The NYT hosts an extremely alarming op ed piece today by a Mark Moyar. Moyar apparently teaches at the U.S. Marine academy – which is the reason the piece is alarming. It is a survey of the Diem era in Vietnam that is almost wholly mythical, which is not surprising given the book that Moyar apparently wrote: ''Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965” In the 1920s, the Weimar government never seriously attempted to eradicate the proto-fascist culture of the German military – and lived, or rather died, to regret it.
The myth that has arduously been cultivated in the American military about that extended war crime, our Hardy Boy’s adventure in genocide in Vietnam, has grown and ramified. Amusingly, this is what Moyar thinks was happening in Diem’s Vietnam in the fifties:
“When the South Vietnamese sects defied the authority of the Saigon government in the spring of 1955, the American special ambassador, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, urged Diem to compromise with them. Efforts to suppress the sects by force, Collins warned, would alienate the Vietnamese people, unhinge the army and lead to disastrous civil warfare. This advice was based on the mistaken premise that political solutions suitable in the United States would likewise be suitable in any other country.
Diem rejected Collins's advice, and with good reason. In South Vietnam, as in other historically authoritarian countries, if the government failed to maintain a monopoly on power, it would lose prestige among its supporters and enemies. Only a strong national government could prevent the sects and other factions from tearing the country apart. While Diem was able to gain the submission of some groups by persuasion, others remained defiant.
In April 1955, fighting broke out between the South Vietnamese National Army and one of the militias. Diem sought to capitalize on the fighting to destroy the militia, which caused Collins to advocate Diem's removal. Other Americans predicted chaos and wanted to abandon South Vietnam altogether.
President Dwight Eisenhower, however, decided that Diem should be allowed to use the army against the militias. In Eisenhower's view, a leader who had the smarts and the strength to prevail on his own -- even if it meant he discarded American advice -- would be a better and more powerful ally than one who survived by doing whatever the United States recommended.
Through political acumen and force of personality, Diem gained the full cooperation of the National Army and used it to subdue the sects. Simultaneously, he seized control of the police by replacing its leaders with nationalists loyal to him. In a culture that respected the strong man for vanquishing his enemies, Diem's suppression of the militias gained him many new followers.”
That is pretty funny. We especially like the word 'strong' - so much prettier than murderous, don't you think? In the real world, South Vietnam was not, and never could be, a country; in 1955, Diem, a former loyalist to the French colonial masters, purged and massacred other anti-Communist factions, ending the year by calling a referendum in which he got a healthy 98 percent of the vote. And in the purges and the marking out of religious sects as enemies of the Diem’s Catholic state, Diem doomed any hope that South Vietnam would be anything, ever, than a perpetual sport of political nature, a nothing that the U.S. would try to bomb, Vietnamize, agent orange, and phoenix into a something. That Moyar considers Diem an American success is, well, sort of like the position of the Communist party in Russia that Brezhnev was an unmitigated success -an exercize in that delirium tremens of the historical consciousness, the thug's nostalgia. It shows an absence of any standard by which one can actually learn from one’s mistake. The absence of that standard has a clinical name: psychosis.
Moyar’s point in bringing up this ludicrous travesty of Vietnam’s history is to suggest that the way forward in Iraq is to find … a Diem. You can’t make these people up. Unfortunately, they sit on a 500 billion to trillion dollar endowment a year, and they are systematically making the American republic into a Satrapy of Idiocy. Surely, oh God please, just for the sake of satire … surely somewhere one of the zombie groups is floating the idea of a Rumsfeld for President group.
We have to have that. We have Jackass, we have American Idol, we have O.J. Simpson as our national black murderer to run up the flag when the spirits flag … oh, we really, really need a Rumsfeld for President group!
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
the agent people, the percipient state
Imagine, then, Lenin.
In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party.
Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? LI is not interested in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, so much as trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream, the party will found the revolution – and, beyond the ultimate question of the state’s always to be put off dissolution , that means it will found the state.
Of course, as James Scott points out, Lenin is wrong in the case of Russia – the revolutions came about spontaneously, just as the people he denounced said they would. And in 1905 and 1917, Lenin quickly accommodated to that fact – but the party he founded acted as though they had created the revolution. The thing that is important to LI is that this conception of the function of the party is something new, something that theorizes the way parties will be throughout the twentieth century.
This role is new. No revolution in the past came about through the organization of a party. Parties formed as secondary political characteristics of the state. The change, perhaps, comes first in the U.S. –one could argue that the Republican party, under Lincoln, is the first party to expand its role to something more than a loose confederation of likeminded people seeking the power of office, becoming a nation-builder.
But Lenin was the one who saw the party most clearly as a new dispositif, to use Foucault’s term. Or, to use the terms of LI’s last post , there was a new dialectic of agent and percipient set up by Lenin’s notion of the party.
The Lockean-Rousseau-ian state had been founded on a semi-magic relationship between the people and the state. The people were the Agent, sending their thoughts to the great state Percipient. The thoughts are, of course, not natural phenomena, but the phenomena of a will – and just as the agent is controlling, in some small way, the percipient, so, too, the Agent people is controlling the state Percipient, which represents the people’s will.
Into this duality, Lenin introduces the party, which is again shaped around an agent/percipient relationship. But by this time the constants had been loosened – the agent’s will might well actually reflect the work of the percipient, who is not simply the naïve, the young lady sleeping in the bed who wakes up to see the face of the baron who is transmitting her thoughts to her on a dark street, but has played her own trump cards – has found a role as a theorizer, dropping her own suggestions into the mind of the agent.
Lenin finds his textual source for the party’s role in Engels. That’s the bit of What is to be done LI will look at next, in some other post.
In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party.
Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? LI is not interested in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, so much as trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream, the party will found the revolution – and, beyond the ultimate question of the state’s always to be put off dissolution , that means it will found the state.
Of course, as James Scott points out, Lenin is wrong in the case of Russia – the revolutions came about spontaneously, just as the people he denounced said they would. And in 1905 and 1917, Lenin quickly accommodated to that fact – but the party he founded acted as though they had created the revolution. The thing that is important to LI is that this conception of the function of the party is something new, something that theorizes the way parties will be throughout the twentieth century.
This role is new. No revolution in the past came about through the organization of a party. Parties formed as secondary political characteristics of the state. The change, perhaps, comes first in the U.S. –one could argue that the Republican party, under Lincoln, is the first party to expand its role to something more than a loose confederation of likeminded people seeking the power of office, becoming a nation-builder.
But Lenin was the one who saw the party most clearly as a new dispositif, to use Foucault’s term. Or, to use the terms of LI’s last post , there was a new dialectic of agent and percipient set up by Lenin’s notion of the party.
The Lockean-Rousseau-ian state had been founded on a semi-magic relationship between the people and the state. The people were the Agent, sending their thoughts to the great state Percipient. The thoughts are, of course, not natural phenomena, but the phenomena of a will – and just as the agent is controlling, in some small way, the percipient, so, too, the Agent people is controlling the state Percipient, which represents the people’s will.
Into this duality, Lenin introduces the party, which is again shaped around an agent/percipient relationship. But by this time the constants had been loosened – the agent’s will might well actually reflect the work of the percipient, who is not simply the naïve, the young lady sleeping in the bed who wakes up to see the face of the baron who is transmitting her thoughts to her on a dark street, but has played her own trump cards – has found a role as a theorizer, dropping her own suggestions into the mind of the agent.
Lenin finds his textual source for the party’s role in Engels. That’s the bit of What is to be done LI will look at next, in some other post.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
friedman and a non-tomato
I’ve poked around and looked at Milton Friedman’s tributes and tomatoes. I’m mostly in the throw a tomato camp – but there were libertarian moments in Friedman’s work that I definitely love. Among them, naturally, was his opposition over forty years to drug prohibition.
What surprises me, however, about that opposition is how little it drew strength from any theory of markets – and I’ve always thought that had to do with the reluctance to ascribe any virtue to state regulation. In fact, the illegal drug markets are a wonderful instance of what happens when the state abandons its regulatory function by opting for straight banning. State regulation is often very inefficient – think of the way state’s regulate liquor and cigarette sales, and how leaky the ban on selling to minors is – and yet the standard by which it should be measured has, as its primary dimension, social concord. The first thing one wants in an economy is relative peace. Snatch and grab, which is all very well for the revolutionary moment, quickly becomes hell – as Iraq is demonstrating every day.
I talked with a friend in Mexico City this morning, and in her ritzy neighborhood, Polanco, they just had a dramatic shootout bankrobbery. Then we talked about the crime, the feelers that are out to privatize Pemex (which Fox’s government has underfunded so that it can be sold off because – it is underfunded!), etc. The misery that the neo-liberal regime imposes on a country accumulating, year after year, until something breaks, and inequality is no longer a fun topic to bat around among economists at the AEI meeting, but puts a gun in your face.
Anyway, to return to Friedman’s good side… Having an intensely silly ideal of the state as a thing that ‘keeps out’ of the political economy, Friedman deprives himself of a tool for analyzing what goes entirely wrong when the state bans a consumer commodity like, say, marijuana, and why that banning is different from the case of the state banning the manufacture of a product like DDT. Lately, I’ve been reading Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, which goes into Romer’s theorem about endogenous technological change, and I will have some stuff to say about defining commodities in some far future post. At the moment, though, let’s just say the dumbness of the division between the public and the private sphere, as construed by economists, tripped up Friedman, who posited his objection to drug banning on the libertarian principle of freedom that is, itself, shaky business. There is a deeper lesson to be learned about markets from the catastrophes resulting from the American determination to, a., ban certain drugs internationally, and b., consume as much of those banned drugs as we can afford. Of all the ways in which the American imperium has fucked up the world, this is, practically, the greatest of all fuck ups, one that has reached into the shantytowns of Sao Paolo and the countryside of Sicily, has created black market states and financed the killing gangs of Africa, has put Latin America in a noose for the past sixty years and was the satyr play that ran within the larger play in Vietnam.
(Of course, the bigger fuck up – the mad addition of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere, otherwise known as stealing the earth’s atmosphere – has been more gradual and less purposive.)
Other off the cuff remarks – the thumbsucker in the NYT Business section about Friedman’s real contribution was dumb even by the NYT standard of dumb obituaries about intellectuals. Friedman, it turns out, taught economists to think of the economics as … a world view! Now, I bet Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, F.A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi wish they had thought of that.
What surprises me, however, about that opposition is how little it drew strength from any theory of markets – and I’ve always thought that had to do with the reluctance to ascribe any virtue to state regulation. In fact, the illegal drug markets are a wonderful instance of what happens when the state abandons its regulatory function by opting for straight banning. State regulation is often very inefficient – think of the way state’s regulate liquor and cigarette sales, and how leaky the ban on selling to minors is – and yet the standard by which it should be measured has, as its primary dimension, social concord. The first thing one wants in an economy is relative peace. Snatch and grab, which is all very well for the revolutionary moment, quickly becomes hell – as Iraq is demonstrating every day.
I talked with a friend in Mexico City this morning, and in her ritzy neighborhood, Polanco, they just had a dramatic shootout bankrobbery. Then we talked about the crime, the feelers that are out to privatize Pemex (which Fox’s government has underfunded so that it can be sold off because – it is underfunded!), etc. The misery that the neo-liberal regime imposes on a country accumulating, year after year, until something breaks, and inequality is no longer a fun topic to bat around among economists at the AEI meeting, but puts a gun in your face.
Anyway, to return to Friedman’s good side… Having an intensely silly ideal of the state as a thing that ‘keeps out’ of the political economy, Friedman deprives himself of a tool for analyzing what goes entirely wrong when the state bans a consumer commodity like, say, marijuana, and why that banning is different from the case of the state banning the manufacture of a product like DDT. Lately, I’ve been reading Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, which goes into Romer’s theorem about endogenous technological change, and I will have some stuff to say about defining commodities in some far future post. At the moment, though, let’s just say the dumbness of the division between the public and the private sphere, as construed by economists, tripped up Friedman, who posited his objection to drug banning on the libertarian principle of freedom that is, itself, shaky business. There is a deeper lesson to be learned about markets from the catastrophes resulting from the American determination to, a., ban certain drugs internationally, and b., consume as much of those banned drugs as we can afford. Of all the ways in which the American imperium has fucked up the world, this is, practically, the greatest of all fuck ups, one that has reached into the shantytowns of Sao Paolo and the countryside of Sicily, has created black market states and financed the killing gangs of Africa, has put Latin America in a noose for the past sixty years and was the satyr play that ran within the larger play in Vietnam.
(Of course, the bigger fuck up – the mad addition of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere, otherwise known as stealing the earth’s atmosphere – has been more gradual and less purposive.)
Other off the cuff remarks – the thumbsucker in the NYT Business section about Friedman’s real contribution was dumb even by the NYT standard of dumb obituaries about intellectuals. Friedman, it turns out, taught economists to think of the economics as … a world view! Now, I bet Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thorsten Veblen, F.A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi wish they had thought of that.
Friday, November 17, 2006
a percipient speaks
That sleep, or rather the borderland which lies on either side of sleep, is peculiarly favourable to the production in the percipient, not only of hallucinations in general, but of telepathic hallucinations in particular, has already been shown. – Frank Podmore, Apparitions and Thought Transference.
Let’s first imagine Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, shall we? Of course we shall. A baron and a doctor, a respectable man whose investigations into sexual pathology have uncovered much rich material about the peculiar perversion of algolagnia. So we shall imagine him, one night, in the winter of 1886 … “I think it was in the month of February, as I was going along the Barerstrasse one evening at half past 11, it occurred to me to make an attempt at influencing at a distance, through mental concentration. As I had had, for some time, the honour of being acquainted with the family of Herr…, and thus had had the opportunity of learning that his daughter, Fraulein …., was sensitive to psychical influences, I decided to try to influence her, especially as the family lived at the corner of the Barerstrasse and Karlstrasse. The windows of the dwelling were dark as I passed by, from which I concluded that the ladies had already gone to rest. I then stationed myself by the wall of the houses on the opposite side of the road, and for about five minutes firmly concentrated my thoughts on the following desire: Fraulein … shall wake and think of me.”
