The creeps

It is hard to predict the political result of the EU's attempt to crush democracy in Greece. The big Creeps, as one could call the austerity group, would welcome a solution a l'egypte, with a complacent military government. And perhaps they will get their wish. But it might be that the anti-creep forces in Spain, Italy, Ireland and even France will be charged by the evident anti-democratic animus that now rules in Europe. Usually, when a movement is crushed, its moment goes out. When the soviets sent tanks into Prague, that effectively ended any chance for any future socialism with a human face. The equivalent, the sending of debt collectors to Athens to make sure the level of starvation is just so, might crush the notion of EU with a human face. My hope, of course, is a mobilization of movements that will drive the incumbent parties out of office all over Europe. But, alas, I'd bet against it. If the creeps - faux socialists in France and Spain and the UK, the faux democrats in the Northern countries - succeed, their overthrow will probably be from the right. It is a rather ghastly prospect.

on hiding

Hiding, as Aristotle might say, is said of two different class of actions. One class is uniquely aboout hinding oneself. The other group is about hiding other things, which can include other people, or, more often, semi-people: the stuffed Mickey Mouse, the stuffed ant-eater, the plastic giraffe.
Adam is now old enough to recognize that we cut down the wildernesses, lay the railroads, plot the land, pave the roads, and build the houses in order to create congeries of hiding places. His two favorite places are in the space between the wall and the refrigerator, in the kitchen, and pappa’s closet, a storage area next to our real closet that has been carved into the wall space about three feet above the floor. The latter has a real negative, in that to hide there, Adam has to ask to be lifted up to it. This broadly signals that one is hiding. On the plus side, it it s perfect cubby, with an odd interior angle to it – this storage space was definitely a Los Angeles after thought – and a door – oh heaven – the closing of which you can impress upon your parent is a very important matter that has to be seen to right now. The door has several advantages. For one, the cubby becomes all dark. Dark is the color of hiding, For another thing, the world outside the hiding place becomes another sort of hiding place. This accomplishes, in a semi-quasi way, the second class of hiding. 
Once established in one’s hiding place, one faces a choice: either signal that one is hiding – which creates a game – or not. Adam is not quite old enough for the second, more contemplative form of hiding. The latter kind of hiding was once my favorite type, because it allowed for either spying or contemplating the world, the sky, a tree, a bird, a book, or some errant ramification of the usual scene. Spying, of course, requires a particular kind of hidey hole, or sometimes just quiet trailing, with the ocassional sudden ducking behind a bush or a tree to avoid detection. In reality, it was the ducking that one spied for – otherwise, it got rather dull. 
Adam’s version is to crack open the door. Sometimes, he finds, as he expects, his mom or dad standing there. Sometimes, though, they are hiding, or at least doing something else. Usually Adam can’t hold out and says something like Adam’s here, or I see you.
The kitchen hiding place is more of a getaway. The kitchen was forbidden territory. But, just as those settlers who cleared the wilderness drifted into territory forbidden to them by the state or native powers regardless, so, too, Adam has so often disobeyed the law of staying out of the kitchen that the powers that be have given up. So far, he has not completely wedged himself into the space between the wall and the fridge, but he’s come close. After a while, he’ll withdraw and just sit in front of the passage. Here is where he takes loot – from some disgusting object he has illicitly taken from the garbage can he is not supposed to look into to an odd fragment broken from some toy. I’m not sure what he does, communing with these things, but I think it has to do with inventing science.

who killed cock robin

When I grew up in the suburbs, the nights, at least during the school season, were quiet. You’d hear, outside the window, in your bed, maybe the slur of a car leaving or entering a driveway. No voices. In the summer, when the nights were long and people were out in their lawn chairs, then there’d be voices.

In the city, this changed. When I lived in a dubious section of New Haven, there were days when very threatening loud people would be going down the street. In Austin, in the parking lot that was right beneath the window of my cheap efficiency, sometimes there would be fights, or the sound of broken glass. Also, since the highway was near by, the sound of traffic. Not very insistent. In Paris, we can hear the sounds of cafes, sometimes singing. Singing! Cafes! Paris! This is real.

Here in Santa Monica, there is the perpetual late night hobo drama – someone is always pissed off, screaming, exhausted by a life without shelter. There are people parking in the street, the sound of doors closing. On weekends, there’s the sound of groups going to bars, talking, laughing. For the last six months, next door, they have been tearing down the old pet store and erecting a glassy office for Charles Schwab. This has meant a lot of heavy machinery starting up at six in the morning, and weird sounds in the evening, as though some late night crewe was out there. Before they tore down the pet store, its parking lot was another hobo junction. It is right below Adam’s window. Adam got an earful of fuck! Shit! And all the commonplace filler words  that make up the excited conversation of people who are semi-inebriated, whether they are out on the street or twenty something frat boys.

When we go back to Paris, Adam will hear the café songs. And the ocassional drunk.

What I can’t remember hearing, but must have, is bird song. Two nights ago, we heard, marvelously, the chirping of some song birds up to eleven at night. I am hearing a bird singing right now. Now, I know, intellectually, that we are living in the age of who killed cock Robin – the petrochemical insecticide age, the age of vast environmental distruction, the end of the Holocene, that is forcing song birds to the wall. I am not sure that Adam will know those songs when he is my age. When I was a boy, our subdivision was not completely built out. There was still a small pond and a marsh near us. We put up a purple martin house and the martins came. Blue jays were plentiful. Robins, warblers, wrens, chickadees, cardinals, grosbeaks, swallows. I know things are quieter now. The Audubon society published a survey taken from a massive scan of birder notes over forty years – starting in 1967 – and they found this:

“Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.”

As we usher out the Holocene and humanity continues to take its century long spree on the planet, we are probably talking about passenger pigeon time for the bobwhite and the meadowlark and the lark.

So, enjoy the birdsong now.  We killed cock robin…

nightwood

When Djuna Barnes read the manuscript of Nightwood to her ex lover, Thelma Wood (who was depicted in it somewhat as the character Robin Vote), Wood expressed her criticism of the book by throwing a cup at Barnes and then landing a right and a left to her face. Apparently, she didn't like it. Since then, a lot of people haven't liked Nightwood for its decadence, obscurity, modernism, or whatever. Lately, I've been reading it and finding the reading slow, which is what Barnes, I think, intends. The danger of slow reading is that the reader will give up. What keeps one going is the truly amazing, even if maddening, prose, the sort of thing Edward Gibbon would have produced if he'd taken acid: it has the glazed, marmoreal finish of some imperial decline and fall while accelerating and decelerating to the barbarian clangor of to a quite non-Gibbonesque fever dream. Plus the famous, skewed aphorisms that stud the thing: "I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog" - which is surely equal to Lautreamont.

