which is not quite Ashworth’s point, I should point out, but LI’s addendum.) And a state that could do the latter would have an incentive for tolerating or encouraging private enterprise.

So, how did taxing encourage objectivity?

“To assist in its attempt to define and levy the production of home produced goods, theexcise, in particular, turned to quantification, and a particular notion of accuracy thattried to advertise claims to objectivity and equity in its gauging activities.3 The constitution and stages of a taxed manufacture had to be defined and made clearly accessible to the excise method. As well as defining what ingredients manufactures could use, it also dictated what times they could begin production and what shape the site of manufacture should be.

As well as needing technical ability a prospective excise officer required patronage from someone of recognised social authority. Thereafter his career was, at least in theory, subject to merit. Training and a degree of worth rather than mere connection were novel features in eighteenth-century England. So too was the tool of anonymity. The excise officer was deliberately plucked from areas suitably distant from his round to ensure his face was unknown in his place of business. In other words, his relationship with the local community, at least to begin with, was not based on familiarity but on anonymity. To ensure this process was sustained, after a specified period the officer was duly removed to serve in another district. This is in contrast, for instance, to the collection of the land tax, which was collected by local respected figures. Thus, if, as Steve Shapin maintains, ‘Premodern society looked truth in the face’, it was the case at the excise that so-called truth was coming face to face with strict bookkeeping, internal checking, instrumentation and anonymity.”

Indeed, Ashworth’s account of the difficulties shaping the administration of the excise, and the incentives that drove it to greater accuracy and objectivity, display the logic Simmel discerned in the creation of the third party.

There is, firstly, weakness:

“To ease the volatile relationship between the producer and the excise required the development of new techniques of collection. The general unpopularity of the excise made it vulnerable, and this was perhaps one factor in its drive towards its particular bureaucratic structure and practices—in the words of Theodore Porter, ‘the drive to supplant personal judgement by quantitative rules reflects weakness and vulnerability’”

There is, then, the benefit that accrues from this vulnerability. The uniformity of a standard leads to “regularisation across the country,” leading to that odd seemingly contradictory social fact: a society that is both more strongly identified with the state and more individualistic. Ashworth gives some instances of accuracy in various manufactures – of paper, glass, and beer – that are expressed, in the exciseman’s regulating gaze, oddly like the description of manufactures in the Encyclopedie, Taxes give us an “objective” textbook of technology, and become an unwitting vehicle of technological selection.

Ashworth points out that the excise taxes were placed upon the masses, representing the “first time the masses had been seriously taxed, and, secondly, [demanding] a great deal of contact time at the source or target of the tax.” So accuracy and objectivity spread among the population who had, previously, associated the tertiary power with the ascetic.

The delusion inherent in the thought that civilization progresses is to think that different, early stages in the civilizing process are overcome. This is the Whig’s neurosis, or the liberal’s. Disciplining a population to accept and even value objectivity is hard work, and there is always a current of resentment that can break either to the right or to the left. What we see, in Bush culture meritocracy, is a compromise formation – expertise is guaranteed by position, not accuracy, or various modes of separating knowledge from performance, like the testing in the school system. And within different modules, success becomes a matter purely of persuasion – so that the unpersuaded are marked down not as people with, perhaps, a different take on facts, but people who impede the whole flow of the organization. Wreckers, in short. This penetrates even into the source of information, which becomes contentious. To get a certain piece of information from an unsanctioned source – to operate as though the third had its own will – is to defy the rules of the meritocracy, which then proceeds to either ignore or ridicule the bearer of that information.

LI has been thinking that the third figure, the third who is always with you, the resented tertium quid, has a myth. Remember Bellerophon? Bellerophon was a nice, handsome Greek noble who repelled the advances of the wife of the king. The wife went to the king and told him that Bellerophon had tried to rape her. [First instance of Simmel's third, the couple and the child]. The king, believing her but afraid of Belleropon, sent him on to the King of Lydia as an emissary, with a sealed letter. [Second instance -- the letter as the third's emotional disengagement] The letter read: kill the bearer of this letter. The king, reading the letter, decided to do away with Bellerophon by having him kill a monster ravishing the district, the Chimera. [Third instance -- the resentment of the couple, visited on the third, by way of a substitute for the couple]

Bellerophon is the image of the tertium quid. His indifference is his menace, and he carries his death sentence in a sealed envelope. But that sentence is infinitely differed, as his supposed weakness shows itself, in the end, to be latent power. After all, he did slay the Chimera.

In the Bush culture, the figures of objectivity are all being given secret death sentences -- except the death they are supposed to receive is a purely social death. A death of inattention, of never making it into the mainstream, of being extremists, of being labeled by the labelers as "not serious." We'll see who survives this struggle.

The Metaphysical Roots of the Bush culture

An article by Joseph Nocera in the NYT profiles the very deserved fall of Morgan Stanley’s CEO, Philip Purcell, as a case study in the image deflation of the tough CEO. The first graf of the thing caught LI’s eye:

“BACK in the 1980's, Fortune published a feature called "America's Toughest Bosses." Donald H. Rumsfeld made the list one year (he was running G. D. Searle). So did legendarily crusty executives like Robert Crandall of American Airlines ("has a towering temper and swears a lot"), Frank Lorenzo of Texas Air ("not trusted inside or outside the organization") and Harry E. Figgie Jr., chairman of the manufacturer Figgie International ("really abusive - the Steinbrenner of industry").”

This mention of Rumsfeld got us thinking about the divorce between competence and success that is an often noted aspect of the Bush administration and can be extended to the whole Bush culture. By this, we mean the media, the official opposition, Wall Street, etc., -- the pseudo-meritocracy that has descended on this country like the star Wormwood falling upon the freshwater of the world.

The current contretemps around the Downing Street Memo(s) gives us a nice little snapshot of this historic moment. Here we have the great panjandrums of the print press – the Washington Post, the New York Times – who crafted the shoddiest of fictions leading up to and into the war (think, for instance, of the headline story about a captured Iraqi scientist significantly pointing to spots of sand – proof positive of a fiendish WMD program in the best tradition of Spiderman villains) – stirring in their dinosaur juices to denounce the very idea that there is anything newsworthy about the memos, or John Conyers attempt to get Congress to address them. The Michael Kinsley op ed piece in the Post last week was perhaps the nadir of this meme: a man who works for a newspaper that headlined the Michael Jackson acquittal as though Jesus had once again cast aside the cerements, in the midst of a news frenzy about a blonde kidnapped on the island of Aruba, in the season of the Runaway Bride, is suddenly making the distinction between the “popularity” of a story and the news proper. Just because people are interested in the Downing Street memo(s) – he mentions receiving hundreds of emails per day about them – is no reason that the LA Times should stoop to reporting about them. Heavens! The news media has standards way too elevated to pick news stories on the basis of popularity alone. And now, this just in about Tom Cruise...

And so the NYT retains Judith Miller. And the Bush administration retains every official who predicted that the war would be a cakewalk, that the oil would pay for it, that the number of troops occupying the country was immaterial, etc. It punishes every official who made correct predictions – from the Generals who told the truth about the manpower cost of the occupation to the poor putz who tried to tell Congress that Bush’s drug pill industry welfare bill would cost one hundred billion more than the Administration said it would. And so the internal standard that would make certain failures punishable is broken. But at the same time, the exterior face of the administration is of maximal toughness. These are the elite. These are the ones who’ve passed the tests of the meritocracy.

