Distance posses spatial, temporal, cultural and even personal modes. The anthropologist Edward Hall, working in the vein of ecological epistemology that had its origin in studies done for the air force on air fighter and bomber crew reactions, even suggested a science of the near and far: proxemics. Newspapers and tv deal in various degrees of false proximity, which in itself is not a bad thing: after all, illusion surrounds even our most personal acquaintanceship with people and events Like the lovers in Max Ernst’s version of the kiss who wear bags over their heads, even at our closest we never quite know how far away we are.
But …as LI has pointed out with the tedious industry of a woodpecker tearing through the bark of a tree at 5 a.m. outside your window – the problem with the Media coverage in Iraq is less about the good news and the bad news as it is about dealing in a self-created false proximity, omitting major parts of the news that simply don’t fit the American worldview – or at least that worldview shared by the NYT, Fox News, and your local banker. In that worldview, American-like political figures are always important in whatever country they inhabit, and are always movin’ on up. The ordinary people of Iraq are to be sought out and interviewed, occasionally, and even polled: this much is true. But what they say and do is never to be considered in the background of how they actually view things. It is, rather, a phantasmagoria of isolated man in the street stories that occupies a decent interval between interviews with American experts and properly vetted Iraqis.
So it isn’t surprising that the American media has been completely blindsided by the power accrued by the Shi’ite Islamicist parties, and they have still not told us, almost a year and a half after the first elections in Iraq, who these people are or where they come from. For instance, the NYT regularly tells us that Muqtada Al-Sadr is a big supporter of the current Iraqi prime minister, Jafaari. What it doesn’t tell you is that the very party through which Ibrahim Jafari came to power, the Dawa party, that was founded by one of Sadr’s cousins back in the fifties. Three years into the war, and I doubt one American in twenty five has even heard of the Dawa party. Every day you read and hear amazing stories about Islamofascists, or Islamicists, and it has become a wearisome commonplace among the belligeranti to bemoan the alliance of the left and Islamic radicals; meanwhile, the big success story in the Islamic radical world has been propelled by U.S. troops and U.S. money beyond the dreams of any Marin County hippie scion. The very party that seeded Hezbollah in Lebanon is the party that U.S. soldiers defend, today. The often expressed idea that the “good news” in Iraq is that violence only embroils a central region is silent about the causes of the southern regions peacefulness: the biggest takeover of territory by a Islamic fundamentalist group since the taking of Afghanistan by the Taliban has occurred there. From the point of view of LI, the comedy of the situation – the Tartufferie of the belligerents, the stirring up of American nativists about Iran (of all places) as we support with might and main the extension of a moderated version of Khomenei’s dream – is predictable. Ignorant armies clashing by night is our definition of slapstick. In articles about American foreign policy, you will always stumble over elevated references to Wilson or Kissinger. Forget them. Think Three Stooges.
LI is, of course, a public service kind of place, so in this post we thought we’d give our readers a timeline of the Dawa party, militants of which the U.S. has been attacking in the vain hope that they can call back the forces that we have unleashed. As LI has often said, the status of the Americans in Iraq has been one of increasing irrelevance since the battle of Najaf in 2004 – since then, the Americans have been used as a tool by various sides, and coddled in their illusion that they have control of a situation they have neither the means nor the intelligence to manage.
So, for the happy few: The history of the Dawa party as I’ve been able to gather it from various sources, with especial mention going to Rodger Shanahan.
1. Founded in 1957 – although since it was founded at a time of intense nationalistic fervor and coups and counter-coups, it isn’t altogether clear that it didn’t exist before 1957. The Da’wa group - Hizb al-Da'wa al-Islamiyya – is, at the time of its founding, a group whose coordinates mesh with the general American Middle Eastern policy, which is all about a paralyzing fear of communism, and the mistaken idea that Nasserite Arabic nationalism is simply the puppet manipulated by the Russian spymasters. This meant that the Da’wa strongly supported the massacre of the so called communists, as well as the real ones, after the overthrow of the great Iraqi leader, al-Qasim – a man who could have lead Iraq to the kind of neutral stance India took. Alas, his coziness with the communists put the black spot on him. Anyway, to use Rodger Shanahan’s three phase schema, the first phase of the Da’wa party lasted until 1968. They grew under Iraq’s leader, Abd al-Salam 'Arif.
2. When the Ba’athists came into power in 68, the party developed a politics that built on the former military government’s statist economic policies, but turned against compromising with Islamicist groups. Of course, this was in the aftermath of the 67 war, which saw the failure of the Nasser model, but had still not seen the eruption in Iran. In fact, it is easy to see that the policies Americans favored in Iran, under the Shah, were being paralleled in Iraq, under the Ba’athists. From Shanahan:
“During the 1970s, the Shi'a journal Risalat al-Islam was shut down, a number of religious educational institutions were closed, and a law was enacted that obligated Iraqi students of the hawza to undertake national military service. The Ba'thists then began specifically targeting al-Da'wa members, arresting and imprisoning them from 1972 onwards. In 1973, the alleged head of al-Da'wa's Baghdad branch was killed in prison, and one year later, 75 al-Da'wa members were arrested and sentenced to death by the Ba'thist revolutionary court.(14) In 1975, the government canceled the annual procession from Najaf to Karbala (known as marad al-ras).”
Since the world exists to be made into an operetta, it should be noted that those who are most anxious to see the Shah’s descendents return to power Iran are most adamant about the U.S. support for the government of Iraq, which is led by those who, in spirit, were persecuted by the Pahlavis. Ah, musical chairs, musical chairs.
3. When finally, in 1980, Saddam Hussein proscribed the party, the leaders of the Da’wa went to various places – Iran, Syria, Lebanon – and met various allies and fates, all shaped by Da’wa’s fundamental Islamic politics. So three members of Da’wa were part of the founding of the Lebanese Hizbollah party. The indispensable Shanahan:
“The attraction of many members to Khomeini's concept of wilayat al-faqih, along with the desire to support the nascent Iranian revolution in the face of invasion by Iraq had repercussions for al-Da'wa. In Lebanon, the increasingly secular outlook of Amal after the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr in Libya, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Amal leader Nabih Berri's participation in the 1982 National Salvation Committee, all conspired to force many Lebanese al-Da'wa members to seek more activist Shi'a political models. This is reflected in the fact that three of the nine delegates that founded Hizballah in 1982 were members of al-Da'wa.(30) In addition Shaykh Ibrahim al-Amin, Amal's representative in post-revolutionary Iran (and an al-Da'wa member from his Najaf days) returned to Lebanon and recruited many al-Da'wa members into Hizballah.”
4. In the period of the Da’wa diaspora, the major events are: the gravitational effect of the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war on the party, which caused some members to split off and go to SCIRI, and that still causes divisions within the party between those with varying degrees of loyalty to the supreme judgment of the clerics. It should be noted that, from an American perspective, in one way this doesn’t matter at all: the economic aspects of Islamicist philosophy have long shed the first, fine puritanical indignation at the devilish workings of money in the modern economic system. As the NYT approvingly notes, the head of SCIRI is a first water privatizer, and would be as eager to sell Iraqi oilfields to Exxon for a minimum cut of the loot as any American pawn globalizing in some Latin American country, to the glory and honor of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of profit, Citibank without end, amen. Yes, these people are people we can deal with – they will impoverish the millions in order to ship money to the U.S. to support our very Christian way of life – supersized, obese, and obscene as that may be – but the problem is that America is the world’s most neurotic country. It will insist on ignoring, for decades, some concrete reality – as, for instance, the reality of Iran – in the hopes that they can make policy around it.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
praising galbraith
LI has been re-reading Galbraith’s The Affluent Society lately. It is part of our re-reading of a number of thinkers – Carson, Kapp, Karl Polanyi – who developed institutional economics into the premier tool of liberal thought. The ideas of these thinkers make contact with much of the “complexity” science stuff that the Santa Fe Institute investigates. Galbraith’s theme, in The Affluent Society, was to show how private affluence and public poverty – a poverty of the regulatory infrastructure, a poverty resulting from spreading pollution over the environment, a poverty within the healthcare and educational systems – coexisted in the United States. The United States was unique, at the time in which Galbraith wrote (1957) for its economic power and wealth, so it made a good test case for seeing how economics, embedded as the dominant value system within a society, grotesquely distorts that society. The worship of wealth itself, which has become the lingua franca of American society (and which causes the observer to be afflicted, at times, with pure disgust), was still not the pernicious factor in 1957 that it has become now. Although, in fairness, the opposition to the crimes of the corporate dominated state had fallen into desuetude in 1957 too – a point far removed from the heroic period of the thirties, in which social democracy was still a viable alternatives to the gospel of the wealthy.
Anyway, for those who haven’t read the book, the first couple grafs from the first chapter.
“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish.
As with individuals so with nations. And the experience of nations with well-being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all, throughout all history, have been very poor. …
The ideas by which the people of this favored part of the world interpret their existence, and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth. These ideas were the product of a world in which poverty had always been man's normal lot and any other state was in degree unimaginable. This poverty was not the elegant torture of the spirit which comes from contemplating another man's more spacious possessions. It was the unedifying mortification of the flesh—from hunger, sickness and cold. Those who might be freed temporarily from such burden could not know when it would strike again, for at best hunger yielded only perilously to privation. It is improbable that the poverty of the masses of the people was made greatly more bearable by the fact that a very few—those upon whose movements nearly all recorded history centers—were very rich.”
Anyway, for those who haven’t read the book, the first couple grafs from the first chapter.
“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn't enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish.
As with individuals so with nations. And the experience of nations with well-being is exceedingly brief. Nearly all, throughout all history, have been very poor. …
The ideas by which the people of this favored part of the world interpret their existence, and in measure guide their behavior, were not forged in a world of wealth. These ideas were the product of a world in which poverty had always been man's normal lot and any other state was in degree unimaginable. This poverty was not the elegant torture of the spirit which comes from contemplating another man's more spacious possessions. It was the unedifying mortification of the flesh—from hunger, sickness and cold. Those who might be freed temporarily from such burden could not know when it would strike again, for at best hunger yielded only perilously to privation. It is improbable that the poverty of the masses of the people was made greatly more bearable by the fact that a very few—those upon whose movements nearly all recorded history centers—were very rich.”
Monday, March 27, 2006
regulation and you -- LI only slightly bores its readers
LI has been reading about the immigration issue, and looking at the pics of the amazing demonstrations. And it occurred to us that, as a public service, we should pull out the patented LI-THEORY-OF-REGULATION to make sense of it all. (thank you, thank you, people in the back row, but that last tomato you hurled up here is not appreciated!)
If you will remember, regulation is bounded by two ideal poles. One is an ideal of absolute unregulation (an impossibility, by the way, but conceptually necessary) and the other is banning. As the equilibrium of the regulation of a product or a service shifts towards the banning pole, certain questions must be asked – the most important of which is the ‘cost of banning.” A cost is an indicator of possibility – if a product or service costs so much to ban that it successfully would destroy or seriously damage the political system doing the regulating, this should make us re-consider banning. It is for this reason that LI has previously advocated lifting the bans on illegal drugs like marijuana and heroine, and is disapproving of moving from gun licensing to gun bans. I should note, in passing, that regulation is ALWAYS going to impinge on any good or service – the question is going to be, who regulates it. A gang eliminating another gang in order to sell heroin in a certain area is simply regulating action-movie style. That gang will control purity, cost, availability, etc. The public/private divide is secondary, or derivative, to regulation, libertarians to the contrary.
