zombies in love

Iraq, I rack 'em up and I roll,
I'm back and I'm a hi-tech GI Joe.
I pray for peace, prepare for war
and I never will forget ~
there's no price too high for freedom
so be careful where you tread. – Clint Black.

LI is sickly fascinated by the sixth Bush budget. Six years in a row of what some muckety muck’s might call pathological lyin’ by our Rebel in Chief ©, not bein’ as well trained as he is in the big picture. Although there is no price too high for freedom, we have not been putting that exactly square in the budget for the past three years. Our bold Rebel in Chief ©. learned, in the secret years of his training as one of America’s great guerilla warrior (after the big one himself, Sylvester Stallone) to clothe boldness with discretion – hence the song of the supplemental that has tripped shyly through congress, year after year.

Our Rebel in Chief ©. has grown so enamored of fictitious numbers that he could market his budget as a his own personal memoir. Part of the wonder of the thing are his zombie groupies. It is sorta like a cult in which the leader’s failures become tests for the follower’s faith. The more the Rebel in Chief © fucks the pooch, the more you acquire credit in heaven by believing in him. It’s even an incentive to fuck the pooch – I’m pretty sure that the big man sometimes just fails in certain ways to see just how his zombies will figure out how to kiss his ass. Idi Amin used to do the same thing. The ritual of the approach is very important. There’s a wonderful article in the NYT yesterday where the journalists run right into Bush’s lies and lies about Katrina, and the embarrassment of the reporters is visceral – you can feel them suddenly euphemizing up a storm. Because if you say here’s a lie, the zombie will eat you. It is scary out there in the cable show dark, where jowly men in suits, like human gastric ulcers, maunder on threateningly about politics.

So how much more will the war’s supporters go for? How wide the failure, and how often will they tell themselves like battered woman going back to bozo, we just ain’t getting’ the good news yet! And, after all, don’t you want to be a hi-tech GI Joe in the biggest budget flop ever made? It’s like Waterworld on crack. Sure you do, honey. Burn down the studio. Order more sets. 400 billion dollars for F/X, and here’s the good one: we could probably just cut that by 200 billion if we just gave every terrorist 10 million bucks, free and clear. But that would show lack of vision! Those terrorist extras create the ambiance! No expense should be spared!

The reason why is freedom. The reason why is the wind of freedom. Man just gots to be free. It is in his nature. Actually, it is in his left testicle, according to medical science. All that good news is just pent up and waitin’ to flood out. Iraq is gonna look so good any day now that we will all want to move there – and that just might be a good idea, since this fuckin’ country is approachin’ bankruptcy fast! Plus the dozen or so hurricanes that are sure to drown this or that ho hum metropolis this summer, interrupting our Rebel in Chief©’s vacation – what kind of country is that, anyway?

Since the Congressional Budget Office now puts the cost at 500 billion, and they are not including medical costs for wounded vets or other disguised costs which Stiglitz claims raises the cost another four to six hundred billion – well, we are finally realizing Clint Black’s romantic dream. And to think, we coulda paid for that Social Security shortfall and national health care with the money we are spendin’ and have a little left over for carfare.

I guess that the idea is: fuck that. Our country is about freedom and the ownership society, not about fuckin’ dental care for the kiddies, man. So let’s rack up another 600 billion chips and all sing, like zombies in love:

“If everyone would go for peace/
there’d be no need for war/
but we can’t ignore the devil/
he’ll keep coming back for more!”

I’m psyched!

let it all come down

Some days, you read the papers and you think, surely this dirty regime is about to fall.

Item: Vice President Cheney directed his assistant, Scooter Libby, to leak what seems to be classified information.

Item: The CIA officer who coordinated intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the Bush vanity project says that the administration cherry picked the intelligence to make its case.

Item: Bush’s news conference comment that he not only did not know Abramoff, but thought for a long time that he was a brand name of cleaner, like Easy-off, is contradicted by Abramoff’s own memory of good times with George.

Item: old news, but again, the Crawford ranch White House was quite aware that NOLA was drowning as it was drowning. Panicked, Bush went to the West Coast and played a little back stage guitar.

Item: even Republicans agree that this year’s White House Budget has as much chance of being realized as the Aristocrats has of being named the 700 Club Movie of the Year.

But the machine keeps grinding madly on. It becomes more and more obvious that we are trapped in one of the minor moments in history – hemmed in, on one side, by Danish cartoons, and on the other side, by a claymation POTUS, preparing for our obvious problems – global warming, a warming trend in the gulf and the Atlantic that is going to lead to more severe storms, a transportation technology centered around a nineteenth century invention, a serious reckoning with a post-manufacturing economy – by closing our eyes.

Perhaps hibernation is the only good political answer to this moronic inferno. But aesthetically, this is the trifecta. The gold rush. The Klondike of irony. This is the era of yahoos, and there’s no excuse for a writer not to watch it with extreme interest, pad in hand. Watch the yahoos shit on each other. Watch the zombies mouth the slogans. Watch the press make itself into a bodyguard of lies for systematic injustice, and then blandly preen itself on its objectivity. Watch the big pieces drift.

I love the smell of stupidity in the morning.

the machine that eats your brain

As the Muhammed-as-Snuffy-Smith controversy continues, it is interesting to watch the politics become a veritable machine to produce idiocy. I suspect that there is some mystical law that governs these things. But, one wonders, what is this law? Is it something in the nature of opposition itself, some diabolical dialectical germ that is slipped into that moment in the discourse which ends up producing those magnificent retards, the left and the right, the point and the counterpoint, the defenders of civil liberties (with exceptions) and the defenders of the oppressed (no matter what they do)?

If this is so, it would subvert my idea of progress, the good society, the goals of art, the use and purpose of philosophy, the true, the beautiful and the just. It would make my life a mockery and the minimum life style I’ve chosen the door prize of the lowest order of sap. It would make my words no more rational than the foaming of a poisoned rat.

… Well, at least it would be all about me. There’s always a bright side for your true American narcissist.

In this case, on the one side, we have the every brilliant Teheran government paper, with its Auschwitz cartoon contest; on the other side, we have the calls in Britain to jail the demonstrator who dressed up as a suicide bomber. And then there are the guys in Afghanistan who have died for the sake of… uh, what? rushing an army base that represented in their minds a cartoon published by unbelievers in an unbelievers kingdom by the sea.

Myself, I went, via Le Colonel Chabert, today, to Democracy Now and discovered, to my dismay, that the idiocy may be terminal. The conversation between As’ad Abikhalil is and Irshad Manji is enough to make you pull out your hair. Abikhalil should be representing my line: he is a non-believer who nevertheless wants to defend a degree of outrage among the Moslems who are outraged. So far, so good. But he immediately goes into a riff of free association that has little to do with anything. Israel, of course, pops up. And he can’t get over the fact that Manji has appeared on Fox news. This seems to be a mortal sin. Manji, on the other hand, is full of the kind of gotcha tactics that make me turn off the radio.

Yet both could have helped each other a little bit. This is the thing about discourse, and opposition. It is not a zero sum game. The beauty of opposition is to keep it on the highest possible level, not to take advantage of the referee looking away to foul your opponent. Manji makes a good point, and ruins it by making it into a description of Abikhalil’s position, when it isn’t a description of his position at all:

“And speaking of dissent, you know, I find it interesting that your other guest suggests or actually emphasizes that there is a targeting of Islam, but that no other religion, you know, can be mocked. How then does he explain the routinely and viciously anti-Semitic programming that comes out of the Arab world. And I would remind him that we Muslims never protest that kind of atrocity. So, how do we have integrity demanding to the rest of the world that they completely respect our religion, when we ourselves have trouble respecting other faiths?”
And while it is true that you don’t find a lot of Christian fundies protesting about the oppression of Buddhists in Tibet, you do find Christians and non-Christians in Western countries protesting. And it is also true that a repulsive anti-semitism has been emitted as a salve by Arabic countries for the “cause of Palestine.”

Unfortunately, Abikhalil decides, (instead of saying, that doesn’t represent my point, but I think I can connect what you are saying to my suspicion that Islam was selected for mockery for reasons that aren’t being admitted) to attack Manjil for various crimes of political correctness, plus not being an Arab speaker. Nobody asks if there are any Danish speakers in the room. And -- let me guess -- they didn't serve Danishes in the Green Room. Maybe they can rename them Holy Cream Cheese Pastries.

As'ad Abikhalil: “Well, Amy, that’s very easy to respond to. First of all, I am aware of the pontification of the other guest on FOX News, among other outlets that relish the opportunity to have somebody like her –“

I haven’t watched a political show on tv for around fifteen, twenty years, but I imagine this is just how they all operate. I don't get it -- why does anybody watch them?

Then my man Abikhalil gets involved in this discussion:

“AMY GOODMAN: As’ad AbuKhalil, would you say this is an overreaction, what is happening?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, first of all, Amy, it’s not up to me to decide. I have my own sensibilities, and for me, I mean, as a secular atheist, you know, I would love to have people who mock and ridicule all religions together, but it is the inconsistency that’s striking, as well as hypocrisy…”

Well, LI has no problem deciding. If ever there was an over-reaction, we are seeing it. If ever there was a predictable over-reaction, we are seeing it. I've considered how I want to die -- whether I want the total package, the pain, the cancer, the death agony going on for days, or the in-and-out package, heart attack, death. But one thing I definitely know: I do not want to die over an insulting cartoon.

