nabokov and a cold war trope

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlos Ginsberg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.   

 It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in  Nabokov’s lectures on Russian history. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the

Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, some day, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscoping skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanch at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union. In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge rhetoric in Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a parallelism argument – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to one to the other. Hey, we are all human. However, in Pushkin’s case, try as he might, Nabokov can’t make the  parallel lines meet. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

This is a phrase from  Nabokov has his fictitious author say  about the radical’s views of Pushkin:  “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””, thus, again, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them. However, in actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” In Berdaiev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937, a little before the Cold War), the boots are retained, but Pushkin is pushed aside for Shakespeare: Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform. Leszek Kolakowski takes the line that  we can attribute to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” –  an expansion of Berdaiev’s sentence, and making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.” This feat of quotation correcting occurs in the very narrow space of a footnote, but when we think  of what a lordly career the phrase has had, it seems to deserve something more.

 

  

ISIS is not a terrorist outfit

I am sick to death of the definitional inflation of the word terrorist. Villifying one's enemies goes a long way back, but I think the modern use of terrorist to mean any enemy whatsoever was started by the Nazis, who labelled all resistance to them in the countries they conquered terrorist. Now, they could have called it simply resistance, but such a name would imply that a total project could be resisted. I think that is where the terrorist idea gets its hot air from.
In the case of ISIS, the difference between them and the "moderate rebel" groups the West supports is that they aren't moderate, that they are successful, and that they are gobbling up Iraq. These may well be good reasons for the US and its allies to try to destroy ISIS, War is about this kind of thing. But one must be clear about what is happening. For instance, ISIS is not attacking the US, the US is attacking ISIS. When one reads these panic inducing reports that ISIS may strike at US territory, thus ISIS is a terrorist group, I think: no, ISIS, like any group that is attacked by a state, may attack that state back.
It should be unnecessary to say that the fact that I consider ISIS another paramilitary group does not mean I am somehow for ISIS, or find its beheadings groovy. But I am against linguistic slipperiness which, in the end, has allowed the US for the past couple wars to skirt around the international covenants and treaties it has signed about fighting war. And, indeed, skirt around the constitutional language that sets up strict procedures for warmaking (and which have been ignored by the political establishment since 1945 - if only americans were as strict constructionist about war as they are about owning handguns!).
If ISIS threatens US interests to the extent we have to bomb them, well, lets have a discussion about that. But lets not falsify the discussion from the beginning by pretending the ISIS - unlike, say, the Libyan paramilitaries who we aided in overthrowing Qaddafi - are terrorists. They aren't.

the mush in France

I read the thumbsucker pieces about the Socialist Party in Le Monde’s Ideas section yesterday, including the manifesto by the 200 Hollande loyalists from the National Assembly. What did I get for my labors? It was like plowing through a swamp of earwax – it was like being gnawed by weasals while trying to escape from melting tundra. It was in other words a completely unenlightening and vaguely disgusting experience, with an avoidance of the issue at hand that would be frightening if it weren’t so yawn-worthily predictable.

Here’s the issue at hand. The PS is at a record level of unpopularity. Thus, the question at hand is what strategic sense it makes to be unpopular and at the same time utterly shed one’s principles, embracing their contradiction – neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, austerian economics and a very public palling around with the malefactors of great wealth. It is one thing to be unpopular because of one’s principles, and quite another to be unpopular and adopt the opposition’s principles. It is, in short, a cretinous strategy.

But it hasn’t been done by the PS alone. Time after time over the past seven years, since the depression began, leftist parties in Europe have abandoned everything they stood for and adopted austerianism. The results of this move are in. The results are: the leftist party is rolled at the general election by the standardbearer for the right, and are even rolled by the populist anti-immigrant anti-European parties, which, while strictly right on race and social matters, adopt a leftist economic stance.

If this were a simple footrace, what the PS is telling its militants is that it is better to run it with a fifty kilo weight tied around your neck.

These observations, which are extremely banal but at least relevant to the issue of the party, are never even touched on by the neo-liberal former Mitterand minister (and former payer of a half million dollar fine in the US for shady business practices), the haughty poli sci prof, and the 200. Instead, they serve up great gobs of rhetoric and re-heated third way malarky, signifying absolutely nothing.

Why would an elite become so braindead that it can’t even gain clarity about its own interests? This is a historical situation that pops up often: think of the 1940 French military strategy, or the 2003 American Iraq occupation strategy. Think of the crash of 2008.  On this scale, the demise of the PS is a minor matter, but it is still gruesomely interesting to watch.

the parody of socialism in France

The debacle of the French socialist party – which seems well on its way to achieving a place in the museum of extinct parties, next to the Frei Democratische party in Germany – can be explained, in large part, as a phenomenon of the class struggle.

Class struggle! Haven’t we all gone beyond that since Reagan and Thatcher freed the free world?

Well, one would think so as class becomes the absent category in sociology and theory. But its sinking into the collective unconscious doesn’t make it any less so.