Our gags

Gag is a strangely ugly word. Its repetition of the g seems to enact the throttling that is the meaning accorded to it primitively by the lexicographers. In fact, until the late eighteenth century, the nominal and verbal forms of gag all referred to the notion of some foreign matter either in the mouth and throat (and the physiological reaction thereto) or some matter barring the mouth. When Anthony Wood tells us about the punishment accorded to the Leveler, John Lilburne, for insubordinant speech, he tells us he was whipped while being dragged down a London street at the hind end of a cart, and then put in the pillory in a courtyard, where he continued to rail at the authorities until he was “gagged”. The association of gagging with speaking was clear in law and practice. In Pope’s Dunciad, the triumph of dullness would not be complete without the display of the tortures undergone by her victims:

Beneath her footstool, science groans in chains

And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains;

There foamed rebellious logic, gagged and bound

There stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground

The question for an ardent believer in speech magic – the invisible leaps and bounds that act out and incorporate the intellectual history of a language – is how we go from this sense of gagging to the idea of the gag as either hoax or joke. A quick look at slang lexicographers gives us, with the telegraphic obscurity that this tribe deals in, some clues – Partridge, for instance, thinks that gagging some victim of a robbery produces first the outraged gurgle of the victim and “hence” the notion of nonsense, which passes itself on to its associate, the hoax. A more solid clue is given by the citation of Lockhart in the English Dialect Dictionary (1900).

Lockhart is known today, if at all, as the biographer of Walter Scott. In his day, though, Lockhart was the boy. According to his biographer, Andrew Lang, he was definitely a rankin’ Scots intellectual, mentioned in the same breath with Carlyle. In 1819, Lockhart, like Carlyle with Sartor Resartus, decided to publish a thing that was not a collection of essays and not a fiction, but a crossover, a halfbreed. I am partial myself to the halfbreeds of literature, but it is true that they are not exactly domesticable in the classroom the way a poem, essay or story is.In one of the letters, Lockhart, an Edinburg man, holds forth on the state of wit in Glasgow. Lockhart claimed – and all these claims are under the cloud of exaggeration, for as his biographer admitted, Lockhart had a waspish tonge and a Tory disposition – thawt in every party in Glasgow, after a certain number of drinks had been downed, the guests would start to pun: “ for punning seems to be the sine qua non of every Glasgow definition of wit.”

It is under this fug of drinks and puns that the primary meaning of gag meets the angel of language, that player of long games, who put his hand on the word and moved it. Lockhart  writes of the “jocular vocabulary of the place”, which is how he places the term “gagging” – which “signifiesm as its name may lead you to suspect, noting more than the thrusting of absurdities, wholesale and retail, down the throat of some too credulous gaper.” A gag could be the kind of doublesided compliment that makes a crowd laugh.  Or it could involve some “wonderful story … evidently involving some sheer impossibility. “ He writes of the “joke” of the matter – thus twinning the hoax and the joke.  Thus it is, in an atmoshere of imbibing liquids (the well known effect of which, if overdone, is spewing them out with interest), that ‘gag’ is turned.

As the psychoanalytically inclined have long observed, the double function of the mouth, which emits sounds and swallows matter, has long been a common object of reflection and unconscious desire and dread. Freud speaks of the transition from the matter of sounds to the abstractions of sense in his essay on Narcisisism, and is followed by Klein and, in his own deviant way, Deleuze in Logic of Sense – who engages with the word/matter distinction throughout his intricate flight.

Freud, however, was preceded in some ways by the Church fathers, whose meditations on the meaning of Jesus’s speech at the last supper – this is my body, take eat; this is my blood, take, drink – understood the dualism as shaped, in its center, by a miraculous divine intervention.

The reason I’ve been pursuing the gag down the rabbit hole is that I feel it is an underused concept. When discussing fiction, reviewers tend to dwell on plot, but in most fiction worth the reading, the plot is the servant of the gags. I’ve been reading a lot of high modernism lately – Djuna Barnes, for instance – and the displacement of plot by gag is a lot of what that modernism was about.

My ambition is to write some perfect gags by the time I lay down my burdens. 

the ownership society - now with fifty percent more autism!

“The state doesn’t own your children,” Paul told CNBC’sClosing Bell. “Parents own thechildren, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

Rand Paul, who likes to rush in where even Palins fear to tread, has been mocked for this conjunction of “own” and children. Or I should say some have mocked it, while most have let it pass as mere flotsam on the ocean of cretinism in which we all, as Americans, daily float.

However, the word “own” there is doing so much business, stands out so much like a sore thumb, or maybe a freakish fist of sore thumbs, that I have to buzz around it and find a place to bite, like a mosquito whose maxillary palp organs have been rubbed the right way by the delicious aroma of human sweat gland.

One of the many recent bits marked down for deletion in the collective American memory was the glorious slogan, “ownership society”, under which so many financial products were deregulated in the interest of the common man.  Here’s a bit of a flashback from a site run by a rightwing aparatchik named Jim Glassman (who I happened to work for when I was in college, and before he took his jackassery to new levels):

“The greatest political and demographic shift over the past twenty years was not the number of new Spanish speaking residents, but rather the number of individuals who owned shares of stock. In the 1996 elections, pundits spoke of soccer moms as the key demographic. This time around, the 2004 elections will be decided by America's growing investor class.

With this in mind, President Bush spoke directly to the burgeoning investor class at the Republican National Convention by announcing his vision for America becoming an "ownership society." Bush's speech called for a new paradigm in which government policies empower, not inhibit, individuals, so that each person has more choices and control over his healthcare and retirement. Included in the vision are Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Lifetime and Retirement Savings Accounts (LSAs/RSAs), Comp/Flex time, and Social Security Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs). All of these plans have one important theme in common: individual ownership.”

We all like to remember that George Bush was elected in 2000 while losing the popular vote, and we all like to forget that he was authentically elected (no Supreme Court helping) by a healthy margin in 2004. What’s more, he told us exactly what he was going to do.