Looking at the description of Morgan Stanley under Purcell, these are the features that stare out at one:

1.The insistence on loyalty.
2.The unscrupulous dealing with any perceived enemy.
3.The gradual corruption of all monitoring functions.
4.The gradual reduction of co-ordination to conspiracy.
5.The outstanding and persistent failure of the tough guy leadership to meet the minimal metrics of objective success, as measured by the market place.

Thinking about this, we turned to Georg Simmel’s notion of the triad.

Simmel was fascinated by secrets, by the slippage between coordinating activity and conspiracy, by the positive alienation effected by money. He divides the investigation of socialization into three areas: the individual, the aggregation of individuals (the group), and the conflict that may occur on both levels – individual against individual, group against group.

To our eyes, this may look like an imitation of Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics (the pop science ideas of thermodynamics were in circulation in Simmel’s day, and turn up diversely in Freud and in Henry Adams, as well – and I could no doubt extend that list). However, Simmel’s notion of the dyad and the triad has been undergoing something of a rediscovery in social network theory for the past ten years or so. We are going to translate a bit about the triad, and then, in our next post, delve a bit into the roots of the social resentment of objectivity, or the notion of the Judge-enemy.

The passage from Simmel comes after he gives examples of triads and their sometimes unexpected effects – for instance, the triad formed by the child and the parents. He then points to the disputes between laborers and capital in England are often settled before a non-partisan board:

“When the non-partisan holds up the claims and the reason of the one party before the other, they lose the tone of subjective passion that they usually draw out from the other side.

Here we see something function in a healthy way that is so often considered to be suspect: that a mental content [seelischen Inhalt]’s air of feeling within its primary bearer, usually weakens significantly within a second bearer to whom this content is transferred.
Thus sensations and arguments, that must first transit through many mediating person, are so often without effect, even if their objective content arrives wholly undistorted in the decisive instance; for there is, in the transference, a loss of emotional imponderabilia, which not only fill out insufficient material reasons, but even endow sufficient ones with the drive to practical realization.

This highly significant fact, at least for the development of purely mental influences, brings it about, in the simple case of a socially mediating third element, that the feeling-intonations that accompany some demand fall away from the content, suddenly, and just because it is being formulated by a third party and represented to another; and so the vicious circle can be avoided as the affair becomes intelligible to all: that circle which occurs when the emotional emphasis of the one calls out emotional emphasis in the other, which then reacts again on the first one, and so on, until there is no more limit.”

Unexpected consequences fascinate us here at LI. Last year, we pondered whether the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would actually free the administration to engage elsewhere on its patented path to maximum criminal activity. Well, LI worried in vain. We were not counting on the pure incompetence of the Bush people. Rumsfeld has squandered the army the way Bush squandered the budget surplus. The result is that the army is breaking. The real question is whether the U.S. is going to be in the odd position of spending half a trillion dollars per on the War Department while fielding an army consisting of 100 fatigued frag victims.

While the anti-war movement in this country has either hibernated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, suffering the curious death from asphyxiation that befalls mammals who spend too much time with their heads up their assholes – or rallied its invite only, vegan lefty undergrad troops to acts of high, symbolic impotence – the real antiwar movement has been beautifully self organizing in the burbs and the highlands. It consists of parents who don’t want to sacrifice their children for the mad vanity project of a bunch of D.C. eggheads. Ah, every once in a while LI does feel the distant intimation of … well, let’s admit it, patriotism … when we witness such things as the undeclared general strike against the project that was imposed on us by the Weekly Standard crowd and their Pentagon companeros. While the Rubicon that divides the noble lie from the pathological one is so easily jumped in D.C. that the noble liars don’t even give it a second thought, the consequences outside of D.C. – the abasement of American prestige, the skewing of American self interest into a dead end filled with alien corpses, the impoverishment of American culture, the elevation to power of the greatest single collection of educated morons since Mcnamara started flowsheeting kill-to-hill ratios in the War room – is nevertheless felt, as it were, in the very air and water.

Now, there has always been a puzzle about the neocons. The puzzle is in two parts, only one of which gets publicized. The publicized part is: how could they have been so incredibly unprepared for occupying Iraq? The less publicized part is: how could they have been so incredibly arrogant as to think that they could take various democracies for a joy ride without any domestic blowback? One of the consequences of the leadership of a government embarking on an unpopular war is the disenchantment of the people with the leadership. This is a no brainer. It could be missed by the D.C. wizards only because their vaunted expertise consists solely in a sort of gaseous moralism. They had, as we have found out, no real knowledge at all about Iraq. They have no real knowledge, as in knowledge of language and history and culture, about most places in the world. They even have no real knowledge of the history and culture of the countries they live in, i.e. the U.S. and the U.K. It is astonishing how little the Wolfowitz crowd and their journalistic acolytes – the Hitchens, the Krauthammer, the Hoagland, etc., etc. – really know. Besides the piss elegance of being able to allude to Plato and Leo Strauss over the sherry, these people apparently have gone through life with the motto, everything I learned I learned at expensive Georgetown restaurants. Because they have broken canapés with the thrilling Mr. Chalabi, they were all Iraq experts. One is reminded of that astute political scientist, Jeremiah. What he said of Jerusalem could well be said of Bush War D.C.: “all that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward. Her filthiness is in her skirts she remembereth not her last end; therefore she came down wonderfully: she had no comforter.”

All of which is by way of guiding the reader to today’s extra special reading: Max Boot’s column in the L.A. Times. Boot has become quite deranged, always harping on ‘staying the course’ – not a good idea when you are in the wrong lane on the interstate. His proposal is, to give you the shortened version, this: to overcome the general strike against the Bush war, the Pentagon should be given the power to hire foreigners – basically, to compose an army of mercenaries, which can then be put at the pleasure of the executive. Boot points out that this worked well for the Roman Empire. He doesn’t point out that it spelled the doom for the Republic. Not that this would particularly bother him and his ilk – self-described meritocrats deserve, after all, to live in a meritocracy protected by Condottieri. It’s the brave new gated community world! As usual, a neocon boldly walks up to the plate and calmly dismisses the whole structure of American conservative thought, built up over two hundred years, to the applause of the right. Who knew that the ultimate victims of the neo-Peronist Bushies would be the American tories?

So tell me again – how did these people get within a mile of the levers of power?

nothing too cognitive today, people

In an article on Iranian bloggers in der Spiegel, my friend, the Brooding Persian, got almost a whole paragraph. Congratulations! I told him I’d translate the graf and insert a link

"The tone is of absolute earnestness. A blogger who goes under the melancholic moniker of the Brooding Persion writes, commenting on Iran’s nuclear plans, “a country that can’t even keep its public toilets clean shouldn’t be laying a finger on nuclear technology.” The “brooding persian” is stupifyingly learned. He debates the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss and writes clear sighted columns about the spiritual kinship of Iranian and American neo-conservatives. His blog, written in elegant English, burgeons with social-critique. Iranian weblogs give us a unique instance of the human soul under religious dictatorship. Young people who pursue the struggle against the bigotry of the rulers on the internet, speaking of a hollowed out life, are beyond anger. They don’t want to be seen as victims. Their regard is directed at the hairline fractures in the system. “A great blessing of the Islamic Republic consists in how it has made us impatient with piety,” writes one blogger, Omila. “The Shah never succeeded in doing what the Ayatollahs have finally achieved. The youth of today, ruled by the representatives of God on Earth, now even put the existence of God into question.”"

