“I will be as ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majesty’s royal hand shall set me. -- Bacon
Francis Bacon would have immediately understood the how the CEO of Hewlett Packard, Patricia Dunn, got kicked bumpety bump down the winding staircase up which she had advanced, since he, too,
fell in the aftermath of a rather shady scandal that began when, as attorney general, he vetted an application for a patent of monopoly concerning the manufacture of silver and gold thread for a brother and a cousin of the King’s favorite, Buckingham. Ever since Macaulay made the abuse of this patent (by Giles Mompesson, among others, a splendid example of a 17th century buck, unscrupulous, mean, the model for Massinger’s Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts) the centerpiece of his accusing essay about Bacon, Baconites have rushed to the man’s defense.
And one of these days, LI will dawdle over a post about the whole thing – but – yesterday, when we were looking for scholarly work on flattery (of which there is surprisingly little) we came across a passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which the master says much that we want to say, except with his own vocabulary. Hegel is rather a big, black yawning cavern, and his terms are the stalactites and stalagmites of that cavern – those large, impressive accumulations of what exists, in much simpler, particulate form, in the little drops of water out of which they were formed. You have to be a good spelunker to get anywhere with H. And the Phenomenology is a little like the Anatomy of Melancholy – or, actually, Gravity’s Rainbow – in that it tries to contain everything. So you never know what you will find there.
Hegel’s passage about the transition from ‘heroic service” to “heroic flattery” is found in the sixth chapter, on the self-alienated spirit. To which I will go in my next post. At the moment, my work load has suddenly gotten heavy (thank you, God, Allah, and the million names of Shiva!) So I have to do these things in little bits.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Friday, September 22, 2006
All rising to great place is by a winding star; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man's self, whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed. – Francis Bacon
LI’s dao is sarcasm. First comes the irony, then comes the insight. So, yesterday, we appended a ps to our post on Iran, recommending that the best way to influence policy at the moment is through insinuation and flattery at the Bush court. Thus, strategically, those who want to avoid bombing Iran in this country should try to find ways to make this seem like Bush’s own thought, the logical conclusion of his perfectly brilliant Middle Eastern policy. We meant this satirically – for there is nothing that still awakens the latent Puritan in the American character as flattery, and we have a Puritan in the woodpile as well as anybody else. But as soon as we had written it, a piece of the puzzle, as it were, dropped in place. For if – as we think is true – in shedding the Constitution (the torture debates being only one moment in the long process of creating a monarchical and hateful executive, for which all succeeding generations will, of course, view us, each and every one of us, as some of the vilest creatures who ever crawled upon the face of the earth), the Federal government has become more and more like a court society, then one should expect that the manners of a court society will emerge. And court societies are run far more than historians like to admit on flattery.
Since flattery is so inimical to republican virtue, or to a political culture that is, at least formally, constituted by vote, that it is only viewed from the angle of the moralist. That angle suggests that flattery is a character fault, or two character faults: servility, on the part of the flatterer, and gullibility or vanity, on the part of the flattered. This character analysis has loomed so large that there is not, properly, a functionalist account of flattery. Flattery doesn’t have a chapter in books on political science, or “theology.” However, I suspect that this severely underestimates flattery. As the U.S. becomes your usual bloated and debt ridden empire, with a Fortune 500 of billionaire knaves lording it over a mass of ignorant and credulous peasants with credit cards, Godfearing Snopeses who drink away their Sundays (while newspapers love to report on how 99 percent of Americans love God and Jesus Christ and believe the world was created 10,000 years ago, they report much less on the fact that only about a third of Americans attend church every Sunday), the republican virtue of “choosing” our representatives slowly transforms into something else – the democratization of flattery (to speak in the cant of Thomas Friedman). We are given the pleasant role of flattering those who are going to rule us anyway. As election time draws near, you can pretend to be your favorite tv pundit and “support” a candidate. It is like being near greatness!
There is an excellent text for exploring the way flattery works in court society: Francis Bacon’s letters. Bacon crawled on his stomach of his own free will so much that it was almost like he had snake genes. But he was, also, a genius. And occasionally sparks of that genius irked his betters. The man he dedicated the Essays to, Lord Buckingham, was a favorite of King James and of his son, Charles. And a more arrogant man never walked England’s green and pleasant land. Sometimes, Bacon would get caught between Buckingham and James on some issue that Bacon thought was relievingly foreign to their concerns – something where he could make his own judgment. Rather like some EPA peon thinking he could get away with actually enforcing a law against some heinous pollutant. “Surely,” the peon thinks, “Dick Cheney won’t come down on me if I send this letter to X company asking them, in the politest terms, to please, please refrain from pouring mercury into the drinking water of Los Angeles.” Or some such naïve, twittish gesture. Down comes the iron fist, and out goes our peon, to be re-educated on K street in the wiles of the D.C. court and to return, perhaps under a blessed Democrat, to advance further, by scrapping and corruption, up the ladder until someday he can retire into some businessy sinecure.
More on Bacon, Coke, and the business of gold and silver thread in a further post.
LI’s dao is sarcasm. First comes the irony, then comes the insight. So, yesterday, we appended a ps to our post on Iran, recommending that the best way to influence policy at the moment is through insinuation and flattery at the Bush court. Thus, strategically, those who want to avoid bombing Iran in this country should try to find ways to make this seem like Bush’s own thought, the logical conclusion of his perfectly brilliant Middle Eastern policy. We meant this satirically – for there is nothing that still awakens the latent Puritan in the American character as flattery, and we have a Puritan in the woodpile as well as anybody else. But as soon as we had written it, a piece of the puzzle, as it were, dropped in place. For if – as we think is true – in shedding the Constitution (the torture debates being only one moment in the long process of creating a monarchical and hateful executive, for which all succeeding generations will, of course, view us, each and every one of us, as some of the vilest creatures who ever crawled upon the face of the earth), the Federal government has become more and more like a court society, then one should expect that the manners of a court society will emerge. And court societies are run far more than historians like to admit on flattery.
Since flattery is so inimical to republican virtue, or to a political culture that is, at least formally, constituted by vote, that it is only viewed from the angle of the moralist. That angle suggests that flattery is a character fault, or two character faults: servility, on the part of the flatterer, and gullibility or vanity, on the part of the flattered. This character analysis has loomed so large that there is not, properly, a functionalist account of flattery. Flattery doesn’t have a chapter in books on political science, or “theology.” However, I suspect that this severely underestimates flattery. As the U.S. becomes your usual bloated and debt ridden empire, with a Fortune 500 of billionaire knaves lording it over a mass of ignorant and credulous peasants with credit cards, Godfearing Snopeses who drink away their Sundays (while newspapers love to report on how 99 percent of Americans love God and Jesus Christ and believe the world was created 10,000 years ago, they report much less on the fact that only about a third of Americans attend church every Sunday), the republican virtue of “choosing” our representatives slowly transforms into something else – the democratization of flattery (to speak in the cant of Thomas Friedman). We are given the pleasant role of flattering those who are going to rule us anyway. As election time draws near, you can pretend to be your favorite tv pundit and “support” a candidate. It is like being near greatness!
There is an excellent text for exploring the way flattery works in court society: Francis Bacon’s letters. Bacon crawled on his stomach of his own free will so much that it was almost like he had snake genes. But he was, also, a genius. And occasionally sparks of that genius irked his betters. The man he dedicated the Essays to, Lord Buckingham, was a favorite of King James and of his son, Charles. And a more arrogant man never walked England’s green and pleasant land. Sometimes, Bacon would get caught between Buckingham and James on some issue that Bacon thought was relievingly foreign to their concerns – something where he could make his own judgment. Rather like some EPA peon thinking he could get away with actually enforcing a law against some heinous pollutant. “Surely,” the peon thinks, “Dick Cheney won’t come down on me if I send this letter to X company asking them, in the politest terms, to please, please refrain from pouring mercury into the drinking water of Los Angeles.” Or some such naïve, twittish gesture. Down comes the iron fist, and out goes our peon, to be re-educated on K street in the wiles of the D.C. court and to return, perhaps under a blessed Democrat, to advance further, by scrapping and corruption, up the ladder until someday he can retire into some businessy sinecure.
More on Bacon, Coke, and the business of gold and silver thread in a further post.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
in other news from the idiot front -- William Bennett!
LI is going to get to our pacifism post this weekend, we hope.
In the meantime, readers are urged to peruse, rapidly, holding their noses, the noxious op ed by William Bennett and Rod Paige, urging – as is the wont of big government conservatives – the takeover of local educational standards by a D.C. corps of test-centric whackos. For Bennett, the man responsible for increasing the tempo of drug related crimes in the U.S. in the 80s, this is standard stuff. Just as he had no clue about how markets work, and so, making the black markets more violent in the 80s, mistook that violence as a sign that he should continue a truly brainless drug policy, so, here, he takes the unmistakable signs that the No Child Left Behind act is a farce, turning American schools into test taking factories, and draws… the wrong conclusions:
“But there's a problem. Out of respect for federalism and mistrust of Washington, much of the GOP has expected individual states to set their own academic standards and devise their own tests and accountability systems. That was the approach of the No Child Left Behind Act -- which moved as boldly as it could while still achieving bipartisan support. It sounds good, but it is working badly. A new Fordham Foundation report shows that most states have deployed mediocre standards, and there's increasing evidence that some are playing games with their tests and accountability systems.
Take Tennessee, for example. It reports to its residents that a whopping 87 percent of its fourth-graders are "proficient" in reading. Yet the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the number is more like 27 percent. That's a big difference. Or consider Oklahoma. In one year the number of schools on its "needs improvement" list dropped by 85 percent -- not because they improved or their students learned more but because a bureaucrat in the state education department changed the way Oklahoma calculates "adequate yearly progress" under the federal law.”
So – a law that produces unexpected and terrible results just needs to be tightened even more. Federalized even more. This kind of thinking has crept over conservatism like poison ivy taking over a barren back yard – which is why the right now simply produces sound and fury, going through either an intellectual decline or an actual extinction event. Has the right had an actual idea in the last twenty five years? I mean a real one, not a fake generated to support Exxon Mobile's oil business.
LI has a simple educational cure-all: abolish the test culture. Burn the national tests. Or – since rationality must be mixed with superstition in order to become policy – change standardized testing so a large part of it is collaborative. That’s right. Kids not only should get info from other kids, but the ways of getting info should be taught and tested. The last time it was necessary to equip an individual with a world of information for himself alone as he headed out for the territories was probably around 1800. Most people at the moment do not work in monk like solitude. LI does, of course, so that you don’t have to! The real reason we individuate tests and etc is not to educate children, but to sort them – so that we can give a leg up to the richest, and call it a meritocracy. That is the sole and only function of the test system.
Now, the test superstition, via Bennett and Bush, is an evangelical meme. Just as Evangelicals are attached to the literal words in the good book, they are attached to another image from another book – Robinson Crusoe. They want their kids educated like it was 1799.
It ain’t. Get over it. Overthrow pedagogical idiocy. And wonder about a media that gives a forum to such disasters as Bennett.
Meanwhile, talking about the meritocracy, we meant to link to Michael Wolff's astonishing review of a book "investigating" Harvard in the NYT Book review section Sunday. We loved it. And noticed that it got very little comment around the blogosphere. I suppose that is because Wolff dispatches sacred cows with a little too much casualness. The blogs just don't know how to deal with that kind of thing.
In the meantime, readers are urged to peruse, rapidly, holding their noses, the noxious op ed by William Bennett and Rod Paige, urging – as is the wont of big government conservatives – the takeover of local educational standards by a D.C. corps of test-centric whackos. For Bennett, the man responsible for increasing the tempo of drug related crimes in the U.S. in the 80s, this is standard stuff. Just as he had no clue about how markets work, and so, making the black markets more violent in the 80s, mistook that violence as a sign that he should continue a truly brainless drug policy, so, here, he takes the unmistakable signs that the No Child Left Behind act is a farce, turning American schools into test taking factories, and draws… the wrong conclusions:
“But there's a problem. Out of respect for federalism and mistrust of Washington, much of the GOP has expected individual states to set their own academic standards and devise their own tests and accountability systems. That was the approach of the No Child Left Behind Act -- which moved as boldly as it could while still achieving bipartisan support. It sounds good, but it is working badly. A new Fordham Foundation report shows that most states have deployed mediocre standards, and there's increasing evidence that some are playing games with their tests and accountability systems.
Take Tennessee, for example. It reports to its residents that a whopping 87 percent of its fourth-graders are "proficient" in reading. Yet the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the number is more like 27 percent. That's a big difference. Or consider Oklahoma. In one year the number of schools on its "needs improvement" list dropped by 85 percent -- not because they improved or their students learned more but because a bureaucrat in the state education department changed the way Oklahoma calculates "adequate yearly progress" under the federal law.”
So – a law that produces unexpected and terrible results just needs to be tightened even more. Federalized even more. This kind of thinking has crept over conservatism like poison ivy taking over a barren back yard – which is why the right now simply produces sound and fury, going through either an intellectual decline or an actual extinction event. Has the right had an actual idea in the last twenty five years? I mean a real one, not a fake generated to support Exxon Mobile's oil business.
LI has a simple educational cure-all: abolish the test culture. Burn the national tests. Or – since rationality must be mixed with superstition in order to become policy – change standardized testing so a large part of it is collaborative. That’s right. Kids not only should get info from other kids, but the ways of getting info should be taught and tested. The last time it was necessary to equip an individual with a world of information for himself alone as he headed out for the territories was probably around 1800. Most people at the moment do not work in monk like solitude. LI does, of course, so that you don’t have to! The real reason we individuate tests and etc is not to educate children, but to sort them – so that we can give a leg up to the richest, and call it a meritocracy. That is the sole and only function of the test system.
Now, the test superstition, via Bennett and Bush, is an evangelical meme. Just as Evangelicals are attached to the literal words in the good book, they are attached to another image from another book – Robinson Crusoe. They want their kids educated like it was 1799.
It ain’t. Get over it. Overthrow pedagogical idiocy. And wonder about a media that gives a forum to such disasters as Bennett.
Meanwhile, talking about the meritocracy, we meant to link to Michael Wolff's astonishing review of a book "investigating" Harvard in the NYT Book review section Sunday. We loved it. And noticed that it got very little comment around the blogosphere. I suppose that is because Wolff dispatches sacred cows with a little too much casualness. The blogs just don't know how to deal with that kind of thing.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
tarrying with pacifism
Since LI is dedicated to the destruction of Mars – which is like the mouse that fucked the elephant, n’est-ce pas? – the question arises: Mistah LI, are you a pacifist?
No. LI is not a pacifist. But – borrowing language from the world’s greatest vendor of snakeoil, Mr. G. Hegel his own self – I do want to preserve the resistant and always crushed negation of the pacifistic moment.
