calling back the dawgs of war

LI believes in détente with Iran. My friend, the Brooding Persian, doesn’t. Now, my friend, Mr. B.P., has the advantage of Persian birth, an infinitely greater knowledge of the history, culture, and politics of Iran, and all of the tacit knowledge brought by recent and prolonged immersion in the country, while LI sits on his ass in Texas and reads newspapers. So the advantage is all to Mr. B.P.

However, we are still unconvinced. We are also unconvinced that the evident belief of some in the Bush administration that we should start the bombing of Iran any day now is actually going to be realized. It is easy to get hysterical about how incompetent the Bushies are and how bloodthirsty they are, but it is best to put this in context: the thing about history is that it operates by thens. Those who think it is the year 2002 all over again fail to reckon with the consequences of the year 2002, or the year 2004. The war in Iraq, for one thing, seemed like, and was, a short term economic winner. The excuse to mount a policy of extreme military Keynesianism in 2002, after a debilitating market crash and a pretty soft demand landscape, fit into the general Bush governing policy. But the war in Iran looks like a short term economic loser – just for starters. Plus, of course, the soldiers in Iraq are hostages to fortune, and any Cambodia invasion ploy now would simply lead to both Iran and Iraq as lead and dead weights around the President’s party. Those who have been through a war hysteria are, of course, going to be impressed by it enough to suspect that it lies latent in the population like some flue virus. They ignore the other side of war – war fatigue. War fatigue about the war in Iraq has come with remarkable swiftness – see our post about legitimacy for one (partial) explanation of it. In moments of stress, we sometimes buy into the underground comix version of America as a land of redneck Neanderthals. Exaggeration in caricature does not, however, point to statistical truth – it is best at pointing to existential and particular truths. I could easily go out into the streets of Austin and find some guy whose opinion would be that the Middle East should be nuked. But to really judge this guy, I would have to know how much that opinion weighs in his life. I would have a much harder time finding a guy who really devotes a lot of time to such questions. And even my imaginary Mr. Blowhard would probably back down (if he didn’t have one for the road in his belly) to a more moderate position. One of the things I do not like about blogs is that, all too often, one feels the blogger is writing with some caricature opponent leaning over his shoulder – this leads to a Flintstone version of politics, and you just have to put in your villain – a righwinger can put in Jane Fonda and John Kerry, a lefty can put in George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Myself, I’m of the lefty tribe, and I find George Bush and Dick Cheney villainous. But I don’t think they are unhuman – they largely share a set of motives with myself. When I lose my grip on that fact, I devalue any analysis I make of what is going on in D.C.

Which brings me to this Q and A in the post with the president of the American/Iranian council, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers. I highly recommend the piece. While Dr. Amirahmadi has an academically naïve realism about states – to say that states have interests rather than allies sounds realistic, but actually presupposes more clarity within a state about its interest than is ever, or could be ever, the case – I am generally impressed by his grasp, a, of the political reality in Iran, in which President Ahmadinejad is struggling for internal power rather than invested with it, and b., his grasp of the wider situation.

First, a,: “Mr Ahmadinejad is a calculative man. He is also an ambitious person that have to run a country dominated by powerful clergies. His reference to Twelve Imam is directed at nuetralizing that power and gain legitimacy from it. In really, and as the experience in the last 7 months show, he has not been more religiously strict then his predecessors. No new religious restrictions have been imposed and the population does not feel that a major change in that direrction has taken place. Note also that he does not any more speak about imams but about nuclear techonology and other mundane issues.”

And … this should be soooo emphasized:
“On Ahmadinejad, his statements are to be condemned, but I must also note that the man is not the one who makes war and peace decisions for Iran, and strategic policies like ones toward the US and Israel are not determined at his level. Those bigger decisions, including the nuclear matter, are decided by the Leader, the Expediancy Council, and the National Security Council of the country. Iran has a 20-year "Vision Plan" that has set directions for the President to follow. He has some degree of autonomy but cannot disregard those directives.”
And on b, which is where Mr. B.P. and I disagree:

"Waldorf, Md.: Why are we assuming that these people are not telling the truth? Has the U.S. given them some kind of bomb making materials in the past and that is why we are so adamant about this? To me the U.S. is coming across as bullying these people. Why don't we back off a little bit. Or is there a hidden agenda that only certain people know and the public, of course, is the last to know?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: There is no hidden agenda! The US and Iran have had serious difficulty in the last 26 years. It all started with the revolution (which was made against past US interventions in Iran and against "its" dictator in Tehran). The nuclear matter is only one among such problems. There are issues of terrorism, peace in the Middle East and human rights/democracy. Over time, the situation has become even more complicated (e.g. the US situation in Iraq). Please note that nations have neither enemies nor friends; they have interests. It is only unfortunate that the governments in Tehran and Washington (as well as in Tel Aviv) have not looked deeper into the tremendous common interests that exist here and have instead focused on differences. This must change for the situation to normalize. [misspellings corrected]"

LI thinks that one of the roots of the Iraqi invasion was retaining a policy of double sanctions against Iraq and Iran in the nineties, when it should have been adjusted – there should have been a definite tilt towards Iran. Not only would this recognize reality, but Iran’s incorporation into the world system would, we think, work towards strengthening civil society in Iran by making palpable the everyday advantages of eroding the power of the mullahs. It seems to be the case – and I may be totally off base – that Iran’s majority working class population has been economically stagnant while its ownership class has prospered. Since the appeal of civil society freedoms is mixed up with economic policies that seem to reward the already prosperous ownership class, however, that appeal is justly subject to the suspicion that the price of freedom is continuing economic misery. The Cold War interpretive scrim, which the neo-cons like to drag out, is particularly distorting here: the Islamicist politico can well combine that position with the neo-liberal ultra – hence the American affection, at the moment, for a SCIRI leader who is also a free trader maximus, privatize the oil fields kind of guy.

Given what I am saying, however, I can imagine an easy objection: what you are saying, Mr. LI, contradicts itself. You are advocating normalizing Iran – integrating it into a neo-liberal world system – while analyzing the internal political situation in terms that posit the neo-liberal system as a standing evil that incites a nationalism that would interfere with any normalizing process.

I’ll slip out of that strait jacket, and doing amazing other Houdini like feats, in another post.

Here’s a news item that will be well hidden in the NYT or WAPO.

The president of Colombia, the strongest American ally in South America, is making moves that would be hyper-criticized if they were made by the greatest American devil figure in South America, Chavez. This is from Global Insight Daily Analysis:

“Incumbent Colombian consul to Italy and former head of the South American country's intelligence service, Jorge Noguera, has denied involvement in an alleged plot to kill Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe has recalled the one-time Administrative Department of Security (DAS) chief from his current post in the European country to answer allegations that were published recently by two magazines in Colombia. Noguera is accused of overseeing the plot in conjunction with Colombian paramilitaries. Claims that the DAS had been infiltrated by paramilitary groups brought about Noguera's resignation in late October last year (see Colombia: 26 October 2006: Director of Colombia's Intelligence Service Resigns). Reports stem from former DAS employee Rafael Enrique García, who accused the Uribe administration of acting in an authoritarian manner similar to that of the disgraced former Alberto Fujimori government of Peru (1990-2000).

García described Noguera as the Vladimiro Montesinos of the Uribe government, referring to the imprisoned Peruvian one-time intelligence chief who helped Fujimori control his political opponents through a spying network.”