Of course. A wholly natural scientific experiment to perform at eleven o’clock at night, especially when the ladies are asleep and one of them, you happen to know, is susceptible to psychic experiences. Schrenck-Notzing just might have been strolling home from a hard night experimenting with haschich, in his laboratory – a complete bust that, as it did not induce telepathic experiences as one rather hoped. No control in the percipient. And the agent, frankly, became susceptible to unnamed horrors. As we well know, it will be several years before Schrenck-Notzing finally makes his true scientific reputation with an exhaustive study of the ectoplasm exuded by mediums (200 + photos) with the truly Schrenck-Notzingian title, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics - but to return to our percipient for a second, Fraulein … - that night she was lying in bed with her eyes closed when suddenly the room seemed to brighten, “and I felt compelled to open my eyes, seeing at the same time, as it appeared to me, the face of Baron Schrenck.” It was just the kind of thing Fraulein … would confide, the next day, to her dear friend, Fraulein Prieger, who as it happens went skating the next day with Baron Schrenk and spilled the beans.
Well, such a gothic intro to the dry subject of the structure of political parties! A little parapsychological Ringen, and one hopes the best for dear Fraulein …, a case history headed towards tragedy if you ask me. But LI simply liked the metaphoric richness of the relation between agent and percipient, which we are going to use to talk about the party, the working class, and the state when we get around to our next post on Lenin, who as it happens did write “ What is to be Done” in Munich, while he signed his letters with the name Petrov and received all communications at Gabelsbergerstrasse 20a, München.
Meanwhile, a man is concentrated out in the parking lot on LI’s window. And my room is filled with light…
Let’s first imagine Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, shall we? Of course we shall. A baron and a doctor, a respectable man whose investigations into sexual pathology have uncovered much rich material about the peculiar perversion of algolagnia. So we shall imagine him, one night, in the winter of 1886 … “I think it was in the month of February, as I was going along the Barerstrasse one evening at half past 11, it occurred to me to make an attempt at influencing at a distance, through mental concentration. As I had had, for some time, the honour of being acquainted with the family of Herr…, and thus had had the opportunity of learning that his daughter, Fraulein …., was sensitive to psychical influences, I decided to try to influence her, especially as the family lived at the corner of the Barerstrasse and Karlstrasse. The windows of the dwelling were dark as I passed by, from which I concluded that the ladies had already gone to rest. I then stationed myself by the wall of the houses on the opposite side of the road, and for about five minutes firmly concentrated my thoughts on the following desire: Fraulein … shall wake and think of me.”
Of course. A wholly natural scientific experiment to perform at eleven o’clock at night, especially when the ladies are asleep and one of them, you happen to know, is susceptible to psychic experiences. Schrenck-Notzing just might have been strolling home from a hard night experimenting with haschich, in his laboratory – a complete bust that, as it did not induce telepathic experiences as one rather hoped. No control in the percipient. And the agent, frankly, became susceptible to unnamed horrors. As we well know, it will be several years before Schrenck-Notzing finally makes his true scientific reputation with an exhaustive study of the ectoplasm exuded by mediums (200 + photos) with the truly Schrenck-Notzingian title, Phenomena of Materialisation: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics - but to return to our percipient for a second, Fraulein … - that night she was lying in bed with her eyes closed when suddenly the room seemed to brighten, “and I felt compelled to open my eyes, seeing at the same time, as it appeared to me, the face of Baron Schrenck.” It was just the kind of thing Fraulein … would confide, the next day, to her dear friend, Fraulein Prieger, who as it happens went skating the next day with Baron Schrenk and spilled the beans.
Well, such a gothic intro to the dry subject of the structure of political parties! A little parapsychological Ringen, and one hopes the best for dear Fraulein …, a case history headed towards tragedy if you ask me. But LI simply liked the metaphoric richness of the relation between agent and percipient, which we are going to use to talk about the party, the working class, and the state when we get around to our next post on Lenin, who as it happens did write “ What is to be Done” in Munich, while he signed his letters with the name Petrov and received all communications at Gabelsbergerstrasse 20a, München.
Meanwhile, a man is concentrated out in the parking lot on LI’s window. And my room is filled with light…
Thursday, November 16, 2006
what is to be done?
I was reading the chapter on Lenin in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State a couple of days ago. In that chapter, Scott compares Lenin to other modernist figures, and in particular Le Corbusier. Scott takes Lenin’s text, What is to be Done, as his starting point for discussing the organization of the Communist party as a classic modernist project: the use of military metaphors, a planning structure based on an elite command center, the distrust of spontaneity, the whole nine yards. But more than that, Scott compares Lenin’s notion, in 1903, that a party such as he envisions it, and only a party such as he envisions it, can really bring about a revolution, with what happened in 1917, when the spontaneity that Lenin believed to be doomed by its lack of goals and viable mechanisms actually did the task that the Bolsheviks couldn’t do in fifteen years – overthrew the Czar. Revolution, it turned out, was very different from Lenin had envisioned it.
Now what struck LI is that Lenin’s theory of the party is so closely associated with the Communist party that we don’t see how it actually is about… any party. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Fascist, Menshevik, Bolshevik – LI’s hunch is that the curiously little investigated thing, the party form, and its role in the twentieth century, should start with Lenin.
Anyway, we thought it would be good for a coupla posts. But first, we will begin with another figure, an associate of Weber’s, Robert Michels, who wrote the text book on the nature of the party in 1910, formulating the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’
Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism, teaching in Italy. But we are concerned with jut a few of his notions.
Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.
Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unezpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. LI would actually institutionalize gratitude in terms of favors. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that lead to the successful longevity of the representative – in other words, cost of entry goes up, the longer the representative endures in office, the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.
There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of fining itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”
The idea of an alliance is very important. Because the party is so often considered as an instrument, as something that is designed completely to accomplish a purpose, it is hard to see it standing for itself. It must stand for an idea, represent a class, an ethnic group, etc.
Which will get us to Lenin, in my next post, or some post soon.
Now what struck LI is that Lenin’s theory of the party is so closely associated with the Communist party that we don’t see how it actually is about… any party. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Fascist, Menshevik, Bolshevik – LI’s hunch is that the curiously little investigated thing, the party form, and its role in the twentieth century, should start with Lenin.
Anyway, we thought it would be good for a coupla posts. But first, we will begin with another figure, an associate of Weber’s, Robert Michels, who wrote the text book on the nature of the party in 1910, formulating the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’
Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism, teaching in Italy. But we are concerned with jut a few of his notions.
Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.
Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unezpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. LI would actually institutionalize gratitude in terms of favors. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that lead to the successful longevity of the representative – in other words, cost of entry goes up, the longer the representative endures in office, the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.
There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of fining itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”
The idea of an alliance is very important. Because the party is so often considered as an instrument, as something that is designed completely to accomplish a purpose, it is hard to see it standing for itself. It must stand for an idea, represent a class, an ethnic group, etc.
Which will get us to Lenin, in my next post, or some post soon.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
marie antoinette... maria stuart...ulrike...gudrun
uber "die Spielformen weiblicher Herrschaft, die am Ende alle in den Tod führen" –
“…over the forms of the play of feminine domination, which in the end leads to everybody’s death.”
The big deal about Coppola’s Marie Antoinette has passed – but I’d much prefer to see Jelenik’s new play: Ulrike Maria Stuart. The combination of Schiller’s play and the Ulrike Meinhof story (and I admit that I still have a bit of a thing for Ulrike Meinhof) sounds like an idea hatched in hell – where all the good theater comes from. The lines, at least the one’s quoted in the Spiegel review, are – for anyone who remembers the old New Left style (I remember, long ago in France, reading an Autonomen manifesto demanding that parents masturbate their children to lead them out of the toils of bourgeois repression – oh, that was a long, long time ago. Who knew the years of lead would turn into years and years of fool’s gold?) – of a champagne like, ticklish deliciousness. Here’s a lament from the “youth” of today:
"Ach, wie gerne hätten wir die repressiven ideologischen Apparate selber noch erlebt, doch diese Offensivposition gab's nur für dich, wir hatten nicht die Wahl."
That language, ripped directly from the dictionary of the Comintern directives and employed as though it were the everyday speech of the working masses, or as though Europa, circa 1976, were like Malraux’s Shanghai, 1929 – oh, I admit, I rather miss it. It is far more entertaining than the vulgate of biz inspirational speech that now stalks the tongues of the young.
Reading the Spiegel review does remind LI, though, of what Meinhof faced – the concatenation of pure media cant and hatred is still par for the course for the “radikal Links.” Maria Stuart, of course, stages the confrontation between two queens – Mary and Elizabeth – and Jelenik’s play apparently confronts Meinhof with her RAF rival, Gudrun Ensslin. Here’s a blast from the past – Ensslin’s communication of 5 June, 1970, after a liberation action – was this the torching of the stores? No, it was the jailbreak engineered, if such a precise word can be applied to such a sloppy procedure, by Meinhof and Baader.
Genossen von 883 - es hat keinen Zweck, den falschen Leuten das Richtige erklären zu wollen. Das haben wir lange genug gemacht. Die Baader-Befreiungs-Aktion haben wir nicht den intellektuellen Schwätzern, den Hosenscheißern, den Allesbesser-Wissern zu erklären, sondern den potentiell revolutionären Teilen des Volkes.
“There’s no point in explaining the correct action to the wrong (false) people. We’ve done that for long enough. We don’t have to explain the Baader-Liberation action to the yammerers, the one’s who shit in their pants, the know-it-alls, but to the potential revolutionary section of the people.”
Let’s scratchtapose here, without telling you why, to an article in Slate, today’s home of the know-it-alls and the ones who shit in their pants, although only at the thought of modifying NAFTA or something important like that. There was an article last week on the terror that stalks London (HOOODIIEES!) that perfectly represented our cocooned moment. Here’s how it begins:
“The other night, my girlfriend and I were sitting on the upper deck of one of London's bright red buses, staring out the window with the drowsiness of early evening, when we came to a lurching stop. Just then, six boys clambered up onto the second deck. They all wore hooded sweatshirts. The boys moved toward the back and began, in an exuberant way, to make a ruckus—shrieking, laughing, speaking in a peculiarly adolescent patois. There wasn't menace in their adolescent singsong, exactly, but its brazenness made their message clear: We own this bus. I gripped my girlfriend's hand. We stared stiffly forward, our lips tight, hoping that whatever the boys were saying didn't concern us.”
Can’t you just see the movie version? The boyfriend, who we’ll call Abba, separated from the girlfriend, who we’ll call Baba. The London evening coming down. Abba streaking through the streets in his new, 400 dollar trainers. Ah, every muscle strained. But then, cut to Baba, surrounded by the sinister hoodies, like the gang in Touch of Evil. They close in … and now they … and now they… oh, fiends in human form! They force her to drink whole milk, thus spoiling the whole gifted child soy program she was on! Goodby Harvard, hello Duke. Such is the violence of modern life. And poor Baba, how many years will it take her to get over the trauma! Abba himself will curse the shoestore where he got his trainers and go for a much more expensive pair, next time.
And yet, why did LI, reading this article of the true gated community angst end it humming:
When you’re a Jet
you’re a Jest all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dying daaaay!
“…over the forms of the play of feminine domination, which in the end leads to everybody’s death.”
The big deal about Coppola’s Marie Antoinette has passed – but I’d much prefer to see Jelenik’s new play: Ulrike Maria Stuart. The combination of Schiller’s play and the Ulrike Meinhof story (and I admit that I still have a bit of a thing for Ulrike Meinhof) sounds like an idea hatched in hell – where all the good theater comes from. The lines, at least the one’s quoted in the Spiegel review, are – for anyone who remembers the old New Left style (I remember, long ago in France, reading an Autonomen manifesto demanding that parents masturbate their children to lead them out of the toils of bourgeois repression – oh, that was a long, long time ago. Who knew the years of lead would turn into years and years of fool’s gold?) – of a champagne like, ticklish deliciousness. Here’s a lament from the “youth” of today:
"Ach, wie gerne hätten wir die repressiven ideologischen Apparate selber noch erlebt, doch diese Offensivposition gab's nur für dich, wir hatten nicht die Wahl."
That language, ripped directly from the dictionary of the Comintern directives and employed as though it were the everyday speech of the working masses, or as though Europa, circa 1976, were like Malraux’s Shanghai, 1929 – oh, I admit, I rather miss it. It is far more entertaining than the vulgate of biz inspirational speech that now stalks the tongues of the young.
Reading the Spiegel review does remind LI, though, of what Meinhof faced – the concatenation of pure media cant and hatred is still par for the course for the “radikal Links.” Maria Stuart, of course, stages the confrontation between two queens – Mary and Elizabeth – and Jelenik’s play apparently confronts Meinhof with her RAF rival, Gudrun Ensslin. Here’s a blast from the past – Ensslin’s communication of 5 June, 1970, after a liberation action – was this the torching of the stores? No, it was the jailbreak engineered, if such a precise word can be applied to such a sloppy procedure, by Meinhof and Baader.
Genossen von 883 - es hat keinen Zweck, den falschen Leuten das Richtige erklären zu wollen. Das haben wir lange genug gemacht. Die Baader-Befreiungs-Aktion haben wir nicht den intellektuellen Schwätzern, den Hosenscheißern, den Allesbesser-Wissern zu erklären, sondern den potentiell revolutionären Teilen des Volkes.
