american despair and mass murder

Who remembers James Oliver Hubert? That was the McDonald’s Massacre, 21 killed, July 18, 1984. He screamed as he shot, I’ve killed thousands. How about Patrick Sherril, post office worker, who killed 15 in the Edmond Oklahoma, post office, August 20, 1986? How about William Bryan  Cruse? That was the Publix in Palm Bay Florida, 6 killed, 13 wounded, April 23, 1987. Cruse was 60 years old. Then there was Joseph Wesbecker, who, in spite of his mental health issues, was able to purchase the AK 47 that he used to kill seven of his former co-workers at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky, September 15, 1989. How about James Edward Pough? That was ten people, the GMAC office, Jacksonville Florida, 1990. How about John T. Miller? Five people, Social Services office, Watkin Glens, New York, October 15, 1992. How about George Hennard, the doctor’s son, in the Luby’s in Kileen Texas, 23 killed, October 16, 1991? The papers at the time said it was America’s greatest mass shooting. This may or may not be true.  Then, showing that an armed camp is not necessarily a safe camp, there was Dean A. Mellberg, who went onto the hospital at the Fairchild Airforce Base in Spokane Washington and killed 4, wounded 21, and was killed himself on June 20, 1994. Remember Dean? Mental problems. AK 47. AK 47s are one of the arms of choice. For instance, drifter Patrick Edward Purdy was able to acquire one, although he had difficulty acquiring employment, and used it to kill five and injure 30 at the Cleveland Elementary school in Stockton, California, January 17, 1989. His victims ranged in age from 6 to 10 years old. William D. Baker used an AK 47 to kill four at the International Truck and Engine Core plant in Melrose Park, Illinois, on February 5, 2001. Funny thing, but the 66 year old Baker was about to go to prison. Unfortunately, nobody had taken away his extensive arm collection before the date he was to turn himself in. Doug Williams, in Meridian Mississippi, killed his victims – four blacks, as he avowedly hated blacks, and one white, besides himself – with a semi-automatic rifle at the Lockheed Martin plant where he worked on June 8, 2003. Newspapers noted that the event was the worst  work-site mass killing in 2 and ½ years – a record of peace and calm! Perhaps the benchmark they were using was the slaying  of seven in Wakefield, Massachussetts, on December 26, 2000. Michael McDermott, who worked at Edgewater Technology, came to work toting a semi-automatic rifle, a semi-automatic pistol, and a twelve gauge shotgun. How about church mass murders? Do you remember Matthew Murray, who killed five and wounded five at two churches in Colorado, on December 10, 2007? Or the two monks killed in a monastery in Conception, Missouri, on June 10, 2002. The killer was a 71 year old farmer, Lloyd Robert Jeffress. Remember Lloyd? The seven killed by Larry Ashbrook at the youth service in Fort Worth Wedgewood Baptist, and wounded 7. This was on September 15, 1999.  And lest we seem to be highlighting Christians, there’s the 9 Buddhist monks slain at the Promkunaram Wat temple outside of Phoenix, on August 10, 1991. Eventually, the killers were found. They used rifles, Alessandro Garcia and Jonathan Doody. They were 16 and 17 years old. Of course, churches and schoolyards are not the only sites that gunmen descend on in America. Carl Drega, a former nuclear plant worker, 67, killed four and wounded four before killing himself in Columbia, New Hampshire, because of court disputes. One of the dead was, in fact, a judge. This was on August 19, 1997. He used a rifle. “Authorities found hundreds of pounds of explosives and an elaborate system of tunnels” on his property.  A lawyer, Richard S. Baumhammers, decided to express his ideas about the supremecy of the white Christian race by killing his Jewish neighbor, an Indian, two Chinese and a black man in Mckees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on April 28, 2000. Surely you remember Richard? That was after a black man in Pennsylvania, Ronald Taylor, in Wilkensburg, shot and killed three. The landlord never fixed the door in Taylor’s apartment. Taylor sought out whites. Then there are the family issues. We all have probably forgotten retired Air Force sergeant Gene Simmons. He killed 16 in Russellville, Arkansas, on Christmas Eve in 1987. Fourteen were family members who’d come to the Simmons house for a Christmas party. They ranged from the 20 month old to the 46 year old wife. Firepower included two 38 caliber pistols. These killings, it is said, inspired another family Christmas massacre, as Robert Dressman shot and killed six people eating at the table in Algona, Iowa, two days after Simmons capture. Dressman killed himself, too.  Do you remember David McGowan, 44, an investigator for the Riverside D.A.’s department? He used his duty pistol to slay his wife, his mother, and his three kids before shooting himself, on May 11, 2005.

Mass slaying is as American as apple pie. It goes back. In Norwalk, Iowa, for instance, the Forsyth family slaying, in which the estranged husband killed his wife, his two children, and two childen she was babysitting (June 14, 1993) succeeds, by some fifty four years,  the slaying of five of the seven McCanich children by the mother, who shot them and then shot herself (October 31, 1937). It is claimed, in an article in the October issue of The Smithsonian  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-first-mass-murder-us-history-180956927/?no-ist that Howard Unruh, who, after a bad day, took his German Lugar pistol and walked around Camden New Jersey killing people at random on Labor Day, 1949, performed the first modern mass murder in this country. But how about Gilbert Twigg, who opened fire on a concert crowd in Winfield Kansas and killed six on August 13, 1904? Patrick Sauer identifies Unruh as the first due to two things: the randomness of the killing and the rapid fire of the technology. Twigg used a double barreled 12 gauge shot gun. But he was able, with this weapon, to inflict enormous damage, wounding 25 men and one woman.

The question is why. Lately, every massacre becomes a political insult match. Ah, the right wing fascist! Oh, the liberal protected Muslim! But one can pretty much predict that persons, mostly male, from every walk of life in America will be the perpetrators of the next one and the next and the next. What, for instance, produces the school killer? This isn’t a recent phenom. Verlin Spencer was a South Pasadena principle who, on May 6, 1940, killed five colleagues in the classic manner – stalking through  an institutional space, the school district headquarters, and systematically killing. In perhaps the most horrific school murder in US history, Andrew Kehoe, who was a., disgruntled, b., male, and c., 55 – it is surprising how many mass murderers are older – blew up a school in Bath Michigan, killing 44 and wounding 90. This was in 1927. In Grant Duwe’s history of mass murder in the US, he claims that there was a mass murder wave between 1900 and 1939, a trough in the 1940 to 1965 period, and a second mass murder wave which extends to 1999. Duwe, though, is rather captious about his definitions. Spree murders are not mass murders by his definition. This strikes me as a not very well motivated division. His definition is of that a mass murder mmust occur within a 24 hour period and include at least four victims. In my opinion, the intent to kill might not result in murder in many cases, but is nonetheless the operant motive.