What did ownership mean? Well, for those of us who combine Marx’s notion that ideology has the quality of reversing the true arrangement of social relations with St. Paul’s maxim that we must read what happens in the World as in a mirror, the meaning was obvious: the ownership society was about appropriating the few assets of the wage class and replacing them with debt. This is exactly what happened. In contrast to Glassman’s claim, the bottom 80 percent of the income scale owns approximately 5 percent of the financial wealth, according to Wolff, an economist who specializes in the composition of wealth in America. In 2007, the median household had assets of around 150 thousand dollars, of which the vast majority, 100, 000 dollars, was invested in a house. Ah, the house! That centerpiece of the ownership society. In 1989, the collected debt of the average household equaled 89 percent of average income – and by 2007, it equaled 141 percent. Now this kind of trend, if put in another situation, say the Soviet Union, would show the total level of expropriation had gone sky high – but in the United States, ownership means that your percentage of what you really own goes sliding merrily down the slope, as you vote for your creditors to turn the screws and call it – freedom.

This, of course, is one shot at the prize of understanding the metastasis of ownership in the American discourse. The idea that the most private and intimate relationship between two humans is one of ownership extends well beyond this, of course. It is a recent and alarming development in public craziness – a severe form of social autism, which is, coincidentally, one of the fears that drives the anti-vaxxers. We watch the social norm become autistic, and we naturally grow fearful for our children – even as we work, in every way, to normalize that autistic way of thinking and speaking.

There’s so much more to say! I’ll stop, here. I apologize for the paradox mongering, which is as easy as skipping stones, I gotta admit. But fun!

cabinet magazine

We went to the art book fair here yesterday. Art book might conjure up visions of the oversized book of impressionist paintings that graced the table in your folks’ living room, accruing over time  a light surface of dust. There weren’t those. These were small press and zine books, with a fair amount of arty and not so arty porn, poetry, artist collaborations, essays, and dozens of mags; among the latter we came upon the table for Cabinet.

Cabinet is, no contest, the best magazine in America. Don’tbelieve me? Check out their archive, which is mostly free.

We decided to increase our media load and buy a year’s subscription. It was a great bargain – less than 30 bucks. Reader, go and do likewise.

The first thing I read in the new issue, which we took home with us, was a wonderful essay with Michael Witmore about his book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected knowledges in Early Modern England. In spite of the air of solecism around “knowledges” in that title, Witmore is an impressively articulate interviewee. His thesis is that, broadly, the notion of accident changed in the 17^th century. At the beginning of the century, and for centuries past, accident was, in normal, educated circles, an Aristotelian thing:

“… the idea of an accident as an event was essentially the idea that wo independent causal lines could meet in a given place at a given moment and produce something that could not have been foressn by either of those causal agents. So Aristotle’s example would be two people go to the marketplace, one goes to buy olive oil, the other goes to buy grapes, and they meet accidentally in the marketplace and settle a debt on that ocassion. “

As a good little derridean, I hold no example is innocent, and that an example of the accident that sticks in a marketplace and debt is something that can be gone into muchly. But I’ll put a brake on my inner Jacques and go on to Witmore’s sense of how this notion changed in the 17^th century.

“Calvin’s sense is that there is a theater of God’s judgment in the world, that God communicates through theater, and that accidental events – things that just seem to happen – are precisely those sttartling events that get a rise out of the spectator and in fact engage the conscience in unusual and startling ways.”

Now, those origin-mongers out there would probably say that Calvin didn’t just come up with this, and we can go back and back all the way to the Vedas for similar views. Anthropologists used to claim that, universally, all human death is looked upon as murder of some sort in “savage” society. I am not sure that this factoid is still upheld in contemporary anthropology, but it surely did have backing in many societies far away from Calvin’s Geneva (although let me butt in here and say that I don’t think those cultures were all that far away – the idea that the European cultures were different, were civilized, were where the progress was, is a faith-based claim, which any survey of European societies – from Galician peasants in the twentieth century to Parisian voyou – would put to flight. The West is just savages with video games, as far as I can see).

Still, Witmore might be on to something here, some further fracture in the order of things.

Myself, I confess to having a high regard for what Pierce called tychism – the idea that coincidence underlies the physical structure of the universe, and that it is irreducible to physical law. I’ve always found the calculations about the probability of there being a big bang, or there being life on earth, etc., curiously blind to the fact that this probability must also encompass the probability that probability calculations can be made. Tychism, as I see it, means that all things swim, as the accident of that particular moment, in a sea of accidents. From this viewpoint, the extended phenotype of an event – say, the waves in the sea –includes the sound of the waves in a seashell cupped to an infant’s ear. That sound is really, of course, the throbbing of our common blood, but its recognition as the sound of waves is wrapped up with what waves are. Though we can erase the contingent factors around the wave – there could be no seashell, there could be no infant – we cannot erase the possibility of seashells and infants.

Which is another way of saying that we grope in the unknown as variables of that dark element, in all worlds and at world’s end, amen.

a minor apocalypse

Death does tend to jog my memory. When the decease of Konwicki, the Polish writer, was announced in the Times, I thought that now would be a good time to read A Minor Apocalypse. Re-read, except for the fact that when  I read it, I didn’t finish it. This is because… well, it was too good. There are books that make me envious, and then there are books that overwhelm me. Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow obviously belong in the latter category. But the books in the first category are as rare, and a little more difficult to define. They are usually written in a way that I would like to write, or at least one of the ways, but they seem to have completely filled that way of writing up. Thus, the envy. I can read, say, Delillo and know that I can copy Delillo to an extent – that he is working in a quarter of literature that I recognize and could move in myself. But Konwicki seems to have discovered the perfect way to write the kind of novel that usually is pretty bad – the novel about not being able to write the novel. Of course, I take off my hat to Flaubert and Proust for doing it right, but I am talking about a less monumental version of that odd quest – the quest, so to speak, for sterility.

In Konwicki’s book, this old modernist trope is combined with a new one – one that is both contemporary and not: political suicide. In the sixties and up through the eighties, the idea was basically to kill oneself in protest. Thus, the monks in Vietnam burned themselves, as did some anti-Vietnam war protesters. The IRA prisoners starved themselves to death.

Interesting moment, since it has been succeeded by a more militant form of suicide in which one blows oneself and other people up. The one form of suicide seems, at least, highly refined, whereas the other seems barbarous. However, the suicides in the sixties to eighties period were characterized most of all by ineffectuality. Whereas we don’t know what we will see, looking back at the militant form of suicide. I have a feeling it, too, will be ineffectual, plus bloodier.