LI must say, we have heard Iranians make the latter claim all the way back in 1985. It has become a cliché among intellectual Iranians. Anyway, the B.P. was right, it turns out, and I was wrong. I kept telling him not to keep writing about Schmitt and Strauss. Well, he thereby attracted the attention of Spiegel – another of the endless proofs that you should take my advice with the caution that my instincts are almost always wrong.
….

Yesterday night I went to see Louis XIV play at Stubbs. Perhaps because I have been contemplating rent seeking lately, I began to think about how the line is an emblem of the market in privilege. One’s place in the line is purely a matter of who preceded you to your place – just as birth order determines monarchy or title. Going to see a concert at a club has other interesting features. Unlike standing in line to get a movie ticket, there is less of a sense that the line is being processed with capitalist rationality. In fact, the line simply stood there for a while. When this happen, the line becomes a different shape, as little “courts’ form – friends break the back to back physiognomy of the thing to face each other, lending an increasing bumpiness to the line -- blurring the distinction, in fact, between a line and a crowd. One observes a certain anxiety as you go back through the line, and suddenly ‘explorers” will appear – people detaching from their place in the line and going up to check out the head of it. And then the linekeepers will appear. Music clubs invariably hire linekeepers who have zip sense of organization. They are always as goofy as the assistants that are sent from the Castle to “aid” K. in Kafka’s novel. So eventually the line keepers get us into two lines. Apparently, there is a secret society of privilege in the line we are all in – those who have already paid for their tickets. Or are on some mysterious list. This, too, represents a reality about privilege. Although order of precedence is the apparent organizing principle, in reality there are the privileged among the privileged. This makes it hard to apply the concept of a unifying class interest to explain every instance in the life of the line – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a general unifying interest in preserving precedent as the line’s principle. Those who criticize the class notions of the Marxists often point to disturbances in the structure of interest to claim that class isn’t the final determining instance in capitalist social formations.

… but then the ticket guys said it was time to sell the tickets for real, and I came out of my little analytic day dream. The concert, by the way, was disappointing. Louis XIV has a nice sound on a few songs, and they have a nice sense of stage, but the ultimate r n r jism wasn’t with the boys last night.

Get thee behind me, Mr. N.

I said – or perhaps threatened – that I had two more posts on Nietzsche, having felt a fiery call to deliver my message to the unheeding heathen. He who has ears can get his hat – there is probably some raree blog controversy much more interesting elsewhere. So, without further ado, and taking up where we left off last time:

The influence of Nietzsche on the concepts or tactics of fascism is, I think, nill. Tactically, Nazism employed tactics that have spontaneously occured to your average ten year old bully for millenia, amplified by modern technology and enriched with all the bile and acids of ethnic hatred and the bodyslamming effect of the business cycle. Conceptually, even Nietzsche’s most ardent Nazi followers admitted that he was anti-antisemitic, anti-nationalist, and anti-state. These are constants in his work from the post Wagner period to the very end. Nietzsche's closest experience with fascist art and rhetoric -- in the Wagner circle -- made him very unhappy.

In attempting to annex Nietzsche, his fascist interpreters made three interrelated claims. They claimed that the will to power gives us a guide to the immutable social categories of the strong and the weak, no matter that they are, on the surface, contingent and changeable; that the will to power is the central concept that makes all of the rest of Nietzsche’s work intelligible; and that the systematic summa is to be found in the Will To Power.

We, on the other hand, claim that the idea of a central illuminating concept in Nietzsche’s work is a will of the wisp – except if you believe, as Nietzsche came to, that it is the Eternal Return of the Same; that Nietzsche alternates between treating the categories of the strong and the weak as immutable ahistorical concepts and as very mutable ones, in line with his criticism of any of the truth claims of immutable, transcendent categories deduced from philosophic principles; and that the Will to Power was brokered into existence by Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister, who took various jottings Nietzsche made about future masterworks (jottings that every writer makes) too seriously, and who created her Nietzsche book out of a basic and deep ignorance of Nietzsche’s principle of composition. Elizabeth’s idea, which is common today, is that Nietzsche scattered a bunch of insights – aphorisms – about in no particular order, responding to no particular textual strategy. If he contradicted himself, he contradicted himself, a la Whitman. Myself, I find Nietzsche’s notebooks always fascinating. But they do not make a book. However, Elisabeth and even poor Peter Gast, the friend of Nietzsche’s she suborned to do the project, mistook the episodic for the chaotic. This isn’t surprising. Elisabeth was looking for money and prestige; she was never known as a fine reader or critic. So here was the goal: get together a schoolboy version of a philosophy book by bundling together thoughts under different topic headings, and there you have it.

This won’t do. What Nietzsche got from Plato was a deep dialogical tact. What that means is that you have a sense for how a point a view can inspire a response, which then touches a spring in the original point of view that moves it in such a way that in explaining itself, it becomes something else again. Doxa are mercurial or they are dead. In the later case, they can be stuffed into almanachs, dictionaries, encyclopedias and tests. They retain a use value for memory; they lose, however, their real, discursive life.
At this point I am going to do something so extremely boring nobody will read the next bit – but such are the sacrifices I make for art. I’m going to apply a certain theory of reference, developed by Francis Jacques, to Nietzsche’s work – in particular, his notion of retro-reference. Jacques developed this in contrast to the prevailing Anglo school which constructed a theory of indexicals that responded to the demands of formal language – which, in Jacques’ opinion, distorts the role of indexicals by artificially bracketing their dialogic instances; or perhaps I should say his is a theory which operates as an adjunct to that school. I’ll write a little about this in my next Nietzsche post, drag in the Nietzschian “I,” expatiate on Nietzsche’s gogolian fascination with doubles, and finish up this series, to everybody’s relief.

Why we love this country

As we all know, the Bush administration has been so innovative in the field of corrupt practices, misprision, and fraud, that it is no longer possible to tell the government apart from a RICO target. So we were amused by the latest incident of malfeasance with the intent to defraud the taxpayer. Also, a few lesser lives without the law, i.e., innocent Iraqi lives, were sacrificed -- but on the plus side, another GOP lobbyist has been rewarded for his inherent love of freedom. Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to mark up your invoices for undelivered goods 400 percent is an even better thing. And having friends in high places in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is the best thing of all.

A nice little rundown on Custer Battles in Business Week includes the following fun to know and tell facts:

a. Custer Battles is formed in 2002 by “former Army Rangers Mike Battles and Scott Custer … before the Iraq invasion to seek rebuilding contracts. Battles, a GOP campaign contributor and a former CIA case worker, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002 as a Rhode Island Republican.”

b.While a more timid government might be afraid to entrust the lives of soldiers in an occupied territory that is filled with arms dumps and hostile forces to a contractor with approximately six months of experience, the Bush White house is anything but timid. Rather, enriching anything connected to the GOP, especially if it is slightly paramilitary and smells of Soldier of Fortune magazine is jut the thing the Bush White House loves best. So in the ‘bring em on’ fashion so beloved of the American electorate, Custer Battles and its fifteen subsidiaries harvest the bounty of war.
c. In a war that is, to all intents and purposes, an incompetent pirate raid on some of the richest oil fields in the world, it is hard to enforce a sense of integrity among the help. So Custer Battles operates much as if it were a division of Haliburton:

“By itself, Custer Battles is already in a great deal of trouble. It is under investigation by the Pentagon for allegedly cheating the U.S. government out of tens of millions during the chaotic months following the Iraq invasion. In September 2004, the military banned Custer Battles and 15 of its subsidiaries and officials, including Morris, from obtaining government contracts while the criminal probe proceeds.

