My friend D. sent me a little CD the other day. It had the Rage against the Machine song on it, Killing in the Name of. D. is an old Metallica fan, from before they had an on-call psychoanalyst. Myself, I love noise, but I am not a metal person. I particularly hate the voices that a lot of metal music features, in which some singer has to assume the precise sound that would be made by the Cowardly Lion on meth – a fake monster voice, full of empty volume and scatchiness.
All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.
A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.
The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.
Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.
That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.
Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
L'affaire du collier
"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]"
Some Time journalists have expressed concern that the company's decision could have a chilling effect on their relations with sources and could hinder their newsgathering efforts.
"We're very much worried about what kind of signal this sends," Ms. Tumulty said. In Washington, she added, "confidentiality is the lubricant of journalism."
In re the summer’s mini-Rove scandal: LI has been searching for historical parallels to write about Matt Cooper’s revealing email, as published by Newsweek. It throws a nice light on the mores of the press corps. This is how the sausage is packaged (incidentally, last night we saw Alain Tanner’s excellent film, La Salamandre (1971). So we have seen how sausage is really packaged). We all knew that most stories in the media peddle a pro-government, pro-corporationist agenda; but the question is, what do the puppets, ie the journalists, think they are doing? How does a corps that exudes such arriviste arrogance negotiate its own perpetual surrender? It takes a major event – for instance, being led into a war desired by a lobby in D.C. – to show us that the techniques that sell tickets to and toy spinoffs of The War of the Worlds are now routinely used to sell every war and policy lurch. It is a world of press releases, with the voice of the third person narrator in your average news story turning out to belong to somebody from the dread State or the dread Corporation or other of the infinite band of dimwits working the American hypno-zone. They have simple desires. They want to steal your money, kill your brothers and sisters, and erect a large tombstone over your every opportunity for joy. The journalist has the complicated but rewarding task to make this seem inevitable – as inevitable as seeing the latest movie or watching the latest tv show. Press criticism has become a lazy blogger past-time. The point of it, though, is to pluck out those moments of ersatz necessity and lay them bare in all their essential ridiculousness. Though it is true that murder and the destinies of nations are at stake, it is also true that fate, here, is operating in the comic mode.
Incidentally, a story about Rove in the NYT this morning ends in this appropriately lubricated manner: “A former official who has worked for Mr. Bush said: "This president is Mr. Alamo. He sees the hordes coming over the hill and he heads for the barricades. And not to raise a white flag."
Wow. Former official risks all to deliver world class flattery to former boss. Punishment: a three hundred per job on K Street. No wonder the NYT scribe guaranteed him anonymity. Just think – if there were more Cooper like surrenders of anonymous sources, we wouldn’t have such choice bits to thicken the stew of sycophancy and propaganda. Our very freedoms would be threatened.
PS -- Press auto-fellation watch:
This, from David Carr's review of In Cold Blood in today's NYT:
"Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives."
PPS -- LI sometimes worries that our p.o.v. is so from Mars that we are separated, forever, from our fellow mooing herds of Americans. We too, wait in the slaughterhouse stockyard. But somehow, we don't have our little bovine head on straight. In any case, the views given above are reflected in this article in the NYObs by Christopher Lehman.
Some Time journalists have expressed concern that the company's decision could have a chilling effect on their relations with sources and could hinder their newsgathering efforts.
"We're very much worried about what kind of signal this sends," Ms. Tumulty said. In Washington, she added, "confidentiality is the lubricant of journalism."
In re the summer’s mini-Rove scandal: LI has been searching for historical parallels to write about Matt Cooper’s revealing email, as published by Newsweek. It throws a nice light on the mores of the press corps. This is how the sausage is packaged (incidentally, last night we saw Alain Tanner’s excellent film, La Salamandre (1971). So we have seen how sausage is really packaged). We all knew that most stories in the media peddle a pro-government, pro-corporationist agenda; but the question is, what do the puppets, ie the journalists, think they are doing? How does a corps that exudes such arriviste arrogance negotiate its own perpetual surrender? It takes a major event – for instance, being led into a war desired by a lobby in D.C. – to show us that the techniques that sell tickets to and toy spinoffs of The War of the Worlds are now routinely used to sell every war and policy lurch. It is a world of press releases, with the voice of the third person narrator in your average news story turning out to belong to somebody from the dread State or the dread Corporation or other of the infinite band of dimwits working the American hypno-zone. They have simple desires. They want to steal your money, kill your brothers and sisters, and erect a large tombstone over your every opportunity for joy. The journalist has the complicated but rewarding task to make this seem inevitable – as inevitable as seeing the latest movie or watching the latest tv show. Press criticism has become a lazy blogger past-time. The point of it, though, is to pluck out those moments of ersatz necessity and lay them bare in all their essential ridiculousness. Though it is true that murder and the destinies of nations are at stake, it is also true that fate, here, is operating in the comic mode.
Incidentally, a story about Rove in the NYT this morning ends in this appropriately lubricated manner: “A former official who has worked for Mr. Bush said: "This president is Mr. Alamo. He sees the hordes coming over the hill and he heads for the barricades. And not to raise a white flag."
Wow. Former official risks all to deliver world class flattery to former boss. Punishment: a three hundred per job on K Street. No wonder the NYT scribe guaranteed him anonymity. Just think – if there were more Cooper like surrenders of anonymous sources, we wouldn’t have such choice bits to thicken the stew of sycophancy and propaganda. Our very freedoms would be threatened.
PS -- Press auto-fellation watch:
This, from David Carr's review of In Cold Blood in today's NYT:
"Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives."
PPS -- LI sometimes worries that our p.o.v. is so from Mars that we are separated, forever, from our fellow mooing herds of Americans. We too, wait in the slaughterhouse stockyard. But somehow, we don't have our little bovine head on straight. In any case, the views given above are reflected in this article in the NYObs by Christopher Lehman.
Monday, July 11, 2005
chiral up!
Lately, LI has been enjoying Chris McManus’ book Left Hand, Right Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures. We love an omnium gatherum, of which this is a superior instance. Also, handedness is naturally of interest to the philosophically minded. It comes as no surprise (although, actually, it did come as a surprise) that one of the great pioneers in the study of the problem of handedness was Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that the dispute over absolute or relative space – the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz – could be resolved by considering right and left. Kant was, as always, right (a word etymologically connected, as all handedness researchers assure us, to the superstitious reverence accorded to the right hand, just as superstition accords ill luck to the left – the left is “cack-handed”), although as always, he was also wrong.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
dissociative politics
The Plame affair is a curious cultural relic. It revolves around an utterly revolting law that prevents the names of covert CIA operatives from being leaked. This unnecessary constraint on our civil liberties was passed in 1994, meaning that we somehow managed to trundle through the Cold War without it. The Alice in Wonderland aspect of the case begins with the law, which has suddenly become a sacred thing, next to the flag and motherhood, in the liberal ‘sphere. Taking down America’s imperial ambitions, or at least making them transparent, is never going to occur if the transparency is blocked by a trumpery law. Novak is an utterly ridiculous figure, in LI’s view, but we are glad he revealed the inner workings of this particular action. Far from being a traitor, actions like Novak’s are necessary if we are ever going to rein them in.
Laws like the non-disclosure law are not, however, ever about treason, but about court society. The exist in order to create vectors of blackmail and blackguardism. The second Alice in Wonderland aspect of the Plame case is that it shows us how American foreign policy – a thing of D.C. cabals – is enacted. Joseph Wilson might well have been the right man to send to Niger to check on the bogus yellow cake story, but it is nevertheless of high interest that his wife put in a word for him. Who does put in words for people in that place? Who puts in the word for Chalabi? Who put in the original word for Pearle? At least the investigation has opened up that mechanism a little, so that we can see springs operating against springs. There is a distressing American habit of respecting the governing class. The governing class in D.C. is no more respectable than it was in Byzantine courts – indeed, a lot less respectable. It consists of circus performers, praetorian guards, satyrs and whores. Unlike the Byzantine court, there is a lot less learning among them.
The third Alice in Wonderland thing is how journalism works through the blackmail vectors. Obviously, journalists are used as the knights for complicated in-fighting, whispering a little info here, spreading a little gossip there. Basically, journalism operates to weed out any bit of talent or dissent that appears to threaten the cabal form. Judy Miller’s role is particularly interesting, since she was basically an operative in Operation Lie mounted by the belligerents in 2002-2003. Diffusing information that the white house wanted diffused allowed her to play the game of then bouncing the information off the white house or the collection of neo-con eggheads and sycophants with White House connections.
Bringing us to the fourth Alice in Wonderland thing, the use of jail. LI has always wondered at the American addiction to jail. In our opinion, jail is properly the place for the few truly dangerous criminals – rapists, murderers – plus the occasional incorrigible robber. Mostly the people in jail should be under house arrest. There is, of course, no incentive for the purging of the jails, and every incentive to build more of them. We would support with all our Mighty Mouse powers a politician who proposed creating anti-jail incentives – for instance, tying one hundred fold increases in social welfare to increases in the jail population. But to jail everybody must go, it seems…
In Antonio D’amascio’s Goodbye Descartes, there is a story about a nineteenth century railroad worker who suffered a horrible accident that made neurological history. An iron rod, accidentally propelled by a mistimed explosion, entered his skull at such speed that it entirely left the head, exiting out of the top of the skull, and taking with it some frontal brain matter. The worker survived, but his personality was utterly changed. He became unable to understand goal oriented action. Or rather, he understood it intellectually, but he couldn’t incorporate himself into any larger plan. As D’Amasio puts it, he was dissociated, with his intellect disconnected from his pragmatic life.
Dissociation is a very good term for D.C. politics. Politics on this level is not about ideology – ideology is secondary. It is about the dissociation of power as its own goal. Judith Miller, Christopher Hitchens, CNN, Fox – they are all products of the dissociative form of governance we suffer under.
…
Since we are talking about jail, we must talk about another issue, however heavily it weighs on our heart. Yes, LI is terribly sad that Li’l Kim’s going to the slammer. Not that we are surprised. In the slammer’s terms, this was a slam dunk. But listen to Shut up bitch for the Queen Bee's response to her critics. Like the Elizabethan wits, Li'l Kim has taken the opportunity to make a little artistic use of an unfortunate predicament. But hasn't she always? Ah, women like Li'l Kim have wrought complete disaster on my heart forever. Why is it I treasure every tantrum and twist of mood? I don't know. And I don't care.
Kimberly, if you are out there, listen: Kit Marlowe was killed moving in similar circles to those of Ms. Bella Mafia, and he got 'a great reckoning in a small room", as Shakespeare said. It happened like this:
...it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."
Ingram? As you would expect, look for the man with dubious connections to the cops, down to a fake weapon laydown, rumors, and a skewed inquest. Then another Elizabethan, Ben Jonson, killed an actor with whom he'd previously been in prison, guy named Gabriel Spensor. You will appreciate that Spensor was murdered because he claimed that the Chamberlain's Men were better actors than the company Jonson preferred, the Admiral's Men. Shades of a certain incident for which you are playing the patsy.
So Kimberly -- if you need a prison correspondent, and this message in a blog bottle reaches you, write me at rgathman@netzero.net. We won’t rat you out, take that as a solid fact. And since we have piss poor aim, our firearm skills aren’t gonna get you in trouble either. We will always be there for ya…
Ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough
(shut up, bitch)
Laws like the non-disclosure law are not, however, ever about treason, but about court society. The exist in order to create vectors of blackmail and blackguardism. The second Alice in Wonderland aspect of the Plame case is that it shows us how American foreign policy – a thing of D.C. cabals – is enacted. Joseph Wilson might well have been the right man to send to Niger to check on the bogus yellow cake story, but it is nevertheless of high interest that his wife put in a word for him. Who does put in words for people in that place? Who puts in the word for Chalabi? Who put in the original word for Pearle? At least the investigation has opened up that mechanism a little, so that we can see springs operating against springs. There is a distressing American habit of respecting the governing class. The governing class in D.C. is no more respectable than it was in Byzantine courts – indeed, a lot less respectable. It consists of circus performers, praetorian guards, satyrs and whores. Unlike the Byzantine court, there is a lot less learning among them.
The third Alice in Wonderland thing is how journalism works through the blackmail vectors. Obviously, journalists are used as the knights for complicated in-fighting, whispering a little info here, spreading a little gossip there. Basically, journalism operates to weed out any bit of talent or dissent that appears to threaten the cabal form. Judy Miller’s role is particularly interesting, since she was basically an operative in Operation Lie mounted by the belligerents in 2002-2003. Diffusing information that the white house wanted diffused allowed her to play the game of then bouncing the information off the white house or the collection of neo-con eggheads and sycophants with White House connections.