The true insanity of Mars is not that Mars is in perpetual war, but that peace and war are secondary to the war structure. Pacifism is premised on the fact – a fact acknowledged by all the sane - that states are the primary political actors in the international order, and that wars are things that they engage in or do not. But this is not what the insane, the underground man, or the mouse that fucks the elephant, sees. No sir. We see that it is war and its structures that govern states. We see Mars, looming all around us. We see that we live in a Republic in which people can calmly claim that, for instance, we have been at war with Iran for the last thirty years, and they could be right! After all, war is no longer declared anymore. It creeps in on little cats feet. It was what everybody who was anybody knew yesterday, when they denied that they knew it and derided those who claimed that they knew it. War, which at one point in the development of liberal democracies were ritualized to the point that they were actually declared, according to some book of rules, never really were declarable things, perhaps – Mars arose from the capitalist turn like Dracula coming out of his coffin when the time was ripe.
Tarrying is the term Zizek scooped out of the preface to Mr. Hegel’s Rotten Bottom Cabinet of Potions, also known as the Phenomenology of Spirit. Now, Zizek, what do we know about Zizek? LI’s far flung correspondent in NYC, Mr. T., knows more about the man than we can even imagine. But I want to quote both the translation from the Preface of the P.d.G quoted at the beginning of Z’s book and a passage in which Zizek uses the phrase in his own way, which turns out to be a passage appropriate to the anxieties of elephant fucking mice and underground men.
Here’s the passage from Hegel:
Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that coverts it into being. – Hegel, Preface (stolen from marginal comments written on a found copy of the libretto of Zauberfloete, obviously).
And here’s Zizek:
‘The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other” part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power: already the Chernobyl catastrophe made ridiculously obsolete such notions as “national sovereignty”, exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our “spontaneous ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the “big Other” (“New Age consciousness”: the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “nonexistence of the Other,” of tarrying with the negative.”
Such banging of the chords! But we hear certain things we like, there. Well, this post is actually about a 2001 article in Peace and Change by Michael Clinton entitled, Coming to Terms with Pacifism: the French case, 1900-1918. But I’ll reserve that for my next post.
No. LI is not a pacifist. But – borrowing language from the world’s greatest vendor of snakeoil, Mr. G. Hegel his own self – I do want to preserve the resistant and always crushed negation of the pacifistic moment.
The true insanity of Mars is not that Mars is in perpetual war, but that peace and war are secondary to the war structure. Pacifism is premised on the fact – a fact acknowledged by all the sane - that states are the primary political actors in the international order, and that wars are things that they engage in or do not. But this is not what the insane, the underground man, or the mouse that fucks the elephant, sees. No sir. We see that it is war and its structures that govern states. We see Mars, looming all around us. We see that we live in a Republic in which people can calmly claim that, for instance, we have been at war with Iran for the last thirty years, and they could be right! After all, war is no longer declared anymore. It creeps in on little cats feet. It was what everybody who was anybody knew yesterday, when they denied that they knew it and derided those who claimed that they knew it. War, which at one point in the development of liberal democracies were ritualized to the point that they were actually declared, according to some book of rules, never really were declarable things, perhaps – Mars arose from the capitalist turn like Dracula coming out of his coffin when the time was ripe.
Tarrying is the term Zizek scooped out of the preface to Mr. Hegel’s Rotten Bottom Cabinet of Potions, also known as the Phenomenology of Spirit. Now, Zizek, what do we know about Zizek? LI’s far flung correspondent in NYC, Mr. T., knows more about the man than we can even imagine. But I want to quote both the translation from the Preface of the P.d.G quoted at the beginning of Z’s book and a passage in which Zizek uses the phrase in his own way, which turns out to be a passage appropriate to the anxieties of elephant fucking mice and underground men.
Here’s the passage from Hegel:
Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that coverts it into being. – Hegel, Preface (stolen from marginal comments written on a found copy of the libretto of Zauberfloete, obviously).
And here’s Zizek:
‘The crucial, hitherto underestimated ideological impact of the coming ecological crisis will be precisely to make the ‘collapse of the big Other” part of our everyday experience, i.e., to sap this unconscious belief in the ‘big Other’ of power: already the Chernobyl catastrophe made ridiculously obsolete such notions as “national sovereignty”, exposing the power’s ultimate impotence. Our “spontaneous ideological reaction to it, of course, is to have recourse to the fake premodern forms of reliance on the “big Other” (“New Age consciousness”: the balanced circuit of Nature, etc.). Perhaps, however, our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “nonexistence of the Other,” of tarrying with the negative.”
Such banging of the chords! But we hear certain things we like, there. Well, this post is actually about a 2001 article in Peace and Change by Michael Clinton entitled, Coming to Terms with Pacifism: the French case, 1900-1918. But I’ll reserve that for my next post.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Let's not attack Iran
LI has maintained, since 2004, that the U.S. won’t invade Iran. However, we wonder, in the light of recent news about U.S. naval deployments in the Gulf, whether the Bush administration is really planning to attack Iran. The proxy war against Hezbollah was a major disaster, and as we know, this administration has never met a disaster it hasn’t wanted to repeat. It is like being ruled by brain addled drivers from the demolition derby.
Fred Kaplan’s analysis in Slate is worth reading, even if it is larded with the usual U.S. propaganda about how much the people of Iran hate their gov. LI thinks the theocratic structure of the Iranian government is despicable, but I am not sure that I represent the feeling of the majority of Iranians. Somehow, an awful lot of them voted for their president – a fact easily wiped away from the board by the fact that Iran has a truly undemocratic system. Why, unlike in the U.S., for instance, the deciding factor in who is elected president is the majority of the vote. Shocking – no electoral college! As you can see, we are dealing with a bunch of undemocratic yahoos.
I was struck by this paragraph:
“More than that, the Iranian people—who, by all accounts, hate their government and like much about the United States—would regard the attack as an act of terror, a violation of sovereignty, a far more destructive replay of the nightmare of 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the shah. Even if the attack somehow unseated the present regime, the new one might be no less anti-American, no less intent on acquiring nuclear weapons—an ambition that the attack would set back by only a few years in any case.”
The Iranian people, if Kaplan’s first sentence is true, share their sentiments with the American people, who by all accounts also hate their government and like much about the United States.
On Mars, as we know, the mission of the media is basically war fluffing – the dissemination of stories about the potential targets of aggression in which the target is so darkly colored that the essential fact – that Mars is the non-provoked aggressor – is hidden by a load of bilge.
In this respect, the media has been doing a fine job. Still, we don’t see how the war with Iran is going to come off. The lack of manpower we have already stressed. There is, also, the fact that the one hope the Bushies have for the upcoming election is that gas prices don’t skyrocket.
On the other hand, we believe the political savvy of the White House is vastly overrated. Like a heavyweight champion in a dull period in boxing, the GOP has simply not faced a worthy opponent. So maybe they would, actually, risk the spike in gas prices for their principle – the principle of perpetual profit for the war machine.
ps -- there is a nice piece by Hirsch at Newsweek on the diplomatic option -- Bush taking a leaf out of Nixon's China book.
Matt Yglesias very justly criticizes Hirsch for indulging in another Bush fantasy - everything about Hirsch's piece is right, except that there is no way our Rebel in Chief would do it. But I think that one thing became obvious in the run up to the Bush vanity war -- one has to play the politics of fantasy in America. This is true in all court societies, actually. Courts evolve flatterers and flattery evolves policy because it is the very nature of Courts to do so. Since the remnant of democracy in America gives voters a chance to flatter (and not, heavens no, to decide anything about policy issues - leave that to the Joe O'Beirnes of the world), there is hope that flattery can be used in a populist way. To move the Rebel in Chief to become the Nixonian diplomat, one has to work at making that scenario, with all the loathsome syncophancy of Bush, work as a flattery scenario that Bush cannot resist without chipping his imago among the crowd of zombies who think he is God's appointed.
I'm not sure how to successful wage such a policy via flattery myself, but the first thing to do is to recognize that vanity and money, alone, drive politics in this country. Crows such as myself, alas, don't make good flatterers.
Fred Kaplan’s analysis in Slate is worth reading, even if it is larded with the usual U.S. propaganda about how much the people of Iran hate their gov. LI thinks the theocratic structure of the Iranian government is despicable, but I am not sure that I represent the feeling of the majority of Iranians. Somehow, an awful lot of them voted for their president – a fact easily wiped away from the board by the fact that Iran has a truly undemocratic system. Why, unlike in the U.S., for instance, the deciding factor in who is elected president is the majority of the vote. Shocking – no electoral college! As you can see, we are dealing with a bunch of undemocratic yahoos.
I was struck by this paragraph:
“More than that, the Iranian people—who, by all accounts, hate their government and like much about the United States—would regard the attack as an act of terror, a violation of sovereignty, a far more destructive replay of the nightmare of 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the shah. Even if the attack somehow unseated the present regime, the new one might be no less anti-American, no less intent on acquiring nuclear weapons—an ambition that the attack would set back by only a few years in any case.”
The Iranian people, if Kaplan’s first sentence is true, share their sentiments with the American people, who by all accounts also hate their government and like much about the United States.
On Mars, as we know, the mission of the media is basically war fluffing – the dissemination of stories about the potential targets of aggression in which the target is so darkly colored that the essential fact – that Mars is the non-provoked aggressor – is hidden by a load of bilge.
In this respect, the media has been doing a fine job. Still, we don’t see how the war with Iran is going to come off. The lack of manpower we have already stressed. There is, also, the fact that the one hope the Bushies have for the upcoming election is that gas prices don’t skyrocket.
On the other hand, we believe the political savvy of the White House is vastly overrated. Like a heavyweight champion in a dull period in boxing, the GOP has simply not faced a worthy opponent. So maybe they would, actually, risk the spike in gas prices for their principle – the principle of perpetual profit for the war machine.
ps -- there is a nice piece by Hirsch at Newsweek on the diplomatic option -- Bush taking a leaf out of Nixon's China book.
Matt Yglesias very justly criticizes Hirsch for indulging in another Bush fantasy - everything about Hirsch's piece is right, except that there is no way our Rebel in Chief would do it. But I think that one thing became obvious in the run up to the Bush vanity war -- one has to play the politics of fantasy in America. This is true in all court societies, actually. Courts evolve flatterers and flattery evolves policy because it is the very nature of Courts to do so. Since the remnant of democracy in America gives voters a chance to flatter (and not, heavens no, to decide anything about policy issues - leave that to the Joe O'Beirnes of the world), there is hope that flattery can be used in a populist way. To move the Rebel in Chief to become the Nixonian diplomat, one has to work at making that scenario, with all the loathsome syncophancy of Bush, work as a flattery scenario that Bush cannot resist without chipping his imago among the crowd of zombies who think he is God's appointed.
I'm not sure how to successful wage such a policy via flattery myself, but the first thing to do is to recognize that vanity and money, alone, drive politics in this country. Crows such as myself, alas, don't make good flatterers.
Monday, September 18, 2006
a little appeal
LI went to the mailbox today, thinking that a certain little synaptic gap in our total finances was about to shrink, due to some overdue checks coming in --but no such luck. It is one of those moments when the trapeze bar isn't there, and the trapezist looks down to check the net. Yikes!
All of which is to say -- those of you readers who have thought of contributing to LI's continued well being (and not readers who have contributed, abundantly, in the past) -- might want to click our little pay pal button.
All of which is to say -- those of you readers who have thought of contributing to LI's continued well being (and not readers who have contributed, abundantly, in the past) -- might want to click our little pay pal button.
mars 2
A few home truths. LI is neither opposed to the state, nor to capitalism, nor, if it comes to it, to socialism. This puts LI out of the running as far as political philosophy is concerned. As far as LI is concerned, political philosophy is as strange a thing as, say, a philosophy of poker that only recognized two cards: the Ace and the deuce. A poker philosopher with that idea would be uniquely un-equipped to recognize a poker game. Often when I read the crowd of libertarians, conservatives and lefties expound on the public and private sectors, I feel like I am reading my fictitious poker philosopher trying to figure out the name of this god damned card game they keep showing on ESPN2.
Myself, I have my eye on Mars. It isn’t that I think of Mars as wholly bad, an absolute evil – I have too great a dialectical sense of the conditions of my own existence, and that of everyone, literally, who I know or have ever known, and too little suicide in my veins, to utterly damn Mars – as much as I think the Martian dialectic is running out. We are approaching a limit in which the Martian negative moment – that moment that was glimpsed in the 1940s, in the erection of the missiles in the fifties and sixties, at Chernobyl, in the discovery of the ozone hole – is expanding to absorb and annihilate all previous positive moments. Mars, of course, has such a cancerous grip on our brains, its tendril have run into our innards to such an extent, that it is hard to find any way to confront that coming moment. That is, hard to find any way to simply cut the shit and say what is happening.
All of which is an intro to today’s translation exercise – from Minima Moralia:
It is hard enough just to tell what the truth is; but we should not be terrorized from doing so in our interactions with other people. There are criteria here that will do for the present. One of the most reliable is when it is objected against you that an expression is ‘too subjective.’ If that objection is made decisively, and with that indignation in which you can hear the angry harmony of all reasonable folks faintly chiming in, you have reason to be, briefly, satisfied with yourself. The concepts of subjective and objective have completely reversed. Objective now means the uncontroversial side of phenomena, its unquestioned, absorbed impression, the fassade glued together out of pre-classified data, and thus: the subjective; and subjective denotes whatever breaks through this, what emerges in the specific experience of things, what injures the pre-judged convenus and requires relationship to the object itself instead of the majority opinion about it. The latter can’t even see it, not to speak of thinking it. Thus, the objective. How full of hot air the formal objection of subjective relativity really is shows itself in its proper field, that of aesthetic judgments. Whoever, from the force of his precise reaction, submits himself seriously to the discipline of an artwork, its immanent laws of form, the coercion inherent in its construction, will find the prejudices of the simple subjectivity of his experience collapse like a miserable semblance, and every step that he takes by means of his extreme subjective inervation in the thing has an incomparably greater objective force than the encompassing and the well established conceptual structures of, for instance, ‘style’, whose scientific claims come at the price of the above described experience. This is doubly true in the era of positivism and the culture industry, where objectivity is calculated according to the dictates of an organized subject. In the face of this, reason has completely, and without windows, fled into idiosyncrasies, which are reproached with their arbitrary whims by the arbitrary whim of established power, because it aims at weakening subjects out of fear of the objectivity that can be annulled by these subjects alone.
I’m not sure if I quite captured the complicated dance at the end of this passage. Or understand it. Reason flees into idiosyncrasy, that seemingly heightened state of the arbitrary, based on will alone, because of the arbitrary will of the Gewalthaber, those who hold power, who have created the world in which subjective and objective inverse themselves in order to fatally weaken the subject’s ability to gain, by experience of things themselves, that objectivity annulling the subjective’s bondage to prejudice. The latter of which, I think, would then annul the objective conditions of the inversion. At least that is how I trace those steps.
In the standard translation it reads: "reason has retreated entirely behind a windowless wall of idiosyncracies, which the holders of power arbitrarily repraoch with arbritariness, since they want subjects impotent, for fear of the objectivity that is preserved in these subjects alone."
Preserved isn't right. Annulled, my choice, isn't right either. We are back the dreaded aufheben of Hegelian fame. I'd retouch it as - suspended - that is held in suspension in these subjects alone.