Custer Battles employees have also been accused of firing on unarmed Iraqi civilians, of using fake offshore companies to pad invoices by as much as 400 percent, and of using forgery and fraud to bilk the American government. Two former associates have filed a federal whistle-blower suit, accusing top managers of swindling at least $50 million.”

d. Failing onward and upward is what the American upper class is all about. So the fun guys at Custer Battles, after being formally banned by the Pentagon, operate out of the Custer Battles hq, but under different nomenclature. Clever, eh? “Rob Roy Trumble, who previously was operations chief for Custer Battles,” resuits up a few operations that are just so necessary to our ongoing effort to spread liberty across the plains of Mesopotamia that the Pentagon has to throw money at the guy again. Flowers give pollen to bees, the male peacock spreads its irresistible tail before the weak kneed female, and GOP businessmen make proposals to the War Department. It’s a nature thing.

e. But so clever, so clever, this Custer Battles company! Here’s what they did. They re-baptized themselves as two other companies, Emergent Business Service and Tarheels Training. They affiliate themselves with a Romanian company which seems to be subsidiary of a killers for hire company out of Britain. And the fleet foots at the Pentagon allow them to bid, once more, on contracts. Astonishing, isn’t it.

America. Ruled by the worst. Elected by the ignorant. Plucked like a dead chicken.

More on Nietzsche, oh my

LI is tempted, at this point, to go ballistically Germanistic and talk about the circle around Stefan George. Lehmann, after dismissing the early wave of Nietzsche interpreters as bunglers who missed the great man’s message, believes that here, finally, with the Aryan brotherhood around George, the proper ecclesia of Nietzsche interpretation finds its footing. Of course, the five hundred thousand printing of Thus Spake Zarathustra, distributed to the troops at the front, planted the seed. One imagines that Elisabeth Nietzsche, finally wealthy, got her revenge in attending the Bayreuth festival in style in the postwar years.

Lehmann divides the rightwing school into three divisions, with a cursory glance at what he calls the “inauthentic” school of Nietzsche interpretation, which includes Max Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, Graf Keyslering and Oswald Spengler. About the George circle, the best philosopher in his view was Ludwig Klages. Actually, we have read a little of Klages ourselves. Lehmann’s overview complains that Klages doesn’t quite make the connections that light up the master theme of Nietzsche’s work, the Will to Power. But at least Klages grasps that the Will to Power, and not the dilettantish perspectivism, is the key to Nietzsche. But since, for Klages, a Schopenhauerian, the Will to Power is negative – not the heightening of life but the black spot, the invisible plague – Nietzsche’s work ultimately collapses in self contradiction, of which only some gigantic ruins – the notion of resentment, for instance – remain to be used by the philosopher. With the smug confidence of a man who thinks he has chosen the winning side of history, Lehmann tells us that with [such] an alien metric is the lifework of a thinker measured, whose authentic contemporary meaning has emerged with ever greater clarity.”

Then there is the case of the existentialist interpretation of Nietzsche, and his comparison with Kierkegaard. Who could doubt that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world comes from his own personal existence, rather than a striving for some cold objectivity? Interestingly – it tells us how low Heidegger’s bid to be the Nazi’s premier philosopher – Lehmann covers the existential/catholic interpretation of Nietzsche with never a word about the master from the Black Forest, instead concentrating on Jaspers.

But finally we come to the authentic interpretation of Nietzsche, the one which places him in the grand vista that leads from the concept of the Ubermensch to the Fuhrer himself. This is how Lehmann makes the rhetorical transition:

“The necessary experience to which the Nietzsche Renaissance of the present owes its origin, the world war, that as a historic experience has not ended in the year 1918, but continues in the midst of our most immediate turns of events – it not only spans the powers of negation, but also the ties of the new order that were forged in struggle. And the philosophy that overlooks that –isn’t it blind before the sheer present? Doesn’t it miss out on our existential situation (existenzielle Situation)?”

("Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt/
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete")

Springtime (for Nietzsche and Germany), in Lehmann’s view, comes about because of Alfred Bäumler, who makes the connection between the Will to Power – again, the backbone of Nietzsche’s thought in the rightwing view – and the “great politics” – what I am translating rather capriciously as macropolitics.

What Bäumler does is give us a very political Nietzsche, the midpoint of whose work was the struggle to counter Bismarck’s politics. Bismarck’s mistake was to found the state on equality, when the state is naturally founded on inequality – those inequalities that are found in the natural order. But “Bismarck’s ears were deaf to philosophy.” Nietzsche’s great counter-political moves were received with indifference. Only by taking account of the fact that Nietzsche, in the period of waiting for the hero to lead his country, do we understand how that impatience at the Bismarckian order led to the part of Nietzsche that might be difficult for a Nazi to accept:

But it made Nietzsche’s judgments over Germany ambiguous: these are not ‘objective’ expressions, but judgments that will attack, sort out, wound, bring attention to. And they encompass not only the decayed characteristics of the German essence: German innerlichkeit, flatness, banality, spiritlessness, but also the counter-images and counter-concepts: the roman culture and French culture (in opposition to German barbarism), the good European (in oppostion to the nationalist), the Renaissance (in opposition to the German reformation), and much else, to which we can add Nietzsche’s prejudice against anti-semitism and his occasional praises of the Jewish race and intelligence. Whoever takes that seriously will completely overlook the point at which Nietzsche is completely serious, the political intention of these very intentional constructions. He will not comprehend, why Nietzsche, in this political situation, had to attack this way and in no other; and even more, why these scenarios, understood correctly, as Nietzsche wished them to be understood, do not stand in contradiction with his fundamental political knowledge.”

Lehmann’s solution to the Nietzsche problem is, we must admit, formally similar to many philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche – one chooses where Nietzsche is serious and where he is polemical, and builds up from the serious. The Nietzsche that asked if there was room for laughter in science is subordinated to the spirit behind the most violent rhetoric in the Nietzsche canon. And the critical element in Nietzsche, the link to, for instance, the German enlightenment – a link that Nietzsche signaled by dedicating his first book, away from the Wagner circle, to Voltaire – becomes a necessary instrument in his attack on Bismarck. The necessity, here, is a little strained – how, exactly, does it promote a nationalistic, anti-semitic regime to attack nationalism and anti-Semitism? But German philosophers have long learned that the invocation of necessity clears us of many logical sins of omission – especially those having to do with the connecting middle terms.

Lehmann’s next two paragraphs make a sustained case for Nietzsche as a fascist. I’ll translate them, and then, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow, I will return with the third episode in our philosophical cliffhanger, who’s screwing Nietzsche? (and by the way, translating the next two paragraphs – translating all of the Lehmann so far – is like watching someone suffocate my brother. It gives me an excruciating pain.)