Bringing us to the fourth Alice in Wonderland thing, the use of jail. LI has always wondered at the American addiction to jail. In our opinion, jail is properly the place for the few truly dangerous criminals – rapists, murderers – plus the occasional incorrigible robber. Mostly the people in jail should be under house arrest. There is, of course, no incentive for the purging of the jails, and every incentive to build more of them. We would support with all our Mighty Mouse powers a politician who proposed creating anti-jail incentives – for instance, tying one hundred fold increases in social welfare to increases in the jail population. But to jail everybody must go, it seems…
In Antonio D’amascio’s Goodbye Descartes, there is a story about a nineteenth century railroad worker who suffered a horrible accident that made neurological history. An iron rod, accidentally propelled by a mistimed explosion, entered his skull at such speed that it entirely left the head, exiting out of the top of the skull, and taking with it some frontal brain matter. The worker survived, but his personality was utterly changed. He became unable to understand goal oriented action. Or rather, he understood it intellectually, but he couldn’t incorporate himself into any larger plan. As D’Amasio puts it, he was dissociated, with his intellect disconnected from his pragmatic life.
Dissociation is a very good term for D.C. politics. Politics on this level is not about ideology – ideology is secondary. It is about the dissociation of power as its own goal. Judith Miller, Christopher Hitchens, CNN, Fox – they are all products of the dissociative form of governance we suffer under.
…
Since we are talking about jail, we must talk about another issue, however heavily it weighs on our heart. Yes, LI is terribly sad that Li’l Kim’s going to the slammer. Not that we are surprised. In the slammer’s terms, this was a slam dunk. But listen to Shut up bitch for the Queen Bee's response to her critics. Like the Elizabethan wits, Li'l Kim has taken the opportunity to make a little artistic use of an unfortunate predicament. But hasn't she always? Ah, women like Li'l Kim have wrought complete disaster on my heart forever. Why is it I treasure every tantrum and twist of mood? I don't know. And I don't care.
Kimberly, if you are out there, listen: Kit Marlowe was killed moving in similar circles to those of Ms. Bella Mafia, and he got 'a great reckoning in a small room", as Shakespeare said. It happened like this:
...it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."
Ingram? As you would expect, look for the man with dubious connections to the cops, down to a fake weapon laydown, rumors, and a skewed inquest. Then another Elizabethan, Ben Jonson, killed an actor with whom he'd previously been in prison, guy named Gabriel Spensor. You will appreciate that Spensor was murdered because he claimed that the Chamberlain's Men were better actors than the company Jonson preferred, the Admiral's Men. Shades of a certain incident for which you are playing the patsy.
So Kimberly -- if you need a prison correspondent, and this message in a blog bottle reaches you, write me at rgathman@netzero.net. We won’t rat you out, take that as a solid fact. And since we have piss poor aim, our firearm skills aren’t gonna get you in trouble either. We will always be there for ya…
Ain’t no mountain hiiiiiiiiiiiigh enough
(shut up, bitch)
Friday, July 08, 2005
more froth for your buck
To sum it up: Tony Blair took a non-threat to the U.K., Saddam Hussein, implanted a continuing British presence in the Middle East, and for the return on the British investment got 50 some deaths, 700 some casualties, and the disruption of all of London.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
“Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri and, more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi -- have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.
As in the Madrid bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al Qaeda's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches.
"No more 9/11, but lots of 3/11, especially in Europe," declared the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about al Qaeda's evolution presented at numerous U.S. government forums this year by terrorism specialist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist who has recently studied al Qaeda's European cells.”
Terrorism on tap Рit is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clich̩s that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
“Even the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attacks in London has generated soul-searching about whether effective countermeasures exist against an Islamic extremist movement that appears able to "self-generate" new terrorists, as a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official put it. "The impact of it is significant. It shows they have been able to overcome a well-developed security architecture in London," the former official said. "It shows that al Qaeda and associated groups and fellow travelers still have the ability to conduct an effective operation."
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
“While the United States has pressed hard for friendly Arab nations to upgrade their ties here, it has been wary of the new government's ties with another neighbor, Iran, and American diplomats and military commanders said on Thursday that they were still weighing an announcement that Iraq and Iran had reached agreement in Tehran on a military cooperation pact that will include Iranian training for Iraqi military units.
Iraq's defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as having told reporters after the signing ceremony, "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."”
PS – we’ve been very displeased, lately, to see one meme among liberal bloggers: that of getting young Republicans to sign up to go to Iraq. This is another example of rhetoric surmounting common sense. If you want the US to withdraw from Iraq, or set a timetable, don’t encourage, even as a sport, giving the War department more toys to play with. The principle of the strike is pretty simple. Discourage recruitment. Discourage enlistment. I was happy to hear, from my brother, that in Atlanta, the quakers have been active in some of the high schools, passing out anti-recruitment literature. The joke of encouraging Young Republicans to sign up is ultimately on the recruits that are over there right now, and on the Iraqis. It is a sick and sorry joke.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
“Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri and, more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi -- have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.
As in the Madrid bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al Qaeda's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches.
"No more 9/11, but lots of 3/11, especially in Europe," declared the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about al Qaeda's evolution presented at numerous U.S. government forums this year by terrorism specialist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist who has recently studied al Qaeda's European cells.”
Terrorism on tap Рit is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clich̩s that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
“Even the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attacks in London has generated soul-searching about whether effective countermeasures exist against an Islamic extremist movement that appears able to "self-generate" new terrorists, as a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official put it. "The impact of it is significant. It shows they have been able to overcome a well-developed security architecture in London," the former official said. "It shows that al Qaeda and associated groups and fellow travelers still have the ability to conduct an effective operation."
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
“While the United States has pressed hard for friendly Arab nations to upgrade their ties here, it has been wary of the new government's ties with another neighbor, Iran, and American diplomats and military commanders said on Thursday that they were still weighing an announcement that Iraq and Iran had reached agreement in Tehran on a military cooperation pact that will include Iranian training for Iraqi military units.
Iraq's defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as having told reporters after the signing ceremony, "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."”
PS – we’ve been very displeased, lately, to see one meme among liberal bloggers: that of getting young Republicans to sign up to go to Iraq. This is another example of rhetoric surmounting common sense. If you want the US to withdraw from Iraq, or set a timetable, don’t encourage, even as a sport, giving the War department more toys to play with. The principle of the strike is pretty simple. Discourage recruitment. Discourage enlistment. I was happy to hear, from my brother, that in Atlanta, the quakers have been active in some of the high schools, passing out anti-recruitment literature. The joke of encouraging Young Republicans to sign up is ultimately on the recruits that are over there right now, and on the Iraqis. It is a sick and sorry joke.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
the csa and terror
The rituals begin. The comments sections are flooded with “our prayers and thoughts are with you.” The leaders condemn the attack. They are against terrorist attacks. The Pope, too, is against terrorist attacks. Not a single leader thinks that London commuters should be blown to bits by a network winding back to a very alive and not very dead and certain not captured Osama Bin Laden.
These are the grooves we are stuck in. LI has an idea that the model for the half-security state – the state that leaves obvious gaps in its defenses while it goes about putting people’s library book checkout records under the magnifying glass – is Russia. Yeltsin, with Western encouragement, made himself briefly popular by playing the terrorist card and invading Chechnya. Putin has infinitely refined on the Yeltsin prototype. That the Bush culture is at once as tough as testosterone and as supine as a newly born lamb when it comes to demanding the taking down of the paramilitary networks from their supposedly tough leaders is a peculiar psychological complex that often accompanies junta politics. I especially love the rightwing meme that you can’t use “police” methods against terrorists. In point of fact, that is all you can use – the method of hunting down and destroying dispersed cellular groups that are armed and exist on a black money dole is the only method for destroying them. Because the perpetual war economy is about an elaborate welfare system for defense department engineers, it is understandable that this element thinks that terrorism is an excuse to get more of the gravy. If Boeing and Halliburtan don't make a profit on it, it can't be security. Cold war days are happy days. In the meantime, of course, there is also the solution of throwing bureaucracies and money at the security problem and making immigrants go through purposeless knots as though this was really sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly, instead of bottlenecking the good. However, one has to admire the emergence of a rich Homeland security welfare system that puts money into bungholes in Wyoming and Mississippi and takes money out of NYC, in the time honored, free riding fashion of Red State politics. Sweet.
In the week after Bush was re-elected, LI rethought a lot of what we used to assume about politics. The ascendancy of the Confederacy means, we think, that progressives must create enclaves and networks outside of D.C. – hence, they must invert their reflex support of centralizing power in the national government and work for the serious devolution of that power. But there is a fly even in this ointment: there is no alternative to endowing the central government with military power. This is a real problem: the D.C. Pentagon crowd, and their international clientele, are simply clueless. The evolution has been to the dumbest, which is why this is the Rumsfeld era in the ministries of war, technosmart and logistics dumb, full of strategic visions and tactical collapse. They cannot protect us, but they can certainly lie to us -- as the Bush and Blair governments did systematically in the run up to the war. They were the Code Orange Bobsey twins of misleading statements.
Meanwhile, the basic, security-making feature of government, which is equivalent to a membrane for a cell, is in hands that have proven themselves utterly unable to cope from day one.
It is childish to think men with bombs can be absolutely stopped. In fact, the benefit of an open society overwhelms the risk of terror. But a international order led by men who unwittingly open up new venues for terror, who brag about fighting wars that train terrorists, who intentionally create situations in which constituencies for terrorism are born, is rather like a hospital managed by doctors and nurses who refuse to obey the simple rules of hygiene. They become deadly to the rest of us. Our leaders have become very good at condemning the barbarity of killing commuters, which is a good thing. Because every policy they have pursued and every opportunity they have punted increases the possibility that we will see much more of it.
These are the grooves we are stuck in. LI has an idea that the model for the half-security state – the state that leaves obvious gaps in its defenses while it goes about putting people’s library book checkout records under the magnifying glass – is Russia. Yeltsin, with Western encouragement, made himself briefly popular by playing the terrorist card and invading Chechnya. Putin has infinitely refined on the Yeltsin prototype. That the Bush culture is at once as tough as testosterone and as supine as a newly born lamb when it comes to demanding the taking down of the paramilitary networks from their supposedly tough leaders is a peculiar psychological complex that often accompanies junta politics. I especially love the rightwing meme that you can’t use “police” methods against terrorists. In point of fact, that is all you can use – the method of hunting down and destroying dispersed cellular groups that are armed and exist on a black money dole is the only method for destroying them. Because the perpetual war economy is about an elaborate welfare system for defense department engineers, it is understandable that this element thinks that terrorism is an excuse to get more of the gravy. If Boeing and Halliburtan don't make a profit on it, it can't be security. Cold war days are happy days. In the meantime, of course, there is also the solution of throwing bureaucracies and money at the security problem and making immigrants go through purposeless knots as though this was really sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly, instead of bottlenecking the good. However, one has to admire the emergence of a rich Homeland security welfare system that puts money into bungholes in Wyoming and Mississippi and takes money out of NYC, in the time honored, free riding fashion of Red State politics. Sweet.
In the week after Bush was re-elected, LI rethought a lot of what we used to assume about politics. The ascendancy of the Confederacy means, we think, that progressives must create enclaves and networks outside of D.C. – hence, they must invert their reflex support of centralizing power in the national government and work for the serious devolution of that power. But there is a fly even in this ointment: there is no alternative to endowing the central government with military power. This is a real problem: the D.C. Pentagon crowd, and their international clientele, are simply clueless. The evolution has been to the dumbest, which is why this is the Rumsfeld era in the ministries of war, technosmart and logistics dumb, full of strategic visions and tactical collapse. They cannot protect us, but they can certainly lie to us -- as the Bush and Blair governments did systematically in the run up to the war. They were the Code Orange Bobsey twins of misleading statements.
Meanwhile, the basic, security-making feature of government, which is equivalent to a membrane for a cell, is in hands that have proven themselves utterly unable to cope from day one.
It is childish to think men with bombs can be absolutely stopped. In fact, the benefit of an open society overwhelms the risk of terror. But a international order led by men who unwittingly open up new venues for terror, who brag about fighting wars that train terrorists, who intentionally create situations in which constituencies for terrorism are born, is rather like a hospital managed by doctors and nurses who refuse to obey the simple rules of hygiene. They become deadly to the rest of us. Our leaders have become very good at condemning the barbarity of killing commuters, which is a good thing. Because every policy they have pursued and every opportunity they have punted increases the possibility that we will see much more of it.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
science as culture
There is nothing some scientists hate more than to have their activities scrutinized by a certain kind of sociologist. Somebody, for instance, like Bruno Latour, who they suspect is saying, in obscure language, that science is a dream, a highly wrought bubble composed of countless work-arounds and displayed before the credulous, who haven’t the training to see through the trick, as a seamless miracle. That is not, really, what Latour is saying, although he does, at critical points, suspend the question of the truth of what a particular scientist or a collection of scientists is maintaining in order to aim at what the scientists are doing. For the scientists, their motivations come from the nature of things; for Latour, their motivations come from the nature of scientists.