In any case, Duwe’s explanation is that the 1940 to 1965 period was conformist, religious, affluent, and did not witness a mass black market in drugs. Yet, there were still mass murders going on.

It isn’t as though mass murder were confined to the US. If we look at European history, and we distinguish the violence of war from that of individual violence (which I consider a dubious division, but so be it), we can find many mass murders, but no consistent, monthly tendency to mass murder as we find in the US. True, American civilians own an astonishing amount of firepower – 88 guns per 100 people. Compare that with Spain, where the number is 11 guns per 100 persons. In France, which is pretty much at the EU norm, it is 31. That is still a lot of guns. Many Americans mistakenly believe that Europeans do not own guns. What is true is that gun ownership is more regulated and overseen, generally. Not everywhere, however. In Italy, for instance, the figure is around 12 per 100, but this disguises the fact that the law allows the individual to own a number of weapons with loose regulatory supervision.

However, it seems to me that the regulation of guns is a surface phenomenon, a reflection of the degree to which a society on all its levels is willing symbolically to submit to the dictates of the state. I don’t think that American history is explained by rugged individualism – in fact, to a degree, Americans fear non-conformity and are generally willing to obey the rules, whether the one about stopping at stop lights or the one about lining up in a straight line, in striking contrast to other countries. At some level, however, Americans despair of what Isaiah Berlin calls positive liberty – or what I would call the provision of elementary subsistence by the state. Often, what is striking about mass murder is the fact that its motive seems so trivial – a property dispute, a bad date. It is as if the killer’s patience snaps, and the only choice is between the landlord agreeing to repair the door and killing a number of strangers. How that choice forms in the mind of a person points to something about the American condition that ought to be made much more a part of the argument about gun violence in this country.  We have to accommodate this discourse to the level of despair out there. How much evidence do we need?

on yelling

Yestrday night, Adam said, don’t be rude to me, Daddy.

This set me back on my heels. How had I been rude to him?

Well, parenting alternates between the pole of cuddling and the pole of yelling. Yelling is one of the great sounds in the bourgeois domestic lair. The enlightenment has, thankfully, softened our moeurs, so that the whipping routinely meted out to children in, say, the eighteenth century astonishes us. The raised hand, the belt, the paddle, these are the malevolent spirits that haunted the great rebels and novelists of the 19^th century. Max Ernst’s picture of the Virgin Mary whaling the tar out of the little baby Jesus is not only a monument to surrealism, but holds a (mostly unacknowledged) place in the history of parenting in the twentieth century. Reading between the lines, Marcel was surely so punished by the father that he can never quite forgive as he traversess the thousand some pages of In search of lost time.

But yelling… Who among us doesn’t? In actual fact, I’m extremely suspicious of non-yellers. I figure that they are substituting coldness and silence for noise, and that is the devil’s substitute. And no, it is hard for me to imagine the person who can summon up sweet reason in an instant when discovering their angel scribbling with a pen on the dining room wall.

Of course, I yell with a guilty conscience. I’m never wholly into it – I’m always conscious of the yelling as a role. Among my talents, I lack the natural bellow – and I do have a smart mouth, which over the decades I think I’ve tamed. Sometimes, though, my tongue remembers its old tricks.Thus, when yelling, I’m always a bit histrionic. Adam has the three year old’s ability to zero in on the histrionic and the phony. What I want is, well, an acknowledgment of fault and sincere repentence – as in, okay, I will wear the clothes that you have laid out for me, instead of demanding to wear the dirty clothes I wore yesterday. What I get, though, is stubborness (I don’t want to!) and something halfway to a smile playing about his mouth, as though Daddy yelling was as one with Daddy hooting like a scary owl in the story of Angus, the lost dog.

Yelling is both an indispensible speech act – as in when Adam runs heedlessly down the sidewalk – and a cuyriously ineffectual one. Ineffectual on both sides – it makes me feel, as the yelller, as though I’m in a false position, and it makes Adam feel, as the yelled at, that the best way to get something you really want is yelling. Of course, I yell at him about his yelling…

Kafka, as usual, is all over this like white on rice. In The Judgment, the roles seem to be reversed. The protagonist’s father is decrepit and like a child – look, he’s even soiled his clothes! He needs to be tucked into bed and hushed. When, all of a sudden, he pops up and in an instant assumes his terrible authority. In Roman law, the father had the formal right to condemn his children to death. This is what the figure in The Judgment does. Kafka felt that the story was his first success. In his diary, in a passage emulously conned by every budding writer, he records the bliss of staying up all night writing it. Maybe it was because Kafka had now opened up one of his great themes, a theme perhaps central to his work. That is, the bourgeois order, the order of the yell, was centrally out of balance. The yell, that exercise of power, by its excess revealed an almost unbearable powerlessness.

This is a hard lesson to learn, people. I am not Josephine the Mouse singer, nor was I meant to be.

the weather of modernism

Kathryn Schultz, in her clever essay on weather and literaturemisses, I think, an opportunity. Her notion is a good one – that a change occurs in the uses of weather between the Victorians and the modernists.  But she confines this insight to the narrow range of Anglo writers. To my mind, the difference in uses – the difference, that is, in what one might calll the cognitive temperament, the mood around what one knows – is exemplified by the opening of Bleak House (to which Schultz makes reference) and the opening of Man Without Qualities (to which she doesn’t). If ever there was a book that was in dialogue with the conventions of the Victorian novel, it is Musil’s book.  Famously, Dickens begins Bleak House with a prose poem about the London fog:

“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”

The booming foghorn like repetition of fog, provides the real punctuation here for sentences that themselves become foggy, that tend to end either before the verb and object arrive, or to creep along embracing descriptively bits of geography. The sentences extend so much that they seem to go down the reader’s throat, much as the fog gets into the breathing of Londoners – and as the passage relies heavily on sentences as units of breath, the effect is enhanced, feeds back into itself.  