Then what are these political insights [Erkenntnisse]? – That life is neither a vale of tears or an hedonistic playground for Nietzsche, but struggle and domination – a domination of those who are naturally, as the Greeks might say, mightier (who first control themselves and can rid themselves of God – “spirit, strictness of the head, independence and hardness, decisiveness, no whining”). As the state rests not on equality, but inequality, so does the culture, being a power-will and a bound (Bändigung), self-control: not an affair for the many, and not an affair of consumers, of happiness, of satisfaction. Nietzsche’s macro-politics is directed against the democratic “ideals”: against the ideology of liberalism, against the socialism of the masses, against bourgeois society and the ‘industrial culture’ – against the increasing assimilation, averaging and shrinking of the European man” (Bauemler). Nietzsche’s political will is the will to the type, to breeding and discipline, to the soldierly leadership, to strong races and healthy bodies. These are Germanic-northern and greek values, that determine even his “anti-stateism, his dislike of the machine state, the state as the goal in itself and as “ethical organism”.

In all of this is Nietzsche a predecessor of National Socialism.”

So – this is the strongest case for Nietzsche’s macropolitics leading directly to National Socialism. In my next post about Nietzsche, I’ll ask about the interpretative moves that are applied here, to Nietzsche’s work; ask whether the left Nietzschians don’t similarly carve out their own Nietzsche; and make the case for a reading of Nietzsche that respects the internal clues in Nietzsche’s work – instead of looking for a master theme – that complies with what he writes in The Case of Wagner:


“What is the characteristic sign of every literary decadence? This: that life no longer lives in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence usurps and darkens the sense of the page, the page gains live at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the likeness for every style of decadence: every time an anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will, “freedom of the individual”, morally speaking – expanded to a political theory, the “same right for all.” Life, the equal liveliness, the vibration and exuberance of live compressed in the smallest images; the remnant poor on life. Overall: paralysis, weariness, stiffening or hostility and chaos: both leaping to the eye ever more insistently the higher one climbs in the forms of the organization. The whole no longer lives in general: it is all pieced together, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”

Or maybe I won't. That sounds like an awful lot of work.

Some links. Klages, who ended up writing the world's longest defense of the philosophy of graphology, is the prophet without honor at this site.

Elisabeth Nietzsche was a case. I can't help but find her life and triumph, as the "heir" of her helpless brother, screamingly funny. This essay by Jenny Diska is nice. Also, I'd recommend John Gimlette's book about Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. Among other things, he pokes around in the memories left of Elisabeth and her hubby's attempt to found an Aryan utopia in Paraguay. Elisabeth and her husband eventually fleeced the anti-semitic gulls and left them to the tropical heat -- never were criminal and victim so evenly matched.

nine American soldiers dead since Tuesday

I read an old column of Alexander Cockburn’s yesterday, from 1999. The substance of the column was that the left in the U.S. was a joke, led by phonies like Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore, and the only progressive political energy was, bizarrely, on the right, where there was a healthy hatred of the government.

Now, as is the case with many Cockburn columns, this was too clever by half. But lopping off the too clever half, he had a point – the only people who were truly, actively against U.S. intervention in Kosovo were rightwingers like Jack Kemp.

Given that politics is mostly positioning, that opposition to war has melted on the right with the Republicans in power. But I do think it could come back. In fact, I think it has, among the grassroots. Save for those who are swayed by the logic of Suttee, which posits that sacrifice demands, in itself, further blind sacrifice (thus the soldiers killed in Iraq are not killed in vain if further soldiers are killed in Iraq), the American will to continue the madness there is crumbling. There is, unfortunately, a lot of anger on the left about this with no forum – the Democrats have long been a coalition of the cowardly, and the irritant of their presence on the scene is mitigated only by their almost total irrelevance and impotence. What LI thinks should be happening is some reaching out to the paleoconservatives. The paleos are really hostile to the wasting of American lives in the service of the great Moloch, Washington D.C. And the wasting of these lives is becoming, increasingly, a vanity project, as the courtiers around King George refuse to confront him about his madness. What one would like to see is an alliance of convenience. The recent discussion about Harry’s Place in LI’s comments was interesting insofar as the writers of that blog present themselves as leftists. So do many who support the mad war. Unfortunately, anti-war people have not yet exploited the opening given by the left-symp war supporters.

These kinds of people – their lifestyles, their vocabulary, their gestures -- evoke blind rage among rightwingers, even as they grudgingly rally to them. It would seem an eminently fair step, in terms of propaganda, to exploit that rage – to present the war as what it is, a faux Leninist project. LI has always thought that the most consistent anti-war position is derived from Burkean conservatism. Yet the antiwar left continually drives away their allies by pulling in extraneous domestic matters. Allies don’t have to be converts – in fact, every ally, in strategic terms, is a potential enemy. The fact that the left doesn’t use the enormous, pent up hostility to D.C. is a historic relic from the time that the liberals controlled D.C. That time is gone, and the D.C. centric gesture ossifies a self defeating politics.

Nietzsche, again

LI received a letter the other day wishing us good luck on our Nietzsche postings, but warning us that we were probably on a fool’s errand. Maybe so. Still, it does seem to us that the controversy about Nietzsche and fascism makes a strange detour around the arguments of the fascists themselves, and this is something we’d like to correct. And we’d like to correct it using one of Nietzsche’s own habitual methods: the question, for us, is what problems faced a philosopher who wanted to make Nietzsche into a proto-Nazi? And, a companion question, what benefit did Nietzsche bring to Nazism?

In Lehmann’s intro, one of the problems that has to be dealt with is that Nietzsche happens to have been multiply claimed between 1890 and 1933. Here’s the way Lehnmann states the problem:

It is not the year 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, that is decisive in bringing to a close the mental reality that we call the 19th century. It was only 1914 that decisively pushed that reality into the past. And if we say that we are closest to Nietzsche not only of all his contemporaries, but among all German thinkers of the past, we meant that his will and his greatness only became visible through the experience of the first world war.

This is how we understand the curious fact that more than a quarter century of Nietzsche scholarship has not succeeded in bringing the philosophy of this thinker out into the open. A writer of such wonderful clarity and transparency of language, who has spoken so often and so extensively about his intentions and tasks – does it require a particular interpretation and the instrument of interpretation, “philology”, in order to grasp his fundamental concepts? Just this, that each person who reads Nietzsche thinks that he is the master of his thought, was the cause of the misunderstanding of his philosophy.”

What is behind Lehmann’s time scheme?

We are all familiar with the pictures and trivia – the picture of Hitler at Nietzsche’s house, posing with a simpering, aged Elizabeth; Hitler sending Nietzsche’s collected works to Mussolini as a present sealing the Axis pact; etc., etc. Those scenes, and their precedent in the work of people like Lehmann, succeeded in one crucial aspect: they pretty much sealed the relation between Nietzsche and fascism, driving out rival claims. But it gives us a very skewed picture of Nietzsche’s reception to think that only the fascists claimed Nietzsche at this time. In fact, the Goethe-kultur of the German speaking countries had absorbed Nietzsche as the last German classic long before then. We know about the effect Nietzsche had on the modernist generation between 1890 and 1914 (which Lehmann denigrates, following, in this, Nazi policy): the influence on Gide, on Svevo, on Shaw, on Barres, on Hamsum, on Hesse, on Mann, on Musil – it is hard to find a writer from that time who hadn’t some opinion of Nietzsche. Or several, over the course of a lifetime – Musil and Mann are notable in this respect. There was also the influence on Jewish culture – in this period, Nietzsche was considered, as Otto Weiniger puts it somewhere, a “philo-Semite.” Martin Buber translated Zarathustra into Polish. The greatest Jewish philosopher, perhaps, of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig, built Der Stern der Erloesung partly out of his struggle with N. But less noted is the political claiming of Nietzsche. The liberal-social democratic party in Germany was particularly attracted to Nietzsche. The German politician who first declared himself Nietzsche’s follower was not Hitler, but Hitler’s antithesis, Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated in 1922, after Rapello. In Nazi eyes, Rathenau was an ideal devil: a rich, liberal, Jewish industrialist associated with that government party that surrendered in 1918 – which is surely not the effect Lehmann wants to emphasize. In a polemic with Sloterdjik over Nietzsche, (the Right Nietzsche in the belly of a left Trojan Horse) Detlef Hartman claims that Nietzsche work was the “most radical driver’ behind the Taylor-Fordist regime advocated by Rathenau, Weber and Schumpeter – that indeed, the idea of ‘creative destruction” has a Nietzschian geneology.