Venezuela has done nothing, really, to harm American interests – the interests of the international lenders, perhaps. But our greatest ally, as is the way of rightwing allies, is a ticking bomb of black market money, connected to the bogus, ongoing drug war. The drug war is noxious both in what it purports to do – restraining people from medicating themselves in order to allow big pharma and the medical industry to charge us more for doing the same thing – and what it really does, creating a huge secret source of funds that America’s intelligence agencies and their clients eagerly fasten themselves to. Not surprisingly, the supposedly “disarmed” rightwing paramilitaries, who claim to have 35 percent of the Colombian legislature in their pocket and who have certainly merged their interests with Uribe, are also involved with Noguera:

“Colombia's intelligence chief has quit amid allegations that his security agency was infiltrated by the main right-wing paramilitary group. President Uribe accepted the resignation of Jorge Noguera, the head of the Administrative Security Department (DAS). President Uribe also dismissed the agency's deputy director, Jose Narvaez. The daily El Tiempo reported that DAS officers were secretly taped while discussing alleged plans by a close aide to Mr Noguera to sell intelligence information to Colombia's paramilitaries. The newspaper also claimed that Mr Narvaez asked for the recording to be made to ensnare his boss in the scandal, revealing deep divisions within the agency, Reuters reports.”

Meanwhile, according to Gary Leech, the Bush administration has indicted the leadership of Farc as the masterminds of the drug trade. FARC is the hardcore leftist group that divides atrocities with the paramilitaries in the countryside:

“The indictment of the FARC leaders further illustrates the Bush administration’s strategy to portray the FARC as the greatest perpetrator of violence and drug trafficking in Colombia. The reality, however, is very different from the Bush White House’s fictitious portrayal. The U.S. indictment provided no evidence to support its claim that FARC leaders have earned $25 billion from drug trafficking and are responsible for 60 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States.
Meanwhile, most Colombia experts agree that the country’s right-wing paramilitaries are far more deeply involved in drug trafficking than the rebels, a fact supported by the numerous drug busts in which the seized cocaine was traced back to paramilitary groups. In fact, former associates of Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the now-defunct Medellín cartel, established some of Colombia’s most prominent paramilitary groups.

At the same time that the Bush administration is making the FARC the focus of its drug war propaganda, it is becoming increasingly evident that the U.S.-backed paramilitary demobilization is nothing more than a charade. Last week, demobilized paramilitary leader Ivan Roberto Duque confirmed publicly on Caracol Radio what Amnesty International, the United Nations and many analysts had been alleging for more than a year: that demobilized paramilitaries are taking up arms again. According to Duque, ex-militia fighters are offering their services to drug traffickers or “private justice” groups, also known as paramilitaries. As a result, the number of killings by paramilitaries in 2005 more than doubled that of the previous year.”

Meanwhile, how about those honest American narcs fighting away in Colombia? The Narco News has been running a nice series on those guys via reporter Bill Conroy:

“A document obtained recently by Narco News makes those questions more than hypothetical queries. In this document, Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs. (The DEA is part of the larger Justice Department.)

The information in that document is also corroborated by a number of other sources that spoke directly to Narco News, including former government officials who are familiar with the DEA’s Bogotá operations

Kent’s memorandum contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

Since this definitely doesn’t fit into the narrative American papers prefer, it won’t be coming out any time soon. Since Conroy’s report in this January, Kent, the whistleblower, you will be happy to know, has been transferred.

the double face of illegitimacy

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, LI quoted a phrase of Benjamin Constant’s that seems to haunt the whole misadventure: “When villains violate the forms against honest men, one knows that this is just one more crime. One is attached to the forms exactly insofar as they are violated; one learns, in silence, and by misfortune, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and preservers of the social order. But when the honest men violate the forms against the villains, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves now as obstacles to justice.”

Constant was active in the French revolution, and he saw the price paid by violating the “forms.” Unlike Burke, he was on the side of the revolution. Young as he was, he saw, as Burke did not, that the French monarchical system had decayed past the point of salvage. But he also appreciated, as Ste Just never did, that the republic is built on forms. As Paine once put it, while monarchy is based on will, the Republic is based on justice. Not on the guillotine, and not on God.

LI has persistently pointed out that the scandal at the heart of this war, and the reason the conversation about it in this country compulsively returns to its origin is that its origin was a brutal violation of the forms by the “honest men” against the villains. The French phrase “hommes honnêtes” is not an assessment of private moral character, but of social position – and in this case, the Bush administration plays the role of honest men. The more modern term for the forms, stemming from Weber, is legitimacy. The illegitimacy of this war has been, from the start, the thing within it which has worked against it, silently unraveling every plan and every defense of this war.

The crime against legitimacy has a double face:

On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the tactics used to promote the war, from cherrypicked intelligence reports to slander to half truths to the contemplation of open frauds, such as Bush’s suggestion that a U.N. plane be shot down over Iraq by the U.S. military disguised as Iraqis. The followers of the Bush administration in the press, the whole tribe of belligeranti, carried into the argument a foul atmosphere of libel, of derision, and of disguise. The latter was particularly important. The war’s very dimensions were disguised. From the disgracing of Shinseki to Wolfowitz’ painful testimony about the cost of the war to the refusal to even discuss the occupation, the war’s press followers existed largely to block any inquiry into what the war would entail.

On the other hand, there was the ragged band of adventurers, half Garibaldi, half Lucky Luciano, that the American government evidently intended to put in place as the native Iraqi government. The most prominent of this band, Ahmed Chalabi, is a notorious thief. And indeed, from the reports of the massive defrauding of the Iraqi people, both directly, in terms of the funds seized from Saddam’s government after Baghdad collapsed, and indirectly, from the use of American reconstruction money, it is apparent that the spirit of Chalabi like thievery has presided over every move the American’s made in “reconstructing” Iraq, right down to the military’s publication of false and unchecked numbers about schools repaired (in which the money for the repairing vanished, and the school’s employees are using the same, unreconstructed structures) to the libraries and monument restored. As importantly, the cohort of exiles, save for some of the SCIRI and DAWA politicians, had no roots in Iraq and quickly became unpopular there. A country that had seen Saddam Hussein was in no mood to support another set of thieves.

Interestingly, Constant’s dictum is so correct that support for the war, collapsing in tandem with the supposed American plan for “victory” in the war, is simply a response to the initial violation of forms. For that initial violation requires infinite covering work, thus perpetuating the violence. And this, in itself, points to a constitutional neglect which we have inherited from the Cold War. Among other things, the Cold War suspended the constitutional duty of the legislature to validate American military action. This duty wasn’t an arbitrary whim of the founding fathers. They knew too well that an executive can use a nation’s resources, its taxes and fighting men, to wage wars to its own personal advantage – in effect, making the military the mercenary force of the executive. George III’s use of Hessian soldiers was a vivid instance. The pretence that an elected executive would have more legitimacy doing the same thing was scotched by the Constitutional Convention’s skeptics. They were right. There’s been an argument – well propounded by Paul Craddick – that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq in March of 2003. That war was the result of legislative resolutions passed in 1998, as well as resolutions passed at the U.N. in 1991. In a sense, this is true – but this simply shows, in a bold way, how the forms for war have fallen into disrepair. Your average American citizen was so unaware that he lived in a nation at war in 2000 that the issue never even surfaced in the election. In fact, it was not a war so much as a sporadic hampering action. The Bush administration knew that it did not have political carte blanche to invade Iraq because of some obscure legislation passed in 1998. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if they did – surely the rotten fabric of post-constitutional warmongering would have been brought down with a resounding crash. This would have been, all things considered, a good thing. That the U.S. Congress couldn’t even formally declare war on the government of Afghanistan after 9/11 shows how fearful both the executive and legislative branch are of resurrecting the old Constitutional curb on military action. Its use would call into question future military actions, not so legitimized.

One consequence, of course, of the failure to declare war on the Taliban and the failure to officially enact a policy that called explicitly for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is that the outrageously negligent military campaign against OBL, culminating with Tora Bora (which, given a competent administration, would certainly have resulted in Rumsfeld’s resignation, since OBL’s escape was the direct result of Rumsfeldian policies in Afghanistan), was allowed to go forward with no ending, and to turn into a campaign in Iraq, as though all wars desired by the President are connected.