The postwar years, from the late forties to the early eighties, saw an almost Hegelian progression: the wage class and its unions triumphed in the construction of the welfare state all over the developed world. That very triumph, however, produced the children who buried the wage class – the technocrats and meritocrats whose natural sympathies were for Capital, not Labor. They looked like business execs and they thought like business execs, and if they climbed through the channels of the Socialist Part (or the SPD or the Labour party), they had no sympathy or understanding for the culture and existences of the wage class. However, in the class system, certain kinds are spinkled at random in the top and the bottom: especially women and gays. In that respect, these technocrats did liquidate that old lefty puritanism and patriarchal attitudes. What was never sprinkled at random in the top was, of course, Africans or arabs, and one notices that they are still not sprinkled in any ratio to their population through the top no matter what flavor the government is.

The triumph of the technocrat type meant, long ago, that the Socialist party, founded as the party of the workers, was progressively hollowing out. The parody of a socialist party that now rules France, with a neo-conservative foreign policy, a neo-liberal economic policy, and a dog-whistle social policy (see the Nouvelle Obs for the story of how the PS muckety mucks are using Najat Vallaud-Belkacem http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20140827.OBS7342/quand-hollande-fait-croasser-la-droite-boutin.html as a dogwhistle to the left, the way George Bush used to appoint evangelicals as a sucker call to the right) will, I assume, come in behind the FN and the UMP in 2017, when, if Hollande’s austerity policies are put in place, unemployment should be reaching around 15 percent – it worked so well for Spain, why not try it for France! The meritocrats who read their Mankiew, their Chicago school economists, and have long ago replaced Marx with Hayek, will not be touched by the unemployment – there is always more room in investment banking for the meritocratic-lings, their darling daughters and sons. Magic Fabius money for everyone! Interestingly, it will be the FN that will surely present a more leftist economic platform, or at least a dirigiste one, and I expect even the UPM will show some concern for the unemployed, rather than basking in the glow of MEDEF.

 

It is hard to imagine France without a left, but apparently this is what is happening. We have to call the European project a complete success in that regard – reinstating the gold standard in the form of the Euro, it was the product and generator of the unbounded rule of speculative capital. You can try to vote against that rule: you will fail.

on a passage in Nabokov 1

I was licked into shape by the Cold War. It was my mother and my father, and I am still a piece of it as I advance towards my death in a world that is no longer moored to it. Vast upheavels have the effecct of making their survivors posthumous people, carrying about obsolete maps and concerned with dead issues – themselves a sort of dead issue. For this reason I follow lines of thought or seize on details that that seem pointless or defunct to those who are under a certain age, and have grown up with a certain set of post Berlin Wall references, and who have never dreamed, as children, of atom bombs dropping from the sky. Similarly, I find it difficult to understand the events and idees recues of the present, I have difficulty being “contemporary” – I have to translate them, clumsily, into their historic “place”, dissolving them so utterly into their causes that I entirely lose their effects – I understand them to death, and don’t understand them at all.

I think of  Nabokov as a supremely cold war writer, or rather, as a writer whose reputation is inseperable from the cold war, just as Orwell’s was. When Bend Sinister was published by Time Life in 1964, with a special forward by Nabokov, the connection was made explicit – here was a more another allegorical attack on totalitarianism, ie the Soviet Union – although, as the “editors of Time Life” note in the preface, there is a lot of word play in the book that even they hadn’t noticed at first.

The cold war atmosphere comes comes across particularly when you read the non-fiction – which is studded with opinions delivered in Nabokov’s best Des Esseintes style, something that at first seems striking – like someone insisting that artificial flowers are better than real ones – and that eventually become an instance of how the manic pursuit of good taste eventually destroys the very foundation of taste, substituting a game of more sophisticated than thou – a game for feebs. This aestheticism was something that seemed very familiar in the fifties, when Nabokov first started becoming known in America. Michael Wood once wrote of how, in Speak Memory, Nabokov’s elegy to “Sirin” – a Russian émigré writer who happened to be Nabokov’s pseudonym – has a certain beauty in its place: “Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his way in American letters. “

Nabokov, in 1950, was actually a rather coddled émigré, teaching at Harvard and friends with the American mandarin of mandarins, Edmund Wilson. His opinions were reliably anti-communist, a stance that he wrapped up in aesthetics – he basically considered anything to the left of his father’s classical liberalism to be posh’lust, which he expressed in a Paris Review interview by saying that mentioning Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam in the same breath is “seditious posh’lust” – thus perhaps reinflating the czarist notion of  sedition for the last time. In the introduction to the lectures on Russian writers, he claims that no writers of any note flourished under the Soviets, and quotes Gladkov as a typical Soviet writer – thus throwing Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha, among others, under the truck. 

TBC

the nose

“But these evils are notorious and confessed; even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire, besides their splendour and the sharpness of their light, will, with their appendant sorrows, wring a tear from the most resolved eye; for not only the winter is full of storms and cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts and sharp frosts; the fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat, and burnt with the kisses of the sun, her friend, and choked with dust; and the rich autumn is full of sickness; and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because sorrow is its biggest portion; and when we remember, that upon the fairest face is placed one of the worst sinks of the body, the nose, we may use it not only as a mortification to the pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest outside of condition which any of the sons and daughters of Adam do posses.”

Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercizes of Holy Dying was one of the 17^th century’s bestsellers; through the nineteenth century, it was a prime example of raree, cadenced prose that crawled into the sentences of Johnson, Coleridge, Emerson and many others. Oh that seventeenth century rag, faint bits of which we still dance to today.

Taylor’s notion of the nose as a sink of the body and a monument to our mortification is the place where I start with noses, a subject that has been forced upon me over the last two weeks, as I’ve been dripping from it, or suffering from its drying up, or in general living a little too familiarly with, like a prisoner trapped within my sinuses and unable to think of anything else. e.

Of course, poor Jeremy Taylor must have witnessed a good many colds in Golden Grove, the house in South Wales where he wrote the Holy Dying. The book is inspired by the death of his wife, Phoebe, in 1651. Who knows, perhaps she died of a disease that had recently started entering the vocabulary of the English: influenza, named for the influence of the stars that was thought to incubate the disease. In his death sermon on his patroness, Lady Carbery, who died at around the same time, Taylor mentions that many new diseases had appeared lately, and many old ones had changed in circumstances and symptoms, which showed some awareness of the disease landscape around him. So who knows how prominently noses figured in Taylor’s life in 1651, when he wrote his greatest work, or how irritated he was at their running.

On the other side of the channel, we have another religious man, an infinitely greater thinker, Blaise Pascal, who also left a famous remark about noses: Pensee no 29 - “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé *  Pascal wrote down three versions of this thought, but all of them agree that it was the size of  Cleopatra’s schnozzle, and not its cuteness, its diminuity, its slightness, that made the face a regal beauty. Thus, Pascal enrolls himself among the truly rare connoisseurs of excess in the nose, or at least more splendor than you get down the slope of some nose-changed blonde extra. An essay by Paul Strapper in 1879 pointed out that we really don’t know the dimensions of Cleopatra’s nose anyway. But Strapper, undetered by the fact that we really have no guide to Cleopatra’s body, imagines it anyway, seeing her as an imperfect beauty, and thus a modern one, since we appreciate the disruption of the line, the flaw, as integral to our vision of beauty  – one that supposes a mercurial mind in a feu follet body. This doesn’t seem to be Pascal’s idea, but at the same time, he surely thought about the fact that the nose he was using as a monument for the mortification of human vanity was large, or at least regal, and not short, or demure.

The seventeenth century seemed to have been especially interested in noses and legendary nose figures. Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth century libertine.The legend of his nose became a fixture of 19^th century literature after Cyrano’s work was rediscovered by Nodier – and it might not have been an obsession of his contemporaries. Theophile Gautier, in an essay on Cyrano in his Grotesques, wrote that the Voyage to the Moon and the nose were Cyrano’s great works, one of art and the other of nature . Gautier described it as a mountain comparable to the Himalayas, or as a tapir’s trunk.  This is sheer nose trumpeting, or thumbing one’s nose at fact in favor of funny.

The eighteenth century, as far as noses went, was long on farce. One of the great nose writers is Laurence Sterne, of course, who ransacked the connection between the nose and the penis until he owned it. However, myself, I’m interested in another nose man whose marriage could have formed the basis for another kind of Tristam Shandy. Lord Elgin, who stole much Greek statuary for the British in the early nineteenth century, lost his wife to his nose – or rather, his lack of one. It seems that Elgin contracted some horrible disease in the Middle East that ate his nose. His wife, according to testimony at their divorce trial, then lost all interest  in her husband, and took up with a neighbor who, presumably, had a nose: a Mr. Robert Ferguson.

Byron, of course, made up a gossipy couplet about Elgin:

Noseless himself, he brings home noseless blocks

To show what time has done and what… the pox.

And so we reach what I consider the height of the nose in literature if not life: the nineteenth century, and Gogol’s The Nose. Here, finally, the outer coat of the nose develops an interior interest, a soul – a sinus of a soul. Nabokov, who is often so concerned to be clever, as a critic, that he fails to be interesting, wrote one good critical book – a study of Gogol. Nabokov, among other interesting things, contends that the nose figures majorly in Russian talk – there are hundreds of proverbial sayings that employ the nose. “The point to be noted is that from the very start the nose as such was a funny thing to his mind (as to all Russians).”

The humorousness of the nose leads us away from the mortification it marks, perhaps – or perhaps that mortification finds its true beauty here. But myself, blowing my nose in a wild trumpet solo lasting ten days, have a hard time seeing the comedy here – or rather, I am desensitized to what I know is a ticklish subject. The cold forces us inside the nose, and there – as is similar, in popular sentimentality, with the clown – all is tears. Furthermore, of course, this is my nose, the nose of a man who, having achieved 56 years of nosewearing activity, must acknowledge its rougeur and scaliness, at times – the results of too much sun and too much booze, or at least beer. So even when I am not forced into a stricter intimacy with my nose than I want, I view it with a bit of dismay. There it is, staring back at me in the mirror, and making it very difficult for me to shave over my upper lip,

Yet I have to give the nose some credit. Surely the inner sound of writing – the thing that I go by to get me from a to z – goes much much better when the nose, whatever its outer look, is comfortable inside. That inner noise is something I become partially deaf to when I have a cold, which is why I stop writing.

