In the 1960s, you could always get a laugh by referring to the John Birch crusade against fluoridation. It was so obviously bogus. And yet, the bogus does live cheek by jowl, in America, with the deepest and darkest anxieties and realities. Fluoridation might not lead to a weak kneed surrender to communism, but the channelization and pollution of America’s streams and rivers, cheerfully commanding bipartisan assent from the social engineers who know what is good for us, was a sign of something seriously out of whack with the system. The Birchers were advocates for an even more extreme out of whackness, but sometimes you have to crystallize your anxieties by going to the far end of the masochistic spectrum.
The best horse laugh to come out of 9/11, an event that hasn’t exactly given rise to a lot of comedy, is in the idea circulating among some parts of the left – parts that have spent years, decades upping the rhetorical ante in denouncing the sundry crimes of Amerika and competing with declarations of fidelity to one Amerikan enemy or another – that 9/11 was an inside job. And so it is that the comfortable lefties take one look at the most successful guerilla act in recent times and immediately attribute it… to the CIA.
However, the bogus, here, sits next to a myth that both the left and right are very comfortable with. The myth is of America’s overwhelming military power. The myth simply ignores the fact that most instances of the extended expression of American military power in the last fifty years have blown up in America’s face.
To illustrate what this means re 9/11, let me tell relate a heartwarming fable.
Say you have a fly, a pesky stinging fly, buzzing around your room.
For the sake of the fable, let’s say you have two instruments to deal with the fly.
One of those instruments is an old flyswatter. It consists of a perforated rubber pad mounted on a rickety wire handle.
The other of these instruments consists of an expensive hammer. Not a hammer with a wooden shaft, either – one with a nice metal, graphite core shaft.
Now, the hammer could truly pound the rickety wire handle of the fly swatter into an unuseable mass. The hammer is mightier than the fly swatter. The fly swatter, too, has a tendency to grossly palp the fly into jelly, whereas the image, at least, of the fly under the hammer is that the jelly would be atomized. Oh, that will hurt the fly!
However, in the face of that pesky stinging fly, it is a bad idea to use the hammer. The reason is this. You will punch holes in the wall. You will break plates and glass. You will break the window. And you might, in some swing, bring the hammer into contact with your leg, which will definitely make you forget about the fly.
Al Qaeda – I’m talking here of the military end, not the popular video subsidiary that has just put out its groovy “Convert to Islam” vid for the American party market – has been rather brilliant. For instance, take the fact that the 20 hijackers came to America to learn how to fly airliners. Now, it is undoubtedly true that there are other places in the world to learn the pilot’s trade, or what they had to know of the pilot’s trade. But to boldly emplace the 20 who are going to attack the U.S. in the U.S. was a small piece of genius. It was the genius of being able to think like the fly. Of course, genius is nothing without luck, and it appears that Al Qaeda was very lucky to get Atta. The man seemed to understand how to organize a project. In fact, from what we know about the project, he operated like most software companies operate when getting guys together for a project – allowing a little social time in which everybody could relax with each other in Vegas, for instance. After the event, much time was spent debating whether Atta was a coward or not. This was a great debate, insofar as it shifted the terms to an emotional plane we can all understand – much like the terms in which we can all take sides on whether Brad should have left Jen or not. Little time or effort was spared for looking at how well Atta organized his group. To do that would make us, well, uncomfortable with our assumption that hammers are all purpose tools, and the bigger the hammer, the more flies you kill.
Similarly, little attention was paid to the evidence that came out at the 9/11 hearings about the military response to the hijacked planes. The day of the attack, we had what Karl Weick has called a collapse of sensemaking. This kind of thing is endemic to disasters involving rapid response organizations – firefighters, jet fighter pilots, nuclear power plant technicians. As Weick has shown, it is not so much from misapplying the rules, or even using the wrong rules, but the collapse in the faith in rules per se that occurs in the heart of the panic. Our air force has, since 1947, been trained to respond immediately to attack – but when the attack finally came, the picture was of scrambled orders and jetfighters heading off in a classic front to protect the U.S. from incoming. The exercises were never designed to protect the U.S. from its own airliners. Again, Al Qaeda’s strategy – to think like a fly – worked. Who sees flies enter a room? But of course, if you see a fly, your response might well be to close the door. That gives the fly its brief opportunity.
It should be said, in one way we are all alive because rapid response organizations are not fail-safe. In the fifties, that crazy fuck, Eisenhower, had a series of sortees mounted by SAC that penetrated Soviet air space and deliberately mimicked the profile of a first strike. The point was to see how rapidly the Soviets responded – and the lesson was that, just as in 1941, the Soviets were not great responders. Their strength was in holding on.
Now, about that fly swatter. John Kerry, in the nineties, wrote, or had written, a nifty little book about terrorism. In it, he makes the observation that terrorist groups are structured like mafia groups, and so are most effectively dealt with by law enforcement – a suggestion he furiously backpedaled from in 2004 (poor Kerry evidently shot the whole wad of his courage in 1971). Kerry was right then and he is right now. Al Qaeda is not the National Liberation Front. The NLF succeeded, as Francis Fitzgerald showed in The Fire in The Lake, because they depended on the Vietnamese villagers. This was something that didn’t compute to the Americans in Vietnam – they were so determined to see the NLF as a terrorist group, coercing cooperation by violence, that they didn’t listen to their informants, who explained that the NLF could not operate that way. They really needed the cooperation of the villagers, hence, they actually talked to them, asked them for advice, etc. When, in the late 60s, the Americans started sending in South Vietnamese cadre to operate on the NLF model, it never worked – as soon as the SV cadre would get to the villages, they would start acting impolite. They would march around like cocks of the walk. The NLF strategy worked not because the NLF recruited nice people – far from it – but because the NLF got the people to see that the NLF was operating from necessity. Maybe they wanted to shove around the village bosses, but they couldn’t afford to.
…
So, if one were going to grade a Q, you’d have to give them an A for strategy, and F for governance, and a B for home video manufacturing. As for the American faith in hammers – well, I remember shortly after Tora Bora, a friend of mine, a Bush supporter, told me with the utmost confidence that we would pick him up. He named several pieces of ultrafine spying equipment we had aloft. It was just a matter of getting our special forces in their ultrafast helicopters and giving them the OK. This idea was believed on the left too – how many scenarios about the October surprise in 2004 were about Bush casually reaching out the God like hand and grasping our pesky wabbit with the turban. It turned out the October surprise was how many Americans live in a bubble of complete illusion about the world. One fed by a press that can’t mention Osama Bin without giving him the Homeric epithet, on the run. On the run Osama. He’s been so on the run he must have a pretty good heart – and that is the kind of thing our bicycling Rebel in Chief can appreciate! It is funny how all these on the run folks keep running back. In the meantime, one does wonder if the strategy of the fly is exhausted. Myself, I think that depends on the quality of the middle managers. Besides, there really is no need to attack the U.S. here when the U.S. is making itself so available for attack elsewhere.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Saturday, September 02, 2006
the old English magicians and ours
William Lilly, the English astrologer and the last of the great English magicians, was called before a Committee of the House of Commons in 1666. It had been noticed that the eighth plate of his book, Monarchy or No Monarchy, published in 1651, “represented persons digging graves, with coffins and other emblems of mortality, and the thirteenth a city in flames. Hence it was inferred that he must have had something to do with the Great Fire which had destroyed so large a part of London, if not with the Plague, which had almost depopulated it.”
In response to a question from the chairman of the committee, Lilly explained that he had written the book after Charles I was beheaded, and sought to depict the future of England, as revealed to him by his stellar sources.
“At last, having satisfied myself as well as I could, and perfected my judgment therein, I thought it most convenient to signify my intentions and conceptions thereof in Forms, Shapes, Types, Hieroglyphics, etc., without any commentary, that so my judgment might by concealed from the vulgar, and made manifest only unto the wise. I herein imitating the examples of many wise philosophers who had done the like.” Today, of course, wise philosophers have refined and perfected this method to adapt it to our more sophisticated civilization: hence the cornucopia of highly placed sources, defense experts, and a White House aids that lead us into depressions, wars, and all the wonderful ways we have invented for gulling the poor, polluting the planet, and stuffing miraculous amounts of money into the pockets of the rich.
Lilly added something that no doubt inflated the price for his expertise, and in our day would have had him writing op eds and lending his eminence to Heritage Foundation sponsored debates:
“Having found, sir,” continued Lilly, “that the city of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague, and not long after with an exorbitant Fire, I framed those two hieroglyphics as represented in the book, which in effect have proved very true.”
I take these quote from the very useful account in W.H. Davenport’s Historical Sketches of Magic and Witchcraft in England and Scotland. Lilly, in his autobiography, marks his testimony as the last event of note in his life, thereby marking himself down as an ass.
Any of our terrorist experts, our equivalent of the old English magicians, only without the superfluous culture, (cultivation of knowledge being, as is well known, the hobby of the losers) would have taken the opportunity to produce a book, gotten in many a spot on talk radio, and eventually reached the heaven of Fox News, CNN, and Good Morning America. Admittedly, the American magicians seem less kin to the great Faust than to the sad and greasy Elmer Gantry, but seen correctly, this is a great advance, a progress in our march to the Rapture. Lilly’s testimony up to that point seems so promising that it is with great sadness that we see him, next, admitting that he didn’t know, exactly, what sinister enemy caused the plague and set the fire. The sense of get up and go, of opportunity, is still born in the old magicians – there’s no getting around the fact that they aren’t, well, Americans. Surely he should have consulted with some young aide to one of the committeemen and read off of some sheet strongly implicating England’s enemies, devils all, internal and external. He could have denounced the appeasers once and for all, admitted their patriotism but strongly implied that torturing them would not, after all, be the worst thing that could happen. He could have used the arts that we see used, every day, in our lovely country. Instead, he merely and mildly told the committee men that the finger of God uses instruments.
Today’s American magicians, whether Michael Ledeen writing for the National Review, Stephen Emerson writing for the New Republic, or the thousands of terrorism experts freshly back from confronting the hordes of Belzebuub in night visions, may have a justified contempt for the simple naivete of the old style magician, seemingly hemmed in by those tiny scruples deriving from the ninth commandment and somehow keeping him from testifying about his certain knowledge that it was Jews, Catholics and Dutchmen that did the dirty deeds – groups who think, in the immortal words of the Rebel in Chief, “the opposite of the way we do.” However, our contemporary thaumaturges should keep in mind the relatively low level of culture prevalent in the 17th century. Bearing false witness, which in the days before democracy was hardly a science at all, has now developed into a major and blessed industry, and we are surrounded by the fruits of those who toil in its vineyards - the political magazines, the newspapers with the stimulating editorials urging us onward to ever more wars, the tv. True, with education has come great progress in creating gullibility. At least half the electorate will actually believe almost anything. They will believe they were abducted by UFOS. They will believe Iraq had tremendous stocks of WMDs, even though they don’t exactly know why certain weapons are WMDs and certain ones aren’t. They will believe that the Rebel in Chief is the toughest hombre since John Wayne quit chewing rocks. In fact, the only thing they won’t believe is that humans come from monkeys, or that the world existed earlier than 10,000 years ago. This is why we are the greatest people in the world.
…
Since the fifth anniversary of 9/11 will unleash such a flood of baloney that it might have turned the fires that day into a gigantic weenie roast, LI figures to get in with his own post now, and beat the rush. We will flip it out tomorrow.
In response to a question from the chairman of the committee, Lilly explained that he had written the book after Charles I was beheaded, and sought to depict the future of England, as revealed to him by his stellar sources.
“At last, having satisfied myself as well as I could, and perfected my judgment therein, I thought it most convenient to signify my intentions and conceptions thereof in Forms, Shapes, Types, Hieroglyphics, etc., without any commentary, that so my judgment might by concealed from the vulgar, and made manifest only unto the wise. I herein imitating the examples of many wise philosophers who had done the like.” Today, of course, wise philosophers have refined and perfected this method to adapt it to our more sophisticated civilization: hence the cornucopia of highly placed sources, defense experts, and a White House aids that lead us into depressions, wars, and all the wonderful ways we have invented for gulling the poor, polluting the planet, and stuffing miraculous amounts of money into the pockets of the rich.
Lilly added something that no doubt inflated the price for his expertise, and in our day would have had him writing op eds and lending his eminence to Heritage Foundation sponsored debates:
“Having found, sir,” continued Lilly, “that the city of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague, and not long after with an exorbitant Fire, I framed those two hieroglyphics as represented in the book, which in effect have proved very true.”
I take these quote from the very useful account in W.H. Davenport’s Historical Sketches of Magic and Witchcraft in England and Scotland. Lilly, in his autobiography, marks his testimony as the last event of note in his life, thereby marking himself down as an ass.
Any of our terrorist experts, our equivalent of the old English magicians, only without the superfluous culture, (cultivation of knowledge being, as is well known, the hobby of the losers) would have taken the opportunity to produce a book, gotten in many a spot on talk radio, and eventually reached the heaven of Fox News, CNN, and Good Morning America. Admittedly, the American magicians seem less kin to the great Faust than to the sad and greasy Elmer Gantry, but seen correctly, this is a great advance, a progress in our march to the Rapture. Lilly’s testimony up to that point seems so promising that it is with great sadness that we see him, next, admitting that he didn’t know, exactly, what sinister enemy caused the plague and set the fire. The sense of get up and go, of opportunity, is still born in the old magicians – there’s no getting around the fact that they aren’t, well, Americans. Surely he should have consulted with some young aide to one of the committeemen and read off of some sheet strongly implicating England’s enemies, devils all, internal and external. He could have denounced the appeasers once and for all, admitted their patriotism but strongly implied that torturing them would not, after all, be the worst thing that could happen. He could have used the arts that we see used, every day, in our lovely country. Instead, he merely and mildly told the committee men that the finger of God uses instruments.
Today’s American magicians, whether Michael Ledeen writing for the National Review, Stephen Emerson writing for the New Republic, or the thousands of terrorism experts freshly back from confronting the hordes of Belzebuub in night visions, may have a justified contempt for the simple naivete of the old style magician, seemingly hemmed in by those tiny scruples deriving from the ninth commandment and somehow keeping him from testifying about his certain knowledge that it was Jews, Catholics and Dutchmen that did the dirty deeds – groups who think, in the immortal words of the Rebel in Chief, “the opposite of the way we do.” However, our contemporary thaumaturges should keep in mind the relatively low level of culture prevalent in the 17th century. Bearing false witness, which in the days before democracy was hardly a science at all, has now developed into a major and blessed industry, and we are surrounded by the fruits of those who toil in its vineyards - the political magazines, the newspapers with the stimulating editorials urging us onward to ever more wars, the tv. True, with education has come great progress in creating gullibility. At least half the electorate will actually believe almost anything. They will believe they were abducted by UFOS. They will believe Iraq had tremendous stocks of WMDs, even though they don’t exactly know why certain weapons are WMDs and certain ones aren’t. They will believe that the Rebel in Chief is the toughest hombre since John Wayne quit chewing rocks. In fact, the only thing they won’t believe is that humans come from monkeys, or that the world existed earlier than 10,000 years ago. This is why we are the greatest people in the world.
…
Since the fifth anniversary of 9/11 will unleash such a flood of baloney that it might have turned the fires that day into a gigantic weenie roast, LI figures to get in with his own post now, and beat the rush. We will flip it out tomorrow.
Friday, September 01, 2006
more fun boy-boy girl-girl boy-girl action in Iraq!
If the Dems are serious about censuring Rumsfeld (something that should have been done, oh, on September 12, 2001), then they might well want to get their list of offences from Robert Looney’s article in Strategic Insights, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School. Discard Looney’s major new idea in the article, another fixer upper suggestion that begs the entire question of means – Looney would like to see Iraq adopt an Alaska style distribution of oil wealth to every member of the population. That’s fine and dandy, and perhaps Looney might consider running on that platform in Basra – except, of course, that if he landed in Basra, he would literally be running for his life. Like others of the ‘reformer-bots’ that have sprung up in the last twenty five years, Looney comes ready programmed with the neo-liberal default settings, which is the plug and play standard in D.C. (we must be brave and wise/and always, always privatize!) as they intone in their mass think tanker meetings.
On the other hand, his article is a quick survey of the collapse of Rumsfeld’s Mesopotamian protectorate. He has conveniently bullet pointed the ‘goals’, the ‘achievements’ and the, uh, failures of the occupation’s first phase – up to January, 2005. Here they are:
“Scope of the Problem
Many reconstruction challenges confronted the coalition after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Some of these were met successfully, while others have presented on-going difficulties and are still present today. In addition new ones have arisen. Of the initial tasks several stand out:[12]
· Restoring government economic functions after looting and state collapse;
· Preventing currency collapse, hyperinflation and economic chaos;
· Rebuilding infrastructure ravaged by war, sanctions, looting and neglect;
· Rehabilitating a health care system cut off from medical advances for two decades;
· Dismantling corrupt, dysfunctional state economic controls; and
· Stimulating the growth of a private sector that had been stunted by government interference.