Tucholsky made fun of the overuse of Nietzsche, in this period. Like a lot of the Vienna spirits, Tucholsky went from admiring Nietzsche to comparing him, unfavorably, with Schopenhauer:

“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”

In that atmosphere, the first and most successful Nazi move was to clear out rivals.

I am not, by the way, making an exculpatory argument – or not yet. There is a newspaper logic that goes like this: x says that the world is round, and y says that the world is flat. So the truth must be in the middle – the world is shaped like a Frisbee. That’s the very definition, to me, of what Nietzsche called herd thinking. Because many sides claimed Nietzsche doesn’t mean one side was not correct. While I think Nietzsche’s thinking contains a good many themes that allow one to see the belligerance, nationalism, and worship of power of the fascists as symptoms of nihilism, I also think there are plenty of footholds in Nietzsche lending themselves to a rightwing reading. There is a line of thought that says, the Nazis misunderstood Nietzsche – and fundamentally I agree with that. But they also understood things about Nietzsche. The hagiographic approach to Nietzsche, criticized by T.V., is all about avoiding those things. So the question is, pace Tucholsky, – did the Nazi editing of Nietzsche have internal textual and conceptual support from the man who wrote, in the Antichrist: ‘The weak and misbegotten shall be driven to extinction. This is the first law of our love of humanity. And one should give them a helping hand”? A sentence over which, as Nietzsche might have put it, a Verhaengniss hangs.

More, hopefully, tomorrow.

a short and not so sweet post

LI has been terrible lately. We know it. Exhaustion on this end. And also – there is a strange cycle in trying to write posts daily. Sometimes, what comes out of my fingers seems like gold – and then sometimes it seems like fool’s gold. I am rather fascinated by that volatility, even if LI's poor readers might find it less than engrossing. It isn’t connected to the quality of ideas – writing isn’t a command and control process, in which the concepts come first and tell the language, or one’s share of it, how to get to work. The concepts are vaguely there, a sort of drape fluttering and room hum, and one’s share of the language is sprawled on the floor, grinding up crayons and picking their noses. And then some cognitive throat clearing occurs, and the language either jumps up and starts spontaneously doing the dance of the bumble bee back from the pollen laden flowers – which is good -- or it bucks and whinnies like a dying mule – which is bad.

Our recommend for your reading pleasure this morning is this Knight Ridder article about the freedom loving Iraqi government our boys and gals are dying for. Those boys and gals are probably proud as punch that the Iraqi gov has discovered such creative uses for the electric drill as an instrument of information gathering. Gee, it is almost as if our boys and gals are dying to reincarnate the very forms and ceremonies of the last Iraq government, Saddam Hussein’s. But that can’t be – can one imagine Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supporting that kind of thing?

Your neighbors. Their blood. Your hands. The virtuous circle rides again, and it is mornin’ in Bush’s America.

Our other recommend is a much longer and lasting read. Santayana's philosophical masterpiece, the Life of Reason, has been put up in all five volumes at the Gutenberg site. We think Santayana was the most important conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and maybe the sole original American contribution to conservative thought. Plus, he is an excellent writer (too excellent, many philosophers claim -- he liked writing a little bit too much). He makes the Strausses and Kirks look like amateur pikers.

too much blog talk

Mr Turbulent Velvet replied to our post about Nietzsche, sort of preemptively killing us in the windup. But we are still determined to trace out one of Nietzsche's posthumous "becomings" -- how N. became a Nazi -- in order to demonstrate that the selective reading of Nietzsche that made him acceptable to the nazis is picked up and reproduced by those who criticize him for being a protofascist without questioning the history of that image. Unfortunately, I’m doing some heavy lifting in another part of my life right now – the editing part – so that I just don’t have the energy today.

So, instead of Nietzsche, a little short post about a funny blog thing. A couple of days ago, at one of our favorite blogs, Charlotte Street, there was a post about “bruschetta brigade” – which I guess is the equivalent, in the U.K., of limousine liberals. It was a nice riff that ended like this:

“Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.”

We made a few comments in the comments section about luxury and its ambiguity in both the classical economic tradition and in Marx.

Well, these comments were seized upon as the quintessence of po-mo nonsense by another blog, Harry’s Place. And, in order to add a little of the necessary irony to the mix, the comments were then attributed to the guy who writes Charlotte Street. Who then writes about the HP people coming to his site and making pissy comments on the post. Thus completing the circle, which is either a vicious circle or a circle jerk – or both. First, you get the drift of the signature. Second, the politics of citation. Third is the blissful repetition of the gesture I was criticizing in my thesis without any consciousness that the gesture was being repeated. The unconsciousness is not my subjective interpretation -- several remarks showed that commentors had inversed the sense of the thesis I was making. And it wasn't a difficult thesis. The scorn poured on the meaningless phrases, all with words of more than two syllables, all obviously “unnecessary” when common sense would tell you all about luxury – how could this be anything other than the reactivation of the very trope I was pointing to? And finally, to put the icing on the eclair, I believe that some commenters on the HP blog must have read earlier posts of mine, stuff I’ve written over the years about my habitual destitution, and transferred the sense of that to the writer of the Charlotte Street blog – there was some discussion about whether the writer of the latter was unemployed.

All of which is pretty funny. If I’d set up a psych experiment on Derrida’s notion of the effects of a text, I couldn’t have come up with a set of more validating inputs. Plus, to me, the luxury of watching my original tracing of the psychopathology of luxury create responses that blindly repeat that psychopathology in another domain (that of rhetoric). I wonder if this is how Pavlov felt when walking through the kennel?

Nietzsche and fascinating fascism

A busy schedule has made LI haphazard and sloppy about posting, lately. We hoped to have up a post about Nietzsche, today, but instead we have this galimatias.

Nietzsche is surely the writer we have studied most closely, and who has had the greatest impact on our life. Consequently, we don’t really like to write about the man. Arguing about Nietzsche is much less fun, in our view, than applying Nietzsche’s m.o. Still, we’ve been following UFO Breakfast’s intermittent series of posts attacking the Big N. and, in particular, his status right now on the left. LI is, if anything, a lefty Nietzschian, so we are going to take a crack at replying to this charge:

“I do think that even if Nietzsche was an innocent reactionary aphorist, there is something peculiar about his work that, when appropriated by progressives, leads not so much to fascism as fecklessness.”