Here, by contrast, is the way Musil begins Man without Qualities:

“A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination  to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising  and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.”

Like Dickens, Musil starts out on a note of humor, bringing together the forces of weather – which have been mathematized – and the city. However, the contrasts here are different.As Schultz points out:

“Yet the weather in “Bleak House” is unmistakably symbolic: the mud is that of a hopelessly sullied culture, the fog that of an opaque and unnavigable legal system. As in earlier, religious stories, meteorology here is morality, and the prevailing conditions leave everything hidden, murky, and stained.”

Musil’s dialectical point will be, eventually, that mathematization is not a value neutral application of science to the world – but on the contrary, is full of moral quandries. For instance, how are we to live with it? Just as the Viennese circle failed, ultimately, to create a language of self evidence in which truth would be a grammatical function fully encompassed in the language’s semantics, Ulrich, the hero of the man without qualities, will fail to not have qualities – that is, to live precisely. In Musil’s binary, precision cannot do without soul. And yet, it creates a world that seems to have chased away all the spirits – even if, in a final moment, it must return to the subject that created it.

These are both moments in the larger event of capitalism, I would say. Or, more accurately, in the development of an industrial system of production under capitalism.  

The anti-Muslim/saudi impunity paradox

One of the great paradoxes of the last two decades has been the simultaneous demonization of Islam in the West, and, at the same time, the impunity of one of the central Islamic states, Saudi Arabia. The attacks in Paris have revived the former, while depending on the latter. So far, so good. But why is this not, at least in the media, a hot issue?

To find some answers, I’d urge the curious to turn to the home page of a financial entity with the impressively ominous name, Kingdom Holding. 

 The official Kingdom Holding site informs us that the  “central figure” behind Kingdom Holding company, according to its internet site “is  His Royal HighnessPrince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul-Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia. Named twice by Forbes Magazine as one of the world’s most intelligentand creative investors, Prince Alwaleed sets the agenda for KHC’s world operations, providing a guiding vision which has seen remarkable success andworldwide recognition.

The grandson of two of the Arab world’s most celebrated figures – King Abdul-Aziz Alsaud, founder and first ruler of Saudi Arabia and HE. Riad El Solh, iconic statesman in Lebanon’s drive for independence – Prince Alwaleed has always been inspired by the uncommon achievements of his family line.”

What we are being told, here, is that Abdul-Aziz Alsaud is essentially a representative, or a member of, the Saudi government.

As such, it is a little surprising that the Kingdom Holding company hasn’t provoked a few questions. According to the New York Times, the Kingdom Holding company, from around 1999 until 2014, held a six percent stake in News corporation. Alsaud used the stake to vote with Murdoch, even as, due to the scandals in Britain, Murdoch’s management came under some stress.

In other words, the company that owns Fox news was partly owned by the Kingdom.

In 2014, there was a reorganization of Murdoch’s company, and the Kingdom moved its investment to the entertainment arm of Fox.

But not to fear! It was also making a strong play for Times Warner stock. The Kingdom site is proud of the relationship:

"Kingdom Holding Company has a substantial shareholding in Time Warner, the world’s largest media company.

KHC’s interest in Time Warner results from a 1997 USD 145m market purchase of a 5% interest in the pioneering Internet company Netscape. Netscape was subsequently sold to AOL which then merged with Time Warner. KHC had identified home and business Internet services as an area of extraordinary opportunity, and the Netscape position was KHC’s first entry into the technology sector, long before Internet-based stocks became unsustainably overvalued.

Within the first sixteen months of the initial investment, Netscape yielded an extraordinary internal rate of return of 90.6% per annum, with the company’s shares skyrocketing in value due to the surging demand for Internet stocks and announcement of AOL’s proposed bid. KHC deepened its relationship with Time Warner in 2001 and 2002 with the purchase of additional share holdings. AOL and Time Warner separated in 2009.

The relationship between KHC and Time Warner remains extremely strong, with the management of Time Warner believing that potential exists for KHC to act as the company’s regional investment partner for the Middle East.”

So, our original paradox can be restated. How is it that media – and Fox and Times Warner between them own a large part of the media that reports news and opinion to American – can host shows that are so overtly anti-Moslem? Take Bill Maher. The man has made a minor career of Islam-dissing. He loves nothing better than to knock down experts in Islam – like, uh, Ben Affleck – with his broad knowledge of the subject.

And how is it that, at the same time, it is not controversial for the US government to, say, sell a billion dollars of bombs, as they did this week, to Saudi Arabia, when Saudi Arabia has been on a campaign of both starving the Yemen population  with a blockade and bombing the cities, with an untold number of civilian casualties? Untold, of course, because you won’t be told this on Bill Maher’s show, or on Fox news, for two.

My theory is: the anti-Moslem rhetoric in the US really effects Moslems who, in Saudi Arabia, would be in prison anyway. In the US, Arabic women, for instance, drive cars, vote, have a civil life, drink, have sex, and in general participate in the life of women in the US. The effect of Maher’s rhetoric means, merely, that a few mosques will be bombed, Arabic kids will be beat up at schools, etc. – the usual hegemonic cruelties. Given that the Saudis have engaged in war almost exclusively against other Moslems – in Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria – it is not surprising that Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul-Aziz has never taken his good friend Rupert Murdoch aside and said, can the anti-Moslem crap.

Nor is it curious that opinion riots against the evils of Putin periodically break out in the Western media, with tons of tears shed over the jailing of dissident billionaire Khodorovsky, whereas the occasional execution by beheading of a sorceressin Saudi Arabia – which is what happened toAmina bint Abdel Halim Nassar in 2011 – produces a yawn. You would think that the elevation of the Saudi delegate to the head of the Human Rights commission at the UN this year would provoke a media storm, given the lack of human rights in Saudi Arabia. But it didn’t. Here was the Obama administration’s response, via the press conference of State Department spokesman Mark Toner:

“Asked whether he thought it was “appropriate for them to have a leadership position,” Toner said, “We have a strong dialogue, obviously a partnership with Saudi Arabia that spans, obviously, many issues. We talk about human rights concerns with them. You know, as to this leadership role, we hope that it’s an occasion for them to, you know, to look at human rights around the world but also within their own borders.”