Konwicki’s book is set… well, it is part of the play of the book that you don’t know when it is set. The narrator can’t get the real date out of anybody. One imagines it is set around the time of General Jarezelski’s coup, in 1981. I wonder how many people remember that coup outside of Poland? It was one of those earthshaking events that has been buried in the general amnesia devoted to the latter half of the Cold war. The narrator, who is having a Konwicki-like crisis over the whole dignity and value of the novel – who is, in other words, perpetually writing third drafts – is visited by representatives of a self-appointed group of dissidents who tell him that it has been decided that he should set fire to himself to protest the oppressiveness of the regime.

Of course, he doesn’t jump at this chance, but objects. The two men who announce the decision to him point out that he doesn’t really write, but that he still has a certain celebrity. When the narrator objects that there are other more celebrated Polish artists, like a certain filmmaker – obviously Wadja – the two reply that this filmmaker is too celebrated, and is still working. No, a dead end like the narrator is best. There is some woody allen like dialogue here:

“After all, you’ve always been obsessed with death,” shipered Hubert hoarsly. “ I never treated your complex as a literary mannerism. You’re intimate with death, you shouldn’t be afraid of it. You have prepared yourself, and us, for your    death most carefully. What were you thinking about before we arrived?”

“Death.”

“You see. It’s at your side. All you have to do is reach out.”

This is an excellent premise for a ramble around Warsaw and around the brain of the narrator.  This is, to me, at the center of the novel world – the ramble. From Don Quixote to Leopold Bloom, it is rambling that really gets the novel’s juices going.

Toddlers in the new world

Everyday is the Renaissance for Adam – everyday it is a new world of words and thoughts. I’ve noticed that it isn’t only Adam – so far, at least, my adoring parental eyes can see. I used to bring Adam to school and deposit him in his classroom and his classmates, when they noticed me, would confine themselves to saying Daddy – this being a generic name for any adult male with infant. Now they all say things, among which is the name Adam.

This is rich talk too, among the richest Adam’s tongue will  ever hoist, since each new word is a new coast,  which one needs to approach with some respect for crosscurrents and possible native arrows – even if if the best strategy is maximum bluster, as if you have been here before. That’s the ticket for  impressing the lurking natives, those grownups who made up this world. For instance, a couple of days ago I was doing what I must love to do, since I do it so often – looking for my fucking cell phone. I am a real talented cell phone loser, a pro, so there I was, putting my hand under the cushions on the sofa, going through the toys in the toybox, etc. While doing this, I asked Adam where my phone was. I wasn’t really asking him for an answer, but more just voicing my frustration. Much to my surprise, he seemed to say behind you, Daddy. And since then, he has used the word behind several times.

Until that moment, I thought Adam’s sole directional concept was up. Up is used a lot around here. Up in the chair, up in the bed, up in the sky is the moon! Look up, see the plane! Down doesn’t figure as often, although get down from the table! Has been uttered on ocassion. However, up and down are still more verb-related than direction-related. Behind, on the other hand, is a leap towards front, back, on the side, over there, here, North South East West left right – our lords and masters, which march us endlessly around as adults. Human adults can be defined not so much as thinking but as sorting animals, and directional words are great and necessary helps.

Being in the true grip of inspiration (whether this comes from his neurons or his neighbors around the table in the classroom is an exercise I leave up to the neuroscientist), Adam doesn’t like being left out of adult conversation, which, in spite of all odds (Adam’s bedtime schedule, our bedtime schedule) still occurs around here, and so, after watching his parents exchange polysyllabic utterance, he will sometimes launch himself into his part of the dialogue. Mostly, this is a simulacra of what his parents have been doing, which contains some eighty percent filler in terms of sounds, a defensive measure to keep from being interrupted. This, of course, he will do, as we all do, for the rest of his um like yeah verbal life, but not so blatantly. In this spill of sounds certain words will stick out, most notably basketball, basketball court, basketball shirt and noisy dinosaurs.

I can see myself in my son. I, too, have never been a minimalist. I’m in the talking game for the glory. I get it.

Andrew Field, in his biography of Djuna Barnes, writes of the discontent of American modernist writers in the 20s with American (read white, upper middle class) talk. It was so flat! I can see where they are coming from. It is still the case that our factories of WASPitude, schools and colleges and universities, teach their products to channel any excess of speech into acceptable channels: feeling speak, uplift, business and political talk, and parties. Later parties will be replaced by other extracurricular material, like babies and vacation. When I am in line at the Whole foods in Santa Monica, here, eavesdropping on what is being said by the presumably well off and educated young folks who are in the line ahead of me, it is amazing how little is said,and with what economy. Compared to the language of the street people, rich (often rancidly so, admittedly, as so much is stewed in the liquor of schizophrenia or addiction), there is a startling lack of color. The modernists were undoubtedly comparing the American custom to the Brits. The first time I ever visited London and, looking for an address I’d been given, asked help from a passerby, the woman pointed to a building and said go in the direction of that building with the unsightly row of chimney pots. I couldn’t imagine an American throwing in the “unsightly”. It just wouldn’t occur. If it did occur, it is a good bet that the American to whom this was said would think: what a weirdo.

I guess in some ways I want Adam to be more rhetorically florid than is the norm in America. But then – I imagine most of his verbal life will be in french. Which is a whole other thing… 

Canetti's fantasy

n a book of aphorisms and little essays entitled All the squandered admiration, Elias Canetti sketches a revenge fantasy, or revolution fantasy, that any person who leans in a certain political direction, the direction that is oddly defined by both anarchy and communism, must have had at one point or another. Here's my translation.

It pains me that there will never be an uprising of the beasts against us, the patient beasts, the cow, the sheep, all the livestock which falls into our hands and cannot escape.
I can imagine how the rebellion breaks out in a slaughterhouse and from there overwhelms a whole city. How men, women, children, the aged are all pitilessly tramplled to death; how the beasts overrun the streets and tracks, break down the gates and doors, and in their anger go whelming up to the very highest floors of houses, just as, underground, the subway cars are crushed by thousands of steers running wild, the sheep with suddenly sharp teeth ripping into us. .
I am somewhat relieved when one particular steer puts to miserable flight that hero, the bullfighter, and the whole bloodthirsty arena too. But an insurgency of the lesser, softer victims, the sheep, the cow, would suit me better. I don’t like to think that this will never happen, and that we will never have to tremble before them, before just these beings.”

the victory in greece

Daniel at Crooked Timber has penned the ultimate City kissoff to the victory of Syriza in Greece. In the course of patronizing the poor thieving Greeks, he also strikes back at the idea that the EU policymakers are stupid - like, they don't know that Greece can never pay back its debt. They know!

