links to here and there

First, LI sends happy birthday wishes to IT. Long may she herd the cats of theory! Long may she operate as a provocateur in the Oxbridgian garden party of philosophy!

Second, in order to get your omni-depressent buzz on, do go to the debate on Iran being hosted at the Brittanica site. The hawks are out in force, saying the same dismally stupid things they always say, advocating the usual death and destruction, from which of course they expect to be spared themselves. The debate is called Target Iran? Which has a very nice, blind as a bat sound to it. I do wonder if it would cause a bit of a scandal to have, say, a debate entitled Target America, in which various Al qaeda members and others debated whether to take down certain pieces of American infrastructure with maximum casualties? But of course, the moral asymmetry here reaches deep down into the language of this war enabling culture.

What to do about this huge, everpresent problem? Is it possible to make America a normal country, or are we doomed to be lead by the seediest, the greediest, and the stupidest into the valley of the shadow of death? There is a wolfish Freikorps tone to the militant warmongers that is all the more ridiculous in that none of them have actually served in the military. It is proxy Naziism – a GI Joe doll version of it. It doesn’t even have the good taste of being a reaction to violence on the front – the only violence the warmongers have ever faced is a queasy stomach after too many fried foods at the AEI banquet. Judging by the insufferable tone alone, I would say we are close to a war with Iran. But judging by what is actually happening, I don’t think we are. Gates, according to the British newspaper, the Telegraph, has taken over the caretaker job of keeping our lunatic Vice President at bay. That we are hedged about and protected from the worst by an old appartchik from the Cold War is cause for grimness in itself. Or rather, protected by Gates and by the unwinnable war that has bogged the American military down in Iraq – one war blocking the other.

Such a state of affairs can’t last. To prevent war with Iran, the only real hedge is to recognize Iran. The only real hedge is to establish economic relations with Iran. Which is also the only way to have any say in what happens in Iran – for only when, say, an Iranian president speaks at a U.S. university can you protest said Iranian president speaking at a U.S. university. This should not be hard to figure out: U.S. foreign policy that simply bars contact and freezes relations with a country hardly ever works. However, once those relations are in place, it is excellent to have outraged people in the U.S. protesting to have contact barred and relations frozen. Grass roots threats to an existing set of relationships can work.

ps

Oh, and I should link to this Foreign Policy blog post, which admiringly cites Wayne White:

Wayne White, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute who was, among other things, principal Iraq analyst at the State Department's highly respected Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2003-2005. Most of his post is a fairly straightforward synopsis of the state of play. But here's an interesting nugget:

“If the U.S. attacks Iran, for either reason, it would most likely do so during the days of maximum darkness in order to capitalize on its significant advantage in night warfare. That period begins around now and ends next March. The following winter, the president would be in office for only a portion of that militarily advantageous period, and also would have to consider the awkwardness of ordering an attack during an election campaign or in the period between the election and when he leaves office on January 20, 2009.

Unless last month's IAEA "work plan" with Iran (aimed at clearing up some matters by November) shows real progress, offering genuine hope that the diplomatic logjam over nuclear enrichment can be broken, this December through March could be the first period during which U.S. military action against Iran becomes a real possibility. Because of the military considerations noted earlier, roughly the same period would be the most likely timing for a fairly robust and mainly aerial assault against IRGC targets inside Iran.”

This is a blast from the past! Reminiscent of 2002, when numbers of warmongering, highly testosteroned bloggers were eagerly planning the invasion of Iraq. Would we use the new military Y weapon – specs would then be brought out – or would we invade with our Black “C” Calvary from the North. One of the funniest of the rightwing bloggers, Steve Van Beste, made quite a name for himself by spinning fantasy scenarios that were just like those of some sub b action movie. This kind of thing really moves the starch heavy white American male to emotional heights even beyond the latest viagra pak upload. It is technical, so it gives one hours of tech doll playing fun – a boy’s own play war game – yet detached enough that one isn’t involved with the messy evisceration of people oneself. Leave that to the guy who, twenty years from now, will be shaking with the vibrations of mass murders past while holding a cardboard sign up, begging for money.

Notice the cool lingo of the scenario setting too, the oh so maleish“days of maximum darkness” – doesn’t it remind you of that movie where the Navy Seals defeated the Russians after putting on their nighttime concealment makeup? And the “fairly robust” – it just bursts with the stategery of nincompoops. It is so Bush era.

Kurt Tucholsky nearly went crazy in the face of this kind of headless militarist mindset in Weimar Germany. We face the same thing in this country, but there are some advantages held by those who prefer peace to thuggery, mass murder, and imaginary blood baths. The country, for one thing, is tired of its Disney vacation in hell, with action soldiers. And of course the six hundred billion (with the cost really mounting to a trillion and a half) for the Iraq war is starting to weigh even on the spirits of the stay at home mass murder cheerleader section. Thus, the rightwingosphere just can’t seem to get up the same Nuremberg spirit that accompanied the rush to war in 2002. The rah rahing is now more in anger that, generally, nobody else is singing along.

But one should always be cautious. Precious specimens like this Wayne White person are actually on the public payroll, instead of tucked into middle management jobs at dog food factories. And that is tragic.

Where is Happiness?

When Louis Sebastian Mercier issued his Moral Fictions in four volumes in 1792, he prefaced it with an explanation of moral fiction:

When I entered into the deceiving career of letters, a little more than twenty five years ago, all the new authors, my confreres, made heroides, or composed moral stories; the heroid served as a the young poet’s preliminary study for tragedies. But this rhymed monologue did not have a long vogue; the narrow frame appeared too fussy, and soon became insipid. However, the moral story maintained itself for a longer period – or, to change my terms, from the form to the character, it is still pleasing, and will always please in its variety, when to the painting of the motile nuances of our ridiculous traits it joins the durable colors and gentle precepts of a moral without pendantry. Besides, the moral story has enriched the French scene with a crowd of interesting and novel situations. A number of authors, entirely lacking in invention, have borrowed from it dramatic subjects that have been crowned, more or less, with success.”

Of course, Mercier was well aware, in 1792, that the conte morale had spawned a sort of pornographic shadow. Ivan Bloch, the sex historian, claims that the literature of pornography, in the 1790s, overwhelmed, in sheer volume, all other types of literature. Certainly much of that pornography was didactic. Sade is the most famous example, but this kind of thing runs back to the seventeenth century combination of frondiste pamphlet and libertine philosophy. In the 1740s, for instance, Therese Philosophe became an underground best seller by alternating the successively more raunchy adventures of a sweet last cast among horny monks and the nymphomaniac pious – scenes that were generally consciously written to produce a tableau, a picture, as though the text, like some out of control caption, faced the standard engravings with which these books were illustrated – with the precepts of volupte and anti-clericism, taught by the monk or the priest or the guide in those rare moments of detumescence.



Mercier takes the view, here, that moral fiction is about debuting as a writer. We take this as a sign that we should not compartmentalize the discourses of pleasure and pain, or the philosophical investigation of the passions, by some test of genre and systematicity. We shouldn’t just look to, say, Condillac to understand the unfolding of sensualism. Which is why we want to compare two texts – one being Mercier’s Where is Happiness? and the other, Diderot’s entry on the Passions in the Encyclopedia – since both texts turn on the notion that, somehow, our passions aren’t free – which leads to the paradoxes developed in Mercier’s short story of an Egyptian king who a pleasure island decrees, in the hopes of spending ten days, with his court, in pure and uninterrupted happiness.

But before I do that, let me say something about ‘sensualism’.