“But you said that you welcome them in this position,” another reporter said. “Is it based on improved record? I mean, can you show or point to anything where there is you know, a sort of stark improvement in their human rights record?”

“I mean, we have an ongoing discussion with them about all these human rights issues, like we do with every country,” Toner said. “We make our concerns clear when we do have concerns, but that dialogue continues. But I don’t have anything to point to in terms of progress.””

Frankly, Toner’s last remark surely earned him some reproach. Look at the fantastic progress Saudi Arabia is making in terms of ridding itself of witches!

In any case, and this is the point of this post, I’d like to start a campaign to pressure Maher into inviting the head of the Kingdom to debate Islam with him on his show. Of course, Maher is just foam on foam, a show that doesn’t even rise to the level of intellectual masturbation, but it would be fun to see him confronted with a little consequence for his views. Because, as Maher well knows, he can do what he wants on his HBO show (HBO is owned by Times Warner), but he probably doesn’t want to travel the career path of Glenn Beck. Yes to controversy that is as thin as yesterday’s bigotry, but no to endangering a “warm, valued, and long-term relationship.”

And hey, I’m wondering what Congress or the media would make of the idea of a Chinese company,or an Iranian one, owning a six percent stake in a major news network. Hmm, they might kick!

France isn't at war with radical Islam. It is allied to radical Islam. It is at war with Daech.

I should read soothing things before I go to bed. Alas, instead, I glanced at an opinion piece in Marianne. It starts out with the obvious: France is at war. Then it immediately goes off the tracks. France isn't at war with Daech. No, France, according to this genius, is at war with "radical Islam."
This would come as surrprising news to French corporations, who've had a boom year selling to the heart of radical Islam, Saudi Arabia, or to the French government, which has supported radical islam in the war in Yemen.
The difference between the ideologies and domestic policies of Daech and the Saudis depend on the fact that Daech is trying to become a real geopolitical power and the Saudis already are one. Otherwise, both are ruled by a particular interpretation of Shari'a, both behead, both make crimes out of such things as sorcery, both absolutely deny civil rights to women, etc., etc.
Ideological fog machines are a standard part of war. But we've been living with this fog for too long. It is poisonous. If a major paper publishes a piece that misrepresents the most obvious fact about political reality right now, it bodes ill for what comes next. We saw this in 9.11. What is true is that the West, in the interest of combatting Arab nationalism and communism, allowed and even encouraged the Saudis to spend money founding mosques worldwide, which have grown into the cheering section for jihadists. Daech, piggybacking on this network, has recruited thousands of supporters. This isn't surprising. France, and the US, and the West in general, are always trying to recruit supporters from their networks in the Middle East.
What protects Daech is pronouncements such as that in Marianne. If you can't identify your enemy, your war is fucked from the get go.
Where did the French planes that bombed Raqaa take off? From fields in the Gulf states. Meanwhile, other figures in the Gulf states gave Daech its startup money and are continuing to fund Daech.
France is allied with radical Islam, and fighting a group that is held together, ideologically, by a variant of radical Islam. These are the facts. Look em in the face, or continue this bumbling through the mindfield that simply leads to endlessly more war and terrorist attacks.
All of which is not something I wanted to think about last night. I wanted to think about the thriller I was reading.

Yes, it is war

The headline of Le parisien saddens me: cette fois, c’est la guerre. It saddens me because it implies that France has not been at war. While, in fact, you cannot bomb territories and your foreign minister cannot keep saying we are at war with DAECH or ISIS without being at war. This is what war looks like.

You can be for the war or against the war, but it has been war for a while, indisputably. As so often , the wars have been  fought according to the old presumption of colonial war: the front is over there in the distance. But this simply isn’t true any more.   Drone some Yemen wedding, bomb Isis, but don’t think that the forces who’ve been armed to the max by the worldwide flow of arms – none of which are of Middle eastern manufacture - are powerless to respond on your home territory.  This isn’t about moral equivalency, it is simply about the way wars are fought.  The irresponsibility of populations who finance huge war machines and let their presidents play with them, play with military forces that are not longer even drafted, leads to an indifference that will blow up in our faces as we dine at a café

.

I truly, naively believe that if populations connected to the elites that have monopolized and made foreign policy irresponsive to the popular will – if, in fact, the popular will was sending its sons and daughters into the military, and sacrificing their lifestyles to war – there would be less hobby wars. Wars that are the hobby of this or that engaged group.

This time is, really, only the successor of a long time in which war has been going on. So wealthy is France, or any of the developed countries, that wars have become things waged in the peripheral vision. But this is the path that leads to an uncontrollable influx of armed men from those distant theaters, or trained there, into the major metropoles to kill as many people as possible.

the myths of the labor "market"

 John Quiggin, the Australian economist, haswritten a post about the business cycle over at Crooked Timber, and in it herings my chimes – or he makes me mount on my hobbyhorse, to use an older cliché.Specifically, he defines recessions in terms of unemployment, mostly, which I think is a good thing – but he defines employment, implicitly, in terms of a labour market analysis, which is a normal thing, but I think is fundamentally misleading. In a footnote, this is how he defines full employment:

“Full employment doesn’t mean zero unemployment, since some people are always changing jobs, or are in the process of leaving the labor market. Roughly speaking, the employment is at full employment in the sense required here when any additional job creation in one sector of the economy is feasible only by attracting workers away from other sectors.”

Implicitly, what is happening here is a vision of laborers as sovereign consumers in a market place, chosing this or that place to work. Or, in times of lesser employment, consumers without the full freedoms that endow the sovereign consumer. Of course, at the same time, these choosers are also vendors. The neo-classical model allows for this double aspect, but doesn’t ask any questions about it that would lead to some nasty dialectical thinking. That way lies madness and Marxism!

Myself, though, I think that this is a way of looking at the labor force that dissolves extremely pertinent sociological and economic distinctions. For instance, we know that around 30 percent of American workers – to stick with America – work in credentialed, or guild like, professions. Not just doctors and lawyers, but accountants, nurses, plumbers and air conditioning men – given this fact, it does seem like the definition of full employment here is, to say the least, not comprehensive.