A number of major successes did occur, especially under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Major successes under the
CPA included:
· Re-established nationwide food-ration system;
· Introduced a new currency and stabilized the exchange rate;
· Liberated most prices without igniting inflation;
· Rebuild the government’s economic ministries;
· Promulgated market-oriented banking, taxation, foreign trade, investment, and business regulations;
· Rehabilitated several thousand schools, health clinics, and hospitals;
· Provided public services to populations that had been deprived under Saddam;
· Increased electrical generation and output;
· Funded small projects across Iraq to meet critical community needs.
Still the Coalition’s economic accomplishments were overshadowed by its unfulfilled promises. During the occupation the CPA failed or was unable to:
· Prevent rampant looting or infrastructure and production facilities;
· Attract foreign investment;
· Implement its newly enacted economic regulations;
· Restructure state-owned industries.
· Fulfill promises of substantial job creation;
· Meet targets for electricity production (despite increases)
· Restore oil output to prewar levels;
· Eliminate costly distorting energy and food subsidies;
· Combat corruption in reconstruction projects;
· Spend more than a fraction of the $18.4 billion the U.S. Congress allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction.
"Patterns of Success and Failure
Following Henderson,[13] several patterns emerge. Most importantly, the Coalition’s success stores shared some essential elements. Its less successful ventures had their own set of distinctive characteristics. Specifically, successful initiatives appear to have imposed no major costs or sacrifices on the population at large.”
LI’s crow side can’t but revel in certain of the bullet points – we particularly liked the achievement of unilaterally restructuring Iraq into a neo-con paradise of de-regulation, and, on the other side of the ledger, the failure “to implement its newly enacted economic regulations.” Yeah, that implementation – the Heritage foundation crowd leaves that for others. No excitement there, baby! While the cowed, second amendment supporting American, his bumper sticker reading “You’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from my trigger”, passively watches as the entire manufacturing base of the country is shipped off to parts unknown and the structural elements of inequality are put in place so that his kids will go to junior college and serve up fresh fries to the children of the upper 1 percent, busy talking on their oh so splendidly outfitted cell phones (we just love the new program that allows you to launch nuclear weapons while driving your hummer!), the addled Iraqi masses did not greet the reforms as the second coming of the ten commandments. Funny, that. Looney quotes a survey that hasn’t quite garnered attention, as in any, in the media:
“A UNDP[14] household survey documents the impact the slow pace of reconstruction is having on the average Iraqi household:
1. The UNDP survey suggests the poorest 20 percent of the population earns 7 percent of the income, while the top 20 percent earns 44 percent.
2. Iraq’s median household income of 144 dollars has dropped from a post-war high of 255 dollars in 2003.
3. One-third of Iraqis canvassed by UNDP described themselves as being among the poor.
4. One-sixth of interviewees met all or most of the criteria suggesting that they lived beneath the poverty line.”
For those familiar with the disease, this is a shock therapy portrait. Plummeting incomes following an initial surge, a top level that aggrandizes its wealth as it builds in ever more indifference to the consequences of that wealth – it could be Russia in the 90s, n’est-ce pas? A situation that Americans might have wanted to examine a bit more closely, since we are surely going to get there by and by, reform-bot by reform-bot.
And that, of course, is the real constraint on Democratic opposition to the Iraq war. The opposition centers on that failure of implementation. Oh, how DLC-ers ache to manfully shoulder that job! They would make sure that flexible job markets and strong private sectors would make Iraq a happy little beehive. The drones would go back to what drones do, instead of devising those nasty IEDs.
Two other one shots from Looney, and then the crow will take wing:
Under the sententious heading, redolent of business inspiration books,
“High hopes and lofty promises are no substitute for sound planning and prudent expectations:”
“As we receive clearer accounts of the functioning of the CPA it is shocking to find how little planning went into the effort.”
And, our favorite sentences in Looney’s article:
“In part, the loss in reconstruction momentum stemmed from the CPA’s assumption that market forces and a surge in private investment would follow the initial reconstruction efforts. Ideological blinders and the lack of a contingency plan made it difficult to overcome these errors when confronted with the effects of increased violence and uncertainty.”
Ideological blinders? I doubt it. You don't put blinders on the blind.
On the other hand, his article is a quick survey of the collapse of Rumsfeld’s Mesopotamian protectorate. He has conveniently bullet pointed the ‘goals’, the ‘achievements’ and the, uh, failures of the occupation’s first phase – up to January, 2005. Here they are:
“Scope of the Problem
Many reconstruction challenges confronted the coalition after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Some of these were met successfully, while others have presented on-going difficulties and are still present today. In addition new ones have arisen. Of the initial tasks several stand out:[12]
· Restoring government economic functions after looting and state collapse;
· Preventing currency collapse, hyperinflation and economic chaos;
· Rebuilding infrastructure ravaged by war, sanctions, looting and neglect;
· Rehabilitating a health care system cut off from medical advances for two decades;
· Dismantling corrupt, dysfunctional state economic controls; and
· Stimulating the growth of a private sector that had been stunted by government interference.
A number of major successes did occur, especially under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Major successes under the
CPA included:
· Re-established nationwide food-ration system;
· Introduced a new currency and stabilized the exchange rate;
· Liberated most prices without igniting inflation;
· Rebuild the government’s economic ministries;
· Promulgated market-oriented banking, taxation, foreign trade, investment, and business regulations;
· Rehabilitated several thousand schools, health clinics, and hospitals;
· Provided public services to populations that had been deprived under Saddam;
· Increased electrical generation and output;
· Funded small projects across Iraq to meet critical community needs.
Still the Coalition’s economic accomplishments were overshadowed by its unfulfilled promises. During the occupation the CPA failed or was unable to:
· Prevent rampant looting or infrastructure and production facilities;
· Attract foreign investment;
· Implement its newly enacted economic regulations;
· Restructure state-owned industries.
· Fulfill promises of substantial job creation;
· Meet targets for electricity production (despite increases)
· Restore oil output to prewar levels;
· Eliminate costly distorting energy and food subsidies;
· Combat corruption in reconstruction projects;
· Spend more than a fraction of the $18.4 billion the U.S. Congress allocated for Iraq’s reconstruction.
"Patterns of Success and Failure
Following Henderson,[13] several patterns emerge. Most importantly, the Coalition’s success stores shared some essential elements. Its less successful ventures had their own set of distinctive characteristics. Specifically, successful initiatives appear to have imposed no major costs or sacrifices on the population at large.”
LI’s crow side can’t but revel in certain of the bullet points – we particularly liked the achievement of unilaterally restructuring Iraq into a neo-con paradise of de-regulation, and, on the other side of the ledger, the failure “to implement its newly enacted economic regulations.” Yeah, that implementation – the Heritage foundation crowd leaves that for others. No excitement there, baby! While the cowed, second amendment supporting American, his bumper sticker reading “You’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from my trigger”, passively watches as the entire manufacturing base of the country is shipped off to parts unknown and the structural elements of inequality are put in place so that his kids will go to junior college and serve up fresh fries to the children of the upper 1 percent, busy talking on their oh so splendidly outfitted cell phones (we just love the new program that allows you to launch nuclear weapons while driving your hummer!), the addled Iraqi masses did not greet the reforms as the second coming of the ten commandments. Funny, that. Looney quotes a survey that hasn’t quite garnered attention, as in any, in the media:
“A UNDP[14] household survey documents the impact the slow pace of reconstruction is having on the average Iraqi household:
1. The UNDP survey suggests the poorest 20 percent of the population earns 7 percent of the income, while the top 20 percent earns 44 percent.
2. Iraq’s median household income of 144 dollars has dropped from a post-war high of 255 dollars in 2003.
3. One-third of Iraqis canvassed by UNDP described themselves as being among the poor.
4. One-sixth of interviewees met all or most of the criteria suggesting that they lived beneath the poverty line.”
For those familiar with the disease, this is a shock therapy portrait. Plummeting incomes following an initial surge, a top level that aggrandizes its wealth as it builds in ever more indifference to the consequences of that wealth – it could be Russia in the 90s, n’est-ce pas? A situation that Americans might have wanted to examine a bit more closely, since we are surely going to get there by and by, reform-bot by reform-bot.
And that, of course, is the real constraint on Democratic opposition to the Iraq war. The opposition centers on that failure of implementation. Oh, how DLC-ers ache to manfully shoulder that job! They would make sure that flexible job markets and strong private sectors would make Iraq a happy little beehive. The drones would go back to what drones do, instead of devising those nasty IEDs.
Two other one shots from Looney, and then the crow will take wing:
Under the sententious heading, redolent of business inspiration books,
“High hopes and lofty promises are no substitute for sound planning and prudent expectations:”
“As we receive clearer accounts of the functioning of the CPA it is shocking to find how little planning went into the effort.”
And, our favorite sentences in Looney’s article:
“In part, the loss in reconstruction momentum stemmed from the CPA’s assumption that market forces and a surge in private investment would follow the initial reconstruction efforts. Ideological blinders and the lack of a contingency plan made it difficult to overcome these errors when confronted with the effects of increased violence and uncertainty.”
Ideological blinders? I doubt it. You don't put blinders on the blind.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
an experiment in mercenary war - Iraq
This is how Emir de Vatel, the eighteenth century military writer, defines mercenaries: “Mercenary soldiers are foreigners voluntarily engaging to serve the state for money, or a stipulated pay. As they owe no serve to a sovereign whose subject they are not, the advantages he offers them are their solve motive. By enlisting they incur the obligation to serve him; and the prince on his part promises them certain conditions which are settled in the articles of enlistment.”
In Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, Janice Thompson describes the conditions that gave rise to the great use of mercenaries by the European kingdoms:
“Scholars agree that feudalism’s constraints on military service wre a major inducement for monarchs to turn to mercenaries. Whatever its other drawbacks, the feudal military system was based on the principle of defense. Knights were duty-bound to serve only a very limited amount of time – something like forty days a year – but, more importantly, were not obligated to serve abroad. Thus, feudal military rights and obligations presented a barrier to launching offensive military campaigns.”
Posthegemony has a very nice summing up of Thompson’s position:
"Janice Thomson's Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (discussed also in the Laboratorium) is about the constitution of sovereignty not (as is customarily stressed) so much by imposition of order within national territories, but by the delegitimation and suppression of extraterritorial violence wielded by non-state actors. In her words, she asks:
How did the state achieve a monopoly on violence beyond its borders that emanates from its territory? What explains the elimination of nonstate violence from global politics? (3; my emphasis)
For, as Thomson recounts at some length, until remarkably recently--the mid nineteenth-century at least--global violence was if anything dominated by non-state rather than state actors. Moreover, this non-state domination of extraterritorial force was for the most part accepted and even sanctioned by states themselves. Why, Thomson asks, should states desire to end this long tradition, especially in so far as it entailed numerous benefits to states both strong and weak?”
LI has been trying to weaken the idea that states are the fundamental units of political order, in favor of the (quite insane) idea that wars are. One of the results of supposing the fundamental status of war is that one looks at armies not as things mounted by a unitary thing called the state which then engage in wars, but instead, as organizations operating to define contests between powers shaping themselves in terms of either past, ongoing, or future wars, in which the state operates as one site of that struggle. If the state transcends war to the extent that it has an independent nature outside of war – and who would deny that? - that transcendence is precarious.
Our perspective does not dissolve states irretrievably into these contesting powers, since obviously states do have a unity and an effect – or some states do, at some times. However, we don’t assume a seamless unity of interest or identity between the sovereign and the people in states. And without that seamless identity, we look at the raising, maintaining and command of armies as perpetually subject to the temptation of the mercenary form even when a nation’s army is composed of citizens of the nation. The mercenary form is defined by how the army is maintained, who utilizes it, and how deviant its status is from that defined by the formal rules of law – from the constitution.
I keep calling Iraq a vanity war. I don’t mean that merely to be sarcastic. It really is a vanity war, and it really is being fought by the exploitation, by the sovereign, of armies that are no longer constrained by the formal rules for their employment, raising, and operation, but instead are being wholly subordinated to the whims of the executive. That the sovereign, here, is an American president, and that the troops are, for the most part, American citizens doesn’t make too much of a difference.
In fact, the warmongers are very eager to push at the boundaries of the mercenary form. A couple of years ago, Max Boot proposed that the U.S. hire illegal immigrants to fight in the army, with the reward being a path to citizenship.
“With combat dragging on in Iraq and plenty of jobs available at home, there aren't enough volunteers. So far, a real crisis has been averted only because the Army has exceeded its retention goals and kept some troops in uniform past their discharge dates, but it will only get tougher to keep volunteers in uniform if troops are constantly deployed overseas.
"There are two obvious, and obviously wrongheaded, solutions to this problem: Pull out of Iraq now or institute a draft. The former would hand a victory to terrorists and undo everything that more than 1,700 Americans have given their lives to achieve. The latter option, aside from being a political non-starter, would also dilute the high quality of the all-volunteer force.
"Having reviewed all the other possibilities and found them wanting, I return to the solution I proposed on this page in February: Broaden the recruiting base beyond U.S. citizens and permanent, legal residents. Legislation has been drafted to make a modest start in that direction.
"The proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is targeted at children of undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. for more than five years but not born here. They would get legal status and become eligible for citizenship if they graduate from high school, stay out of trouble and either attend college for two years or serve two years in the armed forces. This bill, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), drew 48 cosponsors in the Senate last year but failed to get a floor vote. It is likely to be reintroduced soon.
"The DREAM Act is a great idea, but I would go further and offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military.”
(I particularly like that it is called the Dream act. In my graphic novel, the U.S. is led by the Nightmare Party – and this is just the kind of thing the Nightmare party does)
Boot’s article casually calls it the U.S. military, as if it is self evident that a military that is trying to enlist non-U.S. citizens in a war that the citizenry itself doesn’t want to fight is still a U.S. entity. It is as American as a ship that registers in Liberia is Liberian – it is a cover for the usurpation of a particular collective of interests.
Boot, of course, is not the only DREAMer – the Pentagon has high hopes for a fully mechanized army, which would be the mercenary principle on batteries. The objective correlative of the return of the mercenary form – the sovereign’s response to the political upheaval caused by mass mobilization – is the mysteriousness of military funding. There was a New Yorker piece about this a few weeks ago by James Surowiecki.
“Over the past five years, we’ve heard a lot about the rise of what Donald Rumsfeld likes to call “asymmetric warfare,” and about the need to equip our military to fight “nontraditional” enemies. But a look at the defense budget shows that we’re building a new military while still paying for the old one. Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist—eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any “near peer” rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers—or, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.
"Not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance—designed to remake the battlefield with robot vehicles and networked communications systems—began as a ninety-billion-dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar project, and, a recent Pentagon estimate suggests, will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars. Such inefficiency is seldom punished—the Pentagon often hands out bonuses even when companies fail to meet their targets—and is tolerated by regulators. Although government agencies have been required to produce an annual audit of their operations since the late nineties, the Defense Department’s operations are so confused that it has never been able to produce a successful audit. A few years ago, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn’t be explained.”
As you would expect, a trillion dollars going missing elicits a big ho hum from the press – who are much more eager to pursue the homicidal fantasies of disturbed expatriate teachers in Thai prisons. Now, there’s some news we can use as we doze in our cheese like fats and watch the parade of the celebrity monsters on tv, the life force in us turning to dustballs and desolation. But LI, eccentric in all things, sorta wonders about that trillion dollar black hole. Maybe, huh, maybe that isn’t a good thing – not to be unpatriotic, and not to doubt the total validity of what our secretary of Defense so aptly terms our war against 12,000 Islamofascists and some of their mothers, too – a world war that of immense proportions such as has never been seen before or since. But I am thinking that a country that calmly allows the military to disappear that much money is well on its way to a sovereign whose control over a mercenary armed force is just the kind of tyranny that, well, this country was founded to escape. And that a people so supine as to let this happen in front of their eyes, a people that batten like maggots on the war industry and believe every tittle and jot of the warmonger rants they are fed on that bordello of shit called the tv news deserve all the many and staggering blows that they are inevitably storing up for themselves. The wrath to come is forged in the short attention spans of today's spectators, ADD DREAMers all.
Such, at least, are the disenchanted reflections of one inhabitant of DREAM act America.
In Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, Janice Thompson describes the conditions that gave rise to the great use of mercenaries by the European kingdoms:
“Scholars agree that feudalism’s constraints on military service wre a major inducement for monarchs to turn to mercenaries. Whatever its other drawbacks, the feudal military system was based on the principle of defense. Knights were duty-bound to serve only a very limited amount of time – something like forty days a year – but, more importantly, were not obligated to serve abroad. Thus, feudal military rights and obligations presented a barrier to launching offensive military campaigns.”