There is a tradition in the history of philosophy – codified, in the nineteenth century, by Paul Janet - that tells the following story to help us separate the baroque seventeenth from the enlightened eighteenth century: in the seventeenth century, Descartes and even Hobbes is still mixing up a metaphysical analysis of ideations and passions with a physiological one. Even as the Cartesians were supposedly setting their face against the Galenic orthodoxies of the Academy of Medicine in Paris, they were still caught in the humoral paradigm (the subject of a fascinating good book by Noga Arika, the passions and tempers ). So even in the Passions of the Soul, Descartes still leaves the basic framework in place, simply inversing some of the standard Galenic values. While for the humoral school, the subjective viewpoint is wafted up to the brain by animal spirits, like fairies or familiars, and distributed to the various kingdom organs of the body by transmutable fluids, in Descartes vision it is distributed from the brain, with the pineal gland being the palace of ultimate enchantment, where spirit transubstantiates into body. The body below the skin, is conceived of as the landscape of an Arthurian romance, in which our goodly passions and ideas embark upon obscure heroic quests that take them from the liver to the heart to the brain, those three dark kingdoms, or vice versa. By the seventeenth century, this lively, obscure body, the kingdoms under the skin, had already been exposed by Vesalius, and the bloodstream of it was about to be navigated by Harvey. And like the cartographic shock given by the discovery of the New World, the philosopher doctors tried, at first, to parry the shocks of anatomy with the same system and another level of complications. But this system of philosophic physiology broke down.

The result was not the abandonment of philosophical speculation about the ideas, but instead, in good Hegelian fashion, the overcoming of a discourse that had become too hybrid, too saturated by themes originating from too many disciplines in Locke’s radically simplifying gesture. Locke wrote in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that he ‘shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of mind; or trouble myself to examine wherein its essence consists; or by what motions of our spirits or alterations of our bodies we come to have any sensation by our organs…”. All at once, philosophy was freed. The subjective point of view could now be pursued in terms of itself alone. Retroactively, one could even read this moment back into Descartes. Thus philosophy shook off the material dross of medical speculation.

Whether in fact the subjective point of view could be thought of in terms of itself alone was contested in the Enlightenment – it was an aspect of the struggle with epicurean materialism. However, LI will now dim the lights on this background and return us to – the Egyptian king.

Later.

Spreads

LI reads the papers. Everybody reads the papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was enough to send the market up 65 points.

American capitalism is infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe. In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.

Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on, churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002 is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?

In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.

Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which, it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict. No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism, and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in – are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final displacement of Rust belt America.

That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…

The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent, taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like. Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of economics.

All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.

…So much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run. I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.

As a writer, it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the American economy. Making between 9,000 dollars and 16,000 dollars per year for the last seven has not only destroyed all my savings, and probably prepared me for the most gruesome of futures, since I chose to do this during the years when I should be earning most, but – more importantly – deprived me of the tacit knowledge of how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of whatever? No.

However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards. Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living, as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me, because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income strata in the U.S.

Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.

excuses (drama queenery)

This seems to be my season for sickness. The last couple of days I have gotten appallingly better acquainted with parts of my biological functioning about which I much prefer to remain in blessed ignorance. Oh well, as my friend Dave likes to say, what doesn’t kill you gives you a good excuse to drink. I do have a theory that last night I was briefly possessed by the devil. Now I know what those poor Loudun possedées were going through. Supposedly the prioress, submitting to her first exorcism, not only did the standard foaming and screeching, but broke two of her back teeth. Well, I’ll never laugh at bootheeled Jack again! So, all notion of writing about Calasso, Reich, and Bela Tarr’s The Outsider has been driven out of my head. Sorry.

Reich, Calasso, and Bela Tarr

LI is truly a sad sack. As we try to find time, in the interstices between our poorly rewarded tasks, for writing our happiness essay, we are discovering a depressingly vast literature that touches on so much we want to say. Not least among which is a gorgeous essay by Roberto Calasso, “The Repulsive Cult of Bonheur’, published in our favorite journal, Common Knowledge, in 2004.

A few months ago, we commented on the movie W., Dusan Makavejev’s film about, among other things, sex-pol, Wilhelm Reich, and the state of orgasmic repression in 70s Yugoslavia. By coincidence, the film was also shown by Kino-Fist, a collective with which one of our favorite bloggers, Infinite Thought, is connected. After reading Calasso’s essay, we feel like revisiting some of those issues.

…

Calasso begins by quoting from one of Freud’s letters concerning Civilization and its Discontents. Freud, in the letter, talks about a strange serenity – or indifference – that has settled upon him in old age. He is no longer writing with that … surrender, that sense of being swept along by his discoveries. Rather, he has reached a more disengaged point. As Calasso points out, the first section of C and its D. seems to bear out Freud’s point – it is, above all, banal. Yet it builds into a great, mythic insight:

“In Civilization, Freud in fact arrives at a paralyzing conclusion: “What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group.” That is: the process of civilization is destined inevitably to increase the sense of guilt to the point where it is intolerable. This is the final perspective that Freud presents in
a flash and then hides. But it’s enough to reveal the grand, dark basis of Civilization: the final, funereal celebration of our founding myth, the nature/culture opposition. Freud keeps faith with that myth to the last, while its consequences push him to the breaking point. On the one hand, he reaffirms a thesis worn out
by use, from the Greeks to us: that the raison d’être of civilization is to defend us from nature. On the other hand, he follows the inflexible course of his own thinking, which has led him to subsume into nature the entire life of the psyche, and so the birth and the persistence of society appear to him fatally as a wound that can never be closed up.”

This sets up Calasso’s great second section, on Reich, which begins – I’m going to quote largely – like this:


“The mystical marriage of Marxism and psychoanalysis, reports on the crimes of the family, the rehabilitation of schizophrenics, the orgasm as panacea: all these themes, which for years have been debated and redebated, pedantically, in feminist weeklies as well as in seminars at the École Normale and Berkeley, were introduced and developed in the twenties by a Galician doctor, a follower of
Freud before becoming a feared apostate of psychoanalysis—Wilhelm Reich.

Prophet, scientist, social critic, cosmic charlatan—Reich was above all a visionary desperately in thrall to a single vision, which he considered the obvious key to the universe. Yet he had one of the most serious defects that a visionary can have: literal-mindedness, a devotion to facts, to the real thing, to quantitative
measurement, to the determining formula. Thus he wasn’t satisfied with introducing an unseemly notion like orgasm into the midst of psychoanalysis. He wasn’t satisfied with stubbornly circumventing psychoanalysis, with the help of some dazzling intuitions that allowed him to elaborate categories—orgasmic impotence, character armor, emotional plague, fear of pleasure, blocked libido— no less indispensable than the classic Freudian ones. He wanted to go beyond, like a buffalo. He capitulated to the belief that the word biology or some crude measuring apparatus would in itself guarantee a more secure approach to the secrets of the world, allowing him to touch, to see, to quantify the phantom,
ungraspable “orgonic energy” that he thought he had discovered.”

I’m going to quote some more from this essay in my next post, in relation to a movie of Bela Tarr’s, The Outsider, from 1979. The Tarr movie is set in a small Hungarian town, among hospital workers, a factory, various pubs, a disco. Everything is garishly shabby, with that special air of Marxist command and control neglect, the result of the spectacularly faulty notion that one can both create and nurture and industrial society and abolish the market. This is a society that has decided to substitute the production of monuments for the production of commodities – and thus, every ugly product, every pathetic car, every motorcycle, even every factory tool, has the ugliness of a monument, of something put out in a park to commemorate an utterly forgettable personage or event, something that accumulates bird shit and the urine of tramps. Like every Tarr movie I’ve seen, this one implacably grinds its way into the viewer’s heart and rips at the indifference accumulated as a necessary buffer from the day to day suicide, the overwhelming evidence that we can only stand our lives if we avoid looking at them too closely. Get close enough, and one’s life explodes in one’s face – every brief flash of joy or happiness exposing a vulnerability that will be mercilessly exploited by others, and that one will regret in tears and loathing on down the years, until one has hardened into the usual happy monster, a character armor without any inhabitant, a plug-in voluptuary with a distressingly limited range of nervous routines.

celebrity news

Pamela Anderson Weds Rick Salomon

On her blog, Anderson called Salomon a friend of 15 years. And they do have at least one scandalous tie – both have appeared in sex tapes: Salomon with Paris Hilton, and Anderson with Lee.