How to analyze those costs? Well, there are a number of factors, here, but major ones have to do with: the capability of producing the product or service (is it an extensive resource or a strictly limited one?); its place in the economy (is it a direct consumer good or service, or is it an industrial good or service?); and, finally, the cost and nature of the regulating of the good or service (is the regulation going to fall on the police, or on a special bureaucracy? is it going to involve extensive searching? are there perverse incentives that encourage police intervention beyond a certain norm?).
Well, putting our little machine to work about immigrant labor is an interesting task. Surveying the fascist suggestions by the Colorado Nazi – uh, oops, that sounds soooo unneutral. Let me start over. Surveying the interestingly authoritarian law advocated by this Tancredo character, one wonders, beyond the moral sickness of outlawing a sterling moral impulse, about its effect. Let’s say we succeed in throwing eleven million Mexican workers back into Mexico, shutting off one of the major, if not the major, cash flows into that country. How long before Mexico explodes? One month? Two? Anyone who thinks that explosion will be seamlessly closed in by a bogus wall along the border, manned by crazy eyed, potbellied white guys with duck hunting gear should… well, should get a job in the Iraq planning room at the Pentagon. One of the numerous idiocies of the NAFTA setup is that, for a short term gain, Mexico essentially allowed itself to be caught at a permanent subaltern level of production on the world market -- instead of leveraging its labor union structure to extract much more from the macquilladora and use it to finance a true social welfare structure. Hence, you get low cost labor reproducing even lower cost labor, instead of low cost labor accumulating the resources to be used by higher quality labor. But I'm this is an aside.
Of course, this assumes that Tancredo's law would really use the police to satisfactorily purge the country of illegal labor. I would put the chances of that happening at around, what, 1 percent? An eleven million person roundup, undertaken by a disparate, less than million member police department, could only succeed if every other policing task is dropped. In fact, the whole point of the legislation is not to succeed – but to make a vicious, pointyheaded moral point. This is the mark of vicious legislation, as any conservative from the era when there were really such things – the 19th century – could tell you. American conservatives are, of course, no such things – they love nothing better than passing symbolic laws, with all the cave man’s belief that the drawing of the bison with the spear in its side means that the next bison will be magically killed at just that spot.
Unfortunately, George Bush is, uh, right about this. Unfortunately, since Bush’s support for a position is usually a sign that something is fucked. But alas, life is full of chances, and one of those chances is that, out of every million neural firings in the Bush brain, one or two of them will be correct. The guest worker idea is probably not going to work – but Bush’s attitude, which is that the free market in labor has helped the U.S., is essentially correct. To descend to the impressionistic, for a second – since the eighties, the roofing trade in Atlanta has been almost exclusively Mexican/Salvadoran. This is something I knew a bit about, having often worked around apartment complexes and condominiums in the Atlanta area for my brothers. The savings from using a vast, cheaper labor force did not accrue exclusively, or even mostly, to the Mexicans/Salavadorans – it went, instead, to the builders and the homeowners. This is no little thing – one of the mysteries of the U.S. economy for the past thirty years is how a middle strata that is essentially dependent, now, on two earner households, remains prosperous. A large part of that is due to efficiencies in the system that the middle capitalizes on – homebuilding being a perfect example.
If you will remember, regulation is bounded by two ideal poles. One is an ideal of absolute unregulation (an impossibility, by the way, but conceptually necessary) and the other is banning. As the equilibrium of the regulation of a product or a service shifts towards the banning pole, certain questions must be asked – the most important of which is the ‘cost of banning.” A cost is an indicator of possibility – if a product or service costs so much to ban that it successfully would destroy or seriously damage the political system doing the regulating, this should make us re-consider banning. It is for this reason that LI has previously advocated lifting the bans on illegal drugs like marijuana and heroine, and is disapproving of moving from gun licensing to gun bans. I should note, in passing, that regulation is ALWAYS going to impinge on any good or service – the question is going to be, who regulates it. A gang eliminating another gang in order to sell heroin in a certain area is simply regulating action-movie style. That gang will control purity, cost, availability, etc. The public/private divide is secondary, or derivative, to regulation, libertarians to the contrary.
How to analyze those costs? Well, there are a number of factors, here, but major ones have to do with: the capability of producing the product or service (is it an extensive resource or a strictly limited one?); its place in the economy (is it a direct consumer good or service, or is it an industrial good or service?); and, finally, the cost and nature of the regulating of the good or service (is the regulation going to fall on the police, or on a special bureaucracy? is it going to involve extensive searching? are there perverse incentives that encourage police intervention beyond a certain norm?).
Well, putting our little machine to work about immigrant labor is an interesting task. Surveying the fascist suggestions by the Colorado Nazi – uh, oops, that sounds soooo unneutral. Let me start over. Surveying the interestingly authoritarian law advocated by this Tancredo character, one wonders, beyond the moral sickness of outlawing a sterling moral impulse, about its effect. Let’s say we succeed in throwing eleven million Mexican workers back into Mexico, shutting off one of the major, if not the major, cash flows into that country. How long before Mexico explodes? One month? Two? Anyone who thinks that explosion will be seamlessly closed in by a bogus wall along the border, manned by crazy eyed, potbellied white guys with duck hunting gear should… well, should get a job in the Iraq planning room at the Pentagon. One of the numerous idiocies of the NAFTA setup is that, for a short term gain, Mexico essentially allowed itself to be caught at a permanent subaltern level of production on the world market -- instead of leveraging its labor union structure to extract much more from the macquilladora and use it to finance a true social welfare structure. Hence, you get low cost labor reproducing even lower cost labor, instead of low cost labor accumulating the resources to be used by higher quality labor. But I'm this is an aside.
Of course, this assumes that Tancredo's law would really use the police to satisfactorily purge the country of illegal labor. I would put the chances of that happening at around, what, 1 percent? An eleven million person roundup, undertaken by a disparate, less than million member police department, could only succeed if every other policing task is dropped. In fact, the whole point of the legislation is not to succeed – but to make a vicious, pointyheaded moral point. This is the mark of vicious legislation, as any conservative from the era when there were really such things – the 19th century – could tell you. American conservatives are, of course, no such things – they love nothing better than passing symbolic laws, with all the cave man’s belief that the drawing of the bison with the spear in its side means that the next bison will be magically killed at just that spot.
Unfortunately, George Bush is, uh, right about this. Unfortunately, since Bush’s support for a position is usually a sign that something is fucked. But alas, life is full of chances, and one of those chances is that, out of every million neural firings in the Bush brain, one or two of them will be correct. The guest worker idea is probably not going to work – but Bush’s attitude, which is that the free market in labor has helped the U.S., is essentially correct. To descend to the impressionistic, for a second – since the eighties, the roofing trade in Atlanta has been almost exclusively Mexican/Salvadoran. This is something I knew a bit about, having often worked around apartment complexes and condominiums in the Atlanta area for my brothers. The savings from using a vast, cheaper labor force did not accrue exclusively, or even mostly, to the Mexicans/Salavadorans – it went, instead, to the builders and the homeowners. This is no little thing – one of the mysteries of the U.S. economy for the past thirty years is how a middle strata that is essentially dependent, now, on two earner households, remains prosperous. A large part of that is due to efficiencies in the system that the middle capitalizes on – homebuilding being a perfect example.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
whew is that pesky wabbit?
Sometimes, LI has to laugh at the NYT Magazine. We just loved this précis of the main article: “The Hunter-Gatherer: Seeking a better understanding of his place in nature and in the food chain, the author entered the woods of Northern California — with a gun.”
With a gun! Imagine that. And I thought hunting had been extinct for the last four thousand years!
No wonder the editors mistake Bush for a bold cowboy.
But enough of that. The article to go to on this leisurely Sunday is Nancy Scheper-Hughes piece in Nacla on the modern art of body (part) snatching. In anthropological circles, and even a bit outside of them, Scheper-Hughes is famous for her books on violence: Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil and Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Her book on the illicit organ trade is coming out from Farrar Strauss – at least according to her site. If I were the editor of the NYT Mag, I would curse the fact that I’d let go the article in NACLA – it is perfect NYT Mag fare.
Here’s a graf to lure you into the piece:
“The Berkeley Organs Watch project had its origins in bizarre rumors of body snatching and organ theft that circulated wildly in the urban shantytowns of Brazil in the mid-1980s. The residents of Alto do Cruzeiro, site of my long-term anthropological research in Northeast Brazil, reported yellow vans scouring poor neighborhoods looking for street kids and other social marginals whose bodies would not be missed. The drivers were described as U.S. or Japanese medical agents working for large hospitals abroad. The abducted bodies, they said, would appear later on the sides of country roads or in hospital dumpsters missing vital parts, especially eyes, kidneys, hearts and livers. “You may think this is nonsense,” my ordinarily trustworthy field assistant Irene da Silva said, “but we have seen things with our own eyes in public hospitals and in police morgues, and we know better.” Irene’s neighbor, Beatrice, agreed: “In these days, when the rich look at us, they are eyeing us greedily as a reservoir of spare parts.” Edite Cosmos added: “So many of the rich are having transplants and plastic surgeries today we hardly know anymore to whose body we are talking. Where do you think they are getting all those body parts?” “
Come on – you have to admit, that it much catchier than: Elmer Fudd goes huntin’ in Northern California.
The trade Scheper-Hughes’ group uncovered is mostly, as of yet, about yanking the body parts out of the dead and selling them for a profit. But he who says profit says incentive, as anybody who has read those two Scots, Adam Smith and Robert Louis Stevenson would know.
“The director of an experimental research unit of a large public medical school in South Africa showed me official documents allowing the transfer of human heart valves taken without consent from the bodies of poor blacks in the local police mortuary and shipped for “handling costs” to medical centers in Germany and Austria. These allowable “handling” fees helped support the unit’s research program in the face of austerities and the downsizing of advanced medical research facilities in the new South Africa. Although one can understand the frustration of the cash-strapped South African research scientists, the leeway afforded to them contributed to widespread corruption in the country.
In 2002 I contacted the South African Ministry of Health to report a scheme originating at a national tissue bank involving the transfer of hundreds of Achilles tendons that were removed without consent from the bodies of the victims of township violence and shipped by the director of the tissues bank to a corrupt U.S. businessman who paid $200 for each tendon. The tendons, used in sports medicine procedures, were shipped to the United States via South Korea, arriving at the free trade zone of the Tampa international airport where the South African tissues were repackaged as U.S. products. The tendons were then sold internationally and domestically to private medical firms and biotech companies for $1,200 each, generating a tidy profit for every party concerned, except for the poor chaps and their families who were the unsuspecting donors.”
It is interesting that one of the great justifications for colonialist expansion was that the natives were cannibals. I’m reading a history of Texas at the moment that makes this point about various Indian tribes in Texas – supposedly putting a stick in the eye of the Politically correct. I don’t really see the stick in the eye – the Comanches roasted and ate their enemies, the settlers brought black manpower in chain and whipped them into their fields to work, and none of this addresses the fact that expansion was theft, clear and simple. However, LI finds the organ trade rather interesting, insofar as the notion of eating the dead and the notion of just recycling their organs seems to be put in different corners of the mind.
Anyway, so much for our suggestion of the day.
With a gun! Imagine that. And I thought hunting had been extinct for the last four thousand years!
No wonder the editors mistake Bush for a bold cowboy.
But enough of that. The article to go to on this leisurely Sunday is Nancy Scheper-Hughes piece in Nacla on the modern art of body (part) snatching. In anthropological circles, and even a bit outside of them, Scheper-Hughes is famous for her books on violence: Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil and Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland . Her book on the illicit organ trade is coming out from Farrar Strauss – at least according to her site. If I were the editor of the NYT Mag, I would curse the fact that I’d let go the article in NACLA – it is perfect NYT Mag fare.