Interestingly, when the “market” was first being conceptualized, in the 18^th century, it was conceptualized as a ‘natural’ phenomenon against an artificial phenomenon – state sponsored or regulated activity. There is a famous and defining text, Turgot’s entry in the Encyclopedie on the Foire, or fair, that provides an exemplary instance of a discourse we have all become familiar with, in which the workings of the market are ‘distorted’ or “interfered with” by non-market, and hence, vicious, factors. Turgot used this distinction to analyse fairs as opposed to markets:

“Fair and a marketare therefore both a gathering of merchants and customers at a set time andplace. But in the case of markets the merchants and buyers are brought together by the mutual interest they have in seeking each other, while in the case of fairs it is the desire to enjoy certain privileges — from which it follows that this gathering is inevitably much more numerous and solemn at fairs. Although the natural course of commerce is sufficient to establish markets, as a result of the unfortunate principle which in nearly all governments has infected the administration of commerce — I mean, the mania of directing all, regulating all, and of never relying on the self-interest of man — it has happened, in order to establish markets, that the police1 has been made to interfere; that the number of markets has been limited on the pretext of preventing them from becoming harmful to each other; that the sale of certain goods has been prohibited except at certain appointed places, either for the convenience of the clerks charged with receiving the duty with which they are burdened, or because the goods were required to be subjected to the formalities of testing and marking…”

Given Turgot’s definition, one should speak, then, of the labor “market” as, actually, a hybrid of a market and a fair, for certainly many, if not most of those jobs we associate with the upper middle class are fair-like in their composition.

But there is more to the picture than that. I think Quiggens might be more aware than most economists that governments also employ people. But still, it seems to me that he underestimates  employment by the state. In other words, full employment is supposed to be something sustained by private enterprise in which the state plays only a marketmaker role, by using its powers to tax, borrow, and raise and lower interest rates to create optimum conditions of demand in the private sector.. But – to use the US as an example – full employment in the sense of the private sector absorbing all but a small portion of the working population has never been the case since the great depression. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. In 2009, for instance, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, which is really generous, the private sector ends up employing closer to 78 to 80 percent of the work force.

You can look elsewhere in the developed world and find similar statistics. The OECD has published a comparison across countries of the percentage of the work force employed in the public sector. The scandinavian countries rank high – in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, over 30 percent of the workforce works in the public sector. The UK is 21.5 percent in 2015. In Australia, the public sector grew in the past four years – an exception to the OECD norm – to 18.9 percent of the employed population.

So the first thing one can safely say about full employment, even before brandishing the market metaphor,  is that under modern capitalism, it doesn’t ever happen if we rely solely on the private sector. In a sense, the unemployed mass of the Great Depression was dissolved into the state, and has remained there ever since.

sick humor, State department style

I think Americans who have some moral sense should be outraged at the American foreign policy that has supported a civil war in Syria based on the premise that Assad is a dictator who slaughters civilians while providing logistical support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs and starves civilians in Yemen. As this article shows, it is a joke, officially supported by the Obama State department, that the Saudis are fighting for democracy in Yemen. Although this is a joke that is so sickening that even the State Department doesn't push too hard on this line. They did, of course, congratulate the Saudis when they were elevated, in another of those sick jokes, to the head of the UN Human Rights commission. An endless line of sick humor, death and destruction - there you have the Clinton-Bush-Obama Middle Eastern policy in a nutshell.

the view from 1968: the moral and practical problem of encouraging police to shoot to kill

In 1968, Ramsey Clark, at that time the Attorney General, made a speech in response to Mayor Daley’s remark, about rioters in Chicago, that the police should shoot to kill looters. The speech is relevant now, when the head of the FBI and the DEA have expressed support for police responding immediately and lethally in situations that would formerly have been handled with the finesse police should be trained in. Oh, they didn’t express that support directly – the FBI head and the DEA head were sneakier than that, saying that the emphasis on police killings was contributing to a rise in crime.

Here’s a graf from Clark’s speech.

“A reverence for life is the sure way of reducing violent death. There are few acts more likely to cause guerilla warfare in our cities and division and hatred among our people than to encourage police to shoot looters or other persons caught committing property crimes. How many dead twelve year old boys will it take for us to learn this simple lesson?”

Thousands, it turns out, and we still haven’t learned it. The police poobahs think they are making their case by showing how shooting at the police has increased dramatically; what they are really showing is that police methods which visit lethal injuries on numbers of people who have done little or nothing more than crossed a lane without turning on a signal or the like produce an atmosphere where the cops become the target themselves. 

the mythological struggle between the hard and the soft

Ideology deals with concepts like power and order. Mythology deals with percepts, like the hard and the soft. Of course, the story is more complicated than that.  They are a duality, and like many dualities, they love to dress up in each other’s clothes. Ideological concepts disguise themselves in percepts, and mythology’s percepts disguise themselves as arguments.

I’ve just read a fantastically detailed biography of Wyndham Lewis. By the end of it, the reader will have a good sense of Lewis’s bank account balance, year by year. And yet, the reader won’t know why Lewis painted the way he did, thought the way he did, or wrote the way he did.

After Lewis’s death, many critics, following Hugh Kenner’s lead, swallowed Lewis’s version of modernism. It was a modernism that kicked out the Bloomsbury group, and in particular Virginia Woolf. It is as if they caught Lewis’s allergy to Woolf . Now, Woolf, it seems to me, was a much greater artist than Lewis, and her novels can’t be kicked to the curve as somehow not in the modernist spirit – on the contrary, they are modernist in the most cosmopolitan sense. They link up to Bely, to Joyce, and to Faulkner in the genius with which they slant plot, character, description, and the event of reading itself.