Posthegemony has a very nice summing up of Thompson’s position:
"Janice Thomson's Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (discussed also in the Laboratorium) is about the constitution of sovereignty not (as is customarily stressed) so much by imposition of order within national territories, but by the delegitimation and suppression of extraterritorial violence wielded by non-state actors. In her words, she asks:
How did the state achieve a monopoly on violence beyond its borders that emanates from its territory? What explains the elimination of nonstate violence from global politics? (3; my emphasis)
For, as Thomson recounts at some length, until remarkably recently--the mid nineteenth-century at least--global violence was if anything dominated by non-state rather than state actors. Moreover, this non-state domination of extraterritorial force was for the most part accepted and even sanctioned by states themselves. Why, Thomson asks, should states desire to end this long tradition, especially in so far as it entailed numerous benefits to states both strong and weak?”
LI has been trying to weaken the idea that states are the fundamental units of political order, in favor of the (quite insane) idea that wars are. One of the results of supposing the fundamental status of war is that one looks at armies not as things mounted by a unitary thing called the state which then engage in wars, but instead, as organizations operating to define contests between powers shaping themselves in terms of either past, ongoing, or future wars, in which the state operates as one site of that struggle. If the state transcends war to the extent that it has an independent nature outside of war – and who would deny that? - that transcendence is precarious.
Our perspective does not dissolve states irretrievably into these contesting powers, since obviously states do have a unity and an effect – or some states do, at some times. However, we don’t assume a seamless unity of interest or identity between the sovereign and the people in states. And without that seamless identity, we look at the raising, maintaining and command of armies as perpetually subject to the temptation of the mercenary form even when a nation’s army is composed of citizens of the nation. The mercenary form is defined by how the army is maintained, who utilizes it, and how deviant its status is from that defined by the formal rules of law – from the constitution.
I keep calling Iraq a vanity war. I don’t mean that merely to be sarcastic. It really is a vanity war, and it really is being fought by the exploitation, by the sovereign, of armies that are no longer constrained by the formal rules for their employment, raising, and operation, but instead are being wholly subordinated to the whims of the executive. That the sovereign, here, is an American president, and that the troops are, for the most part, American citizens doesn’t make too much of a difference.
In fact, the warmongers are very eager to push at the boundaries of the mercenary form. A couple of years ago, Max Boot proposed that the U.S. hire illegal immigrants to fight in the army, with the reward being a path to citizenship.
“With combat dragging on in Iraq and plenty of jobs available at home, there aren't enough volunteers. So far, a real crisis has been averted only because the Army has exceeded its retention goals and kept some troops in uniform past their discharge dates, but it will only get tougher to keep volunteers in uniform if troops are constantly deployed overseas.
"There are two obvious, and obviously wrongheaded, solutions to this problem: Pull out of Iraq now or institute a draft. The former would hand a victory to terrorists and undo everything that more than 1,700 Americans have given their lives to achieve. The latter option, aside from being a political non-starter, would also dilute the high quality of the all-volunteer force.
"Having reviewed all the other possibilities and found them wanting, I return to the solution I proposed on this page in February: Broaden the recruiting base beyond U.S. citizens and permanent, legal residents. Legislation has been drafted to make a modest start in that direction.
"The proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is targeted at children of undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. for more than five years but not born here. They would get legal status and become eligible for citizenship if they graduate from high school, stay out of trouble and either attend college for two years or serve two years in the armed forces. This bill, introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), drew 48 cosponsors in the Senate last year but failed to get a floor vote. It is likely to be reintroduced soon.
"The DREAM Act is a great idea, but I would go further and offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military.”
(I particularly like that it is called the Dream act. In my graphic novel, the U.S. is led by the Nightmare Party – and this is just the kind of thing the Nightmare party does)
Boot’s article casually calls it the U.S. military, as if it is self evident that a military that is trying to enlist non-U.S. citizens in a war that the citizenry itself doesn’t want to fight is still a U.S. entity. It is as American as a ship that registers in Liberia is Liberian – it is a cover for the usurpation of a particular collective of interests.
Boot, of course, is not the only DREAMer – the Pentagon has high hopes for a fully mechanized army, which would be the mercenary principle on batteries. The objective correlative of the return of the mercenary form – the sovereign’s response to the political upheaval caused by mass mobilization – is the mysteriousness of military funding. There was a New Yorker piece about this a few weeks ago by James Surowiecki.
“Over the past five years, we’ve heard a lot about the rise of what Donald Rumsfeld likes to call “asymmetric warfare,” and about the need to equip our military to fight “nontraditional” enemies. But a look at the defense budget shows that we’re building a new military while still paying for the old one. Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist—eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any “near peer” rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers—or, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.
"Not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance—designed to remake the battlefield with robot vehicles and networked communications systems—began as a ninety-billion-dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar project, and, a recent Pentagon estimate suggests, will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars. Such inefficiency is seldom punished—the Pentagon often hands out bonuses even when companies fail to meet their targets—and is tolerated by regulators. Although government agencies have been required to produce an annual audit of their operations since the late nineties, the Defense Department’s operations are so confused that it has never been able to produce a successful audit. A few years ago, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn’t be explained.”
As you would expect, a trillion dollars going missing elicits a big ho hum from the press – who are much more eager to pursue the homicidal fantasies of disturbed expatriate teachers in Thai prisons. Now, there’s some news we can use as we doze in our cheese like fats and watch the parade of the celebrity monsters on tv, the life force in us turning to dustballs and desolation. But LI, eccentric in all things, sorta wonders about that trillion dollar black hole. Maybe, huh, maybe that isn’t a good thing – not to be unpatriotic, and not to doubt the total validity of what our secretary of Defense so aptly terms our war against 12,000 Islamofascists and some of their mothers, too – a world war that of immense proportions such as has never been seen before or since. But I am thinking that a country that calmly allows the military to disappear that much money is well on its way to a sovereign whose control over a mercenary armed force is just the kind of tyranny that, well, this country was founded to escape. And that a people so supine as to let this happen in front of their eyes, a people that batten like maggots on the war industry and believe every tittle and jot of the warmonger rants they are fed on that bordello of shit called the tv news deserve all the many and staggering blows that they are inevitably storing up for themselves. The wrath to come is forged in the short attention spans of today's spectators, ADD DREAMers all.
Such, at least, are the disenchanted reflections of one inhabitant of DREAM act America.
casualty rates in Iraq -- what is that about?
There has been a rather disappointing discussion going on at Crooked Timber about a Washington Post article by Samuel H. Preston and Emily Buzzell about the casualty rate in Iraq. Kieran Healy attacks them, I think justly, for this passage:
“Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 “person-years” in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq. … One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.
"The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000—39 percent of that of troops in Iraq.
"But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.”
As Healy points out,
“… it’s a well-known fact about the sociology of combat that even in a real, live, shooting war, only a comparatively small number of troops in an army ever see direct, front-line duty—if only because the number of people it takes to sustain those who do go out to the front line, or its equivalent, is very large. (Don’t get me wrong: many of those in support roles will face real dangers, too, and their lives will be very far from normal—it’s just that we’re talking about death rates here.) In fact, even amongst the front-line troops, exposure is more focused and limited than you might think. A similar thing is true of bombing campaigns in built-up areas, such as the recent one in the Lebanon. An awful lot of bombs can be dropped and an awful lot of buildings destroyed, and the deaths will be fewer than you might think. But that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, or completely dysfunctional. Who would think to say, “Hey, a bunch of buildings were destroyed by the bombing and hundreds died, but that’s fewer people per capita than will die of heart disease this quarter”?
This is why comparisons to death rates in civilian settings—even comparatively violent ones—are misguided. Anyone who thinks that someone walking around Philly is more likely to be violently attacked than a marine out on patrol in Baghdad is out of their mind.”
In other words, you aren't going to find "something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil" in Philly. The comments section than took off in the usual direction – was the comparison valid, was it invalid, etc., etc.
My own sense is that this avoids a more interesting question: what is the comparison supposed to prove? And why are comparisons like this common on pro-war sites?
I made a comment myself, which is about what the figures actually show us about the war:
"The obvious question posed by the stats of American military deaths is whether there is connection between the comparative lack of American military fatalities and the way the Iraq war has been lost by the Americans. I’d argue there is.
"The American way of fighting is to protect, with the massive advantages given by American technology, the American fighting man. This is a good strategy to win a conventional battle. But it is a bad strategy to win a guerilla war. Since the goal of the war was to occupy Iraq until the nation had reformed as an American ally, the tactics of the war had to be brought into line with that strategy. And that would mean minimizing collateral Iraqi casualties – that is, individuating Iraqi insurgents and killing or capturing them out of the general civilian population. But individuating those insurgents would significantly raise the level of hazard for American soldiers. The American military has opted, generally, not to do that – instead adopting a strategy like that revealed by the investigation of the Haditha murders. The American infliction of casualties on Iraqis is broadly permitted in order to protect every American soldier from harm; a policy that leads to re-inforcing the insurgency as more and more Iraqis have an incentive, given this policy, to join them or at least tacitly give them support. Add to this that the infliction of iraqi casualties by the Americans has no effect on the infliction of iraqi casualties by the insurgents, and you get a picture of why Americans have lost the war. It is like the police coming into a high crime neighborhood and killing random people in the neighborhood without ever lowering the crime rate.
"I think Americans have essentially been irrelevant in Iraq – a sort of mercenary ethnic cleansing unit – since Najaf in 2004. It is interesting to see how they got to that point so quickly. The stats give us a paradox that is at the center of Amrican foreign policy: the Americans are at once the most aggressive nation in the world and the one with the lowest tolerance for American deaths. Hence, they are more apt to get into wars (severely underestimating the costs) that they then mismanage (trying to remain below a threshhold of casualties that divides their tactical means from their strategic ends). This goes a long way back in American history— Grant and McClellan still fight for the soul of the military, with the compromise being a McClellan like delicacy about American deaths combined with a Grant like ferocity in inflicting massive deaths on the enemy—and identifying the latter as victory. Of course, that isn’t victory at all."
This is a point I've flogged all too often at this site.
But there is a broader issue still. As I keep repeating ad nauseum, the motivations for the Iraq war have to be found in the war culture itself – it is not just Iraq that is in question, but the past sixty years in which war has not only overturned elementary principles of democracy, but has so shaped the attitude of an influential segment in not only the U.S., but in every prosperous nation, that war has become a goal, weapon production has become a manufacturing mainstay, and a low level, constant belligerence has become the temperamental default for the ‘discourse’ about the interactions between states.
In my next post, I want to get to the immediate political root of the Iraq war, which I think transcends the grab bag of the war supporters motives. This is, among other things, an experimental war – a new expression of creating a military force that is solely at the discretion of the executive branch, and using it aggressively with no need to respond in any fashion to any legal or social constraint. To roll out this model of war, you need war lite – you need a volunteer army that you can claim has an acceptable number of casualties in order for that army to, so to speak, operate outside the field of attention – of all except, of course, the unfortunates they operate on. The return of the mercenary form, although not labeled as such, is what we are seeing.
“Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 “person-years” in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq. … One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.
"The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000—39 percent of that of troops in Iraq.
"But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.”
As Healy points out,
“… it’s a well-known fact about the sociology of combat that even in a real, live, shooting war, only a comparatively small number of troops in an army ever see direct, front-line duty—if only because the number of people it takes to sustain those who do go out to the front line, or its equivalent, is very large. (Don’t get me wrong: many of those in support roles will face real dangers, too, and their lives will be very far from normal—it’s just that we’re talking about death rates here.) In fact, even amongst the front-line troops, exposure is more focused and limited than you might think. A similar thing is true of bombing campaigns in built-up areas, such as the recent one in the Lebanon. An awful lot of bombs can be dropped and an awful lot of buildings destroyed, and the deaths will be fewer than you might think. But that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous, or completely dysfunctional. Who would think to say, “Hey, a bunch of buildings were destroyed by the bombing and hundreds died, but that’s fewer people per capita than will die of heart disease this quarter”?
This is why comparisons to death rates in civilian settings—even comparatively violent ones—are misguided. Anyone who thinks that someone walking around Philly is more likely to be violently attacked than a marine out on patrol in Baghdad is out of their mind.”
In other words, you aren't going to find "something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil" in Philly. The comments section than took off in the usual direction – was the comparison valid, was it invalid, etc., etc.
My own sense is that this avoids a more interesting question: what is the comparison supposed to prove? And why are comparisons like this common on pro-war sites?
I made a comment myself, which is about what the figures actually show us about the war:
"The obvious question posed by the stats of American military deaths is whether there is connection between the comparative lack of American military fatalities and the way the Iraq war has been lost by the Americans. I’d argue there is.
"The American way of fighting is to protect, with the massive advantages given by American technology, the American fighting man. This is a good strategy to win a conventional battle. But it is a bad strategy to win a guerilla war. Since the goal of the war was to occupy Iraq until the nation had reformed as an American ally, the tactics of the war had to be brought into line with that strategy. And that would mean minimizing collateral Iraqi casualties – that is, individuating Iraqi insurgents and killing or capturing them out of the general civilian population. But individuating those insurgents would significantly raise the level of hazard for American soldiers. The American military has opted, generally, not to do that – instead adopting a strategy like that revealed by the investigation of the Haditha murders. The American infliction of casualties on Iraqis is broadly permitted in order to protect every American soldier from harm; a policy that leads to re-inforcing the insurgency as more and more Iraqis have an incentive, given this policy, to join them or at least tacitly give them support. Add to this that the infliction of iraqi casualties by the Americans has no effect on the infliction of iraqi casualties by the insurgents, and you get a picture of why Americans have lost the war. It is like the police coming into a high crime neighborhood and killing random people in the neighborhood without ever lowering the crime rate.
"I think Americans have essentially been irrelevant in Iraq – a sort of mercenary ethnic cleansing unit – since Najaf in 2004. It is interesting to see how they got to that point so quickly. The stats give us a paradox that is at the center of Amrican foreign policy: the Americans are at once the most aggressive nation in the world and the one with the lowest tolerance for American deaths. Hence, they are more apt to get into wars (severely underestimating the costs) that they then mismanage (trying to remain below a threshhold of casualties that divides their tactical means from their strategic ends). This goes a long way back in American history— Grant and McClellan still fight for the soul of the military, with the compromise being a McClellan like delicacy about American deaths combined with a Grant like ferocity in inflicting massive deaths on the enemy—and identifying the latter as victory. Of course, that isn’t victory at all."
This is a point I've flogged all too often at this site.
But there is a broader issue still. As I keep repeating ad nauseum, the motivations for the Iraq war have to be found in the war culture itself – it is not just Iraq that is in question, but the past sixty years in which war has not only overturned elementary principles of democracy, but has so shaped the attitude of an influential segment in not only the U.S., but in every prosperous nation, that war has become a goal, weapon production has become a manufacturing mainstay, and a low level, constant belligerence has become the temperamental default for the ‘discourse’ about the interactions between states.
In my next post, I want to get to the immediate political root of the Iraq war, which I think transcends the grab bag of the war supporters motives. This is, among other things, an experimental war – a new expression of creating a military force that is solely at the discretion of the executive branch, and using it aggressively with no need to respond in any fashion to any legal or social constraint. To roll out this model of war, you need war lite – you need a volunteer army that you can claim has an acceptable number of casualties in order for that army to, so to speak, operate outside the field of attention – of all except, of course, the unfortunates they operate on. The return of the mercenary form, although not labeled as such, is what we are seeing.
Monday, August 28, 2006
late breaking news
The World Wide News breaks the story first. The New York Times and The Washington Post both have egg on their faces, although of course the NYT have now assigned the crack team of Adam Nagourney and Elizabeth Bumiller to find the gypsy and ask her if her spells are the reason that, every time they are around the President, he just seems so big, strong, and competent.
My sources tell me that the gypsy has been thinking of placing a curse on UFOBreakfast. Don't be suprised if the tone, there, radically shifts to one of squirrel-o-philia. Rumor has it that Mr. Scruggs is writing a sonnet sequence to a certain H.C., beginning, "Like a man struggling vainly in a pillory/so is my heart bound to you, oh my Hilary."
a request
Our filmic friend at CoolSeason gave us some very valuable comments on the first 25 panels of our graphic novel. If any other member of the LI community (somehow, I started laughing when I wrote that phrase. Okay, the LI cult, sect, cell, cenacle, salon, militia – the LI al qaeda, our own base so help us Lucifer), please email me, and I will email them to you. I am fighting my way, in the GN, towards a clearer storyline, but it must ultimately sustain the load of anger and end-of-time angst that is supposed to detonate in the reader’s head, heart, and bowels. D., my illustrator, and me want to launch a virus that will end the war, bring down the military, return the country to the old time constitutional division of powers, and reverse the fatal trajectory towards destroying the planet's atmosphere and fresh water supply. Baby steps, really.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Solnit
Come on, fuck that NYT Magazine article this morning. Trust me – don’t you trust me? Read this article by Rebecca Solnit in Orion magazine instead.