It is puzzling that supposedly sharp political reporters and commentators – the tribe of the belligeranti –were so blind to the consequences of violating, repeatedly, the forms – of advocating actions that were, on the surface, illegitimate. The puzzle is that no long war can be fought in this way. The conviction that a war is legitimate is a necessary condition for pursuing a long war. There is no way of whistling around this. As the invasion was being mounted, the belligeranti mouthpieces were still mouthing the credo that the war would be short, and were still covering up questions about the occupation with fantasies about flower strewing natives. From their own point of view, this was really suicidal behavior. A long war or a long occupation would inevitably be compared to their rhetoric, and found wanting. As the means were rotten, so would the reaction be violent.

And so it has come to pass that the crisis in Iraq is a double crisis. The group of American proxies in Iraq has been on a continuous retreat, mitigated, perhaps, by the untold wealth that said proxies have deposited in banks in England and America and Switzerland. American strength in the country now depends, oddly enough, on an alliance with an increasingly theocratic Shi’ite majority. And though American papers and politicians look hopefully at “free market” theocrats, like the NYT favorite, Mahdi, it is hard to imagine that the looting of Iraq’s oilfields by opening them up to foreign ownership could really be contrived by any party. The Americans can fall back on the warlords in Kurdistan, but this, too, looks infinitely riskier than it did in 2003. Meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration and its press followers are sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of evasions that materially weaken support for continuing this war – already a minority position, according to most polls, for more than six months now.

Yet also peculiar to this war is the passivity and foolishness of the organized anti-war faction. In LI's opinion, this is also an interesting sign. Much of the opposition to the war seems to come not from liberals, but from leftists. This is problematic. How can leftists complain about the neglect of the forms and at the same time blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeois ideology? It makes the opposition seem either childish or Machiavellian.

This should, then, be the hour of liberalism. Liberals do not blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeouis self interest. At the same time, liberals do not believe that the orienting points of legitimacy are absolute and unchanging. In fact, the illegitimacy of this war results from lies that were acceptable means of promoting wars at other times. The war of 1898 was promoted exactly the way the war in Iraq was promoted. But 1898 is not 2003. The difference in civil rights, in the ower of the state, in our expectations about justice and equity, is considerable. It is the liberal idea that one can push those expectations, and thus reorient what is and what is not "good form." This seems to be a good time for pushing -- alas, just as there seems to be an absense of prominent liberals, save for the mayor of New York City.

Which simply means, to LI -- grassroots work. As Paine said, We have it in our power to make the world anew.

gone to houston

Going to Houston, me buckos. So don't look for anything new here. However, I have to bitch - for some reason, last week, my readership numbers collapsed just as I was putting together some assez cool posts, especially the little one about Marx, Elizabeth Kolbert, and global warming. Or at least I thought that LI was hot, there. (It is an alarming sign for a writer when his hottest stuff falls stillborn from the press, as Davy Hume said about his first book. But vanity forbids me to think that I stink as much as the numbers suggest -- so I press onwards for the good of humanity!)(or at least to appease the chokehold of my evident graphomania!)(and I am using the ! because I like the quivering, tail wagging quality of that punctuation mark. An exclamation mark is the equivalent of a writer jumping up on your pants leg and peeing on your shoe, he's so happy to see you. Take it as a compliment!)

After making the round of Houston's finest stripjoints with my friend David, deconstructing the male gaze, of course, I'll be back. Hey, that was a joke about the stripjoints ... Houston's finest is a little too expensive for either Dave or me. Cheap bars, however, (and Houston is abundantly blessed with them) are another story.

censure

LI needs to do some advertising today – we’ve not had a lot of client activity lately. And we’ve set up a new, streamlined site for our writing service. It is at this site: RWG Communications. So if you know someone who is looking for editing, translating, or general writing help, direct them to that site. Please!

…
And now, for today’s bombshell. LI has made it clear in the past that we don’t approve of impeachment except in extraordinary cases. To us, impeachment shortcircuits one of the Pavlovian advantages of democracy. Voters who elect incompetent, immoral people to public office should suffer from that choice. Not because of some Calvinistic doctrine, but simply from the old chestnut that a burnt child learns not to plunge into fires, lie on hot coals, or put his face over a gas fired burner and turn the thing to on. Democracy is not only about benefiting from good choices, but suffering from bad ones. The reason that suffering is good is that it fully explores those bad choices, which usually extend beyond particular persons to whole domains of policy and character.

For this reason, we have never joined in the chorus of impeach Bush – we hope. Maybe a hasty, angry post here and there. But today’s news, if true – that Bush approved of the campaign of leaks against Wilson – is close to a limit. That limit is best expressed in censure. If the Democrats can’t get around a measure of censure for this president, they … we were going to say something like, they will never get it together. But what is the use? Slamming the crash test dummies one more time affords us no satisfaction. So we simply hope, without putting too much energy into it, that one of the crash test dummies will blink, the Hans Christian Anderson magic will cause a focusing of those painted eyes, and convey a message to the other dummies – something like, isn’t it good to be alive? If this happens, they will censure our criminal president.

what the coup was for

From David Kay Johnston’s excellent article in today’s NYT, an analysis of the last round of Bush tax cuts found:

Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.

These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.

Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years. “

The conservative reaction to this is hilarious:

“The Times showed the new numbers to people on various sides of the debate over tax cuts. Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, a Washington organization, and other supporters of the cuts said they did not go far enough because the more money the wealthiest had to invest, the more would go to investments that produce jobs. For investment income, Mr. Entin said, "the proper tax rate would be zero."

As the beast slouches towards Bethlehem, it is nice to know that it has handlers like Mr. Entin, who claim that the beast is hungry, and needs more of the planet to process through its delicate bowels. Or, in Maria Antoinette speak: let them eat shit.

Of course, the proper response is not just to close down the Bush giveaway, but to take that money back – raising tax rates on the wealthy by twenty to thirty percent to start with. Tax rates aren’t only about revenue, but they counter the Matthew effect - that is, the mechanism of cumulative advantage, defined by Robert K. Merton in a famous paper like this:

“…cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advantages of trained capacity, structural location, and available resources make for successive increments of advantage such that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots in science (as in other domains of social life) widen until dampened by countervailing processes.” Merton named this the Matthew effect after the passage in the Gospel in which our Lord said: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

In a footnote, Merton quotes a Bible scholar who says that Jesus was showing his usual Tolstoy peasant shrewdness here:

“Most recently, I am indebted to M. de Jonge, professor of theology at the University of Leyden, … He notes further that “it is highly likely that [Jesus] took over a general saying, current in Jewish (and/or Hellenistic) Wisdom circles - see, e.g., Proverbs 9:9, Daniel 2:21, or Martialis, Epigr. V 81: ‘Semper pauper ens, si pauper es, Aemiliane. Dantur opes nullis [nunc] nisi divitibus.’ “And de Jonge concludes: “The use made of this sentence [in Matthew] by modern authors neglects the eschatological thrust inherent in the saying in all versions, and (in all probability) in Jesus’s own version of it. It links up, however, with the Wisdom-saying taken over by Jesus: ‘Look around you and see what happens: If you have something, you get more; if you have not a penny, they will take from you the little you have.’” M. de Jonge, summary of lecture, “The Matthew Effect,” 24 July 1987.”

As the rich get richer, opportunities to get rich, or to advance socially in general, get filled in; in a democracy, countervailing processes must be cyclically reactivated in order to break up entrenched momentary structures of advantage, lest these structures harden into chronic anti-democratic tendencies. In the U.S., the countervailing process has generally been growth – yet we have seen years, now, of productivity gains that have gone almost wholly to the top income level. This is definitely a flashing red light. And as we have seen with Katerina, the bankruptcy bill, the looting of Iraq, and the string of criminal capers for which the Bush gang will live in infamy, if you have not a penny, they will indeed take from you what little you have. Greed, in the Bush system, is not a vice but a systematic necessity – for the concentration of wealth in a period in which the Matthew effect is fed by a corrupt and compliant government means that you have to pick the pockets of the very poorest to keep up. The government is the best instrument to do that. Thus, the alliance of big business and big government produces round after round of oppressive, expropriative laws aimed at the working class.

ps Also see David Leonhart on the end of “fordism” – the NYT Biz section today is kicking. Here are the nut grafs.