Last month, Anderson, appearing on Ellen DeGeneres's show, revealed that she was dating a new mystery man. "I paid off a poker debt with sexual favors, and I fell in love," Anderson told DeGeneres of her new guy. "It's so romantic. It's romance."

And Salomon gets a thumbs-up from at least one guy in Anderson's life: magician Klok, who told PEOPLE recently, "I like Rick. He's a really nice guy. As long as he's not making another video, I'm ok with him."

Well, in other news, LI got married and then divorced from Pamela Anderson. We were going to get married to Britney Spears after appearing in a sex video with her poodle, Towser, and a troupe of unicyclists, but there was a mix up at the Chapel, which – oops – will soon be appearing in another bootleg sex video which we are doing our best to suppress, LI DOES VEGAS, send $19.99 to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids Michigan, 20202, and we will throw in the amazing polycutter, your kitchen can’t be without the polycutter! Britney and I fell deeply in love while we were both coincidentally stopping at a light in Bangor, Maine, although at the time I was involved in selling drugs to Lindsey Lohan in order to marry Jena Bush. Tragically, Jena and I had a falling out after I married Brad Pitt, although that marriage had nothing to do with the notorious Brad Pitt and LI HAVE SEXXX with Penguins sex video I am doing my best to suppress, just send 19.99 to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202, and you will also get dirty postcards of Paris Hilton’s dirty underwear, a full set of 36! Trade them with your friends, or use them to write death threats to local stations who broadcast propaganda for murdering the unborn. But as I was saying, the split up with Brad was terrible, for me, my agent, and the thirteen penguins I eventually had to sell to the dog food factory. I ended up, of course, trying to dry out as I hilariously, in retrospect, ran over and killed ten pedestrians while snorting cocaine from the Olson twin’s bottoms – or they said they were the Olson twins. In any case, although I admitted wrongdoing and said it had affected my whole life, I was still put under house arrest for 32 hours, during which time, unfortunately, I ran over 10 other pedestrians but – the upside – that was when Britney and I had the stars in our eyes for each other. Later, of course, I did momentarily mistake her for Madonna, and then for Christine Aguillera, and then for Chris Matthews, and then for Clare Dane’s maid – her blond impalpability making it difficult for me to pick her out of a crowd – but still, until I married and divorced Jena Anderson, I’m sorry, I mean Lori Anderson, or no, Pamela Anderson, Britney was the height and depth my soul could reach. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that she’d been in a sex video with Jena Bush, the collected American Idol lineup of the 2003 season, and a flock of seagulls, which she has been trying to cover up although you can send $19.99 and get an autographed DVD of it for hours of viewing pleasure, send to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202. This explains my fistfight with the seagull that ended up as a brawl in which I killed and ate two retirees in Venice California, which I deeply regret. However, as you all know, I was put in prison for three days for this offense, which now that I’ve calmed down – at the time it seemed like injustice city, and they were picking on me - I do accept, especially as I would never have met Country Music Star whatshername – the one with the red hair – due to her incarceration too, and of course we fell madly in love and fucked through the prison bars, on the warden’s couch, and – apparently, I’m so embarrassed – in front of a camera set up in the rec room, all of which I am trying to suppress but that you can see – along with a whole set of whatsername’s country hits! for only 19.99, send to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202. And of course the papparazi are now bugging us – really, can’t we be allowed some privacy!? It is almost too much, and I blame that for my split up with whatshername, as she was offended by the sex video that I made with ten of the paparazzi and a Shetland pony.

So, obviously, I've been going through some hard times, but through it all, it is my fan base that has carried me through. I appreciate you all so much! It would be fantastic if we could make a sex video together, although I'd be terribly embarrassed by that and want to suppress it, of course.

part one of: silence, word, act

As promised, the first part of Karl Kraus' Silence, Word and Act.

Hey, for you who think translating Kraus is one of life's ho hum tasks, you try it.

Oh, and a word about word. Kraus uses the simple little noun to mean something more than that description of each one of the bits in this sentence. There is a sense of one's own word, one's own breathing in the bits of the sentence, that odd, unownable what you sound like. Bakhtine, if I can trust the translations, used Word to mean something similar.

"This is how silence and breaking silence are related. It is, as with so much that the conscience undergoes, not a contradiction. Because the silence was not reverent awe before an act behind which the word, in so far as it really is one, never retreats. It was simply concern: revulsion against the other word, against those, that the act accompanied, caused them, followed them, against the great dungheap of words of the world, which cannot and ought not to be respected. And the silence was so loud, that it was almost already speech. Now the chains fall off, because the chains themselves see that the word is stronger. It happened without my intending it, it was no act of decision, no plan here and there; there are moments, still, when even the machine has respect, and even in cases where we only expect suggestions, there is also room for inspiration. I have imagined my part for too long; then, as I lived a summer month in the middle of the silence of the most untouched landscape, where I bitterly suffered from the roar that filled everywhere else. It had to happen: after fifteen months in which these fearful heralds of victory rose to such a pitch of noise, from the possessed cashiers of world history down to the unescapable helpful cries of the extra editions, that after all the time even the herald of the greatest cultural bankruptcy that this planet has ever seen would make himself heard, were it only to prove that language itself has not yet been strangled. Really, I’m conscious of the fact that he who does not risk his head in the face of certain things doesn’t have one to risk. But what use is the exchange of heads against the fame of having had one? when with the head the word has also been confiscated, that it has to give! When the same machinery against which he charges, can make a mute of him in return! He will show it that there is more to him than merely his mite, that his endurance is something wholly different; that he can cannot harmonize the circumstances of a world romper room, in which the guns go off by themselves, with the divine plan to let the grass [Gras]and the mind [Geist] grow, and that reproaches a human race that tramples down both. Certainly, rather wager the head under these circumstances than through silent witness of such things to have posterity cast its doubts on you, one would have done better to have none, even if one were merely a German writer, circa 1915. But since the mute victim in these all too great times has still less value and effect then the Word; since it is nothing so exemplary as murder, as that which now everyone can, ought and must do – just because of this the word is liberated from itself. Even the word ought, in this moment, to do what it must; and I am corrupt enough to concede: possibly this state has proved, through its recognition of an exception to the state of exception, that in it as in every state with absolutist inclinations there yet lives a little endpoint of feeling for its cultural ruins. That it even has one last tear to give from a woeful perception that we will, when this adventure is dreamed through all the way, wake up on a bloodier battlefield, to the unlimited firesale managed by the epoch’s hyenas, out of whose infinite emptiness the new power will arise, repressed in the ghettos of hell for centuries and now corrupting the earth, conquering the air and stinking to high heaven. It may be that conservatives, from vocation or from birth, the nobility, church and warriors themselves have lost their spirits before the unbeatable foe, so they will combine with it out of alleged necessity. Perhaps they may, as though out of some enigmatic duty of universal vulnerability, commit frauds daily – but at some point they will notice the value of words that their courage no longer can coin for them, but shame, and that other feeling, which heals in the mightiest places: regret. Thus, all hail the weakling mighty ones! Let the lord enlighten them in their slumbers!"

review envy

“A policeman, Maurice Marullas, has blown out his brains. Let’s save the name of this honest man from being forgotten.”

LI recommends that you run at link speed to Julian Barnes’ LRB essay/review of Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Santé. This is such a good review that I turned several colors while reading it – green, from envy, white, from the painful thought that I would never write a review this good, and blue – well, because that is my normal color. I am, after all, Krishna. Luckily, you will notice that at least the first sentence doesn't quite work. This single blot has saved me the bother of following M. Maraullas.

Anyway, if you don’t read it, you are a stinking pig.

we don't know it

… jede Stunde mit dem letzten Schlag von tausend unschuldigen Herzen durch die Welt dröhnen müsste – “every hour must roar throughout the world with the last beats of a thousand innocent hearts.”