Myself, I have my eye on Mars. It isn’t that I think of Mars as wholly bad, an absolute evil – I have too great a dialectical sense of the conditions of my own existence, and that of everyone, literally, who I know or have ever known, and too little suicide in my veins, to utterly damn Mars – as much as I think the Martian dialectic is running out. We are approaching a limit in which the Martian negative moment – that moment that was glimpsed in the 1940s, in the erection of the missiles in the fifties and sixties, at Chernobyl, in the discovery of the ozone hole – is expanding to absorb and annihilate all previous positive moments. Mars, of course, has such a cancerous grip on our brains, its tendril have run into our innards to such an extent, that it is hard to find any way to confront that coming moment. That is, hard to find any way to simply cut the shit and say what is happening.
All of which is an intro to today’s translation exercise – from Minima Moralia:
It is hard enough just to tell what the truth is; but we should not be terrorized from doing so in our interactions with other people. There are criteria here that will do for the present. One of the most reliable is when it is objected against you that an expression is ‘too subjective.’ If that objection is made decisively, and with that indignation in which you can hear the angry harmony of all reasonable folks faintly chiming in, you have reason to be, briefly, satisfied with yourself. The concepts of subjective and objective have completely reversed. Objective now means the uncontroversial side of phenomena, its unquestioned, absorbed impression, the fassade glued together out of pre-classified data, and thus: the subjective; and subjective denotes whatever breaks through this, what emerges in the specific experience of things, what injures the pre-judged convenus and requires relationship to the object itself instead of the majority opinion about it. The latter can’t even see it, not to speak of thinking it. Thus, the objective. How full of hot air the formal objection of subjective relativity really is shows itself in its proper field, that of aesthetic judgments. Whoever, from the force of his precise reaction, submits himself seriously to the discipline of an artwork, its immanent laws of form, the coercion inherent in its construction, will find the prejudices of the simple subjectivity of his experience collapse like a miserable semblance, and every step that he takes by means of his extreme subjective inervation in the thing has an incomparably greater objective force than the encompassing and the well established conceptual structures of, for instance, ‘style’, whose scientific claims come at the price of the above described experience. This is doubly true in the era of positivism and the culture industry, where objectivity is calculated according to the dictates of an organized subject. In the face of this, reason has completely, and without windows, fled into idiosyncrasies, which are reproached with their arbitrary whims by the arbitrary whim of established power, because it aims at weakening subjects out of fear of the objectivity that can be annulled by these subjects alone.
I’m not sure if I quite captured the complicated dance at the end of this passage. Or understand it. Reason flees into idiosyncrasy, that seemingly heightened state of the arbitrary, based on will alone, because of the arbitrary will of the Gewalthaber, those who hold power, who have created the world in which subjective and objective inverse themselves in order to fatally weaken the subject’s ability to gain, by experience of things themselves, that objectivity annulling the subjective’s bondage to prejudice. The latter of which, I think, would then annul the objective conditions of the inversion. At least that is how I trace those steps.
In the standard translation it reads: "reason has retreated entirely behind a windowless wall of idiosyncracies, which the holders of power arbitrarily repraoch with arbritariness, since they want subjects impotent, for fear of the objectivity that is preserved in these subjects alone."
Preserved isn't right. Annulled, my choice, isn't right either. We are back the dreaded aufheben of Hegelian fame. I'd retouch it as - suspended - that is held in suspension in these subjects alone.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Jim O'Beirne's war
There are those who think Limited Inc is kidding about Iraq being Bush’s Vanity war. This article should clear up that contentious issue. The Iraq war was the first war in this nation’s history fought entirely to give a political party a leg up in the elections, and as a Romper room for its language challenged children. Iraq was a Club Med for the Heritage Foundation set. Something we pointed out when this story first appeared, about two years ago, but worth pointing out again, given this fuller account:
“After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .”
The article is riotously funny, actually. A completely corrupt mindset – conservative Republicans, circa 2003 – goes to Iraq for ideological fun and games. Comic capers, plus IEDs, ensue. Fun for the whole family! I particularly liked the anti-abortion advocate who takes charge of the Iraq Health system and sees, with his eagle eye, right into the heart of Iraq’s problems: they are all about smoking! And so he makes that his first priority. You can’t make this stuff up – the idiocy comes straight from the heartland.
Imagine translating the bar talk of some particularly louche frat bar into official U.S. policy, and voila -- you have the Coalition Provisional Authority.
This was all happening under the nose of the D.C. press corps. )Indeed, the political appointee, O'Beirne, who was stocking the CPA with Bush nomenklatura is married to a celeb media person, Katie O'Beirne). One might wonder, what is it that motivates that corps? Why is it so ghastly, so incompetent, so craven and at the same time so pompous?
David Broder, the mentor of so many a budding centrist and Pappa of pomposity, explained his beliefs this week in an interesting Q and A:
Washington, D.C.: Mr Broder, if you feel Karl Rove is owed an apology from the pundits and writers over Valerie Plame, did you also call for an apology to the Clintons after Ken Starr, the Whitewater investigation and the failed attempt to impeach President Clinton? If not, why not?
David S. Broder: As best, I can recall,I did not call for such an apology. My view, for whatever it is worth long after the dust has settled on Monica, was that when President Clinton admitted he had lied to his Cabinet and his closest assoc, to say nothing of the public, that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned and turned over the office to Vice President Gore. I think history would have been very different had he done that.
…
Ottawa, Canada: I am curious about your statement regarding Mr. Clinton:"..that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned..." This resignation would have been because of private misconduct that he lied about. How sir, would you judge a president that overstated the facts and got the country into a war?
David S. Broder: I would judge that president harshly, as the majority of the voters in this country and in many other parts of the world has done. But I make a distinction between a terrible misjudgment and a deliberate lie. Do you?
_______________________
Reston, Va.: We return a second time to President Clinton. What bothered me greatly about his actions was not what he said to his lawyers but what he told the Cabinet, his White House staff--You can go out and defend me because this did not happen. And he told the same lie to the American people. When a president loses his credibility, he loses an important tool for governing--and that is why I thought he should step down.
And so, in your opinion, the current president, vice president, secretary of defense, etc., have never lied to other government officials or the public and have lost no credibility?
David S. Broder: A classic have you stopped beating your wife question. How do I know whether they have ever lied to other government officials? The people in this administration are responsible for the decision that have led to the current miserable situation in Iraq, and Afghanistan and the worldwide damage to the standing of the United States. I think the American people know that and will hold them accountable--in this election and the next.”
So nice to know that lying about blow jobs is a national emergency, but the conduct of the Iraq war is a terrible and enigmatic thing. The are the values of a court society, in which breaches of decorum resonate far more than the pilfering of the national treasury, the usurpation of the nation’s army for personal ends, or the squalid incompetence that leads to the drowning of one of the Republic’s major cities. As long as the King is in his counting house, stealing all the money, the Broders of the world are sound asleep, and their children are running the Iraq treasury.
Ah, as the cornpone Kingdom runs out of gas and falls on the rest of us, at least this crow will have plenty to laugh at!
“After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.
To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.
O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .”
The article is riotously funny, actually. A completely corrupt mindset – conservative Republicans, circa 2003 – goes to Iraq for ideological fun and games. Comic capers, plus IEDs, ensue. Fun for the whole family! I particularly liked the anti-abortion advocate who takes charge of the Iraq Health system and sees, with his eagle eye, right into the heart of Iraq’s problems: they are all about smoking! And so he makes that his first priority. You can’t make this stuff up – the idiocy comes straight from the heartland.
Imagine translating the bar talk of some particularly louche frat bar into official U.S. policy, and voila -- you have the Coalition Provisional Authority.
This was all happening under the nose of the D.C. press corps. )Indeed, the political appointee, O'Beirne, who was stocking the CPA with Bush nomenklatura is married to a celeb media person, Katie O'Beirne). One might wonder, what is it that motivates that corps? Why is it so ghastly, so incompetent, so craven and at the same time so pompous?
David Broder, the mentor of so many a budding centrist and Pappa of pomposity, explained his beliefs this week in an interesting Q and A:
Washington, D.C.: Mr Broder, if you feel Karl Rove is owed an apology from the pundits and writers over Valerie Plame, did you also call for an apology to the Clintons after Ken Starr, the Whitewater investigation and the failed attempt to impeach President Clinton? If not, why not?
David S. Broder: As best, I can recall,I did not call for such an apology. My view, for whatever it is worth long after the dust has settled on Monica, was that when President Clinton admitted he had lied to his Cabinet and his closest assoc, to say nothing of the public, that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned and turned over the office to Vice President Gore. I think history would have been very different had he done that.
…
Ottawa, Canada: I am curious about your statement regarding Mr. Clinton:"..that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned..." This resignation would have been because of private misconduct that he lied about. How sir, would you judge a president that overstated the facts and got the country into a war?
David S. Broder: I would judge that president harshly, as the majority of the voters in this country and in many other parts of the world has done. But I make a distinction between a terrible misjudgment and a deliberate lie. Do you?
_______________________
Reston, Va.: We return a second time to President Clinton. What bothered me greatly about his actions was not what he said to his lawyers but what he told the Cabinet, his White House staff--You can go out and defend me because this did not happen. And he told the same lie to the American people. When a president loses his credibility, he loses an important tool for governing--and that is why I thought he should step down.
And so, in your opinion, the current president, vice president, secretary of defense, etc., have never lied to other government officials or the public and have lost no credibility?
David S. Broder: A classic have you stopped beating your wife question. How do I know whether they have ever lied to other government officials? The people in this administration are responsible for the decision that have led to the current miserable situation in Iraq, and Afghanistan and the worldwide damage to the standing of the United States. I think the American people know that and will hold them accountable--in this election and the next.”
So nice to know that lying about blow jobs is a national emergency, but the conduct of the Iraq war is a terrible and enigmatic thing. The are the values of a court society, in which breaches of decorum resonate far more than the pilfering of the national treasury, the usurpation of the nation’s army for personal ends, or the squalid incompetence that leads to the drowning of one of the Republic’s major cities. As long as the King is in his counting house, stealing all the money, the Broders of the world are sound asleep, and their children are running the Iraq treasury.
Ah, as the cornpone Kingdom runs out of gas and falls on the rest of us, at least this crow will have plenty to laugh at!
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Mars
When LI was toiling away, learning philosophy back in Grad school, I pretty much focused on Western philosophy. That’s a vast amount of material there, bucko, and I figured that if – by the time I was doddering on the lip of the grave – I understood some of it, that would be enough of an achievement.
But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. Since LI became a pirate intellectual – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclectist – we operate under the proud slogan: fuck the context, show me the beef. Or something like that.
Which brings us to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencisu asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”
It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit. Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature, as Yi-Fu Tuan says. And as the Sayings of Mencius, I should add, also say. Even when Mencius uttered the question in China, the questions was such that it had to be normalized. And remember, the Chinese invented the prototype of industrial power.
Which returns me to the intermittent theme of this blog, over the past year: what I’ve been calling the war culture. Well, an anonymous commentator last week poked a little fun at my penchant for using that term. And it is true, I use the term culture too indiscriminately. The Bush culture. The war culture. Etc. My use of culture is meant to emphasize the connection between a systematic, but not formalized, way of thinking and a systematic way of doing. By contention has been that the system of production we deal with every day, beyond its characteristics as capitalist or socialist, has certain uniform characteristics that flow into the great project of perpetual aggression. One of those characteristics, I think, is the conceptual outlawing of Mencius’ question. It makes no sense to apologize to water for damming it up, or making it flow up over our heads. Mencius must be crazy to think that – or he is thinking of human beings, and making an analogy.
Well, I’ll return to that question later. (And no, I am certainly not going to argue for deep ecology, to prefigure my ponderings). But here’s my stylistic solution to my tiresome use of culture all the time. Instead of war culture, I’m going to steal a leaf from Ryszard Kapuscinski, who uses the sterling, scary word Imperium to denote the Soviet Union. So instead of talking about the Soviet occupation of his hometown in Poland in 1940, he talks of the arrival of the Imperium. I am now going to baptize the war culture “Mars”. As in the God of War and the planet. Since Mars is planetary, and since it is my nutty idea that the state is subordinate to war in our present arrangement of things, I think Mars is entirely appropriate. Also, it has a nice, sci fi ring to it. Mars. I can hear the intro movie music swelling!
PS PS, here is the entire quote:
Kao Tzu said, ‘Human nature is like whirling water. Give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give it an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or bad just as water does not show any preference for either east or west.’
‘It certainly is the case,’ said Mencius, ‘that water does not show any preference for wither east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards.
‘Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.’
- Translation of D.C. Lau
But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. Since LI became a pirate intellectual – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclectist – we operate under the proud slogan: fuck the context, show me the beef. Or something like that.
Which brings us to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencisu asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”
It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit. Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature, as Yi-Fu Tuan says. And as the Sayings of Mencius, I should add, also say. Even when Mencius uttered the question in China, the questions was such that it had to be normalized. And remember, the Chinese invented the prototype of industrial power.
Which returns me to the intermittent theme of this blog, over the past year: what I’ve been calling the war culture. Well, an anonymous commentator last week poked a little fun at my penchant for using that term. And it is true, I use the term culture too indiscriminately. The Bush culture. The war culture. Etc. My use of culture is meant to emphasize the connection between a systematic, but not formalized, way of thinking and a systematic way of doing. By contention has been that the system of production we deal with every day, beyond its characteristics as capitalist or socialist, has certain uniform characteristics that flow into the great project of perpetual aggression. One of those characteristics, I think, is the conceptual outlawing of Mencius’ question. It makes no sense to apologize to water for damming it up, or making it flow up over our heads. Mencius must be crazy to think that – or he is thinking of human beings, and making an analogy.
Well, I’ll return to that question later. (And no, I am certainly not going to argue for deep ecology, to prefigure my ponderings). But here’s my stylistic solution to my tiresome use of culture all the time. Instead of war culture, I’m going to steal a leaf from Ryszard Kapuscinski, who uses the sterling, scary word Imperium to denote the Soviet Union. So instead of talking about the Soviet occupation of his hometown in Poland in 1940, he talks of the arrival of the Imperium. I am now going to baptize the war culture “Mars”. As in the God of War and the planet. Since Mars is planetary, and since it is my nutty idea that the state is subordinate to war in our present arrangement of things, I think Mars is entirely appropriate. Also, it has a nice, sci fi ring to it. Mars. I can hear the intro movie music swelling!
PS PS, here is the entire quote:
Kao Tzu said, ‘Human nature is like whirling water. Give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give it an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or bad just as water does not show any preference for either east or west.’
‘It certainly is the case,’ said Mencius, ‘that water does not show any preference for wither east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. There is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards.
‘Now in the case of water, by splashing it one can make it shoot up higher than one’s forehead, and by forcing it one can make it stay on a hill. How can that be the nature of water? It is the circumstances being what they are. That man can be made bad shows that his nature is no different from that of water in this respect.’
- Translation of D.C. Lau
Friday, September 15, 2006
Br'er Rabbit
One of the great American stories, one of the primal stories, is the story of the Tarbaby. I can’t see how you can understand this culture if you don’t know that story. I can’t see how you can understand this culture if you don’t appreciate that story. That it was ripped off by a cracker newsman (albeit a, for the time, moderate cracker newsman) in Atlanta doesn’t matter in the slightest – this story obviously comes from a genius oral source. Uncle Remus, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison -- the recording angel of history will gather very few positives about Southern civilization when all is said and done.