To do this kind of work, one must be extremely clever. But often, one isn’t. Which brings me to the Spring 2004 issue of Science as Culture magazine. Jon Turney has written just the kind of article that would seem to back up the scientists’ suspicions: “THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as Information Waiting to be Rewritten.” Turney turns his gaze on the genre of the popular science book. A little hurray for that – we are great devourers of popular science books ourselves. The poetics of the genre has been much neglected. Turney, however, isn’t interested in being extensive. Rather, he uses only one popular science book, Adrian Woolfson’s Life Without Genes. He does, it is true, make an allusion to one of Carl Sagan’s. But that is it. This is typical of Turney’s m.o. – generalization with too few examples. The article is an amalgam: Turney borrows Burke’s notion of the sublime to categorize the aesthetic appeal of popular science book, thus applying literary theory to science (of a type). The idea is good, but the follow through is lousy. His explanation of Burke is canned – he throws in some remarks about how people in the Middle Ages feared mountains and people in the eighteenth century started to revere them, which is such a stale insight, has been repeated so often as a cultural fact marking the borderline between the medieval and the early modern, that we are beginning to think it must be untrue. We look forward to some brave soul resurrecting a whole lost culture of medieval mountain climbers.
Turney likes Burke saying:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Surely Turney is right that some feeling that mingles terror and beauty is the expected response that shapes certain passages in certain popular science books. But he really should have gone to Kant for further information. Kant’s idea that sublimity is about the overcoming of some natural disproportion through the intellect is much closer to the modern sublime. The modern sublime is engineering and special effects. To understand the aesthetic impulse, as it relates to popular science books, you have to see its relation to curiosity – which, as problem-solving, has become the basis of our idea of intelligence. I say “our” – not LI’s idea of intelligence, I should add.
Fortified with his idea of sublimity, Turney then takes a crack at biology. Here things get much worse.
By any measure, biology is an incomplete science. Any sampling of the literature on biodiversity, for example, quickly shows that we have little idea how many different kinds of organisms currently exist on Earth, let alone how many may have existed in the past. Electronic databases contain records of a few complete genomes, but there are many more to analyse. And there are many aspects of intracellular or neuronal interaction which are poorly understood, to say the least.
Yet from one point of view, it is possible to imagine a biology which takes complete inventory of all these things. If you begin with the conviction that, in principle, all that is known can be represented as information, then what is not yet known is simply extra information. Conceptually it is equivalent to more of the same. One can then move imaginatively from, say, a DNA database containing the decoded genomes of a few species whose hereditary information has been processed through mass sequencing to a complete database of all species, or even all existing individual organisms. Expand to
include all the organisms that ever have existed and you are still nearer completion. All that remains is to include all the organisms which ever could exist.”
This is biology as Linneaus imagined it – infinite taxonomy. Turney’s unlikely idea that biology is data base making takes him to his even more unlikely idea that biology has now embraced, across the discipline, information as a sort of father son and holy ghost:
There is more to the state of any living organism than its genes, Woolfson acknowledges, but all the other features of its development, organization and experience can nevertheless be considered as simply additional information. In fact at this level of abstraction, the universe of all possible organisms is simply an awfully large subset of the set of all possible states of anything at all. The awesome extent of the Information Sea stems from the fact that ‘all possible bits of information are housed within an information
space … which accommodates every element of an infinitely detailed description of the state of the world at any moment in the past, present or future’ (p. 77).
Indeed, it contains all possible histories—for, again, The Information Sea is [thus] the space of all possible mathematical spaces, a hypothetical information space which contains the complete collection of all the infinite libraries of description that document every possible state of the universe to the highest degree of resolution.
Turney is very impressed by this. LI is less so. What makes information valuable isn’t captured, here, at all – for all possible histories includes false ones. The information that I leaped off the roof and flew for several miles is only separated from the information that I didn’t by the fact that one is a true statement and the other isn’t – not something information can specify. Although, to be sure, in specifying, I am providing information. As for the particular dynamism that provides us with our information about organisms – descent with modification – well, that sort of sinks to the bottom, here, doesn’t it? Turney’s paper has just that aggressive tendency to exaggeration that should make the science-as-culture people cringe. This isn’t, after all, the English department. So that I doubt very much Turney’s point:
As I have stressed, this may seem an unexpected space to explore in a book about the potential and limits of biology. But it is a logical product of the development of biological thinking in the last halfcentury, and of the ascendancy of computational and cybernetic metaphors. As Lily Kay and others have documented in detail, the
development of the idea of the genetic code indicated that biology was becoming an information science.”
In fact, biology is a vast array of different sub-disciplines. Molecular biology certainly uses the information archetypes – which, in turn, are parasitic on 19th century thermodynamics. But the key to biology is that it explains histories – organic development – and the information archetype is always oriented to this explanation. As Turney should have known from reading, well, popular science books, genes are not blueprints. If you skip survival in your tour of biology, you skip, well, biology itself.
To do this kind of work, one must be extremely clever. But often, one isn’t. Which brings me to the Spring 2004 issue of Science as Culture magazine. Jon Turney has written just the kind of article that would seem to back up the scientists’ suspicions: “THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as Information Waiting to be Rewritten.” Turney turns his gaze on the genre of the popular science book. A little hurray for that – we are great devourers of popular science books ourselves. The poetics of the genre has been much neglected. Turney, however, isn’t interested in being extensive. Rather, he uses only one popular science book, Adrian Woolfson’s Life Without Genes. He does, it is true, make an allusion to one of Carl Sagan’s. But that is it. This is typical of Turney’s m.o. – generalization with too few examples. The article is an amalgam: Turney borrows Burke’s notion of the sublime to categorize the aesthetic appeal of popular science book, thus applying literary theory to science (of a type). The idea is good, but the follow through is lousy. His explanation of Burke is canned – he throws in some remarks about how people in the Middle Ages feared mountains and people in the eighteenth century started to revere them, which is such a stale insight, has been repeated so often as a cultural fact marking the borderline between the medieval and the early modern, that we are beginning to think it must be untrue. We look forward to some brave soul resurrecting a whole lost culture of medieval mountain climbers.
Turney likes Burke saying:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Surely Turney is right that some feeling that mingles terror and beauty is the expected response that shapes certain passages in certain popular science books. But he really should have gone to Kant for further information. Kant’s idea that sublimity is about the overcoming of some natural disproportion through the intellect is much closer to the modern sublime. The modern sublime is engineering and special effects. To understand the aesthetic impulse, as it relates to popular science books, you have to see its relation to curiosity – which, as problem-solving, has become the basis of our idea of intelligence. I say “our” – not LI’s idea of intelligence, I should add.
Fortified with his idea of sublimity, Turney then takes a crack at biology. Here things get much worse.
By any measure, biology is an incomplete science. Any sampling of the literature on biodiversity, for example, quickly shows that we have little idea how many different kinds of organisms currently exist on Earth, let alone how many may have existed in the past. Electronic databases contain records of a few complete genomes, but there are many more to analyse. And there are many aspects of intracellular or neuronal interaction which are poorly understood, to say the least.
Yet from one point of view, it is possible to imagine a biology which takes complete inventory of all these things. If you begin with the conviction that, in principle, all that is known can be represented as information, then what is not yet known is simply extra information. Conceptually it is equivalent to more of the same. One can then move imaginatively from, say, a DNA database containing the decoded genomes of a few species whose hereditary information has been processed through mass sequencing to a complete database of all species, or even all existing individual organisms. Expand to
include all the organisms that ever have existed and you are still nearer completion. All that remains is to include all the organisms which ever could exist.”
This is biology as Linneaus imagined it – infinite taxonomy. Turney’s unlikely idea that biology is data base making takes him to his even more unlikely idea that biology has now embraced, across the discipline, information as a sort of father son and holy ghost:
There is more to the state of any living organism than its genes, Woolfson acknowledges, but all the other features of its development, organization and experience can nevertheless be considered as simply additional information. In fact at this level of abstraction, the universe of all possible organisms is simply an awfully large subset of the set of all possible states of anything at all. The awesome extent of the Information Sea stems from the fact that ‘all possible bits of information are housed within an information
space … which accommodates every element of an infinitely detailed description of the state of the world at any moment in the past, present or future’ (p. 77).
Indeed, it contains all possible histories—for, again, The Information Sea is [thus] the space of all possible mathematical spaces, a hypothetical information space which contains the complete collection of all the infinite libraries of description that document every possible state of the universe to the highest degree of resolution.
Turney is very impressed by this. LI is less so. What makes information valuable isn’t captured, here, at all – for all possible histories includes false ones. The information that I leaped off the roof and flew for several miles is only separated from the information that I didn’t by the fact that one is a true statement and the other isn’t – not something information can specify. Although, to be sure, in specifying, I am providing information. As for the particular dynamism that provides us with our information about organisms – descent with modification – well, that sort of sinks to the bottom, here, doesn’t it? Turney’s paper has just that aggressive tendency to exaggeration that should make the science-as-culture people cringe. This isn’t, after all, the English department. So that I doubt very much Turney’s point:
As I have stressed, this may seem an unexpected space to explore in a book about the potential and limits of biology. But it is a logical product of the development of biological thinking in the last halfcentury, and of the ascendancy of computational and cybernetic metaphors. As Lily Kay and others have documented in detail, the
development of the idea of the genetic code indicated that biology was becoming an information science.”
In fact, biology is a vast array of different sub-disciplines. Molecular biology certainly uses the information archetypes – which, in turn, are parasitic on 19th century thermodynamics. But the key to biology is that it explains histories – organic development – and the information archetype is always oriented to this explanation. As Turney should have known from reading, well, popular science books, genes are not blueprints. If you skip survival in your tour of biology, you skip, well, biology itself.
Monday, July 04, 2005
santayana, the fourth
It is Santayana’s luck that he is not tarred, as Heidegger is, with sympathy for fascism, even though Santayana abundantly exhibited same. But the other side of that luck is that Santayana has sunk into relative and undeserved neglect.Undeserved on a number of levels. Simply on the level of sheer delight, Santayana ranks high as a writer. Here, for instance, is his criticism of Bertrand Russell’s politics: Russell's "mind and conscience" are "those of a rebel or reformer. He feels no loyalty to dominant things but enthusiasm for possible ideal contrary things. . . . Nothing can be established in this world merely because it is ideally possible: it must flow from what precedes, it must be derivable from physical forces actually afoot." We take that phrase from the review of Santayana’s letters in the Winter 2005 Sewanee Review, which – should you bump into an issue – you should read. Or, again, here is Santayana on myth and science – elucidating a point which, frankly, LI has some disagreement with, but elucidating it beautifully:
The laws formulated by science—the transitive figments describing the relation between fact and fact—possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf. This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed, each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody's knowledge of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which it may succeed in knowing.
The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity, however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense. To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also. There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof. Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could not be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device, gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is established. It is not, it merely applies; and every situation in which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.
Santayana was a curious cat. Perhaps because he is a cat with only one life in the public consciousness (revolving around that damned quotation – those who forget to read any of Santayana’s books seemed doomed to repeat his one famous quotation), he’s been immune from the fingerpointing that has attached to Heidegger’s Nazi loyalties. It is, one supposes, Santayana’s luck. Like Pound, Santayana spent WWII in Italy. Like Pound, Santayana was a fascist sympathizer. Like Pound, Santayana harbored a dislike for Jews that peppered his correspondence. But unlike Pound, he didn’t feel called upon to diffuse his views over the radio waves. Instead, he lived in a convent during the war.Nevertheless, we think that Santayana is a philosopher one should read. American political philosophy is pretty bare: there is Rawls, edifying and inedible; there is Strauss; there is Thoreau. Santayana is the only conservative philosopher who can be compared to Ortega y Gasset or Coleridge or Constant. Being captured by the conservative movement – and having his name put in the sub-title of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative mind – has not done Santayana a lot of good, since his concept of order is radically independent of the Burkean tradition. Partly this is because Santayana absorbed so richly the idealistic currents of the 19th century that he couldn’t imagine that the human vocabulary or mind could do anything but distort the facts of nature – for him, too, nature is behind the veil of Maya. This freed him, in a curious way, to propose a naturalism neutered of its anti-traditional import. Santayana, like Stephen Jay Gould, saw no reason that the acceptance, on the one hand, of a scientific narrative that put humans wholly in nature as animals that had evolved, should lead to the rejection, on the other hand, of that magisterial, as Gould puts it, that encodes the mythical. LI will talk about this in a later post.
Meanwhile, it is the fourth of July. For this fourth, the Observer has a very special report on the American financed resurrection of Saddam Hussein’s prison system, a state of things for which we are sending men and women to kill for. And to die for. Shall we mark the fifth year of the Bush elevation with mournful silence -- or just curse him out loud, up and down, sideways and backwards, inside out and through every back entrance? Every insult chased with a good goddamn. We recommend the later. Set off a firecracker and curse the Republican darkness.