I’d quote more of this illuminating discussion (partly because it is, apart from being stupid, genuinely funny), but since I am sick this week (with a cough that starts up and goes in my throat like the howls of somebody's chained and abandoned dog, God damn it) I figure I’ll write about this in another post.

zigzag

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff from Die Zeit penned an op ed in the WAPO about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammed. His account of how this began doesn’t, actually, make much sense:

“It's worth remembering that the controversy started out as a well-meaning attempt to write a children's book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. The book was designed to promote religious tolerance. But the author encountered the consequences of religious hatred when he looked for an illustrator. He could not find one. Denmark's artists seemed to fear for their lives. In turning down the job they mentioned the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist for harshly criticizing fundamentalism.

When this episode percolated to the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the paper's cultural editor commissioned the caricatures. He wanted to see whether cartoonists would self-censor their work for fear of violence from Muslim radicals.”

How, pray tell, do you write a book to promote religious tolerance while at the same time breaking one of the taboos of the religion? It is like writing a children’s book about a tribe that has a taboo against photographs, and sending a photographer down to photograph them. A little honesty would be nice here about the real motives involved.

From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we learn that the children’s book author is Kare Bluitgen, who is described as living in an immigrant’s quarter and having immigrant friends. Three artists refused to draw Muhammed not simply because of Theo van Gogh, but, according to the FAZ, because they didn’t want to break the Islamic rule that forbids the prophet’s image. Since that taboo is fundamental to the whole issue, it is weird that Kleine-Brockhoff skirts around it.

The FAZ reports:

“It is really not an accident that it was the Jyllands-Posten that decided to take this step. For one thing, in its pronounced opinions in its columns and in its reader’s letter column it does not restrain itself. The left liberal Danish paper “Information” doesn’t hestitate to classify the Jyllands-Posten as the “faschist Jyllands-Pest” in which you find islamophobit witchhunts, while other papers in the western world are announcing their solidarity with the press in the name of freedom of opinion.”

And the Guardian reports

“Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.
The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.”

Now that a Danish paper dislikes Islam and deliberates ways of insulting the religion is well within the right of any paper. It is misleading, however, to speak airily of the freedom of opinion and leave the content of the opinion void.
As it happens, Denmark is, on the one hand, one of the Coalition of the Willing which has sent soldiers into Iraq, and on the other hand, going through a period of rejection with regard to immigrants. Now, when a major paper deliberately insults the religion of the country one’s soldier’s are occupying, it would seem prudent for the Prime Minister of that country to offer the kind of soothing pap that comes automatically out of the mouth’s of Bush and Blair’s representatives. And should – when government officials proclaim their horror of offending religious sensibilities, they are applying a convention – they aren’t legally restricting the domain of opinion. But Denmark’s p.m., whose party ran on an anti-immigrant platform, refused to do the conventional repair work. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen declined to meet Muslim foreign ministers in Copenhagen over the issue.

Max Weber draws the contrast between Recht (law) and Convention as a matter of boycotting. The violation of a convention engenders the chance that a boycott of some kind will take place. You lose a friend, or you lose a customer. You do repair work. Etc. Certainly convention concerning Christianity, in most Western countries, requires that ministers pretend to take, say, the Pope seriously. That the force of convention was not even powerful enough to lure Rasmussen, who has put Danish soldiers at risk, to do conventional repair work reveals a certain contempt for Muslims, or at least a weakness. And that contempt is pretty close to the surface in this dispute over freedom of opinion.
...

Of course, this isn’t all there is to the issue. I am obviously bending over backwards, here, to see things as they are seen by a Muslim. But I am not a Muslim. I’m not a Christian either, but I was, at one point, and I’ve spent my entire life in a community dominated by Christianity. I’ve had plenty of atheist, Jewish, and Buddhist friends and acquaintances, but of the people I’ve known who come from dominant Muslim communities, almost all of them have rejected Islam. In fact, the dirtiest joke I ever heard about Muhammed came from a Turk.
Which gets us to the ritual zigzag of these things. For surely there is something admirable in the papers of Europe publishing the cartoons in solidarity with the besieged Danish paper?

Well, there is. I think that the reaction in Europe is a lot more courageous than the reaction to the Satanic Verses back in the 80s, or the reaction to Death of a Princess, the documentary that the Saudi’s pretended was an insult to Islam. But there is something odd about simply reprinting the cartoons, since the majority of the readers of these papers are going to feel the sacrilege involved at second hand, as it were. As an intellectual apprehension. Why did the papers not intersperse the Muhammed series with some cartoons about Jesus, and about Moses – with the same kind of visceral dislike? Since convention, as Weber shrewdly remarks, rests on a sort of Pavlovian visceral response, the newspapers should try to translate that visceral response into terms that really do try the limits of freedom of opinion.

This, I think, is at the root of my tendency to see this issue with much more sympathy for the rioting crowds in Damascus or wherever. There is something hollow about an iconoclasm directed towards a religion one doesn’t believe in, or have any feeling for beyond dislike. And, on another level, towards a people who believe this religion who are, almost invariably, the poor working class in Denmark, Germany, France, etc. Insulting the god of the woman who cleans your toilet doesn’t strike me as one of the great blows for freedom. That you should legally be able to do it, and be guarded from any violent consequences for doing it by the state, I take to be self-evident. But spare me the story of faux martyrdom and the braving of conventions.

P.S. Since the Philadelphia Inquirer has had the courage to publish the Muhammed cartoons, may I humbly suggest testing the freedom of speech limits with another cartoon. In this one, Jesus is shown holding a baby. Jehovah is next to him with a match. A big grill is in front of them. The Jesus character goes, you light the grill, I’ll throw on the unbaptized infants. To make it funnier, Jesus can be grasping one of those big barbecue forks.

apologies

Yes – LI was hasty, yesterday, roundly condemning this administration. Today, we have to eat our words, because the Bush administration released a budget that is obviously a highly literate satire, on the order of Dead Souls or A Modest Proposal. Just as we were attacking Bush for boldness, he comes up with this truly postmodern classic, which can be enjoyed by the whole family.

There is, for instance, the halving of the deficit, which is achieved by pretending hundreds of billions of dollars just aren’t being spent. This in itself is a terrific satiric swipe at Enron’s accounting methods, which, by being adopted wholesale by the government, are exposed in all their ridiculousness.

Then there is the 6 percent increase for the military and the 3 percent decrease for education. Let’s see, the six percent raise is, what – 10 million per terrorist? 30? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as we all know that the war on terrorism is a wink wink job. The real battle is to get as much cash in the pockets of the defense industry as possible. And that education, so funny, so delicious. As somebody said, not long ago, we need to produce the best scientists and mathematicians to meet the challenges of the future – not! This made LI laugh until we had to change our clothes. It’s a bit of Lenny Bruce humor, a fuck you, America, but all in good fun.

Global warming? Addiction to oil? Future hurricanes? What me worry? There are priorities and then there are priorities. In the aftermath of Katrina, cutting the budget of the corps of engineers by some ten percent represents pure genius. The administration has always had a sharp eye for real time TV satire. Their version of it is to throw so much money at the wealthy that they go, literally, hog wild and do the darnedest, most unbelievable things – steal from poor Iraqis, cheat the government on defense ware for those laughable losers, the American soldier, and … and this is crème de la crème – load their own pockets as they ‘stabilize’ wages for their workers. Bye bye pensions is the motto of the kreative krewe known simply to the administration as the Pioneers. Sure, it isn’t pretty, but – just as in real tv – there are lessons to be learned among the laughs. Continuing this comedy feat and fiesta, the budget is loaded with tax breaks for the wealthy that will make your eyes water with laughter. An administration that has played one of the great practical jokes of all times – the medicare bill that forbids the government from dickering with the big pharma for lower prices, thus criminalizing efficiency – isn’t quite up to its old standard, but this budget tries in every way.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder how the locust became king! Like an alternate reality, like the confederacy winning the Civil war and rammng its small bore, pathological ideas down our throat, this budget season looks to be as spicy as anything we’ve ever seen.

The best part is coming up, as “earmarks are good” Boehner and his merry men dig in.

And the way the newspapers report this thing – pulling a face as serious as Buster Keaton’s as they report one lie after another – is also a tickle.

We loved this from the NYT:


“The plan includes $50 billion for covering the cost of military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan into the next fiscal year, although administration officials said last week that requests would be submitted soon for supplemental spending for the current year for the wars and for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The budget office released a new estimate saying that the deficit for the current fiscal year would be $423 billion, a record high, up from its midyear estimate of $341 billion. The new budget projects the deficit to fall to $354 billion in the 2007 fiscal year, and to $183 billion in 2010.”

What was it that the old Cold Warriors used to say about Pravda? I think they said something about it printing government lies, and being an example of totalitarianism, and yada yada yada. My how we used to laugh when the Soviet Union would say something one day and something totally contradictory the next day, and their official newspapers would just put it out there without blinking. My that Soviet Union was a corker.

political advise (caution, totally useless)

This is a waste of time, another useless political fantasia. But what the hell. We look like we are going to plunge into a prolonged contest in all venues between the Dems defending our civil liberties (meaning that they want to pass laws to take them away before the president does it unilaterally) and the Republicans defending our national security (can you look into the video camera, Osama? What’s the message for America again?)

Forgive me, I need some release.

The President’s newest and funniest defense of the NSA wiretappings is this: if we had had those wiretappings before 9/11, everything would have been different.

Now why doesn’t a Dem, one Dem, one little Dem, ask: how would things have been different? Would Bush have pressed the FBI? Directed the secretary of transportation to contact the airports? Done the type of things that, say, you do when you are warned that a terrorist attack is imminent?

Gee. It turns out that we were warned – or at least Bush was – that the chance was extremely high of terrorist attack. I suppose he wanted more info. Mohammed Atta’s address book. A map of New York city. Three years to think about it. After all, this is what Bush actually said about the memo he received on August 6, 2001:

"I read it and obviously was discomforted by the fact that Osama bin Laden hated America," Bush said. "But as I mentioned yesterday, we already knew that."