Well, to refresh y’all’s memory, this is the beginning of it:
“One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 'im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun w'at he call a Tar-Baby, en he tuck dish yer Tar-Baby en he sot 'er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see what de news wuz gwine ter be. En he didn't hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin' down de road--lippity-clippity, clippity -lippity--dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin' 'long twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his behime legs like he wuz 'stonished. De Tar Baby, she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low.
"`Mawnin'!' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee - `nice wedder dis mawnin',' sezee.
"Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin', en Brer Fox he lay low.
"`How duz yo' sym'tums seem ter segashuate?' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
"Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin'.
"'How you come on, den? Is you deaf?' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. 'Kaze if you is, I kin holler louder,' sezee.
"Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low.”
The contrapuntal repetition of and variation on "Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin'" and “Brer Fox, he lay low” kills me. It is, to borrow Barthes’ phrase, the punctum here – that complete and unexpected joy of a thing so perfect in itself that explanation can only operate on it the way oxygen operates on silver – giving it a dulling verdigris. It is music of the highest order the American language has to offer. Its effect has worked on me since I was seven, I think. It owns real estate in my heart that will remain there until alcoholism and senility wash away all my cares and woes.
I bring this up because LI strongly identifies with Br’er Rabbit. Many are the Tar Babies we heat ourselves into attacking. We stroll down the road – or, at least, scroll through the internet – looking out for political stories and finding dozens, dozens of offenses that cause our blood to bile. Why, yesterday, we wasted a good hour looking up things about Telos, the journal, because the Telos site has put up the American equivalent of the Euston Manifesto. Why, you might ask, would LI bother? Because something in the look of the thing just drives us crazy, that’s why. That Tar Baby stays still while we ask it all kinds of questions: what the fuck you talking about, Islamo-fascism? And what the hell is this thing about “the left”? And on and on – the bric a brac talk of politics, out of which think tankers have woven a magic web of distractions that keep those interested in power, in the way we live, occupied with lifelong trivialities. For once you enter into that talk, you are doomed to fight with decoys, only decoys, until you exhaust yourself. And sometimes that goes on for forty years.
"'I'm gwine ter larn you how ter talk ter 'spectubble folks ef hit's de las' ack,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. 'Ef you don't take off dat hat en tell me howdy, I'm gwine ter bus' you wide open,' sezee.
So we reared back and was going to bus open the whole stinking manifesto/Telos site/lefty crapola fiesta when we stopped for once -balanced on one foot, a brick in one hand - and thought about life. As in, there are more important things in. The Br’er Rabbit in us was kicking its hind legs so rapidly they formed a blur, but we held onto its long ears and gradually, gradually, slowly, we pulled out of that utter waste of time.
Well, to refresh y’all’s memory, this is the beginning of it:
“One day atter Brer Rabbit fool 'im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun w'at he call a Tar-Baby, en he tuck dish yer Tar-Baby en he sot 'er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see what de news wuz gwine ter be. En he didn't hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin' down de road--lippity-clippity, clippity -lippity--dez ez sassy ez a jay-bird. Brer Fox, he lay low. Brer Rabbit come prancin' 'long twel he spy de Tar-Baby, en den he fotch up on his behime legs like he wuz 'stonished. De Tar Baby, she sot dar, she did, en Brer Fox, he lay low.
"`Mawnin'!' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee - `nice wedder dis mawnin',' sezee.
"Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin', en Brer Fox he lay low.
"`How duz yo' sym'tums seem ter segashuate?' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
"Brer Fox, he wink his eye slow, en lay low, en de Tar-Baby, she ain't sayin' nuthin'.
"'How you come on, den? Is you deaf?' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. 'Kaze if you is, I kin holler louder,' sezee.
"Tar-Baby stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low.”
The contrapuntal repetition of and variation on "Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin'" and “Brer Fox, he lay low” kills me. It is, to borrow Barthes’ phrase, the punctum here – that complete and unexpected joy of a thing so perfect in itself that explanation can only operate on it the way oxygen operates on silver – giving it a dulling verdigris. It is music of the highest order the American language has to offer. Its effect has worked on me since I was seven, I think. It owns real estate in my heart that will remain there until alcoholism and senility wash away all my cares and woes.
I bring this up because LI strongly identifies with Br’er Rabbit. Many are the Tar Babies we heat ourselves into attacking. We stroll down the road – or, at least, scroll through the internet – looking out for political stories and finding dozens, dozens of offenses that cause our blood to bile. Why, yesterday, we wasted a good hour looking up things about Telos, the journal, because the Telos site has put up the American equivalent of the Euston Manifesto. Why, you might ask, would LI bother? Because something in the look of the thing just drives us crazy, that’s why. That Tar Baby stays still while we ask it all kinds of questions: what the fuck you talking about, Islamo-fascism? And what the hell is this thing about “the left”? And on and on – the bric a brac talk of politics, out of which think tankers have woven a magic web of distractions that keep those interested in power, in the way we live, occupied with lifelong trivialities. For once you enter into that talk, you are doomed to fight with decoys, only decoys, until you exhaust yourself. And sometimes that goes on for forty years.
"'I'm gwine ter larn you how ter talk ter 'spectubble folks ef hit's de las' ack,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. 'Ef you don't take off dat hat en tell me howdy, I'm gwine ter bus' you wide open,' sezee.
So we reared back and was going to bus open the whole stinking manifesto/Telos site/lefty crapola fiesta when we stopped for once -balanced on one foot, a brick in one hand - and thought about life. As in, there are more important things in. The Br’er Rabbit in us was kicking its hind legs so rapidly they formed a blur, but we held onto its long ears and gradually, gradually, slowly, we pulled out of that utter waste of time.
the decline of the liberal papers
There were zip environmentalists in the old gold rush days in Sacramento, warning about the dangers of gold panning and such. But if there had been, they’d of been given a good listen to, then tied to the horses, dragged to the trees, and properly strung up. Boom times don’t like naysayers.
Reading about the Washington Post op ed page hiring Bush speech writer Michael “axis of evil” Gerson to balance out such well known doves as Krauthammer, Mallaby, Hoagland, Will and company, I was reminded of how simple, in a sense, is the driver behind the war on terror. To put it in terms of the headlines of the Greater Washington Organization:
“2005 Wrap Up: Washington, DC Region’s Economy is Hottest in Nation”
And to think, things were looking grim back in 2001, after 9/11. Back then, the Post reported (November 16,2001):
“Although the Washington region is likely to escape the recession that appears to be settling in across the country -- in part because of war-related spending by the government -- growth in the District has been halted and may soon turn negative. Business activity is shifting to the suburbs, sped by disruption and the image that the capital is becoming "an armed camp," said Stephen S. Fuller, a George Mason University economist. Washington Post, November 16, 2001.”
Oh, the little tinkle of war related spending, just getting on its baby legs. So cute! and being a cute baby, we naturally wanted to feed it so that it would grow up big and strong. We didn't want to do stupid things, like, oh, invest in energy R and D -- which according to the Scientific American this month is the lowest it has been, both public and private, since 1980. And a good thing, too -- what does energy have to do with anything? We have real problems. The Iranians, for instance! So the American public, always a sucker for baby wars, went out and spent and spent and spent to make baby happy. And what makes baby war happy makes D.C. happy:
“Looking back over 2005, a brief analysis of key economic indicators confirms what most Washingtonians already know: the region’s economy, encompassing Northern Virginia, the District of Columbia and Suburban Maryland, is leading the nation in nearly every major indicator.
Federal Government Contracting Driving Growth
Record federal spending, which has increased significantly in the Greater Washington area since 9/11, continues to be the engine driving the current economic upswing. At an Economic Conference today, Stephen Fuller, PhD, Director, Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, announced that the U.S. Government spent $339 billion nationally in federal procurement in fiscal year 2004. More than 15 percent ($52.6 billion) of this national total stayed in the Greater Washington region. This represents a 19 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.
Which sector is benefiting most from the increase in federal dollars? The area’s technology sector has been the winner for the past few years. According to Dr. Fuller, the government accounts for more than 70 percent of the sales of technology products and services in Greater Washington.””
This tells us, or should tell us, a lot about D.C. based media. Since Bush, one of America’s truly awful president, might be the best president the D.C. region has ever seen, he and his kind are adored by such as the managers of the Washington Post. His administration has practically sprinkled the lawns of the best and brightest with green. Papers are essentially boosters, and what they boost most is what puts money in the pocket of their city’s powerful.
Hence, the, on the surface, puzzling decision of the Post to point the middle finger at their subscribers. Face it, Eastern newspaper readers lean slightly left – they are a liberal crowd. And, all things being equal, the Post should be a liberal newspaper. It was for many years. Your standard Democratic party supporting paper, licked into shape by the New Dealer culture that stayed in D.C. But that culture is, simply, dead. The new culture is New War culture - the long war, the beautiful beautiful long war. Men are men in the long war, and federal spending is federal spending. And the Washington Post is as helpless not to follow that culture (exemplified by the D.C. region’s newest most prominent citizen, Tom Delay) as a sunflower would be to turn away from the sun.
And so we will continue to get the funny split between an increasingly conservative paper, a puzzled and outraged subscriber base, and a Post company that will no doubt finding better media profitmakers than its flagship newspaper. In a better era, where entry costs weren’t prohibitive, it would be a great time to start a D.C. paper. But the decline of papers is directly related to their monopoly of their markets. It is sorta funny: the liberal blogs like to say, bitterly, that the media operates as a stenographer for the White House. With the hiring of Gerson, they've just cut out the middle man.
It is hard to imagine a liberal paper appearing in D.C. for the foreseeable future. However, it is easy to see that the Dems, who still don’t get it, will be in for a nasty surprise if they actually do capture the House. The Post will be doing “investigative” reporting to discredit them from the moment they arrive. They threaten the Gold Rush.
Reading about the Washington Post op ed page hiring Bush speech writer Michael “axis of evil” Gerson to balance out such well known doves as Krauthammer, Mallaby, Hoagland, Will and company, I was reminded of how simple, in a sense, is the driver behind the war on terror. To put it in terms of the headlines of the Greater Washington Organization:
“2005 Wrap Up: Washington, DC Region’s Economy is Hottest in Nation”
And to think, things were looking grim back in 2001, after 9/11. Back then, the Post reported (November 16,2001):
“Although the Washington region is likely to escape the recession that appears to be settling in across the country -- in part because of war-related spending by the government -- growth in the District has been halted and may soon turn negative. Business activity is shifting to the suburbs, sped by disruption and the image that the capital is becoming "an armed camp," said Stephen S. Fuller, a George Mason University economist. Washington Post, November 16, 2001.”
Oh, the little tinkle of war related spending, just getting on its baby legs. So cute! and being a cute baby, we naturally wanted to feed it so that it would grow up big and strong. We didn't want to do stupid things, like, oh, invest in energy R and D -- which according to the Scientific American this month is the lowest it has been, both public and private, since 1980. And a good thing, too -- what does energy have to do with anything? We have real problems. The Iranians, for instance! So the American public, always a sucker for baby wars, went out and spent and spent and spent to make baby happy. And what makes baby war happy makes D.C. happy:
“Looking back over 2005, a brief analysis of key economic indicators confirms what most Washingtonians already know: the region’s economy, encompassing Northern Virginia, the District of Columbia and Suburban Maryland, is leading the nation in nearly every major indicator.
Federal Government Contracting Driving Growth
Record federal spending, which has increased significantly in the Greater Washington area since 9/11, continues to be the engine driving the current economic upswing. At an Economic Conference today, Stephen Fuller, PhD, Director, Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, announced that the U.S. Government spent $339 billion nationally in federal procurement in fiscal year 2004. More than 15 percent ($52.6 billion) of this national total stayed in the Greater Washington region. This represents a 19 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.
Which sector is benefiting most from the increase in federal dollars? The area’s technology sector has been the winner for the past few years. According to Dr. Fuller, the government accounts for more than 70 percent of the sales of technology products and services in Greater Washington.””
This tells us, or should tell us, a lot about D.C. based media. Since Bush, one of America’s truly awful president, might be the best president the D.C. region has ever seen, he and his kind are adored by such as the managers of the Washington Post. His administration has practically sprinkled the lawns of the best and brightest with green. Papers are essentially boosters, and what they boost most is what puts money in the pocket of their city’s powerful.
Hence, the, on the surface, puzzling decision of the Post to point the middle finger at their subscribers. Face it, Eastern newspaper readers lean slightly left – they are a liberal crowd. And, all things being equal, the Post should be a liberal newspaper. It was for many years. Your standard Democratic party supporting paper, licked into shape by the New Dealer culture that stayed in D.C. But that culture is, simply, dead. The new culture is New War culture - the long war, the beautiful beautiful long war. Men are men in the long war, and federal spending is federal spending. And the Washington Post is as helpless not to follow that culture (exemplified by the D.C. region’s newest most prominent citizen, Tom Delay) as a sunflower would be to turn away from the sun.
And so we will continue to get the funny split between an increasingly conservative paper, a puzzled and outraged subscriber base, and a Post company that will no doubt finding better media profitmakers than its flagship newspaper. In a better era, where entry costs weren’t prohibitive, it would be a great time to start a D.C. paper. But the decline of papers is directly related to their monopoly of their markets. It is sorta funny: the liberal blogs like to say, bitterly, that the media operates as a stenographer for the White House. With the hiring of Gerson, they've just cut out the middle man.
It is hard to imagine a liberal paper appearing in D.C. for the foreseeable future. However, it is easy to see that the Dems, who still don’t get it, will be in for a nasty surprise if they actually do capture the House. The Post will be doing “investigative” reporting to discredit them from the moment they arrive. They threaten the Gold Rush.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
ann
Ann Richards is dead. Those who aren’t Texans might have a moment connecting name to face, or more than a moment. But those who are Texans will be … shocked, I guess is the word.
Here are two anecdotes about the former governor from the Houston Chronicle obituary:
“After voting early one afternoon at the Travis County courthouse, Gov. Ann Richards held up her Department of Public Safety detail to admire a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Richards carefully studied the bike, admiring its shiny chrome in the October sunlight, its size, shape and color.
When a reporter queried the governor about what she was doing, Richards replied: "I am trying to decide whether I want a cruise, or a Harley for my 60th birthday."
It was a short news story, accompanied by a photograph, that got noticed by the motorcycle company's moguls. Within hours of publication, Richards had a letter offering her a Harley-Davidson.
Richards, 73, died Wednesday after a six-month battle against esophageal cancer. Her death prompted others to praise her legacy to Texas and her well-known wit that made her national political star.
Richards' former press secretary Bill Cryer of Austin, recalled the whole Harley-Davidson saga.
"Right after that story, she came into my office and said, 'You're going to have to learn to ride a motorcycle with me.' So, she and I spent every Sunday (the next) August, learning how to ride a motorcycle, out on the Department of Public Safety headquarters' parking lot," Cryer said. "She got her license, and I got my license. And I still ride a motorcycle."