"One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers," Mr. Ford said years later. "Paying high wages," he concluded, "is behind the prosperity of this country."
This turned into a pillar of 20th-century economic wisdom. It's time to ask, though, whether Mr. Ford's big idea is as ill suited to this century as his car company seems to be.

By any reasonable standard, the last few years have been bad ones for most people's paychecks. The average hourly wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that makes up 80 percent of the work force — is slightly lower than it was four years ago, once inflation is taken into account. That's right: Most Americans have taken a pay cut since 2002.

But you would never know it by looking at the headline numbers on economic growth. From the standpoint of the broad national economy — the value of the goods and services the country produces — the last few years have been stellar. Despite two wars, soaring oil prices and business scandals, the economy has been growing more than 3 percent a year.

planetary alienation

Though I have used a shovel more than once, I am neither a shovelist nor a ditchdigger. I have the same relationship to Marx – the man himself would recognize me, right away, as a liberal humanist (I’m amused by how that word, bandied about on Marxist leaning sites, always calls out the Raid. As if Liberal humanists were looming on the horizon like so many godzillas, trampling through the bidonvilles!). However, I find Marx infinitely useable, even when, as in The German Ideology, I also find him infinitely boring. (I sometimes fear that much of Derrida’s work, a hundred years hence, will read like the German Ideology – heavy irony in pursuit of long forgotten targets, and all that rich wordplay turned as incomprehensible as the dog latin Rabelais puts in the mouth of the students he mocks in Gargantua). The section on Feuerbach there, as we all know, is extremely pretty and eloquent and just. From it, these two grafs jump out at me this morning:

“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”

How individuals “express” – aussern – their lives is, at the moment, melting the permafrost. That is one of the many dire facts that strewed Elizabeth Kolbert’s three part series (first part here) (second part here) in the New Yorker last year. Now that series has grown a book, which I noticed, with a bit of a sinking heart, is being reviewed in tandem with Timothy Flannery’s book. The sinking heart comes from the fact that no author likes to be lassoed all over the place with another author’s work. But apparently, if we are going to have book reviews touching on the topic of the ecological crisis we are diligently preparing for ourselves, we are going to have to have them do two for the price of one. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, or very many books about global warming, especially when humankind has to get out there and buy those SUVs.
Back to the permafrost. In one of those scary passages that gives us facts that we have to immediately forget, Kolbert – in the first article of her New Yorker series – writes:

“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.

One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.

"It's like ready-use mix - just a little heat, and it will start cooking," Romanovsky told me. It was the day after we had arrived in Deadhorse, and we were driving through a steady drizzle out to another monitoring site. "I think it's just a time bomb, just waiting for a little warmer conditions." Romanovsky was wearing a rain suit over his canvas work clothes. I put on a rain suit that he had brought along for me. He pulled a tarp out of the back of the truck.”

The refusal to take that kind of planetary wide damage seriously is going to be the real legacy of the Bush administration. The key to this time is the rush to create major policy out of minor opportunities, while major crises are waived away or postponed on the premise that the future takes care of itself. This is a misreading of Bush’s fave book, the New Testament, where we are told that it is the dead who take care of themselves. Treating the future as if we were all dead there is, in fact, the mark of the morally dead, the living dead, or –as we like to call them on this site – the zombies. For a nice review of Kolbert’s book (surprisingly), go to Slate this week. Instead of having their usual infinitely smarmy rightwing economic hacks do a bunch of coughing about that obvious fraud, Global warming, they chose a scholar on Rachel Carson, our hero here, to do the review. Rob Nixon, the scholar, does both books (sigh). Here is how he begins:

“The political climate has shifted, too. Kolbert, a suddenly ubiquitous American science reporter, and Flannery, a prolific Australian evolutionary biologist, are emissaries of sanity from the only two sizable industrialized nations that refused to sign the Kyoto protocol capping carbon emissions. The United States, responsible for 25 percent of the planet's greenhouse gases, and Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, are both ruled by conservative governments with a strong fossil-fuel bias. Indeed, the Bush administration has turned foot-dragging over climate change into a veritable performance art—a bamboozling ballet of dissimulation and denial.”

That the U.S. has appropriated the atmosphere for depositing a hugely disproportionate amount of waste isn’t surprising – one of the keys to understanding pollution in capitalism is that capitalism is not, despite the first grade propaganda, based on private property. It is based, rather, on larger property owners seizing the private property of smaller owners. It is all about social costs, and renting your body for zero cents and zero dollars to lodge their corporate chemicals in. Marx had a shrewd idea that the progress of capitalism was the inverse of what the proponents of capitalism claimed - that captilism progressively abolished private property by concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. At the end of this process, Marx thought, the bargaining power of the working class would have to be expressed politically, in a revolution that would establish a new order founded on that capitalist accomplishment. As a liberal, I look at that prospect with horror, and would much rather fight to establish a better equilibrium between the concentration of wealth of the owners and the average householder, and the key front is the environment.

Beyond the playground of ideology, the important point here is that the melting of the permafrost is a collective crime against the planet. And that crime shouldn’t be happening. This is planetary alienation of a species extinguishing sort.

“Kolbert and Flannery write with a shared urgency, but they approach their vexing subject in radically different ways. The brilliance of Field Notes From a Catastrophe flows from Kolbert's gift for making the violence of climate change feel vast yet intimate. She clearly intuits that "global," as in "global warming," is a bland, unpeopled, world-weary word. So she shapes her argument around a series of excursions to talk with scientists in the field (often in the Arctic), many of whom become memorable characters. These aren't braying talk-show "experts" but men and women who have spent patient years, decades sometimes, calibrating shrinking sea ice, dwindling glaciers, and permafrost that has started to thaw. Kolbert works alongside them, getting snowmelt in her boots.
Her field-journal format adroitly bridges the gulf between professionals and amateurs, giving the writing a conversational tone without compromising the science. Kolbert grounds her quiet anecdotal advocacy in the sensory world of local inhabitants. She speaks to Inuits, who have many words for ice and must now find one for the robin, a previously unimagined bird driven north by warming. She speaks to a Dutchman who is developing amphibious homes to cope with the anticipated flooding of one-quarter of the Netherlands. She speaks to an Icelandic glaciologist whose models predict an Iceland stripped of ice by the end the next century. ("Glacial" as a metaphor should be retired from the language: When almost every glacier on the planet is beating a hasty retreat, "glacial progress" now means something else entirely.) In parts of Alaska, the average temperatures have risen 6 degrees since the early 1980s.”

coups

LI recommends going to Tiny Revolution this morning – the brief comment on the Padilla case goes right to the heart of the madness.