The laws formulated by science—the transitive figments describing the relation between fact and fact—possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf. This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed, each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody's knowledge of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which it may succeed in knowing.
The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity, however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense. To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also. There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof. Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could not be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device, gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is established. It is not, it merely applies; and every situation in which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.
Santayana was a curious cat. Perhaps because he is a cat with only one life in the public consciousness (revolving around that damned quotation – those who forget to read any of Santayana’s books seemed doomed to repeat his one famous quotation), he’s been immune from the fingerpointing that has attached to Heidegger’s Nazi loyalties. It is, one supposes, Santayana’s luck. Like Pound, Santayana spent WWII in Italy. Like Pound, Santayana was a fascist sympathizer. Like Pound, Santayana harbored a dislike for Jews that peppered his correspondence. But unlike Pound, he didn’t feel called upon to diffuse his views over the radio waves. Instead, he lived in a convent during the war.Nevertheless, we think that Santayana is a philosopher one should read. American political philosophy is pretty bare: there is Rawls, edifying and inedible; there is Strauss; there is Thoreau. Santayana is the only conservative philosopher who can be compared to Ortega y Gasset or Coleridge or Constant. Being captured by the conservative movement – and having his name put in the sub-title of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative mind – has not done Santayana a lot of good, since his concept of order is radically independent of the Burkean tradition. Partly this is because Santayana absorbed so richly the idealistic currents of the 19th century that he couldn’t imagine that the human vocabulary or mind could do anything but distort the facts of nature – for him, too, nature is behind the veil of Maya. This freed him, in a curious way, to propose a naturalism neutered of its anti-traditional import. Santayana, like Stephen Jay Gould, saw no reason that the acceptance, on the one hand, of a scientific narrative that put humans wholly in nature as animals that had evolved, should lead to the rejection, on the other hand, of that magisterial, as Gould puts it, that encodes the mythical. LI will talk about this in a later post.
Meanwhile, it is the fourth of July. For this fourth, the Observer has a very special report on the American financed resurrection of Saddam Hussein’s prison system, a state of things for which we are sending men and women to kill for. And to die for. Shall we mark the fifth year of the Bush elevation with mournful silence -- or just curse him out loud, up and down, sideways and backwards, inside out and through every back entrance? Every insult chased with a good goddamn. We recommend the later. Set off a firecracker and curse the Republican darkness.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
the last post on this subject, I hope
LI finds the whole festuche of the upcoming Supreme Court hearings to be so much depressing filler. We expect the D.C. Dems to charge out of their trenches once again into withering fire, having, like the English officer corps on the Sommes in 1915, understood nothing and remembered everything.
It is quite simple. Progressive politics on the national level are dead. D.C. is now the heart of big government conservatism. The party can’t adapt to this because it has concentrated its throw weight and vanity in D.C., producing the pompous puffer culture that is the snide voice which replies to Bush’s weekly radio speeches.
So – one needs a strong states rights justice or two. That should be the biggest criteria for liberals – and please, no Roe! if Roe goes down on the national level, it will just be catching up with reality, since in large stretches of Snopes country, abortion went back to the coathanger era in the nineties.
Advice that is futile, of course. The Dem consultants and media hangers-on and all the pathetic political hive continue to hum along as if they are about to retake D.C. any day now. In 1932, the shift to the national level was tactically brilliant. And up until the seventies, it was still a historic necessity. Breaking apartheid in the South, and, to a certain extent, in the North was a great moral victory. But the center didn’t feed the periphery. Snopes states were generally able to retain their anti-labor laws and their legally enshrined feudal customs, partly because it was to the advantage of those Northeastern investors who started putting serious money in the Sunbelt in the sixties. The Sunbelt, in turn, has interiorized the dependent mindset to the degree that the monstrous hybrid of big government and Bama-thought was inevitable: Bush is simply the freerider king, which is why it is popular in households in Mobile and Albany,Georgia and other of the bright lights of civilization to think that he talks directly to Jesus. Faith, after all, is just freeloading gone cosmic.
Adapting to this situation requires waking up. The medical marijuana case was the latest in a long line of examples. Those forms created by the progressives to enforce civility on a restless and depraved rural population have been seized by that civilization, and they are in payback mode. What does that mean? This is the part of the Widescreen space drama where the invaders are seizing the ship’s working mechanisms, and the captain has to press the autodestruct button, while the crew looks on anxiously. The carefully crafted national system has to be taken down. Otherwise, it is easy to predict the passage of a law outlawing abortion nationally in coordination with the redneck court, and a series of other eviscerating judgments -- for instance, the spread of anti-labor legislation on a national level. Etc., etc. The 2000 court decision that gave Bush the presidency (making the recent election of the president of Iran a model of democracy, by comparison – just think, the person with the most votes won!) indicates how far that court will go to enable the crushing power of reaction.
It is quite simple. Progressive politics on the national level are dead. D.C. is now the heart of big government conservatism. The party can’t adapt to this because it has concentrated its throw weight and vanity in D.C., producing the pompous puffer culture that is the snide voice which replies to Bush’s weekly radio speeches.
So – one needs a strong states rights justice or two. That should be the biggest criteria for liberals – and please, no Roe! if Roe goes down on the national level, it will just be catching up with reality, since in large stretches of Snopes country, abortion went back to the coathanger era in the nineties.
Advice that is futile, of course. The Dem consultants and media hangers-on and all the pathetic political hive continue to hum along as if they are about to retake D.C. any day now. In 1932, the shift to the national level was tactically brilliant. And up until the seventies, it was still a historic necessity. Breaking apartheid in the South, and, to a certain extent, in the North was a great moral victory. But the center didn’t feed the periphery. Snopes states were generally able to retain their anti-labor laws and their legally enshrined feudal customs, partly because it was to the advantage of those Northeastern investors who started putting serious money in the Sunbelt in the sixties. The Sunbelt, in turn, has interiorized the dependent mindset to the degree that the monstrous hybrid of big government and Bama-thought was inevitable: Bush is simply the freerider king, which is why it is popular in households in Mobile and Albany,Georgia and other of the bright lights of civilization to think that he talks directly to Jesus. Faith, after all, is just freeloading gone cosmic.
Adapting to this situation requires waking up. The medical marijuana case was the latest in a long line of examples. Those forms created by the progressives to enforce civility on a restless and depraved rural population have been seized by that civilization, and they are in payback mode. What does that mean? This is the part of the Widescreen space drama where the invaders are seizing the ship’s working mechanisms, and the captain has to press the autodestruct button, while the crew looks on anxiously. The carefully crafted national system has to be taken down. Otherwise, it is easy to predict the passage of a law outlawing abortion nationally in coordination with the redneck court, and a series of other eviscerating judgments -- for instance, the spread of anti-labor legislation on a national level. Etc., etc. The 2000 court decision that gave Bush the presidency (making the recent election of the president of Iran a model of democracy, by comparison – just think, the person with the most votes won!) indicates how far that court will go to enable the crushing power of reaction.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Geneology of suicide bombing
Usually, the history of suicide bombing draws a straight line between kamikazes and Palestinians with bombs strapped to their belt. What this skips is the defense postures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the pre-intercontinental period. Watching Fail Safe last week, it struck me that the whole posture depended on delivering bombs from aircraft manned by soldiers who accepted the fact that bomb delivery would be equivalent to suicide. In other words, suicide bombers.
These were the avant garde. After the development of long range missiles, they were replaced by suicide populations. One assumes that the posture died – but it is amazing what can be carried forward, all unconsciously – history is, after all, in Marx’s image, and Kafka’s, and Bataille’s, the great burrowing mole, operating under our feet. The commitment to suicide was tied by a thousand economic incentives to the commitment to prosperity. Live longer through suicide – the motto of the twentieth century.
Usually, the history of suicide bombing draws a straight line between kamikazes and Palestinians with bombs strapped to their belt. What this skips is the defense postures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the pre-intercontinental period. Watching Fail Safe last week, it struck me that the whole posture depended on delivering bombs from aircraft manned by soldiers who accepted the fact that bomb delivery would be equivalent to suicide. In other words, suicide bombers.
These were the avant garde. After the development of long range missiles, they were replaced by suicide populations. One assumes that the posture died – but it is amazing what can be carried forward, all unconsciously – history is, after all, in Marx’s image, and Kafka’s, and Bataille’s, the great burrowing mole, operating under our feet. The commitment to suicide was tied by a thousand economic incentives to the commitment to prosperity. Live longer through suicide – the motto of the twentieth century.
Why LI is no radical:
LI has been pondering a question: when Jack White screams “Take… take … take” in the song of the same name on the latest White Stripes album, why is it that I would trade that moment for the collected works of Jorie Graham and Jonathan S. Foer and a half a dozen other writers? Why is it that that scream seems to me to come from the tumultuous collective parasitic heart – the heart that beats in me – in this epoch of the American decay, in this culture that has ensured that your average Babbit can get through, year after year, using up as much energy as the largest beast ever to stalk the landmasses and leaving behind, as his little value added to the betterment of all nature’s kingdoms, excrement and crushed to-go cups?
Oh, and hypocrite lecteur, I’m that beast too, the leech in my heart keeps screaming take… take… take, as if this was the natural order, and I was actually owed. Owed. Nobody believes that it will someday end, that the account will be finished. No, we are the end of evolution, we are going to live nano-afterlives. Right. I don’t really need some putative survivors to tell me that the life more abundant has turned into the cruelest joke that ever stifled generosity in its crib. LI knows it. Every peasant Jesus’ dream is realized, now, in any destination store you want to aim your SUV at; so why is it all so much value added excrement? Why is it that something better didn’t happen?
It didn’t, though. Take… take… take…
LI has been pondering a question: when Jack White screams “Take… take … take” in the song of the same name on the latest White Stripes album, why is it that I would trade that moment for the collected works of Jorie Graham and Jonathan S. Foer and a half a dozen other writers? Why is it that that scream seems to me to come from the tumultuous collective parasitic heart – the heart that beats in me – in this epoch of the American decay, in this culture that has ensured that your average Babbit can get through, year after year, using up as much energy as the largest beast ever to stalk the landmasses and leaving behind, as his little value added to the betterment of all nature’s kingdoms, excrement and crushed to-go cups?
Oh, and hypocrite lecteur, I’m that beast too, the leech in my heart keeps screaming take… take… take, as if this was the natural order, and I was actually owed. Owed. Nobody believes that it will someday end, that the account will be finished. No, we are the end of evolution, we are going to live nano-afterlives. Right. I don’t really need some putative survivors to tell me that the life more abundant has turned into the cruelest joke that ever stifled generosity in its crib. LI knows it. Every peasant Jesus’ dream is realized, now, in any destination store you want to aim your SUV at; so why is it all so much value added excrement? Why is it that something better didn’t happen?
It didn’t, though. Take… take… take…
Friday, July 01, 2005
another fine mess...
In the preface to Heartbreak House, Shaw wrote:
“Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison.”
Ah, but if Shaw had lived through a second rate war by a first rate power led by fourth rate con men – then he would have been able to brag. Not the earth opening up to eat the European generations, perhaps (the earth has only opened up to eat the Iraqi generations, after all ): but not all cataclysms come on the same scale. Ford Maddox Ford’s phrase, in the Good Soldier (a mouse dying of cancer is the whole story of the fall of the Roman Empire) is, perhaps, more apposite. It is the small lump that sometimes announces the upcoming death.
So it is not a wonder that a story like this – a story that indicates what mad, bad people ride mankind, at the moment, with their D.C. cocktail party plans for world domination coordinate with such halfwit organizational skills as to render them unfit for planning a child’s birthday party – is passed over in silence. This is from two days ago, in the Washington Post. Of course, it was buried on page A19:
“The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.
Veterans Affairs budget documents projected that 23,553 veterans would return this year from Iraq and Afghanistan and seek medical treatment. However, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson told a Senate committee that the number has been revised upward to 103,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. He said the original estimates were based on outdated assumptions from 2002.”
Oh, and of course, the Administration knew all of this as they watched Senator Murray’s attempt, a month ago, to add money to the V.A. go down in Republican approved flames. They simply didn’t want to disclose the underestimate during a period when it would get publicity.
Why they bother puzzles me. As if the media has not, by now, become organically incapable of exercising any critical power whatsoever. The terrible beauty of the Iraq war is in how it makes us see the immense rot at the heart of America’s ‘meritocracy’ – this is an elite that well deserves its inevitable downfall, even if it is paid for by other people’s deaths. These people have passed all the tests in the American system. The tests are, as we suspected, absolutely worthless.
Let’s see, what did the oracles at the WP last say about Iraq?
“Fortunately, most Americans appear to have a hardheaded appreciation of the problems and stakes in Iraq. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that most do not believe the administration's claims of progress, but a majority still is willing to support an extended stay by U.S. forces.”