Let’s begin with one of the statistics:
“The California Gold Rush clawed out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada considerable gold—93 tons or 2.7 million troy ounces in the peak year of 1853 alone, an estimated 973 tons or 28.4 million troy ounces by 1858, more than 3,634 tons or 106 million troy ounces to date.”
My brothers used to be in apartment maintenance. Now, standard practice calls for a quick clean up, laying new carpet and a possible paint job once your resident has vacated his place. If the resident was a smoker, inevitably the paint job followed, since the smoke would stain the walls. This is the literal materialization of human aura, but it isn’t just your renter and his Camels. No, we leave our indelible imprint on the landscape long after we have tidily tucked away the event. In human time, measured by the fingernail and hair growth, tumescence and the brief flurry of orgasm, the fleeting memory that flairs up in the night like a ghost of what the angle looked from a height that was just up to mom’s knee or thigh and is gone before you can complete the memory, organize that field of view, events are inevitably more fleeting, more bound to the attention span – but of course, in organic time, measured by proteins and fats, this isn’t so. An event can last a long time. Hence the interest in Solnit’s gold rush story. It is the quintessential Wild West story, the one the American dream life immediately focused upon – the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, the arrival of hundreds and then thousands come to stake a claim, the settling of California.
But Solnit brings out other pieces of the rush. For instance, by our manifest luck, we just happened to fight a war with Mexico that gave us both the Sacramento River and the means to exploit the gold we found there. That means was mercury:
“In the northwesternmost corner of old Mexico, in 1845, a staggeringly rich mercury lode was discovered by one Captain Don Andres Castillero. Located near San Jose at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the New Almaden Mine was well within the territory seized by the United States by the time it was developed. And only days before the February 2, 1848, treaty giving Mexico $15 million for its northern half was signed, gold was also discovered in California. Thus began the celebrated Gold Rush, which far fewer know was also a mercury rush, or that the two were deeply intertwined.”
Mercury combines with gold, making it much easier to extract from water or earth. Of course, there is the little problem that mercury is extremely poisonous, a neurotoxin that keeps on tickin’.
“During the California Gold Rush, an estimated 7,600 tons or 15,200,000 pounds of mercury were thus deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that placer, or stream-based, mining alone put ten million pounds of the neurotoxin into the environment, while hard-rock mining accounted for another three million pounds. Much of it is still there—a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes find globules the size of a man's fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams—but the rest of it ended up lining the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Some of it is still traveling: the San Jose Mercury News (named after the old mercury mines there) reports that one thousand pounds of the stuff comes out of gold-mining country and into the bay every year, and another two hundred pounds comes from a single mercury mine at the south end of the bay annually. Some of this mercury ends up in the fish, and as you move up the food chain, the mercury accumulates.
"According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, "Fish at the top of the food web can harbor mercury concentrations in their tissues over one million times the mercury concentration in the water in which they swim." All around the edges of the bay, warning signs are posted, sometimes in Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese, as well as English, but people fish, particularly poor and immigrant people, and some eat their catch. They are paying for the Gold Rush too.
“Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out of it. There is something fabulous about this, or at least fablelike. Gold and mercury are brothers and opposites, positioned next to each other, elements 79 and 80, in the Periodic Table of the Elements. And they also often coexist in the same underground deposits. Gold has been prized in part because it does not rust, change, or decay, while mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and that liquid is, for those who remember breaking old thermometers to play with the globules, something strange, congealing into a trembling mass or breaking into tiny spheres that roll in all directions, ready to change, to amalgamate with other metals, to work its way into the bodies of living organisms.”
In the tv series westerns, nobody ever complains about mercury fumes. In real life, the landscape after gold mining is laced with poisons, the sources of the water are diverted and fouled, and of course vegetation, which likes mercury no more than the human body, dies off:
“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether. "Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears," said one onlooker at a hydraulic mine. “
Well, what is good for the nineteenth century is good for the 21st, especially in the Bush culture of infinite waste for the betterment of the upper 1 percent income bracket. Nevada is now the place to go to watch humans poison the earth and the sources of water (in a state that is developing million plus cities, without any visible means of water in, say, fifteen years) because, well, the sacred and wondrous effects of private property are what brought down the communist menace. Notice how it all leads to the kingdom of God, who has a funded position at the Cato Institute.
“The current gold rush in northeastern Nevada, which produces gold on a monstrous scale—seven million ounces in 2004 alone—is also dispersing dangerous quantities of mercury. This time it's airborne. The forty-mile-long Carlin Trend on which the gigantic open-pit gold mines are situated is a region of "microscopic gold"; dispersed in the soil and rock far underground, imperceptible to the human eye, unaffordable to mine with yesteryear's technology. To extract the gold, huge chunks of the landscape are excavated, pulverized, piled up, and plied with a cyanide solution that draws out the gold. The process, known as cyanide heap-leach mining, releases large amounts of mercury into the biosphere. Wind and water meet the materials at each stage and create windblown dust and seepage, and thus the mercury and other heavy metals begin to travel.
“As the Ban Mercury Working Group reports, "Though cumulatively coal fired power plants are the predominant source of atmospheric mercury emissions, the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the United States are the three largest gold mines there." The Great Salt Lake, when tested in 2004, turned out to have astonishingly high mercury levels, as did wild waterways in Idaho, and Nevada's gold mines seem to be the culprit. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that year, "The scope of mercury pollution associated with Nevada's gold mining industry wasn't discovered until the EPA changed rules in 1998 to add mercury to the list of toxic discharges required to be reported. When the first numbers were released in 2000, Nevada mines reported the release of 13,576 pounds in 1998. Those numbers have since been revised upward to an estimated 21,098 pounds, or more than 10 tons, to make Nevada the nation's No. 1 source of mercury emissions at the time." Glen Miller, a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, estimates that since 1985, the eighteen major gold mines in the state released between 70 and 200 tons of mercury into the environment.”
Don’t you love it? The Western states, with their large GOP populations, are also the ones suffering from the various poisonings they bring down on themselves. In the AEC dialectic that has dominated the West since 1945, the low use population is hooked on the conditions that make it a low use population. The embrace of a rabid individualism that masks the grab of the corporate collectives is the route traveled by mercury into the brain, an ideological analogue of the actual route from the air and water via the pores, mouth and tongue to the internal organs, the weaving nerve tissue and up ever heavenward to the brain. In comic book terms, at least, this is no disadvantage -- far from it! As the low use human product gets literally stupider with mercury poisoning, it gets more apt to believe anything.
... And they wonder where that 35 percent of hardcore Bush supporters come from.
Let’s begin with one of the statistics:
“The California Gold Rush clawed out of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada considerable gold—93 tons or 2.7 million troy ounces in the peak year of 1853 alone, an estimated 973 tons or 28.4 million troy ounces by 1858, more than 3,634 tons or 106 million troy ounces to date.”
My brothers used to be in apartment maintenance. Now, standard practice calls for a quick clean up, laying new carpet and a possible paint job once your resident has vacated his place. If the resident was a smoker, inevitably the paint job followed, since the smoke would stain the walls. This is the literal materialization of human aura, but it isn’t just your renter and his Camels. No, we leave our indelible imprint on the landscape long after we have tidily tucked away the event. In human time, measured by the fingernail and hair growth, tumescence and the brief flurry of orgasm, the fleeting memory that flairs up in the night like a ghost of what the angle looked from a height that was just up to mom’s knee or thigh and is gone before you can complete the memory, organize that field of view, events are inevitably more fleeting, more bound to the attention span – but of course, in organic time, measured by proteins and fats, this isn’t so. An event can last a long time. Hence the interest in Solnit’s gold rush story. It is the quintessential Wild West story, the one the American dream life immediately focused upon – the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, the arrival of hundreds and then thousands come to stake a claim, the settling of California.
But Solnit brings out other pieces of the rush. For instance, by our manifest luck, we just happened to fight a war with Mexico that gave us both the Sacramento River and the means to exploit the gold we found there. That means was mercury:
“In the northwesternmost corner of old Mexico, in 1845, a staggeringly rich mercury lode was discovered by one Captain Don Andres Castillero. Located near San Jose at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the New Almaden Mine was well within the territory seized by the United States by the time it was developed. And only days before the February 2, 1848, treaty giving Mexico $15 million for its northern half was signed, gold was also discovered in California. Thus began the celebrated Gold Rush, which far fewer know was also a mercury rush, or that the two were deeply intertwined.”
Mercury combines with gold, making it much easier to extract from water or earth. Of course, there is the little problem that mercury is extremely poisonous, a neurotoxin that keeps on tickin’.
“During the California Gold Rush, an estimated 7,600 tons or 15,200,000 pounds of mercury were thus deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that placer, or stream-based, mining alone put ten million pounds of the neurotoxin into the environment, while hard-rock mining accounted for another three million pounds. Much of it is still there—a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist once told me that he and his peers sometimes find globules the size of a man's fist in pristine-looking Sierra Nevada streams—but the rest of it ended up lining the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. Some of it is still traveling: the San Jose Mercury News (named after the old mercury mines there) reports that one thousand pounds of the stuff comes out of gold-mining country and into the bay every year, and another two hundred pounds comes from a single mercury mine at the south end of the bay annually. Some of this mercury ends up in the fish, and as you move up the food chain, the mercury accumulates.
"According to the San Francisco Estuary Institute, "Fish at the top of the food web can harbor mercury concentrations in their tissues over one million times the mercury concentration in the water in which they swim." All around the edges of the bay, warning signs are posted, sometimes in Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese, as well as English, but people fish, particularly poor and immigrant people, and some eat their catch. They are paying for the Gold Rush too.
“Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out of it. There is something fabulous about this, or at least fablelike. Gold and mercury are brothers and opposites, positioned next to each other, elements 79 and 80, in the Periodic Table of the Elements. And they also often coexist in the same underground deposits. Gold has been prized in part because it does not rust, change, or decay, while mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and that liquid is, for those who remember breaking old thermometers to play with the globules, something strange, congealing into a trembling mass or breaking into tiny spheres that roll in all directions, ready to change, to amalgamate with other metals, to work its way into the bodies of living organisms.”
In the tv series westerns, nobody ever complains about mercury fumes. In real life, the landscape after gold mining is laced with poisons, the sources of the water are diverted and fouled, and of course vegetation, which likes mercury no more than the human body, dies off:
“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether. "Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears," said one onlooker at a hydraulic mine. “
Well, what is good for the nineteenth century is good for the 21st, especially in the Bush culture of infinite waste for the betterment of the upper 1 percent income bracket. Nevada is now the place to go to watch humans poison the earth and the sources of water (in a state that is developing million plus cities, without any visible means of water in, say, fifteen years) because, well, the sacred and wondrous effects of private property are what brought down the communist menace. Notice how it all leads to the kingdom of God, who has a funded position at the Cato Institute.
“The current gold rush in northeastern Nevada, which produces gold on a monstrous scale—seven million ounces in 2004 alone—is also dispersing dangerous quantities of mercury. This time it's airborne. The forty-mile-long Carlin Trend on which the gigantic open-pit gold mines are situated is a region of "microscopic gold"; dispersed in the soil and rock far underground, imperceptible to the human eye, unaffordable to mine with yesteryear's technology. To extract the gold, huge chunks of the landscape are excavated, pulverized, piled up, and plied with a cyanide solution that draws out the gold. The process, known as cyanide heap-leach mining, releases large amounts of mercury into the biosphere. Wind and water meet the materials at each stage and create windblown dust and seepage, and thus the mercury and other heavy metals begin to travel.
“As the Ban Mercury Working Group reports, "Though cumulatively coal fired power plants are the predominant source of atmospheric mercury emissions, the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the United States are the three largest gold mines there." The Great Salt Lake, when tested in 2004, turned out to have astonishingly high mercury levels, as did wild waterways in Idaho, and Nevada's gold mines seem to be the culprit. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that year, "The scope of mercury pollution associated with Nevada's gold mining industry wasn't discovered until the EPA changed rules in 1998 to add mercury to the list of toxic discharges required to be reported. When the first numbers were released in 2000, Nevada mines reported the release of 13,576 pounds in 1998. Those numbers have since been revised upward to an estimated 21,098 pounds, or more than 10 tons, to make Nevada the nation's No. 1 source of mercury emissions at the time." Glen Miller, a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, estimates that since 1985, the eighteen major gold mines in the state released between 70 and 200 tons of mercury into the environment.”
Don’t you love it? The Western states, with their large GOP populations, are also the ones suffering from the various poisonings they bring down on themselves. In the AEC dialectic that has dominated the West since 1945, the low use population is hooked on the conditions that make it a low use population. The embrace of a rabid individualism that masks the grab of the corporate collectives is the route traveled by mercury into the brain, an ideological analogue of the actual route from the air and water via the pores, mouth and tongue to the internal organs, the weaving nerve tissue and up ever heavenward to the brain. In comic book terms, at least, this is no disadvantage -- far from it! As the low use human product gets literally stupider with mercury poisoning, it gets more apt to believe anything.
... And they wonder where that 35 percent of hardcore Bush supporters come from.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
I'm with stupid - the law of the land
It was good to see some bipartisanship return to D.C. this week. According to the WAPO, a bill to re-write the preamble to the Constitution found support from both Hilary Clinton and John McCain – the two sides of the aisle came together in a spirit of amity. “Senator Clinton said that the tedious first sentence - We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect union, etc., etc.” was good in its time, but times have changed. “’I’m with stupid’ has always been my favorite t shirt slogan, and when Senator McCain said it was also his, we thought, why not make erase the obsolete, eighteenth century wording of our founding document and introduce something fresh and representative from the new millennium?” The “I’m with stupid’ change was passed, 95-1, with 4 abstentions. It is also being haled at the White House, where President Bush admitted that it was his favorite t shirt slogan too.” The first sentence now reads: "We, the people of the United States, say: I'm with stupid!"
The I’m with stupid theme is behind the happy convergence of two news stories today. One, in the WAPO, is about Katherine Harris’s own constitutional theory. Harris is running for Senator in Florida. Her personal position on the constitution (a position conveyed to her by a cohort of senile angels, who then went onto Disneyland, using their New Jerusalem discount) is the following:
Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep religious people out of politics.
"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.”
The other story is about another party of God, Hezbollah. It, too, is about the Constitution – apparently, that first amendment part of it can be trashed when your gov feels like trashing it – to protect us though. In this glorious, long war on terrorism, with the wind of liberty sweeping the planet, we can’t afford to have people just saying whatever they want to. Speech has consequences. Cops need the power to shut your trap by knocking your teeth in, or arresting you and sending you to a prison where (heh heh) you better not lean over to pick up the soap in the shower! God, I love jokes about the sodomy rape of prisoners – makes me feel so part of this great nation. Here’s the story in the NYT. A Mr. Iqbal apparently runs a business providing ‘satellite programming for households.” In its wisdom, the FBI has come down on his type – did I say his name is Iqbal? Did I say it isn’t Smith, a good American name, but Iqbal? As in Iqbal? Did I say that? – to stop his nefarious doings:
“But this week, the budding entrepreneur’s house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah — a violation of federal law.
Yesterday, Mr. Iqbal was arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held in $250,000 bail. The Hezbollah station, Al Manar — or “the beacon” in Arabic — was designated a global terrorist entity by the United States Treasury Department in March of this year.”
Now here’s some synergy for you:
“For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.”
Yes, it is idiot vs. idiot on the bloody junkyard of this world, Christian evangelist vs. Hezbollah, and the loser is (envelope please)--
Your right to freedom of speech!
A big round of applause for the end of that shit. We got our American Idol. We got our angelically inspired senatorial candidates. They got the party of God. They got the holocaust cartoon exhibit (the NYT story about which was, actually, rather hopeful. Iranians aren’t attending that sick and rabid stunt – and the story mentioned, as an afterthought, that there is actually a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament who condemned it. How many Jewish members of the Saudi parliament are there? or the Egyptian? or Iraqi?). And all together, if we work real hard, we can encase ourselves in complete and utter ignorance, a worldwide theo-perversity combining Witchhunters, Jewhaters, Ragheadhaters, and the perpetual war crowd in order to better clusterbomb, clusterfuck, atomfuck and enucleate each other and all the rest of us for the glory of God, leaving the planet to look like the Aral Sea on a bad day. Planet Chernobyl. At least, god damn it, it will rid us of all those ultra-dangerous moral relativists running about destroying our civilization.
Is that cool or what? This is what our systems are leading to – showing, once again, that they are the best damn systems in all the world. What other system offers the prospect of world wide heat death while stewing in our gas exhausts and middle aged male rages?