The farcical image of Bush as a bold leader, propagated by the press ever since we saw the real Bush, on 9/11, freeze and act with characteristic indecisiveness, is not so much political as psychopathological. It seems that the 9/11 attack hurt the country’s narcissism so deeply that we collectively -- or at least the media, on our behalf - decided that we have a bold, maybe even a reckless leader.

We don’t. We have a man with a character flaw as a leader. It isn’t a bad character flaw if, say, you are a bank teller. If you swing on a trapeze or lead a country supplied with 15,000 ICBM missiles, however, it can be deadly.

The flaw is this: Bush freezes up when meeting a crisis. We saw this plainly on 9/11. We saw this plainly with Katrina. And, I think, we saw this in the summer of 2003, when it became evident that Rumsfeld’s Iraq plan had failed and we needed new leadership if even a fifth of what Bush wanted to happen in Iraq was going to happen.

People who freeze up in crises do two things. First they lie. We know about the Katrina lies, Bush’s claim that nobody saw that the levees would bust when he had been informed 48 hours before Katrina that the levees would bust. We know about the 9/11 lies, the fight the Bush administration put up not to release the fact that Bush was informed, basically, that Al Q was ready to go soon. We know all about the lies in Iraq, from Mission Accomplished to the news about the thousand points of light in Iraq, an area in which American power is now pretty much irrelevant.

You'll notice that with Katrina, as with 9/11, Bush specifically flew away from the target area. This is a sad indication of the kind of behavior you would expect from someone who fails in crises. To use the military lingo, he doesn't have the guts to face up to these things.

The second thing people who freeze up in crises do is prolong. Having failed to address a situation at the crisis point, the person who freezes up can, by prolonging the situation, normalize it. A normalized bad situation melts the distinction between the moment of failure and all the failures that came afterward. So, for instance, it is normal for us to see Al Qaeda nesting in Pakistan, dabbling, according to the Bush people, in Iraq, blowing up a train station here, a synagogue there. It is so normal we don’t even think that Tora Bora was, uh, a fuckup, a massive fuckup, followed by the fuckup of not guarding the borders into Pakistan (lack of manpower being Rumsfeld’s m.o.), followed by the fuckup of allowing A.Q. and related Islamist groups to form a second power in Pakistan to the point where they are going to be that much harder to uproot. And of course the fuckup in Iraq, the prolongation of a pointless, pointless struggle. And the fuckup in New Orleans, the months of an emergency response that would have shamed Sri Lanka.

So, where’s the Dem to ask the simple question: okay, what would you have done with those wiretaps, Mr. President? Let’s hear it. Let’s hear the list. This ought to be good – a nice, big list of things that you do when you believe that you are in imminent danger of attack. Love to, love to hear it. Really. Take your time. Go on a vacation, perhaps, to get your bold thinking, freedom loving head around the idea.

Led by a contemptible putz who is opposed by a clueless bunch of political nitwits – America, circa 2006. Makes me feel all Walt Whitmanish inside.

ps -- surely someone will write LI to tell us that they had the famous San Diego apartment bugged -- that Bush's suggestion that they didn't is an error or a lie. Surely pursuing the minor fault relentlessly, dotting every i and beating the bushes for every bit of evidence, while letting the major fault -- the outstanding, public failures of leadership, intelligence, and responsibility -- go unquestioned, has been the whole sad pattern the past five years. I'll grant the President his buggings as a counterfactual. Again and again we swerve away from the obvious to forge our political weapons out of the esoteric. Since this has never, ever, worked, I guess the idea is: why not try the tactic one more time? Let me politely disagree, or more impolitely yell: fuck that. My idea is: hey, why don't we try to forge our weapons out of the obvious? Radical, eh?

does it work?

From Suite venitienne

Sophie Calle is a French conceptual artist. There’s a good article on Sophie Calle in the winter Cultural Geographies (“Sophie Calle’s art of following and seduction” by Janet Hand).

Here are some of Calle’s pieces:

Hotel, 1981

“On Monday, February 16, 1981 I was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me. On Friday, March 6 the job came to an end.”

Hand adds this detail: “The hotel, then, takes the form of a photographic and diaristic series describing her intimate encounters with the business and personal possessions of guests whilst working in the hotel.”

In The sleepers (1979) she photographed sleeping people.

In The address book (1983), “Calle used a ‘found’ address book to follow ‘virtually’ the man to whom the book belonged and whom, we are led to believe, she didn’t ‘know’. She visited people whose details were contained in the book, and photographed objects in some way connected to the man she was profiling and with whom she otherwise had no relation. Calle then published her work as ‘an instalment piece’ in the French national newspaper Liberation. It was in this project that Calle came most closely into conflict
with issues of privacy and rights. The man demanded a right of reply in the newspaper, we are told.”

Finally, in “Suite venitienne … she determined to follow a man she hardly knew (Henri B.) to Venice.” This was connected to a set of following pieces, like Twenty years later (2001), in which she asked a gallery owner, Emmanuel
Perrotin, to hire a detective to follow her. In The Shadow, 1981, she’d done the same piece, asking her mother to hire a detective to follow her.

In S.V., she writes:

“For months I followed strangers on the street _/ for the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took notes of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.
At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of the conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.”

Calle followed the man to Venice in a number of ways – for instance, she called all of the hotels in Venice until she found him. And she does eventually attract his attention. Henri B. probably knows about her reputation:


“When Calle encounters Henri B., when he recognizes her and prohibits her from taking his photograph in Venice, even when she follows him back to Paris by train, we are invited to ask what she wants from him. It is to the dramatized issues of consequence and judgement, and to the relation of judgement to aesthetics, that the chase demands our attention. Calle may conjure and preserve the idea of the work in the narrative of Suite ve´nitienne, but just as significantly, the narrative itself is irreducible to a self-referring statement in distinction from an authoring subject.”


Now, I love the descriptions of these pieces. I have immense respect for artists like Calle and Chris Burden, but I know that there is nothing so alienating and infuriating to even literary people than this kind of art. In fact, the first question (and least important) that is asked about such things is, is it art. This question was important in 1920, but just as certain currencies from the 20s have become mere curiosities (Mussolini’s lire, for instance), so, too, certain questions from that time have no exchange-value left. Much more interesting is: does this work? When Burden did a piece he called (as I recall) asshole, where he cuts his hair and buys a suit to look like an FBI agent, goes to a conference to which he has been invited, and answers all questions asked of him like an asshole, does that work?

The problem with conceptual art is the opening it gives to the critic. The art world suffers from the way in which critics have colonized the art world. Someone like Sophie Calle does her act, and collects the relics of it, and might even tell about it, but it is the critic that really conveys the work.

Art critics sometimes do a strange thing. Imagine going to your local club to listen to some band. Imagine a group of people getting out on the dance floor and announcing that you can only dance to this band in the following way, using the following gestures and steps. While that would not go over at a club, it often happens in the art world. Critics who are quite brilliant, like Rosalind Krauss, are also quite adept at doing this. If you read Art Forum, you will find article after article squeezing the work it talks about to death, as the critic fits himself into the art ‘space.’

I have an idea of the kind of demonic impulse to which Calle responds. One of her works is called The Wardrobe:

“I saw him for the first time in December 1985, at a lecture he was giving. I found him attractive, but one thing bothered me: he was wearing an ugly tie. The next day I anonymously sent him a thin brown tie. Later, I saw him at a restaurant and he was wearing it. Unfortunately, it clashed with his shirt. It was then that I decided to take on the task of dressing him from head to toe: I would send him one article of clothing
every year at Christmas.”

I once, as a joke, purchased several babilicous postcards in Florida, and then, as I was passing through a town in Mississippi, I looked up several names in the phonebook and wrote Missing you so much! heart, Candi, and sent them from New Orleans to those addresses. This might have been a cruel thing to do, I’ll grant you, but as a prank it worked extremely well. I strongly doubt I broke up anybody’s marriage, but surely I started a few dinner table conversations. Or perhaps these postcards never arrived, who knows?

Well, I have been pondering these things since my friend, D., sent me the invite to our mutual friend Thomas Glassford’s opening at the MUCA Campus of UNAM this spring. The opening is called Exquisite Corps, and the invite came with a critical epilogue that expounded in highly theoretical terms about the work without, actually, saying anything about the work whatsoever. The invite mentioned other of Thomas’ pieces, like Valley – “an upended ranch cot slit down the middle by a tin gutter” – the description of which I would bet the critical nabob got from Thomas himself. The shame of this is that the critical colonization of Thomas’ pieces really does nothing to help you see them. Quite the contrary. How many artists do I know who have to suffer being pimped out by a critic in order to be seen at all? It is a sad and inverted situation. And the worst of it is, nobody wants to talk about it. The artists can afford to alienate the critics if they are going to have any success – which depends on the critics. This is the sign of a rentier regime about to fall.

And the ones that do bitch are usually the most conservative -- they don't really give a fuck about colonization, they just want attention for another fatiguing go around about figuration a la Jed Perl.



This is the sign of a rentier regime about to fall. This isn't what Duchamp meant at all, at all...

house of cards, 4 br, 3 ba, 1/2 acre lot

Marty Feldstein is not an economist I particularly like – an old Reagan apparatchik – but he does have an interesting column in the Financial Times today. He poses a problem: why didn’t the oil increases spark an economic downturn?