I write this as, hopefully, the epitaph on the gravestone atop my former cold, and to celebrate the faint re-awakening to my  inner tintinabulation. My nose is almost back! 

ferguson/juvenal

Who will guard us from the guardians? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – this is a philosophical question posed by a satirist, Juvenal. It is funny, really: you would imagine that the question would first turn up in Plato or Aristotle, reach its canonical form there – that great rounded form of the thing finally said, as though the whole ocean of discourse had washed over it and worn away every unnecessary edge. But it does not crop up there, nor in Cicero, but in a poem directed against women. “I know the advice my old friends would give/Lock her up and bar the doors. But who is to keep guard over the guards themselves?” (Peter Green’s translation).

Surely there is something of interest here – that an eminently political counsel, something that has been absorbed into the works of the great modern political thinkers, should have first appeared as a question aimed at scoring points against the sucker who thinks he can control his wife’s sexuality, when, as the poem makes clear, she herself can’t. In Juvenal’s poem, a woman’s sex life assumes the dimensions of some vast natural disaster, some erupting volcano, some tsunami. A woman’s sex life buries Pompei all over again.  

In fact, of course, the poem so digs at its own fantastic notion of women as to collapse under its own ridiculousness – which Juvenal recognizes at the end of the poem, when he recognizes that he has turned a satire into something more like a tragedy.

From misogynist satire, then, this question is translated into the just social order, and how to get it. That order suffers under the pressure of two infinities – on the one hand, the infinity of violence, where revenge calls to revenge, and the feud tends to expand in scope until it catches up everyone – and on the other hand, the infinity of order, where those who induce order, by their very position, have access to the abuse of order that calls for them to be subordinated, in turn, to other guardians – and so on in an expanding ring. At the limit, order is always under the spell of a transgressive force that wells up from its own logic and nature, and that forces the order to expand. This is the seed of regulation and bureaucracy that can’t be dreamt away by the libertarian adolescent.  

I started out on this path in order to write about the police lynching in Ferguson; but to bring it to the point, to say something about Ferguson, here my thoughts are blunted by a fact-weighted despair. 

name of officer in ferguson missouri

Interesting how the NYT reports that anonymous has released the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, but refused to name him.also. The link to his name is here

more bombing iraq talk - isn't this just groovy?

:… the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million.”

The NYT today is very worried that if the US doesn’t act, a humanitarian crisis will erupt in Iraq. The cause of the crisis is Isis. And yet, my quote from the Times is not from today – no, it is from May 13, 2007. At that time, Iraq was suffering from a bigger invasion force than any mounted by Isis. The force was called the US Military. They’d been sowing chaos and massacre for four years by this time, and yet there seemed to be no call going out there from any of the major thumbsuckers to bomb Washington D.C. until they withdrew.

Funny that, eh?

I’ve been surprised – which shows how dumb I am – how quickly the hawk narrative has caught on among the punderati, the VSPs. In another recent opinion page piece, the NYT invited  seven figures to debate the question: Is it right that the United States become more involved militarily in Iraq? Of course, this is a question no Iraqi could handle, which is why the seven respondents were all american, with one Iranian american thrown in for good measure.  Two were women who’d been involved in the Bush end of the war on terror, from the perspective of which they could suggest ample measures to make American policy in the Middle East even more of a fucking disaster than it is now.

Because America thirsts for good guys before they pay for bloodshed – as every summer action flick shows – the Kurds have been amped up as the good guys of the moment. I was surprised and pleased to see Steve Coll push back against this meme in a recent New Yorker piece – perhaps stimulated by his colleague Dexter Filkin’s neo-connish rants about Iraq, and Obama’s incredible failure to plunge into the country as into an inviting  swimming pool – one filled with blood! - with soldiers galore – such fun it was the last time!

It has been 11 years since the US, under a criminally negligent president, invaded and occupied Iraq, with results that we can all see. And yet, incredibly, the same old krewe of morons that urged that adventure are now popping up all over the media to urge another. It is a sign of what a sclerotic plutocracy America has become – its elites learn nothing. 

thoughts en route

The last time I walked the streets of the Marais, Adam was ten pounds lighter and I don’t know how many unimaginable inches smaller. Today, we strolled him around the territory that will be his later, after we return from Santa Monica: the Notre Dame, the Hotel de Ville, Rue des Archives, the park on the street off Blancs Manteaux. I could feel him getting an excess of the sense of it all: the buildings, gargoyles, statuary, crowds, small sidewalks, streetlife, bridges, river, high windows, store windows – taking it in. “Taking it in” is a phrase that, perhaps, comes from our stone age psychology. Since the 19^th century, the instruments that measure the senses have become the template for what the senses are – sensitive recorders – but long before that we felt the activity of the senses, not their passivity – we took in the sensate, the eye grasps, the smell and taste extract and send down into the dark tunnels their discoveries, the touch is everywhere, everything material is a monument to the potential sensation of hands, lips, all the working skin. We come from pillagers, all of us, not from lab assistants, and we are out for swag. To take in means that one has a sort of interior “sack” that can get filled, and that is thus limited, can thus fray or burst. For a twenty two month old, there’s a continual shifting between wanting more in the sack and the sack bursting, at which point the toddler sensibly bursts into tears.