“There’s no point in explaining the correct action to the wrong (false) people. We’ve done that for long enough. We don’t have to explain the Baader-Liberation action to the yammerers, the one’s who shit in their pants, the know-it-alls, but to the potential revolutionary section of the people.”
Let’s scratchtapose here, without telling you why, to an article in Slate, today’s home of the know-it-alls and the ones who shit in their pants, although only at the thought of modifying NAFTA or something important like that. There was an article last week on the terror that stalks London (HOOODIIEES!) that perfectly represented our cocooned moment. Here’s how it begins:
“The other night, my girlfriend and I were sitting on the upper deck of one of London's bright red buses, staring out the window with the drowsiness of early evening, when we came to a lurching stop. Just then, six boys clambered up onto the second deck. They all wore hooded sweatshirts. The boys moved toward the back and began, in an exuberant way, to make a ruckus—shrieking, laughing, speaking in a peculiarly adolescent patois. There wasn't menace in their adolescent singsong, exactly, but its brazenness made their message clear: We own this bus. I gripped my girlfriend's hand. We stared stiffly forward, our lips tight, hoping that whatever the boys were saying didn't concern us.”
Can’t you just see the movie version? The boyfriend, who we’ll call Abba, separated from the girlfriend, who we’ll call Baba. The London evening coming down. Abba streaking through the streets in his new, 400 dollar trainers. Ah, every muscle strained. But then, cut to Baba, surrounded by the sinister hoodies, like the gang in Touch of Evil. They close in … and now they … and now they… oh, fiends in human form! They force her to drink whole milk, thus spoiling the whole gifted child soy program she was on! Goodby Harvard, hello Duke. Such is the violence of modern life. And poor Baba, how many years will it take her to get over the trauma! Abba himself will curse the shoestore where he got his trainers and go for a much more expensive pair, next time.
And yet, why did LI, reading this article of the true gated community angst end it humming:
When you’re a Jet
you’re a Jest all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dying daaaay!
One more thing, ahem
Gay Talese, at the below mentioned conference, said something that irritated me. It wasn’t his fault, really – the zeitgeist filled his mouth. He said he considered himself a story-teller. He said everybody has a story. He gestured ecumenically and said, there are hundreds of stories in this room.
Excuse me, but I can’t fucking stand this holy gargling around the word story. In truth, we don’t all have stories at all. Mostly, we have rumors. We are rumors to ourselves. Countless times, I have heard a person with whom I shared experience x tell a third party about x and censor, distort, exaggerate, and in general leave such a patchwork impression of the experience as might be admired by an old Marseillaise street of gossiping fishwives. And that isn’t even going into the major flaws with logic and continuity by which one sequence fits into the other in the ‘story’ of one’s life, as told by the lucky auto in the autobiography. Janet Malcolm made the point long ago in her book, In the Freud Archives, that those who really do live as though they were in a novel are those who most need psychoanalysis. To have a prayer of living a normal life, these folks need to be reduced to bearers of their own rumor. Then they can be safely ensconced in the suburbs.
Now, at one time, LI would have taken the kneejerk stance that it is far better to live as though in a novel than to live as though in some ADD fantasy. We would have claimed that psycho-therapy is the white magic of white magic. But LI has mellowed. LI thinks that it is all too easy and irresponsible to urge the wounded to go into battle. I suspect my own living-in-my-movie has done me a lot of harm: made me less loving and loved, lonelier, less powerful, less generous.
So: no romantic stance here for LI, no climbing the battlements. But I am saying: enough already with the story bullshit.
Stories cost. Stories exact a large price. Stories take the pound of flesh just for an entrée. The cutsification of the story is absurd – like trying to make a pet out of a river born parasitic worm that lays its eggs in the human brain.
Excuse me, but I can’t fucking stand this holy gargling around the word story. In truth, we don’t all have stories at all. Mostly, we have rumors. We are rumors to ourselves. Countless times, I have heard a person with whom I shared experience x tell a third party about x and censor, distort, exaggerate, and in general leave such a patchwork impression of the experience as might be admired by an old Marseillaise street of gossiping fishwives. And that isn’t even going into the major flaws with logic and continuity by which one sequence fits into the other in the ‘story’ of one’s life, as told by the lucky auto in the autobiography. Janet Malcolm made the point long ago in her book, In the Freud Archives, that those who really do live as though they were in a novel are those who most need psychoanalysis. To have a prayer of living a normal life, these folks need to be reduced to bearers of their own rumor. Then they can be safely ensconced in the suburbs.
Now, at one time, LI would have taken the kneejerk stance that it is far better to live as though in a novel than to live as though in some ADD fantasy. We would have claimed that psycho-therapy is the white magic of white magic. But LI has mellowed. LI thinks that it is all too easy and irresponsible to urge the wounded to go into battle. I suspect my own living-in-my-movie has done me a lot of harm: made me less loving and loved, lonelier, less powerful, less generous.
So: no romantic stance here for LI, no climbing the battlements. But I am saying: enough already with the story bullshit.
Stories cost. Stories exact a large price. Stories take the pound of flesh just for an entrée. The cutsification of the story is absurd – like trying to make a pet out of a river born parasitic worm that lays its eggs in the human brain.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Further adventures at the Mailer conference.
Well, LI’s headache got a better offer from a better head, one with a Pacific coast view, the sauna, the cable tv, a lot more sex to at least vicariously control, and so it moved away.
So now I will say one more thing about the Mailer conference.
I didn’t catch most of the conference, which started last Thursday. This is because I have had work – work! – due to my name being spread by former clients like IT, Lei and Silja. If this keeps up, I might be able to afford to get a new boom box to replace my recently deceased stereo. So the one conference panel I did observe was the last one. Three academics spoke, and the MC was Morris Dickstein, who looked like the Gates of Eden was a long time ago.
So okay. Question time. One question about Mailer’s technophobia. This was mulled around by the panel without any theme emerging. Then the eager guy sitting next to me – Robert Boyer, the editor of Salmagundi – made the comment that though Mailer criticized technology, he benefited from it enormously: tv, the paperback revolution, etc. He sat down with a smile on his face and all the other academics smiled too. Oh, it was lovely, an academic gotcha moment. And on that note the conference dissolved.
And that would have been cool, except: Boyer’s comment was entirely dumb. Mailer’s technophobia was not just a longing for arts and crafts, but wound into the politics of his entire oeuvre. And the point of it was dialectical. The point of it was that WWII had shown the world just how vulnerable all the modern systems were – and the following global Cold War system responded to that by a double movement – on the one hand, the system‘s polar powers tried to trump their vulnerability by threatening ever greater destruction, embodied by ever more missiles, aimed at each other – and on the other hand, within the system, the attempt was made to lessen individual vulnerability – whether due to race, sex or economic status. Technology was the common element shared by both ends of this double movement, which is how entrenched power - the system's beneficiaries - could promise invulnerability while producing, at the extreme of the system, ever greater vulnerability – vulnerability on a planet-wide scale. That was the demonic pact – in Mailer’s terms. Mailer’s conservativism consists in maintaining the badness of the devil and the goodness of God. LI would reverse that – the Cold War system, in which we still live, is one of white magic, with the devil being the joker and the only way out of the contradiction that Nobodaddy generated, and that now threaten to destroy it.
In any case, the point isn’t that technology is bad, but that it exists as part of a system and as a promoter of attitudes. The great hope of liberal society is that individuals, freed from the contingent vulnerabilities of scarcity and history, will use that freedom to risk their existences on a higher level. That, in fact, one can create a society that makes possible human generosity. Gives everyone their own movie music and large gestures. The great social fact of the sixties and seventies, however, is that mass adventurousness scares the shit out of the governing class, which then does everything it can to suppress it: drug laws, massive increases in prison building, the creation of an institutional architecture, an educational system that instills the message that one’s life is about, ultimately, making money. The system, Mailer was correct to feel, was slowly destroying other areas of life beyond the prudential – undermining and demonizing the adventurous moment, the moment of chosen risks, the moment of beauty. And this was at the heart of Mailer’s notion that the tool that created tools – technology – was making life less vulnerable by making life less honorable.
Of course, the backlash that started in 1980 was about making life within the system more risky for some and at the same time embedding in more areas of life the economic connection between the destructive technology at the periphery of the system and life within the system. The present administration, trying to both destroy social security and create a long, expensive, vague war, is following that logic to the letter. At the same time, the environment that has borne the cost of the technological system – absorbed the infinite wastes of it, as though those wastes were not a cost – is finally reaching a point of comparative no return. The gamble of creating nations that are armed to the point that they could, theoretically, eliminate humanity has produced a mindset in which the planet’s life is carelessly pissed away so that we can buy the kids the Hummer for the graduation present. Never has such a large disaster come about through such puissant motives.
But while this happens, we can sit around and find Mailer’s gotcha moment – that paperback revolution! tv! jerking off the Black Hole until it finally responds – and that response won’t be pretty.
So now I will say one more thing about the Mailer conference.
I didn’t catch most of the conference, which started last Thursday. This is because I have had work – work! – due to my name being spread by former clients like IT, Lei and Silja. If this keeps up, I might be able to afford to get a new boom box to replace my recently deceased stereo. So the one conference panel I did observe was the last one. Three academics spoke, and the MC was Morris Dickstein, who looked like the Gates of Eden was a long time ago.
So okay. Question time. One question about Mailer’s technophobia. This was mulled around by the panel without any theme emerging. Then the eager guy sitting next to me – Robert Boyer, the editor of Salmagundi – made the comment that though Mailer criticized technology, he benefited from it enormously: tv, the paperback revolution, etc. He sat down with a smile on his face and all the other academics smiled too. Oh, it was lovely, an academic gotcha moment. And on that note the conference dissolved.
And that would have been cool, except: Boyer’s comment was entirely dumb. Mailer’s technophobia was not just a longing for arts and crafts, but wound into the politics of his entire oeuvre. And the point of it was dialectical. The point of it was that WWII had shown the world just how vulnerable all the modern systems were – and the following global Cold War system responded to that by a double movement – on the one hand, the system‘s polar powers tried to trump their vulnerability by threatening ever greater destruction, embodied by ever more missiles, aimed at each other – and on the other hand, within the system, the attempt was made to lessen individual vulnerability – whether due to race, sex or economic status. Technology was the common element shared by both ends of this double movement, which is how entrenched power - the system's beneficiaries - could promise invulnerability while producing, at the extreme of the system, ever greater vulnerability – vulnerability on a planet-wide scale. That was the demonic pact – in Mailer’s terms. Mailer’s conservativism consists in maintaining the badness of the devil and the goodness of God. LI would reverse that – the Cold War system, in which we still live, is one of white magic, with the devil being the joker and the only way out of the contradiction that Nobodaddy generated, and that now threaten to destroy it.
In any case, the point isn’t that technology is bad, but that it exists as part of a system and as a promoter of attitudes. The great hope of liberal society is that individuals, freed from the contingent vulnerabilities of scarcity and history, will use that freedom to risk their existences on a higher level. That, in fact, one can create a society that makes possible human generosity. Gives everyone their own movie music and large gestures. The great social fact of the sixties and seventies, however, is that mass adventurousness scares the shit out of the governing class, which then does everything it can to suppress it: drug laws, massive increases in prison building, the creation of an institutional architecture, an educational system that instills the message that one’s life is about, ultimately, making money. The system, Mailer was correct to feel, was slowly destroying other areas of life beyond the prudential – undermining and demonizing the adventurous moment, the moment of chosen risks, the moment of beauty. And this was at the heart of Mailer’s notion that the tool that created tools – technology – was making life less vulnerable by making life less honorable.
Of course, the backlash that started in 1980 was about making life within the system more risky for some and at the same time embedding in more areas of life the economic connection between the destructive technology at the periphery of the system and life within the system. The present administration, trying to both destroy social security and create a long, expensive, vague war, is following that logic to the letter. At the same time, the environment that has borne the cost of the technological system – absorbed the infinite wastes of it, as though those wastes were not a cost – is finally reaching a point of comparative no return. The gamble of creating nations that are armed to the point that they could, theoretically, eliminate humanity has produced a mindset in which the planet’s life is carelessly pissed away so that we can buy the kids the Hummer for the graduation present. Never has such a large disaster come about through such puissant motives.
But while this happens, we can sit around and find Mailer’s gotcha moment – that paperback revolution! tv! jerking off the Black Hole until it finally responds – and that response won’t be pretty.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
yesterday - Mailer day
LI has an enormous headache – one of those headaches with its own address, utilities and telephone number – so my post today, which was going to be all about how I got to see Norman Mailer speak, yesterday (hooray!) and how I finished my damning review of Pynchon’s new novel (sob) is going to have to be truncated. Suffice it to say that, about the latter, I finished that review with the feeling of the crippled lawyer in Lady From Shanghai, who tracks down his wife, Rita Hayworth, in the Mirror Fun House and calls out to her hundred fold reflected image – Lovah, are you aiming that gun at me? Cause I’m sure aiming this gun at you. Of course, to kill you is to kill myself – but I’m getting tired of the both of us. - My codex to the Planet Mars, Gravity’s Rainbow, that great black magic book about white magic, i.e. the Good War, is still high up there as one of the novel’s I most admire. Alas, Against the Day is the dissolution, a barbaric yawp turned into a barbaric yawn. Lovah, are you aiming that gun at me…?