The prosecutor in the Iqbal case has said that – oh my! – Al Manar glorifies suicide bombers! they are anti-semites as well. Fuck, throw the book at him. We can’t have that running rampant, or soon all of Staten Island will be building IEDs in its spare time. Now, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled program of embedded reporters explaining the great job liberty loving American forces are doing throughout Iraq.
ps
The roots of the G.O.P. hatred of freedom of speech go back to the Southern hatred of freedom of speech. We have, perhaps, too casually tossed this history into the memory hole, but it is important, since the conservative defense of restricting freedom of speech seems, at first, to go oddly with a libertarian strain in conservative theory. To see why this isn’t so, we have to go back to the abolitionist campaign of 1835.
In that year, abolitionist groups decided to create some publicity for themselves by mailing out anti-slavery pamphlets and newspapers – flooding the zone in their own way. Now, in 1835, that great Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, was ruling the roost. He has been viewed via the liberal historians of the 1950s as a democratic president, a people’s president. But Jackson was impatient of democracy when it got in the way of public order. For instance, the exercise of speech to promote terrorism certainly got him hot around the collar – as it so often gets our good Democrats in Congress hot around the collar today. In his annual message to congress in December, 1835, he came up with an excellent solution to the terrorism problem: we needed federal laws to severely repress these incendiaries. The first thing to do, according to Jackson, was for the postmasters to publish the names of every person who received anti-slavery terrorist propaganda. He’d already praised the mobbing of abolitionists, so the publishing of the names would rationalize the lynching process in a way that would hearten the Cheney crowd today. Also, he called for federal laws to stop abolitionists from sending anti-slavery literature through the mail to the South.
This legislation was opposed by, of all people, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was for censoring the abolitionists, with hot tar if necessary, but he was against the federal government taking control of the postal system in this way. Calhoun did like the informal federal effort, led by the Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, to confiscate anti-slavery materials. The postmaster General of New York City was on board, too.
In 1836, a gag rule was passed prohibiting the House of Representatives from discussing any anti-slavery petition or referring to one in any way. In Charleston, S.C., a crowd broke into the post office and burnt the handily available anti-slavery, pro-terrorist literature. In D.C., a man named Crandall was discovered with anti-slavery pamphlets in his possession. This led to some fine sport – a lynch crowd formed, buildings were burned, and Crandall was marched to jail. The equivalent of the WAPO, the Washington National Intelligencer, published an editorial that could have been penned by Fred Hiatt – a wonderful exercise in mature judgment, deploring the riots but attributing it to “ the natural resentment inspired by the demoniacal design, on the part of a fanatical individual to stir up our Negro population to insurrection and murder.” A terrorist sympathizer for sure, this Crandall, and well deserving of remaining in jail eight months until his trial, where – oh, how symbolism has graced this republic – he was prosecuted by Francis Scott Key. Alas, a duped jury let him off on the damned first amendment excuse. Surely the Justice Department should look up this case for pointers, so we don’t have any aberrant juries letting off today’s terrorist sympathizers.
All of these events played out in the shadow of the Nate Turner slave revolt, in which whites were massacred. Our beloved Dixie, assaulted by savage slaves, who were stirred up by the abolitionists. Is it any wonder that, for our security, the first amendment had to be temporarily suppressed in these cases?
The GOP has long been the inheritor of the Calhoun strain in the American culture. The ruling class in the South has had utter contempt for the first amendment for one hundred eighty years – that class now rules the GOP and, by extension, the country. Stifling free expression is near the very heart of their tradition, and they will work to do it with might and main.
The I’m with stupid theme is behind the happy convergence of two news stories today. One, in the WAPO, is about Katherine Harris’s own constitutional theory. Harris is running for Senator in Florida. Her personal position on the constitution (a position conveyed to her by a cohort of senile angels, who then went onto Disneyland, using their New Jerusalem discount) is the following:
Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep religious people out of politics.
"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.”
The other story is about another party of God, Hezbollah. It, too, is about the Constitution – apparently, that first amendment part of it can be trashed when your gov feels like trashing it – to protect us though. In this glorious, long war on terrorism, with the wind of liberty sweeping the planet, we can’t afford to have people just saying whatever they want to. Speech has consequences. Cops need the power to shut your trap by knocking your teeth in, or arresting you and sending you to a prison where (heh heh) you better not lean over to pick up the soap in the shower! God, I love jokes about the sodomy rape of prisoners – makes me feel so part of this great nation. Here’s the story in the NYT. A Mr. Iqbal apparently runs a business providing ‘satellite programming for households.” In its wisdom, the FBI has come down on his type – did I say his name is Iqbal? Did I say it isn’t Smith, a good American name, but Iqbal? As in Iqbal? Did I say that? – to stop his nefarious doings:
“But this week, the budding entrepreneur’s house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah — a violation of federal law.
Yesterday, Mr. Iqbal was arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held in $250,000 bail. The Hezbollah station, Al Manar — or “the beacon” in Arabic — was designated a global terrorist entity by the United States Treasury Department in March of this year.”
Now here’s some synergy for you:
“For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.”
Yes, it is idiot vs. idiot on the bloody junkyard of this world, Christian evangelist vs. Hezbollah, and the loser is (envelope please)--
Your right to freedom of speech!
A big round of applause for the end of that shit. We got our American Idol. We got our angelically inspired senatorial candidates. They got the party of God. They got the holocaust cartoon exhibit (the NYT story about which was, actually, rather hopeful. Iranians aren’t attending that sick and rabid stunt – and the story mentioned, as an afterthought, that there is actually a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament who condemned it. How many Jewish members of the Saudi parliament are there? or the Egyptian? or Iraqi?). And all together, if we work real hard, we can encase ourselves in complete and utter ignorance, a worldwide theo-perversity combining Witchhunters, Jewhaters, Ragheadhaters, and the perpetual war crowd in order to better clusterbomb, clusterfuck, atomfuck and enucleate each other and all the rest of us for the glory of God, leaving the planet to look like the Aral Sea on a bad day. Planet Chernobyl. At least, god damn it, it will rid us of all those ultra-dangerous moral relativists running about destroying our civilization.
Is that cool or what? This is what our systems are leading to – showing, once again, that they are the best damn systems in all the world. What other system offers the prospect of world wide heat death while stewing in our gas exhausts and middle aged male rages?
The prosecutor in the Iqbal case has said that – oh my! – Al Manar glorifies suicide bombers! they are anti-semites as well. Fuck, throw the book at him. We can’t have that running rampant, or soon all of Staten Island will be building IEDs in its spare time. Now, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled program of embedded reporters explaining the great job liberty loving American forces are doing throughout Iraq.
ps
The roots of the G.O.P. hatred of freedom of speech go back to the Southern hatred of freedom of speech. We have, perhaps, too casually tossed this history into the memory hole, but it is important, since the conservative defense of restricting freedom of speech seems, at first, to go oddly with a libertarian strain in conservative theory. To see why this isn’t so, we have to go back to the abolitionist campaign of 1835.
In that year, abolitionist groups decided to create some publicity for themselves by mailing out anti-slavery pamphlets and newspapers – flooding the zone in their own way. Now, in 1835, that great Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, was ruling the roost. He has been viewed via the liberal historians of the 1950s as a democratic president, a people’s president. But Jackson was impatient of democracy when it got in the way of public order. For instance, the exercise of speech to promote terrorism certainly got him hot around the collar – as it so often gets our good Democrats in Congress hot around the collar today. In his annual message to congress in December, 1835, he came up with an excellent solution to the terrorism problem: we needed federal laws to severely repress these incendiaries. The first thing to do, according to Jackson, was for the postmasters to publish the names of every person who received anti-slavery terrorist propaganda. He’d already praised the mobbing of abolitionists, so the publishing of the names would rationalize the lynching process in a way that would hearten the Cheney crowd today. Also, he called for federal laws to stop abolitionists from sending anti-slavery literature through the mail to the South.
This legislation was opposed by, of all people, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was for censoring the abolitionists, with hot tar if necessary, but he was against the federal government taking control of the postal system in this way. Calhoun did like the informal federal effort, led by the Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, to confiscate anti-slavery materials. The postmaster General of New York City was on board, too.
In 1836, a gag rule was passed prohibiting the House of Representatives from discussing any anti-slavery petition or referring to one in any way. In Charleston, S.C., a crowd broke into the post office and burnt the handily available anti-slavery, pro-terrorist literature. In D.C., a man named Crandall was discovered with anti-slavery pamphlets in his possession. This led to some fine sport – a lynch crowd formed, buildings were burned, and Crandall was marched to jail. The equivalent of the WAPO, the Washington National Intelligencer, published an editorial that could have been penned by Fred Hiatt – a wonderful exercise in mature judgment, deploring the riots but attributing it to “ the natural resentment inspired by the demoniacal design, on the part of a fanatical individual to stir up our Negro population to insurrection and murder.” A terrorist sympathizer for sure, this Crandall, and well deserving of remaining in jail eight months until his trial, where – oh, how symbolism has graced this republic – he was prosecuted by Francis Scott Key. Alas, a duped jury let him off on the damned first amendment excuse. Surely the Justice Department should look up this case for pointers, so we don’t have any aberrant juries letting off today’s terrorist sympathizers.
All of these events played out in the shadow of the Nate Turner slave revolt, in which whites were massacred. Our beloved Dixie, assaulted by savage slaves, who were stirred up by the abolitionists. Is it any wonder that, for our security, the first amendment had to be temporarily suppressed in these cases?
The GOP has long been the inheritor of the Calhoun strain in the American culture. The ruling class in the South has had utter contempt for the first amendment for one hundred eighty years – that class now rules the GOP and, by extension, the country. Stifling free expression is near the very heart of their tradition, and they will work to do it with might and main.
Friday, August 25, 2006
the new mlch
While eating, they normally conceal themselves or else close their eyes.
- Doctor Brodies Report.
In Borges’ short story, Doctor Brodie’s Report, then narrator describes the habits of the Mlch - a Yahoo like people who perform all their ‘physical acts’ in open view except for eating. They have the delicacy to conceal the tiniest hints of mastication, even though they are coarse enough to enjoy devouring raw corpses.
Restaurants, for the Mlch, would be as shocking as would be, for us, emporiums designed to let parents to copulate in front of stangers and their own children. But Borges’ story isn’t simply about inverting customs. It plays with an image of the private and the public that registers in myth – an image that sees these as two opposite poles. From that socially false but mythically re-enforced idea flows the libertarian notion of capitalism as a system of private enterprises. In reality, privacy is always defined by reference to a public; it is not in opposition to that public, nor is it even particularly concealed from the public. The mythical ideal of privacy is, in the social sphere, mere autism.
To trace the menu and its effects, as the crow-like LI has been doing – or delaying doing - is just a little attempt to get a few steps into how myth and history split, here, and why, and what havoc it has wrought – to reckon up the beauty and the casualties.
The burden of LI’s insanity, over the last decade, can be summed up as the coming of the Mlch – the leap from myth to history made by the governing class that has administered privatizations worldwide in an attempt to destroy privacy. For the nature of privacy does not reside in its incommunicability, or its surveyed and absolutely defended property lines, but in the fact that privacy is about who one chooses to share space with, who one chooses to share time with. Privacy is not defined by solitude; rather, solitude as private time is derived from privacy as shared time. Only after Friday joins Robinson Crusoe does privacy come into the picture.
This is what makes the appearance of the menu such an interesting little fold in the disembedding of the economic. The menu comes out of the great houses, where the cooking is done by the servants on a scale appropriate to the notables of the ancien regime, and into the public sphere, in restaurants. It comes out of the houses as, what? A marker of the re-organization of the social? an insensible change in the way intimacy is transacted? a way of closing off space in the public for the private? as a constitution of preferences? Hey, a lot depends on the menu here. Too much to bite off, so to speak. But I suppose what should concern me is the link between intimacy and taste – and the role of individuating payment, which was one of the first and most striking things about menus. The rule in the inn was that how much you paid for the food depended solely on how many people were at the table – you did not pay for what you ate. The rule, after the restaurant was established
(- which here is the history, quickly: According to Rebecca Stang’s The Invention of the Restaurant, the first restaurant to call itself a restaurant was opened on Rue Saint-Honore, Hotel d’Aligre in Paris by Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in 1766. The restaurant was about restoration of the health – the eighteenth century doctor, when not worried about rotting smells and onanism, was worried about the effect of heavy foods, such as those served in auberge, on women and gens des lettres. Along with the restaurant came the menu, for in the restaurant, unlike the auberge, the diners’ physiques were individually addressed)
was that each paid for what each ate. And this, of course, is a concept that could only be welcomed by the budding political economist, since it made the eating of food correspond more rationally to the actual market. Or seemed to. However, it rather shocked Rousseau, who recounts going to a restaurant in the fourth of the Reveries chez la dame Vacassin, restauratrice – Rousseau calls it going to dine “en manière de pique-nique” – and who missed the old custom. Even though the restaurant as an invention serving the public health was, as Herve Dumez points out, inspired by Rousseauist themes - the same concern with breastfeeding, with being natural, with getting rid of traditional, unhealthy urban customs. In fact, the Mathurin’s restaurant, originally, emphasized broths – simple instead of healthy foods.
“The framework of the establishment lent itself to the calm necessary for good digestion: for the first time, it would be possible to eat at a separate table, alone, en famille or with friends. One has here the three elements radically new of the restaurant: flexibility of the hours of dining, the choice, with the menu, and the mixture of a private intimacy made possible in a public place open to all. To which we should add a last point: the mixture of traditional cooking with innovation, simplicity (le bouillon) with sophistication. Quickly, but in the line of the maison de sante, the restaurant menus opened up to other dishes than simple soups: fruits and milk based desserts, notably rice pudding, inspired by the best seller, la Nouvelle Heloise.”
It should be pointed out that the idea that the inn simply offered common tables, here, is a myth. You could eat in your room, or you could eat at a table apart, depending on the capaciousness of the inn.
But LI has wandered into facts, here, taking us away from the bonds between taste, privacy, and intimacy. Hmm, that will be for another post.
- Doctor Brodies Report.
In Borges’ short story, Doctor Brodie’s Report, then narrator describes the habits of the Mlch - a Yahoo like people who perform all their ‘physical acts’ in open view except for eating. They have the delicacy to conceal the tiniest hints of mastication, even though they are coarse enough to enjoy devouring raw corpses.
Restaurants, for the Mlch, would be as shocking as would be, for us, emporiums designed to let parents to copulate in front of stangers and their own children. But Borges’ story isn’t simply about inverting customs. It plays with an image of the private and the public that registers in myth – an image that sees these as two opposite poles. From that socially false but mythically re-enforced idea flows the libertarian notion of capitalism as a system of private enterprises. In reality, privacy is always defined by reference to a public; it is not in opposition to that public, nor is it even particularly concealed from the public. The mythical ideal of privacy is, in the social sphere, mere autism.
To trace the menu and its effects, as the crow-like LI has been doing – or delaying doing - is just a little attempt to get a few steps into how myth and history split, here, and why, and what havoc it has wrought – to reckon up the beauty and the casualties.
The burden of LI’s insanity, over the last decade, can be summed up as the coming of the Mlch – the leap from myth to history made by the governing class that has administered privatizations worldwide in an attempt to destroy privacy. For the nature of privacy does not reside in its incommunicability, or its surveyed and absolutely defended property lines, but in the fact that privacy is about who one chooses to share space with, who one chooses to share time with. Privacy is not defined by solitude; rather, solitude as private time is derived from privacy as shared time. Only after Friday joins Robinson Crusoe does privacy come into the picture.
This is what makes the appearance of the menu such an interesting little fold in the disembedding of the economic. The menu comes out of the great houses, where the cooking is done by the servants on a scale appropriate to the notables of the ancien regime, and into the public sphere, in restaurants. It comes out of the houses as, what? A marker of the re-organization of the social? an insensible change in the way intimacy is transacted? a way of closing off space in the public for the private? as a constitution of preferences? Hey, a lot depends on the menu here. Too much to bite off, so to speak. But I suppose what should concern me is the link between intimacy and taste – and the role of individuating payment, which was one of the first and most striking things about menus. The rule in the inn was that how much you paid for the food depended solely on how many people were at the table – you did not pay for what you ate. The rule, after the restaurant was established
(- which here is the history, quickly: According to Rebecca Stang’s The Invention of the Restaurant, the first restaurant to call itself a restaurant was opened on Rue Saint-Honore, Hotel d’Aligre in Paris by Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in 1766. The restaurant was about restoration of the health – the eighteenth century doctor, when not worried about rotting smells and onanism, was worried about the effect of heavy foods, such as those served in auberge, on women and gens des lettres. Along with the restaurant came the menu, for in the restaurant, unlike the auberge, the diners’ physiques were individually addressed)
was that each paid for what each ate. And this, of course, is a concept that could only be welcomed by the budding political economist, since it made the eating of food correspond more rationally to the actual market. Or seemed to. However, it rather shocked Rousseau, who recounts going to a restaurant in the fourth of the Reveries chez la dame Vacassin, restauratrice – Rousseau calls it going to dine “en manière de pique-nique” – and who missed the old custom. Even though the restaurant as an invention serving the public health was, as Herve Dumez points out, inspired by Rousseauist themes - the same concern with breastfeeding, with being natural, with getting rid of traditional, unhealthy urban customs. In fact, the Mathurin’s restaurant, originally, emphasized broths – simple instead of healthy foods.