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life… no, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and we won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, foret they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.

- Karl Kraus, taken from Calasso’s essay, The Perpetual War.

LI just had a nice chat with Amy Chua, the woman who wrote World on Fire, about her new book, Day of Empire. We did the interview for the Austin Statesman. After hanging up, we went to the computer and read the newspapers, and the happy feeling got shot all full of holes, and started leaking on the rug.

We made a resolve last spring to write much less about Iraq on this site because that seemed hopeless and narcissistic. Nothing we said, no analysis we made, mattered. One could apply that criticism to the collectivity of what we have said about anything – but only a mean person would do that, right?

However, like the federal response to Katrina, the Nisoor Square massacre is not only a crime in itself, but a special crime, a representative crime. Usually we can trust the media to cover up representative crimes while making non-representative crimes household names – thus, the media attention devoted to the doings of OJ Simpson were in typical and amazing disproportion to the reality of crime in America, which does not generally consist of rich black men killing their white ex wives, but of poor black men railroaded into prison by any means possible to preserve the subtending structures of the battered Jim Crow system. Which is déjà vu all over again – the same thing happened in the South in the 1880s, when the Federal government surrendered on the 13th and 14th amendment to the White South and the White South, to assure its dominance before the legal structure of Jim Crow was set up, did the same disenfranchisement by way of prison thing.

However, the media’s record of distraction and decoying is not 100%. Sometimes, they accidentally stumble upon a real representative crime. The Nisoor Square massacre is one of them. Among its inglorious aspects is how it lifts into the intermittent glare of public attention a history going back twenty years, to the intervention in Yugoslavia.

Now, controversies about that intervention always seem to go around in a circle of assumptions that I think aren’t true. Unlike the invasion of Iraq, it simply isn’t true that Clinton came into office wanting a more interventionist foreign policy. And I’ve read no credible account that points to the White House as the driver of the intervention – it was driven at a lower level. But it was driven by the same means that were employed in the pre-war campaign of 2002 – trickery, lies, and the crucial work of a dedicated group of liberal publicists tied to a group of people, like Peter Galbraith, at that time ambassador to Croatia, determined to pull the U.S. in, and willing to break international law to do it. In Yugoslavia, as in Colombia, the Clinton administration turned, like some dog trained by a neo-liberal Pavlov, to “private security forces’ – thugs, in order to “lessen the political pressure” – get around legal democratic strictures – in order to enforce policy. To paraphrase the famous sentence from Vietnam, the liberal hawk motto is, we have to destroy democracy in order to spread it. And destroy it they have definitely tried to – all of the usurpations of dictatorial executive power we associate with the Bush administration were prefigured under Clinton. No, Clinton didn’t torture, but he set up the mechanism of executive privilege to invade our rights – notoriously in the case of encryption – that were simply expanded by the Bushies.

Such is the state of the current historical case. You have to do some combination of mega plumbing and root canal work to get to the bottom of all of this hiring of mercenaries, this welling rot and decay that is sapping the spirit from this republic.

All of which is to intro my next post, I think, which is a treat for the ladies and gentlemen in the paying audience and you out there at home. Let’s have a big round of applause for my upcoming translation of Kraus’ famous essay, Silence, Word and Act, written in 1915 a year after he wrote In these Momentous Times, his attack on the War. For that year, according to Edward Timms, his English biographer, Kraus was experiencing the love of his life with Sidonie Nadherny, who was as well connected as you could be in the Habsburg Empire. Her family estate in Janovitz in Bohemia was close to the Archduke Ferdinand’s. Kraus, on the other hand, was a converted Jew, a scandalous journalist, and not at all socially acceptable – as her friend, Rilke, told her. Rilke was much too much the gentlemen to want his friend marrying a Jew. (Rilke, for all his genius, was a bit of a shit). Although Sidonie herself wrote in her diary, in 1917: “K.K., I wish he’d love me less, for in my heart are other dreams and faithful I cannot be and no man should want that of a woman, for it must make her fade.”

In these Momentous Times (In diese Grosse Zeit) came out in November, 1914 (Which began with the famous sentence, In this great time which I still knew when it was so little). Kraus hadn’t said much about the war since it began in August. There, he had his say. So, in 1915, Kraus was already known – as Shaw was known in the U.K. – for his stance against the war. Yet the Fackel was not shuttered – although of course the yahoos raged. This essay is connected to his Momentous Times essay.

Representative Chris Shays: a venomous blot

Representative Chris Shays from Connecticut had this to say, today, about the passage of a bill that would mildly curb the corrupt and odious mercenaries Americans have unloosed in Iraq:

“Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., accused Democrats of rushing the bill through Congress in a partisan bid to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the war.
"It is amazing to me the number of men in Blackwater that have lost their lives and we never hear it on the other side of the aisle," Shays said. "Blackwater is evil. That's the way it appears in all the dialogue."

Of course, he is defending the company that did, among other things, this:


“On that day, the Blackwater convoy was responding to a bombing near a State Department convoy about a mile away. As the Blackwater armored vehicles entered the square, a heavily guarded area near Baghdad's affluent Mansour neighborhood, Iraqi police officers moved to stop traffic.

Kadhum, the doctor, and her son Haitham, who were in the flow of cars the officers were trying to stop, didn't react quickly enough. A Blackwater guard fired, striking Haitham as he sat in the driver's seat, three witnesses said.
"The bullet went through the windshield and split his head open," recalled traffic police officer Sarhan Thiab. "His mother was holding him, screaming for help."

Remember, too, that the Blackwater then wrote up a memo of the incident, on Embassy stationary, and even leaked it to the press, in which no mention was made of any casualties.

All of this reminds LI of Sejanus’ speech in Ben Jonson’s play:

“The coarsest act
Done to my service, I can so requite,
As all the world shall style it honourable:
Your idle, virtuous definitions,
Keep honour poor, and are as scorn'd as vain:
Those deeds breathe honour that do suck in gain.”

And, of course, what would a controversy be without the mob of liberal kiss-asses, bribed touts, and violence fetishists pleading for villains. This is from TNR’s The Plank:

"Via TPM, I recommend this MotherJones article on Doug Brooks and the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), which he heads up. The IPOA is the trade group for private military contractors, including Blackwater. But, although the MoJo article is provocatively headlined "Blackwater's Man in Washington," it provides a nuanced--and actually somewhat sympathetic--portrait of Brooks:

Brooks, who insists that his goal is "to help end wars," brims with excitement about the private sector's potential to save lives in conflict zones around the world. But the conduct in the Iraq War of companies like Blackwater, an IPOA founding member accused of multiple indiscriminant shootings in Iraq, has proven to be a distraction, as have accusations against other companies (not all of them IPOA members) of human trafficking, overbilling, corruption, and shoddy work. Though at times Brooks can make hired guns sound like U.N. peacekeepers, few people doubt his good intentions. "I've known Doug for a while, and I take him very seriously when talks about his focus on private peacekeeping. It's not just marketing," says Singer. The reality, he adds, is that ever since the Iraq invasion the IPOA "has been forced to steer in a completely different direction. You can see that in the press inquiries that Doug is having to answer all the time. He's doing a lot more talking right now about Blackwater and Baghdad than about using contractors in Congo or Darfur." It's a conflict that is perhaps unavoidable as Brooks struggles to ensure that recent contractor scandals "don't hamstring the humanitarian potential" of the IPOA's member companies. But according to Avant, the Iraq War has made it harder, not easier, for Brooks to promote standards in the private military industry. She points out that, especially early in the war, companies that bent the rules typically did better for themselves than companies that followed them. The premium placed on good behavior was weakened as a result. Still, she says, IPOA standards are a good first step. "The industry does have an incentive to say, 'Look, we're not just a group of cowboy mercenaries. This is the law we operate on; these are the standards.'"
For what it's worth, I interviewed Brooks last year for this story on some recent college grads' efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur. And I came away from the interview with Brooks thinking that his heart was definitely in the right place. Alas, the same can't necessarily be said for some of the people he represents.”