Stupidity is always armed with good reasons. The stupidity that plunged the U.S. into Iraq was full of people who said, at the time, the WMD and then later said, nobody believed there was WMD, obviously we were going in for x, y or z reason. Similarly, letting Lehman default was defended at the time as a wonderful warning to the banking system, and afterwards as who knew the international financial system was a ponzi scheme? One of the great stupidities of the EU is the idea that more is better – hence, the acceptance of players who are little more than medium size cities in the real scheme of things, like Latvia. This produces the ultimately stupid organization: too big to fail and too big to manage. We leave the realms of stupid groupthink, here, and enter the realm of truly badly constructed institutional structures. If it were simply a matter of Greece, I’d say that the EU had an overwhelming hand. But it isn’t simply a matter of Greece. If the EU lowers the boom, I don’t think this will say, to the voters in Italy and Spain and Portugal, oh oh, better do as the boss says. I think it will say, we are fucked either way, so why not fuck them back? The Anglo prejudice that all people everywhere will muddle through and settle on the lower rung lifestyle so that the EU project of banks first can keep marching gloriously onward seems to me a misjudgment on every level – here, as always, politics is not separable from economics. Thomas Friedman’s “golden straightjacket” theory, which seems to be what Daniel is endorsing, will, I think not work, and not just cause I don’t want it to work. It won’t work because it doesn’t involve the gradual diminishment of the lifestyle of the vast majority – as in the US – but the sudden and catastrophic diminishment, with no outlet except, as in Latvia, mass migration.

amnesia versus memory as geopolitics

Amnesia versus Memory - chose your marks!

In 2003, just as the US was occupying Iraq, the leftist-with-a-conscience Paul Berman published a small “intellectual history” of Islamic radicalism that traced it all back to the Nazis. Even for Paul Berman, this was hack work of an extraordinary cheapness.  I admit, I love nothing better than  the slagging the ever deserving Paul Berman. I did a little cutwork on him in 2007 that I must quote:

“Berman has accrued a lot of media capital over the years by being a conscience. A conscience is such a great thing to cast yourself as. Especially when you can be the conscience not of the powerful, not of the CEOs, not of the plutocracy, but the conscience of dissent - indeed, he's an old Dissenter dinosaur. Being the conscience of dissent means that you get to whack away at, say, the crimes of the Sandanistas as the Reagan administration arms narco thugs in Honduras. It means that you look out at the old and established mafia of CIA ties and Islamic fundamentalism that drove the cold war in the Middle East and you see - liberal softness for Islamic fundamentalism. A conscience means that you reprove unnamed liberals for beamingly looking on as Moslem fundies surgically remove clits, stone women, and generally tread on our freedom to mock, re the famous cartoons of Mohammed - in the age of Guantanamo, Falluja, and Grozney. The age, to put not too fine a point upon it, of Western countries killing lots and lots of Moslems. And Moslems killing not very many westerners. Liberals, as "Conscience" Berman notes with shock, have even dared to criticize heroic women, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while making poo-pooing sounds at the Bush administration for banning Tariq Ramadan from coming to the U.S. It is amazing what these non-freedom loving liberals will do – up to and including criticizing the U.S. from banning speech by Tariq Ramadan! Freedom of speech means denying freedom of speech for people who secretly don’t believe in freedom of speech. Don’t we all know this? We all know this at TNR. However, those not in that charmed circle of bile and bad faith can only look at these people with amazement.”

I mention him because Berman’s book, Terror and Liberalism and my little pony … oops,  I’m sorry, the my little pony wasn’t part of the title, I don’t know where I get these things. Anyway, this became an ur-text in Project Amnesia – that post 9/11 project in forgetting just what we’ve been up to in the Middle East for the past sixty years. It helped the hawk liberals to embrace the intellectual shambles of Bushism. Unfortunately, so successfully has amnesia been disseminated in the US and Europe that the claims voiced by radical right Islamic leaders are now cited by the “left” as voices of the Muslim community, which insults two things – Muslim and community.
In 2007, Robert Dreyfuss wrote a book that wasn’t an intellectual history – it actually had, like, empirical stuff in it. It was called the Devil’s game, and it romped through Middle Eastern history looking for what the Cold war had wrought.
To give you an example of how project Amnesia has twisted things: at present, we are assured, only namby pamby liberals support Hamas in its endless terroristic project to be terroristic. The sworn enemy of Israel, Israel has always fought it tooth and nail.
Except of course when Israel was aiding it. Cast your mind back to 1968. In those days, a radical secularizing force called Fatah, supported by Egypt’s nationalist, Nasser, was trying to lead the Palestinian refugee community. Israel, the U.S., and the Saudis didn’t like Fatah at all. They saw a weak spot, however: Fatah’s secularism. Perhaps they could play the Islam card.
Dreyfuss quotes the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, who claims that Israel started Hamas. This seems to me to be an exaggeration. There is no exaggeration, however, in the fact that after the 1967 war, when Israel occupied Gaza and the Sinai, they let out of jail the enemies of Nasser, notably the Moslem brotherhood leadership, that they found there. Why? It was a double play – divide the Palestinian community and confound Nasser. As Dreyfuss points out, the Moslem brotherhood in Jordan was firmly on the side of the king and the largest landholders. They were firmly against Nasser’s “communism” and any attempt to upset the traditional economic order.
The Brotherhood was not at all popular in Gaza or on the West Bank precisely because they opposed Nasser’s nationalism. Enter one Ahmed Yassin, who went on to found Hamas officially. He was liberated by the Israelis after the war, and encouraged by Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. What’s not to like? Radical Islam, back then, was Traditional, Freedom loving Islam. This was before the US discovered that it was all about feminism and democracy and Radical Islam was all about nastiness.  Under Israeli occupation, as Dreyfuss points out, the number of mosques in the Gaza rose from 1967 to 1987 from 200 to 600.
This, of course, is history that has now been erased. But the contradictions can’t be erased, they crop up constantly. Thus, the eggsucking obsequy’s in the US press about King Abdullah, the 1000 lashes King – or excuse me, the man of peace, the modernizer. In the US, amnesia is easy. In the Middle East, it has powerful allies too – Hamas doesn’t want to revisit its past, that is for sure. But there are a great many  people in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan who are stubborn as elephants, and continue to remember things even when official policy is that they never happened. In Iraq, after our great and glorious George had Chalabi flown there, to play the role of Charles de Gaulle, he flopped. Polls showed that people actually remembered what Chalabi did in Jordan – that he pulled  off a massive fraud, stealing millions of dollars. For some reason, their eyes didn’t get all glowy at the advent of the liberator.
Amnesia versus memory – this is the real geo-political struggle in the post-Cold War era.