Well, the Mailer symposium at the HRC this week brought together all the once young dudes, who dutifully roll the sixties up the hill until it rolls down again like academic Sisyphi – such as Morris Dickstein – and then for the piece de resistance, the man himself, with – on his left side – his go to guy, Larry Schiller (who is still the guy who sold the pics of Marilyn Monroe dead – he still visibly carries the air of a man who would sell his grandma if it would get him into the news, especially if his grandma had just committed a hatchet murder) and the elegantly suited and perpetually confused Gay Talese on his right. Mailer was totally cool – his belly gone, the arms thin, the eyebrows needing plucking, but still having the devil’s grin in him enough to read an elaborate passage about Hitler’s parents 69ing to the assembled Austin gentry. Speaking of which, the woman in front of me, mistaking me for someone more important (hey, this Joan of Arc haircut is really working out for LI!) told me a story about how she had, indeed, made the mistake of having a fundraiser for Kinky Friedman back in March, but never would have thought he’d become such a jackass, and had sent out a mailing just last week calling on her friends to vote for Bell – but that K.F.’s campaign manager, sitting right before her, had just told her, as though it were the best news, that Governor Perry (the dropped on his head Republican who announced, halfway through his campaign, that non-Christians would go to hell – but graciously declined to make them pay higher taxes if they behaved themselves in his state) had apparently invited K.F. to work with him – on what, God only knows.
Mailer quoted the Trotsky epigram about how to use the press: you can know the truth by comparing the lies, talked about his own way of ‘reporting’, and in general was cushioned by our universal affection. Sincere affection, too. I was happier to actually see Mailer in person than I would be to see… well, almost anyone else.
Well, the Mailer symposium at the HRC this week brought together all the once young dudes, who dutifully roll the sixties up the hill until it rolls down again like academic Sisyphi – such as Morris Dickstein – and then for the piece de resistance, the man himself, with – on his left side – his go to guy, Larry Schiller (who is still the guy who sold the pics of Marilyn Monroe dead – he still visibly carries the air of a man who would sell his grandma if it would get him into the news, especially if his grandma had just committed a hatchet murder) and the elegantly suited and perpetually confused Gay Talese on his right. Mailer was totally cool – his belly gone, the arms thin, the eyebrows needing plucking, but still having the devil’s grin in him enough to read an elaborate passage about Hitler’s parents 69ing to the assembled Austin gentry. Speaking of which, the woman in front of me, mistaking me for someone more important (hey, this Joan of Arc haircut is really working out for LI!) told me a story about how she had, indeed, made the mistake of having a fundraiser for Kinky Friedman back in March, but never would have thought he’d become such a jackass, and had sent out a mailing just last week calling on her friends to vote for Bell – but that K.F.’s campaign manager, sitting right before her, had just told her, as though it were the best news, that Governor Perry (the dropped on his head Republican who announced, halfway through his campaign, that non-Christians would go to hell – but graciously declined to make them pay higher taxes if they behaved themselves in his state) had apparently invited K.F. to work with him – on what, God only knows.
Mailer quoted the Trotsky epigram about how to use the press: you can know the truth by comparing the lies, talked about his own way of ‘reporting’, and in general was cushioned by our universal affection. Sincere affection, too. I was happier to actually see Mailer in person than I would be to see… well, almost anyone else.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
the suicides' cemetery
Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
In the Edwardian age, when the American tourist went to Europe, he or she was sure to take in the suicides’ cemetery in Monte Carlo. The story was that the population of the place was well prepared for suicide. A shot would be heard, certain figures would appear, the body would be disposed of. In John Polson’s decently shocked Monaco and its Gaming Tables, from 1902, cites a typical story is cited from a Menton newspaper:
Another gambling victim
Le Patriote Metonnais, dans son dernier numero, publie le terrible drame suivant qui happened Tuesday evening:
“A man with haggard eyes, and an upset countenance, came out of the gambling hall saying: I am lost, I have nothing more to do than die! I lost two hundred thousand france.”
The Casino guards sought to calm him, but the sad fellow wouldn’t listen to them, and coming upon the great staircase, he took a revolver out of his pocket and blew his brains out.
Some personnel arrived quickly to clean away the blood, and the gambling and ruin continued.”
Matilda Betham-Edwards – the very name comes to us through a heavy chintz cloud of couture, the rustle of all of those chaperones in the Henry James novels – in her France of Today (1894) gives her readers some sage advice:
The traveler … is advised to take the train to Monaco, and, arrived at the little station, whisper his errand in the cab-driver’s ear, “To the suicides’ cemetery.”
Once you get there, you see first the public cemetery – which Betham-Edwards informs us is not really up to American standards … and then – “quite apart from this vast burial ground, on the other side of the main entrance, is a small enclosure, walled in and having a gate of open iron work always locked. Here, in close proximity to heaps of garden rubbish, broken bottles and other refuse, rest the suicides of Monte Carlo, buried by the parish gravedigger, without funeral and without any kind of religious ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright piece of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots.”
But if the Americans, as usual, found that the seductive rumors of wickedness led to a dreary corner of broken bottles and nameless graveplots, the Russians found Monte Carlo much more thought provoking. Chekhov was so impressed with the gambling halls that he wrote home that he would like to spend a year simply gambling there. “This charming Monte Carlo is extremely like a fine… den of thieves. The suicide of losers is quite a regular thing.” Chekhov was as impressed by the expensive restaurants. ‘Every morsel is rigged out with lots of artichokes, truffles, and nightingales’ tongues of all sorts. And, good Lord! how contemptible and loathsome this life is with its artichokes, its palms, and its smell of orange blossoms! I love wealth and luxury, but the luxury here, the luxyry of the gambling saloon, reminds one of a luxurious water-closet.”
Chekhov’s hope that maybe someone could loser would blow his brains out right before Chekhov’s eyes is, of course, typical of the writer’s secret desire of being in the neighborhood when myth condenses into fact. Of course, there was more than just Puritanism plugging the suicides story – there was Nice, competing for tourists with Monaco, that emphasized the suicide angle every chance it got. But the suicide angle was not only a lesson about loss – there was a hidden lesson about capitalism as well. George Hole’s tourist book, Nice and her Neighbors, written two years after Marx visited Monte Carlo in 1882 (not, of course, that Hole had the faintest idea of Marx) recounts a conversation in a train with some young man who won 35 francs – and the remark of another man in the compartment that the winning of thirty pieces of silver has an evil sound: ‘A poor ruined gambler shot himself the other night in the grounds of Monte Carlo. I hope it was not his money you won, for, if so, it was the price of blood.” But one thing about money – the stain of blood wears off remarkably quickly.
Well, of course, for LI the suicides cemetery, with its numbers, stakes, and garbage, and its mythical status, and the cut throat of pure repetition quickly cleaned up by the help, is an allegory for…
Well, I’ll get to that later. One of these days.
In the Edwardian age, when the American tourist went to Europe, he or she was sure to take in the suicides’ cemetery in Monte Carlo. The story was that the population of the place was well prepared for suicide. A shot would be heard, certain figures would appear, the body would be disposed of. In John Polson’s decently shocked Monaco and its Gaming Tables, from 1902, cites a typical story is cited from a Menton newspaper:
Another gambling victim
Le Patriote Metonnais, dans son dernier numero, publie le terrible drame suivant qui happened Tuesday evening:
“A man with haggard eyes, and an upset countenance, came out of the gambling hall saying: I am lost, I have nothing more to do than die! I lost two hundred thousand france.”
The Casino guards sought to calm him, but the sad fellow wouldn’t listen to them, and coming upon the great staircase, he took a revolver out of his pocket and blew his brains out.
Some personnel arrived quickly to clean away the blood, and the gambling and ruin continued.”
Matilda Betham-Edwards – the very name comes to us through a heavy chintz cloud of couture, the rustle of all of those chaperones in the Henry James novels – in her France of Today (1894) gives her readers some sage advice:
The traveler … is advised to take the train to Monaco, and, arrived at the little station, whisper his errand in the cab-driver’s ear, “To the suicides’ cemetery.”
Once you get there, you see first the public cemetery – which Betham-Edwards informs us is not really up to American standards … and then – “quite apart from this vast burial ground, on the other side of the main entrance, is a small enclosure, walled in and having a gate of open iron work always locked. Here, in close proximity to heaps of garden rubbish, broken bottles and other refuse, rest the suicides of Monte Carlo, buried by the parish gravedigger, without funeral and without any kind of religious ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright piece of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots.”
But if the Americans, as usual, found that the seductive rumors of wickedness led to a dreary corner of broken bottles and nameless graveplots, the Russians found Monte Carlo much more thought provoking. Chekhov was so impressed with the gambling halls that he wrote home that he would like to spend a year simply gambling there. “This charming Monte Carlo is extremely like a fine… den of thieves. The suicide of losers is quite a regular thing.” Chekhov was as impressed by the expensive restaurants. ‘Every morsel is rigged out with lots of artichokes, truffles, and nightingales’ tongues of all sorts. And, good Lord! how contemptible and loathsome this life is with its artichokes, its palms, and its smell of orange blossoms! I love wealth and luxury, but the luxury here, the luxyry of the gambling saloon, reminds one of a luxurious water-closet.”
Chekhov’s hope that maybe someone could loser would blow his brains out right before Chekhov’s eyes is, of course, typical of the writer’s secret desire of being in the neighborhood when myth condenses into fact. Of course, there was more than just Puritanism plugging the suicides story – there was Nice, competing for tourists with Monaco, that emphasized the suicide angle every chance it got. But the suicide angle was not only a lesson about loss – there was a hidden lesson about capitalism as well. George Hole’s tourist book, Nice and her Neighbors, written two years after Marx visited Monte Carlo in 1882 (not, of course, that Hole had the faintest idea of Marx) recounts a conversation in a train with some young man who won 35 francs – and the remark of another man in the compartment that the winning of thirty pieces of silver has an evil sound: ‘A poor ruined gambler shot himself the other night in the grounds of Monte Carlo. I hope it was not his money you won, for, if so, it was the price of blood.” But one thing about money – the stain of blood wears off remarkably quickly.
Well, of course, for LI the suicides cemetery, with its numbers, stakes, and garbage, and its mythical status, and the cut throat of pure repetition quickly cleaned up by the help, is an allegory for…
Well, I’ll get to that later. One of these days.
Friday, November 10, 2006
elegy for the unibomber
Last night I was tired, so I dropped in at Waterloo’s for a drink and a bite. There was a boy band playing there – all pretty boys of @ 18-20 in age. Blond hair, rosy skin, perfect teeth, oh the excellent line of credit that had gone into their making, playing C & W about a quite other life of drinking and the degrading frisks of Eros in dubious locales. They all played well, and sang enthusiastically. The parents of one of the musicians were sitting there, with the Mom quite happily bobbing her head to it all. As I sat there and watched, the family of another of the singers came in, with two seventeen year old girls at that stalky, shoulders up age, and one of them happily flashed a smile at the group of singers, which the boys then industriously pretended not to see. A minute later through the entrance trooped three other boys, around 20 or so, wearing U.T. shirts and looking vaguely fraternity-ish, and the group immediately came to life, the singer giving them a happy shout out. Their buds were here! Validation!
And I thought, Freud had it so wrong. The interminably unanswered question is: what do males want?
That war is an organizing principle above the structures of the state has everything to do with male desire, the joker in the human pack, begging for it knows not what and quick to anger and long melancholic years when it doesn’t get it.
But… I don’t have time to go into this at the moment. Must get to work!
Oh, and the picture up there at the top of this post is my friend D., who raised me from a pup. D. is presently working on a masterpiece that crosses the boundaries of all medias and in fact pours gasoline on them and tops it off with a lit match entitled, Elegy for the Unibomber.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
That was quick! Conventional Wisdom continues walking off the cliff in Iraq
Now that the electorate has clearly spoken, it is time for the second phase to kick in. In this phase, D.C. Court society resolutely misinterprets or lies about what they said, thus allowing themselves to continue to be centrists (which is a compound of being for hollowing out Social Security via a fleabag sleight of hand trick and resolutely supporting the continuing influx of defense spending to swell D.C.’S real estate prices and steak dinner prices). The Washington Post has done a particularly excellent job in this regard, coming out with stories about how all of the Iraqis now fear the withdrawal of American support, which derives from talking to a handful of American paid Iraqi parasites and ignoring what is said in Iraq’s papers, for instance – for a rundown of which, see Juan Cole.
But to really see the genius mind of Conventional Wisdom at work, LI urges readers to go to the Q and A with WP’s politics journalist, Michael Fletcher. It is a piece of art not unlike Keat’s ode to a Grecian Urn, if that Urn were a tin chamber pot in which reposed the collected excreta of WP’s op ed belligeranti:
“New Haven, Conn.: Fletcher:
I still don't see a mandate from these elections, and I still don't see people clamoring for a troop withdrawl. This war is winable, so what if the President got rid of the Secty of Defense? He needed another quarterback, and history is filled with this happening. Why are Demcocrats acting as this is "proof" of something?
Michael Fletcher: I don't know that Democrats are acting as if Rumsfeld's removal is "proof" of anything. And exit polls found something like a third of voters want to withdraw from Iraq now--something that, of course, does not seem to be in the cards. The only proof evident in Rumsfeld's removal, to me, seems to be that the laws of gravity apply to the Bush administration as they do to everything else. The president has long ignored the clamor to remove Rumsfeld. But now he has. And he's replaced him with someone with more of a reputation for consensus building. So that's something.”
…
“New Haven: Over 55% of the electorate, according to exit polls favors withdrawing SOME or ALL troops. Even in Montana, 50% favors withdrawing SOME or ALL.
Michael Fletcher: Fair enough. I should have said about a third of voters favored immediate withdrawal of all troops. But either way, I doubt that either option is in the cards right now.”
Of course not. Once you have fucked up on the higher level, the course is clear. You go back to the teacher again and again. You point out how this is going to hurt your grade average. You show that in other classes, you got such high scores that the school paid your cocaine bill. And then you threaten.