Ah, that ‘fortunately’ – shored up by the systematic misinforming of the American public by papers like, well, the Washington Post. Reading the WP editorial board on Iraq is like reading a review of a cookbook by a convicted poisoner – it is an essay in moral obliquity enlivened by grotesque juxtapositions.
“Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison.”
Ah, but if Shaw had lived through a second rate war by a first rate power led by fourth rate con men – then he would have been able to brag. Not the earth opening up to eat the European generations, perhaps (the earth has only opened up to eat the Iraqi generations, after all ): but not all cataclysms come on the same scale. Ford Maddox Ford’s phrase, in the Good Soldier (a mouse dying of cancer is the whole story of the fall of the Roman Empire) is, perhaps, more apposite. It is the small lump that sometimes announces the upcoming death.
So it is not a wonder that a story like this – a story that indicates what mad, bad people ride mankind, at the moment, with their D.C. cocktail party plans for world domination coordinate with such halfwit organizational skills as to render them unfit for planning a child’s birthday party – is passed over in silence. This is from two days ago, in the Washington Post. Of course, it was buried on page A19:
“The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.
Veterans Affairs budget documents projected that 23,553 veterans would return this year from Iraq and Afghanistan and seek medical treatment. However, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson told a Senate committee that the number has been revised upward to 103,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. He said the original estimates were based on outdated assumptions from 2002.”
Oh, and of course, the Administration knew all of this as they watched Senator Murray’s attempt, a month ago, to add money to the V.A. go down in Republican approved flames. They simply didn’t want to disclose the underestimate during a period when it would get publicity.
Why they bother puzzles me. As if the media has not, by now, become organically incapable of exercising any critical power whatsoever. The terrible beauty of the Iraq war is in how it makes us see the immense rot at the heart of America’s ‘meritocracy’ – this is an elite that well deserves its inevitable downfall, even if it is paid for by other people’s deaths. These people have passed all the tests in the American system. The tests are, as we suspected, absolutely worthless.
Let’s see, what did the oracles at the WP last say about Iraq?
“Fortunately, most Americans appear to have a hardheaded appreciation of the problems and stakes in Iraq. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that most do not believe the administration's claims of progress, but a majority still is willing to support an extended stay by U.S. forces.”
Ah, that ‘fortunately’ – shored up by the systematic misinforming of the American public by papers like, well, the Washington Post. Reading the WP editorial board on Iraq is like reading a review of a cookbook by a convicted poisoner – it is an essay in moral obliquity enlivened by grotesque juxtapositions.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
old fashioned family values
LI is a pro-drugs site. It is a pro-sex site. It is a pro-hedonism site. We stand upon the principle that you should be able to put whatever chemicals get you high in your bloodstream once you reach the age of maturity; and that you should be able to sell said chemicals, under the kind of regulations common to such commodities, without fear of arrest. No ifs, ands or buts.
The history of drug bans goes back to the temperance and progressive movements in the 1900s in the U.S. – the country that drove the whole international prohibition movement. Certainly the Brits and the French, with their lucrative opium businesses, were not enthusiasts for the regime of coercive sobriety that enthused the Yankees. Recently, we’ve been reading a very entertaining history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (remembered, if at all, for whipping up the reefer madness hysteria). The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine, is a gold mine of the old weird America – the legendary weave of national security thugs, narcs, drug dealers, Mafioso, and politicians which conspiracy groupies love to ponder, the world within a world of the Lee Harvey Oswald character in Libra, the fascoid underbelly of the American Dream, if your version of the American Dream is the Black Dahlia.
Valentine makes us realize that the government and business derived two advantages from the banning of narcotics. One was realized early on: black money could be used to support surreptitious foreign policy. As early as the twenties, the U.S. government was cooperating with the Nationalist Chinese government to import opium into the U.S., washing the money back to our anti-communist friends among the Nationalist fascists. If Mao Zedong had failed to unseat the Nationalists, we would look back on Chiang Kai Shek as one of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century, behind Hitler and Stalin. Unfortunately for China, his millions are cast into the shadow by Mao’s more millions. Typically, the tension between the American policy of supporting the Nationalists and supporting prohibition created a structurally disastrous system of corruption that ultimately helped destroy the Nationalists, but not before it had spread the network of abetting narcotics and banning them all over Southeast Asia. Poison tutti frutti. The U.S. has pretty much gone with the same model ever since: the Mafia in Sicily in WWII, the Laotian warlord/opium dealers, the Contra coke-runners, Afghani poppy farmers – it is all a golden braid.
LI naively thought that the other advantage was mere coincidence – the proliferation of true dope by way of “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies. Apparently this wasn’t just an unexpected synergy – the FBN cultivated its contacts with big pharma. Every dope head tells some story about how driving out marijuana and letting in tranquillizers is a sort of master plan. This is not a myth – or not only a myth – but a dim memory, much as the memories that collected around barrows over the cliffs near the Bosphorus sorted themselves out in a tale of gods and heroes. In an age in which big pharma routinely reaches down to the elementary school level (in schools that put up signs with the wonderfully brazen lie, Drug Free Zone, under which the dispense colorful attention and mood alterers like M and Ms to the six year old to twelve year old set), I suppose it is naïve to suppose this has all been a big coincidence. Still, it is a bit shocking to realize that Anslinger, the head of the FBN, was instrumental in revising the League of Nation’s accords on pharmaceuticals to open up the international market. There is nothing like knowing that yesterday’s narc was moonlighting for yesterday’s makers of prototype barbs and diet pills to make the paranoia and night sweat of someone like Burroughs seem like the most naturalistic and reasonable response to the historic circumstances.
PS – the counter-recruitment folks out there shouldn’t be too worried by this Washington Post story that the Army met its recruitment goals in June. It met them by cutting down the goals to meet them. From an earlier WP story:
"The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army's recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months -- on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year."
If the 10,000 mark is used, the Army fell short by about 4,000.
Starving the beast is a long journey, but step by step will stop the flow of WMD to Bush and his criminal gang.
The history of drug bans goes back to the temperance and progressive movements in the 1900s in the U.S. – the country that drove the whole international prohibition movement. Certainly the Brits and the French, with their lucrative opium businesses, were not enthusiasts for the regime of coercive sobriety that enthused the Yankees. Recently, we’ve been reading a very entertaining history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (remembered, if at all, for whipping up the reefer madness hysteria). The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine, is a gold mine of the old weird America – the legendary weave of national security thugs, narcs, drug dealers, Mafioso, and politicians which conspiracy groupies love to ponder, the world within a world of the Lee Harvey Oswald character in Libra, the fascoid underbelly of the American Dream, if your version of the American Dream is the Black Dahlia.
Valentine makes us realize that the government and business derived two advantages from the banning of narcotics. One was realized early on: black money could be used to support surreptitious foreign policy. As early as the twenties, the U.S. government was cooperating with the Nationalist Chinese government to import opium into the U.S., washing the money back to our anti-communist friends among the Nationalist fascists. If Mao Zedong had failed to unseat the Nationalists, we would look back on Chiang Kai Shek as one of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century, behind Hitler and Stalin. Unfortunately for China, his millions are cast into the shadow by Mao’s more millions. Typically, the tension between the American policy of supporting the Nationalists and supporting prohibition created a structurally disastrous system of corruption that ultimately helped destroy the Nationalists, but not before it had spread the network of abetting narcotics and banning them all over Southeast Asia. Poison tutti frutti. The U.S. has pretty much gone with the same model ever since: the Mafia in Sicily in WWII, the Laotian warlord/opium dealers, the Contra coke-runners, Afghani poppy farmers – it is all a golden braid.
LI naively thought that the other advantage was mere coincidence – the proliferation of true dope by way of “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies. Apparently this wasn’t just an unexpected synergy – the FBN cultivated its contacts with big pharma. Every dope head tells some story about how driving out marijuana and letting in tranquillizers is a sort of master plan. This is not a myth – or not only a myth – but a dim memory, much as the memories that collected around barrows over the cliffs near the Bosphorus sorted themselves out in a tale of gods and heroes. In an age in which big pharma routinely reaches down to the elementary school level (in schools that put up signs with the wonderfully brazen lie, Drug Free Zone, under which the dispense colorful attention and mood alterers like M and Ms to the six year old to twelve year old set), I suppose it is naïve to suppose this has all been a big coincidence. Still, it is a bit shocking to realize that Anslinger, the head of the FBN, was instrumental in revising the League of Nation’s accords on pharmaceuticals to open up the international market. There is nothing like knowing that yesterday’s narc was moonlighting for yesterday’s makers of prototype barbs and diet pills to make the paranoia and night sweat of someone like Burroughs seem like the most naturalistic and reasonable response to the historic circumstances.
PS – the counter-recruitment folks out there shouldn’t be too worried by this Washington Post story that the Army met its recruitment goals in June. It met them by cutting down the goals to meet them. From an earlier WP story:
"The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army's recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months -- on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year."
If the 10,000 mark is used, the Army fell short by about 4,000.
Starving the beast is a long journey, but step by step will stop the flow of WMD to Bush and his criminal gang.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
be like Bush!
Although LI thinks William Saletan is mostly a (what is the polite word here?)… an idiot, he has written the only sensible article about Bush’s speech. Basically, Saletan gets it:
“We're "helping Iraqis rebuild their nation's infrastructure and economy," Bush said tonight. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. ... We're improving roads and schools and health clinics. We're working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we'll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens."
Deliver a better life for its citizens. Is it any mystery why polls have turned against the occupation? The people being polled are Americans. The people deriving a "better life" are Iraqis. Bush spent half the speech obscuring this gap. He equated Iraqi terrorists with the 9/11 hijackers and kept insisting that we're fighting for "our" freedom and security. But that spin lost its force long ago, when Saddam's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, forcing Bush to reframe the war as a democracy-spreading project. It's a noble war, but it's noble because it's altruistic. And people get tired of altruism.”
Now, LI thinks that it is an imperialist war, not an altruistic one, an ignoble piece of political grandstanding in ocean’s of other people’s blood enacted by a pampered, preening crowd of D.C. eggheads and carnivores – but the main point stands. The U.S. has absolutely no reason to be delivering a better life for Iraq’s citizens. Any old time conservative who has read Hayek could tell you that the U.S. is unlikely ever to deliver a better life for Iraq’s citizens – that Iraq can do that much better. In fact, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq recovered from a much more devastating war with Iran quicker than it is recovering today. This isn’t because the Ba’athist command and control regime was more efficient, but because it was more embedded – it could capture Iraq’s tacit knowledge, which is the way systems work.
When LI is in a generous mood and not viewing the leadership of the Democratic party with the disgust we usually reserve for those bizarre species of parasites that life cycle through pigeons and mosquitoes, we realize that the Dem paralysis stems, partly, from a kneejerk reaction to Bush’s old fashioned liberalism in Iraq – it gets the old New Deal juices flowing. LI is a fan of the New Deal too. We are strong believers, around here, in the Keynesian economic model. We think the libertarian dream of a stateless economy has been shredded by history – in the same way that the socialist dream of a command and control economy has been shredded by history. But New Deals can only be carried out by the natives – be they American, German or Japanese.
The Downing Street memo should have made it plain to all by now. In 2001, the Bush administration decided to spend any amount on an adventure in Iraq. That amount will probably be around half a trillion dollars, if not more. Why the Dems don’t simply run on this fact is an astonishment and a proof of their terminal condition, an institutional tabes dorsalis. Why any taxpayer in Missouri should devote a goodly chunk of their salary to the installation of an electric generating plant in a place that could easily borrow the funds to do so itself (having one of the great oil reserves on earth) is beyond comprehension. At the same time, of course, we are being told that we can’t afford social security, and that the government that borrowed from the Social Security fund, i.e. the U.S. government under George Bush, just might not pay it back.
As we wrote yesterday, we are going to try to remember to advertise the counter-enlistment program in every post. Here’s the link to Counter Recruitment.net. Remember, just advise people who are thinking about enlisting to listen to what the President had to say about Vietnam: “The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions…” George Bush was right about that. Use your President as a role model and DO NOT enlist for this war.
After all, Bush's successful career shows that if you put raw and rancid self interest over sentimental patriotism in your life, you too, can become president of the greatest country in the world, and help to systematically destroy it.
“We're "helping Iraqis rebuild their nation's infrastructure and economy," Bush said tonight. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. ... We're improving roads and schools and health clinics. We're working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we'll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens."
Deliver a better life for its citizens. Is it any mystery why polls have turned against the occupation? The people being polled are Americans. The people deriving a "better life" are Iraqis. Bush spent half the speech obscuring this gap. He equated Iraqi terrorists with the 9/11 hijackers and kept insisting that we're fighting for "our" freedom and security. But that spin lost its force long ago, when Saddam's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, forcing Bush to reframe the war as a democracy-spreading project. It's a noble war, but it's noble because it's altruistic. And people get tired of altruism.”