Nevertheless, Lewis is a fascinating writer. I’ve never been able to finish Apes of God, with its impossible mannerism, or Self Condemned, with its rather mysterious gloom, So I’ve decided to repair this by reading Tarr. Tarr is the essential Lewis book, where the material that became The Art of Being Ruled or Time and the Western Man is put to the test of being lived – that is, of being contested. Walter Allen, in an essay on Lewis, made the suggestion that Lewis wrote in the tradition of the Victorian sage – Carlyle, Ruskin, etc. What distinguishes the sage, Allen says, quoting  John Holloway on Carlyle, is a rather disquieting feature:

“One of the things that most disturbs a modern reader of his work is constant dogmatism. Through Carlyle’s work the nerve of proof – in the redily understood and familiar sense of straightforward argument – simply cannot be traced; and the sucession of arbitrary and unproved assertions tends to forfeit our attention. Yet this is only a subordinate difficulty, because although proof is clearly missing it is by no means clear  what would supply this lack, as it is by no means clear what needs proof. The general principles which would summarize Carlyle’s ‘system’ are broad and sweeping gestures, hints thrown out, suggestions which leave us quite uncertain about their detailed import. And what is clearly true of his work is also true of the others. “

It is the lack of proof – which I would interpret as an indissoluble overlapping of the mythological and ideological levels of the text - that makes Lewis’s politics difficult. He obviously flirts with fascism, but he is not a party member like Pound. Rather, I feel his fascism is expressed in his mythology, in which the hard struggles against the soft. The soft, for Lewis, is always disgusting, whereas the hard is always an admirable achievement. In a way, this mirrors the way, in the 21^st century, the American establishment mythologizes. Toughness is always good, weakness is always bad. America’s horrendous foreign policy is based on this seemingly infantile binary – in fact, one could say that the foreign policy, tout court, is a case of homosexual panic. Uncle Sam must always present his butch side to the world.

In artistic terms, Lewis’s flight from the soft is what connects his entire career as a polemicist, satirist, painter, and novelist.  He associated the hard with vision. In a sort of primitive physicalism, the eye becomes a projector of rays – not the soft receiver that it actually is and has to be. What is truly seen is truly seen in hard lines.  The fetish of the hard is the fetish of the machine, which, in Lewis’s mythology, is never oiled, never uses weakness, the spring, the buffer, the tampon, but is always in a maximum state of hardness.  Such machinery is so strong, in fact, that it is always in peril of crashing. It can’t last. It is a machine that is built not to function, but to express the mythological state  of hardness.

to the GOP candidates: let's show some love to Carson today!

I don't see what is wrong with this. Carson is no different from all the rest of the GOP candidates. He turned down a scholarship to west point in his head. Rubio was a poor boy who climbed the social ladder through entrepreneurship and pluck in his head. Fiorina, in her head, saw bodysnatchers using their alien vehicle, Planned Parenthood, to make soup out of fetuses, And Trump has dreamt up a whole country named the USA which ranks, militarily and economically, with Albania, but, after a quick fixer upper, will rank with alexander the great's empire, and the Roman one too, In the most classical sense, the Republicans are running as idealists. I'm hoping they will show some love to Carson, who is just being attacked by the liberal press, After all. It isn't a lie if you can believe it just before going to sleep!

Dexter Filkens very poor, sham defense of Chalabi.

In the New Yorker, the old interventionist fellow traveler, Dexter Filkins, performs a pretty worn out magic trick, exonerating Chalabi for the lies and propaganda he spread in Iraq, and leaving the man's career at that. 

Of course, Chalabi was no seducer of innocents. The Bush administration was crowded with chickenhawks, anxious to "liberate" Iraq, reap a bountiful political score in the US, and Chili-ize the occupied country in the best shock doctrine fashion. Of course, they were afraid to risk the political capital that would come from really occupying the country, and they could hide behind Rumsfeld's screwy military science which told him that you could pacify Iraq with about five hundred thousand less soldiers than it would actually take to even begin. No Vietnams please, we are chickenhawks was the motto.
However, by trotting out the usual I interviewed Chalabi nonsense, and focusing all attention on the run up to the war, Filkins conveniently forgets Chalabis role in the occupation in 2003. Here, Chalabi was key. Because he was one of the main players to press for de-Baathification, which was realized by Paul Bremer's decision to unilaterally disband the army and ban Ba'athists from state positions. In one stroke, Iraq lost its governance. Imagine having half a million too few soldiers to actually continue the civic and social life of a territory and then stripping out the government that had served that territory for the last thirty years.
Sadly, Filkins, a terrible war correspondent, was chosen by the New Yorker as their man in the Middle East. This isn't surprising - Remnick, after all, published the wild tales of the 9.11 - Saddam Hussein connection, as designed by Jeffrey Goldberg, to turn up the pro-war heat back in the day. But I think that the readership of the New Yorker is probably much out of synch with the pap being fed it by such as Filkins.
For the story of Chalabi and the occupiers, a much better source is Aram Rosten's biography of Chalabi. Here, I'll quote from the pages devoted to Bremer's de-Ba'athification edicts.

As much as L. Paul Bremer and Ahmad Chalabi would come to
hate and despise each other, Bremer, who replaced Jay Garner as
America’s overseer in Iraq, danced unwittingly to Chalabi’s tune when
he issued the de-Baathification order on May 16, 2003. He carried out
Chalabi’s policy, although, he explained later, it was merely adapted
from a law handed to him directly by Doug Feith.

And then Bremer quickly installed Ahmad Chalabi as the head of
the commission to “de-Baathify” Iraq. On the top floor of the Iraqi
government building, in the Green Zone, Chalabi entrenched his De-
Baathification Commission, which assumed the aura and reputation
of an Inquisition. “They had tons of money,” explained one Iraqi involved
with the commission. “Their fortunes have risen and fallen
many times, but when they were first created, they were a much-feared
organization that occupied one of the floors of the building the government
used.And I know people quaked even going there. If your file
entered there, God knows what they would do to you.”

Chalabi had the extraordinary power now to end anyone’s employment,
strip away his pension even, leave him destitute. If Chalabi chose
to paint someone as a leading Baathist, that would mean his prospects of
government employment were over.And of course it left him open to arrest
by the Americans, who barely monitored the committee’s methods.

It was immediately clear to anyone who cared to know that not all
Baathists had blood on their hands and that patriotic Iraqis were being
pushed out of their jobs and turned into beggars because of the
process led by Chalabi. “It was like ‘de-Sunnification,’” said one diplomat.
The most competent administrators, who had been forced to be
Baath Party members, were banned from working in government
jobs. “De-Baathification appears to have gone some way toward dismantling
a state that had been left largely intact by the unexpectedly
swift war,” as The Economist put it."