The reality principle is about the fact that American soldiers will remain there and die and do nothing. Or rather, they will contribute to the killing of tens of thousands of more Iraqis, but these deaths will be in vain. Just as the American deaths will be in vain. Even Chalabi and the Meatman himself, Saddam Hussein, have figured out that the only course in Iraq at the moment is negotiations between all parties. You don’t have to read Thomas Hobbes to know that security is the foundation of any state – if you can’t go outside, you have entered a death spiral indifferent to the ideological labels you give it. But the Fletchers of D.C. are going to throw many more bodies – just not their own – into the death spiral:
“Huntington Beach, Calif.: I may be in a minority, but I think this election hurts McCain's chances in 2008. He is calling for MORE troops. Considering the mood of the electorate, I think that attitude is a non-starter. Giuliani is too liberal for the GOP. I think the money on that side is on Mitt Romney. Your thoughts?
Michael Fletcher: I think it's too early to say. What if more troops were sent and they were able to quell the insurgency and other bloodshed, however unlikely that may seem?”
Ah, always bet on the horse with the outside chance – especially if it has three legs and rickets. That’s why the Fletchers of the world are where they are, while the measly 55 percentile is laughable. What do those people know about world affairs?
But to really see the genius mind of Conventional Wisdom at work, LI urges readers to go to the Q and A with WP’s politics journalist, Michael Fletcher. It is a piece of art not unlike Keat’s ode to a Grecian Urn, if that Urn were a tin chamber pot in which reposed the collected excreta of WP’s op ed belligeranti:
“New Haven, Conn.: Fletcher:
I still don't see a mandate from these elections, and I still don't see people clamoring for a troop withdrawl. This war is winable, so what if the President got rid of the Secty of Defense? He needed another quarterback, and history is filled with this happening. Why are Demcocrats acting as this is "proof" of something?
Michael Fletcher: I don't know that Democrats are acting as if Rumsfeld's removal is "proof" of anything. And exit polls found something like a third of voters want to withdraw from Iraq now--something that, of course, does not seem to be in the cards. The only proof evident in Rumsfeld's removal, to me, seems to be that the laws of gravity apply to the Bush administration as they do to everything else. The president has long ignored the clamor to remove Rumsfeld. But now he has. And he's replaced him with someone with more of a reputation for consensus building. So that's something.”
…
“New Haven: Over 55% of the electorate, according to exit polls favors withdrawing SOME or ALL troops. Even in Montana, 50% favors withdrawing SOME or ALL.
Michael Fletcher: Fair enough. I should have said about a third of voters favored immediate withdrawal of all troops. But either way, I doubt that either option is in the cards right now.”
Of course not. Once you have fucked up on the higher level, the course is clear. You go back to the teacher again and again. You point out how this is going to hurt your grade average. You show that in other classes, you got such high scores that the school paid your cocaine bill. And then you threaten.
The reality principle is about the fact that American soldiers will remain there and die and do nothing. Or rather, they will contribute to the killing of tens of thousands of more Iraqis, but these deaths will be in vain. Just as the American deaths will be in vain. Even Chalabi and the Meatman himself, Saddam Hussein, have figured out that the only course in Iraq at the moment is negotiations between all parties. You don’t have to read Thomas Hobbes to know that security is the foundation of any state – if you can’t go outside, you have entered a death spiral indifferent to the ideological labels you give it. But the Fletchers of D.C. are going to throw many more bodies – just not their own – into the death spiral:
“Huntington Beach, Calif.: I may be in a minority, but I think this election hurts McCain's chances in 2008. He is calling for MORE troops. Considering the mood of the electorate, I think that attitude is a non-starter. Giuliani is too liberal for the GOP. I think the money on that side is on Mitt Romney. Your thoughts?
Michael Fletcher: I think it's too early to say. What if more troops were sent and they were able to quell the insurgency and other bloodshed, however unlikely that may seem?”
Ah, always bet on the horse with the outside chance – especially if it has three legs and rickets. That’s why the Fletchers of the world are where they are, while the measly 55 percentile is laughable. What do those people know about world affairs?
the superannuated apocalypse now
LI talked with his brother, who is doing a job in a hotel in Florida with his other brother, tonight. I thought I’d lay my latest rap on him, but he found it unlikely. Actually, my bro was oddly out of the loop about this election – he’s feeling rather burned about America in general. But anyway, I told him that the Dems had won, and this and that and the other thing, and then we talked about Rumsfeld resigning and Gates taking his place.
That’s when I proposed that this was obviously a superannuated version of Apocalypse Now. The vanity war has made some folks some money, and they had to give it to Jr – he wanted a war – to get what they wanted. But the tax cuts and the legal restructuring of things like the bankruptcy law and environmental regulation are so yesterday’s news, and the damned vanity war is starting to upset people. Good contractor money there, but now we are coming down to dribs and drabs. And we are definitely going to have to pony up for Schumer to avoid major investigations of where that money went to or what it bought.
So Gates has a mission. He has one more mission. He has to go up the river again and he has to tell Jr. that the vanity war has to wind down. He has to convey that the message isn’t just that his father is concerned. Sure, his father is always fucking concerned. The message is that other people are concerned. Other people are saying that it is time to shut down this particular operation because, frankly, there’s nothing more to wring out of it. It is like, we need a new model war at least. Something quicker, something that won’t take up so much shelf space. Guys are getting restless. Nobody is saying stripping away that dividend tax wasn’t fucking manna from the Gods. Nobody is saying Jr. has let them down. And everybody knows that Jr. wanted his own war and he worked for it, and haven’t they been like supernice to give it to him? And everybody appreciates trying to pull the old pump and dump scheme with Social Security. But for example. Why didn’t the doggies eat the poisoned dog food? Maybe they are getting spooked with this fucking war for no reason. Is what guys are saying. And so Gates has to go up there, he has to reason with Jr. He has to go by the heads on the poles in the yard – there’s Colin Powell, there’s the fucker from Alcoa, Secretary of Treasury, what’shisname, and there’s 650,000 creepy Iraqis. Jr.’s sitting there, at first Gates is thinking shit, he’s going to read to me from Eliot and there’s going to be copyright problems with this movie and I am liable up to my ass, but no, its from the Stranger. It’s, Jr. says, French. The native woman he’s shacked up with, she gives him a French book. Do you read French, Gates, Jr. says and Gates doesn't know if this conversation is really about French. Gates only knows that everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
And of course Jr. says, it’s my war. He says, Dad got his fucking war. He got his fucking missiles. Missiles like with nuclear stuff in them. So uberdangerous we were all supposed to piss our pants. That's the great George Bush for you. He’s never home, then he comes home, oh, let's move to D.C. and play Vice President, and then he’s all president and shit, and then he doesn’t even keep it. He doesn’t even know how to keep it, Gates. I stole it, okay? I did that. Me. Well, the boys helped me do that. But at least then I kept it. They love me. And he’s telling me what to do? Me? And of course Gates is thinking of the last time he talked to Condi, and how she said, What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man! And Gates has to buckled down, he has to breathe out, let’s do it, he remembers Sr saying he's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops, and so Gates says to him the guys are serious this time, Jr., and Jr is saying did they say why, Gates, why they want to terminate my command? Gate’s knows he has to go through with this dialogue:
Gates: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Jr: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Gates: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Jr: Are my methods unsound?
Gates: I don't see any method at all, sir.
At which point we definitely have to cue to:
“The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...fuck you”
But my brother didn’t buy any of it.
That’s when I proposed that this was obviously a superannuated version of Apocalypse Now. The vanity war has made some folks some money, and they had to give it to Jr – he wanted a war – to get what they wanted. But the tax cuts and the legal restructuring of things like the bankruptcy law and environmental regulation are so yesterday’s news, and the damned vanity war is starting to upset people. Good contractor money there, but now we are coming down to dribs and drabs. And we are definitely going to have to pony up for Schumer to avoid major investigations of where that money went to or what it bought.
So Gates has a mission. He has one more mission. He has to go up the river again and he has to tell Jr. that the vanity war has to wind down. He has to convey that the message isn’t just that his father is concerned. Sure, his father is always fucking concerned. The message is that other people are concerned. Other people are saying that it is time to shut down this particular operation because, frankly, there’s nothing more to wring out of it. It is like, we need a new model war at least. Something quicker, something that won’t take up so much shelf space. Guys are getting restless. Nobody is saying stripping away that dividend tax wasn’t fucking manna from the Gods. Nobody is saying Jr. has let them down. And everybody knows that Jr. wanted his own war and he worked for it, and haven’t they been like supernice to give it to him? And everybody appreciates trying to pull the old pump and dump scheme with Social Security. But for example. Why didn’t the doggies eat the poisoned dog food? Maybe they are getting spooked with this fucking war for no reason. Is what guys are saying. And so Gates has to go up there, he has to reason with Jr. He has to go by the heads on the poles in the yard – there’s Colin Powell, there’s the fucker from Alcoa, Secretary of Treasury, what’shisname, and there’s 650,000 creepy Iraqis. Jr.’s sitting there, at first Gates is thinking shit, he’s going to read to me from Eliot and there’s going to be copyright problems with this movie and I am liable up to my ass, but no, its from the Stranger. It’s, Jr. says, French. The native woman he’s shacked up with, she gives him a French book. Do you read French, Gates, Jr. says and Gates doesn't know if this conversation is really about French. Gates only knows that everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.
And of course Jr. says, it’s my war. He says, Dad got his fucking war. He got his fucking missiles. Missiles like with nuclear stuff in them. So uberdangerous we were all supposed to piss our pants. That's the great George Bush for you. He’s never home, then he comes home, oh, let's move to D.C. and play Vice President, and then he’s all president and shit, and then he doesn’t even keep it. He doesn’t even know how to keep it, Gates. I stole it, okay? I did that. Me. Well, the boys helped me do that. But at least then I kept it. They love me. And he’s telling me what to do? Me? And of course Gates is thinking of the last time he talked to Condi, and how she said, What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man! And Gates has to buckled down, he has to breathe out, let’s do it, he remembers Sr saying he's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops, and so Gates says to him the guys are serious this time, Jr., and Jr is saying did they say why, Gates, why they want to terminate my command? Gate’s knows he has to go through with this dialogue:
Gates: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Jr: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Gates: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Jr: Are my methods unsound?
Gates: I don't see any method at all, sir.
At which point we definitely have to cue to:
“The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...fuck you”
But my brother didn’t buy any of it.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
the prophet jonah and his pet raven watch fox news
Readers of the Genealogy of Morals will remember Nietzsche’s quotes from Tertullian to the effect that one of the supreme pleasures of heaven will lie in watching the torments of the damned. In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the concept of ressentiment as the key to the slave uprising in morals:
"The slave uprising in morals begins with that fact that Ressentiment itself become creative and gives birth to values: Ressentiment is natural to those to whom real reaction, that of the act, is forbidden, and who can only keep themselves guiltless through an imaginary revenge."
Well, darlin’, isn’t that just LI? whose reactions have to be swallowed – along with blood and shit and poverty – in a truly indigestible bolus, caught as we are like one of nature's most unlucky passengers - a passenger pigeon, a bison - in a nation that seems hell bent on mass murder and the mortal fouling of the planet as it careens here and there, throwing unparalleled pelf in the way of unimaginably vulgar plutocrats. Our only the power is that of writing stuff – a power compounded of vocables and saliva, and not much different in kind than a Bronx cheer.
So it was a great pleasure to see the governing class given a great slap last night. I watched the returns at a friend’s house, and got to see names on actual tv, live. Now I know what Katie Couric and Ken Olberman sound like. I finally got to see a Colbert routine. And I got to see Fox election central, with the puzzling succession of news hosts – each looking more Martian than the other. Was it just the reception on that particular tv set, or has Fox discovered a whole new breed of Caucasion male - with a skin color like some outer space alloy and the eyes of a Manga nightmare?
I was pretty bummed about the Texas Governor’s race, which essentially dooms hundreds of thousands of kids to further misery as the testing shibboleth rolls over their organisms, and all for squat. But besides that result, which was pretty much a strangling foretold, the night went well.
When I got back home, I decided to follow Tertullian’s advice and my own deep slavish instincts, last night I made the rounds of the conservative blogs, wanting to hear the shrieks of the justly punished, the gnashing of teeth, the moans. But though I longed to rejoice in the pain of mine enemies – hey, give me his head and I’ll scrape the skin off to make a drinking cup of his fucking skull – I couldn’t, for some reason, warm myself here. LI would have made up exactly the same excuses, and have exactly the same idea that really, really my friends all my ideas are agreed to by a vast majority of Americans.
Well, of course they aren’t. Tough titty for the vast majority of Americans.
I can only hope that the Senate falls, and that finally some real oversight kicks in – although it is about 500 billion dollars late. If, as I suspect, next year will contain the impact from the end of the real estate bubble, the discontent with Iraq and the Bush ideology, with its caste system veneration of the wealthy, might suffer for it. I’m going to entertain a hope (why not?) that a sense of reality will actually dawn among the D.C. dregs, that talks with Iran will lead to recognition of Iran, that the U.S. will encourage all Iraqi factions to negotiate while withdrawing American troops, and that the trillion dollars earmarked for the military this year marks the crescendo of the atrocity orgy.
"The slave uprising in morals begins with that fact that Ressentiment itself become creative and gives birth to values: Ressentiment is natural to those to whom real reaction, that of the act, is forbidden, and who can only keep themselves guiltless through an imaginary revenge."
Well, darlin’, isn’t that just LI? whose reactions have to be swallowed – along with blood and shit and poverty – in a truly indigestible bolus, caught as we are like one of nature's most unlucky passengers - a passenger pigeon, a bison - in a nation that seems hell bent on mass murder and the mortal fouling of the planet as it careens here and there, throwing unparalleled pelf in the way of unimaginably vulgar plutocrats. Our only the power is that of writing stuff – a power compounded of vocables and saliva, and not much different in kind than a Bronx cheer.