On her 60th birthday, Richards went to the DPS and passed the test for her motorcycle license. She donated the Harley-Davidson to the DPS' motorcycle safety training classes.”
And here is the second one:
“Richards -- and many other Democrats -- used to frequent a small Mexican food cafe on Congress Avenue, Las Manitas.( Republicans go there now.)
Once, Richards ordered a cappucino, and the waitress apologetically explained that they only had coffee. True to her generous spirit (and selfish to her love for cappucino) Richards bought the owners of the small restaurant a beautiful, copper cappucino maker.
There is an official portrait of Ann Richards next to the cash register at Las Manitas. With her irreverent sense of humor, Richards signed it: "Thanks for all the great food. Love, Meg Ryan."”
It isn’t that LI unequivocally loved Ann Richards – we know how responsible she was, in the early 80s, for developing Travis County. And at one time that was still a very sore topic. But shit, I’m tired of grudges - beware of the carcinogenic quality of memory. She may have been the last Democratic Texas governor in this state, or at least for the next fifty years. And she was one of those Dixie governors – the populist governors, like Earl and Hughie – for whom politics was inseparable from appetite – not like the pinheaded ideologues of today, not the policymaking wonks, not the exercise freaks, the people Burke despised, the theoreticians. This shouldn’t pass from the world without a few tears.
Here are two anecdotes about the former governor from the Houston Chronicle obituary:
“After voting early one afternoon at the Travis County courthouse, Gov. Ann Richards held up her Department of Public Safety detail to admire a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Richards carefully studied the bike, admiring its shiny chrome in the October sunlight, its size, shape and color.
When a reporter queried the governor about what she was doing, Richards replied: "I am trying to decide whether I want a cruise, or a Harley for my 60th birthday."
It was a short news story, accompanied by a photograph, that got noticed by the motorcycle company's moguls. Within hours of publication, Richards had a letter offering her a Harley-Davidson.
Richards, 73, died Wednesday after a six-month battle against esophageal cancer. Her death prompted others to praise her legacy to Texas and her well-known wit that made her national political star.
Richards' former press secretary Bill Cryer of Austin, recalled the whole Harley-Davidson saga.
"Right after that story, she came into my office and said, 'You're going to have to learn to ride a motorcycle with me.' So, she and I spent every Sunday (the next) August, learning how to ride a motorcycle, out on the Department of Public Safety headquarters' parking lot," Cryer said. "She got her license, and I got my license. And I still ride a motorcycle."
On her 60th birthday, Richards went to the DPS and passed the test for her motorcycle license. She donated the Harley-Davidson to the DPS' motorcycle safety training classes.”
And here is the second one:
“Richards -- and many other Democrats -- used to frequent a small Mexican food cafe on Congress Avenue, Las Manitas.( Republicans go there now.)
Once, Richards ordered a cappucino, and the waitress apologetically explained that they only had coffee. True to her generous spirit (and selfish to her love for cappucino) Richards bought the owners of the small restaurant a beautiful, copper cappucino maker.
There is an official portrait of Ann Richards next to the cash register at Las Manitas. With her irreverent sense of humor, Richards signed it: "Thanks for all the great food. Love, Meg Ryan."”
It isn’t that LI unequivocally loved Ann Richards – we know how responsible she was, in the early 80s, for developing Travis County. And at one time that was still a very sore topic. But shit, I’m tired of grudges - beware of the carcinogenic quality of memory. She may have been the last Democratic Texas governor in this state, or at least for the next fifty years. And she was one of those Dixie governors – the populist governors, like Earl and Hughie – for whom politics was inseparable from appetite – not like the pinheaded ideologues of today, not the policymaking wonks, not the exercise freaks, the people Burke despised, the theoreticians. This shouldn’t pass from the world without a few tears.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
introducing the LI sockpuppet
A recent post on ufobreakfast convinced LI that we were falling behind the times. The middle aged man, in this busy, blogorific epoch, is nothing without his own sockpuppet -- a loveable pseudonym/imaginary friend that can lick his ass and attack his enemies.
So we've been auditioning sockpuppets.
YOURTHEBIGGESTGENIUSEVER turned in a very fine comment on our Kiss me post: "this journalism, not unlike Moses' ten commandments, will change all of human history." However, YOURETC. forgot, in a post that doesn't really get to the heart of our brilliance, that the ten commandments are not journalism. Moses, like Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, was a new journalist, and so he reported on himself in the third person in Exodus. However, there is a difference between journalism and what journalism reports -- or at least, that is what they taught me at the Deep Eddie bar I hang around. I don't want to have to be correcting my sockpuppet, otherwise what is the point? So, alas, we told YOURETC to set up his own blog and get a few links from Instapundit.
Now, since the most famous sockpuppet at the moment is Lee Siegal's Sprezzatura, we did call up its agent, and Sprezzatura agreed to try out on the Tomatoes post. But Sprezzatura obviously has worked the New Republic route a little too much. His comment was, This post, as so many of your brave and brilliant posts, are like bullets in the back of the Israeli hating Islamo-fascists that I know you, for one, would give your wife and sacrifice your neighbors, and their dogs, and even their goldfish to stop. Thumbs up -- even better than Marty Peretz!
Personally, I don't think Sprezzatura was even trying. Supposedly he has been flooded with offers, and you know how uppity a sockpuppet can get. If you DON'T, I suggest you see that old Anthony Hopkins movie, Magic.
As Sprezzatura and his entourage walked out the door with LI's week's supply of cocaine (goddamn that little pissant!), another sockpuppet, Jesuslovesyourbigcock, walked in. At first of course we mistook him for spam, since spam is always either trying to enlarge our penis or get us to pour the treasures of our checking account into a sure thing investment. After showing us ID, Jesuslovesyourbigcock wrote, about the Marat post: You are my Rebel-in-Chief, LI - spermatic, decisive, a skinny A.J. Liebling. You are reaching the young people of America with your marvelous prose, and they are, figuratively, throwing down their swords, or at least giving up their fucking war gamer mentality, and turning them into plowshares.
Hot diddley! Now that's what I call sockpuppetry. On the spot we hired him -- which is why the cupboard is now totally bare of blow! Oh well, we hope it is worth it. Those in the LI community who have a cup of cocaine they can loan us should mail us ASAP.
So we've been auditioning sockpuppets.
YOURTHEBIGGESTGENIUSEVER turned in a very fine comment on our Kiss me post: "this journalism, not unlike Moses' ten commandments, will change all of human history." However, YOURETC. forgot, in a post that doesn't really get to the heart of our brilliance, that the ten commandments are not journalism. Moses, like Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, was a new journalist, and so he reported on himself in the third person in Exodus. However, there is a difference between journalism and what journalism reports -- or at least, that is what they taught me at the Deep Eddie bar I hang around. I don't want to have to be correcting my sockpuppet, otherwise what is the point? So, alas, we told YOURETC to set up his own blog and get a few links from Instapundit.
Now, since the most famous sockpuppet at the moment is Lee Siegal's Sprezzatura, we did call up its agent, and Sprezzatura agreed to try out on the Tomatoes post. But Sprezzatura obviously has worked the New Republic route a little too much. His comment was, This post, as so many of your brave and brilliant posts, are like bullets in the back of the Israeli hating Islamo-fascists that I know you, for one, would give your wife and sacrifice your neighbors, and their dogs, and even their goldfish to stop. Thumbs up -- even better than Marty Peretz!
Personally, I don't think Sprezzatura was even trying. Supposedly he has been flooded with offers, and you know how uppity a sockpuppet can get. If you DON'T, I suggest you see that old Anthony Hopkins movie, Magic.
As Sprezzatura and his entourage walked out the door with LI's week's supply of cocaine (goddamn that little pissant!), another sockpuppet, Jesuslovesyourbigcock, walked in. At first of course we mistook him for spam, since spam is always either trying to enlarge our penis or get us to pour the treasures of our checking account into a sure thing investment. After showing us ID, Jesuslovesyourbigcock wrote, about the Marat post: You are my Rebel-in-Chief, LI - spermatic, decisive, a skinny A.J. Liebling. You are reaching the young people of America with your marvelous prose, and they are, figuratively, throwing down their swords, or at least giving up their fucking war gamer mentality, and turning them into plowshares.
Hot diddley! Now that's what I call sockpuppetry. On the spot we hired him -- which is why the cupboard is now totally bare of blow! Oh well, we hope it is worth it. Those in the LI community who have a cup of cocaine they can loan us should mail us ASAP.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Nine views of Jean Paul Marat (first part)
Création difforme de la société, Fille sourde de cette mère aveugle. Lie de ce pressoir, Marat c’est le mal souffert devenu le mal vengeur… "
- Victor Hugo
1. Of all those revolutionary lives in the 1790s, Marat's has the most symbolic narrative arc -- a hider in the sewers, a brief triumph over his enemies, the moderate Girondists, a death in the bathtub, apotheosis in David's famous picture. Its symbolic perfection is exploited both by those who find Marat a saint and those who find him an ogre. To Taine, he was obviously insane with delusions of gradeur – le delire ambitieux. To his Marxist biographer, Earnest Belfort Bax, he was, as he entitled himself, the “people’s friend,” although untutored in the ways of class – a transitional figure, in short, which nineteenth century Marxists loved the way Darwinians loved fossils of mammoths and pygmy horses. I think he is a prototype of that essentially modern figure, the Underground Man. After all, he literally did hide underground – in Paris’ sewers, waiting out a hunt mounted for him by the police. While hiding from the police is nothing new, there is something very interesting about Marat’s legendary descent into the sewer. He himself exploited it for its mythic resonances – as though he foresaw the romantic aura that would attach to it in the nineteenth century. On November 2, 1792, Marat writes:
“Freres et amis, c’est d’un souterrain que je vous addresse mes reclamations. Le devoir de conserver, pour la defense de la patrie, des jours qui me sont enfin devenus a charge, peut seul me determiner a m’enterrer de nouveau tout vivant pour me soustraire au poignard des laches assassins qui me poursuivent sans relache.”
[Brothers and friends, I am sending you these protests from the underground [literally – from an underground tunnel]. The duty to preserve myself for the defense of my country, with the days that I have left, are the only reasons that have determined me to bury myself once gain, alive, in order to remove myself from the dagger of cowardly assassins who pursue me without letup.]
2. This is unbelievably stirring, if you have the right historic sense for it. On a popular level, this is the release of a voice that will be exploited throughout the nineteenth century, in novel after novel. This is the Comte de Monte Cristo. This is the attitude of Les Miserables – or part of the mix of elements Hugo put into that novel. The more sinister undertone, in English novels, is borrowed by such covert master villains as Holmes’ great antagonist, Moriarity. And that voice will continue on in the twentieth century in film and comics, the dividing line between the hidden hero and hidden villain expressing the new moral uncertainties of politics in the age of capitalism – which is also, intrinsically, the age of contesting capitalism. In fact, Marat’s enemies didn’t believe a word of the underground story. “We know that Marat was in England, in consultation with Pitt, when it was believed he was hidden in the underground in Paris,” wrote Fantin des Oudards in 1801 – when the denigration of all Marat stood for had been going on for some time. To be in the underground could mean that you were anywhere – only the Shadow knows.
- Victor Hugo
1. Of all those revolutionary lives in the 1790s, Marat's has the most symbolic narrative arc -- a hider in the sewers, a brief triumph over his enemies, the moderate Girondists, a death in the bathtub, apotheosis in David's famous picture. Its symbolic perfection is exploited both by those who find Marat a saint and those who find him an ogre. To Taine, he was obviously insane with delusions of gradeur – le delire ambitieux. To his Marxist biographer, Earnest Belfort Bax, he was, as he entitled himself, the “people’s friend,” although untutored in the ways of class – a transitional figure, in short, which nineteenth century Marxists loved the way Darwinians loved fossils of mammoths and pygmy horses. I think he is a prototype of that essentially modern figure, the Underground Man. After all, he literally did hide underground – in Paris’ sewers, waiting out a hunt mounted for him by the police. While hiding from the police is nothing new, there is something very interesting about Marat’s legendary descent into the sewer. He himself exploited it for its mythic resonances – as though he foresaw the romantic aura that would attach to it in the nineteenth century. On November 2, 1792, Marat writes:
“Freres et amis, c’est d’un souterrain que je vous addresse mes reclamations. Le devoir de conserver, pour la defense de la patrie, des jours qui me sont enfin devenus a charge, peut seul me determiner a m’enterrer de nouveau tout vivant pour me soustraire au poignard des laches assassins qui me poursuivent sans relache.”
[Brothers and friends, I am sending you these protests from the underground [literally – from an underground tunnel]. The duty to preserve myself for the defense of my country, with the days that I have left, are the only reasons that have determined me to bury myself once gain, alive, in order to remove myself from the dagger of cowardly assassins who pursue me without letup.]
2. This is unbelievably stirring, if you have the right historic sense for it. On a popular level, this is the release of a voice that will be exploited throughout the nineteenth century, in novel after novel. This is the Comte de Monte Cristo. This is the attitude of Les Miserables – or part of the mix of elements Hugo put into that novel. The more sinister undertone, in English novels, is borrowed by such covert master villains as Holmes’ great antagonist, Moriarity. And that voice will continue on in the twentieth century in film and comics, the dividing line between the hidden hero and hidden villain expressing the new moral uncertainties of politics in the age of capitalism – which is also, intrinsically, the age of contesting capitalism. In fact, Marat’s enemies didn’t believe a word of the underground story. “We know that Marat was in England, in consultation with Pitt, when it was believed he was hidden in the underground in Paris,” wrote Fantin des Oudards in 1801 – when the denigration of all Marat stood for had been going on for some time. To be in the underground could mean that you were anywhere – only the Shadow knows.
Monday, September 11, 2006
kiss me
Our readers will no doubt call to mind, on this day that seems especially appropriate to survey the ongoing war on terror, how often, and with what righteousness, the U.S. has threatened Iran and Syria for allowing insurgents to use their territory to access Iraq.
The Bush administration has also, lately, been in an upbeat mood about its contribution to the w-w-war on terror, to wit, the legalization of torture, and the extension of executive, judicial and penal power to the CIA. And one has to admit, this contribution almost exactly mirrors the soul of this administration: brutish, small, incompetent, and of a piece with the Dixie totalitarianism that runs, a rich vein, through our history: from the pro-slavery freebooters of the 1850s in Kansas through the lynchers of the 1890s to the segregationists of the 1950s.
Those who, like LI, believe the war on terror is a farce being performed by madmen, with various subject populations in walk on roles, found confirmation for that view in two articles this weekend. One, in the Washington Post, threw in the towel on the “Osama bin is on the run” line that has become a media’s mock Homeric epithet, forged in the fires of press syncophancy and always served piping hot to the hoi polloi who might, by some unwarranted exercise of the mental faculty, wonder where that dead or alive man is today. Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson’s article, “Bin Laden Trail Stone Cold,” was notable for one scoop:
“Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.”