'Heart being in the right place' means that he participates in the action movie fantasy of giving opulent white American males a proxy instrument to rain death down upon who they chose. The presupposition here, so flattering to the moral wankers who make up the circles of seriousness in D.C., is that the deciders have such tender sensibilities that we can trust them implicitly to do the right thing – which is why they need to preserve an on call mercenary force. It worked so well under the first Clinton, so let's preserve it for the second, is the subtext, here.

a stray thesis

One of my stray theses about happiness is that the discourse of happiness suffers from a variant of the pathetic fallacy, as Ruskin called the attempt to instill a mood into a landscape, or to project human feelings, in general, on the inanimate. The variant of this is to project happiness upon fortunate circumstances, as though the circumstances themselves were happy. Since, of course, happiness derives from the experience of those circumstances, we are dealing with a sort of mass hallucination, a doubling of the hedonic focus. Or perhaps I should say a hedonic neurosis. And from this we get an unending and dreary succession of complaints on the same theme: I'm not happy!

To explain what I mean, let me quote history’s eternal dirty old man, Voltaire. Voltaire, as is well known, found the abstract constructions of the doctors of the church ultimately laughable. But he was also wary of the abstract constructions of the materialists, the more radical group of philosophes that came after him. He distrusted their confident assertions about matter. Matter was a shit or a fuck, it was a ball or a pen, it was a building or a street, and when it was organic matter, it worked in a way we don’t understand and did things we didn’t comprehend. He is an old crab, and only old crabs really have the smile of reason on their pusses. In a rather confusing text, a gloss on Diderot’s entry on the passions in the Encyclopedie, Voltaire imagines himself interrogating, first, a doctor of the church.

Tell me this, doctor (I don’t mean medical doctor, who has done something, spent a long time examining the sinosities of the brain, who has researched whether the nerves have a circulating fluid, who has dug in vain in the womb in order to see how a thinking being forms, and who knows everything that can be known of our machine, alas, I mean a doctor in theology). I conjure you in the name of that reason which makes you tremble. Tell me why, having seen your servant make a movement from the left to the right and from the right to the left of the gluteus muscle, that, on the spot your imagination lights up; two erector muscles, coming off of the iskion, give a perpendicular movement to your phallus – its cavernous body fills with blood – you introduce your balanus intra vaginum of your governess, and your balanus tickles suum clitorida giving her, like you, a one or two second pleasure, and from which is born a thinking being, all corrupt with original sin? What is the relation, if you please, between this action and the movement of the gluteus muscle of your gouvernante [sic – maid]? You can read Thomas Aquinus and Scotus and Bonaventure, you will never find anything explaining that incomprehensible mechanism by which the eternal architect directed your ideas, your desires your actions, and had born a little bastard of a priest predestined to damnation for all eternity.

So far, so good. In fact, this connects to Diderot’s entry – which I am planning to use in my essay, so I will be translating it soon for you good and lucky people. Then Voltaire takes on an even odder human behavior.
“The next morning, after having taken your chocolate, your memory retraces the image of the pleasure you tasted yesterday, and you begin anew. Do you believe, my great automaton, that it is that memory that you have in common with animals? Do you know what nerve fibers recall your ideas, and paint in your brain all the voluptuous pleasures of yesterday by a prolonged sentiment which has slept with you and re-awakened with you? The doctor replies according to Thomas Aquinas that all of this is a product of his vegetative soul, his sensitive soul, and his intellectual soul, all through of which compose one soul, which being non-extended evidently acts on the whole extended body.
I spot his embarrassed air, as he stutters out words of the meanings of which he hasn’t the slightest idea. And I say, at last: doctor, if you agree in spite of yourself that you don’t know what a soul is, and that you have spoken your whole life long without understanding it; why don’t you break down an confess it like an honest man? why not conclude that it is necessary to comclude with the physical premonition of doctor Boursier, and in certain spots in Malebranche, and chiefly in that wise Locke, so superior to Malebranche? why don’t you conclude, I say, that your soul is a faculty that God gave you, without telling you the secret of it, as he has given you so many others? learn that many reasoners claim that, properly speaking, there is only the unknown power of the divine Demiurge and his unknown laws which all operate in us? And, to speak frankly, we don’t know what it is all about.”
From which Voltaire concludes, at the end of the essay:

“Poor marionettes of the eternal demiurge, who know neither why nor how an invisible hand makes your parts move, and then throws us in to the mass of others in the box! Let us repeat here, more than ever, with Aristotle: everything is an occult quality.”

There is something about this comic nihilism that reminds me of another grand old dirty old man, Bertrand Russell, who gave up philosophy, for the most part, in the forties, telling people that he’d gone back to Berkeley – and then delighting in dousing enthusiasms in his History of Philosophy. These crabs and their smiles of reason. I wonder if this is where I’m headed?

However, to return to my point. Even the basic sexual elements, that which will give us pleasure, turns out to be a much more unpredictable experience, constructed from internal mysteries, than we like to admit. Does a beautiful ass move you? A voice? Hair? Hairlessness? We go out in the world, we make experiments, or... more often, we don't. We find a place to settle and we cling to it, because there is a great cost to making experiments. Voltaire, who is making a somewhat different point than my point about the hedonic fallacy, is pointing to the root of it, nevertheless.

the always awesome media cogito

There are two news stories I’d recommend to LI readers today – one is by James Glanz, of all people, in the NYT. Emboldened by the Waxman committee’s timid display of intransigence – there’s even a threat that the Democrats might try to regulate the mercenaries in Iraq, heavens! the Dems play so rough! – the establishment American press has actually gone out and collected information, instead of letting information, in the form of faxes from the State department composed by Blackwater, come to them – and of course, in the latter case, be distributed by them to the public at large, which must be cretinized every day if the system is to roll lustily forward.

So, after persistently reporting on the death toll settled on by the State department at 11, the NYT story raises the stakes a bit – to 17 dead, 24 wounded. In a nice ass covering move, this is attributed to Iraqi officials and called a ‘higher toll than previously thought.’ You will notice the function of thought, here. ‘Thought’ isn’t Descartes’ thought, animate and animating in all human beings, the kingly cogito, but NYT’s thought, where it is the intellectual property of a small and elite group of serious people, which include Blackwater, Democratic party consultants, the Pentagon, and of course the White House, which does the thinking around here – that is, in these here states.

Then we get the grisly account:

“The new details include these:
A deadly cascade of events began when a single bullet apparently fired by a Blackwater guard killed an Iraqi man whose weight probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the car forward as the passenger, the man’s mother, clutched him and screamed.
The car continued to roll toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee.
Minutes after that shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy — possibly the same one — moved north from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several witnesses say.
But questions emerge from accounts of the earliest moments of the shooting in Nisour Square.

The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee.

As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was shot in the back as he tried to flee. The account of the struggle among the Blackwater guards corroborates preliminary findings of the American investigation.

Still, while the series of events pieced together by the Iraqis may be correct, important elements could still be missing from that account, according to the American official familiar with the continuing American investigation into the shootings.

Among the questions still to be answered, the official said, is whether at any time nearby Iraqi security forces began firing, possibly leading the Blackwater convoy to believe it was under attack and therefore justified in returning fire. It is also possible that as the car kept rolling toward the intersection, the Blackwater guards believed it posed a threat and intensified their shooting.”

Yes, when we ‘think’, we have to remember we are on sufferance. What American officials think will, of course, be treated as the word of God – and like God, these American officials must not be named. To name them would be a form of blasphemy, although on the other hand, it just might lead to idolatry – so wise are they, so successful, so tough, so mission accomplished, that it is possible we, en masse, would fall down and worship at their feet. Worried by both things, the NYT has taken thought to prevent it.