As I wrote constantly at the time, you cannot separate the run up to the war and the occupation. To do so gives one an absurd picture of what went on - a picture that gives cover to incompetents, criminals, and, by no accident, their abettors in the press.
So why does Dexter Filkins still have a career explaining Iraq?

chalabi is deader than dick cheney's heart

I've often written about Chalabi. He was a character who seemed to embody the madness of the first stage of the Bush era - the second stage, in which we live, is characterized by opoid addiction and suicide, which is another story. 

Anyway, he tires me. So I'm reprinting a post I wrote when the NYT Magazine did their postmortem on Chalabi after his party was wiped out in the first Iraqi election.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The horrendous Dexter Filkins is at it again. The NYT Magazine profile of Chalabi is an indulgence verging on an impudence – after all, why not devote that space to a basically meaningless story about Filkins fave guy? Here’s one of our favorite passages in this extended exercise in bosculating Chalabi’s golden fanny:

“When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.

But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free.”

To set them free! Doesn’t it make you feel all Country and Western?

Having cast my lot with the black magicians, I've been trying to come up with a spell to launch a meme from this tiny blog. The meme would be about the failure of the MSM, from the beginning, to comprehend Iraq. The evidence for that failure would be the incredibly exaggerated role assumed by Chalabi in reports about Iraq after the invasion that kept appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major media. At the same time, the way Chalabi himself was perceived in Iraq didn't even figure in those reports. For instance: for years, LI has maintained that the legitimacy of the supposed American project of bringing 'democracy' to Iraq, still hailed by the belligeranti, was undermined from the beginning by trying to set up a notorious thief as our proxy in Iraq. Filkins remarks, sort of as an afterthought in one place, that he was amazed at how the Iraqis all seemed to know that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of stealing up to 40 million dollars from the bank he founded. Now, this isn't a small and insignificant piece of information - even though Filkins treats it as such, devoting a total of four sentences to it. This is a huge piece of information. It is about how the Iraqis were seeing things. If the MSM were really curious about the supposed American project, this kind of information was vital feedback for Americans.

In fact, however, the MSM is simply an adjunct of the conventional wisdom of whatever court faction wants to bamboozle us this time. And so in all those stories about Chalabi, none of them were about the perception current in Iraq from the beginning that he was a huge thief. It is also true that he is a huge thief, but the perception was more important. You can't conduct an occupation that is legitimated on helping the occupied and then try to elevate a thief to the position of ruler.

Well, we were reminded by the sorry ass stroy of this post, filed after the Iraqi election, 1/26/06. I totally regret the severe underestimate of Iraqi casualties:

the shame of the press
Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.

If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.

Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.

Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:

“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”

Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:

“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.

“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”

On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.

Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”

Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:

“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.

This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:

“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."

Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.

But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”

Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.

Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.

without an element of real terrorism, the Government would never grant women the franchise

We saw Suffragette last night. I found it a pretty good political flick. Its most brilliant choice was to focus on a prole, the laundry worker played by Carey Mulligan. The word about this movie and the way it is being advertised has created a faux controversy. Apparently, publicity pics show the Mulligan, Meryl Streep and some other stars of the film wearing tee shirts across which is emblazoned the slogan, I’d rather rebel than die a slave, a phrase from a Pankhurst speech featured in the film. This turns the film’s sympathy for attacks on property into a slogan no better nor worse than I’m with stupid. In other words, activism becomes consumerism, and consumerism is then considered from the standpoint of whether it sets off twitter storms of offended comments.

This is too bad. The film is all white, as has been pointed out; what hasn’t been pointed out is that the all white movement appropriated strategies from the anarchists and from a long line of labour protest going back to the Luddites. Personally, I think there is material here for the black lives matter movement – the shattering of windows in zones of luxury consumerism  Instead of the uplifting but empty slogan that the movie is marketing, I prefer Emmeline Pankhurst’s line: ‘The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics’. The current disposition allows people to go out in the street with signs, as long as the police approve, but would jail any leader who went around saying such things now as a terrorist.

Many reviews I have read of the film – including an astonishingly tone deaf one in the New Yorker by Richard Brody – have gone at it with how the story of the Suffragettes should have been told. As with Selma (or War and Peace, for that matter), some material must be left out, and others must be turned and shaped by the the dynamics of the story. Myself, I was dissatisfied with two points: one was the depiction of the laundry factory as a world of silent passivity. Have I been mislead by L’assomoir, or did the film substitute an isolation tank for a much less respectable, more raucous, more resistant scene? And my second bone to pick was the dialogue around “telling the king” that Pankhurst was in danger from her fasting – I didn’t think it plausible that this servile idea would have been born in the brain of the working class Carey Mulligan character.

I went back and tried to look up some of the history that the film covers. I didn’t know it. History is, as always, messy. The Emmeline Pankhurst of the movie, who welcomes the support of all women, does not exactly correspond to the Pankurst of history, who seemed, at least in the time frame of the movie, to agree with her daughter, Christabel, who actively opposed giving working class women the vote, and felt so strongly about this that she split the movement. Her sister, Sylvia, took the opposite, radical side. At the same time, perhaps because of Christabel’s class arrogance, she was not afraid of radical action. I came across Christabel Pankhurst’s leaflet, Window Breaking: to one who has suffered, and I liked it. I  thought about what we would think if this were a contemporary leaflet from a Palestinian on the West Bank, or an African-American activist in Ferguson, Missouri. Some controversy has whirled around the lack of people of color in the movie, Suffragette, but to my mind, what is missing is that the kinds of weapons used by the oppressed today are condemned by the people of whiteness in positions of power when those same weapons were used, at one time, by the people of whiteness in positions of social weakness.

Here’s the beginning of the leaflet.

“Dear Sir, You, a prosperous shopkeeper, have had your windows broken and your business interfered with, you are very angry about it, and no wonder. But you are angry with the wrong people. You are angry with the women who broke you windows, whereas you ought really to be angry with the people who drove them to it. Those people are the members of the present Government.” 

In an unpublished fragment found by Sylvia Pankhurst’s biographer, Mary Davis, Sylvia is frank about both her opposition to her sister’s views and tactics and her unwillingness to oppose them in public to avoid splitting the movement.  “My sister… declared that, without an element of real terrorism, the Government would never grant women the franchise.”

Put that on a tee shirt or twitter it and see what happens.

racism: it is not just rednecks

Racism has a double aspect: there is a racism of sentiments and a racism of structure. It is a mistake to think that these aspects are governed by the same dynamic, and will reflect the same “moves.” And yet, they are “aspects” – ultimately, sentiments and structure form a unity.