He answers this by pointing to one unexpected benefit of Alan Greenspan’s bubble:
“The key to the economy's strength in 2004 and 2005 was that household saving declined dramatically while the price of oil rose. Household saving fell from 2.5 per cent of after-tax income in the third quarter of 2003 to a remarkable minus 1.8 per cent two years later. This 4.3 per cent shift of after-tax income was equal to a rise in consumer spending equal to 3 per cent of GDP.

In dollar terms, saving fell from a Dollars 205bn (Pounds 115bn) annual rate in the third quarter of 2003 to dissaving at a rate of Dollars 159bn two years later. This shift of Dollars 364bn in the annual rate of saving far outstripped the fall in income caused by the higher cost of oil. This fall in saving allowed households to raise consumption spending on non-oil goods and services while paying for the higher cost of imported oil.

The primary cause of this dramatic shift was the fall in interest rates and the resulting rise in mortgage refinancing. Homeowners who refinanced their mortgages took out cash and reduced their monthly payments at the same time. Much of the cash obtained by refinancing was spent on consumer durables, home improvements and the like. The lower monthly payments permitted a higher level of sustained spending on all non-durable categories.”

In spite of his randy Randian beginnings, Greenspan couldn’t have been more Keynesian in his policy over the last three years. One can argue that here, if anywhere, Keynes’ jibe that in the long term, we are all dead is justified. For really, those who point to the long term are in as much ignorance as anybody else as to the features of the long term. Who would have predicted, in 2001, that Exxon of all companies would make the greatest quarterly profit in corporate history five years down the road? The energy sector looked dead in the water back in those dear days when the afterglow of the New Economy powered by the Hi Tech Industry that was going to take everyone to Cisconian heights was the line still being pushed in the biz rags and newspaper columns.

There is a problem with turning savings into (oh glorious, English averse word) dissavings. Creditors have a bad habit of getting impatient with dissavings. Ask my landlord. The macro facts of the economy do show, pretty beautifully, how features emerge via turbulence in larger systems that are not caught in the causal net presupposed by linear thinking. That the American householder can both afford the Christmas presents and the SUV to truck them away from the mall she got them in is a piece of the jugglery of everyday life that should confound the petty prophets among us (among whom, of course, I include LI).

Feldstein points out that mortgages grew by 3 trillion dollars, to 7 percent of the GDP, from 2001 to 2004. His idea is that we are reaching a limit. And that as the limit is reached, further money for oil price increases is going to have to come from ceasing spending elsewhere. And that sounds logical.
“The powerful effect of mortgage refinancing on consumer spending was a very happy coincidence for the American economy at a time when oil prices were depressing consumers' real incomes. If oil prices were to rise again in 2006 or 2007, the adverse effect on consumers' real incomes would not be offset by increased mortgage refinancing. Mortgage refinancing has now peaked and is declining. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates again to counter the inflationary pressures that remain from the rise in energy costs. And individuals no longer have the large amounts of household equity against which to borrow.
A rise in the oil price could happen again at any time. There is little spare capacity in global oil production and oil demand is rising rapidly in China and other Asian countries. A shock that reduced the production or shipping of oil could drive its price sharply higher. Speculative forces could compound this problem. The US was lucky after 2003 to escape the contractionary effect of an oil price rise even without an explicit change in monetary or fiscal policy. It would not be so lucky if a big oil price increase happened again now.”

The only country that benefits more from that happy coincidence than the U.S. is, perhaps, Iran. While the hawks would love nothing better than to sink their talons into the hide of that country, Bush – not the world’s brightest bulb, but a man who sucked oil from his mother’s breast, so to speak – has, we imagine, an intuition that the dogs of war would definitely knock over the jugglery of peace. And that would knock down – to continue this riot of journalistic metaphors – the whole house of cards. A house that can definitely be resold next year for more than it was bought for last year!

the new civil libertarians

Chris Bertram has a very good take on the controversy about the Muhammed cartoons It nicely breaks down the hypocrisy involved in this sudden overflow of support for civil liberties. Myself, I am astounded by the sudden enthusiasm for freedom of speech by a crowd that has just been busily arguing that the Executive branch in the U.S. has a perfect right to listen to all our telephone conversations and read all of our email – but it turns out there is one right that is precious, and that is to show funny pics of Muhammed. All very well, too, to condemn those ultra-violent Islamists who murdered Theo Van Gogh. We are so with you, brothers and sisters!

B.. but how about the U.S. Military murder of Tariq Ayoub? Somehow, this topic seems not to launch a thousand impassioned blogs. And certainly the U.S. military, who investigated the U.S. military and found to its satisfaction that the U.S. military was doing a damn fine job, doesn’t figure on anybody’s list of terrorist threats to freedom of the press. Funny, Taras Protsyuk didn’t know that. Neither did Jose Couso.

One does get sick of the under the surface pretence that Muslims everywhere are the horrid murderers of innocent white Christians. Anybody who does the death counts know that the opposite is the case.

So, for those of us who support the provocations of a Theo Van Gogh, I’d suggest going to this site dedicated to getting the U.S. Military to conduct a real investigation, leading to a trial, about the murder of Jose Couso.

This is what Couso’s Mother has to say on that site, in part:

“My son was good at his job. He was no kamikaze, nor was he reckless. That is why he decided to stay in Baghdad; and because he was a careful person, starting on April 7 he stayed inside the Hotel Palestine, which was the headquarters for the international media, as your commanders knew full well.
There you murdered him, in cold blood. There was no fighting, so there is no excuse. But you, Philip Decamp, authorized it; you, Philip Wolford, gave the order, and you, Thomas Gibson, pulled the trigger. And the three of you knew you were killing innocent people, But you did it anyway. Damn you.”

As for Dima Tahboub, wife of Tariq Ayoub, well, what can you expect from a Muslim? A lot of them think their lives are as good as Christian lives. The nerve. Doesn’t understand the least thing about the world.

“Dima Tahboub, wife of the 35-year-old journalist, says she may take legal action, because "The report proves the cold-blooded murder of my husband.""America always claimed it was an accident. But I believe the new revelations prove that claim was false or at least trustworthy," the Daily Mirror reported her as saying. "I will seek legal advice in light of this new information to achieve justice," she added.

Ayyoub died on 8 April 2003, when his office on the west bank of the Tigris river in Baghdad was hit by at least two American missiles as he reported from the roof. That same morning US tanks fired at the Palestine Hotel, which was used by scores of journalists, killing two of them. The offices of Abu Dhabi TV, some 300 metres away from the Al Jazeera office, were also hit that day. Following the attacks the Pentagon said it would never intentionally target journalists.

Ayyoub was born in Kuwait to a Palestinian family who later moved to Jordan as refugees as a result of the Gulf War. Before joining Al Jazeera he worked as a producer for the APTN news agency and wrote for the English language newspaper The Jordan Times. While working as a journalist he was arrested so many times his family said they had lost count, but he was never charged and was always released soon afterwards. He had one daughter, Fatmeh, who was just one-year-old when he died.”
The CPA, when in power in Iraq, showed the might and idealism of the Western Civil liberties standard by paying to put lies in Iraqi newspapers while at the same time raiding and shutting down Muqtada al-Sadr ‘s Al Hawza newspaper because it printed, well, lies. But I am sure the pro-war contingent, who are bleeding profusely at the threats being faced by poor, poor Danish cartoonists, can see that there are two sides of everything, and you can’t exactly have a newspaper criticize an occupying force, can you? That stirs up violence.

Or go to Al Jazeera’s blog, Don’t bomb us. And search for it on Google, too. Give the NSA something to look at.

this I believe... oh yeah

Notes

Still more about the SOTU. LI stands for very little positive legislation, but we do believe strongly in one law. It should certainly be mandated that before every State of the Union Speech, the opening montage from Seven Beauties should be shown. No commentary from the commentariat, just the montage, those wonderful bombings, the destroyed cities, Hitler and Mussolini shaking hands, the fleeing masses escaping strafing of fighter planes, and that jazzy score, and the Italian chant with the English tag, oh yeah, on the end of every line ("The ones who don't enjoy themselves, even when they laugh. Oh yeah./ The ones who worship the corporate image, not knowing that they work for someone else. Oh yeah. /The ones who should have been shot in the cradle... Pow! Oh yeah. The ones who say 'Follow me to success, but kill me if I fail... so to speak.' Oh yeah.)

It would add a bit of reality to the theatre, blood to the abstract threats of blood. And we would know what it means when a country proclaims itself a force for good.

We hadn’t seen the film in years, and suddenly felt like seeing it again last night. It still has the old death magic, like a joke that gives you a heart attack. Oh yeah.

…

We did not celebrate Blair’s failure to revive the ye olde practice of the Auto de fe in LI the other day. Belated congratulations to the British for lighting that bill with a match and then stuffing it down the front of the odious P.M.’s pants.

Blair is a curious compound of the worst elements of the two ur-P.M.s, Gladstone and D’Israeli. He possesses Gladstone’s moral unctuousness, and D’Israeli’s unhinged adventurism. The morally vain rogue is not a common figure in literature, but Moliere pretty much patented the type with Tartuffe.