And there is a discussion in the April Harpers about the culture of the military we also recommend, for more extensive reading. The discussion includes Edward Luttwak, Andrew J. Bacevich, Charles J. Dunlap Jr, and Richard H. Kohn, with moderation by Bill Wasik, and it begins with the dismissal of a military coup scenario and ends with a consideration of the rightleaning political culture in the military. Since I have been going to a lot of military blogs, lately, trying to decode them, in a way, so I can use their language and attitudes to create the perfect anti-recruitment message, I’ve been struck by something the panel talks about:

“WASIK: I want to address the question of partisanship in the military. Insofar as there is a "culture war" in America, everyone seems to agree that the armed forces fight on the Republican side. And this is borne out in polls: self-described Republicans outnumber Democrats in the military by more than four to one, and only 7 percent of soldiers describe themselves as "liberal."
KOHN: It has become part of the informal culture of the military to be Republican. You see this at the military academies. They pick it up in the culture, in the training establishments.
DUNLAP: The military is an inherently conservative organization, and this is true of all militaries around the world. Also the demographics have changed: people in the South who were Democratic twenty years ago have become Republican today.
BACEVICH: Yes, all militaries are conservative. But since 1980 our military has become conservative in a more explicitly ideological sense. And that allegiance has been returned in spades by the conservative side in the culture war, which sees soldiers as virtuous representatives of how the country ought to be.
KOHN: And meanwhile there is a streak of anti-militarism on the left.
BACEVICH: It's not that people on the left disdain the military but rather that they are just agnostic about it. They don't identify with soldiers or soldiering.
LUTTWAK: And their children have less of a propensity to serve in the military. Parents who describe themselves as liberal are less likely to make positive noises to their children about the armed forces.
DUNLAP: Which brings up a crucial point. Let's accept as a fact that the U.S. military has become more overtly ideological since 1980. What has happened since 1980? Roughly, that was the beginning of the all-volunteer force. What we are seeing right now is the result of twenty-five years of an all-volunteer force, in which people have self-selected into the organization.
BACEVICH: But the military is also recruited. And it doesn't seem to me that the military has much interest in whether or not the force is representative of American society.”


This rightward shift has been very speeded up by the Iraq war. In effect, the war has caused a near collapse of black enlistment. In fact, urban enlistment in general has sunk, and has been made up by enlistment from the country. This is a bad thing, over the long term. And, as we know, the officer corps in the Air Force has gotten awfully tainted with the worst, most bug eyed evangelical views. This doesn’t get the frightened attention it should:


KOHN: And partisanship in the military overall, i.e., the percentage of the military that identifies with a party as opposed to being "independent" or nonaffiliated, is much greater overall. Not only are military officers more partisan than the general population; they're more partisan than, say, business leaders and other elite groups. I've tracked the numbers of retired four-star generals and admirals endorsing a candidate in presidential campaigns, and it's vastly up in the last two elections.
BACEVICH: Remember at the Democratic National Convention, where General Claudia Kennedy introduced General John Shalikashvili to address the delegates? Why were they up there? There was only one reason: to try to match the parade of retired senior officers that the Republicans have long been trotting out on political occasions.
KOHN: But is that to get military votes? Or just to connect with the American people on national security and patriotism?
BACEVICH: It's both. In 2000, the Republican National Committee put ads in the Army Times and other service magazines attacking the Clinton/Gore record. To me that was, quite frankly, contemptible.
WASIK: It seems as if the two are related: if it's reported that you have the support of the military-as was the case before the 2004 election, when newspapers noted that Kerry had less than 20 percent support within the military-then you get a halo effect among the rest of the voters. Does the partisanship of our military present a danger to the nation?
KOHN: One of the great pillars in our history that has prevented military intervention in politics has been the military's nonpartisan attitude. That's why General George Marshall's generation of officers essentially declined to vote at all, as did generations before them. In fact, for the first time in over a century we now have an officer corps that does identify overwhelmingly with one political party. And that is corrosive.:
Which leads into the most interesting discussion about an issue that hardly ever sticks its head out of the hole. After spending a trillion or so dollars every four years on the military in the States, would the military allow itself to be cut back? To be demobilized? At the end of the Cold war, basically – nothing happened. If this country can’t demobilize at the end of a war, then the structure of aggression has become simply part of what the U.S. is. If we could cut military spending (bracketing veteran’s entitlements) to about one hundred billion a year, which I think is something any even halfway liberal politician ought to shoot for – what happens when the military doesn’t allow it?
KOHN: Consider this glaring example of political manipulation by the military: After every other American war before the Cold War, the country demobilized its wartime military establishment. Even during the Cold War, when we kept a large standing military, we expanded and contracted it for shooting wars. But in 1990 and 1991, the military-through General Colin Powell, who was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time-intervened and effectively prevented a demobilization.
BACEVICH: More accurately, I'd say that he prevented any discussion of a demobilization.
KOHN: That's right.
DUNLAP: We did have a reduction in the size of the military. There were cuts of around 9 percent, in both dollars and manpower.
KOHN: But it was nothing compared to the end of great American wars prior to that.
BACEVICH: Powell is explicit on this in his memoirs. "I was determined to have the Joint Chiefs drive the military strategy train," he wrote. He was not going to have "military reorganization schemes shoved down our throat."
KOHN: This was not a coup, but it was very clearly a circumvention of civilian political authority.”

All of which is on LI's mind. One of the side effects of anti-recruiting which I do not want to see is the strengthening of the rightwing peckerhead cohort in the military -- but I don't see any alternative -- surely the only way to withdraw American troops from Iraq is the strangle the army strategy, but this is why I want to design an anti-recruitment mechanism that doesn't discourage enrollment in the military after the Iraq war.

things for our national short term memory to forget

My comrades, the libertarians (to do a little Hitchensspeak) have rather loony ideas about the market -- but LI stands shoulder to shoulder with them about civil liberties. So it was heartening to read Reason’s Jeff Taylor take the axe to the massive lying about 9/11 – no, not the massive lying that 9/11 was really contrived by U.F.O. Zionists, but the massive lying that 9/11 couldn’t have been prevented, and that everything – every fucking thing – done since, the insane Patriot act, the Homeland Security department (an Escher nightmare inside a Piranesi torture chamber), of course the war on Iraq, has all been useless, unnecessary, a power play by the sleaziest and greediest, made possible by the dopiest and most gullible – the zombie legions still lifting the binoculars to spot all that good news from Iraq -- while the people and structures that bungled 9/11 have been allowed to grow fat and flourish in their little posts.

The national secret police and intelligence agencies are, as one would expect from bureaucracies encased in self-defined secrecy, among the incompetent wonders of the world. Even when the CIA succeeds, as they did in Iraq in 54, they fuck up. But mostly they skip the short term success phase and go right to the fuckup.

But the FBI, always jealous of the CIA, can proudly assert that, in the race for worst, most ill governed and misbegotten American bureaucracy ever, they are far ahead of all contenders, a unique agency in the annals of bumbling, supported by a long history of reaching out to racists, McCarthyites and the hardcore right in order to garner, year after year, the oh so precious and squanderable billions . This is an agency that expressly herded through a law, in the 30s, to make auto theft that crosses a state line a federal crime. Why? Because it happens that autos are well marked things, easy to track down. So whenever the FBI wants to inflate its quota of solved crimes, it just goes after a stolen auto. It did this for decades under Hoover.

Now, the FBI isn’t incompetent about all things. Spying on vegetarian restaurants in which some animal rights speaker is wolfing down the broccoli is something they are expert at. As long as the animal rights speaker doesn’t give em the slip – staying in the bathroom too long, for instance.

…

So, to pass from general disasters to particular ones: what we knew about 9/11 before Moussaoui’s trial was that the warning that a terrorist act was coming did not even provoke an incurious George into asking his Department of Transportation secretary about airport safety. There was, after all, brush to be cut in Crawford. We also know – via Douglas Farah’s reporting – that the knowledge that 9/11 was coming up had circulated among al Qaeda’s contacts in Liberia and Sierra Leone – since the A.Q. and Hizbollah have long had desultory dealings in blood diamonds. In other words, chatter was loud and widespread about the coming attack. What, according to Taylor, was revealed by Moussaoui’s trial, like an x ray showing a tumor, was just how the FBI manages crime prevention. Crime prevention is a bummer – either you respond too hard to some false alarm, or you respond too indifferently to some real crisis. The best thing for a bureaucrat to do, then, is bury any evidence. And so, like a child’s whispering game, the guys in D.C. heard something very different from the things heard by field agents.