So it was a great pleasure to see the governing class given a great slap last night. I watched the returns at a friend’s house, and got to see names on actual tv, live. Now I know what Katie Couric and Ken Olberman sound like. I finally got to see a Colbert routine. And I got to see Fox election central, with the puzzling succession of news hosts – each looking more Martian than the other. Was it just the reception on that particular tv set, or has Fox discovered a whole new breed of Caucasion male - with a skin color like some outer space alloy and the eyes of a Manga nightmare?
I was pretty bummed about the Texas Governor’s race, which essentially dooms hundreds of thousands of kids to further misery as the testing shibboleth rolls over their organisms, and all for squat. But besides that result, which was pretty much a strangling foretold, the night went well.
When I got back home, I decided to follow Tertullian’s advice and my own deep slavish instincts, last night I made the rounds of the conservative blogs, wanting to hear the shrieks of the justly punished, the gnashing of teeth, the moans. But though I longed to rejoice in the pain of mine enemies – hey, give me his head and I’ll scrape the skin off to make a drinking cup of his fucking skull – I couldn’t, for some reason, warm myself here. LI would have made up exactly the same excuses, and have exactly the same idea that really, really my friends all my ideas are agreed to by a vast majority of Americans.
Well, of course they aren’t. Tough titty for the vast majority of Americans.
I can only hope that the Senate falls, and that finally some real oversight kicks in – although it is about 500 billion dollars late. If, as I suspect, next year will contain the impact from the end of the real estate bubble, the discontent with Iraq and the Bush ideology, with its caste system veneration of the wealthy, might suffer for it. I’m going to entertain a hope (why not?) that a sense of reality will actually dawn among the D.C. dregs, that talks with Iran will lead to recognition of Iran, that the U.S. will encourage all Iraqi factions to negotiate while withdrawing American troops, and that the trillion dollars earmarked for the military this year marks the crescendo of the atrocity orgy.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
I want a good Daddy! and a Good Mommy!
There is a curious dream that is dreamt among my liberal brethren. Every election year it will be expressed, in a distressed tone of voice of a man invoking Miss Manners. In this dream, elections are not bloody things involving people, but rather, dressed up events involving earnest high school students debating the finer points of property tax law.
The NYT has an oped piece by Barry Schwartz that is as relentlessly programmatic in this respect as a clock is with regard to midnight and noon. First, of course, we begin with a lament about the election year party. This year, we asked everybody to bring healthful dishes and non-alcoholic beverages. We also tried to supply some hymn books and pamphlets on abstinence. But to no avail!
“SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- ANOTHER national election season has come to an end -- the sorriest, sleaziest, most disheartening and embarrassing in memory. The best one can hope for is a candidate who is a complete cipher. How has American electoral politics come to this?”
Sleaziness – as in actually looking up the records of the cut outs that we are going to send to Washington, D.C., on their all expense paid internship for various lobbying firms – is, contrary to the shocked Mr. Schwartz, not the problem with our system – it is the lack of willingness to be really sleazy. That is, to have a good, warts and all impression of the candidate, the kind of impression one has of one’s fellow employees. The system that doles out the power tries as hard as it can to deny us any glimpse into the backstage of its 24/7 impression management.
Schwartz illustrates the sad sadness of violating Mom’s rule (if you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say anything at all!) with a psychological study showing that positives and negatives stand out given changing instructions in the way we are to evaluate people (via a hypothetical child custody decision balancing the traits of Parent A and Parent B) - even though the list of negatives and positives are stable. Now, one would think that this would reconcile him to humanity’s perpetual need for sleaze – or at least make him curious about the arts by which we do gain our impressions of people, and how these are reflected in elections. But not Mr. Schwartz. He goes from telling us about human nature to urging us to forget human nature and to treat elections as a technocrat would treat putting together a toy railroad set for the kids. Such is his love of humanity that he urges us to slough it off when electing our rulers. Such is LI’s contempt for the technocratic viewpoint, however, that we find this advice, to say the least, ludicrous.
“If somehow the cynicism lifted, and we saw ourselves charged with the task of deciding who to say yes to, we'd have more candidates like Parent B. Just one negative feature would not be enough to disqualify someone, in our minds. There would be little to gain by capturing and broadcasting ''macaca moments,'' or subtly invoking old Southern fears of black men cavorting with white women. Candidates would be able to take positions and speak their minds. This might lead to the arrival of candidates who actually have positions and minds. We might even be willing to risk generating a little enthusiasm at the prospect of being led by them.”
Actually, not only do I have little enthusiasm for being “led” by those I vote for – they can suck my big cock (oops - this is not tea party language) - they can, uh, kiss my ass if they think I’m voting for them as “leaders”. I vote for representatives, that is all. I can fucking lead my own self. That Schwarz can so easily equate the publicity given to a candidate given to uttering racist statements with a racist advertisement tells us all I need to know about his own ability to evaluate Parent A and Parent B. It sucks. And I’m not looking, myself, for a big Daddy or Mommy to govern me. I already have a Dad and a Mom.
The Schwartzes of the world - the snooty reformers, always looking to get politics out of the hands of the unwashed - inject liberalism with that reputation it seemingly can't shake: its allergy to the people it supposedly wishes to benefit. He is the perfect complement to the millionaire rightwing populist. The two of them drive me fucking nuts.
The NYT has an oped piece by Barry Schwartz that is as relentlessly programmatic in this respect as a clock is with regard to midnight and noon. First, of course, we begin with a lament about the election year party. This year, we asked everybody to bring healthful dishes and non-alcoholic beverages. We also tried to supply some hymn books and pamphlets on abstinence. But to no avail!
“SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- ANOTHER national election season has come to an end -- the sorriest, sleaziest, most disheartening and embarrassing in memory. The best one can hope for is a candidate who is a complete cipher. How has American electoral politics come to this?”
Sleaziness – as in actually looking up the records of the cut outs that we are going to send to Washington, D.C., on their all expense paid internship for various lobbying firms – is, contrary to the shocked Mr. Schwartz, not the problem with our system – it is the lack of willingness to be really sleazy. That is, to have a good, warts and all impression of the candidate, the kind of impression one has of one’s fellow employees. The system that doles out the power tries as hard as it can to deny us any glimpse into the backstage of its 24/7 impression management.
Schwartz illustrates the sad sadness of violating Mom’s rule (if you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say anything at all!) with a psychological study showing that positives and negatives stand out given changing instructions in the way we are to evaluate people (via a hypothetical child custody decision balancing the traits of Parent A and Parent B) - even though the list of negatives and positives are stable. Now, one would think that this would reconcile him to humanity’s perpetual need for sleaze – or at least make him curious about the arts by which we do gain our impressions of people, and how these are reflected in elections. But not Mr. Schwartz. He goes from telling us about human nature to urging us to forget human nature and to treat elections as a technocrat would treat putting together a toy railroad set for the kids. Such is his love of humanity that he urges us to slough it off when electing our rulers. Such is LI’s contempt for the technocratic viewpoint, however, that we find this advice, to say the least, ludicrous.
“If somehow the cynicism lifted, and we saw ourselves charged with the task of deciding who to say yes to, we'd have more candidates like Parent B. Just one negative feature would not be enough to disqualify someone, in our minds. There would be little to gain by capturing and broadcasting ''macaca moments,'' or subtly invoking old Southern fears of black men cavorting with white women. Candidates would be able to take positions and speak their minds. This might lead to the arrival of candidates who actually have positions and minds. We might even be willing to risk generating a little enthusiasm at the prospect of being led by them.”
Actually, not only do I have little enthusiasm for being “led” by those I vote for – they can suck my big cock (oops - this is not tea party language) - they can, uh, kiss my ass if they think I’m voting for them as “leaders”. I vote for representatives, that is all. I can fucking lead my own self. That Schwarz can so easily equate the publicity given to a candidate given to uttering racist statements with a racist advertisement tells us all I need to know about his own ability to evaluate Parent A and Parent B. It sucks. And I’m not looking, myself, for a big Daddy or Mommy to govern me. I already have a Dad and a Mom.
The Schwartzes of the world - the snooty reformers, always looking to get politics out of the hands of the unwashed - inject liberalism with that reputation it seemingly can't shake: its allergy to the people it supposedly wishes to benefit. He is the perfect complement to the millionaire rightwing populist. The two of them drive me fucking nuts.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Electing a new heaven on earth - uh, someday
"Now God defend! What will become of me! I have neither consulted with the stars nor their urinals, the almanacks. A fine fellow, to neglect the prophets who are read in England every day! They shall pardon me for this oversight. There is a mystery in their profession they have no to much as herar of – “the Christian starry Heaven” – a new Heaven fancied on the whole earth.”
Thomas Vaughan, the alchemist, whose merit as one of the greatest writers of English prose is obscured because he wrote about, well, alchemy, wrote the above words in the 1650s, I think. Vaughan was quite a guy. He died of getting an overdose of mercury vapor up his nose, after a standard stormy life trying to balance natural magick, a clerical position, and reactionary politics. He was “ousted” from the clergy in Wales for “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the king.” Well, how is LI to resist a compagnon de route like this? Before he died, Vaughan dreamed he was pursued by a stone horse – which is the same dream his wife had before she died. O for a life of portents and poetry.
Anyway, LI’s purpose in citing Vaughan is to disclaim any foresight into the results of tomorrow’s election, and to mildly decry the newspaperly madness of following the polls. For a political blog, we haven’t really spent a lot of time on the election, it seems. The reason is that our regular readers are no doubt going to vote, as we did last Friday, for liberal or lefty types, with here and there an exception, and those readers who aren’t going to vote that way are probably not going to be persuaded by us, and … we just don’t practice an election-centric politics.
In our own case, we are more concerned that the library here in Austin finally gets a shot of money (although the odds are probably against this) and that the highways don’t (although the odds are probably for this). We live in a district that the Stalinist Reps gerrymandered into a perpetual Republican fief, so our vote counts for nothing against the dickhead who represents us. And, finally, the one vote we were looking forward to – voting for Kinky Friedman for Governor – we didn’t cast, as K.F. turned sour in this election and displayed a peculiar tone deafness about racism. So it was back to voting for Bell, the Dem candidate, who actually did something that made us happy: he came out foursquare against the testing mania in the public schools. In fact, the only person who likes the test industry’s grip on the poor 1st through 7th graders is our utterly ridiculous Governor, Perry. May he suffer someday for all the miseries he has put these thousands of children through.
The races we were interested in were mostly elsewhere. We are especially happy that Eliot Spitzer looks like a walk in NY. In fact, New York voters have the luxury of voting strategically. We talked to a friend up there who is voting Green, and that seemed fine to LI – Spitzer’s win being pretty much locked in, the question is, how can you take your microscopic vote and use it to encourage a leftward tilt?
On the other hand, the race that would be difficult for us is also in New York. That’s the one between Pirro and Cuomo. On the one hand, Cuomo is undoubtedly the better candidate, even though we are fed up with inheritors of political capital running for office. On the other hand, Pirro seems to be one of those unique people who is happy about turning her life into a public sit com. We’ve totally enjoyed her pursuit of her wayward creep of a husband, Al – the detectives, the weeping to gossip columnists, the tapes and videocameras. As attorney general, Pirro would make her philandering hubby’s life a living hell. She’d be able to get favors from state troopers. Her so called best friend, that fucking bottle blonde, shamelessly flirting with Pirro’s hubby under her very eyes! Well, time to look at your tax returns, baby. On the other hand, the argument could be made that being the attorney general of New York entails other duties than exacting personal revenge on your spouse and the bitches that throw themselves in his way. Hmm. On the one hand, civic duty, on the other hand, the howl of the redneck in my blood, that fan of mudwrestling and the NY Post. I have no idea how I’d vote.
I do know that the urinal of the popular will, the polls, should not obsess any properly constituted mind.
Thomas Vaughan, the alchemist, whose merit as one of the greatest writers of English prose is obscured because he wrote about, well, alchemy, wrote the above words in the 1650s, I think. Vaughan was quite a guy. He died of getting an overdose of mercury vapor up his nose, after a standard stormy life trying to balance natural magick, a clerical position, and reactionary politics. He was “ousted” from the clergy in Wales for “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the king.” Well, how is LI to resist a compagnon de route like this? Before he died, Vaughan dreamed he was pursued by a stone horse – which is the same dream his wife had before she died. O for a life of portents and poetry.
Anyway, LI’s purpose in citing Vaughan is to disclaim any foresight into the results of tomorrow’s election, and to mildly decry the newspaperly madness of following the polls. For a political blog, we haven’t really spent a lot of time on the election, it seems. The reason is that our regular readers are no doubt going to vote, as we did last Friday, for liberal or lefty types, with here and there an exception, and those readers who aren’t going to vote that way are probably not going to be persuaded by us, and … we just don’t practice an election-centric politics.
In our own case, we are more concerned that the library here in Austin finally gets a shot of money (although the odds are probably against this) and that the highways don’t (although the odds are probably for this). We live in a district that the Stalinist Reps gerrymandered into a perpetual Republican fief, so our vote counts for nothing against the dickhead who represents us. And, finally, the one vote we were looking forward to – voting for Kinky Friedman for Governor – we didn’t cast, as K.F. turned sour in this election and displayed a peculiar tone deafness about racism. So it was back to voting for Bell, the Dem candidate, who actually did something that made us happy: he came out foursquare against the testing mania in the public schools. In fact, the only person who likes the test industry’s grip on the poor 1st through 7th graders is our utterly ridiculous Governor, Perry. May he suffer someday for all the miseries he has put these thousands of children through.