The writer of the blog, Turbulent Velvet, is very good. He employs those methods approved of by the legendary Mike Fink, who always began his fights with:

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

The no holts barred polemic he launches on Nietzsche chaws right through him, using a reading of Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corpse to make the milk white followers of the zeitgeist, the fans, the causuists, the excusers, tremble in their boots:

“It's popular & common to forgive fascists because they invent funny one-liners at the expense of the weak and helpless. It's the main reason Clear Channel has taken over our culture. "He's just an entertainer."

Nietzsche hagiography is simply the tweed/punk sublation of that formation with a lacuna as big as the fuckin' sun.

2.
There's not much point in reading a dusty biography of Alexander Pope organized around the argument that "he was more sinned against than sinning." Why? Because a critic who derives all of his primary categories for evaluating an author directly from that author himself is doomed not just to write a hagiography but the precise hagiography that the author programmed him to write.

For the same reason there is no point in reading an approach to Nietzsche which takes him to be a "buffoon" or that his work should be divided into three stages because that's what he told us to think about him. Nietzsche fans are such good little boys and girls: they always do what they're told. (Granted, it's hard for Nietzsche fans to think for themselves because he makes them feel like such courageous naughty little rebels if they think like him instead. Rebel against me, said Zarathustra! And the fans quote him, even as they don't!)

Nietzsche is unique in his ability to inspire universal hagiographic abjection. And along with the hagiography comes an even more bizarre suspension of any suspicion about its obvious universality. For all other major philosophers one can find shelves of books written polemically against their work, often with no quarter given. The "anti" gesture is part of the tradition: Marx writes the anti-Hegel, Nietzsche the anti-Christ, D&G the anti-Freud. But there is no tradition of anti-Nietzsche to speak of, not even a tepid desire there should be one--especially on the Left where one would expect to find little else.”

So -- I am not going to take on Waite. Rather, I’d like to take the case of Nietzsche as fascist or Nazi from the mouth of the people who first made that case: the Nazis themselves. Luckily, Lehmann’s 1939 preface to Nietzsche’s works, which was produced in Nazi Germany, is up on the web. I often find it puzzling that the case for Nietzsche’s fascism is discussed as if it were a matter of Nietzsche and Heidegger and contemporary American and European philosophers, none of whom openly espouse fascism. As Husserl said to the blind man, go to the things themselves. What is left out of the equation are those who did espouse fascism, and thought Nietzsche was its prophet.

My argument that N. leads neither to fascism nor fecklessness is that: a., the fascist interpretation begins by seriously distorting Nietzsche’s reception, which is part of the general fascist reaction against modernism; b, that the reading of Nietzsche as a fascist systematically segregates and diminishes the critical dimension in Nietzsche; c, that the fascist interpretation, while rightly seeing the Will to Power as essential to Nietzsche’s philosophy, conflates it with “Macro Politics” (grosse Politik); and d, that the conflict in Nietzsche’s own politics, in the latter part of the work, has to do with finding the scale at which his models of power work. C. was the whole point of Bäumler’s work, which was key to the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche. As Lehmann puts it:

“He has further shown, that Nietzsche, the political thinker, was the only one among his contemporaries to set the demands of the future and the making of Macro-Politics (“grosse” Politik zu treiben) in opposition to the Christian-nationalist state, the Second Reich, the bourgeois mass and class state, whose downfall he forsaw.”

This finds the right locus in Nietzsche, for it is his opposition to Bismarck and the Germany of his time that, to the fascists, skews Nietzsche to the right – and to me, skews Nietzsche to the critical. I wouldn’t say to the left, which was worker based and for which Nietzsche had no feel and only a distant appreciation. Nietzsche was no socialist. His own sense was that he had no political faction in Germany. His politics as a practical matter were hopelessly out of date -- he was a Frondeur, a supporter of the nobility against the monarchy, an impossible political position in the late 19th century, although a lively one in 17th century France.

But the obsolescence of his politics, his dandyism, freed him from being a partisan -- gave him the "fecklessness" to be critical. What I would say is that Nietzsche’s own political thinking picked out the totalitarian seed in the democratic state. I would say this is why, contra Mr. TV, Nietzsche's shock effect is not comfortably contained within an academic s/m fan club. The reigning myth is that democracy is opposed to totalitarianism – that totalitarianism comes from outside democracy, infests it like a disease, sickens it, overthrows it. Churchill's image of Lenin being conveyed into Russia on a sealed train like a bacillus picks up on this myth. Nietzsche, on the contrary, claims that the organizational form to which democracies tend – the party form – prefigures a new kind of tyranny. He saw that the party organization flourished in the democratic culture of the nineteenth century, and he saw how that organization reproduced itself by coordinating ideology and party interest. He saw how the tie between those two tends, inevitably, to advance party interest and hollow out ideology, insofar as the representatives of ideology becomes the party's ruling clique. He was certainly right that all of the significant tyrannies of the twentieth century in the West have come through parties, and have ruled through parties. This isn't true of tyrannies in the past.

This makes things interesting. The fascist claim on Nietzsche, here, and the left Nietzschian claim, both rely on constructing Nietzsche’s response to German statebuilding (even if that theme has been undercontextualized among contemporary Nietzschians) which of course happened while he was alive. That is probably where I will go after doing a post on Lehmann. I’m not sure if I am going to go into the d. too much. And I’m not sure if I will have time for too much of any of this. And, as I say, I find arguing about Nietzsche oftentimes besides the point. But as I am myself wondering about American politics in the age of Bush – and especially the debilitating lock of the parties on political alternatives – it fits with my present preoccupations.

oh that American rag...

The court decision on medical marijuana is unsurprising – this is a court that has consistently insulated the war on drugs from the Constitution, affirming, time and time again, the tactics of the police state and the destruction of the Bill of Rights -- as long as that destruction leads to the American penitentiary society of which we are all so proud. The NYT captures the weirdness of the vote:

"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.”

The present court has, however, no problem with inconsistency – they simply convey the conservative agenda in all its many splendid contradiction, regarding the reach of state power. Still, the drug issue has been tied in for years with the system whereby the Federal government has increased its power over the states – the ban on narcotics traffic being, along with the protection of endangered animal fur and feathers, one of the first areas in which the Fed asserted its preemptive regulatory right to reach into the states economies, and thereby shape their general political culture.

If this were a consistent court, this ruling would lead to the affirmation of a broad array of federal regulatory powers – it would be, in other words, incredibly New Dealish. But this is a political court, and its rulings about Federal power over, say, land use will hew to that line which pleases the rich, while its rulings about drug use will hew to that line which pleases the evangelicals.

The advantages of inconsistency in politics outweighs the ponderous benefits of precedence. I think liberals have to start thinking of states rights in a new way, as the U.S. becomes more and more Confederate. The use of the federal government to break up apartheid was a great victory – but one shouldn’t be tied to an ossified form. That was then, this is now. When the AG’s office is filled by a torture advocate, the time to get out of the habit of increasing federal power is now.

Russia

While it is illegal to experiment on a living human being, there are no laws against experimenting on nations. Poor Russia has suffered two great experiments – one, the Bolshevism of communism, and the other, after Gorbachev, the Bolshevism of capitalism. The latter, of course, is much favored in the Western press, which has gotten more worked up about the jailing of a billionaire Mafioso/oil tycoon than all the premature deaths in Moscow and Chechnya combined.