Now, LI thinks that it is an imperialist war, not an altruistic one, an ignoble piece of political grandstanding in ocean’s of other people’s blood enacted by a pampered, preening crowd of D.C. eggheads and carnivores – but the main point stands. The U.S. has absolutely no reason to be delivering a better life for Iraq’s citizens. Any old time conservative who has read Hayek could tell you that the U.S. is unlikely ever to deliver a better life for Iraq’s citizens – that Iraq can do that much better. In fact, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq recovered from a much more devastating war with Iran quicker than it is recovering today. This isn’t because the Ba’athist command and control regime was more efficient, but because it was more embedded – it could capture Iraq’s tacit knowledge, which is the way systems work.
When LI is in a generous mood and not viewing the leadership of the Democratic party with the disgust we usually reserve for those bizarre species of parasites that life cycle through pigeons and mosquitoes, we realize that the Dem paralysis stems, partly, from a kneejerk reaction to Bush’s old fashioned liberalism in Iraq – it gets the old New Deal juices flowing. LI is a fan of the New Deal too. We are strong believers, around here, in the Keynesian economic model. We think the libertarian dream of a stateless economy has been shredded by history – in the same way that the socialist dream of a command and control economy has been shredded by history. But New Deals can only be carried out by the natives – be they American, German or Japanese.
The Downing Street memo should have made it plain to all by now. In 2001, the Bush administration decided to spend any amount on an adventure in Iraq. That amount will probably be around half a trillion dollars, if not more. Why the Dems don’t simply run on this fact is an astonishment and a proof of their terminal condition, an institutional tabes dorsalis. Why any taxpayer in Missouri should devote a goodly chunk of their salary to the installation of an electric generating plant in a place that could easily borrow the funds to do so itself (having one of the great oil reserves on earth) is beyond comprehension. At the same time, of course, we are being told that we can’t afford social security, and that the government that borrowed from the Social Security fund, i.e. the U.S. government under George Bush, just might not pay it back.
As we wrote yesterday, we are going to try to remember to advertise the counter-enlistment program in every post. Here’s the link to Counter Recruitment.net. Remember, just advise people who are thinking about enlisting to listen to what the President had to say about Vietnam: “The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions…” George Bush was right about that. Use your President as a role model and DO NOT enlist for this war.
After all, Bush's successful career shows that if you put raw and rancid self interest over sentimental patriotism in your life, you too, can become president of the greatest country in the world, and help to systematically destroy it.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
the just say no resistance
If you want to know why the Democrats will most likely blow the best chance they’ve had in a decade in 2006, read the Kerry op ed in the NYT. It is of his special “I voted for it before I voted against it” brand of politics – one that so delights the D.C. power pointers. Basically, Kerry is taking the position of supporting everything Bush stands for, in Iraq, behind pseudo-tough talk about the Bush mistakes. As for a timetable to leave the country – like in the next six months – forget it. The Kerry plan is an infinite process plan, a perpetual filibuster filled with Iraqi and American corpses.
However, much more interesting is the op ed by Lucian Truscott about the coming apart of the military’s middle ranks. Truscott wrote a memoir of his West Point training, which occurred just as Nixon’s ‘secret plan’ for Vietnam was in its Cheney-esque “last throes.” Truscott’s idea is that West Point is special because of the code to which officer trainees must swear:
“But the honor code was not just a way to fight a better war. In the Army, soldiers are given few rights, grave responsibilities, and lots and lots of power. The honor code serves as the Bill of Rights of the Army, protecting soldiers from betraying one another and the rest of us from their terrifying power to destroy. It is all that stands between an army and tyranny.
However, the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA.”
And this is what he thinks is happening all over again:
“The mistake the Army made then is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?
I've seen the results firsthand. I have met many lieutenants who have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, practically back to back. While everyone in a combat zone is risking his or her life, these junior officers are the ones leading foot patrols and convoys several times a day. Recruiting enough privates for the endless combat rotations is a problem the Army may gamble its way out of with enough money and a struggling economy. But nothing can compensate for losing the combat-hardened junior officers.”
Resistance by way of the established parties is futile. There isn’t enough courage in the whole of the House and Senate to fuel the revolution of an oiled wheel in a gerbil cage. Tearful apologies about offending the chickehawk crowd are more in order. Remember, the best resistance is simply not to go along. Here, again – perhaps LI should make this our sign off line – is the counter-recruitment site: Youth and the Military.
To paraphrase the VP, "We have other priorities in the '00s than military service." Remember, joining the army is simply another opportunity for hawks at home to get ahead: they will take your jobs, your education, and your comfortable life. They will leave you with bitterness, medical bills, and recurring trauma. It isn’t worth it. Friends don't let friends sign up.
ps -- LI wrote that post and then went to Slate, where we had the pleasure of seeing this site's resident scarecrow and jack of all popinjays, C. Hitchens, has written a nice little column that should be entitled, "let the servants fight the war while I drink with Bungalow Paul W. in Georgetown." Totally funny. It is almost an anti-recruitment ad in itself.
Die bungy cord jumping. Die drinking and driving. Die in a drug deal gone bad. But don't die for this filthy crowd. They aren't worth a hangnail.
However, much more interesting is the op ed by Lucian Truscott about the coming apart of the military’s middle ranks. Truscott wrote a memoir of his West Point training, which occurred just as Nixon’s ‘secret plan’ for Vietnam was in its Cheney-esque “last throes.” Truscott’s idea is that West Point is special because of the code to which officer trainees must swear:
“But the honor code was not just a way to fight a better war. In the Army, soldiers are given few rights, grave responsibilities, and lots and lots of power. The honor code serves as the Bill of Rights of the Army, protecting soldiers from betraying one another and the rest of us from their terrifying power to destroy. It is all that stands between an army and tyranny.
However, the honor code broke down before our eyes as staff and faculty jobs at West Point began filling with officers returning from Vietnam. Some had covered their uniforms with bogus medals and made their careers with lies - inflating body counts, ignoring drug abuse, turning a blind eye to racial discrimination, and worst of all, telling everyone above them in the chain of command that we were winning a war they knew we were losing. The lies became embedded in the curriculum of the academy, and finally in its moral DNA.”
And this is what he thinks is happening all over again:
“The mistake the Army made then is the same mistake it is making now: how can you educate a group of handpicked students at one of the best universities in the world and then treat them as if they are too stupid to know when they have been told a lie?
I've seen the results firsthand. I have met many lieutenants who have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, practically back to back. While everyone in a combat zone is risking his or her life, these junior officers are the ones leading foot patrols and convoys several times a day. Recruiting enough privates for the endless combat rotations is a problem the Army may gamble its way out of with enough money and a struggling economy. But nothing can compensate for losing the combat-hardened junior officers.”
Resistance by way of the established parties is futile. There isn’t enough courage in the whole of the House and Senate to fuel the revolution of an oiled wheel in a gerbil cage. Tearful apologies about offending the chickehawk crowd are more in order. Remember, the best resistance is simply not to go along. Here, again – perhaps LI should make this our sign off line – is the counter-recruitment site: Youth and the Military.
To paraphrase the VP, "We have other priorities in the '00s than military service." Remember, joining the army is simply another opportunity for hawks at home to get ahead: they will take your jobs, your education, and your comfortable life. They will leave you with bitterness, medical bills, and recurring trauma. It isn’t worth it. Friends don't let friends sign up.
ps -- LI wrote that post and then went to Slate, where we had the pleasure of seeing this site's resident scarecrow and jack of all popinjays, C. Hitchens, has written a nice little column that should be entitled, "let the servants fight the war while I drink with Bungalow Paul W. in Georgetown." Totally funny. It is almost an anti-recruitment ad in itself.
Die bungy cord jumping. Die drinking and driving. Die in a drug deal gone bad. But don't die for this filthy crowd. They aren't worth a hangnail.
Monday, June 27, 2005
the bush culture version of free enterprise
This Sunday, the Austin Statesman’s A section (which should be called, 'the scrapbook of two day old news from the Washington Post, the NYT, and Knight Rider' section, since there is very little original reporting in it) did have a nice big story about Buda’s new attraction: a Cabela’s.
Buda is a country town maybe a fifteen minute drive from Austin, in Hays County. Cabela’s is an outfitter store – but it bills itself as more than a store. It is a store experience, with aquariums, an in the store mini-mountain, and the like. The story is a good example of what the Bush culture means by free enterprise. Enterprise should free itself of costs by putting them on third parties – notably, the state.
With admirable lobbying skill, Cabela has received both positive payment from the state – in cash -- and negative inkind benefits from tax breaks. Plus, there are the agreements to extend Loop 4 for access to Cabela. Plus the various complicated clauses having to do with land use ceded to Cabela by Buda on which Cabela has the option to buy. It has been, all around, a beautiful deal.
One could put together the pieces from the Statesman article, and admire the jigsaw puzzle of corporationism, cronyism and boomerism coming together in one trifecta. First, of course, the state has to convince itself that it needs to give a corporation money. And to do that it needs a study. A study it got. This study said that Cabela’s in Buda would become the second biggest tourist attraction in Texas. That we are supposed to believe that an outfitter store in Buda will become a Disneyland like magnet, given that Texas is now starting to crawl with outfitter stores, is one of the ways that business is like poetry: the suspension of our disbelief is strongly advised.
Now, if I make a study that shows I’m going to make a heap of money and attract millions of customers to my store, according to Economics 101, I ought to be able to get money on the private markets and go ahead with my gangbuster plans. This is why Economics 101 is about useless as a map to modern capitalism. Instead, such studies are the wonderful excuse needed by state lobbyfed legislators to take the money that they can’t find for, say, healthcare and shovel it into a profitable enterprise. So Cabela’s gets a little Texas sugar right off the bat: $600,000 from the state. Just to show our appreciation. But the study implies that Cabela’s has magic powers. Anywhere a Cabela’s lands, apparently, people flock to it and how. So the Buda location has to compete. Can’t get those sweet sites without a little more sugar.
There's something a little disconcerting about this. Surely San Antonio could drum up its own outfitter destination store for half the price. And how deep, exactly, is Cabela's magic spell, given that it is setting up competition for itself all over the Southwest? In fact, this seems to be Cabela's business plan. It is the kind of business plan that could have been designed by an old fashioned leech (Hirudo medicinalis). Cabela’s, it appears, while magically attractive, does have an odd view of where its money comes from, according to SEC filings published by the Texas Observer:
“In SEC filings, the company admits that it counts on government at both the state and municipal level for “free land,” “monetary grants,” and economic development bonds for the “recapture of incremental sales, property or other taxes.” So reliant is Cabela’s on generous government handouts and tax breaks that “the failure to obtain similar economic development packages … would have an adverse impact on our cash flows and on the return on investment in these stores.”
Hays country is using an instrument called tax increment financing in order to put Cabela’s on the welfare train. This allows a local government to publicly fund “needed structural improvements.” Ah, and if those needed structural improvements happen to be a parking lot for the millions of happy tourists flocking into this destination store, so be it. There is nothing odd about any of this. The state is ordinarily used by private enterprises to amplify their profit margins, or to achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals, etc., etc. Positive externalities like this only become controversial when the state wants payback – when, for instance, the state regulates pollution. At this point, the libertarians and conservatives come pouring out of the woodwork, talking about private enterprise and state tyranny. After all, aren't all those fortune 500 ceos self-made men?
Unfortunately, Texas hasn’t yet financed a state tourist destination dedicated to its own hypocrisy. It should. It would attract millions of visitors.
Buda is a country town maybe a fifteen minute drive from Austin, in Hays County. Cabela’s is an outfitter store – but it bills itself as more than a store. It is a store experience, with aquariums, an in the store mini-mountain, and the like. The story is a good example of what the Bush culture means by free enterprise. Enterprise should free itself of costs by putting them on third parties – notably, the state.
With admirable lobbying skill, Cabela has received both positive payment from the state – in cash -- and negative inkind benefits from tax breaks. Plus, there are the agreements to extend Loop 4 for access to Cabela. Plus the various complicated clauses having to do with land use ceded to Cabela by Buda on which Cabela has the option to buy. It has been, all around, a beautiful deal.
One could put together the pieces from the Statesman article, and admire the jigsaw puzzle of corporationism, cronyism and boomerism coming together in one trifecta. First, of course, the state has to convince itself that it needs to give a corporation money. And to do that it needs a study. A study it got. This study said that Cabela’s in Buda would become the second biggest tourist attraction in Texas. That we are supposed to believe that an outfitter store in Buda will become a Disneyland like magnet, given that Texas is now starting to crawl with outfitter stores, is one of the ways that business is like poetry: the suspension of our disbelief is strongly advised.
Now, if I make a study that shows I’m going to make a heap of money and attract millions of customers to my store, according to Economics 101, I ought to be able to get money on the private markets and go ahead with my gangbuster plans. This is why Economics 101 is about useless as a map to modern capitalism. Instead, such studies are the wonderful excuse needed by state lobbyfed legislators to take the money that they can’t find for, say, healthcare and shovel it into a profitable enterprise. So Cabela’s gets a little Texas sugar right off the bat: $600,000 from the state. Just to show our appreciation. But the study implies that Cabela’s has magic powers. Anywhere a Cabela’s lands, apparently, people flock to it and how. So the Buda location has to compete. Can’t get those sweet sites without a little more sugar.