Then we have the ‘spot report’ from the Washington Post, which gives us a chuckleworthy picture of our brave mercenaries in Iraq and their firin’ ways. Seems like Prince’s citation of the number of firearm discharges against the number of missions is probably skewed by, oh, 80 percent. But not to worry! The mercs are regulated by the toughest of the tough, such as one Lightener. A man whose thoughts are as the toughened, ultra tough, tough tough tough thoughts of the Weekly Standard editorial board, which are thoughts indeed.

“Procedures for reporting shooting incidents also often varied, according to current and former guards. "It's almost like a case of cover your ass," the former Blackwater guard said. "It's like, 'These guys did this, they filled out this report, we have documentation on it, and unless anybody else says anything, it's in this file here.' "
Lightner, the Army major who monitors shooting incidents, said he thought the number of reported incidents was in some ways insignificant. "Other than entertainment value, I don't see why I need to be all that worried about the number of incidents, as long as they were legitimate," he said. "If they were incidents of wrongdoing, then that's a different story."
Lightner said he usually accepted the company's version of events. "If they're reporting firing a weapon, and there's no wrongdoing, and they operated according to the law, then God bless 'em, drive on," he said. "If Aegis sends me a report and says, 'Bad guys shot at us, we shot back and dropped two of them,' I'm not going to investigate. I'm not going to worry about it, unless somebody comes back and says, 'Yeah, they dropped two children, or they dropped a woman.' "

Yup, its funner than a shootin’ gallery…

The important thing here is not to let the Democrats get away with ‘regulating’ the mercenaries. The mercenaries have to go. And the problem with them being used by the Pentagon at all is that the use is bi-partisan. Clinton used Dyncorps, remember, as a substitute for American troops in Bosnia because – he didn’t want to be constrained by the popular impulse not to commit American troops. For which he was lauded by the liberal interventionists like the Roman senate used to laud Nero. Plant a wicked seed, grow a wicked tree, bearing poison fruit.

Blackwater getting paid to monitor blackwater exonerates Blackwater

LI has been thinking more about CNN’s Blackwater report. To refresh your memory, here’s the salient quote

“Blackwater said its employees responded properly to an insurgent attack on a convoy, and the State Department "spot report" written by the Blackwater contractor underscores that and doesn't mention civilian casualties.

However, the contractor's account is at odds with Iraqis' version of the incident. A senior Iraqi National Police official participating in the Iraqi governmental probe of the shooting said the Blackwater gunfire was unprovoked and random, killing and wounding several civilians.

Blackwater contractor Darren Hanner drafted the two-page spot report on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Hanner, listed on the report as the center's watch officer, was working for Blackwater at the time the report was written -- just after the shooting occurred, said a highly placed industry source. He was to rotate out of Iraq last week, the source said.”

Now, let’s move beyond the fact that Blackwater not only got paid for murdering Iraqis, but – in one of those sweet beyond belief deals that make our time so precious – even got paid for covering it up. This is double dipping with a vengeance.

No, LI has been thinking of the news stories that came out after the Nisoor Square shooting, notably in the NYT and the Washington Post. Both sources reported the shootings in a rather odd way. That is, they reported them wholly through the lens of the State Department – which, as we know now, was speaking in terms it had contracted Blackwater to make up. In other words, it reported on Blackwater’s murders using Blackwater’s spin. Of course, it isn’t as though the media, spiritually in hock to the Bush culture, couldn’t manufacture their own bs. As Fred Hiatt says, in his ‘I love mercenaries’ editorial in the Washington Post today (an editorial in which, of course, he doesn’t even utter the dreaded M word:

“The latest shooting incident -- one of at least five this year in which Blackwater guards have killed Iraqis -- is still under investigation by a U.S.-Iraqi commission. Teams from the State Department (which is getting FBI help) and the Pentagon are conducting separate reviews of private security contractors. Already, though, it seems clear that Blackwater's critics are right in one important respect: There are inadequate controls over security firms, especially those working for the State Department. A decree by the coalition occupation authority early in the war exempted U.S contractors from Iraqi laws, and it's not clear that Blackwater guards working for the State Department are covered in practice by U.S. statutes that govern behavior by American soldiers. This needs to be corrected. Even if a proposed Iraqi law governing private contractors does not go forward, Congress and the Bush administration should ensure that those who kill innocent Iraqis or engage in other criminal excesses can be held legally accountable. Moreover, U.S. diplomats and military commanders should exercise more control over the guards who work for them, with the aim of preventing them from needlessly alienating Iraqis.

At the same time it is foolish to propose the elimination of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the short term. As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates pointed out at a recent congressional hearing, the downsizing of the U.S. military has left the Army without enough people to perform many specialized tasks -- of which VIP security is one. More than 130,000 contractors serve the U.S. mission in Iraq, including some 30,000 security guards, and without them it would be impossible for U.S. forces to function.”

(One should remember: the Post is dead set on the U.S. bombing Iran. That, at the same time, the Post doesn’t think the U.S. could operate without a mercenary force tells us that the Post would either like to see that mercenary force expanded or that the Post expresses its foreign policy views with the charming insouciance of a baby learning to use the word da-da. Take your pick.)

If we go back to this report on September 28 in the Post, helpfully headlined –

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“Blackwater Faced Bedlam, Embassy Finds: 'First Blush' Report Raises New Questions on Shooting”,

we find an ‘embassy’ report that gives us a much different picture of what happened in Nisoor square than any of the other reports. The Post made this a front page article.

“The initial U.S. Embassy report on a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving Blackwater USA, a private security firm, depicts an afternoon of mayhem that included a car bomb, a shootout in a crowded traffic circle and an armed standoff between Blackwater guards and Iraqi security forces before the U.S. military intervened.
The two-page report, described by a State Department official as a "first blush" account from the scene, raises new questions about what transpired in the intersection. According to the report, the events that led to the shooting involved three Blackwater units. One of them was ambushed near the traffic circle and returned fire before fleeing the scene, the report said. Another unit that went to the intersection was then surrounded by Iraqis and had to be extricated by the U.S. military, it added.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Post’s 'two page memo' seems to correspond exactly to the Darren Hanner memo. In fact, they are identical, which means that the Post devoted its headline and a story to simply repeating a memo written by a Blackwater employee, without telling its readers that this memo was written by a Blackwater employee. That, basically, the Post was taking stenography from Blackwater. By attributing the memo to the ‘embassy’, the Post could then triangulate it with quotes from ‘Blackwater’. This is known as a virtuous circle, or circle jerk, in the spin-news world of American reporting.

So we get this paragraph:

“The report, by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, details the events as described by Blackwater guards -- details that are now at the center of an intense debate in Iraq and in Congress over the larger role of private security firms in Iraq. Tens of thousands of armed, private guards operate in Iraq, protecting everything from U.S. and Iraqi officials to supply convoys. The shooting incident is being scrutinized in at least three separate investigations.
Witnesses and the Iraqi government have insisted that the shooting by the private guards was unprovoked. Blackwater has claimed that its guards returned fire only after they were shot at. The document makes no reference to civilian casualties. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed and 12 wounded in the incident. The report said Blackwater sustained no casualties.”

Now, if we substitute into the first sentence, “The report, by Blackwater, details the events as described by Blackwater guards’, we get a pretty good sense of how the news is usually reported from Iraq, and some sense of why we are still there. The media isn’t just brownnosing this administration; it has become, soul and body, part of the White House’s anal equipment.

It helps to remember this story when reading any stories reported from Iraq in the American press.

Lo-ammi: a son is born

Sometimes LI wonders why we bother with commentary. Collage is the mightier instrument. So, this is from the latest NYT Blackwater piece, reporting on one of Blackwater’s murders [called ‘incidents’ as a figleaf]


“The incident involving “a drunken Blackwater contractor” arose when the employee killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, Adil Abd-al-Mahdi, in December 2006. State Department officials allowed Blackwater to take the shooter out of Iraq less than 36 hours later.