“The framework of the establishment lent itself to the calm necessary for good digestion: for the first time, it would be possible to eat at a separate table, alone, en famille or with friends. One has here the three elements radically new of the restaurant: flexibility of the hours of dining, the choice, with the menu, and the mixture of a private intimacy made possible in a public place open to all. To which we should add a last point: the mixture of traditional cooking with innovation, simplicity (le bouillon) with sophistication. Quickly, but in the line of the maison de sante, the restaurant menus opened up to other dishes than simple soups: fruits and milk based desserts, notably rice pudding, inspired by the best seller, la Nouvelle Heloise.”
It should be pointed out that the idea that the inn simply offered common tables, here, is a myth. You could eat in your room, or you could eat at a table apart, depending on the capaciousness of the inn.
But LI has wandered into facts, here, taking us away from the bonds between taste, privacy, and intimacy. Hmm, that will be for another post.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
menus, cartes, and where we are
In the OED, the first meaning of menu is – the common people. Sons of the menu seems to have been a seventeenth century phrase. The second meaning, a schedule or list, takes its first instance of menu in English from a book, in 1830, that refers to French cooking.
In his essay on Grimod de la Reynier’s Almanach in Consuming Culture, the arts of the French Table, Michael Garval (whose homepage links to a “menu of the month” ) describes the frontispiece, which presented a little semi-humorous cartoon of the gourmand, with the bibliotheque of the 19th gourmand (bookshelves overflowing with provisions), his meditations, the first duty of an Amphitrion “with the master of the house, in the kitchen, receiving a menu from his chef,” his dreams, his awakening, and then “le plus mortel ennemi du diner”, in “which the gourmand spoils his appetite by indulging in an overly copious lunch.” I am probably not the first person to see this as a parody of Descartes in the Discours, right? So I won’t flog the comparison. What is interesting, instead, is the appearance of this menu in the household. The civilizing process, man. From the aristocrat’s schedule to the bourgeois’s grand palaces of gourmandise to the driveby ‘can I take your order’, something is happening here. But do we know what it is?
Of course, it is menu in English, but carte gastronomique in the early nineteenth century. A carte is a map, which implies a referent in which one orients oneself – a space. But what kind of space is this – the space of cuisine?
Well, I could take a leap here into Kant’s essay on orientation, which is actually a pretty good intro to the always fascinating topic of left and right and might give us some anchors for the ur-text of preferences (remember, of course, that while menus and restaurants are appearing in Paris, Bentham is dividing the moral world into pleasures and pains, a binary over which one can calculate – in fact, LI, at this moment, has half a mind to claim an intimate connection between the origin of the political economic text, constitutions and menus – text types bound together in this moment, a disguised relationship that seems to have attracted few critics – yes, many are the ties that bind the U.S. Constitution to the menu at the Taco place up the street, and a true American deconstructor, or simply your average KritikDJ, would set about mixing one with the other, scratch scratch) but let’s stick, for a moment, with Grimod.
Ah, let's do that in our next post.
In his essay on Grimod de la Reynier’s Almanach in Consuming Culture, the arts of the French Table, Michael Garval (whose homepage links to a “menu of the month” ) describes the frontispiece, which presented a little semi-humorous cartoon of the gourmand, with the bibliotheque of the 19th gourmand (bookshelves overflowing with provisions), his meditations, the first duty of an Amphitrion “with the master of the house, in the kitchen, receiving a menu from his chef,” his dreams, his awakening, and then “le plus mortel ennemi du diner”, in “which the gourmand spoils his appetite by indulging in an overly copious lunch.” I am probably not the first person to see this as a parody of Descartes in the Discours, right? So I won’t flog the comparison. What is interesting, instead, is the appearance of this menu in the household. The civilizing process, man. From the aristocrat’s schedule to the bourgeois’s grand palaces of gourmandise to the driveby ‘can I take your order’, something is happening here. But do we know what it is?
Of course, it is menu in English, but carte gastronomique in the early nineteenth century. A carte is a map, which implies a referent in which one orients oneself – a space. But what kind of space is this – the space of cuisine?
Well, I could take a leap here into Kant’s essay on orientation, which is actually a pretty good intro to the always fascinating topic of left and right and might give us some anchors for the ur-text of preferences (remember, of course, that while menus and restaurants are appearing in Paris, Bentham is dividing the moral world into pleasures and pains, a binary over which one can calculate – in fact, LI, at this moment, has half a mind to claim an intimate connection between the origin of the political economic text, constitutions and menus – text types bound together in this moment, a disguised relationship that seems to have attracted few critics – yes, many are the ties that bind the U.S. Constitution to the menu at the Taco place up the street, and a true American deconstructor, or simply your average KritikDJ, would set about mixing one with the other, scratch scratch) but let’s stick, for a moment, with Grimod.
Ah, let's do that in our next post.
menus con't
Give me liberty, or give me death, and can you make that with extra cheese?” – Patrick Henry at the Burger King
When I cast my beady, crow’s eyes over the long stretch of modernity – in these dog, dead days, I have little else to amuse me – I see nothing that so aptly fits Polanyi’s model of the disembedding of the economy as the rise of the menu – the course of which is, appropriately, a blank as far as I can tell. No opus to light the weary traveler on his way. Just the kind of trace that makes my juices flow. At the same time, of course, LI is a humble blogger, no maker of opuses but a poker of holes: we aren’t going to build Rome in a thousand words or less, or give you the foundations of menu-ology here.
In the two scenes we picked out from two movies in our last post, it would be easy to leave the menus behind. Like the King in Las Meninas, or – a better comparison – like the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, gracing Lacan’s Seminaire, volume 11, they are where the gazes are gathered and the source that builds the space the gazes all span. So, what royal personage is doing the looking here? Well, it is LI’s humble contention, and the root of the insanity that has obviously driven him mad, that the gaze that stares out from the menu is the fly’s gaze, one in which two hundred flavors of ice cream, thirty brands of corn flakes, eggs with rye toast or steak cooked to your preference and ten combinations of milk (soy, whole, or one percent) and coffee can be held in balance, equally. The restaurant ain’t no panopticon, but it is one of the many entrances to the fly’s world, the kingdom of Capital. And we do know the name of the Lord of the Flies, don’t we?
Not that LI is particularly kicking against Belzebuub. We are humble servitors, more humble, because more miserably unsuccessful, than most - we simply have a causist’s quibble with the definition of freedom in the fly’s kingdom. That definition is spelled out in preferences, and he who says preferences says a pricing and market mechanism before you can say “still working on that, sir?” Or, “do you want onions and pickle on that?” What better text for preferences is there, what better object of the neo-classical school than the menu? Belzebuub’s poetic conceit is that all that exists, exists to be put on a menu. It functions not only to separate and classify choices, but to civilize and educate. Just as the child’s growth as a biological entity is measured by yardsticks and charts, the child’s entry into the fly’s kingdom comes by way of learning about, well, entrees.
All of which is LI creeping towards his object and around it again, instead of making the bold pounce. Maybe I can make the pounce in the next, or the next, post.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
for a history of the menu
When I wrote my master’s thesis on seriousness, I spoke, in the Pauline phrase, as a child – or rather as a child of French philosophy. Thus, I did not look hard enough at English sources to find references to seriousness. I did find that seriousness has never been seriously thematized in philosophy, even though it has been inherent since Socrates made his first wisecrack. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this while reading Hazlitt – who I read to strengthen my prose style. (My master’s thesis, by the way, is that seriousness never really forms an opposite – it is always a wildcard in the play of the dialectic, and thus functions both to maintain and to deconstruct the system of oppositions within metaphysics. About which I could go on at length, but… being in all things merciful to my readers … I won’t):
“To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is. Now the serious is the habitual stress which the mind lays upon the expectation of a given order of events, following one another with a certain regularity and weight of interest attached to them. When this stress is increased beyond its usual pitch of intensity, so as to overstrain the feelings by the violent opposition of good to bad, or of object to our desires, it becomes the pathetic or tragical. The ludicrous, or comic, is the unexpected loosening or relaxing this stress below its usual pitch of intensity, by such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure, and leaves no time nor inclination for painful reflections.”
There is much that is wrong with this – and especially the naïve distinction between pain and pleasure – but the nice thing about it is that Hazlitt recognizes that the serious is distinct not just from the ludicrous, but from the tragic.
Now, myself, as a loser, I have found that every oracle in my life eventually pokes a big stick up my ass except for the ludicrous – and so I have followed it like my own personal destiny, and here I now sit, a crow in all but feathers, cawing over the corpse of the American culture in its Bushian phase, where painful reflection mixes inextricably with the clownish. That culture, as I grew up with it, I realize dimly, is an aspect of war culture, which has its zones and manners.
But on to the subject of this post, which is existential freedom, liberalism, and the menu.
…
A few days ago, LI was visiting our local video store when the clerks put on a movie that stands out, in our mind, for loathsomeness. Not the loathsomeness of catsup flecked fx, nor that of porno raunch, but a more dreadful, soul destroying loathsomeness, a glimpse into the dark abysm of the middle class soul. I am speaking, of course, of When Sally Met Harry. Or is it When Harry Met Sally? In any case, I was visiting just as Meg Ryan was seated with -- oh, what’s his name, the guy who plays Harry, that sadsack comic – and she was ordering something at a restaurant. And it flashed on my senses that this scene was obviously referencing the scene in Five Easy Pieces when Jack Nicholson tried to order breakfast at a diner. Now, while FEP isn’t my favorite piece of cinema, the anger in Nicholson has a didactic quality that LI likes – for here, in a nutshell, is the problem with social contract liberalism, with its notion that freedom is about preferences. The solution to that anger, in FEP, for this form of liberalism, is expanding the preferences – hence, the same scene in WHMS, in which we get glimpses of what the hippie revolution wrought in lifestyle America – a place where a decent latte is never too far away. Or something like that.
Now LI has long contended that freedom isn’t defined by preferences – that, in fact, the idea of identifying freedom in that technical, economic sense with political freedom per se is exactly where the libertarian goes wrong. There is a rather beautiful phrase is G. Baum’s book on Karl Polanyi: “This, then, is Polanyi’s orginal argument: the longing of the bourgeois conscience transcends the possibilities of bourgeois society. What this conscience calls for is the creation of a transparent society that allows its members to estimate the effects of what they are doing and thus assume ethical responsibility for their actions.”
I am not sure about the transparency, but I am sure about the longing and the anger when that longing is marginalized, or translated into mere preference mongering.
Now, one thing about both movies is that the scenes are centered around the interaction between a text and social action – the text being the menu. I have looked around, but in vain, for a history of menus. Menus are considered to be so obvious that the fact that menus weren’t present in places where people came to eat – inns, basically – until the start of restauranting in the late 18th century doesn’t really register as a historically interesting event. To see how people would enter an inn and order food or drink, look, for instance, at Don Quixote. Or the 18th century picaresque. No character brandishes a menu in these texts. In fact, the same thing is true in Dickens -- characters are continually being brought chops and beer, but you don't see the characters asking, well, what type of beer do you have? Although by this time, actually, that sentence was starting to make sense.
This is why my next post will be about Grimod de la Reyniere, the man who wrote the first popular restaurant guide, the Almanach des gourmands. Overshadowed by Brillat-Savarin, Grimod de la Reyniere is now experiencing a little renaissance of interest by pop culture scholars.
Or at least that is what I think the next post will be about.
“To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is. Now the serious is the habitual stress which the mind lays upon the expectation of a given order of events, following one another with a certain regularity and weight of interest attached to them. When this stress is increased beyond its usual pitch of intensity, so as to overstrain the feelings by the violent opposition of good to bad, or of object to our desires, it becomes the pathetic or tragical. The ludicrous, or comic, is the unexpected loosening or relaxing this stress below its usual pitch of intensity, by such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure, and leaves no time nor inclination for painful reflections.”
There is much that is wrong with this – and especially the naïve distinction between pain and pleasure – but the nice thing about it is that Hazlitt recognizes that the serious is distinct not just from the ludicrous, but from the tragic.
Now, myself, as a loser, I have found that every oracle in my life eventually pokes a big stick up my ass except for the ludicrous – and so I have followed it like my own personal destiny, and here I now sit, a crow in all but feathers, cawing over the corpse of the American culture in its Bushian phase, where painful reflection mixes inextricably with the clownish. That culture, as I grew up with it, I realize dimly, is an aspect of war culture, which has its zones and manners.
But on to the subject of this post, which is existential freedom, liberalism, and the menu.
…
A few days ago, LI was visiting our local video store when the clerks put on a movie that stands out, in our mind, for loathsomeness. Not the loathsomeness of catsup flecked fx, nor that of porno raunch, but a more dreadful, soul destroying loathsomeness, a glimpse into the dark abysm of the middle class soul. I am speaking, of course, of When Sally Met Harry. Or is it When Harry Met Sally? In any case, I was visiting just as Meg Ryan was seated with -- oh, what’s his name, the guy who plays Harry, that sadsack comic – and she was ordering something at a restaurant. And it flashed on my senses that this scene was obviously referencing the scene in Five Easy Pieces when Jack Nicholson tried to order breakfast at a diner. Now, while FEP isn’t my favorite piece of cinema, the anger in Nicholson has a didactic quality that LI likes – for here, in a nutshell, is the problem with social contract liberalism, with its notion that freedom is about preferences. The solution to that anger, in FEP, for this form of liberalism, is expanding the preferences – hence, the same scene in WHMS, in which we get glimpses of what the hippie revolution wrought in lifestyle America – a place where a decent latte is never too far away. Or something like that.
Now LI has long contended that freedom isn’t defined by preferences – that, in fact, the idea of identifying freedom in that technical, economic sense with political freedom per se is exactly where the libertarian goes wrong. There is a rather beautiful phrase is G. Baum’s book on Karl Polanyi: “This, then, is Polanyi’s orginal argument: the longing of the bourgeois conscience transcends the possibilities of bourgeois society. What this conscience calls for is the creation of a transparent society that allows its members to estimate the effects of what they are doing and thus assume ethical responsibility for their actions.”
I am not sure about the transparency, but I am sure about the longing and the anger when that longing is marginalized, or translated into mere preference mongering.
Now, one thing about both movies is that the scenes are centered around the interaction between a text and social action – the text being the menu. I have looked around, but in vain, for a history of menus. Menus are considered to be so obvious that the fact that menus weren’t present in places where people came to eat – inns, basically – until the start of restauranting in the late 18th century doesn’t really register as a historically interesting event. To see how people would enter an inn and order food or drink, look, for instance, at Don Quixote. Or the 18th century picaresque. No character brandishes a menu in these texts. In fact, the same thing is true in Dickens -- characters are continually being brought chops and beer, but you don't see the characters asking, well, what type of beer do you have? Although by this time, actually, that sentence was starting to make sense.
This is why my next post will be about Grimod de la Reyniere, the man who wrote the first popular restaurant guide, the Almanach des gourmands. Overshadowed by Brillat-Savarin, Grimod de la Reyniere is now experiencing a little renaissance of interest by pop culture scholars.
Or at least that is what I think the next post will be about.
Monday, August 21, 2006
my buds and companeros, the hummers
LI hopes readers haven’t found our last two posts intolerably dull. The thing is, the graphix novel we are working on does some projecting into the future. We have been dreaming of a period of great thirst, as the extent of glacial melting starts truly drying up drinking water sources, some time after 2040. Our little dystopian vision is of a Rwanda like situation in which the generation that drove cars (called "the Hummers") is systematically slaughtered by their offspring. How that fits into the plot remains to be seen. So, in any case, we are playing around with a vocabulary and vision. Sorry for the longeurs.
…
Ah, the symbols of the great glacier melt. Last week, the British papers had an interesting story about the reappearance of the body of a climber lost on Mount Blanc in 1989:
From the Daily Telegraph:
“THE mummified remains of a British mountaineer who vanished 17 years ago have been found in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps.
Michael Seavers, 31, was one of three British climbers who disappeared in a snowstorm with a German companion.
The bodies of William Ogburn, 32, and Leslie Lawrence, 29, were found within six months of the tragedy.
But Mr Seavers's body and that of his German companion Dirk Ziolkowske, 24, have not been found until now.
A guide said yesterday that he had seen their remains last Friday and mountain rescue teams recovered them from an altitude of 10,500ft, close to the Toula glacier on the Italian side of Mt Blanc.”