A reader wisely scored LI for suggesting that Central Europe would do better to create an EU-style union with Russia than with the EU. This is not going to happen – not only are the hostilities still too deep, but Russia has drifted back into its own history of disastrous strong men with Putin. There is a nice personal essay – St. Petersburg Portraits -- by Emma Lieber in this season’s Massachussetts Review. Portraits of St. Petersburg are a motif in Russian literature – Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, for instance, which begins with the Prospect itself as a sort of generator of drama, out of which its characters -- its artist and the young prostitute -- arise as geographic coordinates of what becomes a typical Gogolian delirium. Lieber visited St. Petersburg as a student for a year – and her voice has that comfort with… no, more, that quiet relish in the slightly bizarre and backwards and louche that one picks up from all the American expat lit that has come out of stays in Eastern Europe (Arthur Phillips’ Prague is a good example). Americans have a special status there, since the scramble for existence in the capitalist system is being done by people who have learned it by the book -- learned it, that is, by inference from those books that demonized it. It is as if a culture had adopted Christianity as they had inferred it from the works of Alistair Crowley. Lieber has the preternatural actuarial wisdom that comes from having absorbed the statistics, which I guess is part of growing up and getting into a good college now. So she is grimly aware, for instance, of the statistics concerning life expectancy. For males in Russia, the emptying out of the male slot after forty has an alarming visibility:

“Vysula was my host father for five months of my stay in St. Petersburg. He is around 50 years old, and he expects to live another five years or so, ten years tops. Of his class of twelve boys at school, ten are already dead, from sickness or alcoholism or Communism, or some combination of these.”

“At any rate Vysula remains, alive and sober, one of the last of his childhood friends to have reached middle age, though while I was there he was always sick in some way. He usually had a cold or the flu and would wander from room to room with a scarf around his neck, quizzing me constantly about American medicines and offering absurd advice about how to stay healthy
(which always reminded me of the Woody Allen character in Sleeper, a '70s health-food nut who has been cryogenically frozen for several centuries and thaws out to find that cigarettes, deepfried
fat, and chocolate had been the healthy stuff all along). In general Vysula looked well-fed and sturdy, and I never could quite believe that he was sick. But if we're to judge by the statistics,
he probably will die in the next five or ten years.”

We’ve been told, again and again, that the free market shocks of the nineties were making all the difference for the Russians – and at the same time we’ve been told, again and again, that Russia is held together by criminal activity. Lieber is, of course, giving only her impressions, but it doesn’t seem too far fetched to think that an atmosphere so constituted by a monstrous past at the heel and the inability to shake off whole geological strata of expectations in order to free oneself to act must bear down upon people. On the advise of friends from Massachusetts, Lieber gets in touch with a Solugub scholar, Elizabeva, and meets her daughter and mother – no men in the household, another exemplar of the statistical norm:

It is perfectly typical in St. Petersburg for three generations to share their living space, because apartments are hard to come by and Russians don't tend to move out (although luckily the country is past the point where ex-spouses must live together for decades, as they did until rather recently). It is also fairly typical that these three generations should be made up entirely of women, since Russian men tend to die. Elisaveta's family, she
once told me smilingly, can't hold on to its men—first her father died, then her husband, then her brother. When her dog gave birth last year the male puppies died right away, but the females were healthy and strong.”

There is this amusing riff about Elisaveta’s mother:

“She lives with her two college-aged daughters, Valentina and Maria, and her mother, a
true Russian babushka (literally, grandmother), who is huge, takes a shot of vodka before every meal, dresses in a housedress and slippers, and paddles around making outraged remarks in a raspy, slurred voice to no one in particular. Elizavetas mother never leaves the house. I assumed that the reason was her much discussed bad heart, but Elizaveta explained matter-of-factly that "Mama hasn't wanted to go out since 1943," when, as a young woman during the siege, she was chased through the streets of Leningrad by cannibals.”

History is a matter of more trick or treat than we like to think. And once you start getting the tricks, it is hard to stop.

the good news just keeps pouring in...

“The Bush administration tried this week to counter the impression that Mr. Zarqawi and other insurgents were derailing the nascent Iraqi political process. Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that American and Iraqi forces over the past few months had killed about 250 members of Mr. Zarqawi's network, including some top lieutenants, and captured more than 400.

General Myers, appearing Wednesday with Mr. Rumsfeld, said the number of attacks against American forces was down 20 percent from peaks last November, during the battle of Falluja, and in January, before the elections. But he did not mention that attacks had doubled, to about 70 a day now, from early April.”
NY Times


Thirty members of the Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve died in the Iraq war in May, matching the highest toll for any month of the war, according to Pentagon figures…

The Guard and Reserve, which make up nearly half the force in Iraq, have generally had fewer than 20 deaths per month during the war, and it's not clear why their losses spiked to 30 in May. That matched the 30 deaths among the Guard and Reserve in January, and it compared with 11 in April, 13 in March and 16 in February.
-- USA today

war, what is it good for -- let me count the ways

Harry has an interesting and almost irony free post here which makes the very good point that those who toss around the chickenhawk label when it comes to the pro-Iraq war set aren’t exactly besieging the military recruitment offices to serve in Afghanistan and Kosovo. The larger point is that chickenhawk-hood is a status that crosses the ideological line between liberal and conservative.

That’s an important point. In fact, it was Clinton’s own shifty ways of getting out of fighting in Vietnam that made it hard to countenance his own use of military force in Kosovo. Clinton is a very clever man – he knew this was true. But to be president of the United States is to be president of a country that routinely spends about a trillion dollars every four or five years on the military. That spending is to war like the civit musk is to perfume – it is the pure essence. One simply has to find the right solution to dilute it in. Orwell was right: we live in a society that is perpetually at war.

What infuriates liberals is that Bush has escaped the shadow of non-service that haunted Clinton. How did this happen? LI suspects that, after 9/11, Bush was inoculated from all the damning old questions. But, unlike Harry, we don’t think that the liberals are wrong to push this agenda, even if they are hypocrites to do so. Hypocrisy is just another name for checks and balances – one opposes those forms one used to support when they turn against you. Short term memory loss is a politicians stock in trade. One of the symbolic checks on turning our in vitro wars into the real bloody thing is that there is a scale of responsibility, such that nobody can escape some participation. This was true after the civil war – it was one of the reasons that the Robber Barons achieved political power by supporting politicians instead of becoming politicians, since the J.P. Morgan set profited hugely from the Civil War by renting succedanea to serve for them – and it seems to have been true all the way up to 1992. That the last two presidents have defied that rule is not good – it shows a crack in the structure of symbolic equality that used to support the democratic culture in this country. It is as much a symptom of a country heading down the path of castes as is the salaries of CEOs.

A deeper mistake, we think, of the anti-war side is one we commit all the time – the reliance on the rebarbative horror of war. Lee was right – it is good that war is so horrible, lest we enjoy it too much. War is fun. There is no way around that. For proof, you can look no further than a five year old boy with a plastic soldier and some acorns to throw. Or the fifteen year old with the interactive game. War has always been fun. We need a whole structure of symbolic prohibitions – call it civilization – to keep the war of all against all from breaking out. Or to sublimate it. When the symbolic code that shames the person who supports a war from making some sacrifice for it – joining it, having his or her kids join it, paying for it – breaks down, that is bad news beyond the lesser question of whether liberals or conservative, little enders or big enders, are being coherent.