The races we were interested in were mostly elsewhere. We are especially happy that Eliot Spitzer looks like a walk in NY. In fact, New York voters have the luxury of voting strategically. We talked to a friend up there who is voting Green, and that seemed fine to LI – Spitzer’s win being pretty much locked in, the question is, how can you take your microscopic vote and use it to encourage a leftward tilt?
On the other hand, the race that would be difficult for us is also in New York. That’s the one between Pirro and Cuomo. On the one hand, Cuomo is undoubtedly the better candidate, even though we are fed up with inheritors of political capital running for office. On the other hand, Pirro seems to be one of those unique people who is happy about turning her life into a public sit com. We’ve totally enjoyed her pursuit of her wayward creep of a husband, Al – the detectives, the weeping to gossip columnists, the tapes and videocameras. As attorney general, Pirro would make her philandering hubby’s life a living hell. She’d be able to get favors from state troopers. Her so called best friend, that fucking bottle blonde, shamelessly flirting with Pirro’s hubby under her very eyes! Well, time to look at your tax returns, baby. On the other hand, the argument could be made that being the attorney general of New York entails other duties than exacting personal revenge on your spouse and the bitches that throw themselves in his way. Hmm. On the one hand, civic duty, on the other hand, the howl of the redneck in my blood, that fan of mudwrestling and the NY Post. I have no idea how I’d vote.
I do know that the urinal of the popular will, the polls, should not obsess any properly constituted mind.
sitting in the monad - The NYT celebrates its fave Iraqi, Chalabi, one more time
The horrendous Dexter Filkins is at it again. The NYT Magazine profile of Chalabi is an indulgence verging on an impudence – after all, why not devote that space to a basically meaningless story about Filkins fave guy? Here’s one of our favorite passages in this extended exercise in bosculating Chalabi’s golden fanny:
“When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.
But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free.”
To set them free! Doesn’t it make you feel all Country and Western?
Having cast my lot with the black magicians, I've been trying to come up with a spell to launch a meme from this tiny blog. The meme would be about the failure of the MSM, from the beginning, to comprehend Iraq. The evidence for that failure would be the incredibly exaggerated role assumed by Chalabi in reports about Iraq after the invasion that kept appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major media. At the same time, the way Chalabi himself was perceived in Iraq didn't even figure in those reports. For instance: for years, LI has maintained that the legitimacy of the supposed American project of bringing 'democracy' to Iraq, still hailed by the belligeranti, was undermined from the beginning by trying to set up a notorious thief as our proxy in Iraq. Filkins remarks, sort of as an afterthought in one place, that he was amazed at how the Iraqis all seemed to know that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of stealing up to 40 million dollars from the bank he founded. Now, this isn't a small and insignificant piece of information - even though Filkins treats it as such, devoting a total of four sentences to it. This is a huge piece of information. It is about how the Iraqis were seeing things. If the MSM were really curious about the supposed American project, this kind of information was vital feedback for Americans.
In fact, however, the MSM is simply an adjunct of the conventional wisdom of whatever court faction wants to bamboozle us this time. And so in all those stories about Chalabi, none of them were about the perception current in Iraq from the beginning that he was a huge thief. It is also true that he is a huge thief, but the perception was more important. You can't conduct an occupation that is legitimated on helping the occupied and then try to elevate a thief to the position of ruler.
Well, we were reminded by the sorry ass stroy of this post, filed after the Iraqi election, 1/26/06. I totally regret the severe underestimate of Iraqi casualties:
the shame of the press
Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.
If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.
Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.
Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:
“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”
Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:
“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.
“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”
On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.
Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”
Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:
“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.
This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:
“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."
Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.
But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”
Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.
Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.”
“When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.
But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free.”
To set them free! Doesn’t it make you feel all Country and Western?
Having cast my lot with the black magicians, I've been trying to come up with a spell to launch a meme from this tiny blog. The meme would be about the failure of the MSM, from the beginning, to comprehend Iraq. The evidence for that failure would be the incredibly exaggerated role assumed by Chalabi in reports about Iraq after the invasion that kept appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major media. At the same time, the way Chalabi himself was perceived in Iraq didn't even figure in those reports. For instance: for years, LI has maintained that the legitimacy of the supposed American project of bringing 'democracy' to Iraq, still hailed by the belligeranti, was undermined from the beginning by trying to set up a notorious thief as our proxy in Iraq. Filkins remarks, sort of as an afterthought in one place, that he was amazed at how the Iraqis all seemed to know that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of stealing up to 40 million dollars from the bank he founded. Now, this isn't a small and insignificant piece of information - even though Filkins treats it as such, devoting a total of four sentences to it. This is a huge piece of information. It is about how the Iraqis were seeing things. If the MSM were really curious about the supposed American project, this kind of information was vital feedback for Americans.
In fact, however, the MSM is simply an adjunct of the conventional wisdom of whatever court faction wants to bamboozle us this time. And so in all those stories about Chalabi, none of them were about the perception current in Iraq from the beginning that he was a huge thief. It is also true that he is a huge thief, but the perception was more important. You can't conduct an occupation that is legitimated on helping the occupied and then try to elevate a thief to the position of ruler.
Well, we were reminded by the sorry ass stroy of this post, filed after the Iraqi election, 1/26/06. I totally regret the severe underestimate of Iraqi casualties:
the shame of the press
Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.
If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.
Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.
Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:
“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”
Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:
“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.
“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”
On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.
Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”
Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:
“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.
This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:
“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."
Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.
But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”
Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.
Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.”
Sunday, November 05, 2006
welcome to the rabies festival
A couple of days ago, LI made the argument that U.S. policy in Iraq had brought about civil war, instead of preventing it. And, furthermore, that the common view, which is that the U.S. has spent its entire time trying to prevent a civil war, was wrong – that the U.S. intention, per the criminals in the White House, corresponded to a weakening of Iraq that would entail, at the least, factionalization, and more probably, violence on a civil war scale. Brian, in a comment on this post, logically reduced LI’s argument to the one that the U.S. intended the partitioning of Iraq.
That made me think about the difference between intentions and conditions. And that made me think, golly, I’ll just write a whole fucking post on this intrinsically fascinating topic!
It is the LI position that the larger, institutionalized social forces, like the state, or businesses, or parties, operate in reality not to institute some rigid intention or goal, but to produce the conditions that will make push forward the self-organizing of a set of goals. But that this never seems to be the case. It always seems that institutions, like people, follow some intention.
Francois Jullien is the guy who has started LI thinking about these things, got us out of our shitty trance, shook us awake for a fleeting shitty moment. In “A treatise on efficacy” Jullien compares the Western and Chinese notions of how states and enterprises operate. For instance, he considers Sun Tzu’s notion that the general, before battle, should “ban omens and dismiss all doubts.”
“The whole of this Chinese thought is prompted by a single concept: whatever happens “in any case” “cannot not happen” (once all the conditions are ascertained); in other words, it is “ineluctable” (bi)
“This idea of the ineluctability of processes and so also of success for whoever is capable of profiting from it recurs constantly throughout all Chinese thinking. Even a thinker such as Mencius subscribes to this logic of consequentiality, despite the fact that he adopts a position altogether opposed to the theses of the strategists, since he considers that sovereignty depends not on the relation of forces and therefore the art of warfare, but on the sway exercised by morality. Or rather, morality is itself a force, and a particularly strong one, because it possesses great influence and uses this to effect, in a diffuse and discrete fashion. Be concerned for your people, Mencius tells the ruler, share your pleasures with them, and you will inevitably progressively come to rule over all other princes. That is because all peoples will desire to pass under your authority; they will open their doors to you and will be unable to resist you. Through violence, you will inevitably eventually come to grief, for the power at your disposal is limited and arouses rivalry.”
Okay. When we put up quotations here, we have this audio-visual image in our head – the quote hangs there, on the screen, as we mouth into the dark, Professor Unrath on his downers. In reality, of course, the quote falls behind us – like landscape revealed in the window of a bus, falling away from the passenger who tries to keep it in his visual space for the longest. Sorry Charley. Anyway, to illustrate the importance of the ineluctability of processes, LI is thinking: for a long time – for three years, actually – we have felt something like the very chiton scraped off our nerves whenever we read the inevitable sign off line of the pro-war or MSM set about Iraq. The deal will be some fucking essay or news report considering another fucking disaster. Or announcing the administration’s latest move, which has the integrity, coherence and logic of some mad male masturbator’s theory of bitches, caught on the q.v. as he retires to the institutions communal bathroom. And yet, after the careful, pawful consideration, with the utmost respect for the sacred powers that be, of this luminous turd, one that will have negative consequences even relative to the very goals it is supposedly designed to support, the belligeranti and the sheepsouled journalist then elevate themselves, as though they were standing above mere probability and bowels, and will pretend that war is some crazy ass amalgam of miracles and chances and write something to the effect that - but suppose Iraq gets better in the next three months, or – but things can still turn around in Iraq. Oh fucking A. Oh my right and left buttocks. Oh my very dick, let it gangrene and fall off me – for this is the crazy motherfucker of the thing that makes me think I have wandered into a vast den of the lobotomized, a zombie zone, where the disconnect between the conditions that are ascertained and the supposed uncertainty of what follows from them has become the gospel that we believe, in spite of the mounting pile of corpses (smell the magic!) in front of our very eyes. In this sad and idiot bombed zone, the zone of the mind, where the terrorists are D.C. courtiers and the target is your synapses, the melancholy of that sign off optimism is that, really, it is an invitation to lose it all right there. Take out cock, pussy, cerebellum, inner organs, and all the change and keys in your pocket, put it in the tray, and let the monsters of the governing class eat it all right before your astonished, or actually tranquilized, eyeballs. What the fuck? Why not believe anything? It is as if I decided to build a birdhouse, but couldn’t predict, before I finished it, whether it was actually a supersonic automobile.
Now, why - as we pass into the interns’ white chambers and calmly discuss today’s autopsy, stripping off our green rubber gloves – why have dialectics and structure, or the Way and process – why have they so utterly vanished in Middle Class America? White magicians and black know that dialectics and structure haven’t vanished from reality itself. But LI suspects that the disappearance of the political power of the working class is intimately related to the fall of dialectics and structure, or process and the way, and the rise of a peculiar seriality interiorized in the very heart of middle class existence. Our friend, IT, has written a dissertation that tells part of that history. The repressed, in the U.S., is dialectics and structure, and our great post-industrial growth industry is in managing the return of that particular repressed, which takes all kinds of threatening forms in the rabies festival (in which LI has a tent at least) outside the gated community.
A subject to which we will return later.
That made me think about the difference between intentions and conditions. And that made me think, golly, I’ll just write a whole fucking post on this intrinsically fascinating topic!
It is the LI position that the larger, institutionalized social forces, like the state, or businesses, or parties, operate in reality not to institute some rigid intention or goal, but to produce the conditions that will make push forward the self-organizing of a set of goals. But that this never seems to be the case. It always seems that institutions, like people, follow some intention.
Francois Jullien is the guy who has started LI thinking about these things, got us out of our shitty trance, shook us awake for a fleeting shitty moment. In “A treatise on efficacy” Jullien compares the Western and Chinese notions of how states and enterprises operate. For instance, he considers Sun Tzu’s notion that the general, before battle, should “ban omens and dismiss all doubts.”
“The whole of this Chinese thought is prompted by a single concept: whatever happens “in any case” “cannot not happen” (once all the conditions are ascertained); in other words, it is “ineluctable” (bi)
“This idea of the ineluctability of processes and so also of success for whoever is capable of profiting from it recurs constantly throughout all Chinese thinking. Even a thinker such as Mencius subscribes to this logic of consequentiality, despite the fact that he adopts a position altogether opposed to the theses of the strategists, since he considers that sovereignty depends not on the relation of forces and therefore the art of warfare, but on the sway exercised by morality. Or rather, morality is itself a force, and a particularly strong one, because it possesses great influence and uses this to effect, in a diffuse and discrete fashion. Be concerned for your people, Mencius tells the ruler, share your pleasures with them, and you will inevitably progressively come to rule over all other princes. That is because all peoples will desire to pass under your authority; they will open their doors to you and will be unable to resist you. Through violence, you will inevitably eventually come to grief, for the power at your disposal is limited and arouses rivalry.”
Okay. When we put up quotations here, we have this audio-visual image in our head – the quote hangs there, on the screen, as we mouth into the dark, Professor Unrath on his downers. In reality, of course, the quote falls behind us – like landscape revealed in the window of a bus, falling away from the passenger who tries to keep it in his visual space for the longest. Sorry Charley. Anyway, to illustrate the importance of the ineluctability of processes, LI is thinking: for a long time – for three years, actually – we have felt something like the very chiton scraped off our nerves whenever we read the inevitable sign off line of the pro-war or MSM set about Iraq. The deal will be some fucking essay or news report considering another fucking disaster. Or announcing the administration’s latest move, which has the integrity, coherence and logic of some mad male masturbator’s theory of bitches, caught on the q.v. as he retires to the institutions communal bathroom. And yet, after the careful, pawful consideration, with the utmost respect for the sacred powers that be, of this luminous turd, one that will have negative consequences even relative to the very goals it is supposedly designed to support, the belligeranti and the sheepsouled journalist then elevate themselves, as though they were standing above mere probability and bowels, and will pretend that war is some crazy ass amalgam of miracles and chances and write something to the effect that - but suppose Iraq gets better in the next three months, or – but things can still turn around in Iraq. Oh fucking A. Oh my right and left buttocks. Oh my very dick, let it gangrene and fall off me – for this is the crazy motherfucker of the thing that makes me think I have wandered into a vast den of the lobotomized, a zombie zone, where the disconnect between the conditions that are ascertained and the supposed uncertainty of what follows from them has become the gospel that we believe, in spite of the mounting pile of corpses (smell the magic!) in front of our very eyes. In this sad and idiot bombed zone, the zone of the mind, where the terrorists are D.C. courtiers and the target is your synapses, the melancholy of that sign off optimism is that, really, it is an invitation to lose it all right there. Take out cock, pussy, cerebellum, inner organs, and all the change and keys in your pocket, put it in the tray, and let the monsters of the governing class eat it all right before your astonished, or actually tranquilized, eyeballs. What the fuck? Why not believe anything? It is as if I decided to build a birdhouse, but couldn’t predict, before I finished it, whether it was actually a supersonic automobile.