This scoop, by those who keep up with such things, should be combined with the information we already have about what the military did during the battle of Tora Bora and Rumsfeld’s claim, afterwards, reprinted in Philip Smucker’s book, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, “We have seen repeated speculation about his [bin Laden’s] possible location,” he said, adding that the pieces of information “haven’t been actionable, they haven’t been provable, they haven’t resulted in our ability to track something down and actually do something.” Ah, a spoonful of the Rumsfeldian sugar makes the medicine go down – LI’s little conspiracy theory that Osama was let to escape to provide the Bushies with a terrorist on tap looks better every day.
Our theory combines with another of our theories – that letting Osama escape was premised on the Bushist fantasy that America’s strength, like that of a god, was such that we could always pull in the little rascal. According to Priest and Tyson, in a year in which the President is sore in need of an October surprise, he’s doing his best to get one:
“"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."
But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.”
The last three months our old rootin’ tootin’ Rebel in Chief suddenly flashed on that outlaw Osama, did he? Imagine that.
Mary Ann Weaver, in a NYT Mag article last year, has a very nice summary of what happened at Tora Bora and concludes thusly:
“On or about Dec. 16, 2001, according to American intelligence estimates, bin Laden left Tora Bora for the last time, accompanied by bodyguards and aides. Other Qaeda leaders dispersed by different routes, but bin Laden and his men are believed to have journeyed on horseback directly south toward Pakistan, crossing through the same mountain passes and over the same little-known smugglers' trails through which the C.I.A.'s convoys passed during the jihad years. And all along the route, in the dozens of villages and towns on both sides of the frontier, the Pashtun tribes would have lighted campfires along the way to guide the horsemen as they slowly continued through the snow and on toward the old Pakistani military outpost of Parachinar.
Tora Bora was the one time after the 9/11 attacks when United States operatives were confident they knew precisely where Osama bin Laden was and could have captured or killed him. Some have argued that it was Washington's last chance; others say that although it will be considerably more difficult now, bin Laden is not beyond our reach. But the stakes are considerably higher than they were nearly four years ago, and terrain and political sensibilities are far more our natural enemies now.
There is no indication that bin Laden ever left Pakistan after he crossed the border that snowy December night; nor is there any indication that he ever left the country's Pashtun tribal lands, moving from Parachinar to Waziristan, then north into Mohmand and Bajaur, one American intelligence official told me. The areas are among the most remote and rugged on earth, and they are vast. Had bin Laden been surrounded at Tora Bora, he would have been confined to an area of several dozen square miles; now he could well be in an area that snakes across some 40,000 square miles.
Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp."
The NYT article that provides a sweet-n-sour chaser to Priest’s obituary for the Osama on the run meme is about Pakistan’s treaty with the Taliban, which might get in the way of flooding the zone – although, being a mere peapicker instead of the Rebel in Chief, I just don’t know.
“On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a “truce” with militants who have resisted Pakistani military efforts to gain control of the region, which is roughly the size of Delaware. The agreement, which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks, immediately set off concern among American analysts.”
I love the concern business. Usually, I don’t know, such a thing would set off condemnation. Our vampiric V.P. would show his fangs on that show he does on Fox, “Cheney Shows His Fangs” – you know, it comes on right before “America’s Funniest Waterboarding Videos.” But here we have the measured responses of the mature republic we are.
“After two attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 were linked to the tribal areas, Pakistani officials expanded the military effort to subdue the region. But after suffering heavy casualties in 2004 and early 2005, they began negotiating with local militants. Last year, Pakistan signed a separate agreement with militants in South Waziristan, but the move failed to slow the killing of government supporters.
“If you look at the number of deaths in the region, it’s not clear that they’ve dropped,” said Xenia Dormandy, former director for South Asia for the National Security Council. Signing such truces, she said, “is a potentially dangerous route to take because there is little pressure that you can bring to bear to make sure they can follow through on the agreements.”
"Two hundred miles to the south, the Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta, according to American analysts. Afghan officials say the Taliban used the area to plan and carry out sweeping attacks in southern Afghanistan in the spring.”
The amazing thing, to LI, is that the fraud of the war on terror is so threadbare. You don’t have to really rise from your reclining chair to connect the dots. We know how it was done, we know who did it, and we know how it goes on, and on, and on. This truly offends me. As the Al Pacino character says in Dog Day Afternoon says:
Kiss me! Kiss Me!
Cause I liked to be kissed when I’m fucked!
My motto for this all too sad day.
The Bush administration has also, lately, been in an upbeat mood about its contribution to the w-w-war on terror, to wit, the legalization of torture, and the extension of executive, judicial and penal power to the CIA. And one has to admit, this contribution almost exactly mirrors the soul of this administration: brutish, small, incompetent, and of a piece with the Dixie totalitarianism that runs, a rich vein, through our history: from the pro-slavery freebooters of the 1850s in Kansas through the lynchers of the 1890s to the segregationists of the 1950s.
Those who, like LI, believe the war on terror is a farce being performed by madmen, with various subject populations in walk on roles, found confirmation for that view in two articles this weekend. One, in the Washington Post, threw in the towel on the “Osama bin is on the run” line that has become a media’s mock Homeric epithet, forged in the fires of press syncophancy and always served piping hot to the hoi polloi who might, by some unwarranted exercise of the mental faculty, wonder where that dead or alive man is today. Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson’s article, “Bin Laden Trail Stone Cold,” was notable for one scoop:
“Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.”
This scoop, by those who keep up with such things, should be combined with the information we already have about what the military did during the battle of Tora Bora and Rumsfeld’s claim, afterwards, reprinted in Philip Smucker’s book, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, “We have seen repeated speculation about his [bin Laden’s] possible location,” he said, adding that the pieces of information “haven’t been actionable, they haven’t been provable, they haven’t resulted in our ability to track something down and actually do something.” Ah, a spoonful of the Rumsfeldian sugar makes the medicine go down – LI’s little conspiracy theory that Osama was let to escape to provide the Bushies with a terrorist on tap looks better every day.
Our theory combines with another of our theories – that letting Osama escape was premised on the Bushist fantasy that America’s strength, like that of a god, was such that we could always pull in the little rascal. According to Priest and Tyson, in a year in which the President is sore in need of an October surprise, he’s doing his best to get one:
“"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone "stone cold."
But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.”
The last three months our old rootin’ tootin’ Rebel in Chief suddenly flashed on that outlaw Osama, did he? Imagine that.
Mary Ann Weaver, in a NYT Mag article last year, has a very nice summary of what happened at Tora Bora and concludes thusly:
“On or about Dec. 16, 2001, according to American intelligence estimates, bin Laden left Tora Bora for the last time, accompanied by bodyguards and aides. Other Qaeda leaders dispersed by different routes, but bin Laden and his men are believed to have journeyed on horseback directly south toward Pakistan, crossing through the same mountain passes and over the same little-known smugglers' trails through which the C.I.A.'s convoys passed during the jihad years. And all along the route, in the dozens of villages and towns on both sides of the frontier, the Pashtun tribes would have lighted campfires along the way to guide the horsemen as they slowly continued through the snow and on toward the old Pakistani military outpost of Parachinar.
Tora Bora was the one time after the 9/11 attacks when United States operatives were confident they knew precisely where Osama bin Laden was and could have captured or killed him. Some have argued that it was Washington's last chance; others say that although it will be considerably more difficult now, bin Laden is not beyond our reach. But the stakes are considerably higher than they were nearly four years ago, and terrain and political sensibilities are far more our natural enemies now.
There is no indication that bin Laden ever left Pakistan after he crossed the border that snowy December night; nor is there any indication that he ever left the country's Pashtun tribal lands, moving from Parachinar to Waziristan, then north into Mohmand and Bajaur, one American intelligence official told me. The areas are among the most remote and rugged on earth, and they are vast. Had bin Laden been surrounded at Tora Bora, he would have been confined to an area of several dozen square miles; now he could well be in an area that snakes across some 40,000 square miles.
Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp."
The NYT article that provides a sweet-n-sour chaser to Priest’s obituary for the Osama on the run meme is about Pakistan’s treaty with the Taliban, which might get in the way of flooding the zone – although, being a mere peapicker instead of the Rebel in Chief, I just don’t know.
“On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a “truce” with militants who have resisted Pakistani military efforts to gain control of the region, which is roughly the size of Delaware. The agreement, which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks, immediately set off concern among American analysts.”
I love the concern business. Usually, I don’t know, such a thing would set off condemnation. Our vampiric V.P. would show his fangs on that show he does on Fox, “Cheney Shows His Fangs” – you know, it comes on right before “America’s Funniest Waterboarding Videos.” But here we have the measured responses of the mature republic we are.
“After two attempts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003 were linked to the tribal areas, Pakistani officials expanded the military effort to subdue the region. But after suffering heavy casualties in 2004 and early 2005, they began negotiating with local militants. Last year, Pakistan signed a separate agreement with militants in South Waziristan, but the move failed to slow the killing of government supporters.
“If you look at the number of deaths in the region, it’s not clear that they’ve dropped,” said Xenia Dormandy, former director for South Asia for the National Security Council. Signing such truces, she said, “is a potentially dangerous route to take because there is little pressure that you can bring to bear to make sure they can follow through on the agreements.”
"Two hundred miles to the south, the Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta, according to American analysts. Afghan officials say the Taliban used the area to plan and carry out sweeping attacks in southern Afghanistan in the spring.”
The amazing thing, to LI, is that the fraud of the war on terror is so threadbare. You don’t have to really rise from your reclining chair to connect the dots. We know how it was done, we know who did it, and we know how it goes on, and on, and on. This truly offends me. As the Al Pacino character says in Dog Day Afternoon says:
Kiss me! Kiss Me!
Cause I liked to be kissed when I’m fucked!
My motto for this all too sad day.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
the final exciting episode in the ongoing series, I married a tomato!
In perhaps my favorite Wodehouse novel, Heavy Weather, there is a scene in which the unscrupulous and ultimately unlucky detective, Pilbeam, is manipulating Lord Emsworth, (who is, as always, ridden by the nightmare vision of his pig, the Empress, being poisoned). Pilbeam is maneuvering to get Monty Bodkin, Lord Emsworth’s secretary, fired – for reasons too complex to go into here. Of course, in lieu of conversing, Lord Em is pottering about verbally, tossing out of of those stream of association sequences, as is his wont. This provokes one of those wonderful, casual paragraphs from the master that crushes the heart of any true writer – for how can you top this?
“Pilbeam had not had the pleasure of the nineth Earl’s acquaintance long, but he had had it long enough to know that, unless firmly braked, he was capable of trickling along like this indefinitely.”
And so it is, too, with LI. We’ve been trickling along about the tomatoes, now, for a couple of posts, what? And perhaps it is time we got down to brass tacks.
So, to sum up what we have learned so far: we have an industry that is not centered on California, and that is heavily reliant on manual labor, in the 1940s. Then we have the agricultural department at the University of California putting their heads together and coming up with a solution to the farmer’s labor problem: a mechanical tomato harvester. The machine is perfect, except for the squiffy nature of the tomato itself. So, into the laboratory we go, and out we come with a more content filled tomato, designed specifically for the machine that harvests it. This results in, one, a concentration in the tomato farming field, as “by virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing.” We have a reorganization of the labor force – it is thinned out, its functions are re-distributed, the unions that represent it are slashed, and it is less costly. And we have – although this fact isn’t in Winner’s essay, but comes from the invaluable Pritchard and Burch – a shift in the center of the tomato industry to California. And of course, remember that the majority of tomatoes are being processed for pastes and ketchup – ah, the golden age of ketchup, that Cold War fixture. As Lee Reich points out in Gourmet Vegetables, the deal with tomatoes is that ‘determinate varieties’ have been designed to resist all the many perils that nature strews in the path of the tomato, but at the cost of becoming, at best, insipid.
Reich is especially keen to extirpate the myth that garden grown tomatoes of themselves are tasty little fruits, because the seeds that are usually bought to grow them are (cue the music from Jaws) of the determinate variety. Which is no surprise, as the seventies experienced a burst of gourmandise in the seed industry, with big agri-businesses eating little seed companies. With Heinz owning something like 90 percent of the tomato seed stockpile, we are, it seems, condemned to ketchup. Ketchup, ketchup everywhere.
Okay, LI is trickling on once again. What is the point of this? Oh, yes. The point is that one made so often and so loudly by the ideologues of the free market. It is that the freemarket extends preferences, and thus, those people who enjoy free markets are freer themselves. Little determinate varieties of liberty, those people.
And yet, it is easy to see that something is wrong with this picture of preferences. The idea seems to be that you are given preferences, just as you are given a menu. But back in the back room, back in the kitchen, who is cooking up the varieties of preferences? And as they cook it up, redesign the tomato, buy the seed stocks, and in general make life better for all of us ketchup swillers, isn’t there a silent moment when the flavor of the tomato exits, stage right? And without any tomato gourmands having a sayso in the matter. Indeed, is the taste of the tomato a public good, or a private one? These, as you can see, are the questions that arise from all this tomato throwing.
To which, at some point, we will return to weary the poor Pilbeams out there.
“Pilbeam had not had the pleasure of the nineth Earl’s acquaintance long, but he had had it long enough to know that, unless firmly braked, he was capable of trickling along like this indefinitely.”
And so it is, too, with LI. We’ve been trickling along about the tomatoes, now, for a couple of posts, what? And perhaps it is time we got down to brass tacks.
So, to sum up what we have learned so far: we have an industry that is not centered on California, and that is heavily reliant on manual labor, in the 1940s. Then we have the agricultural department at the University of California putting their heads together and coming up with a solution to the farmer’s labor problem: a mechanical tomato harvester. The machine is perfect, except for the squiffy nature of the tomato itself. So, into the laboratory we go, and out we come with a more content filled tomato, designed specifically for the machine that harvests it. This results in, one, a concentration in the tomato farming field, as “by virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing.” We have a reorganization of the labor force – it is thinned out, its functions are re-distributed, the unions that represent it are slashed, and it is less costly. And we have – although this fact isn’t in Winner’s essay, but comes from the invaluable Pritchard and Burch – a shift in the center of the tomato industry to California. And of course, remember that the majority of tomatoes are being processed for pastes and ketchup – ah, the golden age of ketchup, that Cold War fixture. As Lee Reich points out in Gourmet Vegetables, the deal with tomatoes is that ‘determinate varieties’ have been designed to resist all the many perils that nature strews in the path of the tomato, but at the cost of becoming, at best, insipid.
Reich is especially keen to extirpate the myth that garden grown tomatoes of themselves are tasty little fruits, because the seeds that are usually bought to grow them are (cue the music from Jaws) of the determinate variety. Which is no surprise, as the seventies experienced a burst of gourmandise in the seed industry, with big agri-businesses eating little seed companies. With Heinz owning something like 90 percent of the tomato seed stockpile, we are, it seems, condemned to ketchup. Ketchup, ketchup everywhere.
Okay, LI is trickling on once again. What is the point of this? Oh, yes. The point is that one made so often and so loudly by the ideologues of the free market. It is that the freemarket extends preferences, and thus, those people who enjoy free markets are freer themselves. Little determinate varieties of liberty, those people.