Rationalization comes upon us later, and we blame the idiots driving in cars, the street signs, the government, our loved ones, our co-workers – we pretend that the sack is infinitely elastic. You are very rarely asked, at the job interview, how much sensation you are comfortable with. Funny, that, since it determines, as much as skill, what the job is gonna go like.

…

There are some changes in the neighborhood, I was pleased to see in my very brief ambit. Namely, a couple of new restaurants and shops, including a bio take out place which I hope is still here when we return.

Now I sit here in the Café Charlot on Bretagne and revel a bit in the gray, somewhat rainy day. I like rainy gray summer days in Paris. Everything seems to revert to Atget black and whites. Is this merely the retro conservatism of a middling man in the upper fifties, treasuring his failed promise as though it were some perverse triumph? Well, duh. But it is also that a real city displays, under different angles of light and different seasons, the concantanations of its infinite possibilities, such as are not found on the list of addresses that guides the postal service.

I’ll end this with two poems, one a poor translation of a Baudelaire poem by me myself, and one – by the same author – written a couple years ago in the summer rain, Sinatraish mood.

Pluviôse,  the whole city on his nerves,

From his overflowing urn pours a grey cold

On the pale inhabitants of the nearby cemetary

And on the mortality of the foggy neighborhoods.

On the windowsill, my cat is looking for a place to lie down,

Ceaseless stretching his thin and mangy body;

The soul of an old poet wanders in the drainpipe

With the sad voice of a reluctant ghost.

A bee drones a lament, and the smoky log in the fireplace

Accompanies the clock, which has clearly caught a cold,

With its falsetto, while in an odorous  pack of cards-

fatal inheritance of some old case of dropsy-

The cute  jack of hearts and  queen of spades exchange

cynical remarks about their defunct affairs.

Not a very good translation. Oh well. I wrote a poem in 2011 that perhaps expresses my liking for rainy paris days better:

The rain mumbles on the terrace

Its histories of reincarnation

While we sit, eating chicken.

It’s good. Your green blouse

Is good. The wine is good.

Have the seals been opened?

The seals of the angel

Whose flaming sword

Seems like a ridiculous affectation

Held against

The warm gut of the world.

Or has apocalypse been expelled

From our private life

As the rain mumbles on the terrace

And I cut into the white meat.

cockburn versus berman - party like its 1985

Paul Berman has always been a NYT Mag kinda leftist – it is a leftism that is to leftism what cottage cheese is to Stilton – the former is a delight only to the diet-er, without any of the odors, flavor, or texture of real cheese and,in political terms, the former is only a delight to the neo-lib, rid of any suggestion of price controls or, heavens, a stripped down Pentagon and unilateral disarmament (which immediately leads to Munich, don’t you know!) There’s been some buzz among the usual journalists about Berman’s  “takedown” of Alexander Cockburn in The Newrepublic – which is where cottage cheese goes to die, and be transformed into the sort of rancid stuff that eventually stands on its hind legs and demands that we invade Syria and arm the Ukraine and privatize social security at the same time.

Berman’s article was better written long ago, in a letter to the Nation in 1985, when he pretty much said the same thing about Cockburn in a long complaint that Cockburn had distorted his review of a book about the underground press to make him out to be, in Berman’s words, “a hawk, nearly a felon, virtually Republican.” This is the Berman who went on to become one of the grand supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  

Cockburn, a much wittier and deeper writer, replied to Berman’s letter – in which Berman suggested that the Nation fire Cockburn while remarking that Cockburn’s nasty prejudices were fucking up the atmosphere of amity that joined the New Republic, Dissent, and the Nation in the brave new world of anti-communist, neo-liberal, popular frontism that would go from triumph to triumph if only not held back by persnickety stalinists of the Cockburn type, riding on the back of solid democratic socialist politicos like Michael Dukakis (okay, I made up that about Dukakis – it is in the spirit of the letter). Cockburn answered  with brio and quotes. Berman had thought to preemptively defend himself  by claiming that Cockburn was a misquoter, dropping significant quotes that showed that Berman, too, upheld the red flag and all that. This is what Cockburn wrote:

 For a critic who regularly sticks it to playwrights- as part of his professional duties, Paul Berman seems awfully thinskinned.-Since he’s issued a Sneak Alert, fretting that somehow wriggle free with a crafty response, I had better quote once again the lines from his review

that bothered me. There was no distortion or misrepresentation whatsoever.