The alps are the scene of some geologically interesting stuff at the moment. They are actually growing again. As the weight of the alpine glaciers diminishes, the mountains grow inches taller. And how much is that weight going to diminish?
This is from Biotech week:
“Scientists consider glaciers to be among the best natural indicators of climate change and, therefore, monitor them closely. Rapidly shrinking glacier areas, spectacular tongue retreats, and increasing mass losses are clear signs of the atmospheric warming observed in the Alps during the last 150 years.
Michael Zemp and colleagues in the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich note that in the 1970s, about 5,150 Alpine glaciers covered a total area of 2,909 square kilometers [1,123 square miles]. This represented a loss of about 35% of glacial area from 1850 to that time. Accelerated loss of ice cover since then has resulted in a total loss of 50% of the 1850 area, culminating in a volume loss of 5 to 10% of the remaining ice during the extraordinary warm year of 2003.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an increase in summer air temperature of one to five degrees Celsius [two to nine degrees Fahrenheit] and a precipitation change between minus-20% and plus-30% by the end of the 21st century is a plausible scenario. The University of Zurich researchers say that for each one degree Celsius [two degrees Fahrenheit] increase in mean summer temperature, precipitation would have to increase by 25% to offset the glacial loss.”
There is a lake in the center of Austin. It wasn’t there one hundred years ago. It might well not be there a hundred years from now. But nobody is going to experience that span. Rather, our experiences are in the permanent. The way you make it home from work is permanent. The work you do is permanent. Sun rises permanently. Sun sets permanently. What is now is, of course, permanent. What is now always was and always will be.
Only fanatics – the kind of people who never say amen - could think otherwise.
…
Ah, the symbols of the great glacier melt. Last week, the British papers had an interesting story about the reappearance of the body of a climber lost on Mount Blanc in 1989:
From the Daily Telegraph:
“THE mummified remains of a British mountaineer who vanished 17 years ago have been found in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps.
Michael Seavers, 31, was one of three British climbers who disappeared in a snowstorm with a German companion.
The bodies of William Ogburn, 32, and Leslie Lawrence, 29, were found within six months of the tragedy.
But Mr Seavers's body and that of his German companion Dirk Ziolkowske, 24, have not been found until now.
A guide said yesterday that he had seen their remains last Friday and mountain rescue teams recovered them from an altitude of 10,500ft, close to the Toula glacier on the Italian side of Mt Blanc.”
The alps are the scene of some geologically interesting stuff at the moment. They are actually growing again. As the weight of the alpine glaciers diminishes, the mountains grow inches taller. And how much is that weight going to diminish?
This is from Biotech week:
“Scientists consider glaciers to be among the best natural indicators of climate change and, therefore, monitor them closely. Rapidly shrinking glacier areas, spectacular tongue retreats, and increasing mass losses are clear signs of the atmospheric warming observed in the Alps during the last 150 years.
Michael Zemp and colleagues in the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich note that in the 1970s, about 5,150 Alpine glaciers covered a total area of 2,909 square kilometers [1,123 square miles]. This represented a loss of about 35% of glacial area from 1850 to that time. Accelerated loss of ice cover since then has resulted in a total loss of 50% of the 1850 area, culminating in a volume loss of 5 to 10% of the remaining ice during the extraordinary warm year of 2003.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an increase in summer air temperature of one to five degrees Celsius [two to nine degrees Fahrenheit] and a precipitation change between minus-20% and plus-30% by the end of the 21st century is a plausible scenario. The University of Zurich researchers say that for each one degree Celsius [two degrees Fahrenheit] increase in mean summer temperature, precipitation would have to increase by 25% to offset the glacial loss.”
There is a lake in the center of Austin. It wasn’t there one hundred years ago. It might well not be there a hundred years from now. But nobody is going to experience that span. Rather, our experiences are in the permanent. The way you make it home from work is permanent. The work you do is permanent. Sun rises permanently. Sun sets permanently. What is now is, of course, permanent. What is now always was and always will be.
Only fanatics – the kind of people who never say amen - could think otherwise.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
cosmo-polemos
“Few polls were take to measure the air force’s success in public relations, but by June 1945 a Fortune survey indicated progress. As Fortune put it, “The people are sold on peace through air power.” On more subjective grounds, the air force also had reason for optimism as 1945 appraoched because doubts ere arising within the military establishment about public support for a large peacetime ground army. Arnold believed that Americans would support in its place a powerful air foce making few demands on manpower and responding to public anxieties, nourished by the air force itself, about defending against future Pearl Harbors.” The Rise of American Air Power: the creation of Armageddon by Michael Sherry
He sew his eyes shut
Because he is afraid to see – Nine Inch Nails
The conclusion I draw from my last post is nothing so facile as that all wars are one war. That is an analytic dead end. But I’d suggest that the set of wars that have taken place between 1939 and, say, the beginning of the Heat Death era, around 2040, form a distinct, unified historical epoch. And that war, here, has to include events that are usually segregated from it – the mass transformation of infrastructure that appeared all across the globe (dams, irrigation systems, road systems, the dispersal of urban areas into subways), the great scientific and technological research systems, the psychology-education complex – etc.
We are citizens of the wars. War men and women, war races. Human product among low use populations – this should be the caption for much of our history at the moment. We have devised elaborate plots behind which the parts actually fit together, the hidden patterns come alive, and we love them. We are entertained infinitely by our own destruction. And such has been the creation of cosmo-polemos.
This is why I find articles like Ralph’s fascinating. It begins with those events that have been rather forgotten relative to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“On the night of 9 March 1945, 325 B-29 ‘Superfortresses’, based in the Marianas and under the command of Major General Curtis E. LeMay, dropped 1665 tons of bombs, all of which were incendiaries,on the heart of residential Tokyo. The bombs generated a ferocious, unstoppable firestorm that consumed 15.8 square miles of the city and killed a roughly estimated 100 000 of its citizens. The targeted residential zone bordered a large manufacturing sector of the city: consequently 22 numbered industrial targets were destroyed and struck from the target list the next morning. By official Japanese estimates, 267 171 buildings were levelled (one-quarter of the city), and 1 008 005 Japanese were left homeless.2 Viewed as a massive success by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), the Tokyo raid kicked off a firebombing campaign. that laid waste to more than 60 of Japan’s largest cities and killed hundreds of thousands of its civilians by the end of the Second World War.”
Historians of the war confront a puzzle, here. U.S. air policy, laid out in the 1930s, was very clear about what the Brits called ‘area bombing.’ Roosevelt, in a speech in 1939, said:
“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”
Roosevelt wasn’t just engaging in rhetoric. The U.S. air power policy developed in the thirties specifically aimed at destroying the industrial fabric of enemy power. In the air war over Germany, the U.S. tried, at least, to adhere to this policy. When, in 1945, Dresden was destroyed by an Anglo-American fleet of bombers, a British officer, C.M. Grierson, suggested at a press conference that the purpose was to kill civilians, it disturbed the American command. In fact, the destruction of German cities, Operation Clarion, was discussed and disputed with these issues in mind:
“Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, former commander of the 8th Air Force in Germany, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz (who was then co-ordinating Clarion) and asked him not to carry out the attack: ‘We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber against the man in the street.’12 Spaatz went ahead with Clarion anyway, but remained, according to one general’s diary, ‘determined that the American Air Forces will not end this war with a reputation for indiscriminate bombing’.”
Given this dialogue in the European theater, why was the Pacific theater so different?
Ralph’s structured answer gives weight to the logical development, out of precision bombing, of a terror bombing policy. But in practice, terror bombing was enacted due to the interplay between Curtis LeMay and General ‘Hap’ Hapgood Arnold. It was not planned, but emerged as an improvisation from a context in which it was dialectically prefigured -- by which I simply mean that the boundaries that defined the industrial attrition policy were always subject to change, and were never anchored to any logical constant. Both LeMay and Hapgood knew that they were facing a potential crisis: peace. Hapgood was a strong advocate of strengthening the Air Force and keeping it independent from the army. Independence meant resources.
The Committee assessing the air war over Japan, as Ralph describes it, went from advocating the destruction of industry according to the thirties strategic framework to consideration of the “intriguing idea,” as one General put it, of promoting “complete chaos” in six cities by killing “584,000 people.” But this was put in terms of its economic effects – for killing people as people did make one feel a bit of a heel. Rather, the 584,000 would be workers. Human product. Subtract workers and you effect the economy.
These thoughts, then, were in the Air Force mind. And there were threats closing in:
“The pressure to do ever more for the purpose of air force independence manifested itself in many ways. First to feel it were those within the B-29 programme. As mentioned above, Arnold had risked his career for this US$3 billion endeavour. It was the B-29 that could grant air force independence, because it was the weapon that could deliver fire-power in ways the army and navy could not. But Arnold constantly risked losing his B-29s to the insatiable needs of the army and navy. In early 1944 Arnold specifically designed the 20th Air Force (which would contain the XX and XXI Bomber Commands) to be as far removed from other branches of the military as possible. In a novel fashion, the 20th reported not to the army, but directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arnold, a member of the JCS, was both commanding general of the 20th as well as executive agent for the JCS in the Pentagon.36 The JCS created the broad strategic framework, but within that framework Arnold
could do essentially whatever he wanted.37
“Command freedom did not guarantee wartime independence, however. Arnold was very candid in his memoirs about his fears that the Air Forces would be subordinated in the Pacific theatre. He recalled that Admiral King, the highly effective commander of the US Fleet, said, ‘Trouble with all this rearrangement and reorganization is your Air Force, Hap. If you would take your Air Force and bring it over to the Navy, then the Navy … would be the largest and most powerful force in the world.’38 Arnold certainly had no desire to follow this plan, and was instead determined to keep his 20th as far from naval operations as possible. But even if Arnold maintained an independent air arm, he still would have to prove he was achieving results with his B-29s in order to keep them.”
Keeping what you got – this is the essence of great drama. Arnold, like the Golem in Lord of the Rings, wanted his precious. And the navy was threatening to take his precious away. And what stood between him and his loss? A buncha Japanese civilians.
These rivalries have become a thing of comedy. However, the 584,000 Japanese, in addition to contributing to the war effort, were notoriously humorless, which meant that, as they were dying, they wouldn’t be dying of laughter. Which is funny, since laughter is the best medicine.
So, 1944 was coming to a close, and the precision bombing campaign, which Arnold had entrusted to the man who developed the precision bombing strategy, Hansell, had been pounding Japan. Precision bombing depended on the relatively primitive guiding technology the air force had, and on weather. The publicity was bad about the bombing of the steel factories that were targeted according to the earlier protocol, since they stubbornly withstood bombardment. In the meantime, over in China, Curtis LeMay was doing wonders. Somehow, his B-29s were getting to their targets in Japan at twice the rate of Hansell’s.
So it all started to click. If precision bombing depended on such complexities, perhaps one could considering widening the cone of destruction. Hansell was asked to make a whole incendiary strike on Nagoya. The purpose was specifically to kill civilians. Hansell answered back:
“I have with great difficulty implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of selected primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods … We are just
beginning to get results … I am concerned that a change to area bombing of the cities will undermine the progress we have made.”
Well, this resistance was no good.
“Arnold did not want to hear about any more problems from Hansell; he was impatient, and wanted reports of big results. As he said himself, the ‘best evidence of how you are getting along is the pictures of the destruction that you have accomplished against your primary targets’.53 Hansell was not providing these pictures. Shortly after Hansell’s interview, Arnold made the decision to relieve Hansell and replace him with LeMay. Norstad delivered the news to Hansell in person on 6 January. Again, Hansell was shocked, but now also extremely disappointed. General Arnold wrote to him soon after, explaining his reasoning for the change in command: ‘The job from now on is no longer planning and pioneering. It has become one of operating. LeMay … should be our best qualified operator.’54 This small statement is most revealing. Arnold did not want a planner in charge of his B-29s: he needed someone who would just get things done; again, he wanted results – and fast.”
One often reads about how the Truman White House had its eye on the Soviets during the last phase of the war against Japan. Or that the main point, vide Paul Fussell, was to save American lives. But we should also remember how many eyes were turned to Boeing. And how easily we can go from precision bombing to ‘area bombing.’ In fact, it seems to be the history of the use of American air power after WWII.
He sew his eyes shut
Because he is afraid to see – Nine Inch Nails
The conclusion I draw from my last post is nothing so facile as that all wars are one war. That is an analytic dead end. But I’d suggest that the set of wars that have taken place between 1939 and, say, the beginning of the Heat Death era, around 2040, form a distinct, unified historical epoch. And that war, here, has to include events that are usually segregated from it – the mass transformation of infrastructure that appeared all across the globe (dams, irrigation systems, road systems, the dispersal of urban areas into subways), the great scientific and technological research systems, the psychology-education complex – etc.
We are citizens of the wars. War men and women, war races. Human product among low use populations – this should be the caption for much of our history at the moment. We have devised elaborate plots behind which the parts actually fit together, the hidden patterns come alive, and we love them. We are entertained infinitely by our own destruction. And such has been the creation of cosmo-polemos.
This is why I find articles like Ralph’s fascinating. It begins with those events that have been rather forgotten relative to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“On the night of 9 March 1945, 325 B-29 ‘Superfortresses’, based in the Marianas and under the command of Major General Curtis E. LeMay, dropped 1665 tons of bombs, all of which were incendiaries,on the heart of residential Tokyo. The bombs generated a ferocious, unstoppable firestorm that consumed 15.8 square miles of the city and killed a roughly estimated 100 000 of its citizens. The targeted residential zone bordered a large manufacturing sector of the city: consequently 22 numbered industrial targets were destroyed and struck from the target list the next morning. By official Japanese estimates, 267 171 buildings were levelled (one-quarter of the city), and 1 008 005 Japanese were left homeless.2 Viewed as a massive success by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), the Tokyo raid kicked off a firebombing campaign. that laid waste to more than 60 of Japan’s largest cities and killed hundreds of thousands of its civilians by the end of the Second World War.”
Historians of the war confront a puzzle, here. U.S. air policy, laid out in the 1930s, was very clear about what the Brits called ‘area bombing.’ Roosevelt, in a speech in 1939, said:
“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”
Roosevelt wasn’t just engaging in rhetoric. The U.S. air power policy developed in the thirties specifically aimed at destroying the industrial fabric of enemy power. In the air war over Germany, the U.S. tried, at least, to adhere to this policy. When, in 1945, Dresden was destroyed by an Anglo-American fleet of bombers, a British officer, C.M. Grierson, suggested at a press conference that the purpose was to kill civilians, it disturbed the American command. In fact, the destruction of German cities, Operation Clarion, was discussed and disputed with these issues in mind:
“Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, former commander of the 8th Air Force in Germany, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz (who was then co-ordinating Clarion) and asked him not to carry out the attack: ‘We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber against the man in the street.’12 Spaatz went ahead with Clarion anyway, but remained, according to one general’s diary, ‘determined that the American Air Forces will not end this war with a reputation for indiscriminate bombing’.”
Given this dialogue in the European theater, why was the Pacific theater so different?
Ralph’s structured answer gives weight to the logical development, out of precision bombing, of a terror bombing policy. But in practice, terror bombing was enacted due to the interplay between Curtis LeMay and General ‘Hap’ Hapgood Arnold. It was not planned, but emerged as an improvisation from a context in which it was dialectically prefigured -- by which I simply mean that the boundaries that defined the industrial attrition policy were always subject to change, and were never anchored to any logical constant. Both LeMay and Hapgood knew that they were facing a potential crisis: peace. Hapgood was a strong advocate of strengthening the Air Force and keeping it independent from the army. Independence meant resources.
The Committee assessing the air war over Japan, as Ralph describes it, went from advocating the destruction of industry according to the thirties strategic framework to consideration of the “intriguing idea,” as one General put it, of promoting “complete chaos” in six cities by killing “584,000 people.” But this was put in terms of its economic effects – for killing people as people did make one feel a bit of a heel. Rather, the 584,000 would be workers. Human product. Subtract workers and you effect the economy.
These thoughts, then, were in the Air Force mind. And there were threats closing in:
“The pressure to do ever more for the purpose of air force independence manifested itself in many ways. First to feel it were those within the B-29 programme. As mentioned above, Arnold had risked his career for this US$3 billion endeavour. It was the B-29 that could grant air force independence, because it was the weapon that could deliver fire-power in ways the army and navy could not. But Arnold constantly risked losing his B-29s to the insatiable needs of the army and navy. In early 1944 Arnold specifically designed the 20th Air Force (which would contain the XX and XXI Bomber Commands) to be as far removed from other branches of the military as possible. In a novel fashion, the 20th reported not to the army, but directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arnold, a member of the JCS, was both commanding general of the 20th as well as executive agent for the JCS in the Pentagon.36 The JCS created the broad strategic framework, but within that framework Arnold
could do essentially whatever he wanted.37
“Command freedom did not guarantee wartime independence, however. Arnold was very candid in his memoirs about his fears that the Air Forces would be subordinated in the Pacific theatre. He recalled that Admiral King, the highly effective commander of the US Fleet, said, ‘Trouble with all this rearrangement and reorganization is your Air Force, Hap. If you would take your Air Force and bring it over to the Navy, then the Navy … would be the largest and most powerful force in the world.’38 Arnold certainly had no desire to follow this plan, and was instead determined to keep his 20th as far from naval operations as possible. But even if Arnold maintained an independent air arm, he still would have to prove he was achieving results with his B-29s in order to keep them.”