And yet, it is easy to see that something is wrong with this picture of preferences. The idea seems to be that you are given preferences, just as you are given a menu. But back in the back room, back in the kitchen, who is cooking up the varieties of preferences? And as they cook it up, redesign the tomato, buy the seed stocks, and in general make life better for all of us ketchup swillers, isn’t there a silent moment when the flavor of the tomato exits, stage right? And without any tomato gourmands having a sayso in the matter. Indeed, is the taste of the tomato a public good, or a private one? These, as you can see, are the questions that arise from all this tomato throwing.
To which, at some point, we will return to weary the poor Pilbeams out there.
bjorn lomborg
LI is going to interrupt our tomato laden series of posts to point our readers to the latest effusion from Bjorn Lomborg. It is rather like his last effusion, and the one before that – Lomborg is an endlessly content to produce the same thing: an article that will, one, deny some scientific truth about environmental degradation by happily cherrypicking among instances, and two, offer up some vague, charitable counter-program – the idea being to either wean the liberal from his environmentalist idols by shaking a little guilt making reference to the poor in front of him, or at least to point to the hypocrisy of the liberal, convicted of shamefully ignoring the poor by worrying about them broiling to death.
To pay this guy a lot of attention is, perhaps, a mistake. But we are still attracted to Lomborg’s bait.
His latest trick has been to wave around a sum – 75 billion dollars – which Lomborg has extracted from some UN report: “According to UN estimates, for $75 billion a year - half the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol - we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on Earth. Shouldn't that be a higher priority?”
Anybody who believes 75 billion a year would come close to providing clean drinking water for ever person on earth, let alone the rest of his list, is truly out of his mind. There are of course no specs on a project like this. Yet it is, in a way, a perfect conservative project, in the tradition hatched by Grandpa Reagan. Reagan faced a huge puzzle as a president – while popular as a slogan, nobody really wants small government. But he did want to cut back any government leftovers for those he was hostile to – the poor, blacks, environmentalists, etc. The solution, which came to him in a vision (with Edward Teller playing the part of the Virgin), was to create programs that would uniquely benefit his base. Thus was born Star wars, the prototype of conservative big government ever since. It is an almost perfect program: it has a vague or non-existent goal, there are no criteria to measure its success, and even as the need for it collapses, the rhetoric for it gets ever more heated. A trillion dollars later, it is still chugging along, producing endless streams of revenue to war industries and putting dinner on the table for thousands of engineers, economists and managers across the country. Who, reliably, are strong national security voters.
75 billion a year for drinking water means, of course … endless futile water projects. And he who says water projects says Scandinavian engineering firms. The very idea makes such as Lomborg all dreamy.
There isn’t a chance in hell that that sum would be enough to guarantee drinking water to the Indian subcontinent, let alone the whole world. Nor is the 120 billion dollar cost Lomborg quotes as derivative from the Kyoto protocols exactly honest. A regulatory regime that tilted the field to the greener company has always, in the past, resulted in more efficiency, greener technologies, and disturbances of big monopolies – in fact, it results in new companies, the breaking of old monopolies, and new sources of wealth. If the theory of free trade is correct, the kind of low tech manufacturing that naturally devolves to cheaper sites does so in order to give way to higher quality manufacturing – and green technology certainly qualifies as that. The Kyoto protocols are actually part and parcel of the kind of third way neo-liberalism so embraced by the Economist in the nineties. That, for LI, is a definite problem, but – saving our objections for another time – it is a sign of how quickly the neo-liberal credo has degenerated into the cannibalism that was always under the surface that it no longer recognizes its children. But perhaps the truth is, that credo could only go as far as a certain sector in the economy – the petro-war industry sector – allowed it to go.
To pay this guy a lot of attention is, perhaps, a mistake. But we are still attracted to Lomborg’s bait.
His latest trick has been to wave around a sum – 75 billion dollars – which Lomborg has extracted from some UN report: “According to UN estimates, for $75 billion a year - half the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol - we could provide clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on Earth. Shouldn't that be a higher priority?”
Anybody who believes 75 billion a year would come close to providing clean drinking water for ever person on earth, let alone the rest of his list, is truly out of his mind. There are of course no specs on a project like this. Yet it is, in a way, a perfect conservative project, in the tradition hatched by Grandpa Reagan. Reagan faced a huge puzzle as a president – while popular as a slogan, nobody really wants small government. But he did want to cut back any government leftovers for those he was hostile to – the poor, blacks, environmentalists, etc. The solution, which came to him in a vision (with Edward Teller playing the part of the Virgin), was to create programs that would uniquely benefit his base. Thus was born Star wars, the prototype of conservative big government ever since. It is an almost perfect program: it has a vague or non-existent goal, there are no criteria to measure its success, and even as the need for it collapses, the rhetoric for it gets ever more heated. A trillion dollars later, it is still chugging along, producing endless streams of revenue to war industries and putting dinner on the table for thousands of engineers, economists and managers across the country. Who, reliably, are strong national security voters.
75 billion a year for drinking water means, of course … endless futile water projects. And he who says water projects says Scandinavian engineering firms. The very idea makes such as Lomborg all dreamy.
There isn’t a chance in hell that that sum would be enough to guarantee drinking water to the Indian subcontinent, let alone the whole world. Nor is the 120 billion dollar cost Lomborg quotes as derivative from the Kyoto protocols exactly honest. A regulatory regime that tilted the field to the greener company has always, in the past, resulted in more efficiency, greener technologies, and disturbances of big monopolies – in fact, it results in new companies, the breaking of old monopolies, and new sources of wealth. If the theory of free trade is correct, the kind of low tech manufacturing that naturally devolves to cheaper sites does so in order to give way to higher quality manufacturing – and green technology certainly qualifies as that. The Kyoto protocols are actually part and parcel of the kind of third way neo-liberalism so embraced by the Economist in the nineties. That, for LI, is a definite problem, but – saving our objections for another time – it is a sign of how quickly the neo-liberal credo has degenerated into the cannibalism that was always under the surface that it no longer recognizes its children. But perhaps the truth is, that credo could only go as far as a certain sector in the economy – the petro-war industry sector – allowed it to go.
Friday, September 08, 2006
you say tomato/ and I say/ oppression
Langdon Winner’s essay, Do Artifacts have Politics, in 1986, makes the following thematic point about the relationship between technology and politics:
“[There are] … two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily under stood. Second are cases of what can be called "inherently political technologies," man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term "politics" I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements.”
Winner gives a number of examples of politically conditioned artifacts. One is the height of the overpasses over Long Island parkways, which are set at a default nine feet. Winner claims that the long bridges are in accordance with the intention of the man who devised the Parkway system in the twenties, Robert Moses. Moses did not want blacks from New York City to get out to Long Island by way of his Parkways. Since New York City blacks were, disproportionately, bus users, the discouragement of buses, which were two high for the underpasses, discouraged blacks from getting on the Parkways.
This example has spawned a little subset of pro and contra pieces. There are two points that are disputed here. One is the general political point. As Latour has pointed out, designed objects have what Donald Norman calls affordances – that is, multiple uses. Some of them are unexpected, revealing themselves over time. According to Latour, then, the prevailing intention when a design is introduced shouldn’t be analyzed as if it were equivalent to the function the design really plays:
“That designers use detours through material objects to enforce types of behaviour, everyone who has been made to slow down near a school because of the silent presence of a speed trap (also called a 'sleeping policeman') would readily agree. Yes, we are made to do things we would not have done otherwise every time we enter into contact with an artifact: when we want to boil water for our morning coffee, lock a door behind us, fasten our seat belt before our car engine starts, and so on about two hundred times a day. This doesn't mean however that only oppression and discrimination are expressed through those humble and devious techniques. We are also, thanks to them, 'allowed', 'permitted', 'enabled', 'authorised' to do things.
Thus, to say that our ordinary course of action is intermingled with artifacts does not mean that they have politics —at least, not yet. Does politics begin when the irreversible built in techniques are taken into account? Architects are well aware of the heavy weight bequeathed to them by their predecessors. My own Haussmanian building in Paris, has the perverse tendency to force the students inhabiting its coveted 'chambre de bonnes' to climb six stories through a steep and narrow staircase, while the happy owners of the flats are allowed to glide through a comfortable lift inserted inside a wide staircase. Are the students ‘discriminated’ against? Undoubtedly, but the reason is that during the Belle Epoque it was unthinkable to have the servants and valets take the same stairs as the Zolaesque bourgeois for whom those buildings had been designed. In the meantime, though, servants have disappeared, students have come in and the discriminating power of two incompatible stairs has remained: it is now, literally, cast in concrete. To undo Hausmann's political bigotry would mean destroying my house, stone by stone... Does it mean, however, that buildings in the Latin Quarter ‘have’ politics?”
Although I usually like Latour, I admit that this is an unusually sloppy response. Winner is certainly not equating politics with oppression, although that can be an aspect of politics – it is the most striking aspect, so it makes for the most striking example. And that the social scene around an artifact changes doesn’t mean that the Latin Quarter buildings don’t ‘have’ politics. To use an example Winner uses in another essay, the American constitution is an imminently designed program. Yet, over time, the program has meant different things, and been used in different ways. Does that mean that the constitution doesn’t ‘have’ politics?
A more disturbing response to Winner was given by one of Latour’s pupils, Woolgar, who claimed in “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS” that the whole story of Moses’ decisionmaking rests on mythical grounds – buses, back in the twenties, weren’t twelve feet high; the assistant who attributed the decisions about the Parkways to racism was simply one source in Caro’s biography of Moses; and other highway structures in NYC are also nine feet high – lower than the national standard.
This should put us on our guard about the stories that collect around artifacts. However, Winner’s other examples haven’t been so disputed – Cyrus McCormick’s pneumatic molding machines, which did a less efficient job of molding metal for his threshers, but which kicked the skilled workmen, who were largely union supporters, out of his factories; and .. the reason for this post … the tomato picker.
Tomatoes, it turns out, are a much studied subject. If you want the very scoop of the long saga of tomato ‘improvement’, you could turn to the fascinations, such as they are, that stock every page of Bill Pritchard and David Burch’s Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Global Tomato Processing Industry. For those of you with a train to catch, however, I will quote a long excerpt from Winner’s essay:
“The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.9 Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting. 10 But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough re shaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.
“By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization. 11 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.
“The University of California's research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them "would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application." 12
“As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate economic concentration in that industry.13 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.14 It is in the face of such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem "antitechnology" or "antiprogress." For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.”
Ohoho – as Peter Pan used to cry, before he engaged with Captain Hook. I spy something going on here. About which I will write in my next post.
“[There are] … two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily under stood. Second are cases of what can be called "inherently political technologies," man-made systems that appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term "politics" I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements.”
Winner gives a number of examples of politically conditioned artifacts. One is the height of the overpasses over Long Island parkways, which are set at a default nine feet. Winner claims that the long bridges are in accordance with the intention of the man who devised the Parkway system in the twenties, Robert Moses. Moses did not want blacks from New York City to get out to Long Island by way of his Parkways. Since New York City blacks were, disproportionately, bus users, the discouragement of buses, which were two high for the underpasses, discouraged blacks from getting on the Parkways.
This example has spawned a little subset of pro and contra pieces. There are two points that are disputed here. One is the general political point. As Latour has pointed out, designed objects have what Donald Norman calls affordances – that is, multiple uses. Some of them are unexpected, revealing themselves over time. According to Latour, then, the prevailing intention when a design is introduced shouldn’t be analyzed as if it were equivalent to the function the design really plays:
“That designers use detours through material objects to enforce types of behaviour, everyone who has been made to slow down near a school because of the silent presence of a speed trap (also called a 'sleeping policeman') would readily agree. Yes, we are made to do things we would not have done otherwise every time we enter into contact with an artifact: when we want to boil water for our morning coffee, lock a door behind us, fasten our seat belt before our car engine starts, and so on about two hundred times a day. This doesn't mean however that only oppression and discrimination are expressed through those humble and devious techniques. We are also, thanks to them, 'allowed', 'permitted', 'enabled', 'authorised' to do things.
Thus, to say that our ordinary course of action is intermingled with artifacts does not mean that they have politics —at least, not yet. Does politics begin when the irreversible built in techniques are taken into account? Architects are well aware of the heavy weight bequeathed to them by their predecessors. My own Haussmanian building in Paris, has the perverse tendency to force the students inhabiting its coveted 'chambre de bonnes' to climb six stories through a steep and narrow staircase, while the happy owners of the flats are allowed to glide through a comfortable lift inserted inside a wide staircase. Are the students ‘discriminated’ against? Undoubtedly, but the reason is that during the Belle Epoque it was unthinkable to have the servants and valets take the same stairs as the Zolaesque bourgeois for whom those buildings had been designed. In the meantime, though, servants have disappeared, students have come in and the discriminating power of two incompatible stairs has remained: it is now, literally, cast in concrete. To undo Hausmann's political bigotry would mean destroying my house, stone by stone... Does it mean, however, that buildings in the Latin Quarter ‘have’ politics?”
Although I usually like Latour, I admit that this is an unusually sloppy response. Winner is certainly not equating politics with oppression, although that can be an aspect of politics – it is the most striking aspect, so it makes for the most striking example. And that the social scene around an artifact changes doesn’t mean that the Latin Quarter buildings don’t ‘have’ politics. To use an example Winner uses in another essay, the American constitution is an imminently designed program. Yet, over time, the program has meant different things, and been used in different ways. Does that mean that the constitution doesn’t ‘have’ politics?
A more disturbing response to Winner was given by one of Latour’s pupils, Woolgar, who claimed in “Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses' Bridges, Winner's Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS” that the whole story of Moses’ decisionmaking rests on mythical grounds – buses, back in the twenties, weren’t twelve feet high; the assistant who attributed the decisions about the Parkways to racism was simply one source in Caro’s biography of Moses; and other highway structures in NYC are also nine feet high – lower than the national standard.
This should put us on our guard about the stories that collect around artifacts. However, Winner’s other examples haven’t been so disputed – Cyrus McCormick’s pneumatic molding machines, which did a less efficient job of molding metal for his threshers, but which kicked the skilled workmen, who were largely union supporters, out of his factories; and .. the reason for this post … the tomato picker.
Tomatoes, it turns out, are a much studied subject. If you want the very scoop of the long saga of tomato ‘improvement’, you could turn to the fascinations, such as they are, that stock every page of Bill Pritchard and David Burch’s Agri-Food Globalization in Perspective: International Restructuring in the Global Tomato Processing Industry. For those of you with a train to catch, however, I will quote a long excerpt from Winner’s essay:
“The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce headed for canning factories. To accommodate the rough motion of these harvesters in the field, agricultural researchers have bred new varieties of tomatoes that are hardier, sturdier, and less tasty than those previously grown. The harvesters replace the system of handpicking in which crews of farm workers would pass through the fields three or four times, putting ripe tomatoes in lug boxes and saving immature fruit for later harvest.9 Studies in California indicate that the use of the machine reduces costs by approximately five to seven dollars per ton as compared to hand harvesting. 10 But the benefits are by no means equally divided in the agricultural economy. In fact, the machine in the garden has in this instance been the occasion for a thorough re shaping of social relationships involved in tomato production in rural California.