Berman first described the fine Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett as “a friend of the North Vietnamese government and a Communist of the worst The nuance there was plainly that any friend of the North Vietnamese government should

scarcely be a friend of reasonable people like Berman and the  readers of the New Republic. That nuance became forthright abuse with the gibe about the of Burchett’s Communism. -Having thus primed his readers, Berman wrote:

“Burchett offered the insight (1) that the United States was opposing a popular movement in, Vietnam, and (2)

that to war against the popular will means to war against the populace, i.e., to make massacre a policy. Yes,

without question, the movement paid in the end for the prestige it accorded the Burchett line:”

I quoted that passage exactly, and rereading it several times in the wake of Berman’s charges of distortion, am assured

that it clearly means whatI  thought it meant. The “insight” that the United States was opposing a popular movement and making massacre a policy is described as “the Burchett line.’‘ This same Burchett has just  been described as a Communist of the worst sort. And when the word “line” is juxtaposed with the word “Communist” in such negative

terms, it impossible to conclude that Berman is bearing witness to the value of Burchett’s analysis.

In his letter Berman actually endorses my reading by saying  that he “acknowledged Burchett’s objectionable flaws . . . and the unfortunate consequences came from them.” .~T he only such consequences that Berman mentions in the article are Burchett’s views on the Vietnamese popular struggle and the U.S. policy of massacre. Berman claims that suppressed the fact that he “praised” Burchett when he said of the movement that it “gleaned from him what

could hardly be gleaned in  the early years of  the war, from the mainstream press.” But  this praise -- scarcely overwhelming since in the early days of the war the mainstream  press was offering no insights whatsoever --is

almost imnediately qualified by Berman’s remark that by 1969 the mainstream press “was conducting investigations into Vietnam somewhat more reliable than those of Wilfred Burchett.”

So all I can do is ask my question again: What was the United States doing in Vietnam if not what Burchett said it was doing? In his letter Berman manages to avoid saying anything on this substantive question, which was the point of my item.

Since Berman accuses me of wider distortion, I may as well say openly that I thought his New Republic article was

carefully tailored to the prejudices of that magazine’s editors. His patronizing account of what he called the “hip underground” went in lockstep with his abuse of any radical 1960s politics, particularly antiwar politics, more challenging than tie-dyed T-shirts and bleed-off graphics. And since he is sufficiently shameless to claim that he

praised the worst-sort-Communist Burchett, I quote what Berman said about the leaders

of the antlwar movement in the late 1960s:

They were still the old crowd of acidheads, Buddhist poets, hippie Maoists, beyond-the-pale comedians, electric guitarists, Third World guerilla warriors, future stockbrokers and religious nuts, plus an unscrupulous conniver or two, and they should have known not to take themselves too seriously.

This kind of language has made Martin Peretz happy ever since he stepped out on his own road to ruin in the late sixties, as I

imagine Berman well knew when he wrote  his review. He and Peretz are of course as one on the- Mideast. That aside, Berman’s own politics  have often puzzled me.  I used to think they tended towards a sort of antiquarian anarchism,  but now that innocuous posture has given way to the safari rig of Bananas Republicanism.

Berman sticks it to Navasky too. My beef with Big Vic centers around opportunism, but of rather different sort. Of course he likes these exchanges on the letters page, for which he doesn’t have to pay  even in the high two figures. I expect him to suggest soon that the title of column be changed to “Letters, cont.” so he’ll get all my services,

including answerin silly letters like Berman’s, entirely for free.”

That is what a free spirit writes like. His brief aside, etching Berman’s persona as a Safari Republican was pretty much completely borne out by the subsequent career – although I think Cockburn was a little too generous re Berman’s motives. Berman was one of the innovators in the trick of presenting these views as those flowing from an unimpeachable leftism.  This is the  contrarian trick  that became a regular schtick at Slate. It is necessary to reference one’s leftism in order to keep that contrarianism up one’s sleeve, otherwise you’ll sink into the stream of all the Weekly Standard lookalikes advocating this or that mass slaughter. To get heard, one has to advocate mass slaughter for the highest humanitarian reasons!

Cockburn’s letter shows, I think, why  Berman so wants to strangle Cockburn’s corpse: the man so maddeningly had his number.

at cassis

I woke up about four in the morning. There were still lights glowing in the pines out back. For a while I filled my head with stupid thoughts and worries, and then had the happy idea that this was living besides the point. I found my glasses on the table and being careful not to wake A., I put on my bathrobe and walked out on our terrace and looked beyond the pines to the sea. The lights had finally gone out. I could hear the sea booming. The Mediterranean! Endlessly defaced, defouled, overfished, and still the loveliest thing, its blue the primitive symbol of beauty, before beauty was industrialized, commoditized, reified, and beaten to death in a billion images! And Cassis, too, is in the countryside where they are continually finding grottes where neolithics or perhaps plain lithics painted the walls and did mysterious things, piling up stones in certain ways. I’d read of an underwater cave near here, recently discovered, with wall paintings. One of the first places, then.
Mostly, though, I concentrated on the surge. I listened to it in the silence created by a respite from the cries of the cigales who, during the day, are always buzzing in the trees, and who must be enjoying some form of insect sleep at 4 in the morning. I thought about how it was this surge that went into the first poems, a mantic pursuit of all the sense of the world in the world’s own welling language, which the tongue could feel in its dark, blunt thickness but never speak, freely. It's tied to us, the tongue, and the high goal had to be to untie it a bit, to let it grumble a bit as royally as that persistent water massing against rock. Our nature: a phrase absurd, abused, perverted from the motions that compose it, which meets us, after all the money and the maps, at four in the morning as the air lightens perceptibly moment by moment, dawn just around the corner.
Then I went back and lay close to A.