Here’s a graf to lure you into the piece:
“The Berkeley Organs Watch project had its origins in bizarre rumors of body snatching and organ theft that circulated wildly in the urban shantytowns of Brazil in the mid-1980s. The residents of Alto do Cruzeiro, site of my long-term anthropological research in Northeast Brazil, reported yellow vans scouring poor neighborhoods looking for street kids and other social marginals whose bodies would not be missed. The drivers were described as U.S. or Japanese medical agents working for large hospitals abroad. The abducted bodies, they said, would appear later on the sides of country roads or in hospital dumpsters missing vital parts, especially eyes, kidneys, hearts and livers. “You may think this is nonsense,” my ordinarily trustworthy field assistant Irene da Silva said, “but we have seen things with our own eyes in public hospitals and in police morgues, and we know better.” Irene’s neighbor, Beatrice, agreed: “In these days, when the rich look at us, they are eyeing us greedily as a reservoir of spare parts.” Edite Cosmos added: “So many of the rich are having transplants and plastic surgeries today we hardly know anymore to whose body we are talking. Where do you think they are getting all those body parts?” “
Come on – you have to admit, that it much catchier than: Elmer Fudd goes huntin’ in Northern California.
The trade Scheper-Hughes’ group uncovered is mostly, as of yet, about yanking the body parts out of the dead and selling them for a profit. But he who says profit says incentive, as anybody who has read those two Scots, Adam Smith and Robert Louis Stevenson would know.
“The director of an experimental research unit of a large public medical school in South Africa showed me official documents allowing the transfer of human heart valves taken without consent from the bodies of poor blacks in the local police mortuary and shipped for “handling costs” to medical centers in Germany and Austria. These allowable “handling” fees helped support the unit’s research program in the face of austerities and the downsizing of advanced medical research facilities in the new South Africa. Although one can understand the frustration of the cash-strapped South African research scientists, the leeway afforded to them contributed to widespread corruption in the country.
In 2002 I contacted the South African Ministry of Health to report a scheme originating at a national tissue bank involving the transfer of hundreds of Achilles tendons that were removed without consent from the bodies of the victims of township violence and shipped by the director of the tissues bank to a corrupt U.S. businessman who paid $200 for each tendon. The tendons, used in sports medicine procedures, were shipped to the United States via South Korea, arriving at the free trade zone of the Tampa international airport where the South African tissues were repackaged as U.S. products. The tendons were then sold internationally and domestically to private medical firms and biotech companies for $1,200 each, generating a tidy profit for every party concerned, except for the poor chaps and their families who were the unsuspecting donors.”
It is interesting that one of the great justifications for colonialist expansion was that the natives were cannibals. I’m reading a history of Texas at the moment that makes this point about various Indian tribes in Texas – supposedly putting a stick in the eye of the Politically correct. I don’t really see the stick in the eye – the Comanches roasted and ate their enemies, the settlers brought black manpower in chain and whipped them into their fields to work, and none of this addresses the fact that expansion was theft, clear and simple. However, LI finds the organ trade rather interesting, insofar as the notion of eating the dead and the notion of just recycling their organs seems to be put in different corners of the mind.
Anyway, so much for our suggestion of the day.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
more on anti-recruitment -- leaflet work
As we have said before, LI is extremely tired of the discussion about what the Democrats could do about the war. Or the Republicans. We could give a fuck. We wanted to know what we could do about the war. Which is the start of this project which I am tentatively calling: killthewarinyourgarage. You get a little taste of the army's plight in this oped at WAPO.
LI has been busily working at the anti-recruitment leaflet we mentioned a couple of posts ago. Mr. VD has sent us a graphic, and we've been assured banner space at one left leaning blog. Actually, as the leaflet idea gets more concrete, it might be the case that the website we get will hold several different leaflets. My friend Dave in the Great Pacific Northwest promised to help me on the graphix too.
The tone of the leaflet is the deflated boner in the mix for LI. We are well aware that our black humored, bile & candy prose is inappropriate here. We don't want to appeal to the 18-25 set that goes to anti-war demos, cause, like, why? -- we want to appeal straightforwardly to those potential recruits who may be Republicans, may be evangelical Christians, may be hardworking 4 H-ers, and most likely come from families that "support our troops." So, there is a no irony rule here.
Anyway, this stuff below is what we are mulling. I'd love to hear suggestions about this. Mail me at rgathman@netzero.net. Evidently, certain parts of this are not satisfactory at the moment. In particular, we want to get across the point that patriots can chose not to fight in a war that they believe is badly led. The quotes from Bush and Cheney are about that. But it is a subtle point, and I don't think I've made it well, yet. There is a part of me that wants to strongly insinuate how evil these people are -- and that is completely stupid and self indulgent. Rather, I need to simply suggest that every generation makes its choices, and that there is no shame in chosing to wait until the army is out of Iraq to enlist.
Before you talk to an army recruiter, there are a few facts you should know:
· 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades as of January, 2006
· American military deaths numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20; American military wounded: 16,472
· More than half wounded in explosions sustain head injuries
· The Government is looking for ways to cut down on helping the wounded pay for their treatment over the years: the Pentagon’s top personnel officer, David Chu, wrote in January, 2005 in the Wall Street Journal: "The amounts have gotten to the point where they are hurtful," David Chu Pentagon's top personnel official
Your benefits will almost certainly be cut. If you are the victim of an IED (Improvised Explosive Devise), your lifetime care will depend on benefits coming from Washington. And Washington has to cut benefits. Bottom line: you will be out on the street: “At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.
After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.” – ABC, February 27, 2006.
In this part, I am going to put in a description of IEDs and some of the destruction they have wrought.
· Who wants to continue this war? Not the American people. Polls show 56 percent of the American people think the Iraq war was a mistake. And when people don’t support a war, don’t be fooled by “we support the troops” rhetoric. If you join now, you have a higher chance of injury or death and a lower assurance you will get benefits to help you get over it, and an even higher chance that any money they promise you will be inadequate.
· If someone offered you a ten thousand dollar bonus to work in a butcher shop, would you? Would you if you couldn’t get out of the contract? Would you if you had a one in six chance of injury? Would you if 2.5 of your fellow employees died per day? Think about it – why take the risk of chronic pain, death, and possible mental stress for years to come unless there was a larger cause you were fighting for? So, let’s look at that larger cause. First, let’s look at the patriotism of the men who started the war and are continuing it. Then, let’s look at the reasons the war was started and is continuing. Finally, let’s look at the positive side of not feeding the war machine – or, Getting America back to the Constitution.
·
· Patriotism
So you want to serve your country? You can serve it in many ways. But you don’t have to go to an unpopular and unwinnable war. History shows us many American patriots that avoided war. Did you know President George Bush avoided going toVietnam? Here is what he said about the topic
“Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions”
Vice President Cheney avoided going to Vietnam. Why? As he told a newspaper: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." While others were going to war, Cheney was getting ahead. That was the smart thing to do.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s top advisor, was draft age during the Vietnam war. He didn’t go. Neither did Vice President Cheney’s top advisor, Scooter Libby.
· These men and others like them were able to use the years that others spent in Vietnam getting ahead. They are now sending other men off to Iraq. Does that sound like a fair deal? It isn’t. If it is right for America’s highest ranking officials to avoid a mismanaged war, if this is patriotism, then it should be all right for you. Having “other priorities” means finding other ways of succeeding in this country. Patriotism is contributing something positive, no matter what.
· Don’t be the last soldier to die, or have a shattered spine, or a torn off limb, in a war with no mission end point. Unless we the people exert ourselves through not volunteering, the war will go simply go on and on, since nobody is willing to stop it. But YOU CAN STOP IT.
LI has been busily working at the anti-recruitment leaflet we mentioned a couple of posts ago. Mr. VD has sent us a graphic, and we've been assured banner space at one left leaning blog. Actually, as the leaflet idea gets more concrete, it might be the case that the website we get will hold several different leaflets. My friend Dave in the Great Pacific Northwest promised to help me on the graphix too.
The tone of the leaflet is the deflated boner in the mix for LI. We are well aware that our black humored, bile & candy prose is inappropriate here. We don't want to appeal to the 18-25 set that goes to anti-war demos, cause, like, why? -- we want to appeal straightforwardly to those potential recruits who may be Republicans, may be evangelical Christians, may be hardworking 4 H-ers, and most likely come from families that "support our troops." So, there is a no irony rule here.
Anyway, this stuff below is what we are mulling. I'd love to hear suggestions about this. Mail me at rgathman@netzero.net. Evidently, certain parts of this are not satisfactory at the moment. In particular, we want to get across the point that patriots can chose not to fight in a war that they believe is badly led. The quotes from Bush and Cheney are about that. But it is a subtle point, and I don't think I've made it well, yet. There is a part of me that wants to strongly insinuate how evil these people are -- and that is completely stupid and self indulgent. Rather, I need to simply suggest that every generation makes its choices, and that there is no shame in chosing to wait until the army is out of Iraq to enlist.
Before you talk to an army recruiter, there are a few facts you should know:
· 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades as of January, 2006
· American military deaths numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20; American military wounded: 16,472
· More than half wounded in explosions sustain head injuries
· The Government is looking for ways to cut down on helping the wounded pay for their treatment over the years: the Pentagon’s top personnel officer, David Chu, wrote in January, 2005 in the Wall Street Journal: "The amounts have gotten to the point where they are hurtful," David Chu Pentagon's top personnel official
Your benefits will almost certainly be cut. If you are the victim of an IED (Improvised Explosive Devise), your lifetime care will depend on benefits coming from Washington. And Washington has to cut benefits. Bottom line: you will be out on the street: “At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.
After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.” – ABC, February 27, 2006.
In this part, I am going to put in a description of IEDs and some of the destruction they have wrought.
· Who wants to continue this war? Not the American people. Polls show 56 percent of the American people think the Iraq war was a mistake. And when people don’t support a war, don’t be fooled by “we support the troops” rhetoric. If you join now, you have a higher chance of injury or death and a lower assurance you will get benefits to help you get over it, and an even higher chance that any money they promise you will be inadequate.
· If someone offered you a ten thousand dollar bonus to work in a butcher shop, would you? Would you if you couldn’t get out of the contract? Would you if you had a one in six chance of injury? Would you if 2.5 of your fellow employees died per day? Think about it – why take the risk of chronic pain, death, and possible mental stress for years to come unless there was a larger cause you were fighting for? So, let’s look at that larger cause. First, let’s look at the patriotism of the men who started the war and are continuing it. Then, let’s look at the reasons the war was started and is continuing. Finally, let’s look at the positive side of not feeding the war machine – or, Getting America back to the Constitution.
·
· Patriotism
So you want to serve your country? You can serve it in many ways. But you don’t have to go to an unpopular and unwinnable war. History shows us many American patriots that avoided war. Did you know President George Bush avoided going toVietnam? Here is what he said about the topic
“Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions”
Vice President Cheney avoided going to Vietnam. Why? As he told a newspaper: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." While others were going to war, Cheney was getting ahead. That was the smart thing to do.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s top advisor, was draft age during the Vietnam war. He didn’t go. Neither did Vice President Cheney’s top advisor, Scooter Libby.
· These men and others like them were able to use the years that others spent in Vietnam getting ahead. They are now sending other men off to Iraq. Does that sound like a fair deal? It isn’t. If it is right for America’s highest ranking officials to avoid a mismanaged war, if this is patriotism, then it should be all right for you. Having “other priorities” means finding other ways of succeeding in this country. Patriotism is contributing something positive, no matter what.