“By virtue of their very size and cost of more than $50,000 each, the machines are compatible only with a highly concentrated form of tomato growing. With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973, and yet there was a substantial increase in tons of tomatoes produced. By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanization. 11 Thus, a jump in productivity to the benefit of very large growers has occurred at the sacrifice of other rural agricultural communities.
“The University of California's research on and development of agricultural machines such as the tomato harvester eventually became the subject of a lawsuit filed by attorneys for California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farm workers and other interested parties. The suit charged that university officials are spending tax monies on projects that benefit a handful of private interests to the detriment of farm workers, small farmers, consumers, and rural California generally and asks for a court injunction to stop the practice. The university denied these charges, arguing that to accept them "would require elimination of all research with any potential practical application." 12
“As far as I know, no one argued that the development of the tomato harvester was the result of a plot. Two students of the controversy, William Friedland and Amy Barton, specifically exonerate the original developers of the machine and the hard tomato from any desire to facilitate economic concentration in that industry.13 What we see here instead is an ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns, patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power. Over many decades agricultural research and development in U.S. land-grant colleges and universities has tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness concerns.14 It is in the face of such subtly ingrained patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato harvester are made to seem "antitechnology" or "antiprogress." For the harvester is not merely the symbol of a social order that rewards some while punishing others; it is in a true sense an embodiment of that order.”
Ohoho – as Peter Pan used to cry, before he engaged with Captain Hook. I spy something going on here. About which I will write in my next post.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
whose taste is it?
Last week, LI ran a series of posts about menus. Our point was that menus, which seem like innocent things, actually encode and enact important social attitudes and arrangements. Our more specific point was that menus came out of the great houses -- where they were used as a means of communication between the cooks and the owners (aristocrats or the great bourgeois families) into the public sphere as one of the components in the making of restaurants.
My point in sketching that history was to question the division between the private and the public -- and to point to the way the division is made absolute in liberal myth.
When I use the word myth, I don't mean a thing that has no social effect -- a mere illusion. There's a charming story, in Sydney Smith's Lectures on Moral Philosophy, that is the perfect illustration of myth:
"Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hands of Mr. Hume in 1737; so that with all the tendency to destroy, there remains nothing left for destruction: but I would fain ask if there be any one human being, from the days of Protagoras the Aderite to this present hour, who was ever for a single instant a convert to these sublte and ingenious follies? … Pyrrho said there was no such thing as pain; and he saw no proof that there were such things as carts and wagons; and he refused to get out of their way: but Pyrrho had, fortunately for him, three or four stout slaves, who followed their master without following his doctrine, and whenver they saw one of these ideal machines approaching, took him up by the arms and legs, and without attempting to controvert his arguments, put him down in a place of safety."
Whereever you see myth, you see slaves. They are the necessary concomittant of the ideal. And just as Pyrrho's slaves paid for Pyrrho's myth, so, too, we pay for the myth of the absolute distinction of the private and the public every day, rescuing the system that dedicates itself to the myth in every newspaper and tv show by giving it our absolute belief while spending the brute and best part of ourselves, in everyday life, negotiating its unworkablity. And so we are gnawed at, year in and year out. The system actually wears a hole in us, a black hole of existential exhaustion, which becomes the malign center into which we toss every fucking thing we love, letting it all disappear in order to save the shaky, self-contradictory structure for one more day.
The terms public and private have never been so flung about as during the last two decades -- the age of 'privatization.' LI's notion is that the private and public spheres have been redefined, both in reality and in myth, in tandem with the disembedding of the forces of production - to use Polanyi’s phrase for the assumption of systematic autonomy on the part of the economic system, and the bending of the social to fit its necessities. In capitalism, this long event was accompanied and justified by a notion of freedom, which in turn was entangled in a notion of the separation of the private and public spheres from one another. Socialism derives its own notions about the system of production from the capitalist event. LI, ever the Derridian, maintains that the separation of the private and the public sphere is forever undecidable. It simply cannot sustain the strain of being elevated to an absolute.
To illustrate these things, I'm going to pursue a related question, which is: what kind of property is taste? In particular, the taste of the tomato. I'm choosing the tomato because that fruit has, it turns out, been the object of an awful lot of literature. So first I am going to look at Langdon Winner's famous essay, Do Artifacts have Politics. In the next post.
PS
The Inestimable Mistah Scruggs sent me a link to a website we can all rally around. The site is dedicated to a policeman who is riding a one eyed horse across America, preaching the gospel of DECRIMINALIZING DRUGS. Sanity, in the current moronic inferno, can only be heard above the talk radio roar by dressing itself up in motley. Hurray for the legions of King Lear's Fools out there - our last fuckin hope, buckos!
My point in sketching that history was to question the division between the private and the public -- and to point to the way the division is made absolute in liberal myth.
When I use the word myth, I don't mean a thing that has no social effect -- a mere illusion. There's a charming story, in Sydney Smith's Lectures on Moral Philosophy, that is the perfect illustration of myth:
"Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hands of Mr. Hume in 1737; so that with all the tendency to destroy, there remains nothing left for destruction: but I would fain ask if there be any one human being, from the days of Protagoras the Aderite to this present hour, who was ever for a single instant a convert to these sublte and ingenious follies? … Pyrrho said there was no such thing as pain; and he saw no proof that there were such things as carts and wagons; and he refused to get out of their way: but Pyrrho had, fortunately for him, three or four stout slaves, who followed their master without following his doctrine, and whenver they saw one of these ideal machines approaching, took him up by the arms and legs, and without attempting to controvert his arguments, put him down in a place of safety."
Whereever you see myth, you see slaves. They are the necessary concomittant of the ideal. And just as Pyrrho's slaves paid for Pyrrho's myth, so, too, we pay for the myth of the absolute distinction of the private and the public every day, rescuing the system that dedicates itself to the myth in every newspaper and tv show by giving it our absolute belief while spending the brute and best part of ourselves, in everyday life, negotiating its unworkablity. And so we are gnawed at, year in and year out. The system actually wears a hole in us, a black hole of existential exhaustion, which becomes the malign center into which we toss every fucking thing we love, letting it all disappear in order to save the shaky, self-contradictory structure for one more day.
The terms public and private have never been so flung about as during the last two decades -- the age of 'privatization.' LI's notion is that the private and public spheres have been redefined, both in reality and in myth, in tandem with the disembedding of the forces of production - to use Polanyi’s phrase for the assumption of systematic autonomy on the part of the economic system, and the bending of the social to fit its necessities. In capitalism, this long event was accompanied and justified by a notion of freedom, which in turn was entangled in a notion of the separation of the private and public spheres from one another. Socialism derives its own notions about the system of production from the capitalist event. LI, ever the Derridian, maintains that the separation of the private and the public sphere is forever undecidable. It simply cannot sustain the strain of being elevated to an absolute.
To illustrate these things, I'm going to pursue a related question, which is: what kind of property is taste? In particular, the taste of the tomato. I'm choosing the tomato because that fruit has, it turns out, been the object of an awful lot of literature. So first I am going to look at Langdon Winner's famous essay, Do Artifacts have Politics. In the next post.
PS
The Inestimable Mistah Scruggs sent me a link to a website we can all rally around. The site is dedicated to a policeman who is riding a one eyed horse across America, preaching the gospel of DECRIMINALIZING DRUGS. Sanity, in the current moronic inferno, can only be heard above the talk radio roar by dressing itself up in motley. Hurray for the legions of King Lear's Fools out there - our last fuckin hope, buckos!
Monday, September 04, 2006
the ballad of haditha
By way of the Sweet Nothing site, LI was alerted to a budding neo-con Wallace Stevens, one Lynn Chu, whose poem entitled “Why I Continue to Believe in the War in Iraq” would make even a man sitting in an electric chair laugh. The opening lines possess the sublime beauty of, say, a drunk’s missed piss:
“Because to depose a murderous despot is a good thing.
Because the UN resolved to do something a dozen times and didn't.
Because we are the only nation in the world with the decency and strength to do it.
Because we did so with a minimum of human loss.
Because other nations, rueing their past glory, are envious.
Because I believe in nationbuilding. “
It goes on. And then it goes on.
According to the Sweet Nothing site, Lynn Chu is a literary agent.
On a pro-war site called the Democracy Project, there is an indication that Chu’s verse, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is putting starch into the souls of the drooping.
“Lynn Chu holds a J.D from the University of Chicago Law School, is admitted to the New York Bar, and is a very successful literary agent. Midge Decter emailed me a first draft of a poem Chu wrote. Chu may not give up her day job for poetry, as she admits. It’s a long read, but a good creed. Pay special attention to the last line.”
“It’s a long read, but a good creed.” Is that a line for the remake of the Dukes of Hazard or what? It was born to be spoken late at night, in some truckstop parking lot, by two all Americans. What they do next in that parking lot should be left to our all American imagination.
All of which reminded me of a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter Thompson and his attorney have finally pursuaded the hotel people to let them have a room. They’ve sorted out their chemical situation. Hunter is feeling better – no more lizard men in the halls, which had been bugging him. Naturally, in the hotel room, he flicks on the tube:
“The TV news was about the Laos Invasion—a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men fleeing in terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. “Turn that shit off!” screamed my attorney “Let’s get out of here!” A wise move.
"Moments after we picked up the car my attorney went into a drug coma and ran a red light on Main Street before I could bring us under control. I propped him up in the passenger seat and took the wheel myself...feeling fine, extremely sharp. All around me in traffic I could see people talking and I wanted to hear what they were saying. All of them. But the shotgun mike was in the trunk and I decided to leave it there. Las Vegas is not the kind of town where you want to drive down Main Street aiming a black bazooka-looking instrument at people. Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple—red convertible...stoned, ripped, twisted...Good People.
Great God! What is this terrible music?
“The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley”:
“...as we go marching on When I reach my final campground, in that land beyond the sun, and the Great Commander asks me...” (What did he ask you, Rusty?) “Did you fight or did you run?” (and what did you tell him, Rusty?) “...We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had...”
No! I can’t be hearing this! It must be the drug. I glanced over at my attorney, but he was staring up at the sky, and I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun. Thank christ he can’t hear this music, I thought. It would drive him into a racist frenzy.”
If we are to climb to the true heights of the belligeranti aesthetic in our current dire moment (a summit once or twice approached by Christopher Hitchens Mirror pieces) when so many have lost confidence in the Rebel in Chief, we need someone to write us the Ballad of Haditha. Imagine it! The way in which the press has leaped on the marines already for doing nothing more than splattering a number of Iraqi kids to kingdom come, which will teach their type not to plant IEDs again, does boil the blood. Clint Black, perhaps, could sing it. Chu is God’s appointed lyricist for this divine mission, but she has to get some kinks out of her infected brain first. She is never going to be raptured if she keeps trying to impress the liberals with that godawful imitation of Jubilate Agno. Honey, come on down to the racetrack, where the meth flows like wine and everyone is a good red stater, full of Christian impulses but never, never the Coward of the County – especially when it comes to taking shit from dark skinned pissants, bellyaching about the freedom we have brought to their shitkicker’s hell. “Did you fight or did you run?” That sums up our creed, and it is a good read. However, even the lowliest sadsack down at the race track knows that the actual fighting should be left to the final fucker on the end of the great national daisy chain - the young, dumb, full of cum pussy married too early and with the talons of the credit card companies in him, which talons, looked at from the Rapture perspective, represent the American bald eagle its own self.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord – and gosh, it looks just like Vice President Cheney with a boner!
“Because to depose a murderous despot is a good thing.
Because the UN resolved to do something a dozen times and didn't.
Because we are the only nation in the world with the decency and strength to do it.
Because we did so with a minimum of human loss.
Because other nations, rueing their past glory, are envious.
Because I believe in nationbuilding. “
It goes on. And then it goes on.
According to the Sweet Nothing site, Lynn Chu is a literary agent.
On a pro-war site called the Democracy Project, there is an indication that Chu’s verse, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is putting starch into the souls of the drooping.
“Lynn Chu holds a J.D from the University of Chicago Law School, is admitted to the New York Bar, and is a very successful literary agent. Midge Decter emailed me a first draft of a poem Chu wrote. Chu may not give up her day job for poetry, as she admits. It’s a long read, but a good creed. Pay special attention to the last line.”
“It’s a long read, but a good creed.” Is that a line for the remake of the Dukes of Hazard or what? It was born to be spoken late at night, in some truckstop parking lot, by two all Americans. What they do next in that parking lot should be left to our all American imagination.
All of which reminded me of a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter Thompson and his attorney have finally pursuaded the hotel people to let them have a room. They’ve sorted out their chemical situation. Hunter is feeling better – no more lizard men in the halls, which had been bugging him. Naturally, in the hotel room, he flicks on the tube:
“The TV news was about the Laos Invasion—a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men fleeing in terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. “Turn that shit off!” screamed my attorney “Let’s get out of here!” A wise move.
"Moments after we picked up the car my attorney went into a drug coma and ran a red light on Main Street before I could bring us under control. I propped him up in the passenger seat and took the wheel myself...feeling fine, extremely sharp. All around me in traffic I could see people talking and I wanted to hear what they were saying. All of them. But the shotgun mike was in the trunk and I decided to leave it there. Las Vegas is not the kind of town where you want to drive down Main Street aiming a black bazooka-looking instrument at people. Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple—red convertible...stoned, ripped, twisted...Good People.
Great God! What is this terrible music?
“The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley”:
“...as we go marching on When I reach my final campground, in that land beyond the sun, and the Great Commander asks me...” (What did he ask you, Rusty?) “Did you fight or did you run?” (and what did you tell him, Rusty?) “...We responded to their rifle fire with everything we had...”
No! I can’t be hearing this! It must be the drug. I glanced over at my attorney, but he was staring up at the sky, and I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun. Thank christ he can’t hear this music, I thought. It would drive him into a racist frenzy.”
If we are to climb to the true heights of the belligeranti aesthetic in our current dire moment (a summit once or twice approached by Christopher Hitchens Mirror pieces) when so many have lost confidence in the Rebel in Chief, we need someone to write us the Ballad of Haditha. Imagine it! The way in which the press has leaped on the marines already for doing nothing more than splattering a number of Iraqi kids to kingdom come, which will teach their type not to plant IEDs again, does boil the blood. Clint Black, perhaps, could sing it. Chu is God’s appointed lyricist for this divine mission, but she has to get some kinks out of her infected brain first. She is never going to be raptured if she keeps trying to impress the liberals with that godawful imitation of Jubilate Agno. Honey, come on down to the racetrack, where the meth flows like wine and everyone is a good red stater, full of Christian impulses but never, never the Coward of the County – especially when it comes to taking shit from dark skinned pissants, bellyaching about the freedom we have brought to their shitkicker’s hell. “Did you fight or did you run?” That sums up our creed, and it is a good read. However, even the lowliest sadsack down at the race track knows that the actual fighting should be left to the final fucker on the end of the great national daisy chain - the young, dumb, full of cum pussy married too early and with the talons of the credit card companies in him, which talons, looked at from the Rapture perspective, represent the American bald eagle its own self.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord – and gosh, it looks just like Vice President Cheney with a boner!
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