Then the State Department charge d’affaires recommended that Blackwater make “a sizable payment” and an “apology” in an effort to “avoid this whole thing becoming even worse,” the report went on. The State Department official suggested a $250,000 payment to the guard’s family, but the department’s Diplomatic Security Service said that was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed.” In the end, $15,000 was agreed upon. The report adds credence to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have adopted an aggressive, trigger-happy approach and displayed disregard for Iraqi life.”

Via TPM

A Blackwater contractor wrote an initial U.S. government report about how his colleagues killed Iraqi civilians in a September shooting that strained U.S.-Iraqi relations, government and industry sources told CNN.

The Iraqi government claims private contractors with Blackwater USA, who were guarding a U.S. diplomatic convoy, killed as many as 20 civilians on September 16 in western Baghdad's Nasoor Square.

The incident produced an outcry in Iraq and raised questions about the accountability of foreign security contractors in Iraq, who under an order laid down by the U.S.-led occupation government are not subject to Iraqi law for actions taken within their contracts.

Blackwater -- which provides security to U.S. diplomats -- says its employees responded properly to an insurgent attack on a convoy, and the State Department initial "spot report" written by the Blackwater contractor underscores that scenario and doesn't mention civilian casualties.
…
The Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted a two-page "spot report" on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The TOC -- which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions -- has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.

And this, from David Carr’s For the Rich, Magazines Fat on Ads:

But it is not just about rich people. Luxury has been defined down any number of ways. “Sex and the City” is now in wide syndication, which means that most of the country now knows that Jimmy Choo is not a kind of beef jerky. BMW is introducing the 1 Series next year with a lower point of entry for the aspirant. Even if you can’t afford a baby Beemer, you can express your taste in finery in everything from coffee to chocolate. And while other teenage magazines folded, Teen Vogue proved that brand aspiration can be baked in at a very young age.

I think what has to really be baked in at a young age is how those Crazy Iraqis leap to take our bullets in the gut so they can get the big big payoff! Because, of course, they lack a life respecting ethos, like us Christians. Ah, the liberation generation, the liberation culture, the winds of the ownership society sweeping through the Benevolent Hegemon. Makes me shiver.

And from the Book of Hosea:

And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.
3: So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son.
4: And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel.
5: And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.
6: And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And God said unto him, Call her name Lo-ruhamah: for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away.
7: But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.
8: Now when she had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son.
9: Then said God, Call his name Lo-ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.

Everybody dance now.

on the way down to the bottom

LI heartily recommends this article for the hilarious sidelight it throws on our funniest, most corrupt administration.

It seems that the White House, with the compassion of twenty Buddhas, realizes that its nomination of wacko rightwingers to various posts can do said rightwingers some financial harm – because sometimes Congress doesn’t kiss ass fast enough. It’s a training problem. But it is no problem for the clever Bushies! Not when you have a whole goldbricking pseudo-charity around to which the Gov can shovel tax free dollars!

Invention, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago, is the dynamic of capitalism, and what is more inventive than Commonwealth Research Institute? It’s a charity. It’s a faith based organization. It’s a way to pay Republicans $13,400 a month for doing zip work. And it’s a Merchant of Death – all in one!

“Commonwealth Research and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies, are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as tax-exempt charities, even though their primary work is for the Pentagon and other government agencies. In a recent report Concurrent, also based in Johnstown, Pa., said it was among the Defense Department's top 200 contractors, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, force readiness and advanced materials.
Concurrent's top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier.
Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.”

If you love the smell of Empire decaying in the morning, you will love the smell of CRI - a scrumptious odor, much like highway kill in the noonday Texas sun. But such things are bound to happen when your income distribution skew makes Brazil look like Sweden. Hate the way the country is headed? Tough shit. The wealthy will block every avenue of change, until of course they are expropriated by the chain of events they have put in place, as their skankiness is – oh, Mother Nature is so hard – completely and thoroughly punished – which, of course, is a punishment in which we will all share.

the Sunday sickness unto death rant

LI was looking up info on Blackwater, yesterday, and we came across the Virginian-Pilot profile of the company. That profile included little bios of the guys at the top of America’s Funniest Mercenary Company. It was the bio of the COO that stuck with me. Isn’t this man a posterboy of the Bush culture. I can see my face, I can see the face of 350 million of my fellow Americans, slug-like somnambulists heading towards the cliffs but with the finest of accessories … contributing another sweet 300 million dollars today, as on all days, to the mass murder of Iraqis (it is always Christmas in Iraq) … reflected in this man’s record, from the Virginian-Pilot:

“JOSEPH SCHMITZ, 49, became chief operating officer and general counsel of the Prince Group in September 2005 after a stint as inspector general at the Defense Department.
Schmitz was the senior Pentagon official responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse. Now he faces a congressional inquiry into accusations that he quashed two criminal investigations of senior Bush administration officials. The inquiry is continuing, according to a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Schmitz was a special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration. He was awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service on his retirement from the Pentagon.

Schmitz’s father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman from California and a prominent member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative group that flowered during the Cold War. He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party after its founder, George Wallace, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.

John Schmitz’s political career ended with the revelation that he had a mistress who bore two of his children. He then moved to Washington, where he bought a house once owned by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau, also became embroiled in a scandal. As a married teacher in Washington state, she went to prison after being convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student with whom she ultimately had two children. The two have since married.”

Could you make things like this up? If you did in a novel, you would be denounced for creating Leftist caricatures. That Schmitz’s father’s career ended not because he was a racist and crazed semi-fascist, but because he had an affair with a younger student, speaks to the fact that there are congressional districts in which lunacy equals electability. So Joseph Schmitz was obviously set up to be an early achiever in the Great Bushian Post 9/11 Orgy. And party he did.

David Sirota and Judd Legum wrote a piece about Schmitz back when he was the Pentagon’s inspector general:

“Fact: Halliburton has overcharged taxpayers for food, accepted kickbacks for oil subcontracts, and spent taxpayer money renting rooms at five-star resorts in Kuwait.
But instead of expressing outrage the government's top watchdog, Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, last week parroted the company line, saying he believes Halliburton's problems "are not out of line with the size and scope of their contracts." He then accused the press of overemphasizing the connections between the company and its former CEO Dick Cheney, even though Vice President Cheney still collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation, owns company stock options, and had his office "coordinate" Halliburton contracts in Iraq.
Why is the government's top independent watchdog deliberately sugarcoating taxpayer ripoffs? Because he, like other Bush administration officials charged with overseeing expenditures in Iraq, is anything but independent.

Instead of filling the various inspector general, comptroller, and budget officer positions in Iraq with skilled, non-partisan public servants, President Bush has packed them with partisans and cronies like Schmitz. Many of these individuals have longstanding political ties with the administration and ties to the very industries and companies that they are supposed to oversee. Here are the dirty details:

Joseph Schmitz: Defense Department Inspector General

Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz was appointed to his post by President Bush in 2001 after the Associated Press reported the office "was caught cheating" and destroying internal documents. His office has broad jurisdiction to investigate all Pentagon contracts, both in Iraq and elsewhere. But judging by Schmitz's qualifications, the White House had one thing in mind when it appointed him: political loyalty.

According to National Journal, Schmitz is the son of former California Rep. John G. Schmitz, who was a John Birch Society director. As a member of the archconservative Washington Legal Foundation, Joseph Schmitz made a name for himself as "a conservative activist" and as a lawyer for House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a court case attempting to outlaw forms of taxation. In 1992, he authored a letter to The Washington Times insinuating that the Democratic presidential nominee had connections to Russian intelligence, writing, "The KGB apparently knows more about the shady side of Bill Clinton than the American people ever will."

His short tenure at the Pentagon has been marked not only by defending Halliburton, but also by defending the administration he is supposed to be overseeing. For instance, in 2002, Schmitz refused congressional entreaties to declassify a report detailing how the administration was providing inadequate training and protective gear to troops in the event of a bio-chemical attack.”