· Don’t be the last soldier to die, or have a shattered spine, or a torn off limb, in a war with no mission end point. Unless we the people exert ourselves through not volunteering, the war will go simply go on and on, since nobody is willing to stop it. But YOU CAN STOP IT.
the two bit underground man
As a small timer, a two-bit underground man, LI has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the rich – envy of all that spread. At the same time, however, there is always the eternal mystery of wealth. Not the mystery of how it is accrued – the mystery of why. A mystery best expressed in the immortal dialogue between J. Gittes and Noah Cross in Chinatown:
“Cross: That's what I am doing. If the bond issue passes Tuesday, there'll be eight million dollars to build an aqueduct and reservoir. I'm doing it.
Gittes: Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not gonna get.
Cross: Oh, that's all taken care of. You see, Mr. Gits. Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.
Gittes: How you gonna do that?
Cross: By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that.
Gittes: How much are you worth?
Cross: I've no idea. How much do you want?
Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Cross: Oh my, yes!
Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gits - the future! Now where's the girl. I want the only daughter I've got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Gittes: Who do you blame for that - her?
Cross: I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gits. Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.”
This rather neatly ties together two of the great mysteries of society: the incest prohibition (poor nervous Evelyn) and the desire of certain people to endlessly, endlessly acquire wealth. But let’s not go to Freud just yet. I’ve been, in fact, going to Georg Simmel. The translating job I have has forced me to read a bit of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Simmel’s complete works are up on the Net, for those who have the German to read it. For pauvre moi, always a week away from having not a pot to piss in, I’ve been extremely interested in Simmel’s notion of a the connection between money and the its degree of separation from labor. The series of ends, as he calls it, that money has to traverse has an unpredictable impact on money. Anybody who has hung around the rich puzzles over how certain petty expenditures can discombobulate them at the same time that large, gaudy, unbelievable expenditures are so very calmly made that there is a greatness in them. It is the latter quality that F. Scott Fitz was talking about.
So here is a bit from Simmel:
“We can’t deny, on a large enough scale … that there is a proportion between the tempo of earnings and that of expenditure.
Thus, nobody expends money more easily and with less prudence than the gambler, the goldminer and the demi-monde; and the ruinous financial policy of the Spanish since Carlos V can be pinned to the relative lack of work with which America’s noble metal fell to the lot of the Spanish.
This as it comes, so it goes (»wie gewonnen, so zerronnen«) refers not only to the objective structure of the economy, that tends to posit the security of the earned only as a price of a certain solidity of the earning: the professions of particularly easy and quick earning already contains in their objective circumstances the little canals, through which the earned has the tendency and chance to once again drain away.”
Now, for an economist, consumption is just consumption and there is no more mystery in it than the Eucharist holds for a Unitarian. But for LI, always wondering where the fuck my pittance goes to, those little canals are like fate, or the unconscious: the objectified unconscious of being broke. And yet, at a certain point, what can you do with that extra money? The objective circumstances of the rich, to correct F. Scott, are different. LI will return in another post to Simmel’s explanation of that.
“Cross: That's what I am doing. If the bond issue passes Tuesday, there'll be eight million dollars to build an aqueduct and reservoir. I'm doing it.
Gittes: Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not gonna get.
Cross: Oh, that's all taken care of. You see, Mr. Gits. Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.
Gittes: How you gonna do that?
Cross: By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that.
Gittes: How much are you worth?
Cross: I've no idea. How much do you want?
Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Cross: Oh my, yes!
Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gits - the future! Now where's the girl. I want the only daughter I've got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Gittes: Who do you blame for that - her?
Cross: I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gits. Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.”
This rather neatly ties together two of the great mysteries of society: the incest prohibition (poor nervous Evelyn) and the desire of certain people to endlessly, endlessly acquire wealth. But let’s not go to Freud just yet. I’ve been, in fact, going to Georg Simmel. The translating job I have has forced me to read a bit of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Simmel’s complete works are up on the Net, for those who have the German to read it. For pauvre moi, always a week away from having not a pot to piss in, I’ve been extremely interested in Simmel’s notion of a the connection between money and the its degree of separation from labor. The series of ends, as he calls it, that money has to traverse has an unpredictable impact on money. Anybody who has hung around the rich puzzles over how certain petty expenditures can discombobulate them at the same time that large, gaudy, unbelievable expenditures are so very calmly made that there is a greatness in them. It is the latter quality that F. Scott Fitz was talking about.
So here is a bit from Simmel:
“We can’t deny, on a large enough scale … that there is a proportion between the tempo of earnings and that of expenditure.
Thus, nobody expends money more easily and with less prudence than the gambler, the goldminer and the demi-monde; and the ruinous financial policy of the Spanish since Carlos V can be pinned to the relative lack of work with which America’s noble metal fell to the lot of the Spanish.
This as it comes, so it goes (»wie gewonnen, so zerronnen«) refers not only to the objective structure of the economy, that tends to posit the security of the earned only as a price of a certain solidity of the earning: the professions of particularly easy and quick earning already contains in their objective circumstances the little canals, through which the earned has the tendency and chance to once again drain away.”
Now, for an economist, consumption is just consumption and there is no more mystery in it than the Eucharist holds for a Unitarian. But for LI, always wondering where the fuck my pittance goes to, those little canals are like fate, or the unconscious: the objectified unconscious of being broke. And yet, at a certain point, what can you do with that extra money? The objective circumstances of the rich, to correct F. Scott, are different. LI will return in another post to Simmel’s explanation of that.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
More on an anti-recruiting pamphlet
I received an email about the anti-recruiting pamphlet idea. And I’ve been spinning around ideas in my head. But LI needs suggestions.
The army is having problems. This is from one of the slew of newstories recently about recruiting
“Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of Blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command and cited in published reports. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9 of this year.”
13.9 is outstanding. I think the African-American community, which has collectively turned its back on this president, has done a good job making joining the army now vaguely shameful. However, this can be accelerated. One of the things that I am always impressed with is how the conservative sphere is continually making good suggestions to the left about this, and how indignant the left gets. For instance, suggesting that the bad news from Iraq is just to demoralize Americans. I think that is an excellent suggestion, and one of the things this pamphlet should do is make going to Iraq seem, a., unsupported by the American population, b., dangerous beyond any risk that you would want to take, and c., futile at that. The extremely high rate of injury, much higher than in Vietnam, will I think give even the most testosteroned up 18 year old pause. The thing is, how to convey this in such a way that, a., it makes not joining up – abstinence - seem patriotic, and b., that it is written in a far less preacherly tone than the pamphlets I have seen. My ideal would be that the pictures would be stark and hard – comparisons of the ideal be all that you can be with pics of wounded men – that the message would be, no, you will not get support after your leg is blown off – the money for V.A. is being cut, and you will have to battle your entire life long against prejudice and the government – that you can actually help bring the war to a close by not signing up, and thus helping others – and that other patriots, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, exercised the option of not going during Vietnam and instead devoted those years to getting ahead – and look where they are now. Nobody calls them unpatriotic for dodging the war in Vietnam. This is a subtle but I think very necessary point – the people who go will fall behind because the people who stay here – even the people who support them, and go yeah, go to Iraq – are really getting ahead in the game of life. It is, in essence, a sucker’s game to go to Iraq. This point has the advantage of being true, and the disadvantage of being one of those points people try to sentimentally ignore.
Since I am not used to writing for 18 year olds, though, I am a little unsure of what kind of thing works. Probably I ought to go out and by teen people and the like. Ultimately, I would like the tone of this to be don't tread on me, with the treading being by the Executive Branch, using the voluteer army as a government funded mercenary corps to do what it likes. I think I'll look up all those Readers Digest attacks on the IRS and apply them to this issue.
Do drop me some suggestions. rgathman@netzero.net
The army is having problems. This is from one of the slew of newstories recently about recruiting
“Blacks make up about 23 percent of today’s active-duty Army, but the share of Blacks in the recruit classes of recent years dropped. From 22.7 percent at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the share slid to 19.9 percent in 2002; 16.4 percent in 2003 and 15.9 percent last year, according to figures provided by Army Recruiting Command and cited in published reports. The slide has continued, dropping to 13.9 percent as of Feb. 9 of this year.”
13.9 is outstanding. I think the African-American community, which has collectively turned its back on this president, has done a good job making joining the army now vaguely shameful. However, this can be accelerated. One of the things that I am always impressed with is how the conservative sphere is continually making good suggestions to the left about this, and how indignant the left gets. For instance, suggesting that the bad news from Iraq is just to demoralize Americans. I think that is an excellent suggestion, and one of the things this pamphlet should do is make going to Iraq seem, a., unsupported by the American population, b., dangerous beyond any risk that you would want to take, and c., futile at that. The extremely high rate of injury, much higher than in Vietnam, will I think give even the most testosteroned up 18 year old pause. The thing is, how to convey this in such a way that, a., it makes not joining up – abstinence - seem patriotic, and b., that it is written in a far less preacherly tone than the pamphlets I have seen. My ideal would be that the pictures would be stark and hard – comparisons of the ideal be all that you can be with pics of wounded men – that the message would be, no, you will not get support after your leg is blown off – the money for V.A. is being cut, and you will have to battle your entire life long against prejudice and the government – that you can actually help bring the war to a close by not signing up, and thus helping others – and that other patriots, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, exercised the option of not going during Vietnam and instead devoted those years to getting ahead – and look where they are now. Nobody calls them unpatriotic for dodging the war in Vietnam. This is a subtle but I think very necessary point – the people who go will fall behind because the people who stay here – even the people who support them, and go yeah, go to Iraq – are really getting ahead in the game of life. It is, in essence, a sucker’s game to go to Iraq. This point has the advantage of being true, and the disadvantage of being one of those points people try to sentimentally ignore.
Since I am not used to writing for 18 year olds, though, I am a little unsure of what kind of thing works. Probably I ought to go out and by teen people and the like. Ultimately, I would like the tone of this to be don't tread on me, with the treading being by the Executive Branch, using the voluteer army as a government funded mercenary corps to do what it likes. I think I'll look up all those Readers Digest attacks on the IRS and apply them to this issue.
Do drop me some suggestions. rgathman@netzero.net
an amphibian on dry land
The London Times did a nice thing a week ago that I missed – they published several articles to celebrate Beckett, on his centenary. LI particularly liked Roy Foster’s appreciation, which ends with a very nice anecdote:
“Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year."
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. "The brother?" asked my father-in-law, surprised. "Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself." Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.”
What LI loves about Beckett is the way he pushes the rule: the bleaker, the funnier. One of our own obsessions since dear old college days is the way that one rule in life never seems to be questioned: that the serious and the non-serious are completely separate categories. Or as Mark Twain said, in his rules for funerals: “don’t laugh.” This is common sense, but LI… always laughs. Our taste tends towards the lurid and the bitter because we think of art as seriousness taken non-seriously. (and aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is non-seriousness taken seriously -- remember, it all starts with that prating pietist, Kant, trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle). Our own little aesthetic hierarchy starts with the fact that Lear, in the end, remembers “my poor fool is hang’d.” The fool – which could be Cordelia as well – was both lucky and unlucky in that last act – for after all, one of the bits in his repertoire was to make sexual puns out of legal punishments, and a hanging fool was, of course, the kind of thing he'd zip up. Beckett's work shows just how funny this is, or could be made to be from the fool’s point of view, if he were still around, like Molloy, to enjoy his own hanging.
We liked this graf from Foster’s piece too:
“Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: "Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds." And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned -for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. "Vous etes anglais, M. Beckett" -"Au contraire."”
“Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett's, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair's biography. Noting the Dublin name ("Beckett with two t's is always Irish"), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that "his brother, the playwright, now very well known" always came over for the summer championships. "We used to have dinner together every year."
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. "The brother?" asked my father-in-law, surprised. "Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself." Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.”