One field agent, Harry Samit, who interviewed Moussaoui, was persistent:

“When defense lawyer Edward MacMahon cross-examined Rolince [Samit’s superior, a D.C. based FBI honcho] possibly the first and only time a government security official has been so challenged on 9/11, the disconnect between the official story and reality was plain. Rolince knew nothing of the August 18, 2001 memo Samit had sent to his office warning of terror links. In that memo, Samit warned that Moussaoui wanted to hijack a plane and had the weapons to do it. Samit also warned that Moussaoui "believes it is acceptable to kill civilians" and that he approved of martyrdom. Rolince testified he never read the memo.
On August 17 Samit sent an e-mail to his direct superiors at FBI headquarters recounting Moussaoui's training on 747 simulators. "His excuse is weak, he just wants to learn how to do it... That's pretty ominous and obviously suggests some sort of hijacking plan," Samit wrote.
Rebuffed by his superiors and ignored by Rolince, Samit still sought out more info worldwide and from sources as diverse as the FBI's London, Paris, and Oklahoma City offices, FBI headquarters files, the CIA's counterterrorism center, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, probably the National Security Agency, and the FBI's Iran and OBL offices.”

Ah, and then there is this nugget:
“Defense attorney MacMahon then displayed an August 30, 2001 communication addressed to Samit and FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a Bureau agent in Paris. It passed along that French intelligence thought Moussaoui was "very dangerous" and had soaked up radical views at London's infamous Finnsbury Park mosque. The French also said Moussaoui was "completely devoted" to bin Laden-style jihadism and, significantly, had traveled to Afghanistan.

Yet on August 31 Maltbie stopped Samit from sending a letter to FAA headquarters in Washington advising them of "a potential threat to security of commercial aircraft" based on the Moussaoui case. Maltbie said he would handle that, but it is not clear if he ever did.”

Yes, we wouldn’t want to wake up, would we. But America the somnambulist has responded by stripping out as many civil rights as we could, allowing an autistic president to proceed with an unnecessary, vanity project war, and putting in place a candy store for earmarking Repub pols called Homeland security. Bozo über alles, dudes.

The man made a mess of things. He got all balled up with Christ. He made a white marriage. He had one son die of tuberculosis, the other shoot himself. He only rode his own space once—Moby-Dick. He had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all torpor. Half horse half alligator. – Charles Olson

The writer no more creates writing than the electrician creates electricity. Invisible currents move at their own speed, out there, among unknown elements – and the writer merely captures a bit of that invisible world in the poor conductors available to him, and measures it and deludes others – though not himself – that he made the conductor, the current, the speeds and fluctuations.

New, yes, to our science, but not to that invisible world itself. Nothing is new or old, there.

So … I received a salutary shock, much like that given to Franklin by the key tied on the wet kite string, from a paragraph I wrote today about ghost stories. Making a plebian précis of Machen’s glorious image of Grimaldi the clown pursuing the spectre of his brother through the London streets, always a minute or two behind him at every house, I wrote:

“That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.”

Well,I looked at that graf with a little amazement, because – although not precisely worded, I should have been a little less gnomic about the kingdom of heaven, or being on time, and pandemonium, or being late -- I should have pointed to the root of meritocracy in the schedule, the saint's luck of always being on time -- I should have pointed out how its negation, being late, is not precisely its negation but a sort of parody, a shadow of being on time that infects its victim even when he is on time, so that his on-timeness is always slightly addled, unlucky –anyway, all of this somehow met in that paragraph, and it seemed to be the missing piece I was looking for, or at least one of them, in my project of understanding success and failure in America. In fact, the psychoanalysis of the meritocracy should definitely accord a large place to the uncanny. Anyone who has read Freud’s essay On the Uncanny will see a parallel in Grimaldi’s hopeless bummel.

And thinking of this, I also thought of a line from Olson’s Maximus poem. A line about failure. I’d stored that line up, put it in some notebook, but I couldn’t find it. I looked for it and stumbled across Olson’s essay on Melville.

I decided to put up the first part of it, Call Me Ishmael – also the name of the whole book. The essay has the spaced intensity of poetry. Olson is an essayist along the same lines as Emerson, or Nietzsche –the pendulum is always swinging between the vatic and the vapid. It is a prose that makes large bets. This excites adolescents, and gives those who have outlived all avatars, moderate souls dessicating their way towards retirement, something to jeer at

What I like best about Olson was how intensely he felt about failure and success in America – how he knew some bone truths about this gristle hearted country. Of course, poets in the fifties and sixties, like novelists, could be successes. Not in the way they are successes now, with the soft shoe act on NPR, the terrible kindergarten readings, all so educated in not dramatizing a line it is funny, the last horrible debris of modernism combined with the complete eclipse, in America, of oratory – an art that only survives, heavily disguised, in hip hop. Successes nevertheless, in the fifties -- Robert Lowell got his face on the cover of a Time magazine. Meanwhile, Olson taught, delivered the mail, and watched the Organization Man, the tranquilized behemoth, bestride the suburbs.

Anyway, Olson’s essay on Melville gets the elements right away:

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration."

He also gets a basic fact about the culture, one so disguised that you can only see it historically, at a distance, it so goes against the grain of what you are supposed to feel in this place:

“Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.

To Melville it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people. Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource.”

And Olson gets the polarity right. It also gets the mythic names right. The polarity is Melville and Poe:

“He had the tradition in him, deep, in his brain, his words, the salt beat of his blood. He had the sea of himself in a vigorous, stricken way, as Poe the street. It enabled him to draw up from Shakespeare. It made Noah, and Moses, contemporary to him. History was ritual and repetition when Melville's imagination was at its own proper beat.”

The names are strewn through the text (John Henry, for instance, is there) like so much phosphorescence. Here’s an instance of it:

“This Ahab had gone wild. The object of his attention was something unconscionably big and white. He had become a specialist: he had all space concentrated into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick. And he assailed it as Columbus an ocean, LaSalle a continent, the Donner Party their winter Pass.”

That the polarity and the names are all of the peculiar dialectic of success and failure – the way failure searches through the street for its lost other, is killed on the Texas coast and cannibalized in the Sierra Nevada and comes out of that innocent (I’ve always loved that one of the survivors of the Donner Party opened a restaurant in Sacremento – the most American of stories!) – is where you have to begin to look at the whole odd structure of petrified luck and its worship in these here States.

"Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope. Melville is the truer man. He lived intensely his people's wrong, their guilt. But he remembered the first dream. The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root."

the unlucky world part two

(See previous post)

Or so I would think. But Jo Bath and John Newton’s Sensible Proof of Spirits essay makes the story much less straightforward. Bath and Newton show how the ghost became a disputed site in seventeenth century England, taken up by intellectuals like Glanvill and More as part of a larger defense of Christian belief. But it is a mistake to infer that Glanvill and More were defending tradition – for B & N make clear, an old, unsystematic belief in ghosts was changed by their use in the intellectual “game” of defending a Christian order against a perceived threat.

“By the early seventeenth century there were signs that the confessional divide upon this issue was becoming increasingly blurred as scholars and clerics, “reluctant to discard visible spirits altogether,” admitted the possibility of ghostly visitation (Thomas 1971, 705). John Aubrey records that as early as the 1590s, “when [William Twisse] was a School-boy atWinchester, [he] saw the Phantoˆme of a School fellow of his deceased . . . who said to him, I am damn’d. This was the occasion of Dr. Twisse’s Conversion, who had been before that time . . . a very wicked Boy” (Aubrey 1696, 73). Thus he became a puritan divine following the sighting of a ghost, a somewhat unique event on two counts: firstly, as the spirit was the agent of conversion; and, secondly, because it was an encounter with a damned soul. The surety of demonic theories, which had been stated with such force by protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century, began to be questioned in the reign of Charles I. Oxford dons discussed “whether spirits really and substantially appeare, i.e. the ghosts of the deceased”—and these speculations were to provide a foretaste of the intellectual debates that were to follow (Crosfield 1935, 17).