the biography of a price

We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of the life story from the human to the inhuman has become quite fashionable, as though, since we all know about the pathetic fallacy, we are allowed to systematically commit it. I jest, ho ho – and in fact I have to admit that there is something life-like about these things and their passage through our lives. If they aren’t alive, they still have mana – a lifelike power. They become totems.
However, noone, so far as I know, has done a biography of a price. Ah, there’s a subject! One would first have to wrest it from the enormous mystifications of the economists, who know what a price must be without often looking at what a price is, and one would have to restore it to its true nature, its genesis, its type.
Scratch a price and you find an adventure. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that the adventure it encodes is determined by a thing called a “market” – and so mystery calls to mystery. The mystics of capitalism have shamelessly spoken of the “magic of the marketplace” – which serves as an alibi for our adventurer. In fact, all adventurers deal, at one point or another in their careers, with magic. From Raleigh to Cagliostro, from the average American politician to the Spanish conquistador, all have used magic to fill in the gaps, biographical and strategic. But the biographer’s strong suite is a counter-magic: a grasp of details. While the adventurer sheds one persona for another, one claim to effects at a distance for another, one spectacle for another, the biographer, that dogged leveler, reconnects the membra disjecta with a thousand and one facts, with fine filaments of cause, deliberation, association and purposes (a plural that covers serial disappointments, self-subversions and incompatibilities – for the biographer is not your rational expectations robot, explaining that all can be explained through a system that explains anything. A biographer who seeks to explain a life is a biographer who has gone mad).
The critic Harold Innes claimed that the story of modernization in the west is the story of the penetration of the price system. This is an insight that holds together a truth and a falsehood. Just as there are no solitary human individuals – every mother’s son or daughter of ‘em must be a mother’s son or daughter – so too, there is no single price. Price’s came into the world en masse, rather than as a single prototype – no caveman hammered out a price, held it up, and said, now what will this be goood for? But Innes’s insight is also false, in that it treats price system as something autonomous – it is as if, with the word system, we move from the puppet to the puppetmaster.
TBC

realism again

A wonderful thing about taking care of a 21 month old that might not look, on its face, like a wonderful thing, is the amount of app-less time the child’s care forces upon you.

Adam, at some point a month ago, changed his sleeping pattern. The 9 month old that got to bed at 7 p.m. and slept until 6 or 7 a.m. stopped working like a sleep machine. Now, it is around 8 p.m. that he gets to bed, and we have to stay with him until his breathing takes on a certain open mouthed regularity and the sound of the pacifier being tasted, taken out of the mouth, and reinserted ceases. While this activity, or hopefully, inactivity, is going on, we lay in the bed next to his crib. If we get up too soon, if we misjudge the breathing and the routine with the pacifier, if we try to escape from the nursery and get back to making dinner or watching a video prematurely, Adam turns on the waterworks.

Last Monday, this is just what I was doing. I didn’t have a light on or a tablet near by. I didn’t have a book or a piece of paper. The only app I had was the high window in Adam’s room, which frames a random portion of the sky. Although this portion of the sky does its best, no doubt, to be interesting, it isn’t, very. However, it does have one good trick: it turns, as though bruised, from a lighter blue to a clotted bluish purple in the hour between 8 and 8:30. And I, lying app-less on the bed with my head propped on the pillow, am in a good position to confirm the progress of the evening, the regress of the sunlight.

At this moment that I’ve been laboriously budging us towards in this fudge of words, I was not so much thinking of the physics of light but about realism. Again.  

To return to the thread I was pulling in a previous post about realism: I think that it is a mistake to connect realism to the real, as its distingushing characteristic. Rather, it is the real through the lens of the plausible, the credible. What constitutes the plausible or credible, in a society, is closely connected with the whole question of credit in every sense – economic, sociological, epistemological. To see realism as a narrative form – or rather, to see realism as making up the  kind of world in which narratives of plausibility exist – helps us to disconnect it from a defining opposition with, say, idealism, or romanticism.  

I’m concerned with fiction – so I thought, lying app-less. Adam was still not snoring.

But I am not saying that this is the only characteristic, am I? Connected to it is the fact that in these narratives, the world is “full”. The authorial voice can represent that fullness – as it does in Balzac or in Dickens. Or the authorial voice can be removed, and the world be given as full, as in Flaubert. It is no wonder that, so often, the pursuit that traverses these words is that of the borrower by the creditor. Credit is everywhere – or so it represents itself.

 Against this realism there is another world of narratives that are shot threw with the plausible. One could say that they are parasitic on realism in so far as the implausible effect requires some sense of the codes of realism. In these narratives, the assumption of the fullness of the world and the creditworthyness of the narrator suddenly snaps in the readers head, like a pencil.