What LI loves about Beckett is the way he pushes the rule: the bleaker, the funnier. One of our own obsessions since dear old college days is the way that one rule in life never seems to be questioned: that the serious and the non-serious are completely separate categories. Or as Mark Twain said, in his rules for funerals: “don’t laugh.” This is common sense, but LI… always laughs. Our taste tends towards the lurid and the bitter because we think of art as seriousness taken non-seriously. (and aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is non-seriousness taken seriously -- remember, it all starts with that prating pietist, Kant, trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle). Our own little aesthetic hierarchy starts with the fact that Lear, in the end, remembers “my poor fool is hang’d.” The fool – which could be Cordelia as well – was both lucky and unlucky in that last act – for after all, one of the bits in his repertoire was to make sexual puns out of legal punishments, and a hanging fool was, of course, the kind of thing he'd zip up. Beckett's work shows just how funny this is, or could be made to be from the fool’s point of view, if he were still around, like Molloy, to enjoy his own hanging.
We liked this graf from Foster’s piece too:
“Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: "Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds." And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned -for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. "Vous etes anglais, M. Beckett" -"Au contraire."”
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
squeeze the army to death
Bush’s press conference made clear what was clear to any thinking person: there will be no pullout of Iraq via establishment politics:
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
“President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the war in Iraq is dominating nearly every aspect of his presidency, and he served notice for the first time that he expects the decision on when all U.S. troops come home to fall on his successors.”
Periodically, LI comes back to the subject of non-recruitment. Squeezing the volunteer army until there’s no toothpaste left in the tube is the right thing to do. Not all functions in this society have to be triangulated through a politician. The easiest and most effective thing to do is to talk to seventeen and eighteen year olds and keep them from signing up. You don’t have to attack the army. It is a matter of committing later, when the army is engaged in doing something other than a vanity project. Again, one must respectfully quote the Vice President himself about Vietnam: “I had other priorities,” he said, making it clear that the patriotic thing to do is to avoid getting into pointless wars.
We don’t need politicians to take us out of Iraq – they need us to stay in it.
The American Friends Service committee has a downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet here.
Looking through that pamphlet, LI is thinking that it is organized along lines that are too general. We are thinking of writing our own downloadable anti-recruitment pamphlet, focusing much more strictly on staying out of the Iraq war. We are going to try to do that and put it up in the bar next to these posts. A simply worded, Tom Paine like pamphlet laying out reasons not to join the military, in any branch, during the current crisis. We don’t have time for it at the moment, but in the next month.
The one thing the Dems could do – although they won’t – is push for a law putting a divide between the National Guard and the regular army. The National Guard is going to be needed at home more than ever this hurricane season. Unfortunately, the military has been kidnapping the Guard for Bush’s project.
In the long run, the obvious problem with having a volunteer army is that the executive branch increasingly uses it as a private army – a mercenary army, at the beck and call of the White House, paid for by the taxpayer, plaguing the planet. Ultimately, squeezing that army isn’t enough – the army has to be taken back from the Executive branch. We cannot afford to allow the president to mount private wars corresponding more to the currents of his psychopathology than to the dictates of national interest.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
post elsewhere
LI has contributed another post to Long Sunday. And today is so jam packed with tasks we have to finish that we can't really fiddle in this space.
Check it out, here.
Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!)
ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful methods to rid the world of the evil that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is why to defeat the US War on us we use peaceful means, education, and our peaceful spirit to show that there is evil in America and it needs to be addressed. Our enemy uses guns, weapons, helicopters, wire tapping, phone surveillance, snitches, informers, German Shepherd attack dogs, gulags and concentration camps. Is there any doubt what should be eradicated from the face of the earth?"
And this:
"Montreal, Quebec: Marc, why should you and the others Michelle and Greg be charged within Canada on a an Canadian warrant and then not be prosecuted under Canadian law??
All the Best to the BC3
Marc Emery: Because the Canadian political establishment that is in governance in Canada (The Liberal-Conservative parties) both want me out of the way for as long as possible, like the enemies of freedom (White House, DEA, Congress) in the USA do.
In 10 years I achieved huge results in Canada and the world. I sent out over 4 million seeds, had people grow those plants out, over 10 years, probably produced 10 to 20 million marijuana plants around the world, forcing the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi police style activities in the USA, Canada and the world. Then with that money, I spent just under $4 million on court cases, lawyers for class action suits, ballot initiatives, politicians, elections, rallies, conferences, political parties, all peaceful, democratic investments, completely transparent, to subvert the US drug war and bring about a legal environment where cannabis can be taxed, regulated in a manner that addresses all social concerns. Ending prohibition, to say it simply.
It was a genius plan. Produce millions of plants to Overgrow the Governments, give the US people what they want (they do want the marijuana, and they'd rather grow it themselves than buy Afghani or foreign pot) and then spend the money they have entrusted to me to achieve what Americans who must hide from their government cannot do, participate in the public process to end prohibition."
What can LI add except -- you will not get a chance to read something this good in the WAPO for a long, long time. Don't miss it!
Check it out, here.
Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!)
ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful methods to rid the world of the evil that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is why to defeat the US War on us we use peaceful means, education, and our peaceful spirit to show that there is evil in America and it needs to be addressed. Our enemy uses guns, weapons, helicopters, wire tapping, phone surveillance, snitches, informers, German Shepherd attack dogs, gulags and concentration camps. Is there any doubt what should be eradicated from the face of the earth?"
And this:
"Montreal, Quebec: Marc, why should you and the others Michelle and Greg be charged within Canada on a an Canadian warrant and then not be prosecuted under Canadian law??
All the Best to the BC3
Marc Emery: Because the Canadian political establishment that is in governance in Canada (The Liberal-Conservative parties) both want me out of the way for as long as possible, like the enemies of freedom (White House, DEA, Congress) in the USA do.
In 10 years I achieved huge results in Canada and the world. I sent out over 4 million seeds, had people grow those plants out, over 10 years, probably produced 10 to 20 million marijuana plants around the world, forcing the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi police style activities in the USA, Canada and the world. Then with that money, I spent just under $4 million on court cases, lawyers for class action suits, ballot initiatives, politicians, elections, rallies, conferences, political parties, all peaceful, democratic investments, completely transparent, to subvert the US drug war and bring about a legal environment where cannabis can be taxed, regulated in a manner that addresses all social concerns. Ending prohibition, to say it simply.
It was a genius plan. Produce millions of plants to Overgrow the Governments, give the US people what they want (they do want the marijuana, and they'd rather grow it themselves than buy Afghani or foreign pot) and then spend the money they have entrusted to me to achieve what Americans who must hide from their government cannot do, participate in the public process to end prohibition."
What can LI add except -- you will not get a chance to read something this good in the WAPO for a long, long time. Don't miss it!
Monday, March 20, 2006
then-ism
LI sometimes feels bad that our radical sensibilities aren’t really captured by a correspondingly radical politics. It is nice to be more ultra than thou, and to either proclaim the self-evident virtues of anarchy or Marxism or libertarianism, etc.
But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism.
Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.
Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it.
The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage. Of course! A perfect “then” moment.
Correspondingly, we love reading Marxist oriented criticisms of, say, the intricate capitalist structure that has led to the environmental horrors of the shrinking ozone layer and global warming. And how are we going to change that? Why, by a revolutionary breakthrough overthrowing capitalism! Brilliant. That’s a darn tootin’ brilliant plan, there, boss. And who is going to lead that, finance it, and how long will it take? Why, we just gotta trust that a party composed of self-less people, financed by George Soros and Jesus Christ, will arise from the Lit Crit departments to mirror, perfectly, the wants of the people in a brand new revolutionary space, a perfect vacuum created by destroying the influence of the capitalist. Capitalism, which in paragraphs 1 through 10 is described as an all powerful evil system, is overthrown in a wink in paragraph 11 by a group of people absolutely uninfluenced by the mechanisms used to overthrow the all powerful evil system, and now ready to lead us to nirvana. And didn’t such a party system lead to the so far greatest crimes against the environment ever committed, re the whole industrial structure of the Soviet union, as this unchecked leadership shifted social costs massively onto the general population. Well,some people are just spoilsports. Another perfect “then” moment.
The whole bloody story of Iraq is, of course, a triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America. And I have noticed, looking around at the celebration of the third year of the fiasco, that the triumph of the “then” has gone almost completely unnoticed, as new schemes, unattached to any 'then', are proposed to "get America out of Iraq.” We particularly like the one where America, much like the baddest cop on your favorite show, just tells the Iraqis, okay, break it up into three different nations. There you go! The painlessness of that solution, the obvious compliance of the Iraqis when they hear the jig is up, and the Johnny come marchin’ home of our boys (who we all support so much! support support support, that’s our middle name around here), points to the genius at work in the American population at large.
But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism.
Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.
Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it.
The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage. Of course! A perfect “then” moment.
Correspondingly, we love reading Marxist oriented criticisms of, say, the intricate capitalist structure that has led to the environmental horrors of the shrinking ozone layer and global warming. And how are we going to change that? Why, by a revolutionary breakthrough overthrowing capitalism! Brilliant. That’s a darn tootin’ brilliant plan, there, boss. And who is going to lead that, finance it, and how long will it take? Why, we just gotta trust that a party composed of self-less people, financed by George Soros and Jesus Christ, will arise from the Lit Crit departments to mirror, perfectly, the wants of the people in a brand new revolutionary space, a perfect vacuum created by destroying the influence of the capitalist. Capitalism, which in paragraphs 1 through 10 is described as an all powerful evil system, is overthrown in a wink in paragraph 11 by a group of people absolutely uninfluenced by the mechanisms used to overthrow the all powerful evil system, and now ready to lead us to nirvana. And didn’t such a party system lead to the so far greatest crimes against the environment ever committed, re the whole industrial structure of the Soviet union, as this unchecked leadership shifted social costs massively onto the general population. Well,some people are just spoilsports. Another perfect “then” moment.
The whole bloody story of Iraq is, of course, a triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America. And I have noticed, looking around at the celebration of the third year of the fiasco, that the triumph of the “then” has gone almost completely unnoticed, as new schemes, unattached to any 'then', are proposed to "get America out of Iraq.” We particularly like the one where America, much like the baddest cop on your favorite show, just tells the Iraqis, okay, break it up into three different nations. There you go! The painlessness of that solution, the obvious compliance of the Iraqis when they hear the jig is up, and the Johnny come marchin’ home of our boys (who we all support so much! support support support, that’s our middle name around here), points to the genius at work in the American population at large.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
bozoism: a swedenborgian perspective
How the delights of every one's life are changed after death into things that correspond can be known from a knowledge of correspondences; but as that knowledge is not as yet generally known I will try to throw some light on the subject by certain examples from experience. All who are in evil and who have established themselves in falsities in opposition to the truths of the church, especially those that have rejected the Word, flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves; and this because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caves and clefts of rocks well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those that have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such caves; and they frequent rooms so dark that they are even unable to see one another; and they whisper together in the ears in corners. – Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell
The sinister farce of American drug policy hit its normal two notes this past week: one clownlike, and the other terroristic. The clownlike note was provided by the DEA’s demand that Canada extradite the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana to stand trial for thirty years – thirty years the monsters want to cut from his body – for selling pot seeds. Now, LI has long been in favor of putting DEA agents themselves in prison, after suitable show trials, for kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and the usual like, but we have doubts this is going to happen. It is one of those peculiarities of national character that the American, a type that tattoos snakes not being tread on on its forearm, has been shredding his rights like so much dead dermis for thirty years in the ‘war against drugs.’ Is this because the average American is a buffoon, an asskisser, a dog in love with a flea or a flea in love with a dog, a pariah among the higher order of Swedenborgian angels that circulate through our celestial body continually? I dunno, I just live here. A nation that passes two million of its population through the prison pipeline, many of them for either selling the means to medicate and enjoy oneself without a permit from the doctor and a profit made by a pharmaceutical company, should be investigated not so much by Amnesty international as by Bozo international. The alarming growth of bozoism in this country, which triumphed in Florida in 2000, is, perhaps, something that can be cured. I recommend high gas prices and another decade of 700 billion dollar debts, myself. Maybe it is a temporary epidemic. Those who think bozoism is simply a tiresome fad disease, a psycho-somatic poltergeist, are urged to read Rumsfeld’s op ed in the WAPO. Obviously, this is a man in the last throes of bozoism. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that he has not yet been quarantined.