Continued belief that the dead could return is notable in the fact that it was considered worth attempting to make a pact with a friend—that whoever died first should report back from the afterlife. This is notable not only for its view of ghosts as souls of the dead and not demons in human form, but also for the underlying notion that such experiential data might verify post-mortem existence. Aubrey http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8misc10.txt records the appearance of Lord Bacconi to Lord Middleton while he was in the Tower after his capture at Worcester during the Civil War. Such pacts continued after the Restoration, and Joseph Glanvill, among others, recounts how Captain William Dyke was disappointed when his friend, Major George Sydenham, failed to make an arranged rendezvous in Dyke’s garden three nights after his death. Sydenham appeared to Dyke soon afterwards, however, and apologised that he was unable to keep his earlier appointment, thus vindicating the former’s arguments for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which they had vigorously debated while both were living. Not all pacts were fulfilled, however: the failure of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s friend, Montague, to manifest after death was “a great snare to him during his life” (Burnet 1787, 27).”

Of course, the Earl of Rochester, who wrote the finest poems on fucking in the English language, was a notorious skeptic. But why would skepticism about ghosts lead to skepticism about God? Partly this was due to Glanvill’s chain argument:

“The denial of the existence of spirits was seen as the thin end of a wedge that led ultimately to atheism, an idea that found forceful expression in More’s dictum “No Spirits, No God” (More 1653, 64). This argument was taken up even by moderate Anglicans—Benjamin Camfield wrote that denying the existence of spirits had dangerous consequences: “’tis to be observed, among our modern Atheists and Sadducees especially, that their antipathy and aversion, as to the notion and being of Spirits universally, hath carried them on (and naturally doth so) to the dethroning of God, the Supreme Spirit and the Father of Spirits”(Camfield 1678, 172).

Glanvil similarly spoke of a “chain of connexion,” where disbelief in ghosts and witches—as the lowest and most tangible section of the supernatural chain— ultimately resulted in disbelief in the resurrection and the immortality of the soul. (Glanvill 1681, part IV, 4).”

LI is the more fascinated by this – probably more than the poor reader of this site – as we have just finished reviewing James Morrow’s excellent novel, The Last Witchfinder, for the News and Observer – we hope that PZ has published the review by now – which is one of those alternative history novels a la Neal Stephenson about the legal end of witchcraft. Morrow doesn’t view the burning of witches as an anachronistic and rather charming habit, but as a crime involving flesh, fire and faggots. It has a very sweet and limited energy, unlike, we should say, Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy, which was wedding cake on top of wedding cake.

Well, we poor players have long overstayed our welcome. I’m going to split this up into two posts, Ad Majorum Brevitas Gloriam.

the unlucky world

According to an essay by Arthur Machen (the English ghost story writer who fascinates Javier Marias, the great Spanish novelist), Grimaldi, the most famous clown of Regency England, was performing one night in 1803 in a play called “A Bold Stroke for a Wife” when he was told that there were two men waiting to see him at the stage door that led from the back of the theatre into the street. Grimaldi went to see what they wanted, and confronted two apparent strangers. One was in a white waistcoat, and had evidently been living in the tropics, such was the complexion of his skin. He greeted Grimaldi familiarly. Grimaldi was at a loss as to who this person was until the man unbuttoned his shirt and showed the clown a scar. The man was Grimaldi’s brother John. This was pretty amazing – John had supposedly gone down on a Naval ship years before.

Grimaldi, of course, was overjoyed, and invited the men in. John’s companion demurred – and John, after giving him instructions on when they would meet again in the morning, mounted the stairs with Grimaldi and came into the Green room while his companion disappeared into the London night. Grimaldi still had to complete his part in the play, so he left his brother with another man, a Mr. Wroughten, while he went to do his stage business. John showed Mr. Wroughten that his duffel bag was full of coins, and bragged about his various successes. Grimaldi was in and out of the green room according to his entrances and exits. His idea was that John should come with him, after the play, to see their mother. John asked for her address, which Grimaldi gave, but then he said that they should go together, and that he merely had to change out of his costume in the dressing room.

To quote Machen: “And then the strangeness of it all came with a sudden onset on Grimaldi. "The agitation of his feelings, the suddenness of his brother's return, the good fortune which had attended him in his
absence, the gentility of his appearance, and his possession of so
much money; all together confused him so that he could scarcely use
his hands." He seems to have fallen into the state which the Scots
call a "dwam," a manner of waking vision, in which actualities are
taken for dreams and the man wonders when he will awake and recognise
that he has been amongst the shadows of the night.” It was in this state that Grimaldi returned to the Green room, only to find that his brother had left.

This is my favorite part of the story. Grimaldi found an actor named Powell in the Green room, and asked if he’d seen John.

"I saw him," he replied, "but a moment ago; he is waiting for you on
the stage. I won't detain you, for he complains that you have been
longer away now than you said you would be."

So Grimaldi hurried to the stage area. John wasn’t there. Another actor was there named Bannister. Bannister asked who Grimaldi was looking for, and after Grimaldi told him he was looking for John, Bannister said:

"Well, and I saw and spoke to him not a minute ago," said Bannister.
"When he left me, he went in that direction (pointing towards the
passage that led towards the stage-door). I should think he had left
the theatre."

So the clown went out of the theater, but he didn’t spot John. The doorkeeper said he’d gone out just a minute before. Grimaldi, out in the street, decided that John had, perhaps, decided to visit an old friend of his who lived close to the theater, Bowley. So he rushed to the Bowley house and knocked, even though it was rather late. Bowley came to the door:

“Mr. Bowley himself opened the door, and was evidently greatly
surprised.

"I have, indeed, seen your brother," said he. "Good God! I was never
so amazed in all my life."

"Is he here now?" was the anxious inquiry.

"No; but he has not been gone a minute; he cannot have gone many
yards."

"Which way?"

"That way--towards Duke Street."”

The clown rushed onwards, then, thinking that his brother was going to see another friend there, a Mr. Bailey. He rattled the door of the house, which was dark, rousing the girl, who spoke to Grimaldi from the window:

“"I tell you again, he is not at home."

"What are you talking about? Who is not at home?"

"Why, Mr. Bailey. I told you so before. What do you keep on knocking
for at this time of night?"

In great bewilderment, Grimaldi begged the girl to come downstairs, as
he wanted to speak to her, telling her his name. She came down after a
short interval.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir," said the maid. "But there was a
gentleman here knocking and ringing very violently not a minute before
you came. I told him Mr. Bailey was not at home; and when I heard you
at the door I thought It was him, and that he would not go away."

Then Grimaldi asked the girl if she had seen the gentleman's face. She
had not; she had looked out of the upper-window, and all that she
noticed was that the gentleman had a white waistcoat, whence she
inferred that he might have come to take her master out to a party.

Back went the amazed and frightened actor to the theatre. There
nothing had been seen of the lost brother; and then Grimaldi began a
sort of mad midnight tour of the houses of old friends round the Lane,
knocking and ringing people out of their beds and enquiring after his
brother. Some of the people thought Grimaldi was mad; and said so. His
manner was wild, and nobody had heard of John Grimaldi for fourteen
years. They had long given him up as dead.”

And so Grimaldi finally lost the trail of his brother. He went home. He told his mother. She fainted. The next day, and the next, no sign of John. And no sign ever again. Grimaldi pulled some strings to see if John hadn’t been impressed into the Navy that night. He talked to the London police. But never a hide nor hair of the man was discovered. It was as if he’d never been.

This is what Machen says:

“It is an extraordinary tale. It may be true in every particular. But
there are strange circumstances in the history. For example: why
should John knock up his old friend, Mr. Bowley, only to dart away
from his door in a minute's time? Note that minute in advance all
through the chase. It persisted up to Mr. Bailey's house. The
servant-girl there said, "there was a gentleman here knocking and
ringing very violently not a minute before you came." I do not quite
know why; but this fixed period of a minute inspires me with distrust.”

But it is, of course, the minute that makes the tale. That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.