Here’s Lytton Strachey on the D’Israeli, Gladstone and Queen Vic:

Mr. Gladstone had been the disciple of her revered Peel, and had won the approval of Albert; Mr. Disraeli had hounded Sir Robert to his fall with hideous virulence, and the Prince had pronounced that he "had not one single element of a gentleman in his composition." Yet she regarded Mr. Gladstone with a distrust and dislike which steadily deepened, while upon his rival she lavished an abundance of confidence, esteem, and affection such as Lord Melbourne himself had hardly known.
Her attitude towards the Tory Minister had suddenly changed when she found that he alone among public men had divined her feelings at Albert's death. Of the others she might have said "they pity me and not my grief;" but Mr. Disraeli had understood; and all his condolences had taken the form of reverential eulogies of the departed. The Queen declared that he was "the only person who appreciated the Prince." She began to show him special favour; gave him and his wife two of the coveted seats in St. George's Chapel at the Prince of Wales's wedding, and invited him to stay a night at Windsor. When the grant for the Albert Memorial came before the House of Commons, Disraeli, as leader of the Opposition, eloquently supported the project. He was rewarded by a copy of the Prince's speeches, bound in white morocco, with an inscription in the royal hand. In his letter of thanks he "ventured to touch upon a sacred theme," and, in a strain which re-echoed with masterly fidelity the sentiments of his correspondent, dwelt at length upon the absolute perfection of Albert. "The Prince," he said, "is the only person whom Mr. Disraeli has ever known who realised the Ideal. None with whom he is acquainted have ever approached it. There was in him a union of the manly grace and sublime simplicity, of chivalry with the intellectual splendour of the Attic Academe. The only character in English history that would, in some respects, draw near to him is Sir Philip Sidney: the same high tone, the same universal accomplishments, the same blended tenderness and vigour, the same rare combination of romantic energy and classic repose." As for his own acquaintance with the Prince, it had been, he said, "one of the most satisfactory incidents of his life: full of refined and beautiful memories, and exercising, as he hopes, over his remaining existence, a soothing and exalting influence." Victoria was much affected by "the depth and delicacy of these touches," and henceforward Disraeli's place in her affections was assured. When, in 1866, the Conservatives came into office, Disraeli's position as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House necessarily brought him into a closer relation with the Sovereign. Two years later Lord Derby resigned, and Victoria, with intense delight and peculiar graciousness, welcomed Disraeli as her First Minister.”
This is Gladstone’s response upon hearing that the Conservative government had fallen, and Queen had sent for him to form a new government:

“Mr. Gladstone was in his shirt-sleeves at Hawarden, cutting down a tree, when the royal message was brought to him. "Very significant," he remarked, when he had read the letter, and went on cutting down his tree. His secret thoughts on the occasion were more explicit, and were committed to his diary. "The Almighty," he wrote, "seems to sustain and spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself to be. Glory be to His name."

The Victorian vernacular, which slid easily between laissez faire and the Almighty’s designs, is easy to make fun of, but at least in Victorian times it was not frivolous. Tony Blair is, however, deeply frivolous, a sort of cuckoo conservative in Labour’s nest, singing a song of Thatcher. We look forward to his further humiliating defeats in Parliament.
….
And now a little self advertisement for our editing, ghostwriting, and translating service. If you or someone you know is looking for a writing service, please tell them about us. Our link is RWG Communications, Thanks.

Fluff and Circumstances

So the president followed his bliss last night. I missed it. I no longer have the stomach to watch Bush go the nine rounds with the English language. The English language has the odds, the weight, and the experience, while the President takes the body blows and collapses at the end. What was once funny is now the kind of thing that some society to prevent cruelty to the animals should surely look into. I imagine he was heavily applauded for making the usual adolescent tough remarks about the rest of the world. I imagine he did not refer to Pioneer Jack Abramoff as a close and important friend. Was it last year, or the year before that the axis of evil shifted to steroids being used by switch hitters? Well, I imagine the steroid references were dropped. At least this year he has laid off proposing doing away with other New Deal and Great Society programs. Although proposing doing away with his own pill company entitlement program would actually garner a blip in the polls.

Instead of watching fluff, I did my liberal duty and went out to see Good Night and Good Luck, finally. Nice film. LI shares Clooney’s nostalgia for a world that did its business in Manichean black and white, a world in which young men tried to look like middle aged men instead of the reverse. As I wrote to my friend, T., the barbering in this movie awed me. Clooney is a sport of political nature – our last remaining Rod Serling liberal. It is a liberalism born of a horror of sci fi totalitarianism, one that dreams Egyptian dreams of huge underground headquarters in which generals fondle the buttons that would send up the missiles. No casting department could have found a better face for the phobic ultima than was borne by McCarthy. The actual footage was pretty amazing – by the end, as we know, McCarthy was simply plastered most of the time, but to listen to the permanent sneer in his voice, and to know that, like the music Josephine sang to the Mouse folk, this sound entranced the millions – this is Twilight Zone America.

Of course, the horror now is Cheney’s face, McCarthy as an android CEO. McCarthy’s most fervid followers, and the ones who supported him financially, were the Texas oil millionaires. The Hunts, the Murchisons. The line between Lincoln and Bush, so often pushed by the Weekly Standard crowd, is faint and almost invisible, but the line between McCarthy and Bush is a living thing, a culture that grew around fear of nationalized oil fields abroad (Buckley’s dad, of course, suffered from the nationalization of his oil fields in Mexico), and the fear, at home, that the oil depletion tax would somehow be attacked provided almost all the money to make conservatism a political force in this country.

PS -- after writing the above, I looked at the NYT coverage of the speech. Surely the Times has never had a worse D.C. bureau. The funniest report was by David Sanger, which contains such ludicrous Timesman's gems as this, from the second graf:

"The Texan who swept onto the national political scene six years ago talking about drilling for new energy supplies and preserving the American way of life vowed on Tuesday night to wean the nation from its reliance on oil." Which, of course, is not at all true -- Bush made some inane remarks about lessening U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil, as if petroleum were not a fungible product. And of course Bush has made the hydrogen engine pledge before, and it has gone to that magic place where all the toothfairies deposit all the babyteeth.

Or this: "It was, in short, a speech rooted in some harsh global and political realities, and one unlikely to rank among Mr. Bush's most memorable. Instead of evoking the grand ambitions that have suffused his presidency since the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush emphasized the familiar and the modest."

I wonder how Sanger ranks the most memorable. No doubt they will be carved in stone on some stelae after Bush retires from office to a job he is actually qualified for: brush-cutting. The NYT decision that Bush will invariably be described as bold, or some synonym, creaks and moans with irreality. Meanwhile, we boldly never actually won the war we started out to win, as Osama bin Laden turns himself into an independent video producer. What a sad and shameful spectacle "swept in" six years ago, and what complete putzes report on it.

PPS h
Just so you know how the D.C. correspondents work, Froomkin’s column is about how the Bush white house chews up the speech and spits it into each little journalistic maw, so it can be re-spit into the pages of the newspaper. I say, cut out the middleman and have the White House press secretary write those analyses of the speech in the NYT:

Journalists are not exactly transparent about how much advance knowledge they have of the president's speech before he gives it.

As usual, the press yesterday got the full text of the speech an hour before delivery. Bush himself hosted an off-the-record lunch for network anchors.
And some six-and-a-half-hours before delivery, White House counselor Dan Bartlett spoke to the press in great detail about the speech for almost an hour.

la vie francaise

"The periodical press has been, as is its nature to be, only an instrument of disorder and sedition. . . . The press has thus disseminated disorder into the most upright minds, shaken the firmest convictions, and produced in the midst of society, a confusion of principles that yields to the most sinister attempts. Thus by anarchy of doctrines, it prepares anarchy in the state." – Report to the King, July 25, 1830, from Spectacular Realities : Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris by Vanessa Schwartz..

The story in Bel Ami is pretty simple. It is another story about a man rising to social success using the instruments of capitalism. This story, in an English novel, would be about the ‘natural’ rise of this man, through either a death (an inheritance) or sex (a marriage). In France, death and sex are wrenched from their natural poles – they are manipulated in one way or another. The English illusion that the peculiar stratifications of class respond to a natural order is, in France, a form of nostalgia for an époque when that was true. This is not to say that the rentier has no place in French literature. However, the great French novelists do not take a ceremonial authorial attitude towards the rentier, as the English novelists do. If I were to go about this in a Hegelian way, I’d probably posit Henry James’ work as the great synthesis of the two attitudes…

But I digress. In Bel Ami, an ex colonial soldier named Georges Duroy rises through the ranks of a newspaper, La Vie Francaise, on the way to becoming the tres rich husband of Suzanne Walter, the boss’ daughter. Duroy’s rise as a journalist is remarkable insofar as Maupassant portrays him as barely literate. But it turns out that, just as today, with its Novaks and Barnes and TV pundits, illiteracy is no bar to the ambitious man who doesn’t mind having his articles ghostwritten for him, and who realizes that the power of the pen is virtual – the menace disguised in the ability to disseminate “news,” - rather than actual, the virtuosity of the exercise. To the right character, a vista of profitable entries unscrolls before the rolling eye. That journalism is related, on the one side, to literature, and on the other side, to blackmail, has been abundantly revealed by the Plame scandal, even as it is unconsciously sensed by your average householder.

It isn’t only Duroy who uses his blackmailing propensities to get ahead: the owner of La Vie Francaise has set himself up in order to tout certain speculations and dowse others. The growth of news gathering around this central premise is a happy accident.

As the quote at the head of this post indicates, the very idea of a free press was a liberal idea in the nineteenth century. Bel-Ami was published in 1885, four years after the press laws were radically liberalized, allowing the “penny press.” The association between liberalism and the press was forged in the same process that brought about the extension of suffrage, the growth of unions, and the basic plan of what we’ve grown used to as the liberal state. This, of course, includes growth in the state’s military. Duroy’s original entry into LVF stems from his having served in Algeria. The imperialist effect appears at this moment, and not by some coincidence. Comically, the account of his adventures in Algeria is put together by Madame Forestier. After the party at which Duroy’sa stories about Algeria had attracted the attention of the proprietor of LVF, “M. Walter, Deputy, Financier, a man of money and affairs, a Jew from Southern France,” Duroy spends days trying to write an account of his experience – all in vain. He takes the task to be the same as the writing of an exposition in high school. It isn’t, of course. As Maupassant realized, the narrative of the news story calls upon the same narrative intelligence that flows into novels.