The terroristic face is being shown in America’s great ally in Latin America: Columbia. On the one side of the coin is sending a harmless Canadian to jail, and on the other side of the coin is supporting, with might and main, the familiar conjunction of fascist and drug dealer, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of free trade for all. Somehow, the media critics of Chavez, who go through every election and referendum in Venezuela looking for the stronghanded methods of communism – we just know they are there! – somehow ignored an election in which armed narcotics godfathers, paramilitaries who have already negotiated with the Uribe government to avoid extradition to the U.S., have helped Bush’s man achieve that magical 70 percent of the vote – with more than 60 percent of the voters abstaining.
The place to read about it is the invaluable Colombia Journal online.
“Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office.”
An additional factor that aided the paramilitary cause in the congressional elections was the low voter turnout. Preliminary reports show that only 34 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, low even by Colombian standards—42 percent of voters participated four years ago. In one Bogotá precinct, only 80 of the 1,200 registered voters showed up to cast a ballot. The combination of the paramilitarization of the electoral process and the voter apathy evident in many areas not under paramilitary control ensured a victory for pro-Uribe parties.”
Hilariously, the Bush administration is worried about the coca growers in Bolivia, and so is the American news media.
Who will deliver us from the curse of Bozoism, o my fallen cohort of droogs?
I don’t know. I’m going out to smoke a joint, now.
The sinister farce of American drug policy hit its normal two notes this past week: one clownlike, and the other terroristic. The clownlike note was provided by the DEA’s demand that Canada extradite the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana to stand trial for thirty years – thirty years the monsters want to cut from his body – for selling pot seeds. Now, LI has long been in favor of putting DEA agents themselves in prison, after suitable show trials, for kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and the usual like, but we have doubts this is going to happen. It is one of those peculiarities of national character that the American, a type that tattoos snakes not being tread on on its forearm, has been shredding his rights like so much dead dermis for thirty years in the ‘war against drugs.’ Is this because the average American is a buffoon, an asskisser, a dog in love with a flea or a flea in love with a dog, a pariah among the higher order of Swedenborgian angels that circulate through our celestial body continually? I dunno, I just live here. A nation that passes two million of its population through the prison pipeline, many of them for either selling the means to medicate and enjoy oneself without a permit from the doctor and a profit made by a pharmaceutical company, should be investigated not so much by Amnesty international as by Bozo international. The alarming growth of bozoism in this country, which triumphed in Florida in 2000, is, perhaps, something that can be cured. I recommend high gas prices and another decade of 700 billion dollar debts, myself. Maybe it is a temporary epidemic. Those who think bozoism is simply a tiresome fad disease, a psycho-somatic poltergeist, are urged to read Rumsfeld’s op ed in the WAPO. Obviously, this is a man in the last throes of bozoism. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that he has not yet been quarantined.
The terroristic face is being shown in America’s great ally in Latin America: Columbia. On the one side of the coin is sending a harmless Canadian to jail, and on the other side of the coin is supporting, with might and main, the familiar conjunction of fascist and drug dealer, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of free trade for all. Somehow, the media critics of Chavez, who go through every election and referendum in Venezuela looking for the stronghanded methods of communism – we just know they are there! – somehow ignored an election in which armed narcotics godfathers, paramilitaries who have already negotiated with the Uribe government to avoid extradition to the U.S., have helped Bush’s man achieve that magical 70 percent of the vote – with more than 60 percent of the voters abstaining.
The place to read about it is the invaluable Colombia Journal online.
“Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office.”
An additional factor that aided the paramilitary cause in the congressional elections was the low voter turnout. Preliminary reports show that only 34 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, low even by Colombian standards—42 percent of voters participated four years ago. In one Bogotá precinct, only 80 of the 1,200 registered voters showed up to cast a ballot. The combination of the paramilitarization of the electoral process and the voter apathy evident in many areas not under paramilitary control ensured a victory for pro-Uribe parties.”
Hilariously, the Bush administration is worried about the coca growers in Bolivia, and so is the American news media.
Who will deliver us from the curse of Bozoism, o my fallen cohort of droogs?
I don’t know. I’m going out to smoke a joint, now.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
d.c. linguistics
There was a story on the radio the other day about a new movie, "thank you for smoking," that features a cigarette industry lobbyist as its hero. The cigarette lobbyist does funny things, like, for instance, trying to brand anti-tobacco programs aimed at children with cigarette company names – this anti-smoking film is brought to you by R.J. Reynolds, for example.
In actual fact, the cigarette lobbyist in the film is a tame and pallid version of the real life wild wild D.C. variety. Example:
There’s a story in the WAPO today about the D.C. Federal court overturning one of Bush’s responses to Global Warming – making it easier for coal plants to pollute.
“Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their operations.”
What this means, in layman’s terms, is that coal plants simply cannot shift those costs of operations to third parties. As the court put it about the Bush administration’s argument:
“EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."
And now, here is where the vocabulary of the lobbyists comes in.
“The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet under, where before it was just in a casket."
Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. "This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."
That last sentence is a joy and a treasure, obviously forged in one of the most advanced laboratories in hell. The WAPO wisely ends the article with these words:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
In actual fact, the cigarette lobbyist in the film is a tame and pallid version of the real life wild wild D.C. variety. Example:
There’s a story in the WAPO today about the D.C. Federal court overturning one of Bush’s responses to Global Warming – making it easier for coal plants to pollute.
“Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their operations.”
What this means, in layman’s terms, is that coal plants simply cannot shift those costs of operations to third parties. As the court put it about the Bush administration’s argument:
“EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."
And now, here is where the vocabulary of the lobbyists comes in.
“The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet under, where before it was just in a casket."
Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. "This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."
That last sentence is a joy and a treasure, obviously forged in one of the most advanced laboratories in hell. The WAPO wisely ends the article with these words:
So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
Friday, March 17, 2006
our long national nightmare is over
The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq, would be -- and this is my preference -- the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. – Thomas Friedman
These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.
I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.
Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”
Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!
These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.
I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.
Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”
Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!
the bloody third -- part 2
Another post (re my post below) from the travelogue of the beginning of this war. A home movie. I'll entitle this clip, "what do you get when you have a sick and narcissistic left?" You get debate on a level that would make the angels -- the departed souls of the babies on the Gerber jars, those boomer emblems -- weep.
March 13, 2003
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which (the scientists now tell us ) we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who’ve had sex, but their many children. That’s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in ‘04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I’d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush’s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ‘04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies. Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we’ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
March 21, 2003
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
March 13, 2003
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which (the scientists now tell us ) we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who’ve had sex, but their many children. That’s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in ‘04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I’d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush’s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ‘04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies. Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we’ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
March 21, 2003
So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?
Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.
Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.
No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,
"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."
are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.
So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.
Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.
Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.
I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.
the bloody third
The bloody third anniversary. There is a demonstration in Austin tomorrow, starting at eleven. Myself, I'd advise --as a protest -- reading MacBeth, today. Take this passage as your guide to Iraq:
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
In honor of this anniversary, we are going to publish a little travelogue of posts. A travelogue from a man who never budged, a pocket Cassandra.
This is from March 09, 03:
March 09 03
The Exile's Temptation
"C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de révolutionner pour la vertu que de révolutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des scélérats violent les formes contre les hommes honnêtes, on sait que c'est un délit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation même ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, à les regarder comme des choses sacrées, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honnêtes violent les formes contre des scélérats, le peuple ne sait plus où il en est ; les formes et les lois se présentent à lui comme des obstacles à la justice" " -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
It is infinitely more dangerous to revolutionize for virtue than to revolutionize for crim. When the scoundrels violate the forms against the honest people, we know that it is just one more of their crimes. We are attached to the forms, even by their violation: we learn in silence, and by the weight of mischance, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and conservators of the social order. But when honest men violate the forms against the scoundrels, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves then as obstacles to justice.”
How would I see the War if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremacy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
MALCOLM
Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.
MACDUFF
Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.
MALCOLM
What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.
In honor of this anniversary, we are going to publish a little travelogue of posts. A travelogue from a man who never budged, a pocket Cassandra.
This is from March 09, 03:
March 09 03
The Exile's Temptation
"C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de révolutionner pour la vertu que de révolutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des scélérats violent les formes contre les hommes honnêtes, on sait que c'est un délit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation même ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, à les regarder comme des choses sacrées, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honnêtes violent les formes contre des scélérats, le peuple ne sait plus où il en est ; les formes et les lois se présentent à lui comme des obstacles à la justice" " -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant
It is infinitely more dangerous to revolutionize for virtue than to revolutionize for crim. When the scoundrels violate the forms against the honest people, we know that it is just one more of their crimes. We are attached to the forms, even by their violation: we learn in silence, and by the weight of mischance, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and conservators of the social order. But when honest men violate the forms against the scoundrels, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves then as obstacles to justice.”
How would I see the War if I were an Iraqi exile?
LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.
With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.
So, what would I think?
Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremacy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.
And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?
Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:
"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.
Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.
Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.
Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:
"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "
Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
their every word is a lie
Later Thursday, Rice was twice shouted down by anti-war protesters as she spoke to students at Sydney University's music school.
"Condoleezza Rice, you're a war criminal," a young man shouted minutes Rice began her address. "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you can't wash that blood away," he repeated until guards led him away.
Rice drew applause with her response: "I'm glad to see that democracy is well and alive at the university," she said, adding that democracy is now also alive at universities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. – Washington Post
BBC report, 10 January 2006
“Text of report by Ali Ajjam headlined "Shi'i and Sunni extremists tighten grip over the cities of Mesopotamia, Iraqi religious parties have secured control over Basra and turned its universities into centres of mourning for Al-Husayn and its department into mobilization centres" published by London-based newspaper Al-Hayat website on 6 January
When the young female engineer who works in a government department in Al-Kut Governorate (180 km south of Baghdad) arrived at work, she was surprised to find that her male and female colleagues were absent. Soon she discovered that most of the employees had gone down to the parking lot of the office building. The department's director had called an "electoral allegiance" meeting, and every employee was told to participate in the meeting to show allegiance to the "Shi'i list" just four days before the last elections.
The scene stunned engineer "HA". Government employees, who had grown beards following their director's orders, were chanting slogans and reciting inflammatory vernacular poetry to raise enthusiasm among the audience. The director had also banned neckties. She recalled a similar scene with her former director. Almost three years ago, the former director stopped work in the same department and gathered the olive-uniformed employees who were carrying their weapons in preparation for the war, which ended with the fall of the former regime.
Exactly as she did before the war, when she decided to leave her job, once again she collected her papers and personal belongings and returned home. The picture of her director among his employees while chanting "Ali... Ali..." was chasing her. In addition, his harsh words urging her to wear a headscarf were reverberating in her ears.”
"Condoleezza Rice, you're a war criminal," a young man shouted minutes Rice began her address. "Iraqi blood is on your hands and you can't wash that blood away," he repeated until guards led him away.