We return to this in our second post.

defending the enlightenment from its defenders

Madeleine Bunting is a columnist for the Guardian who is against the war (yeah!) but is also soft on religion – so that she often goes after people who are against the war, like Richard Dawkins (not so yeah!). LI has been pretty amused, however, by the reaction to her recent thumbsucking piece about the Enlightenment. The piece goes in a rather predictable way for someone who wants to combine a general leftward leaningness with spirituality – Bunting is generally not happy with the Enlightenment. This has caused various pro-war people (here ) and anti-religious people (here ) to the projecting of thunderous batteries of spitballs at her.

Actually, Bunting’s column comes at the enlightenment from a refreshingly unique angle, at least for a newspaper columnist:

“Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam. It was as if the debate had shifted from the Reformation - why hasn't Islam had one? (it dawned on such questioners that a)the Christian Reformation led to several centuries of appalling bloodshed and b)there's a good argument that Wahabi Islam is precisely Islam's reformation) - to another tack: why hasn't Islam had an Enlightenment?)

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias. Montesquieu's 'Persian Letters' is a good example of this.”

However, it is here that one wonders about her own acquaintanceship with Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters.” In fact, a writer much more involved with the creation of the colonialist mindset, Johnny Mill’s father, James Mill, had, in 1810, a much different idea of Montesquieu. He complains that Montesquieu (among other 18th century writers) romanticized Moslem culture, and Asian culture in general. In fact, I’d buy Mill’s version over Madeleine’s – that is, I’d say that far from being anti-Muslim, Montesquieu’s work, along with William Jones’ work on Sanskrit antiquities, was the beginning of an attitude of cultural relativism that Bunting can simply assume today, so much has it rooted in the conventional wisdom.

Here’s what Mill wrote about William Jones – a pretty pure product of the philosophe culture:

“Sir W. finds proofs of a pure theism as easily among the Persians as among the Arabs. "The primeval religion of Iran," he says, "if we rely on the authorities adduced by Mohsani Fani, was that which Newton calls the oldest (and it may be justly called the noblest) of all religions: A firm belief that one supreme God made the world by his power, and continually governed it by his providence; a pious fear, love, and adoration of him; a due reverence for parents and aged persons; a fraternal affection for the whole human race, and a compassionate tenderness even for the brute creation."

I could quote endlessly from Mill’s entertaining Chapter X, Book 2, an attack on the European softheadedness of according the Asians, Persians and Hindoos the least color of civilization.

In fact, that kind of praise for Islam – which, shed of the scandalous worship of a magician, Jesus, seemed, to those who were admittedly not experts in Islam, a religion much closer to their own deism than Christianity – is not uncommon in the Enlightenment. Montesquieu, in the Spirit of the Laws, did take oriental despotism (which Voltaire criticized as a fiction) as a model with which to obliquely criticize the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. But your average Enlightenment figure, from Leibniz up to Diderot, was much more apt to view the Other as distinctly embodying a history and a corpus of tradition that was not automatically subordinate to the West. True, the Oriental other was fictionalized to provide a model against which to criticize or praise features of French or British, or in general Christian civilization. Still, Bunting’s idea of the relation between the Orient and Europe (not that she should be held to some high scholarly standard -- she is merely writing an ephemeral piece) seriously misjudges the Enlightenment’s disposition. Plus, of course, the idea that the Enlightenment sprang up solely in response to the threat of the Ottoman empire is entirely too reductive. After all, the French allied with the Ottomans, and in the nineteenth century the British and the French often found themselves on the Ottoman side – but who would say that this was evidence of pro-Islamic feeling? The whole issue of the Arabic reception of early modern science and the perception, among both the Ottomans and the North African Arabic polities, that the European powers were gaining advantage – is not so simple.

But … this brings us to the subject of ghosts. LI is just using the Bunting piece as a bridge to commenting on “Sensible Proof of Spirits”: Ghost Belief during the Later Seventeenth Century by Jo Bath and John Newton in the April issue of Folklore. Which will be tomorrow’s post.

... ending with a fable

Les anecdotes les plus utiles et les plus précieuses sont les écrits secrets que laissent les grands princes, quand la candeur de leur âme se manifeste dans ces monuments – Voltaire

Well, LI has no access to the secret history of Ibrahim Jafari – we are definitely lacking the crucial anecdotes. But we thought, what the hell, we’d trail the semi-invisible man through Factiva. Surely some major newspaper or magazine profiled the man who was the first Interim Council president and has been the prime minister for a year and a half. But … though you can find profiles of Chalabi and Allawi galore, though you can find all kinds of pics and interviews with Kenan Makiya, you will find Jafari quoted, entering the newstory picture, sometimes referenced (especially by Jim Hoagland, Chalabi’s agent on the Washington Post), a full profile of him, even some account of what he was doing in London for twenty years as the head of the Da’wa branch there is simply impossible to find. However, one thing is clear – Jafari is used to feeding pablum to a patron. For twenty years, the pablum was fed to Iran, but the strategy was not to be a total Iranian pawn. Feeding pablum to the U.S. is much easier. These grafs in the Washington Post essay by Jafari, My Vision for Iraq, are to be washed down with warm koolaid at the next Heritage foundation meeting:

“The other major challenge my government will face is reviving Iraq's economy. Iraq has been drowned by decades of Baathist socialist policies that have made millions reliant on government handouts. We must encourage entrepreneurship and enterprise, while establishing adequate safety nets for the less privileged.
Economic rehabilitation also requires some tough and unpopular changes, such as the reduction in government subsidies for gasoline that my administration began a few months ago. Such steps can be made only by a popular government that has the trust of the people. My administration has the political capital to be able to bring about these necessary changes.”

Political capital – hmm, an old and venerated Arabic term. LI has been trying to figure out how to make this point in a simple manner. Because criticism of the media is so often about the bias in the reporting of this or that story, instead of the accumulative omissions around which a mass of stories are built, to point to a blind spot, a gap, a motivated absence, sets up a different critical dynamic -- one that is vaguely psychoanalytical. That is always the hardest of criticisms to explain.

So, take a look at Edward Wong's interview with Jafari in the NYTtoday. Again, we get a very sketchy sense of who Jafari is or where he comes from. In fact, in a desperate attempt to keep your NYT reader on the page, Wong feels compelled to mention an Iraqi we have heard of:

"In the first two years of the war, Mr. Jaafari emerged as one of the most popular politicians in Iraq, especially compared with other exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite. A doctor by training and well-versed in the Koran, Mr. Jaafari comes from a prominent family in Karbala, the Shiite holy city. But since taking power last spring, Mr. Jaafari has come under widespread criticism for failing to stamp out the insurgency and promoting hard-line pro-Shiite policies."

Yes, we hang onto that former Pentagon (not to mention NYT foreign correspondent) favorite, just so we know where we are. And so the fogmachines of war keep blasting out their product -- cooled hot air.

…
Oh well. I planned to provide such a nice two poster of info about Da’wa, and I’m afraid I was underestimating how little there is in English out there. So instead, here is a fable.

I found this nice Kurdish fable while hunting for information about Jafari. I came upon Incoherent Thoughts, a blog I’d recommend. Sandrine Alexie, the blogger, translated it into French, and I’m going to translate it into English.

“They say that when Belkîs [the queen of Sheba] came to visit the prophet Solomon, she wished for bird feathers in order to make a bed. The prophet Solomon called together all the birds and told them: you have to tear out your feathers to make a bed for the Queen of Sheba! When the bat understood what was going on, it quickly tore out all its feathers and fled. But the birds did not follow this command and said: prophet Solomon, what a sin it is to ask us to strip ourselves of plumage for your wife! Without a feather, how will we pass the winter? These feathers protect our lives from the cold.

The prophet Solomon recognized the justice of these words and let them go. But the bat had plucked itself: since that time, it blushes to come out in the daylight, in the midst of its friends, and only comes out at night.”
Osman Sabrî in Recueil de textes kourmandji, publié par Stig Wikander, 1959.

I can think of several political applications for this tale ... but I prefer to remain artistically silent about them.

first part: the story of da'wa

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.

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.”