Keeping what you got – this is the essence of great drama. Arnold, like the Golem in Lord of the Rings, wanted his precious. And the navy was threatening to take his precious away. And what stood between him and his loss? A buncha Japanese civilians.
These rivalries have become a thing of comedy. However, the 584,000 Japanese, in addition to contributing to the war effort, were notoriously humorless, which meant that, as they were dying, they wouldn’t be dying of laughter. Which is funny, since laughter is the best medicine.
So, 1944 was coming to a close, and the precision bombing campaign, which Arnold had entrusted to the man who developed the precision bombing strategy, Hansell, had been pounding Japan. Precision bombing depended on the relatively primitive guiding technology the air force had, and on weather. The publicity was bad about the bombing of the steel factories that were targeted according to the earlier protocol, since they stubbornly withstood bombardment. In the meantime, over in China, Curtis LeMay was doing wonders. Somehow, his B-29s were getting to their targets in Japan at twice the rate of Hansell’s.
So it all started to click. If precision bombing depended on such complexities, perhaps one could considering widening the cone of destruction. Hansell was asked to make a whole incendiary strike on Nagoya. The purpose was specifically to kill civilians. Hansell answered back:
“I have with great difficulty implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of selected primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods … We are just
beginning to get results … I am concerned that a change to area bombing of the cities will undermine the progress we have made.”
Well, this resistance was no good.
“Arnold did not want to hear about any more problems from Hansell; he was impatient, and wanted reports of big results. As he said himself, the ‘best evidence of how you are getting along is the pictures of the destruction that you have accomplished against your primary targets’.53 Hansell was not providing these pictures. Shortly after Hansell’s interview, Arnold made the decision to relieve Hansell and replace him with LeMay. Norstad delivered the news to Hansell in person on 6 January. Again, Hansell was shocked, but now also extremely disappointed. General Arnold wrote to him soon after, explaining his reasoning for the change in command: ‘The job from now on is no longer planning and pioneering. It has become one of operating. LeMay … should be our best qualified operator.’54 This small statement is most revealing. Arnold did not want a planner in charge of his B-29s: he needed someone who would just get things done; again, he wanted results – and fast.”
One often reads about how the Truman White House had its eye on the Soviets during the last phase of the war against Japan. Or that the main point, vide Paul Fussell, was to save American lives. But we should also remember how many eyes were turned to Boeing. And how easily we can go from precision bombing to ‘area bombing.’ In fact, it seems to be the history of the use of American air power after WWII.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
war culture in the heraclitean framework
After it became apparent that the Israeli strategy of using air power to make Lebanon Hezbollah-rein had failed, a curious paen to air power appeared in the Washington Post, filed by their military analyst, William Arkin.
“If you've been reading my commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah war here, you know that I am a fan of airpower. To me, modern precision airpower is the epitome of discriminate warfare, which is to say, that it uniquely allows armed forces to discriminate between combatants and civilians. That is, short of two armies consenting to deploy to an unpopulated battlefield -- sort of like what Saddam Hussein did in 1990 after his invasion of Kuwait when he dug his army into the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert.
I've heard the howls of protest -- Dresden, Tokyo, London -- before, but again, to reiterate, modern airpower, with its new precision weapons, allows an unprecedented degree of discrimination.”
There are many interests that converge in the War Culture, and one of the most difficult tasks for the analyst is to separate them and sort them by their various ‘degrees of discrimination’. And if this task wasn’t difficult in itself, there is a philosophical difficulty that is rarely mentioned, at least by historians, foreign policy think tankers, and political philosophers. The difficulty goes back to the standard assumption that war is derivative from the State. First we have the state, then we have the wars between states, just as first we have teams, then we have baseball. However, that assumption is rarely argued for. In LI’s opinion, you could just as well have war first – ontologically and historically, Hobbes’ war of all against all – and then the state. In this view, states derive from war, rather than the other way around. Just as Mallarme thought that everything strives to be written in a book, every war, striving to be part of the one war, leaves in its path fragments of itself. Those fragments are states. But war is the shaper. The more powerful the state, the more the culture becomes a war culture.
The philosophical warrant for this goes back to Heraclitus. The Heraclitean view is expressed in a cluster of fragments recently re-translated, along with the whole corpus of Heraclitus’ work, by Charles Kahn in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Fragment 51 reads: “Homer was wrong when he said “Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!” For there would be no attunement without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.” 52 reads: “One must realize that war is shared, and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (are are ordained?) in accordance with conflict. And 53, the most famous of the fragments on war, reads: War is the father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”
Kahn’s commentary on these fragments is interesting. According to him, the criticism of Homer is that he, like most men, cannot see how, behind appearance, there is a hidden fitting together of all things. According to Kahn, in these fragments, Heraclitus formulates four responses to the question: ‘What is it that most men do not comprhend.’
1. “One must realize that War is common (xynos, shared)’. “…in the place of the familiar thought that the fortunes of war are shared by both sides and that the victor today may be vanquished tomorrow, Heraclitus takes xynos, ‘common’ in his own sense of ‘universal’, ‘all-pervading’, ‘unifying’, and thus gives the words of the poets a deeper meaning they themselves did not comprehend. The symmetrical confrontation of the two sides in battle now becomes a figura for the shifting but reciprocal balance between opposites in human life in the natural world…”
2. “Conflict is Justice”. “Vlastos is clrearly right to insist that Heraclitus’ conception of cosmic justice goes beyond that of Anaximander [one of whose phrases is echoed in Heraclitus’ phrase], since he construes dike not merely as compensation for crime or excess but as a total pattern that includes both punishment and crime itself as necessary ingredients of the world order.
3. ‘All things come to pass in accordance with conflict.’ Kahn points out that this echoes the notion of all things coming to pass in logos. Come to pass can also be understood as birth – which then gives us the strange reversal of the 53rd fragment, since birth here comes from the father, not the mother.
4. “And all things are ordained by conflict.” Kahn thinks that the word for ordained is corrupt. But if it is ordained, he sees the ordination as that proper to an oracle.
If one has the heraclitean framework in mind, the idea that war solely serves the interests of states gives place to the question of what interests are being served by war. And this is a useful thing, insofar as states are not homogenous units. Although we are familiar with trans-national corporations, we still seem to grope when trying to understand transnational interests, which are usually attributed to the hegemonic ambition of a given state. And then, too, there is the definition of wars. We like to count them as distinct things, having beginnings and endings. However, we all know that wars might well have continuities disguised by the ceasefires or intervals of peace that supposedly define them into separate wars, and sometimes we acknowledge this by talking of world wars, or of the sixty or hundred years war.
I hope this isn’t a too utterly philosophical introduction to the topic I am going to discuss in the next post – William W. Ralph’s essay, in the latest issue of War in History, entitled: “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” which argues a thesis that might well explain the motivation for Arkin’s column – or at least one abiding, institutional motivation within the American War Culture.
“If you've been reading my commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah war here, you know that I am a fan of airpower. To me, modern precision airpower is the epitome of discriminate warfare, which is to say, that it uniquely allows armed forces to discriminate between combatants and civilians. That is, short of two armies consenting to deploy to an unpopulated battlefield -- sort of like what Saddam Hussein did in 1990 after his invasion of Kuwait when he dug his army into the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert.
I've heard the howls of protest -- Dresden, Tokyo, London -- before, but again, to reiterate, modern airpower, with its new precision weapons, allows an unprecedented degree of discrimination.”
There are many interests that converge in the War Culture, and one of the most difficult tasks for the analyst is to separate them and sort them by their various ‘degrees of discrimination’. And if this task wasn’t difficult in itself, there is a philosophical difficulty that is rarely mentioned, at least by historians, foreign policy think tankers, and political philosophers. The difficulty goes back to the standard assumption that war is derivative from the State. First we have the state, then we have the wars between states, just as first we have teams, then we have baseball. However, that assumption is rarely argued for. In LI’s opinion, you could just as well have war first – ontologically and historically, Hobbes’ war of all against all – and then the state. In this view, states derive from war, rather than the other way around. Just as Mallarme thought that everything strives to be written in a book, every war, striving to be part of the one war, leaves in its path fragments of itself. Those fragments are states. But war is the shaper. The more powerful the state, the more the culture becomes a war culture.
The philosophical warrant for this goes back to Heraclitus. The Heraclitean view is expressed in a cluster of fragments recently re-translated, along with the whole corpus of Heraclitus’ work, by Charles Kahn in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Fragment 51 reads: “Homer was wrong when he said “Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!” For there would be no attunement without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.” 52 reads: “One must realize that war is shared, and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (are are ordained?) in accordance with conflict. And 53, the most famous of the fragments on war, reads: War is the father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”
Kahn’s commentary on these fragments is interesting. According to him, the criticism of Homer is that he, like most men, cannot see how, behind appearance, there is a hidden fitting together of all things. According to Kahn, in these fragments, Heraclitus formulates four responses to the question: ‘What is it that most men do not comprhend.’
1. “One must realize that War is common (xynos, shared)’. “…in the place of the familiar thought that the fortunes of war are shared by both sides and that the victor today may be vanquished tomorrow, Heraclitus takes xynos, ‘common’ in his own sense of ‘universal’, ‘all-pervading’, ‘unifying’, and thus gives the words of the poets a deeper meaning they themselves did not comprehend. The symmetrical confrontation of the two sides in battle now becomes a figura for the shifting but reciprocal balance between opposites in human life in the natural world…”
2. “Conflict is Justice”. “Vlastos is clrearly right to insist that Heraclitus’ conception of cosmic justice goes beyond that of Anaximander [one of whose phrases is echoed in Heraclitus’ phrase], since he construes dike not merely as compensation for crime or excess but as a total pattern that includes both punishment and crime itself as necessary ingredients of the world order.
3. ‘All things come to pass in accordance with conflict.’ Kahn points out that this echoes the notion of all things coming to pass in logos. Come to pass can also be understood as birth – which then gives us the strange reversal of the 53rd fragment, since birth here comes from the father, not the mother.
4. “And all things are ordained by conflict.” Kahn thinks that the word for ordained is corrupt. But if it is ordained, he sees the ordination as that proper to an oracle.
If one has the heraclitean framework in mind, the idea that war solely serves the interests of states gives place to the question of what interests are being served by war. And this is a useful thing, insofar as states are not homogenous units. Although we are familiar with trans-national corporations, we still seem to grope when trying to understand transnational interests, which are usually attributed to the hegemonic ambition of a given state. And then, too, there is the definition of wars. We like to count them as distinct things, having beginnings and endings. However, we all know that wars might well have continuities disguised by the ceasefires or intervals of peace that supposedly define them into separate wars, and sometimes we acknowledge this by talking of world wars, or of the sixty or hundred years war.
I hope this isn’t a too utterly philosophical introduction to the topic I am going to discuss in the next post – William W. Ralph’s essay, in the latest issue of War in History, entitled: “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” which argues a thesis that might well explain the motivation for Arkin’s column – or at least one abiding, institutional motivation within the American War Culture.
Friday, August 18, 2006
rwg writing services
Alas, the editing jobs aren't pouring in this summer. We did get a nice note from a client who just graduated from {blank} university, the other day, thanking us for our work on his papers.
So, LI readers, drivebys, friends, Romans and Countrymen - help us out. Tell people about our writing service. The links are on the sidebar (or, for mysterious reasons, on the bottom of the page for those of you looking at this via IE 6).
Remember: a full blogger is a happy blogger.
So, LI readers, drivebys, friends, Romans and Countrymen - help us out. Tell people about our writing service. The links are on the sidebar (or, for mysterious reasons, on the bottom of the page for those of you looking at this via IE 6).
Remember: a full blogger is a happy blogger.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
following this summer's murder story
There are some murders we follow. There are some murders we don’t.
During the infinite newscycle of OJ-iana, the only thing that really impressed us was the slo mo car chase. Oh, and OJ’s houseguest, Kato Kaelin. Actually, Kato impressed us a lot – what a job! My own parents evidently abused me: they never once mentioned the career opportunity of being a houseguest to the stars. If LI had known about this as a tyke, forget the dreams of wealth, or the teenage idea of writing and forging, in the smithy of my soul, the consciousness of my race – fuck that. I would have cultivated better hair, better connections, and practiced saying things in the mirror like, “My Cher,” (or Billy Bob or Telly or Chevy or whoever), this is a big place you got here! Roomy is no word for it. You must get lonely here sometimes, eh?” But no, as aforesaid, my folks abused me by hiding the facts, which I can only excuse them for partly by the fact that we were hicks living in Dekalb County, Georgia, where houseguests were usually your uncle or aunt.
But the murder of Jon Benet was much more interesting, in that sick way that certain murders unzip the underlife. Unfortunately, that is only probed by the tabloids. That is, by reporters and celebrity tv persona who have a fair share of the necessary voyeurism to gawp at the doings behind the drapes but no real curiosity about the meat and beat of people – about their pulsing existences. This is why tabloids are frustrating – they strip the two dimensional of its clothing, but its like the Rape of the Sabine Women being reenacted with mannequins. There is no there there not because there is no there there, but because the there has been condensed, evaporated, and replaced with there-substitute.. Plus, of course, the compass points are all the assumption that the only perspective is that of straight morality, and zero question about why, if the straight morality is such a good thing, we find it so utterly, utterly boring, and why it has created a system that is, in so many ways, detestable. Now, LI is not necessarily against boredom – as so many of our long posts attest! – but we do think that it is motivated, and hence subject to the endless novelist’s project.
Since we are neck deep, at the moment, in Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, we are just in the right spirit for the news about Jon Benet’s supposed killer. I should emphasize supposed, since a confession does not equal case solved. The confession is, to say the least, confused, and the pre-made articles pouring out from straight news outlets about how the tabloids injured the poor parents and distorted the facts – amazing how the press, resistant to any criticism about its three year obeisance to Bush and the rush to war, is always willing to criticize the tabloids for the rush to judgment on any given topic - aren’t convincing to me, yet. We will see.
During the infinite newscycle of OJ-iana, the only thing that really impressed us was the slo mo car chase. Oh, and OJ’s houseguest, Kato Kaelin. Actually, Kato impressed us a lot – what a job! My own parents evidently abused me: they never once mentioned the career opportunity of being a houseguest to the stars. If LI had known about this as a tyke, forget the dreams of wealth, or the teenage idea of writing and forging, in the smithy of my soul, the consciousness of my race – fuck that. I would have cultivated better hair, better connections, and practiced saying things in the mirror like, “My Cher,” (or Billy Bob or Telly or Chevy or whoever), this is a big place you got here! Roomy is no word for it. You must get lonely here sometimes, eh?” But no, as aforesaid, my folks abused me by hiding the facts, which I can only excuse them for partly by the fact that we were hicks living in Dekalb County, Georgia, where houseguests were usually your uncle or aunt.
But the murder of Jon Benet was much more interesting, in that sick way that certain murders unzip the underlife. Unfortunately, that is only probed by the tabloids. That is, by reporters and celebrity tv persona who have a fair share of the necessary voyeurism to gawp at the doings behind the drapes but no real curiosity about the meat and beat of people – about their pulsing existences. This is why tabloids are frustrating – they strip the two dimensional of its clothing, but its like the Rape of the Sabine Women being reenacted with mannequins. There is no there there not because there is no there there, but because the there has been condensed, evaporated, and replaced with there-substitute.. Plus, of course, the compass points are all the assumption that the only perspective is that of straight morality, and zero question about why, if the straight morality is such a good thing, we find it so utterly, utterly boring, and why it has created a system that is, in so many ways, detestable. Now, LI is not necessarily against boredom – as so many of our long posts attest! – but we do think that it is motivated, and hence subject to the endless novelist’s project.
Since we are neck deep, at the moment, in Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, we are just in the right spirit for the news about Jon Benet’s supposed killer. I should emphasize supposed, since a confession does not equal case solved. The confession is, to say the least, confused, and the pre-made articles pouring out from straight news outlets about how the tabloids injured the poor parents and distorted the facts – amazing how the press, resistant to any criticism about its three year obeisance to Bush and the rush to war, is always willing to criticize the tabloids for the rush to judgment on any given topic - aren’t convincing to me, yet. We will see.
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