Religion: the purloined letter of modernity

Thus, if man does not use the organs which  his Creator has given him in this abode, when his soul leaves the body it cannot find [any of those organs] again and therefore it remains perplexed, like someone who has neither eyes, ears, heart nor tongue; one can imagine how anguished and torturous his condition would be. But if man sees with his eyes that which he is commanded to see, hears with his ears that which he is commanded to hear, walks on that path which the Prophet has commanded him to walk, speaks with the tongue that which he is commanded to speak, and knows with his heart that which he is commanded to known, then when his soul leaves his body [it retains the faculties of] eyes, ears, heart and tongue, so that in the abode of delights he will possess them in their entirety.” Nasir Khusraw, Knowledge and Liberation.

“Paradise is still locked up and the Cherub is behind us; we must make a trip around the world, and see whether perhaps it isn’t still open somewhere in the back.” – Kleist, On the Marionette Theater

When the French missionaries came to North America, they faced a critical problem with the Indian peoples they attempted to convert, which was that these groups had a perfectly clear idea of the afterlife, and it was nothing like heaven or hell. It was like life – it was not, as Marx would have it (speaking on the assumption that religion is monotheism) a counter-society, or society reversed and thus restored. Thus when the French priests would tell the Hurons about heaven, they would get responses like: “for my part, I have no desire to go to heaven; I have no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not care to give me anything to eat.” In fact, there is an account that neatly captures the Huron this-worldliness in Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls:  the soul of a recently deceased woman came back to a Huron encampment to warn that those who went to heaven were being tortured there by the French.

These stories, which were carried back to Europe in the accounts of the Missionaries, fed into the early enlightenment idea that the Hurons were right. It is a question which is never asked, but should be: did American Indian ideas influence European thought? Lahontan, a French explorer, published a famous book, Supplement aux Voyages ou Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, in which he represents himself talking with Adario, a Huron, about the cosmic vision of the Christians – which Adario finds either barbaric or comic. We know that this book influenced Rousseau and Diderot.

Marx was the intellectual heir of these accounts, but when he wrote the Kritik he had only an intuition of where this intellectual theme would lead him. And we are still being led there. One of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo massacre was the production of cartoons showing an after life Charlie Hebdo crew. It is a comic instance, because even if we believe in the after life, we don’t imagine it. It has been closed down in the imagination as a serious topic. Perhaps this is why a political act, revenging the “dishonor” shown to Muhammed (and, I would contend, treating him as a God – a blasphemy against which Muhammed directed a lot of his energy), is still not imagined as a religious act. We refuse to engage in the politics of the afterlife. We are going to “respect” religions, but them in a black box.

Myself, I think this is an entirely impossible thing to do. Anything social becomes political – this is the primary law of modernity. It isn’t even something I like or approve of – politics, to my mind, is a buncha shit. But my mind wasn’t consulted when we were constructing the global system, so tant pis for me.

In fact, so unimaginable is religious belief to the “progressive” that it can’t be encountered at all – it must have to do with racism. It must have to do with this world. In this sense, the progressive idea of “respect” for religions is founded on an utter disrespect for them, the disrespect that comes when you simply refuse to argue a topic because you find it beneath you.

It is in this atmosphere of disrespect that, for instance, “christian” leaders can come on news shows and expect not a single question about their christianity. Rather, they are accepted (maddeningly) as prima facie  Christians, even as any reader of the gospels would have to be appalled at every word issuing from their mouth. The same is true with imams, or “spokesmen” for the Muslim community.   

how they celebrate MLK day at the New York Times: "lets get David Duke to write an op ed..."

Wow, the New York Times has a jump the shark moment: they invite Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, founded by her father explicitly on the fascist model, to write about Islam today - on Martin Luther King day. Hmm, I'm surprised they didn't invite David Duke to write about MLK, just to make things nice and cozy. Of course, there is no explanation that the FN actually liked to beat up CharlieHebdo journalists in the nineties and sued the journal repeatedly - but what the hell, ignorance is such bliss! I'm expecting an op ed piece on how the Holocaust didn't happen from her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, for Rosh Hashanan. Here is a link to the history of the FN's relationship to Charlie Hebdo that the NYT, in its infinite ignorance, never bothered to share.

"Remembering Charlie Hebdo in the 90s

MARK LEE HUNTER 8 January 2015
"Charlie Hebdo was about more than its fiercely satirical cartoons. It changed the French media and legal landscape forever and was instrumental in the struggle to protect hard-hitting investigative reporting.

As I write, the news coverage of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s offices has been remarkably good, detailing the weekly’s provocations of Islam over the years. Less has been said about Charlie’s running battle with the French extreme right, and its role in widening the space for investigative reporting in France.

I met the staff in the mid-1990s, shortly after the Front National party, a heterogeneous mix that included neo-fascists (and a few real fascists), won municipal elections in four French cities. I was making the rounds of reporters who covered the party, to draw up a list of precautions. The Front’s members regularly beat up journalists at the time, and Charlie’s former editor, Philippe Val, was among those they attacked. Val was calling for the government to ban the party.

The day we met, Val told me that he and his staff had been threatened with attack if they attended a book fair in a Front city, Toulon. To my amazement, he asked me what they should do. He was scared for his people and rightfully so. We found an idea that might lower the risk. Val publicly demanded protection from the Mayor of Toulon. It was the Mayor’s duty to provide it. Instead he said, 'We don’t protect garbage. We collect it.' The state stepped in, and Charlie Hebdo went to Toulon."

Of course, it is the leader of this party that we should turn to in the light of the massacre of the editorial board.
Actually, I can't really mock this sick decision. It is too sick. It is too stupid. It is an unconscious signal about how the elite really feel about the world. It is a reminder that the NYT was an active collaborator in the lies that took the US into Iraq. "

the instituted day dream

Because Marx’s opium metaphor has been seen as implying either that religion is simply an hallucination or a supplement to heal the pain of daily life, his more extended idea of the function of religion, and indeed its genesis, has been cast in the shadow. There are those who have picked up in Marx a certain complicating tendency that changes this story – notably, Ernst Bloch. Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, emphasized the fact that ordinary thinking is often not the kind of closeted reflection we find in philosophy: it is, instead, day dreaming. One could say that, religion, for Marx, in as much as it stems from a vulgar, popular impulse, is day dreaming writ large. It deals, as ordinary calculative thought does not, with the real media in which human life takes its shape and movement:
“Man, that is to say, the world of persons, state, society. This state, this society produces religion, an inverted book of world consciousness, because it is an inverted world. Region is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualized point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its holiday expansion, its general grounds of comfort and justification. It is the fantasmatic realization of the human essense, because the human essence possesses no true reality.”
These terms give us a much larger field to work with in relation to religion. If religion is the inverted world, the secret critique of the real world, it is also frozen forever in that position. This is the meaning of the fact that the fantasmagoric realization of the human essence is the realization of the human essence because the human essence possesses no true reality.
In order, however, to accomplish the work of disenchantment that Marx – all too hastily – thinks is the necessary accompaniment to abolishing a set of circumstances that make illusion necessary – that make happiness dependent on illusion – one has to turn to history, and in particular, that part of human history which describes the transition from the pre-modern to the modern. It is this theme in the critique that bears reflection, because what Marx says here both about the modern and the pre-modern has not lost its relevance because we have twisted the knobs and produced the post-modern.   