Duroy’s real talent is the manipulation of his dick. While Maupassant doesn’t go into the apocalyptic bedroom details, Duroy’s travels from the bed of one rich woman to another is carried on at the same time that he is wrestling with the finer points of journalistic ethics. Eventually, the two story lines converge in Duroy’s marriage to the attractive, mysterious Madam Forestier.

Monsieur Forestier is the editor of La Vie Francaise, and Duroy is inducted into the service of the newspaper by the whim of Forestier inviting him to the party at which he met the publisher. This is another modern note – for haven’t we seen editors and publishers lavish their care on some of the more dubious specimens of the newsgathering trade, recently? In Judy Miller’s case, there is even a slight scent of the boudoir that follows her from story to story – much as in the case of Duroy.

LI has, of course, been having some fun playing with parallels. But, more seriously, the existence of both the fictional LVF and the more factual NYT and WAPO both depends, essentially, on a particular act of consumption: being read. So if we take Singh, et al.’s nodes seriously, we should be looking at hierarchies of readership. Singh thinks of these as marketing relationships. I like the idea that these are reading constituencies. Still, what we have with the LVF, as with any newspaper, is:
1. The readership who subscribe to or buy the paper.
2. Institutional agencies that act as "guardians" of the marketplace, or censors.
3. Advertisers and others with financial stake in the paper.
4. And finally, the “noncommercial intermediaries that act as independent gatekeepers” – these are the readers of power, so to speak. The operate both as the subset of the readers (1) and as the readers to whom the papers producers go before the news appears. In terms of court societies, such as D.C., readers 4 become enmeshed in the news in a peculiar way, one which separates the image of the newspaper from its reality more and more as the newspaper becomes more and more powerful.

The ghost of these readers haunts every news story. One of the things Maupassant saw very well is that the act of writing is not, in the newspaper, independent of the readership constituencies. This is not the worry about whether a particular piece would sell or not. That worry is but one of a set. Right at the root of writing is a grand division of the seemingly indivisible writer – the text that eventually appears, with his byline, its production, its processing through the editorial system, its placement on the page, and the feedback it gets are all parts of a system that displaces the writer from the defining act – the writer is the one who writes – and turns it into another act – the writer is the one who ends up with the byline. This radically subverts the image of the writer as the hermit of the highest form of art. Maupassant knew all about that hermit – after all, he was related to Flaubert and an intimate of his circle.

That the news is, actually, an act of belief rather than of fact – “newness” being a judgment rather than an observation – disseminated by writers who aren’t writers makes the press a very strange locus of anxieties about what is and what isn’t authentic in liberal culture. Even odder, though, is the fact that freedom of the press, which emerges as part of the liberal program, so quickly develops tools that are seized by the right. In fact, the radical right in the twentieth century habitually used the media to achieve political goals, while the “liberal” media has been driven, in its quest for authenticity, to deny its essential liberalism.

Notes

At the moment, in the street outside my window actors are strolling around, clothed in what looks like some vintage 70s gear. The trucks showed up Saturday. The dressing truck, I suppose. A truck from which wires extend. A house up the street has black paper tacked up on the front, and cameras in the yard. In the back yard, this morning, there was a picnic atmosphere.

As far as I can tell, there are no name stars – although I might have just missed them or not recognized them in the cruel natural sunlight. Moviemaking seems to consist largely of people wandering up and down with cell phones held to their ears, making self conscious dialogue. The best thing I’ve heard so far was a young woman saying they have to be naked in this scene. Both of them.

I’m not sure what I dislike more: the businessman’s approach to cell phones, which is basically to carry on in public spaces by an astonishing immersion into the mechanics of private conversation – yelling, a lot of “fuck” this and that, and an imperious tone – or the actor’s more self-conscious use of the cell phone as a theatrical prop. I am pretty sure that the cell phone is not my kind of technological advance. In the old days, you could pretty much bet that a man yelling to himself in the street was off his med pac. Now, you can pretty much bet he has one of those hard to spot cell phone gadgets. The pod people aspect of wires coming out of people’s ears also rather scares me. But I am sure that these aren’t pod people…

I’m pretty sure…

If they were pod people, there’d be weird things happening in the land. Cities would flood, and nobody would respond, or they would respond like zombies after valium overdose. Nations would be invaded for reasons nobody could tell. Governments would unilaterally claim the right to eavesdrop on you, spy on your computer use, and pry into your correspondence. All of these would be symptoms of a pod person invasion, right?

Never happen.

…

Anyway, I asked a good looking blonde gaffer (I imagine she was a gaffer, which I’ve always thought was Hollywood for go-fer) what this movie was about. She told me it was about a man who is on the skids. Wow, and they are filming it in my neighborhood. Makes me feel very South Bronxish.

more fun ...

I’m going to do something different …

I planned to pick through the recent controversies at the WAPO over the ombudsman’s remarks about Abramoff, and the response to those remarks by readers and blogs, and the rather astonishing response in turn by various WAPO appartchiks. But then I thought, that’s no fun.

The point is to try to get a half nelson on the growth of media criticism as a form of politics. LI wanted to use the article by Singh, et al, to complicate, complexify, lye and dye the matter of media, where at one time we made our bread and where, even now, we keep the sly hand in – today, for instance, we should have something in the Austin Statesman. Or is that going to be next week? And something in the Raleigh News and Observer.

But that seems all so boring. Instead, why not segregate out that stuff from Singh et al (and yes, we do like writing Singh et al – it’s a Here Comes Everybody moment) about the constituencies and then apply it to a paper we know more about than WAPO – La vie francaise, the fictional paper in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. While Maupassant, who worked for Gil Blas and a number of papers, backed away from claiming that La vie francaise represented any particular paper – it was, instead, he wrote, an “agency for political cheats and stock market skimmers” – we think that the paper, with its portraits, its strong editorial positions creating the framework in which stories appear, its lazy, crooked, arrogant journalists paying off concierge to get tips about celebrities – we think that it is exactly the type of thing that is hidden under the ultramodern Teflon sheathing of contemporary journalism, with – in WAPO’s case – the role of Madame Forestier, the wife of the editor of the VF, being played by Sally Quinn, the wife of the former editor of WAPO, Ben Bradlee. And just as Madame Forestier is smart enough to ghostwrite the articles glorifying the French colonial effort, Quinn was smart enough and slimy enough to glorify Chalabi and thereby put him into play as our kind of crook, our kind of ruthless subaltern that would steal his nation blind and send the proceeds to the US, in the corridors of D.C. power.

Next post … or the next after that – will continue this theme.

Enron, the Washington Post, Oprah

“On August 27, 2002, the LAUSD board voted unanimously to ban the sale of soft drinks on its campuses, which included 677 schools with 748,000 students.” Which is the center of a case study on trust done by Jagdip Singh, Jean E. Kilgore, Rama Jayanti, Kokil Agarwal and Ramadesikan Gandarvakottai and published in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

Actually, there are two case studies described in “What Goes Around Comes Around: Understanding Trust--Value Dilemmas of Market Relationships,” but the Coke case is more fascinating to me, simply because Coke’s struggle to retain its “pouring rights” in schools was a sorta typical 'we want to own your soul" corporate ploy. As the authors put it:

“Although Coke attracts a wide variety of consumer segments, our focus is the youth segment, especially school-going children. Children ages 5-14 spend $35 billion each year and influence the spending of approximately $200 billion annually (Harvey 2000; Rosenberg 2001). In an aggressive effort to reach school-going children, Coke entered into exclusive 5-10 year contracts that involved large, up-front, and distributed payments to school districts over the contract period. In return, the schools stocked their vending machines exclusively with the company's products and guaranteed exposure to the company's advertising in schools. Referred to as "pouring rights," these contracts include a comprehensive strategy to attract children with logos on school equipment, Channel One, and the Internet, as well as advertising, contests, free samples, and coupons (Nestle 2002, p. 202). As Coke's spokesperson noted, "Our strategy is to put soft drinks within arm's reach of desire and schools are one channel we want to make them available in" (Pear 1994, p. A15).”

In order that the arm’s reach of desire would be just in dollar distance of the third grade math class, Coke would grant school districts money – and in fact set up very cute programs to get the school districts (who were, in the nineties, busy putting up signs that read “drug free zone”) to actually push the stuff on the kiddies.

“A particularly troublesome aspect of pouring-rights contracts for parents and consumer advocates was the bonus incentives tied to soda sales (Kaufmann 2001). For example, Coke offered the schools a commission of 30% for each soft drink can sold compared with 15% for each noncarbonated drink sold (Day 2003). Higher commissions for soft drink sales coupled with bonus incentives for exceeding quotas resulted in many schools' initiating their own aggressive efforts to boost soft drink consumption on school premises. For example, in 1999, a widely publicized memo from a Colorado school administrator who signed himself "The Coke Dude" admonished the school district for not doing its fair share to attract more funds and offered prizes of $3,000, $15,000, and $25,000, respectively, to his elementary, middle, and high school principals. His memo read:
We must sell 70,000 cases of product … at least once during the first three years of the contract. If we reach this goal, your school allotments will be guaranteed for the next seven years…. If 35,439 staff and students buy one Coke product every other day for a school year, we will double the required quota. Here is how we can do it…. Allow students to purchase and consume vended products throughout the day…. I know this is "just one more thing from downtown," but the long-term benefits are worth it. (Bushey 1999, p. 1)”

Well, with Coke dudes in various districts, everything seemed to be working when the Gov'mint, and parents looking down at their children growing fat as pigs and insulin deficient, started coming around. What Singh, et al. were trying to trace is the network of trust nodes, as they call them, that activated as Coke was shoved out of the neighborhood of some lucrative little desiring units.