Rice drew applause with her response: "I'm glad to see that democracy is well and alive at the university," she said, adding that democracy is now also alive at universities in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. – Washington Post
BBC report, 10 January 2006
“Text of report by Ali Ajjam headlined "Shi'i and Sunni extremists tighten grip over the cities of Mesopotamia, Iraqi religious parties have secured control over Basra and turned its universities into centres of mourning for Al-Husayn and its department into mobilization centres" published by London-based newspaper Al-Hayat website on 6 January
When the young female engineer who works in a government department in Al-Kut Governorate (180 km south of Baghdad) arrived at work, she was surprised to find that her male and female colleagues were absent. Soon she discovered that most of the employees had gone down to the parking lot of the office building. The department's director had called an "electoral allegiance" meeting, and every employee was told to participate in the meeting to show allegiance to the "Shi'i list" just four days before the last elections.
The scene stunned engineer "HA". Government employees, who had grown beards following their director's orders, were chanting slogans and reciting inflammatory vernacular poetry to raise enthusiasm among the audience. The director had also banned neckties. She recalled a similar scene with her former director. Almost three years ago, the former director stopped work in the same department and gathered the olive-uniformed employees who were carrying their weapons in preparation for the war, which ended with the fall of the former regime.
Exactly as she did before the war, when she decided to leave her job, once again she collected her papers and personal belongings and returned home. The picture of her director among his employees while chanting "Ali... Ali..." was chasing her. In addition, his harsh words urging her to wear a headscarf were reverberating in her ears.”
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
remember, remember
It has been a long time since I bothered with Norman Geras’ blog, or others in the supposedly left pro-war camp. But I did go to the Geras blog tonight, and found a reply to Madeleine Bunting’s op ed in the Guardian. Bunting's article is a j'accuse, directed against the pro-war intellectuals -- the belligeranti.
Geras’ reply comes in several parts. Here are three of the Iraq parts:
“Ingredient 4 This one concerns the distribution of blame. It's totally forthright, but only in one direction: '[T]he most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented...'; 'the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and still uttering the same meaningless platitudes.' As for the daily carnage being perpetrated by political forces actively opposed to any democratic process and bound by none of the recognized moral constraints in their choice of methods and targets, here Bunting is coyly indirect. It's just 'blood and brutality' and 'nightmare scenarios', and even then it's because (borrowing the words of Zalmay Khalilzad) 'we have opened a Pandora's box'. But even if 'we' are to blame, in Bunting's judgement, for having done that, why does she have no word of blame to direct at anyone else, as if there were no other forces - former Baathists, just for example, jihadis - determining where Iraq is headed? The anger is all reserved for 'the politicians who made the decisions' and so forth - as if there were just one culpable party.
Ingredient 5 Is there any positive side to what has happened in Iraq? Is Bunting pleased at least for the Kurds? Who knows? She offers no word to enlighten you. Is it at all material, as far as she's concerned, that despite everything 'Iraqis have continued to say by decisive margins that, on balance, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was still worth it'. Given Bunting's way of drawing up a balance sheet on Afghanistan, one shouldn't expect her to say anything about this when it comes to Iraq, and she doesn't.
Ingredient 6 And that brings us to the heart of things here - the heart of things being that Bunting doesn't allow that the differences over the Iraq war were a matter of judgement, in which not all the considerations pointed in the same direction. The only look-in this gets from her is this: 'One can understand the eagerness to topple Saddam might have blinded some into backing a recklessly foolish war.' You see, it 'blinded' us. It couldn't have been, could it, that for people of left and liberal outlook this was a genuine and extremely powerful consideration - to terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves? Writing as if there was only ever one arguable or legitimate side of the story, as if the future was from the start completely transparent, and as if there were no human costs in not going to war against Saddam, is a piece of the purest demagogy, if it isn't (as it usually isn't in such things) outright dishonesty. In this latest piece of hers, Madeleine Bunting speaks for all those in the anti-war camp who have simply silenced the 'other' considerations, disallowing that they carried any weight. They have been, unfortunately, many. There were ways of opposing the war, ways that did not indulge in this silencing, this disallowing, and these can and should be respected. The Bunting-style concoction is something else.”
This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that we can expect from the belligeranti as the death spiral plays itself out -- the irrelevance of American power, the unpredictable direction of Iraqi violence, the shedding of all credibility by the Coalition. In essence, the belligeranti re-writing of history will make everything depend on the moral rightness of wanting to “terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves.”
Unfortunately for this argument, it makes no sense. America and Britain could as well have invaded Indonesia in 1990 – after all, Suharto murdered easily 500-800 thousand Indonesians in 1966 and 1967, and if I wished to divide those by the years, I could easily come up with a per year figure of deaths. But the latter would be a lie, just as Geras' remark about Saddam Hussein is a lie. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was feeding the mass graves in 2003. To have smashed him in 1991 would, indeed, have prevented that – but not to have smashed him then casts as much doubt on the moral dimension of the invasion as would be cast if we invaded Serbia today for having invaded Bosnia in 1992.
That Geras clings, still, to the idea that 2003 was 1991, and that invasion was the only way to stop the ‘feeding of the mass graves” is merely the usual farce. But I’d like to concentrate on Ingredient 4, since one of the things that will slip by in the coming battle of recriminations is how much the pro-war party did, actively, to worsen the situation once Iraq was invaded. The mistakes here came fast and thick, and are indicative of the stew of intellectual corruption in which these characters are steeped. A small bill of particulars would go like this:
1. The de-legitimation of secular democracy. The first and most lasting damage done to post Saddam Iraq by the neo-cons and the war supporters happened indirectly. Even as Iraq was being invaded, the Pentagon flew a known swindler, Ahmed Chalabi, with the nucleus of a paramilitary (the first of so many) to Iraq. Not one war supporter I know of blanched. None protested that putting the face of a criminal on the American supported Iraqi force was a tremendous mistake, and would wound any attempt to create a democratic faction in Iraq. Imagine, if you will, gathering a party to support feminism and putting a former rapist at the head of it. Imagine appointing Ken Lay the head of the SEC. Imagine appointing George Bush to some commission to repair New Orleans. In all of those situations, the grotesque disparity between the record of the person so appointed and the ostensible purpose of the organizations to which they were appointed would have immediately created an outcry. Chalabi, the first of a number of sinister American clients in Iraq (Allawi having, perhaps, an even worse record), was placed in Iraq as though it were the most normal thing in the world. This should reveal, pretty much, the massive bad faith of the pro-war side’s ostensive and gaudy “concern for the Iraqi people.” It was the typical colonialist gambit of finding a criminal for a dark skinned, conquered population that can keep enough order to allow looting to proceed in a peaceable manner.
2. The next opportunity for the pro-war crowd to actually make a difference was in the first couple months of the occupation. Those months planted the terrible seeds of what has come after. The refusal to consider immediate Iraqization of the government; the appointment of sub-competent Americans to positions of authority in Iraq; the attempt to redo the Iraqi economy to the benefit of the U.S.; the disbanding of the army; the laissez faire attitude to looting. At no point did the pro-war people flinch. Even when the policy was clearly insane – the disbanding of the army was, obviously, insane, and LI wrote about it as early as May 30, 2003, to say so – the pro-war people never raised a single peep. Of course, what we wrote then was not the CW it is now, but it was pretty easy to guess. But of course, that isn't all. When Halliburton came on the scene like a devouring locust, Christopher Hitchens wrote a column praising the company. For some reason, he didn’t write a column recently, about the Pentagon overruling their auditors and allowing Halliburton to collect 200 million dollars in gouged profits. Surely he should have. The whole attitude of the pro-war party was either smug or organizing themselves in absolute lockstep behind the Bush plan.
3. As the occupation got under way in earnest, and it was evident that an insurgency was taking place, the pro-war people did their best to lie about this. It took months for them to unglue themselves enough from following every jot and tittle of the pronunciamentos issuing from the Bush white house to even notice that something might have gone a teensy bit wrong. Instead of operating, then, in terms of their supposed love for erecting a ‘liberty loving’ Iraq – which would clearly require internationalizing both the coalition force and the governing structure, kicking out Bremer, and speeding up the transition to an all Iraq government – they continued the childish and stupid project of spitting at the French – what they were hired for in the first place, I suppose. This was probably the last chance to transition from the occupation into an Iraq that could have connected with the strong traditions of its pre-Saddam past. However, this was certainly not in the interests of the Americans, who were determined to knock down one of those traditions – Iraq’s seminal role in nationalizing oil and starting OPEC – and so this never happened.
4. After that, of course, the crimes come thick and fast – the air strikes, the massacres of crowds, the outlawing of Sadr, the attacks in Najaf, and the crowning war crime of sacking Falluja, all celebrated by a crowd that now had wandered so far from supporting anything but colonial oppression in Iraq that they had simply become a joke. A joke whose main indignation was directed at George Galloway. The disgusting left in pursuit of the irrelevant left.
5. So, let us not forget what the pro-war group has wrought. And let’s not get caught up in pointless conversations about the worth or non-worth of toppling Saddam Hussein, since regime change and occupation are two different issues -- one did not have to flow into the other, after all. That they did -- that it was obvious that the bogus D.C. warriors were going to invade to stay -- delegitimated the attack in the first place. But the questions should be separated, anyway, for maximum clarity. The question is the worth or non-worth of the occupation of Iraq, and the guilt, the indelible guilt of the pro-war intellecutals is built on that dark and bloody ground.
ps -- I exempt, from the above five points, Johann Hari -- one of the few belligeranti who actually consulted something other than his own moral superiority when writing about Iraq. While disagreeing with Hari's notion of feedback - especially the curious reverence in which he holds obviously flawed polls of the Iraqi people -- at least he has a notion of feedback, and it extends beyond what is being cleverly expressed on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the latest Hitchens screed in Slate. LI understands the moral grounds that would move someone like Hari, or even Geras, to support an invasion to knock out Saddam Hussein. But a morality so doped up on its own righteousness that it mainly functions to produce a smokescreen of invective and sophism behiind which a gang of corporate hustlers and imperialists are trying to impose an unpopular order on an unwilling populace soon passes into immorality. Hari, to his credit, realized this early on.
Geras’ reply comes in several parts. Here are three of the Iraq parts:
“Ingredient 4 This one concerns the distribution of blame. It's totally forthright, but only in one direction: '[T]he most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented...'; 'the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and still uttering the same meaningless platitudes.' As for the daily carnage being perpetrated by political forces actively opposed to any democratic process and bound by none of the recognized moral constraints in their choice of methods and targets, here Bunting is coyly indirect. It's just 'blood and brutality' and 'nightmare scenarios', and even then it's because (borrowing the words of Zalmay Khalilzad) 'we have opened a Pandora's box'. But even if 'we' are to blame, in Bunting's judgement, for having done that, why does she have no word of blame to direct at anyone else, as if there were no other forces - former Baathists, just for example, jihadis - determining where Iraq is headed? The anger is all reserved for 'the politicians who made the decisions' and so forth - as if there were just one culpable party.
Ingredient 5 Is there any positive side to what has happened in Iraq? Is Bunting pleased at least for the Kurds? Who knows? She offers no word to enlighten you. Is it at all material, as far as she's concerned, that despite everything 'Iraqis have continued to say by decisive margins that, on balance, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was still worth it'. Given Bunting's way of drawing up a balance sheet on Afghanistan, one shouldn't expect her to say anything about this when it comes to Iraq, and she doesn't.
Ingredient 6 And that brings us to the heart of things here - the heart of things being that Bunting doesn't allow that the differences over the Iraq war were a matter of judgement, in which not all the considerations pointed in the same direction. The only look-in this gets from her is this: 'One can understand the eagerness to topple Saddam might have blinded some into backing a recklessly foolish war.' You see, it 'blinded' us. It couldn't have been, could it, that for people of left and liberal outlook this was a genuine and extremely powerful consideration - to terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves? Writing as if there was only ever one arguable or legitimate side of the story, as if the future was from the start completely transparent, and as if there were no human costs in not going to war against Saddam, is a piece of the purest demagogy, if it isn't (as it usually isn't in such things) outright dishonesty. In this latest piece of hers, Madeleine Bunting speaks for all those in the anti-war camp who have simply silenced the 'other' considerations, disallowing that they carried any weight. They have been, unfortunately, many. There were ways of opposing the war, ways that did not indulge in this silencing, this disallowing, and these can and should be respected. The Bunting-style concoction is something else.”