Marx and paradise

In  volume 41 of the old Marx Engels Werke, which gathers together Marx’s scraps and trivia (the stuff he carved on his school desk, the limerick he made about a fellow gymnasium student, the boxtops he sent off for a secret decoder ring, etc.)  there is a passage in a gloss on Schelling which concerns the existence of God. This is one of the rare times Marx explicitly talks about old Noboddaddy.  He does so in the most bored manner possible, showing briefly why no proof for the existence of God has ever or will ever work, with all the passion of a page out of Atheism for Dummies.
So: God is not very important in Marx’s critique of religion. Nor, surprisingly, is the church, or priestcraft. If it as if this, too, which had an urgency in the French revolution, is all settled now. Or at least it isn’t primary.
What is primary is paradise.
Marx is fascinated by the anthropological fact that societies have dreamed up an image of utopia which is the exact negative of society as it is lived. I think it is interesting to contrast Marx, here,  with Nietzsche, who tread on the same territory forty some years later. Nietzsche as far as I know never read Marx, but he shares a vocabulary with the Critique. He also shares an interest in eschatology – but he emphasizes the exactly opposite anthropological fact, which is the popular dream of hell. For Nietzsche, hell reveals the true secret of slave morality, its cosmic resentment. For Marx, paradise reveals the secret of what the vast majority of society, the laboring obscure, thought of the society they supported with their labor: that it would be good only if it was utterly changed.
It is this aspect of Marx’s critique that is obscured by the opium wisecrack, which casts too great a shadow over this essay, which begins on the anthropological note:
For Germany, the critique of religion is essentially over, and the critic of religion is the presupposition of all critique.
After is heavenly oratio pro aris et focis is contradicted, the profane existence of the error is compromised. Man, who, seeking the Overman in the fantasmal reality of heaven has found only the reflection (widerschein) of himself, will no longer be inclined to to find only the semblence (Schein) of himself, the Un-person, where he is seeking, and must be seeking, his real circumstances.”

rhetoric and revolution

I have a tremendous future thesis about Marx’s style curled up in my mind, sleeping and issuing yelps like an old  hunting dog dreaming of its glory days. One day, I will eventually write it down in a severely truncated form, where it will flow over three pages max. I’m not a long distance runner, scholarship-wise.

Here are the previews of this exciting and never to be completed future project: Marx’s style, as I would like to prove, is where we see the actual form of dialectical materialism in practice. Or, to put it another way, Marx discovered at an early point in his career that reversal is a tremendous power. Turning things inside out and upside down, wrenching the lines of ownership inscribed in the genetive and the lines of power inscribed in the accusative and dative,  one could truly say that in Marx’s work, rhetoric precedes revolution. He sinks into the regimes of ownership and of power that are his target – as he puts it somewhere in the Grundrisse – allows him to come out of those regimes through a pass that fundamentally alters our view of them.

Perhaps – and this is the kind of semi-psychoanalytical speculation that hovers near fiction, but what the fuck – perhaps Marx’s feeling for reversal is his replay of a crucial moment in his childhood: the moment when he was baptised. Or rather, the moment when his father converted his household from Judaism to Christianity. Apparently his mother resisted this decision for a while, but finally agreed to it. To reverse that baptism did not mean, for Marx, becoming Jewish again. Instead, he became something other than the Jew and the Christian, or at least that was the project.  It is here, trying to reverse an essential surrender, that Marx stumbles upon the principle of negativity. The way forward and the way backwards are contained in one self-identical way, according to common sense, which seeks, thus, to squelch the power of inversion. This is not the case with Marx.  He embraces negativity fiercely in  order not to become the dupe of either positivism or a naïve belief in progress – while still trying to found a “universal history.”

To Anglo-American thinkers, steeped in the culture of common sense, Marx’s reversals can simply seem crabby or crooked, a matter of rhetorical excess that is vaguely alluded to by the term “prophetic” . The first task for these thinkers is to straighten Marx out, get a clear position of the case so we can properly “go forward”.

Perhaps I am making too much of the effect of conversion – although I can’t resist pointing out that there is a line of great German polemicists – Heine, Marx, and Karl Kraus – who all used thundering reversals as their grand trope, and who all were converted Jews. Converted to fit with a society that was always hostile to Jews. Make of this what you will. 

Germany: a third world tale

Michael Loewy calls the Critique “pre-Marxist” because it was written before Marx had absorbed the lesson of the French socialists that class struggle was the fulcrum of society. I can see Loewy’s point, but the essay not only carries the essential voice of Marx – his way of mixing the prophetic and the sarcastic in his most characteristic rhetorical ploy, inverting relations – but it also expresses  Marx’s concern about the place of modernity in universal history – a history that he tried to write in the Grundrisse.  For us, one of the great interests in the piece is that Marx treats Germany as a ‘pre-modern’ country – essentially as a piece of the third world. Marx is the spirit that haunts all post-colonial discourse for good reason – he founded it. Or at least, he was one of the people who gave it shape.

There’s a historical school that claims that Germany’s history did not travel the path of modernity like other European countries. The Sonderweg school is associated with the right, but there is some truth in it for the left as well. At least for Marx, Germany was a lesson in underdevelopment.  Unlike the Sonderweg historians, Marx doesn’t take Germany to be more “authentic” in its struggle with modernity – rather, he takes it to be politically and culturally half-made in an interesting way: one can see, in the forces that fail to synthesis into civil society and industrial capitalism in Germany, the forces that are in operation in the so-called “modern” societies. For Marx, these societies have not come to rest in modernity; they, too, are fractured. The ancien regime might have been overturned, Marx says, but it exists in the unconscious as a trauma with multiple effects on everyday life.