“… we approach a firm's diverse market relationships through a lens of simultaneity and interactivity. Specifically, we draw on the work of Drumwright (1996), Hutt, Mokwa, and Shapiro (1986), Menon and Menon (1997), and Wilkie and Moore (1999) and focus on four nodes of a firm's key market relationships: (1) consumers who are, have been, or will be end users and/or buyers of a firm's products/services; (2) regulatory and institutional agencies that are entrusted by society to act as "guardians" of the marketplace; (3) commercial intermediaries that participate in vertical arrangements with the firm to create time and place value for the latter's products/services; and (4) noncommercial intermediaries that act as independent gatekeepers and/or activists and thus influence access (e.g., parents of schoolchildren, media, scientific community) and/or provide value through information (e.g., consumerist agencies, activist organizations) to end users and buyers. A distinctive aspect of our study is that we extend previous research by examining explicitly how a firm's market relationships across the preceding four nodes intersect and interact.”

I like the authors’ model, even if it does lead to pretty complex mappings of the ‘diverse market relationships…” They trace the various factors that went into the LA school districts decision using the lens of trust, and in particular the way the sugar lobbyists and their allies in the food industry tried to filibuster legislation that would ban or regulate Coke and other sweets from being sold in schools. Coke, in 2001, began to realize it had a huge problem on its hands, and so was backpedaling from exclusive pouring rights contracts – but its bottlers were angry in turn, since they made a lot from those school venues in a market that had long reached saturation.

….
All of which brings us to the issue of media trust. LI has long maintained that the media fallout from the great media depression of 2001-2004 has concentrated way too much on a simple quantitative explanation: it was all an advertising shortfall, the result of the Net crash. We think that is bs. In fact, the pumping strategies that had fed the market in the late nineties was assiduously abetted by the media. I was looking back to newspaper and magazine articles about Enron, thinking of putting up a couple of where are they now posts for the likes of Rebecca Marks, and I was amazed, again, to be reminded about what was being published back in the nineties. For instance, I found something called Success Magazine – I haven’t checked to see if it is still around – and it published an article in Success magazine 1998 extolling “Visionaries. (profiles of five innovative business leaders) (includes related article on eight visionary entrepreneurs)” Of the five visionaries Stephen Rebello was awestruck by, one has now gone to jail and one, Bernie Ebbers, is almost certainly going to jail. And of course, where would visionaries be in the 90s without Ken Lay and Jeff S?

“Kenneth Lay CEO, Enron Corp. Houston, Tex. Number of employees: 14,000 worldwide Revenue: More than $13 billion yearly Lesson: One good idea can break the stranglehold of a monopoly
Most of us grew up with this impression: Flick on a light switch or fire up the furnace, and you're trafficking with a friendly monopoly -- the local utilities company, regulated by the fed. After all, what were our alternatives? A battery pack and a cache of firewood?
Kenneth Lay wanted to rearrange all that. In 1985 the former deputy undersecretary for energy of the U.S. Department of Interior helped forge Enron Corp. from two gas-pipeline firms. In short order, Lay pushed Enron to became something bigger -- a gas-marketing company that, by the '90s, was servicing Argentina, India, and the Philippines. With deregulation fervor brewing, Lay envisaged expanding to exploit an even bigger potential gold mine: freemarket electricity.
Open to competition the nation's $215 billion retail-electricity market? Sell electricity directly to homeowners, businesses, and industrial users? Sounds like a great idea -- unless, of course, you're a deeply entrenched utilities supplier.
"We simply made a commitment to providing consumer choice and competition for retail natural gas and electricity, much like what we've seen in the telecommunications industry," asserts Lay, who manages to sound like an underdog David tackling a monopolistic Goliath despite his power company's output's recently having jumped by 286 percent in one quarter alone.
What took him, md others, so long? "The electricity utilities, which, by the nature of their business, are very skilled at working the political regulatory process," he fires back, like a born zealot. "Few of the larger electricity facilities are pushing for consumer choice and competition."
Okay, so the gloves are off for a fight to die finish, but once the dust settles, how will die services provided by Lay and other free-market suppliers be any different?
The differences between a market and a monopoly will finally mean innovation," he explains, with contagious enthusiasm. "Consumers are going to save $60 million to $80 billion a year, more than $200 million a day. We won't use antiquated analog meters, and there'll be no more guys jumping over fences and fighting dogs to read meters. Digital meters and instantaneous readings will mean that consumers can start making choices as to when to turn on the washing machine or die dishwasher, taking advantage of lower rates that can save them 40, 50 percent."
I’m sure the people of California appreciated that.
But it wasn’t just fly by nights like Success. Fortune, in 1996, published perhaps one of the unintentionally funniest tongue baths of all Lay’s pleasure centers. It begins with that hoary but always good profile grabber, the CRISIS. In this one, our intrepid Lay is on the ski slopes when disaster seems to threaten:
“Kenneth Lay skied down Ajax Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, on a cold dark afternoon last December, blissfully unaware that the stock of his Houston-based energy conglomerate was taking an even steeper plunge. The Enron chairman returned to his vacation home on Roaring Fork River to find an urgent message from President and Chief Operating Officer Richard Kinder: "We've got a major problem, and we've got to talk."
That afternoon, Enron's stock had lost 2 7/8 points, or roughly $750 million in market capital, amid rumors that the company's natural gas marketing arm, Enron Capital & Trade Resources, was shorting the market even as the January futures contracts expired and a pre-Christmas cold snap was sending prices up the chimney. The crisis of confidence was compounded by rumors that Jeffrey Skilling, the 42-year-old wunderkind chairman of Enron Capital & Trade, had been led off the company trading floor in handcuffs.”

Imagine that. And of course the crisis, here, is all about stock prices. Which it might have behoved the author of the article to ponder.

These and a zillion other articles not only got things wrong – they actually got in the way of getting things right. They obstructed rationality and made skepticism into a “contrarian” stance – when of course skepticism is just the way one should approach a narrative involving a lot of money and people with an interest in skewing your perception of the narrative in a certain way.

The business press articles percolated through the four nodes of Singh, et al.'s article in peculiar and depressing ways…

About which, more tomorrow.

the pre-game report

On the eve of the Enron trial, LI watched the Smartest Guys in the Room yesterday. And we scanned the Economist tout sheet of the prosecuted and the let off. Of course, as we know, corporate law is designed, basically, to allow the governing class to rob people without the expense and fuss that comes from having to buy pistols and wave them in various strangers faces. That the prosecution has to prove an epistemological point to the jury – viz, that Skilling and Lay knew they were committing a crime by signing off on various deals to conceal Enron’s debt while pumping its stock, thus making it a crime – is funny in itself, like one of Zeno’s paradoxes – how can you prove someone knowingly committed a crime when the crime depends on knowingly committing it?

If I decide to knock somebody down, steal their credit cards, and use them, the police don’t have to bother convincing the jury that I knew I was committing a crime. But the more money one has, the more murky the line between the criminal and the legal becomes. Law is where class issues can no longer be latent. If they could, the governing class would simply have two sets of laws, one for them and one for the rest of us. That has practically been achieved by Congress and your state legislature, anyway, but they put both those laws together in one lawbook.

Of course, far be it from LI to discourage entrepreneurship. We surely don’t want to do that.

In LI’s opinion, Lay’s defense, here, should be watched carefully by the employee and investors he ripped off, since the defense is basically that he collected his total what, 400 million from his time at the company by doing one of the most pisspoor jobs ever concocted by a timeserving CEO supermensch. Useful info to have at the civil trial – although it is funny, corporate shills complain all of the time of useless due diligence laws and corporate greenmail by greedy lawyers, but outrageous fraud never seems to fall under these laws.

This, of course, was one of the things Enron, the movie, chose not to concentrate on, which is too bad, although understandable. They made the decision to be serious and not to juice up their account with the effects of unearned wealth on Enron’s bright lights. But … iIt wasn’t that the sex and money story line was peripheral to what happened at Enron – it was central. Rich Kinder, whose resignation moved Skilling into the top spot at Enron, resigned because he was having an affair with Ken Lay’s secretary – and Lay didn’t like it, although of course his second wife was his previous secretary, with whom he’d had an affair until he divorced his first and married her. They actually interviewed Amanda Martin for much of the Smartest Guys in the Room without ever explaining that she had a pretty well publicized affair with Ken Rice, one of the great looters at Enron – a dealmaker whose time as the head of the Enron Broadband division was one of the great jokes of the company. He spent more time, by all accounts, worrying about getting ever new motorcycles on Enron expense accounts “for” the division than he did about anything so mundane as the business itself, and what did he carry away from those grueling, three hour days? 53 million, more or less. It is very hard making decisions about which motorcycle your divison will use as its motorcycle symbol, as we all know. That is why we have to pay our upper management so well. They are so, well, smart.

Skilling actually is going to face the hottest time about the Broadband scam, which was a more than usually egregious goldbricking effort – a scheme that depended the synergy between Enron’s pipes and optical fiber, don’tcha know, and how all those easements and that infrastructure put Enron in the primo position to wire every household in America and pump in the videos.