There's something a little disconcerting about this. Surely San Antonio could drum up its own outfitter destination store for half the price. And how deep, exactly, is Cabela's magic spell, given that it is setting up competition for itself all over the Southwest? In fact, this seems to be Cabela's business plan. It is the kind of business plan that could have been designed by an old fashioned leech (Hirudo medicinalis). Cabela’s, it appears, while magically attractive, does have an odd view of where its money comes from, according to SEC filings published by the Texas Observer:
“In SEC filings, the company admits that it counts on government at both the state and municipal level for “free land,” “monetary grants,” and economic development bonds for the “recapture of incremental sales, property or other taxes.” So reliant is Cabela’s on generous government handouts and tax breaks that “the failure to obtain similar economic development packages … would have an adverse impact on our cash flows and on the return on investment in these stores.”
Hays country is using an instrument called tax increment financing in order to put Cabela’s on the welfare train. This allows a local government to publicly fund “needed structural improvements.” Ah, and if those needed structural improvements happen to be a parking lot for the millions of happy tourists flocking into this destination store, so be it. There is nothing odd about any of this. The state is ordinarily used by private enterprises to amplify their profit margins, or to achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals, etc., etc. Positive externalities like this only become controversial when the state wants payback – when, for instance, the state regulates pollution. At this point, the libertarians and conservatives come pouring out of the woodwork, talking about private enterprise and state tyranny. After all, aren't all those fortune 500 ceos self-made men?
Unfortunately, Texas hasn’t yet financed a state tourist destination dedicated to its own hypocrisy. It should. It would attract millions of visitors.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Starve the beast
Starve the beast
There’s a nice interview with a counter-recruitment activist, Clint Coppernoll, at Counterpunch. LI has been behind the curve – we are adding a link to youthandthemilitary which lists counter-recruitment organizations . We were happy to see two groups in Austin, but ... it is frustrating that there are none in Houston, Dallas, S.A. or El Paso. Texas is a big generator of military personnel, and it would be nice to shut down the tap.
Coppernoll is admirably dismissive about the anti-war movement, which has been a vacuum and a comedy, a sort of reductio absurdam of what has been lost as left movements have been institutionalized or annexed by the Democratic party. The results are comparable to what would happen if the Mafia annexed Gamblers Anonymous.
Coppernoll makes an interesting point:
“Dealing with Delayed Enlistment: Most young people enter the military through the Delayed Enlistment Program (sometimes called the Delayed Entry Program). This program allows youth to sign up with a military recruiter for one of the service branches, but receive a report date for basic training for up to a year later. When entering the Delayed Enlistment Program (DEP), youth sign an enlistment agreement and take an oath of enlistment.
It is very common for young people to change their minds after enlistment in the DEP. A young person may re-evaluate their decision. It is important to realize that up until a young person actually reports for basic training, they can be released from any military obligation.
The official way to gain release is to write a letter to the commanding officer of the recruiting station, explaining one's decision not to report to basic training.”
So, if you know someone who has already enlisted, clue them in: they don’t have to go. The vanity project in Iraq is on its last hundred billion dollar legs. Don’t throw yourself on the funeral pyre. Follow the President's example. He didn't allow a false sense of patriotism to lure him to Vietnam. Sensibly enough, he realized it was a snafu, and he could better spend his time birddogging babes and doing some mild drugs. What better advice could you give to the young people of America today?
There’s a nice interview with a counter-recruitment activist, Clint Coppernoll, at Counterpunch. LI has been behind the curve – we are adding a link to youthandthemilitary which lists counter-recruitment organizations . We were happy to see two groups in Austin, but ... it is frustrating that there are none in Houston, Dallas, S.A. or El Paso. Texas is a big generator of military personnel, and it would be nice to shut down the tap.
Coppernoll is admirably dismissive about the anti-war movement, which has been a vacuum and a comedy, a sort of reductio absurdam of what has been lost as left movements have been institutionalized or annexed by the Democratic party. The results are comparable to what would happen if the Mafia annexed Gamblers Anonymous.
Coppernoll makes an interesting point:
“Dealing with Delayed Enlistment: Most young people enter the military through the Delayed Enlistment Program (sometimes called the Delayed Entry Program). This program allows youth to sign up with a military recruiter for one of the service branches, but receive a report date for basic training for up to a year later. When entering the Delayed Enlistment Program (DEP), youth sign an enlistment agreement and take an oath of enlistment.
It is very common for young people to change their minds after enlistment in the DEP. A young person may re-evaluate their decision. It is important to realize that up until a young person actually reports for basic training, they can be released from any military obligation.
The official way to gain release is to write a letter to the commanding officer of the recruiting station, explaining one's decision not to report to basic training.”
So, if you know someone who has already enlisted, clue them in: they don’t have to go. The vanity project in Iraq is on its last hundred billion dollar legs. Don’t throw yourself on the funeral pyre. Follow the President's example. He didn't allow a false sense of patriotism to lure him to Vietnam. Sensibly enough, he realized it was a snafu, and he could better spend his time birddogging babes and doing some mild drugs. What better advice could you give to the young people of America today?
Saturday, June 25, 2005
indignatio continued
The tumblers were falling into place in 420 B.C. At least, according to Laurence Lampert’s excellent analysis of the dialogue known as Hippias Minor in the Spring 2002 Review of Politics. The Review definitely has a Straussian tinge, but sometimes LI likes the odd faith that close reading of ancient texts will give us political redemption.
In the Lesser Hippias, Socrates’ antagonist is Hippias, an Elian sophist and politician. He has come to Athens to participate in the ninetieth Olympiad, in which the Elians were managers of the game. Lampert emphasizes a Thucydidian aspect of Hippias’ presence in Athens:
“More important, however, than the coming Olympics for the Lesser Hippias is the diplomatic conference for which Elis presumably sent Hippias to Athens. That conference had been arranged by the rising new force in Athenian politics, Alcibiades, the young Athenian to whom Socrates had devoted such close attention more than a decade earlier.(n7) Alcibiades had arranged the congress of 420 to implement his bold new strategy; altering the Periclean strategy Athens had followed since the beginning of the war eleven years earlier. Alcibiades' policy required that maritime Athens win Peloponnesian allies for a decisive hoplite battle against Sparta. Thucydides chose this critical moment as the fitting occasion to introduce to his narrative the flamboyant and fateful figure who would come to dominate it as he came to dominate Athenian politics.(n8) Alcibiades appears for the first time in Thucydides as a young strategist and diplomat of great ambition and talent who achieves a striking victory in the first endeavor Thucydides chose to report about him: Alcibiades won the diplomatic battle in 420 by perpetrating an outrageous trick on the Spartan ambassadors, persuading them to lie to the Athenian assembly about their power to finalize a treaty. Unscrupulous Alcibiades then immediately denounced them to the assembly as unscrupulous liars, inciting the assembly into a frenzy of outrage against the Spartans and turning it toward his own policy of alliance with the Argives, Mantineans, and Elians. An earthquake occurred at that inopportune moment and the assembly lost its chance to approve Alcibiades' policy immediately. They approved it some weeks later, however, after Nicias's attempt to negotiate a treaty with the Spartans failed. Alcibiades's diplomatic success further required that he persuade the ambassadors from Argos, Mantinea, and Elis to sign a treaty of alliance with the Athenians. The diplomacy was successful but the hoplite battle two years later would be lost, partly due to Athenian failure to implement Alcibiades' plan and send a full complement of Athenians in a timely manner to the decisive battle near Mantinea in 418.”
For those who like their nudge nudging to be more explicit – we think there is a striking parallel between Alcibiades trick and some recent deception that has been going down. Maybe our faithful readers can guess?..
As we know from the Symposium, Socrates has been close to Alcibiades. The contest staged in the Lesser Hippias between Hippias and Socrates turns on the question of who is better, Achilles or Odysseus? And in what respect? The later question is, abstractly, about the nature of virtue, and, practically, about Homer’s presentation of the two heros. Hippias takes the position that Achilles is the greater man, and the Iliad is the greater poem. His position is pretty straightforward, turning on the scene in the Iliad in which Odysseus pleads with Achilles to return to the Achaian force. The Andrew Lang translation on Gutenberg gives us this unfortunate Victorian translation of Achilles’ reply:
“And Achilles fleet of foot answered and said unto him: "Heaven-sprungson of Laertes, Odysseus of many wiles, in openness must I now declareunto you my saying, even as I am minded and as the fulfilment thereofshall be, that ye may not sit before me and coax this way and that. Forhateful to me even as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing inhis heart and uttereth another: but I will speak what meseemeth best.”
The word for wiles, in Greek, is polytropoi. Lampert sees this as a key word. Hippias’ view is that Achilles is rebuking guile from the morally more unassailable position of straightforwardness. Lampert gives a quite adequate summary of the “plot” of the dialogue (which, I should add, is one of Plato’s smaller dialogues):
“Achilles' words initiate the first argument of the dialogue, an argument about lying, for Hippias interprets Achilles' words as a denunciation of lying and an attack on lying Odysseus. This first argument (365c-371e) begins with a view on the liar that Socrates suggests Homer held: "that the truthful man was one sort and the liar another, and that they are not the same" (365c). Hippias's conviction--"It would be terrible (deinon) if it were not so"--governs his reactions to Socrates' reasoning and leads ultimately to the conclusion of Odysseus's superiority (371e). At the end of the first argument, when Hippias hears this conclusion and the conclusion on which it is based (that the voluntary liar is better than the involuntary liar), he expresses his moral outrage and expands the topic dramatically: "And how, Socrates, can those who are voluntarily unjust, who have voluntarily plotted and done evil, be better than those who do so involuntarily?" (372a, emphasis added) This outburst initiates the second argument (372a-375d), an argument about justice and wrong-doing that in its way repeats the reasoning of the first argument. Hippias expresses the same conviction at the end of the second argument: "It would, however, be terrible, Socrates, if those doing injustice voluntarily are to be better than those doing so involuntarily" (375d). This response initiates the third and final argument (375d-376b) at the end of which "terrible" appears one final time, but this time it states Socrates' judgment on what would be terrible (376c), a judgment that ends the dialogue.”
Socrates’ position in this dialogue is rather startling, especially if you come to it presupposing a certain conventional image of Socrates. That conventional image, taken from the Apology, is of a man who will not lie, a man who seeks definitions, a man who believes, as he says in the Gorgias, that the virtuous man is so far from merely the powerful man that the virtuous man would allow himself to be put to death in defense of virtue. These are all, indeed, sides of Socrates. But there is also the friend of Alcibiades, the ironist who initiates the philosophical quest as one that searches for definition only to upend it by making clear the perpetual inadequacy of that quest (or, if you will, the strange space in which that quest is pursued, in which the end of the movement lands one at the beginning again), the man whose daimon is a sort of spirit of negativity. This Socrates contends for a viewpoint that seems paradoxical: the man who does voluntary injustice is better than the man who does involuntary injustice. The reason? Behind the windings of the dialogue, Socrates reason is strangely similar to Gorgias’ viewpoint: the man who does injustice voluntarily has a greater capacity, both for justice and injustice, than the man who does injustice involuntarily. In other words, being polytropic, wily, guileful, is not a mark of weakness – it is the feint of a higher capacity.
“Under Socrates' questioning Hippias seems eager to state that the liar is capable, prudent, knowing, and wise (365d-366a): his eagerness suggests that he is as outraged at the polytropic man as Achilles was at Odysseus. Outrage makes Hippias far less willing to agree with Socrates' argument that it is the true expert in an art who is both the liar and the truth-teller and that the same man is a liar and truthful about the things of that art (367c-d). Socrates selects arts in which Hippias claims special expertise (calculating, geometry; astronomy) and when he generalizes from these arts to all arts and sciences, he again uses Hippias as his example, the Hippias whom Socrates heard boasting in the market place beside the money tables that he is the wisest of all human beings in the greatest number of arts (368b). Socrates' argument shows that the same man is liar and truth-teller but Hippias's response shows that capable Hippias is not that man; something in addition to the capacity of a Hippias seems necessary for the polytropic man.”
This post is the successor of my last post. My complaint in that one is that politics in America is stuck in the rhetorical mode of indignatio – shame-making. Myself, I think opposition to the current regime (and I am not, here, talking simply about the left – I include even conservative opposition to the war and the lack of stewardship) would be better served by the polytropic. The weakness of, say, Kerry as a politician was not that he was all things to all people, but that he was not convincingly anything to anybody.
But is Socrates right? Does the capacity to lie or to tell the truth – does an elevation above shame – make for the better leader?