It is in this situation that Marx wants us to think about religion. 

Marx's IED: religion, modernity, the west, all that shit...

Out of all the phrases in Marx’s  1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the one that has stuck is: “religion is the opium of the people.” Careless readers – and aren’t we all? – have a Jack Horner like tendency to stick our thumb in the pie and pull out a plumb, destroying the pie’s structure, the cooking that went into it, its mix of tastes.  In this case, to collapse Marx’s essay into this one plumb is an act of barbarity. 

Marx was in his young twenties at the time he wrote the essay – later, as a middle aged man with persistent sores that kept him bedridden in agony, he learned to appreciate the power of opium, which is not a little thing. But the opium crack is only one of the comparisons to which religion gives rise. These comparisons are expressed in the exuberant style favored by a certain Berlin crowd that liked to be  scratchin Hegel and Heine. There’s a study by Bercovitch of the American Jeremiad as an essential American style – the essential style of modernity in Germany, from Lichtenberg to Brecht, echoes with this Berlin  tone. It is repulsive to a certain Anglo-American sensibility – I think the general sense is still in agreement with one of Marx’s glossers, Donald Kelley, who wrote that Marx’s essay contained “no poetry” and a “large amount of convoluted and ill humored philosophizing.” I think, on the contrary, that this may be the most Heine-like of Marx’s essays. Its style is not separate from its argument – which may well be the object of revulsion by Anglo-Americans who have traded style for specialization and thus distrust rhetoric as the mark of the amateur.  The poetry, here, has to be seen as a sort of futuristic act – to be anachronistic. Marinetti, though, would have appreciated Marx’s phrase that critique should not be an anatomical scalpel, but a weapon.  In fact, the weapon Marx devised in this oddly gay romp is rather like our old friend, the improvised explosive devise. It is a combination of deadly technologies tied together on the spot, in the midst of everyday life, and meant to explode both the façade of ‘modern’ society and the, in Marx’s view, ‘pre-modern’ level of society in Germany.

I think it is a good piece to read in the light of the Charlie Hebdo murders and the response to them, especially (and perhaps provincially ) by the high hats of the American left and the lowdowns of the street.

So I think this is what I will do for a while.

Reflection after solidarity with Charlie Hebdo

After solidarity, reflection. I’ve noticed two tendencies in the responses to the mass murder of the Charlie hebdo artists. The first is pretty much the total theme of Andrew Hussey’s rather astringent column in the NYT. According to this theme, the journal went too far. Hussey enlivens the usual complaint by pursuing two different and contradictory complaints. One is that they were past their shelf life, old 68s – as he points out, Wolinski was guilty of being 80. Hussey implies that 80 was about the median age of the editorial board to make the point that this irresponsible May spirit has now been totally discredited. The other complaint, though, makes them totally relevant, creating threats to the French abroad and being hated by the whole of the immigant banlieux.

Hussey sees, with justice, that the immigrant banlieux have a lot to justly complain about.  The other tendency, which one expected – such being the moronic inferno of this world – is that Charlie Hebdo was defending our civilization. With the implication that there is another thing outside our civilization, which is a buncha murderous Islamofascists who need to be taught a good lesson.

We don’t really have to dwell too long on the assimilation of Charlie Hebdo to the rightwing imperialist shitheads. It was a magazine of satire that devoted itself to a violent anticlericalism that was anything but friendly to “our civilization”. I think they would have agreed with a bon mot attributed to Brecht that civilization is such a good idea we should try it some time.

The first criticism is more interesting. In a sense, I think  my problem with Charlie Hebdo’s bare bummed Mohammeds and such is that they did not go far enough. Being anti-clerical, I think, blinded them to the deeper level of humor to be derived from the utterly hypocritical coordination of the “west” and the “Islamic fanatics.” In truth, what we have seen for the last eighty years is the cultivation, for quite cynical reasons, of a form of Islam dominant in the Arabian peninsula. That form of Islam is a product of the nineteenth century, not of the seventh century. Its aim is to dominate and purge the Islamic world of the thousands of intersecting Islamic sects. In this, it was, until the 1960s, successful only in the restricted area of the Arabian peninsula, and not even thoroughly there. But what happened then is that the west decided that these powers would be very useful in the two-fold task of fighting Arabic Nationalism and Middle Eastern communism.

And thus began the hilariously sick comedy of the Western double standard: human rights for, say, totalitarian Russia, and cat licks and giggles for totalitarian Saudi Arabia. In the late seventies, with Iran becoming undone, the West had a new enemy, and agreed, as though this were the best thing in the world, to turn a blind eye as the Gulf states, flush with cash, planted and surplanted Mosques throughout the world. The first target of those mosques was… other mosques. Centuries old traditions and cults were brutally attacked. In the nineties, one saw this in, for instance, Chechnya, a country were the predominant Sufi Moslems became the victims of their so called allies, Moslem paramilitaries financed by Saudi Arabia, who tried to institute the thing called “radical Islamic rule” – except of course when that is the rule of our oil producing allies.

By never going beyond Mohammed’s bare bum, Charlie Hebdo failed to exploit the riches of the sinister and farcical alliance. Take, for instance, last year. The French foreign ministry was in a lather about civil rights in Putin’s Russia. It is a place where a tax avoiding but democracy talking billionaire doesn’t have a chance! Meanwhile, of course, in Saudi Arabia, France’s ally, there was a beheading  and anti-witchcraft campaign going on, with at least forty guest workers, mostly from Indonesia, mostly maids, sitting on death row for casting spells. Remember when Qaddaffi kidnapped the Belgian nurses? That was a crime against humanity. But Saudi Arabia, oh, well, can’t fuck up the oil supply, can we?  The French Foreign minister, Fabius, has spoken out about Pussy Riot and extended best wishes to Khodorkovski, but when it comes to Ati Abeh Inan, the Indonesian maid who spent ten years on death row in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft, silence at the Matignon.  I would think here is the tender spot for placing a little comic dynamite. But I think this was beyond the vision of Charlie Hebdo – it was where they didn’t go. It would be going too far, after all, to basically mock the West for complicity in the murders of Indonesian guest workers by our allies, or for trampling into Bahrain, or for supplying all the money in the world to the Islamic  “radicals”.  Drive a car, and support an ISIS paramilitary for another day – this is of course what it comes down to. 

Still,  you targets what you can hit, as they say. They were a nervy band and their absense is a huge hole, into which, as we know, imbeciles and cretins from the right will be crawling for a long time.