This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that we can expect from the belligeranti as the death spiral plays itself out -- the irrelevance of American power, the unpredictable direction of Iraqi violence, the shedding of all credibility by the Coalition. In essence, the belligeranti re-writing of history will make everything depend on the moral rightness of wanting to “terminate the rule of a genocidal tyrant, to close down the torture chambers and the murderous processes feeding the mass graves.”
Unfortunately for this argument, it makes no sense. America and Britain could as well have invaded Indonesia in 1990 – after all, Suharto murdered easily 500-800 thousand Indonesians in 1966 and 1967, and if I wished to divide those by the years, I could easily come up with a per year figure of deaths. But the latter would be a lie, just as Geras' remark about Saddam Hussein is a lie. There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was feeding the mass graves in 2003. To have smashed him in 1991 would, indeed, have prevented that – but not to have smashed him then casts as much doubt on the moral dimension of the invasion as would be cast if we invaded Serbia today for having invaded Bosnia in 1992.
That Geras clings, still, to the idea that 2003 was 1991, and that invasion was the only way to stop the ‘feeding of the mass graves” is merely the usual farce. But I’d like to concentrate on Ingredient 4, since one of the things that will slip by in the coming battle of recriminations is how much the pro-war party did, actively, to worsen the situation once Iraq was invaded. The mistakes here came fast and thick, and are indicative of the stew of intellectual corruption in which these characters are steeped. A small bill of particulars would go like this:
1. The de-legitimation of secular democracy. The first and most lasting damage done to post Saddam Iraq by the neo-cons and the war supporters happened indirectly. Even as Iraq was being invaded, the Pentagon flew a known swindler, Ahmed Chalabi, with the nucleus of a paramilitary (the first of so many) to Iraq. Not one war supporter I know of blanched. None protested that putting the face of a criminal on the American supported Iraqi force was a tremendous mistake, and would wound any attempt to create a democratic faction in Iraq. Imagine, if you will, gathering a party to support feminism and putting a former rapist at the head of it. Imagine appointing Ken Lay the head of the SEC. Imagine appointing George Bush to some commission to repair New Orleans. In all of those situations, the grotesque disparity between the record of the person so appointed and the ostensible purpose of the organizations to which they were appointed would have immediately created an outcry. Chalabi, the first of a number of sinister American clients in Iraq (Allawi having, perhaps, an even worse record), was placed in Iraq as though it were the most normal thing in the world. This should reveal, pretty much, the massive bad faith of the pro-war side’s ostensive and gaudy “concern for the Iraqi people.” It was the typical colonialist gambit of finding a criminal for a dark skinned, conquered population that can keep enough order to allow looting to proceed in a peaceable manner.
2. The next opportunity for the pro-war crowd to actually make a difference was in the first couple months of the occupation. Those months planted the terrible seeds of what has come after. The refusal to consider immediate Iraqization of the government; the appointment of sub-competent Americans to positions of authority in Iraq; the attempt to redo the Iraqi economy to the benefit of the U.S.; the disbanding of the army; the laissez faire attitude to looting. At no point did the pro-war people flinch. Even when the policy was clearly insane – the disbanding of the army was, obviously, insane, and LI wrote about it as early as May 30, 2003, to say so – the pro-war people never raised a single peep. Of course, what we wrote then was not the CW it is now, but it was pretty easy to guess. But of course, that isn't all. When Halliburton came on the scene like a devouring locust, Christopher Hitchens wrote a column praising the company. For some reason, he didn’t write a column recently, about the Pentagon overruling their auditors and allowing Halliburton to collect 200 million dollars in gouged profits. Surely he should have. The whole attitude of the pro-war party was either smug or organizing themselves in absolute lockstep behind the Bush plan.
3. As the occupation got under way in earnest, and it was evident that an insurgency was taking place, the pro-war people did their best to lie about this. It took months for them to unglue themselves enough from following every jot and tittle of the pronunciamentos issuing from the Bush white house to even notice that something might have gone a teensy bit wrong. Instead of operating, then, in terms of their supposed love for erecting a ‘liberty loving’ Iraq – which would clearly require internationalizing both the coalition force and the governing structure, kicking out Bremer, and speeding up the transition to an all Iraq government – they continued the childish and stupid project of spitting at the French – what they were hired for in the first place, I suppose. This was probably the last chance to transition from the occupation into an Iraq that could have connected with the strong traditions of its pre-Saddam past. However, this was certainly not in the interests of the Americans, who were determined to knock down one of those traditions – Iraq’s seminal role in nationalizing oil and starting OPEC – and so this never happened.
4. After that, of course, the crimes come thick and fast – the air strikes, the massacres of crowds, the outlawing of Sadr, the attacks in Najaf, and the crowning war crime of sacking Falluja, all celebrated by a crowd that now had wandered so far from supporting anything but colonial oppression in Iraq that they had simply become a joke. A joke whose main indignation was directed at George Galloway. The disgusting left in pursuit of the irrelevant left.
5. So, let us not forget what the pro-war group has wrought. And let’s not get caught up in pointless conversations about the worth or non-worth of toppling Saddam Hussein, since regime change and occupation are two different issues -- one did not have to flow into the other, after all. That they did -- that it was obvious that the bogus D.C. warriors were going to invade to stay -- delegitimated the attack in the first place. But the questions should be separated, anyway, for maximum clarity. The question is the worth or non-worth of the occupation of Iraq, and the guilt, the indelible guilt of the pro-war intellecutals is built on that dark and bloody ground.
ps -- I exempt, from the above five points, Johann Hari -- one of the few belligeranti who actually consulted something other than his own moral superiority when writing about Iraq. While disagreeing with Hari's notion of feedback - especially the curious reverence in which he holds obviously flawed polls of the Iraqi people -- at least he has a notion of feedback, and it extends beyond what is being cleverly expressed on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the latest Hitchens screed in Slate. LI understands the moral grounds that would move someone like Hari, or even Geras, to support an invasion to knock out Saddam Hussein. But a morality so doped up on its own righteousness that it mainly functions to produce a smokescreen of invective and sophism behiind which a gang of corporate hustlers and imperialists are trying to impose an unpopular order on an unwilling populace soon passes into immorality. Hari, to his credit, realized this early on.
Monday, March 13, 2006
the world historical tinkerer
"To invent useful and successful inventions, those with inventive minds should take up individual advanced work and study along some worthwhile line. One should not be afraid to look far, far into the future and visualize the things that might be. . . . Remember, the things which are so commonplace today would have been the ravings of a fanatic a few years ago .”—Earl Silas Tupper
LI had promised, last week, to surprise the world by delineating the features of the tinkerer, considered dialectically. Well, the world yawned, days passed, LI went to the rodeo, and – as our readers can see – there is still no earthshaking tinker post, to put beside that moment, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel finds the embodiment of self-consciousness rising up as a narrative moment involving emblematic figures draped in the rich white vocabulary of abstraction.
This morning we are dosed with the proper amount of coffee, and we successfully pieced together a post for another site that is, in some ways, a side-effect of our obsession with the tinker, and so we thought we’d give it another shot.
Let’s first remember Hegel’s figures. The Lordship and bondsman section begins with a movment from life to thinghood:
“In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman.
The master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, i.e. through an other whose very nature implies that it is bound up with an independent being or with thinghood in general. The master brings himself into relation to both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood. And since the master, is (a) qua notion of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of self-existence, but (b) is now moreover at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other — he [the master] stands in relation (a) immediately to both, (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the bondsman mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the bondsman in thrall; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood.”
Interpreting Hegel is like sticking your hand into a beehive for honey. There’s a lot of stinging, unknown variables you have to grope your way past. But my purpose in quoting the Venerable is to bring forward, first, the relationship of self-consciousness to life – which, in Hegel’s terms, has an order to it that moves from the unity of irreconcilables – the absolute object and the absolute mediation seen as one thing – to the division of the perpetually to be reconciled. In that movement, historically, mastery has migrated to the control of the vision of the those irreconcilables, and their administration, while bondship – stuck in thinghood – has no immediate higher level to spare itself its immediacy, and so its dependency. The dependency is a trick, since the thinghood is never perfect, but is at best the simulation of thinghood. And, as we all know, this moment is followed by the struggle for recognition, which Blake summed up best in the notbook verses beginning:
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft/
Farted & belchd & coughd/
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering/
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering..."
But for the tinkerer, the irreconcilability can actually be put to one side if we just stop with the self-consciousness and begin with self-improvement. Self-consciousness we can leave to the teenagers.
Which brings me to the title of one of Hugh Kenner’s books: The Homemade World. The book was about American modernist writers. But confining that phrase to writers is, LI thinks, a waste of its capaciousness. The homemade world is goal towards which treks the tinkerer as well as the Europe addled modernist. While the phrase works for Robert Frost, it also works for another North of Boston man: Earl Silas Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware. About whom we will have more to say in another post.
LI had promised, last week, to surprise the world by delineating the features of the tinkerer, considered dialectically. Well, the world yawned, days passed, LI went to the rodeo, and – as our readers can see – there is still no earthshaking tinker post, to put beside that moment, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel finds the embodiment of self-consciousness rising up as a narrative moment involving emblematic figures draped in the rich white vocabulary of abstraction.
This morning we are dosed with the proper amount of coffee, and we successfully pieced together a post for another site that is, in some ways, a side-effect of our obsession with the tinker, and so we thought we’d give it another shot.
Let’s first remember Hegel’s figures. The Lordship and bondsman section begins with a movment from life to thinghood:
“In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman.
The master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, i.e. through an other whose very nature implies that it is bound up with an independent being or with thinghood in general. The master brings himself into relation to both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood. And since the master, is (a) qua notion of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of self-existence, but (b) is now moreover at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other — he [the master] stands in relation (a) immediately to both, (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the bondsman mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the bondsman in thrall; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood.”
Interpreting Hegel is like sticking your hand into a beehive for honey. There’s a lot of stinging, unknown variables you have to grope your way past. But my purpose in quoting the Venerable is to bring forward, first, the relationship of self-consciousness to life – which, in Hegel’s terms, has an order to it that moves from the unity of irreconcilables – the absolute object and the absolute mediation seen as one thing – to the division of the perpetually to be reconciled. In that movement, historically, mastery has migrated to the control of the vision of the those irreconcilables, and their administration, while bondship – stuck in thinghood – has no immediate higher level to spare itself its immediacy, and so its dependency. The dependency is a trick, since the thinghood is never perfect, but is at best the simulation of thinghood. And, as we all know, this moment is followed by the struggle for recognition, which Blake summed up best in the notbook verses beginning:
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft/
Farted & belchd & coughd/
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering/
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering..."
But for the tinkerer, the irreconcilability can actually be put to one side if we just stop with the self-consciousness and begin with self-improvement. Self-consciousness we can leave to the teenagers.
Which brings me to the title of one of Hugh Kenner’s books: The Homemade World. The book was about American modernist writers. But confining that phrase to writers is, LI thinks, a waste of its capaciousness. The homemade world is goal towards which treks the tinkerer as well as the Europe addled modernist. While the phrase works for Robert Frost, it also works for another North of Boston man: Earl Silas Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware. About whom we will have more to say in another post.
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