In the Lesser Hippias, Socrates’ antagonist is Hippias, an Elian sophist and politician. He has come to Athens to participate in the ninetieth Olympiad, in which the Elians were managers of the game. Lampert emphasizes a Thucydidian aspect of Hippias’ presence in Athens:
“More important, however, than the coming Olympics for the Lesser Hippias is the diplomatic conference for which Elis presumably sent Hippias to Athens. That conference had been arranged by the rising new force in Athenian politics, Alcibiades, the young Athenian to whom Socrates had devoted such close attention more than a decade earlier.(n7) Alcibiades had arranged the congress of 420 to implement his bold new strategy; altering the Periclean strategy Athens had followed since the beginning of the war eleven years earlier. Alcibiades' policy required that maritime Athens win Peloponnesian allies for a decisive hoplite battle against Sparta. Thucydides chose this critical moment as the fitting occasion to introduce to his narrative the flamboyant and fateful figure who would come to dominate it as he came to dominate Athenian politics.(n8) Alcibiades appears for the first time in Thucydides as a young strategist and diplomat of great ambition and talent who achieves a striking victory in the first endeavor Thucydides chose to report about him: Alcibiades won the diplomatic battle in 420 by perpetrating an outrageous trick on the Spartan ambassadors, persuading them to lie to the Athenian assembly about their power to finalize a treaty. Unscrupulous Alcibiades then immediately denounced them to the assembly as unscrupulous liars, inciting the assembly into a frenzy of outrage against the Spartans and turning it toward his own policy of alliance with the Argives, Mantineans, and Elians. An earthquake occurred at that inopportune moment and the assembly lost its chance to approve Alcibiades' policy immediately. They approved it some weeks later, however, after Nicias's attempt to negotiate a treaty with the Spartans failed. Alcibiades's diplomatic success further required that he persuade the ambassadors from Argos, Mantinea, and Elis to sign a treaty of alliance with the Athenians. The diplomacy was successful but the hoplite battle two years later would be lost, partly due to Athenian failure to implement Alcibiades' plan and send a full complement of Athenians in a timely manner to the decisive battle near Mantinea in 418.”
For those who like their nudge nudging to be more explicit – we think there is a striking parallel between Alcibiades trick and some recent deception that has been going down. Maybe our faithful readers can guess?..
As we know from the Symposium, Socrates has been close to Alcibiades. The contest staged in the Lesser Hippias between Hippias and Socrates turns on the question of who is better, Achilles or Odysseus? And in what respect? The later question is, abstractly, about the nature of virtue, and, practically, about Homer’s presentation of the two heros. Hippias takes the position that Achilles is the greater man, and the Iliad is the greater poem. His position is pretty straightforward, turning on the scene in the Iliad in which Odysseus pleads with Achilles to return to the Achaian force. The Andrew Lang translation on Gutenberg gives us this unfortunate Victorian translation of Achilles’ reply:
“And Achilles fleet of foot answered and said unto him: "Heaven-sprungson of Laertes, Odysseus of many wiles, in openness must I now declareunto you my saying, even as I am minded and as the fulfilment thereofshall be, that ye may not sit before me and coax this way and that. Forhateful to me even as the gates of hell is he that hideth one thing inhis heart and uttereth another: but I will speak what meseemeth best.”
The word for wiles, in Greek, is polytropoi. Lampert sees this as a key word. Hippias’ view is that Achilles is rebuking guile from the morally more unassailable position of straightforwardness. Lampert gives a quite adequate summary of the “plot” of the dialogue (which, I should add, is one of Plato’s smaller dialogues):
“Achilles' words initiate the first argument of the dialogue, an argument about lying, for Hippias interprets Achilles' words as a denunciation of lying and an attack on lying Odysseus. This first argument (365c-371e) begins with a view on the liar that Socrates suggests Homer held: "that the truthful man was one sort and the liar another, and that they are not the same" (365c). Hippias's conviction--"It would be terrible (deinon) if it were not so"--governs his reactions to Socrates' reasoning and leads ultimately to the conclusion of Odysseus's superiority (371e). At the end of the first argument, when Hippias hears this conclusion and the conclusion on which it is based (that the voluntary liar is better than the involuntary liar), he expresses his moral outrage and expands the topic dramatically: "And how, Socrates, can those who are voluntarily unjust, who have voluntarily plotted and done evil, be better than those who do so involuntarily?" (372a, emphasis added) This outburst initiates the second argument (372a-375d), an argument about justice and wrong-doing that in its way repeats the reasoning of the first argument. Hippias expresses the same conviction at the end of the second argument: "It would, however, be terrible, Socrates, if those doing injustice voluntarily are to be better than those doing so involuntarily" (375d). This response initiates the third and final argument (375d-376b) at the end of which "terrible" appears one final time, but this time it states Socrates' judgment on what would be terrible (376c), a judgment that ends the dialogue.”
Socrates’ position in this dialogue is rather startling, especially if you come to it presupposing a certain conventional image of Socrates. That conventional image, taken from the Apology, is of a man who will not lie, a man who seeks definitions, a man who believes, as he says in the Gorgias, that the virtuous man is so far from merely the powerful man that the virtuous man would allow himself to be put to death in defense of virtue. These are all, indeed, sides of Socrates. But there is also the friend of Alcibiades, the ironist who initiates the philosophical quest as one that searches for definition only to upend it by making clear the perpetual inadequacy of that quest (or, if you will, the strange space in which that quest is pursued, in which the end of the movement lands one at the beginning again), the man whose daimon is a sort of spirit of negativity. This Socrates contends for a viewpoint that seems paradoxical: the man who does voluntary injustice is better than the man who does involuntary injustice. The reason? Behind the windings of the dialogue, Socrates reason is strangely similar to Gorgias’ viewpoint: the man who does injustice voluntarily has a greater capacity, both for justice and injustice, than the man who does injustice involuntarily. In other words, being polytropic, wily, guileful, is not a mark of weakness – it is the feint of a higher capacity.
“Under Socrates' questioning Hippias seems eager to state that the liar is capable, prudent, knowing, and wise (365d-366a): his eagerness suggests that he is as outraged at the polytropic man as Achilles was at Odysseus. Outrage makes Hippias far less willing to agree with Socrates' argument that it is the true expert in an art who is both the liar and the truth-teller and that the same man is a liar and truthful about the things of that art (367c-d). Socrates selects arts in which Hippias claims special expertise (calculating, geometry; astronomy) and when he generalizes from these arts to all arts and sciences, he again uses Hippias as his example, the Hippias whom Socrates heard boasting in the market place beside the money tables that he is the wisest of all human beings in the greatest number of arts (368b). Socrates' argument shows that the same man is liar and truth-teller but Hippias's response shows that capable Hippias is not that man; something in addition to the capacity of a Hippias seems necessary for the polytropic man.”
This post is the successor of my last post. My complaint in that one is that politics in America is stuck in the rhetorical mode of indignatio – shame-making. Myself, I think opposition to the current regime (and I am not, here, talking simply about the left – I include even conservative opposition to the war and the lack of stewardship) would be better served by the polytropic. The weakness of, say, Kerry as a politician was not that he was all things to all people, but that he was not convincingly anything to anybody.
But is Socrates right? Does the capacity to lie or to tell the truth – does an elevation above shame – make for the better leader?
Friday, June 24, 2005
the politics of apologize
Cato wrote a book entitled Indignatio. Typical of him. I’m with Robert Graves about Cato: he was a complete Roman prick. His nightmarish obsession with exterminating Carthage was quoted for almost two millennia as the model of patriotism, which just shows you that there is a lot of psychosis at the heart of Western civilization. The authoritarian personality was obviously alive and well in the ancient world. Such a mean, limited spirit would naturally be attracted to the rhetorical mode in which resentment is most at home.
Indignatio has always been particularly dear to American political types. Liberals get goosebumps thinking of Joseph Welch asking Joseph McCarthy if, at long last, he has no shame. Nice shot, but since McCarthy had pretty much succeeded in exterminating the impulse to form labor or socialist parties in the U.S. – parties that were once as much a part of our culture as the Republican or Democratic party – I’d give the points to McCarthy. Indigatio, at best, is the loser’s victory. For instance, look at the last week: Dick Durbin’s speech about torture arouses the Republicans to such thunderclaps of offence that it drives Durbin to make a tearful apology on the Senate floor. Now Democrats are about to mount a campaign of mock anger about the speech Karl Rove made to some GOP carnivore fest. rove implied that liberals and Democrats were the enablers that made 9/11 possible – soft traitors, if you will. Is anybody really surprised that Rove thinks the Democrats are soft traitors? Yet the point is to find the offending moment in order to be offended by it. The most politically aware groups in America, on the web, seem to spend most of their time surfing for offenses, seeking out scandals to their (by this time abraded) sensibilities, like pigs rooting up poison truffles.
LI has done a share of this ourselves.
In saner moments we know, however, that the politics of apologize is not a winner. What is odd is that the left side of the spectrum, with so much to rail against, spends so much of its time demanding that such as Karl Rove say they are sorry. This is a strategy that is discarded even by sullen adolescents, after a certain point. It is so evidently pointless.
This level of counterfeit politics, however, does fit the larger strategies of the D.C. elites. Yesterday, Senator Clinton sternly read out bits of Rove and asked various administration officials whether this was the kind of stuff they approved of. This got the pack behind her, baying up a storm. Let’s write our congressmen! I imagine there was movement on the emails. Maybe the WP will have a story. Meanwhile, Clinton’s own collaboration with the administration in every false, mad, and simply stupid move that generated this war even as it preserved Osama bin Laden as an ontap terrorist; her support for every creepy move that has guided American conduct during the course of this war; it all falls away as gentle as short term amnesia.
It isn’t that I am surprised or offended that the Roves, Limbaughs, O’Reilly’s, and on and on think I am a traitor. I could care less. I happen to think they are cretins, mouthpieces for the vulpine D.C. eggheads who have an unblemished record of failure.
So why has our politics been captured in the dumb show of fake shock, indignatio as hollow drama, the theater of the ridiculous Kabuki? And why has the left been especially vulnerable to it, given the feast of real daily shocks that are provided by the D.C. masters of war?
Well, in typically weasel fashion, I’m going to turn to another, related question in my next post: why did Socrates, in the Lesser Hippias, hold that Odysseus was a better man than Achilles? I think, at least, that it is a related question.
Indignatio has always been particularly dear to American political types. Liberals get goosebumps thinking of Joseph Welch asking Joseph McCarthy if, at long last, he has no shame. Nice shot, but since McCarthy had pretty much succeeded in exterminating the impulse to form labor or socialist parties in the U.S. – parties that were once as much a part of our culture as the Republican or Democratic party – I’d give the points to McCarthy. Indigatio, at best, is the loser’s victory. For instance, look at the last week: Dick Durbin’s speech about torture arouses the Republicans to such thunderclaps of offence that it drives Durbin to make a tearful apology on the Senate floor. Now Democrats are about to mount a campaign of mock anger about the speech Karl Rove made to some GOP carnivore fest. rove implied that liberals and Democrats were the enablers that made 9/11 possible – soft traitors, if you will. Is anybody really surprised that Rove thinks the Democrats are soft traitors? Yet the point is to find the offending moment in order to be offended by it. The most politically aware groups in America, on the web, seem to spend most of their time surfing for offenses, seeking out scandals to their (by this time abraded) sensibilities, like pigs rooting up poison truffles.
LI has done a share of this ourselves.
In saner moments we know, however, that the politics of apologize is not a winner. What is odd is that the left side of the spectrum, with so much to rail against, spends so much of its time demanding that such as Karl Rove say they are sorry. This is a strategy that is discarded even by sullen adolescents, after a certain point. It is so evidently pointless.
This level of counterfeit politics, however, does fit the larger strategies of the D.C. elites. Yesterday, Senator Clinton sternly read out bits of Rove and asked various administration officials whether this was the kind of stuff they approved of. This got the pack behind her, baying up a storm. Let’s write our congressmen! I imagine there was movement on the emails. Maybe the WP will have a story. Meanwhile, Clinton’s own collaboration with the administration in every false, mad, and simply stupid move that generated this war even as it preserved Osama bin Laden as an ontap terrorist; her support for every creepy move that has guided American conduct during the course of this war; it all falls away as gentle as short term amnesia.
It isn’t that I am surprised or offended that the Roves, Limbaughs, O’Reilly’s, and on and on think I am a traitor. I could care less. I happen to think they are cretins, mouthpieces for the vulpine D.C. eggheads who have an unblemished record of failure.
So why has our politics been captured in the dumb show of fake shock, indignatio as hollow drama, the theater of the ridiculous Kabuki? And why has the left been especially vulnerable to it, given the feast of real daily shocks that are provided by the D.C. masters of war?
Well, in typically weasel fashion, I’m going to turn to another, related question in my next post: why did Socrates, in the Lesser Hippias, hold that Odysseus was a better man than Achilles? I think, at least, that it is a related question.
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