And we are also all going to OZ on my balloon…

According to Elkind and Bethany McClean's must-read (if you care about Enron, you have to accept that tired cliché in the case of two reporters who became central to the Enron unwinding) in this week’s Fortune, Rice and Causey are going to lighten the prosecutorial task as they have made deals to keep them from spening too much time away from the various millions that were left over from the fines. In the case of white collar law, unlike, say, bank robbery, you get to keep a considerable portion of your loot. We will see, although the preliminaries don't look good -- the government should combat completely the idea that this case is too complicated. Any housewife or bowling alley attendent knows how earmarked money works. The prosecutors should look to seed the jury with the divorced, because what Enron did is, on a grand scale, what many a husband seeks to do in divorce cases -- hide assets. In this case, negative assets. Lay, unlike HealthSouth’s Scrushy, is not a personable man – he is an arrogant prick, and is seemingly even unaware that he is an arrogant prick. He is the same man who used the Enron corporate jet to shuttle his kids to the French Riviera like it was a taxi-cab, all of course on the company ticket. Well, you have to do things like that, as any economist can tell you, to align the interests of the truly brilliant management with the company. Economists in the middle ages made the same kind of arguments for droit de seigneur. Economists exist to excuse the inexcusable – theologians of the pathomarkets.

ps – there are couple of warnings to take to Smartest Guys in the Room One is that there is a gaping hole in the political story told in the movie. The hole is the hand in glove relationship of Enron and the Clinton administration. The Hollywood affection for the Elvis president makes this kind of thing, apparently, hard to see. Simply put, the waiver by Wendy Gramm that allowed Enron to operate in the energy market largely without regulation was continued in the Clinton years even as it became obvious that that Enron was operating as a bank. The India deal became an issue between the U.S and India, as Clinton’s Commerce department, under Ron Brown, put pressure on India to cooperate with Enron, even as it became apparent that Enron had built the equivalent, in energy terms, of the Spruce Goose in India. The neo-liberals at Treasury and Commerce made it very hard for Latin American governments to resist privatizing water, for instance, which was another large Enron project – under Rebecca Mark, Enron ended up owning Buenos Aires Water. And to treat Gray Davis as the martyr of the brownouts is to understand nothing of the (legally) peculating Dem administration which put through the deregulatory program. Alas, in a discourse in which the only sides allowable are Clinton and Bush, how a company like Enron operates is essentially hidden. Maybe that is the reason for the pseudo-division? That energy should have been privatized in the first place, or deregulated, was unquestioned, even though the reasons for it were clearly either untrue or unproven. Almost all energy deregulation feathered in large, sometimes absurdly large, provisions for energy companies that had crippled themselves building unnecessary, expensive nuclear power plants – another boondoggle that went by the name of synergy and that energy execs love to foist off on gullible populations, and not only Iranian ones.

The second is more puzzling. While the film explains mark to market accounting, it doesn't really explain why it didn't work at Enron. While it is true that the way Enron used it was not good, mark to market accounting does have some good effects in theory -- for instance, it smooths out turbulence markets in goods, like natural gas, in which turbulence can act as a bar to use. The problems that can come with mark to market accounting -- massaging the numbers -- were aggravated not by the accounting itself, but by the parallel set up of the "incentive" structure. Dealers at Enron gained bonuses not on real profits, but on book profits. Enron basically screwed itself out of the advantage it could take from mark to market accounting by distributing benefits, asymmetrically, to the management. This is why Rebecca Mark, who, conservatively, cost the company 1 to 2 billion dollars with the massive losses in India and from the water purchases, could cash out with 84 million dollars, and Ken Rice could run the broadband division, that lost 30 million, and gain options worth 30 million. In essence, the company set up an incentive structure in which the incentive was to cheat the company.

And of course the dealers proceeded to bleed Enron. Something like 1.3 billion was taken out of it by execs in the last two or three years, according to Robert Bryce.

Continuing from yesterday…

Wilson finds few direct criticisms of road building. But she does find one, and she contrasts it with the standard argument:

“Few outright critiques of road building can be found. One that stands out
is Fairhead’s (1992) analysis of the destructive effects of road-building in Eastern Zaire. There, he argues, roads represent ‘paths of authority’ and need to be understood as qualitatively different from the flow of goods and people that take place along local pathways. ‘From colonial times, roads were associated with the exercise of power by the state or the chiefs; forced labour was recruited to build them, personal movement along them was taxed and controlled and indigenous land near them was expropriated for plantations and mission stations’ (Fairhead, 1992: 21). In the current phase of roadbuilding financed by the World Bank, relations of power and violence have not changed; indeed, Fairhead claims, roads have further depleted and impoverished a region already suffering acute economic decline. This argument drawing on political economy has strong resonance in the Andes. But more common in the literature are analyses drawing an opposite conclusion. Porter (2002), in a study of off-road villages in sub-
Saharan Africa, emphasizes the human costs of isolation and difficulties faced by women and men who live ‘in a walking world’, unable to access services available at rural centres or make their voices heard in local politics. And at a regional level, as Bebbington (1999: 2022) notes, when seeking to account for instances of agricultural intensification and other forms of livelihood transition, ‘access becomes perhaps the most critical resource of all if people are to build sustainable, poverty alleviating rural livelihoods’.
Clearly, when rural producers must compete in domestic and export markets they are penalized when transport costs are excessively high.”

In these cases, the question of the penetrative power of the road, and who benefits from the “opening up” of territory performed by the road, doesn’t really distinguish road types from one another. They flow from some central, translocal authority, and are considered from the point of view of that authority. But there is another way in which roads operate as tools to close off territory. In Austin, you see this in the way a interstate highway, I-35, provides a barrier between East Austin – dangerous, black and Hispanic – and central and west Austin – which, since the African-American neighborhood in Tarrytown was pretty much liquidated in the sixties, is generally white and middle to upper class. This kind of barrier is made possible by the relative lack of transportation on the east side – the lesser number of motor vehicle owners, the greater number of bus riders, etc.

But Wilson is more concerned with what you might call the functional economy of roads – what not having and having roads can mean to a community. The community she studied, in Peru, from 1994 onwards, is a sad case of road lucklessness. In the eighties, as she gathered from memories of people in the hamlet of Cayesh, the world was defined like this:

“No roads connect the hamlets to the world outside; cayashinos must walk some 50km to 60 km south to reach the paved road to Tarma, or 25 km to 30 km north to reach a dirt road leading up the Ulcumayo valley to the high mining centres.”

The six hundred some inhabitants used pack animals to take their produce to Tarma. But the more well to do also began to desire schooling for their kids, and – operating just as a liberal like me would hope that they would operate – they took their kids to Tarma, too, to be educated. The road to Tarma had opened up the place to the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the world was kind. The Cayashinos were considered second rate, savage Indians. They learned enough to know what this meant. And they learned about resistance. They came back and formed the support groups around which Sendero Luminoso centered.

“Following the invasion of some 200 militants, municipal and community authorities were disbanded, the population prohibited from moving without authorization, and documents of identification confiscated. Several comuneros were killed and the few families who managed to slip away forfeited their lands, livestock and household goods that were distributed amongst the poor. Militants took over as authorities and organized frequent political meetings where they preached that the aristocratic state had deliberately neglected to attend to community needs; the state had treated them with disdain and transformed them into las comunidades mas olvidadas (‘the most forgotten communities’).”

After a year, disaster struck, in the form of an army attack that scattered the Cayeshinos, many of whom emigrated to the city. And it wasn’t until the mid nineties that the hamlet’s population started coming back. They came back to find that most of their land had been claimed by another hamlet. They came back to a shattered system of exchanges. And again, in response to this, they did something hearteningly liberal – they decided they really needed a road.

After five years of intense campaigning, a road plan for Cayash was approved in 1998 by the Ministry of Transport in Lima and a three year construction programme began. The state undertook to contribute technical assistance and heavy machinery while local government provided fuel and Cayash unskilled labour. The project document’s preamble made the political orientation clear. The road would: (i) allow the substitution of traditional systems by new modern techniques of cultivation and livestock raising;
(ii) provide access to credit; (iii) allow greater control by entities of the state; (iv) offer capitalists access to known reserves ofmineral wealth; (v) facilitate an intensive training of peasant producers; (vi) allow an increase in productive infrastructure; and (vii) make possible the establishing of a new socioeconomic structure in the region. What is presented here is a familiar picture of colonization directed from outside, a vision far removed from the social justice and recuperation that the struggling Cayash authorities had in mind. By 2001, with 15 kmof the 50 kmcompleted, the road works stopped. Funds had run out, charges of embezzlement circulated and following the ignominious fall of
Fujimori, the Ministry of Transport refused to be bound by any moral obligation
to finish what the earlier corrupt administration had started.”

This is not a happy story on any level. Theoretically, the road that was supposed to make the territory legible to the state, that was supposed to give control, even oppressive control, to the combination of corporate and political interests, had gone so haywire that Wilson ends her study with this graf:

“One might have assumed that the end of violent conflict would have been marked by a greater presence of state forces of law and order, and a more concerted attempt by the central state to make Andean provinces legible by road-building, but this does not seem to be happening. In the case of Tarma, although the intelligence service survives, police presence has been greatly reduced. Here on the eastern slopes of the Andes, adjacent to the blurred borderlands of the lowland zone, state authority is still under dispute, and
roads are no potent symbols of state-ness. On the contrary, roads are known places of ambush and assault, frequented by delinquents, terrorists, smugglers, drug-dealers; they are the place where deals are done with bad cops. Roads on the fringes of the state are themselves war-zones, a reminder of the fragility of sovereignty and emptiness of the central state’s claim to territoriality. In Peru, the ‘security’ of marginal regions seen from a national perspective remains in doubt; so does the future response of the state.”

The road, here, is Artaud’s alchemical theater, where trade is transfigured into the vehicle of the plague, and where the basic sign of control is really the scene of multiple and shifting anarchies. Not the path of authority after all.