That was in 2004. In 2005, Sirota resigned. The LA Times had a story about the two cases that were being ‘investigated’ by Congress - which is a form of euthanasia for criminal conduct, popular in the omni-corrupt precincts of D.C. Look like you are punishing the guilty, and take contributions from them for your next campaign, the yacht that you’ve always wanted, and a paint job for your house – it’s the D.C. mantra. In any case, this is what the Times reported:

“The first of the criminal investigations in which Schmitz allegedly intervened involved John A. "Jack" Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of Defense for international technology security.

Shaw, who was the subject of a series of articles in The Times last year, tried to manipulate a lucrative contract in Iraq in 2004 to favor a telecommunications company whose board included a close friend, according to whistle-blowers who worked for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Shaw had signed an unusual agreement with Schmitz that gave him some investigative authority. Shaw told U.S. officials in Iraq that he was conducting investigations under that agreement during a trip to Iraq in December 2003. The results of those investigations were later used in his effort to push for contracts of firms tied to his friends and their clients, according to the whistle-blowers.

Shaw, who was forced out of office last year after refusing to resign, has denied any wrongdoing.

Schmitz referred the whistle-blowers' accusations to the FBI, despite the protests of senior criminal investigators in his office who had already found "specific and credible evidence" of wrongdoing by Shaw, according to Grassley's letter.

The FBI has not placed a high priority on the investigation, which has since stalled, according to one person with knowledge of the case.”

I think this was one of the most beautiful of the numberless small crimes committed under the Bush administration by a Bushie. It is so clever! And there is a certain John Birchy sadism to it – take the goody goody procedure and use it to line the pockets of your regular nosepickin’ goldbrickin’ chum, with whom you can discuss the latest from Rush and lament the good old days of Jim Crow – who could resist? Certainly not a man whose elevation to the post of ‘inspector general’ gives new meaning to the phrase, you are doing a heckuva job.

And it is no surprise, given the way the mesh has been woven, that this man is now on the margins of the Blackwater massacre, as the very Zelig of far right mania. Vanity Fair has published a new investigative report on the ‘loss’ of about 9 billion dollars by the CPA during the period that Schmitz was inspector general. Here are some excerpts:

“To be fair, the C.P.A. really did need money desperately, and it really did need to start spreading it among the traumatized Iraqi population. It also needed to jump-start Iraq's basic services. As the C.P.A. demanded ever greater amounts of cash, the pallets of $1, $5, and $10 bills were soon replaced by bundles of $100 bills. During the C.P.A.'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

After arriving in Baghdad, some of the cash was shipped to outlying regions, but most of it stayed in the capital, where it was delivered to Iraqi banks, to installations such as Camp Victory, the mammoth U.S. Army facility adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and to Saddam's former presidential palace, in the Green Zone, which had become the home of Bremer's C.P.A. and the makeshift Iraqi government. At the palace the cash disappeared into a vault in the basement. Few people ever saw the vault, but the word was that during one short period it held as much as $3 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a major repository of the banknotes from America during the brief time the cash was under the care of the C.P.A. The money flowed in and out rapidly. When someone needed cash, a unit called the Program Review Board, composed of senior C.P.A. officials, reviewed the request and decided whether to recommend a disbursement. A military officer would then present that authorization to personnel at the vault.”

And there is this:

"There was corruption everywhere," said one former military officer who worked with the C.P.A. in Baghdad in the months after the invasion. Some of the Iraqis who were put in charge of ministries after Saddam's fall had never run a government agency before. Their inexperience aside, he said, they lived in constant fear of losing their jobs or their lives. All many cared about, he added, was taking care of themselves. "You could see that a lot of them were trying their best to get a quick retirement fund before they were ousted or killed," he added. "You just get what you can while you're in that position of power. Instead of trying to build the nation, you build yourself."

Did any withdrawals from the vault pay for secret activities by government personnel? It is an obvious possibility. Much of the cash was clearly destined for American contractors or Iraqi subcontractors. Sometimes the Iraqis came to the palace to collect their cash; other times, when they were reluctant to show up at the American compound, U.S. military personnel had to deliver it themselves. One of the riskier jobs for some U.S. military men was to fill up a car with bags of cash and drive the money to contractors in Baghdad neighborhoods, handing it over like a postal worker delivering mail.

"Fraud" was simply another word for "business as usual." Of 8,206 "guards" drawing paychecks courtesy of the C.P.A., only 602 warm bodies could in fact be found; the other 7,604 were ghost employees. Halliburton , the government contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, charged the C.P.A. for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers while in fact serving only 14,000 of them. Cash was handed out from the backs of pickup trucks. On one occasion a C.P.A. official received $6.75 million in cash with the expectation he would shell it out in one week. Another time, the C.P.A. decided to spend $500 million on "security." No specifics, just a half-billion dollars for security, with this cryptic explanation: "Composition TBD"--that is, "to be determined."

The pervasiveness of this Why-should-I-care? attitude was driven home in an exchange with retired admiral David Oliver, the C.P.A.'s director of management and budget. Oliver was asked by a BBC reporter what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad:

Oliver: "I have no idea--I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't--nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "Not important?"

Oliver: "No. The coalition--and I think it was between 300 and 600 people, civilians--and you want to bring in 3,000 auditors to make sure money's being spent?"

Q: "Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

And here is a beautiful story of what a difference a little hundred million or so can make. Ask not what you can do for your government, but what it can do for you – and have faith. And feel faith in your heart. And know that Jesus is Lord. And remember that, when asked, the creeps and morons – the merchants of death group – will attribute their good fortunes to – themselves. Their hard work. Their self reliance. Always. It was hard work. It was brains. These are, in the hushed words of the Heritage Foundation type, the "successful". Usually accompanied by Uriah Heeplike hand gestures. So it is with Custer and Battles:

“The name was derived not from Little Big Horn but from the names of the company's owners, Scott K. Custer and Michael J. Battles. Both were former army rangers in their mid-30s, and Battles also had once been a C.I.A. operative. The pair showed up on the streets of Baghdad with the blessing of the White House at invasion's end, looking for a way to do business. At the time, the only American civilians who could gain access to the city were those approved by President Bush's staff.

The Battles half of the team brought the White House access, secured when Michael Battles became the G.O.P.-backed candidate in the 2002 Rhode Island congressional primary for the privilege of losing to the Democratic incumbent, Patrick Kennedy. Battles not only lost the primary but was fined by the Federal Election Commission for misrepresenting campaign contributions. Nevertheless, he forged important political connections. His contributors included Haley Barbour, the longtime Washington power broker and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is now governor of Mississippi, and Frederic V. Malek, a former special assistant to President Nixon, who survived the Watergate scandal and went on to become an insider in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations.

The C.P.A. awarded Custer and Battles one of its first no-bid contracts--$16.5 million to protect civilian aircraft flights, of which at the time there were few, into Baghdad International Airport. The company faced immediate obstacles: Custer and Battles didn't have any money, they didn't have a viable business, and they didn't have any employees. Bremer's C.P.A. had overlooked these shortcomings and forked over $2 million anyway, in cash, to get them started, simply ignoring long-standing requirements that the government certify that a contractor has the capacity to fulfill a contract. That first $2 million cash infusion was followed shortly by a second. Over the next year Custer Battles would secure more than $100 million in Iraq contracts. The company even set up an internal Office of Corporate Integrity. "Integrity is a core principle of Custer Battles' corporate values," Scott Custer stated in a press release.”

And so it goes. Will there be a reckoning? In truth, after 60 years of intense war culture, democracy is bound to fray, to be fatally attracted to that quarter of the country that ardently wishes its dick was a Glock 18c. Even though that quarter of the country spends its life getting well out of the way of any real encounter with danger. Still, the presence of such masses of money does insure that D.C. stays reliably corrupt, and will continue to fight with itself until, exhausted, it gives up - and no Blackwater thug is charged with murder, no ex-Pentagon millionaire with theft. It is a different world. And a worse one.