Now, why - as we pass into the interns’ white chambers and calmly discuss today’s autopsy, stripping off our green rubber gloves – why have dialectics and structure, or the Way and process – why have they so utterly vanished in Middle Class America? White magicians and black know that dialectics and structure haven’t vanished from reality itself. But LI suspects that the disappearance of the political power of the working class is intimately related to the fall of dialectics and structure, or process and the way, and the rise of a peculiar seriality interiorized in the very heart of middle class existence. Our friend, IT, has written a dissertation that tells part of that history. The repressed, in the U.S., is dialectics and structure, and our great post-industrial growth industry is in managing the return of that particular repressed, which takes all kinds of threatening forms in the rabies festival (in which LI has a tent at least) outside the gated community.
A subject to which we will return later.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
the sleeper cell
“Beyond the social level of the public, neighborly sphere there is, once again, the political level. All states have the propensity to protect themselves with the very mechanisms that are so feared at the neighborly level: secret services are part of any state apparatus. Their agents – who may be ‘sleepers’ (programmed and waking up only once alerted), “moles” (actively digging for information under a surface of normalcy), or simple analysts (plowing through often public information and in the process extracting potential secrets…) – ideally never emerge as actors. Their working identity is to remain secret so as not to jeopardize the protective functions of the state, and the underlying purpose is to allow members of the polity to remain safe, even ignorant, of the threats to their normal lives.” – Regina Bendix, Sleeper’s Secrets, Actor’s Revelations
Cruel age! Do you feel how black and low, how heavy the heavens are on the head of man? The poor little children, from their first years, are imbrued with horrible ideas, trembling in their cradles. The pure virgin, innocent, who feels damned by the pleasure the Spirit inflicts upon her. The wife in the marriage bed, martyred by his attacks, resisting and yet, for some moments, feeling in herself… A horrid affair known by those who have the tenia. To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant, which is even more disquieting, making one feel one is at sea! Thus, one scurries about lost, having a horror of oneself, wishing to escape oneself, to die… - Michelet, The Witch
Regina Bendix is an ethnographer. Her essay on the notion of the “sleeper” – as in “sleeper cell” – really jacked me up. Bendix first covers the folkloric bases, listing the various sleepers from mythology, like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and then asks about its use after 9/11. LI read those articles about sleeper cells of terrorists too, but so asleep were we that we never thought about the notion of the sleeper as a secret identity. Bendix’s essay concentrates mostly on the self-identity of the sleeper. LI, however, went off on another train of thought. For if the sleeper is the name of the one who disguises himself to be like the rest of us, surely that implies we are sleepers – that we even, in a sense, recognize this in the metaphorical unconscious. Nietzsche, in The Use and Abuse of History, has a wonderful passage about human beings as a herd, in which the vocables of the German have a tinge of the ox and the cow – the passage seems to be transcribed from the human moo. However, the idea of a sleeper as a watcher, the sleeper as the man awake, or the man who can awake, awaited, of course, the great surveillance discourses of the twentieth century.
And after all, sleep does bind us. The night comes down, and at a certain point we can say, everybody is asleep, and be pretty confident that we are mostly right. But we don’t say, everybody is awake, because even in the daylight we have a sneaking suspicion that waking is a much harder state to define. Sleep is our team identity. We are all sleepers. And we can’t even say for sure that we sleep alone, although we take that on trust. Perhaps we fall into the collective sleep.
LI, though, wants to be a sleeper – wants to be the agent whose duty is to pretend to be asleep, and to be really, all of the time, awake. That agent, as Michelet implies, is the devil, or of the devil’s party: “To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant…” Witches, once; and now, here, today, the American loser at the present moment, stinking quietly away somewhere, or the tattoos and dyed hair waifs and strays, embodying some kind of possession or addiction. In the double life of the sleeper, the best disguise, is to seem like one is not asleep at all – to grind one’s teeth like the underground man at every insult.
But I don't know if I have that much jam.
Cruel age! Do you feel how black and low, how heavy the heavens are on the head of man? The poor little children, from their first years, are imbrued with horrible ideas, trembling in their cradles. The pure virgin, innocent, who feels damned by the pleasure the Spirit inflicts upon her. The wife in the marriage bed, martyred by his attacks, resisting and yet, for some moments, feeling in herself… A horrid affair known by those who have the tenia. To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant, which is even more disquieting, making one feel one is at sea! Thus, one scurries about lost, having a horror of oneself, wishing to escape oneself, to die… - Michelet, The Witch
Regina Bendix is an ethnographer. Her essay on the notion of the “sleeper” – as in “sleeper cell” – really jacked me up. Bendix first covers the folkloric bases, listing the various sleepers from mythology, like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and then asks about its use after 9/11. LI read those articles about sleeper cells of terrorists too, but so asleep were we that we never thought about the notion of the sleeper as a secret identity. Bendix’s essay concentrates mostly on the self-identity of the sleeper. LI, however, went off on another train of thought. For if the sleeper is the name of the one who disguises himself to be like the rest of us, surely that implies we are sleepers – that we even, in a sense, recognize this in the metaphorical unconscious. Nietzsche, in The Use and Abuse of History, has a wonderful passage about human beings as a herd, in which the vocables of the German have a tinge of the ox and the cow – the passage seems to be transcribed from the human moo. However, the idea of a sleeper as a watcher, the sleeper as the man awake, or the man who can awake, awaited, of course, the great surveillance discourses of the twentieth century.
And after all, sleep does bind us. The night comes down, and at a certain point we can say, everybody is asleep, and be pretty confident that we are mostly right. But we don’t say, everybody is awake, because even in the daylight we have a sneaking suspicion that waking is a much harder state to define. Sleep is our team identity. We are all sleepers. And we can’t even say for sure that we sleep alone, although we take that on trust. Perhaps we fall into the collective sleep.
LI, though, wants to be a sleeper – wants to be the agent whose duty is to pretend to be asleep, and to be really, all of the time, awake. That agent, as Michelet implies, is the devil, or of the devil’s party: “To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant…” Witches, once; and now, here, today, the American loser at the present moment, stinking quietly away somewhere, or the tattoos and dyed hair waifs and strays, embodying some kind of possession or addiction. In the double life of the sleeper, the best disguise, is to seem like one is not asleep at all – to grind one’s teeth like the underground man at every insult.
But I don't know if I have that much jam.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
wormwood under the ice cream
And the name of that star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood, signifies the infernal falsity from which their self-derived intelligence is derived, and by which all the truths of the Word are falsified. – Emmanuel Swedenborg. The Apocalypse revealed
Robert Kagan is a bloody old soul, one of war’s puppet intellectuals – not The war, not the war in Iraq, but war as a system, the War system in which we live – and as such, he sometimes speaks the truth. Ask Belzebuub about the anatomy of the fly, and ask Kagan about the tendency of Americans to … well, not fight so much as rain destruction down on their supposed enemies. His column about the Republicans, the Dems, and the American love of war – or, rather, War’s love of America – is right on target:
“In this respect, there is even less debate over the general principles of American foreign policy than during the Vietnam era. In those days, opponents of the war insisted that not just President Richard Nixon was rotten but that the "system" was rotten. They did not just reject the Vietnam War, they rejected the whole containment strategy of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, which, they rightly claimed, helped produce the intervention in the first place. They rejected the idea that the United States could be a benevolent force in the world.
Today Democrats insist that the United States will be such a force as soon as George W. Bush leaves office. Although they pretend they have a fundamental doctrinal dispute with the Bush administration, their recommendations are less far-reaching. They argue that the United States should generally try to be nicer, employ more "soft power" and be more effective when it employs "hard power." That may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as an alternative doctrine.
Many around the world will thrill at the defeat of Republicans next week. They should enjoy the moment while they can. When the smoke clears, they will find themselves dealing with much the same America, with all its virtues and all its flaws.”
War’s puppet here can display his tone of preening certainty because he knows the props and devises of court society. It is a society surrounded, on every side, by the prosperity brought on by war system. The harms are all out in the beyond, which is a place tv cameras roam for the odd freak footage.
...
Which brings me to what I was going to write in this post, and which I just wrote, part of, to our far flung correspondent, Mr. T. in NYC. A little personal reminiscence from the fumes of last night:
… Last night, I went to see Maidstone, that rarely seen Norman Mailer film. Which was great - it was funny, Mailer was in his prime asshole decade, the misogyny was over the top, and the way he kept taking the piss out of people, just begging for some hitback, and the end of the film, which is famous, lived up to its sheer... weirdness. Rip Torn tries to kill Mailer in front of his family with a hammer. Or at least flails away at him, drawing some blood and much wrestling – with Mailer sincerely trying to save his head. I saw this with my friend A., who doesn’t love Mailer – but I do. I long for that spirit to be set lose in the U.S. again. That is, the spirit of testing oneself, instead of immediately responding to vulnerability by seeking absolute cures: gated communities, ever more technically advanced militaries, ever fewer rights, ever creeping encroachments on what we do by the Polizei.
And then I went to the continental club and listened to James McMurtry. Anyway, dancing and hopping away to McMurtry, and seeing the usual UT undergrads there, so damn and briefly happy, such plausible lovely girls, such awkward guys, and the stuffed milk fed sports bodies raising their beers every time McMurtry mentioned the joy of shooting guns, drinking beer, or the state of his hardon, I started thinking about the ice cream we live in and how I just fail to enjoy it - in fact, under all that ice cream, I feel there is an apocalypse, that the structures are falling in very, very slow motion. And so all our personal agonies all seem to dissolve in sugars – but the sugars, I think, really mirror the agonies, they don’t destroy them. They will crystalize later - or so some daemon tells me.
And I wondered if this is just because I'm mildly deranged.
And then I got home and decided that it didn't matter, since the apocalypse under the ice cream is my subject, God fuckin' damn it.
Robert Kagan is a bloody old soul, one of war’s puppet intellectuals – not The war, not the war in Iraq, but war as a system, the War system in which we live – and as such, he sometimes speaks the truth. Ask Belzebuub about the anatomy of the fly, and ask Kagan about the tendency of Americans to … well, not fight so much as rain destruction down on their supposed enemies. His column about the Republicans, the Dems, and the American love of war – or, rather, War’s love of America – is right on target:
“In this respect, there is even less debate over the general principles of American foreign policy than during the Vietnam era. In those days, opponents of the war insisted that not just President Richard Nixon was rotten but that the "system" was rotten. They did not just reject the Vietnam War, they rejected the whole containment strategy of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, which, they rightly claimed, helped produce the intervention in the first place. They rejected the idea that the United States could be a benevolent force in the world.
Today Democrats insist that the United States will be such a force as soon as George W. Bush leaves office. Although they pretend they have a fundamental doctrinal dispute with the Bush administration, their recommendations are less far-reaching. They argue that the United States should generally try to be nicer, employ more "soft power" and be more effective when it employs "hard power." That may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as an alternative doctrine.
Many around the world will thrill at the defeat of Republicans next week. They should enjoy the moment while they can. When the smoke clears, they will find themselves dealing with much the same America, with all its virtues and all its flaws.”
War’s puppet here can display his tone of preening certainty because he knows the props and devises of court society. It is a society surrounded, on every side, by the prosperity brought on by war system. The harms are all out in the beyond, which is a place tv cameras roam for the odd freak footage.
...
Which brings me to what I was going to write in this post, and which I just wrote, part of, to our far flung correspondent, Mr. T. in NYC. A little personal reminiscence from the fumes of last night:
… Last night, I went to see Maidstone, that rarely seen Norman Mailer film. Which was great - it was funny, Mailer was in his prime asshole decade, the misogyny was over the top, and the way he kept taking the piss out of people, just begging for some hitback, and the end of the film, which is famous, lived up to its sheer... weirdness. Rip Torn tries to kill Mailer in front of his family with a hammer. Or at least flails away at him, drawing some blood and much wrestling – with Mailer sincerely trying to save his head. I saw this with my friend A., who doesn’t love Mailer – but I do. I long for that spirit to be set lose in the U.S. again. That is, the spirit of testing oneself, instead of immediately responding to vulnerability by seeking absolute cures: gated communities, ever more technically advanced militaries, ever fewer rights, ever creeping encroachments on what we do by the Polizei.
And then I went to the continental club and listened to James McMurtry. Anyway, dancing and hopping away to McMurtry, and seeing the usual UT undergrads there, so damn and briefly happy, such plausible lovely girls, such awkward guys, and the stuffed milk fed sports bodies raising their beers every time McMurtry mentioned the joy of shooting guns, drinking beer, or the state of his hardon, I started thinking about the ice cream we live in and how I just fail to enjoy it - in fact, under all that ice cream, I feel there is an apocalypse, that the structures are falling in very, very slow motion. And so all our personal agonies all seem to dissolve in sugars – but the sugars, I think, really mirror the agonies, they don’t destroy them. They will crystalize later - or so some daemon tells me.
And I wondered if this is just because I'm mildly deranged.
And then I got home and decided that it didn't matter, since the apocalypse under the ice cream is my subject, God fuckin' damn it.
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