In a society that has  bought into the myth of methodological individualism, the unity becomes ever more mysterious. According to that myth, if we operate on the individual sentiments, we are engaged with the determining cause of racism. If, that is, we could through some process make sure that nobody “feels” racist, then we eliminate racism.  

Although intellectually many liberals think that structural racism is semi-autonomous, in some way, in everyday discourse these liberals tend to reflect the hegemonic position that it is sentiments that count. Thus, without considering that, objectively, those who achieve some success in a society that is structurally racist are themselves complicit in racism – or to be less wishy washy, are racist – they will much prefer looking at some other as the bearer of racism – the white redneck or trailer trash being, of course, the popular bugbear.

This is understandable. The relationship between sentiments and structure is a complex one, and not always easy to unentangle.

But even if the source of the racism, the aspect that is the larger factor in a particular instance, must be subject to analysis, one can still spot it pretty easily if we think about it. To give an example off the top of my head: Robert Caro’s analysis of LBJ’s election to the senate in 1948. This is how the NYT chose to summarize it:

“Mr. Caro maintains that although ballot fraud was common in the late 1940's in some parts of Texas, the Johnson campaign of 1948 raised it to a new level. Mr. Caro supports his charge with an interview with Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County who said he acknowledged his role only after all others involved in the theft had died.

Determined to Win at All Costs

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found. Johnson died in 1973, Stevenson and Parr in 1975. Mr. Caro says the election showed Johnson's determination to win at all costs as well as his coolness under fire and his ability to select gifted lieutenants, whom he then manipulated.”

One notices that the focus on ballot fraud lightly skips over the fact of real voter suppression in Texas in 1948. According to the Census of 1950, the population of Texas was 12.9 percent black, or 977,458, but until 1944, the state law allowed the Democratic party to exclude at its own will voters in the primary. That law was used to create a so called “white primary.” In one of the most important cases that the Supreme Court has ever decided, Smith v. Allwright, the Court ruled that this was an illegal infringement on African American civil riths. Interestingly, the 1948 senate race was one of the first statewide races after the Supreme Court ruling. So instead of speaking of “ballot stuffing” under the assumption that elections before 1948 were more licit, one should be asking whether lifting the long term illegal suppression of black votes made the 1948 election more democratic. More, I say, since grassroots voter suppression of black votes in Texas was still going on. It is only in the context of this much larger scandal that we can talk, with some historical understanding, about white election irregularities.

But the NYT synopsis of Caro’s research doesn’t touch on this, or even seem aware of the irony of talking about election irregularities in a system founded on a gross, systematic election irregularity. After all, that part of the story is in a separate compartment.  It goes under black history, and the NYT would dutifully report on it if called to do so. But running the two compartments together, hyphenating the African hyphen American story? That falls under the excluded middle.

the politics of analogy always tend right: Putin as Yeltsin's heir, not Stalin's

When Americans decide that so and so is a dictator, so and so always becomes Hitler. Except in the case of Russia. American pundits have a great time making the connection between Putin and Stalin. It is a mythogram that is set and fixed in the narrative.

However, it is absolute nonsense.

Stalin’s economic and social policies look nothing like Putin’s. One doesn’t see a major purge of former Putinista trundling off to the camp. One doesn’t see the enormous resources devoted to an industrialization that will create a proletariat which will retrospectively legitimate the regime. To put very briefly events that deserve, and have generated, opuses. Opusi?

No, the Russian leader that Putin resembles most closely is America’s favorite Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin. From the crony capitalism, which brings into alignment the government and certain favored oligarchs, to the manipulation of the media through companies that are aligned with the ruling party, to the use of war as a means of stirring up nationalism and support, to the reliance on primary products as the base of the economy, it is all Yeltsin. Of course, Putin isn’t a drunk, and he hasn’t shelled parliament or signed any treaties breaking up Russia between glasses of vodka. Plus, he hasn’t allowed Western economists of the privatize and profit school to share in the gravy of the Russian economy. But Putin is a product of Yeltsin, both politically and programatically. The class that favors Putin is the clas that favored Yeltsin – the class that has received, in fact, the most favors.

Thus, the backstory of the convenient forgetting of Yeltsin and the conjunction of Putin and Stalin has to do with a piece of shared history. Somehow, though, neither side – Yeltsin’s abettors in the West, and Putinistas in Russia – want to credit that history.

This is what makes the “defense”  of Russia in, for instance, Ukraine such a muddled thing. There are, indeed, unregenerate leftists who really do think Putin’s Russia is like unto the kind of socialist project that needs to be defended against capitalism. This is rather like defending Kuwait’s socialist project against capitalism. It is moronic. It isn’t even sweetly moronic. It is simply making Russia a rag for political anger generated elsewhere.

No, the defense of Russia should be confined to the criticism of obvious stupidities in the attack on Russia by unregenerate neo-libs and cons. I always think that what happened in Ukraine shows how off the mark both sides are. To my mind, the Maiden revolution choked what would otherwise have been an election that would most likely have overturned the corrupt as fuck Party of the Regions. It would have put in place the corrupt as fuck opposition parties. And it would have moderated the issue of accepting the EU’s terms for economic aid, as opposed to Putin’s.

Instead, what happened is that the heart of the Party of the Regions’ vote – Crimea – voted itself out of Ukraine with the aid, obviously, of Russia. I don’t think the vote would have gone against that course even if it had been overseen by some international body. Crimea was responding to the loud, radical right in Kyev. In doing this, however, Russia created a very unbalanced Ukraine, in which the heirs of the Party of the Regions vote will never gain a majority in the Parliament. This is a very Yeltsinian outcome, of course – the grab for power leading to the quagmire that disturbs that quiet period during which the powers that be can digest their booty.

The EU and the US have, of course, made up a different narrative that simply excludes the history of the recent past – one of the favorite tricks of the interventionists in the opinion world, who disdain referring to recent history – they prefer high sounding labels, Democracy, Stalinism, etc., which they attach with abandon to the baggage they intend to support, regardless of whether the baggage is mislabeled or not.

It isn’t really that hard to remember recent history and to make reasonable inferences, however. That is what the Internet is for!