For instance, the pencil which, having written the account of the barber who accidentally cut off the nose of one of his customers and found it in a roll baked by his wife, decides to get rid of the culpable probosis by taking it to a bridge and throwing it in the Neva – only to be wrapped in a fog both physical and textual:

“Ivan Yakovlevich turned pale.. But at this point everything became so completely enveloped in mist it is really impossible to say what happened afterwards…”

But at this point Adam’s breathing became unmistakeable, and what happened afterwards to my meditation on realism is really impossible to say, since I can’t remember it. It was time to make dinner.

realism

If things are in the saddle and ride mankind, as Emerson said, then let us imagine that things take a break every now and then and let words ride.  It is a 30 – 70 split, perhaps, is what I am getting at. This being so, it is foolish to argue with a word once it has established a claim on mankind.

In fact, this is just the kind of foolishness that philosophers – who at one time acknowledged themselves to be half-fool, although now they more often consider themselves to be half-scientist, a half and half creature that to me is still fool – like to engage in. Thus, I, in my half a fool robes, have always had a steady dislike for the word “real” and its court favorite, “realism”.

Here’s my reasoning. If real is meant to refer to the constitution of reality, then, in my opinion, it cant go picking out some bits of reality and discarding others. It must be wholly promiscuous, rather than half chaste. It must include magic, dreams, mirages and perceptions as well as carpenters crowns, heaps and pi. In other words, I take real to make the widest of ontological claims. However, in actual use, real has been turned into an ontological grift, setting itself up as something ontologicallly direct as opposed to all those soft ontologically indirect objects.  These, the realist wants to say, are dependent on  a subjective privilege that takes us out of the real and into the ideal, or the fanatastic.

Here we spot everyday dualism, doing its silent work. And everyday dualism has its advantages, or it wouldn’t hang around. But those advantages, which prime it for everyday distinctions, don’t prime it for metaphysical argument. There, it forgets its place. It rubs up against its own original quantitative claim – that reality is all, whereas non-reality is nothing – and  can only help itself out of its dilemma by silently inserting assumption into the discussion that , indeed, must be discussed before we can have the discussion.

In my opinion, realism is only plausibility writ large: it is a view on what is possible and important that gains its justification from a certain class background. Aristotle, in the Topics, speaks of endoxa – credible opinions – that are “accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise”. This is the filter through which reality becomes realism. The privileged point of view is given us by the class system in the regime in which that point of view is expressed. The reputable class bears various names, depending on the regime we are talking about, whether it is the middle class in America, or public opinion, or most scientists, or – more commonly – an implied everybody who counts that lurks behind a passive construction (“as is well known,” “as is generally agreed”, etc.). Realism’s affiliation with plausibility, rather than reality, is the secret of why the term seems so indeterminate, when you come to close quarters with it.  

swatting at the structural unemployment solution, again.

The Board of Editors of the Scientific American has annoyed me with their editorial comment in the current issue. It is one of those nattering naif kind of comment about how, gosh, machines are gobbling up jobs, and this explains rising inequality, rising unemployment, stagnatine wages and the rest of it. The quote a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osbourne in which the authors predict that, in the coming decades, 47 percent of American jobs will be rendered obsolete by hyper hyper technology, everything from tax preparer to locomotive engineers. Significantly, there’s no mention of CEOs – even though that is a position which, using a few basic data search devices and some algorithms, could easily be folded into a couple of computers. But of course – NO! Not our sacred risktakin’ job creators! Not their jobs, Jesus…

Anyway, what irritates me is the blindness to like data. Because here’s the truth: capitalist private enterprise, as the Great Depression showed and as Marx reiterated back in the nineteenth century, cannot come even near to what the economists call full employment – that is, cannot employ 95 percent of the working population. States increased in size after the 1940s not only because states had more to do – particularly with social insurance and healthcare and education, o my! – but also because without the government hiring, we will be in a perpetual twilight of recession, even in a boom. If Government on the local, state and federal levels had continued to employ, over the recession, as they had before it, we would have long achieved the same level of unemployment as in 2005, Bush’s one boom year.

What I wrote about this in 2009 still stands today. Remember, whenever you hear economists or Janet Yellen or whoever speaking about employment, they are pulling a fast one – in fact, they have pulled it so fast they may believe it themselves. Full employment is not and cannot be achieved under modern capitalism by the capitalists. End of story:

 From 2009 ---

Here’s the truth. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. At the moment, 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, the private sector ends up employing closer to 80 percent of the work force. 

At the moment, what has happened is that the private sector employs about 78 percent of the work force, as unemployment has gone up. Although government has held steady, no doubt in the next year, there will be layoffs from the government, too, This means that neither the private sector nor government will employ the percentage they do on average since WWII.

I put these figures out there so that one isn’t lulled into a discussion of whether the neo-classical models assume full employment or not. This is a nice, liberal discussion, but it overlooks the more fundamental lie, which is the assumption, which is swallowed like the sugar in liquid cough medicine, that the private sector somehow could efficiently employ 100 percent of the work force. It can’t. It has never been able to get past 85 percent in the post war period. There is a limit to the weight it can lift. We know what it is.

So the only argument about the stimulus is this: should the government absorb the extra unemployed or not? That is, should the government grow 3 or 4 percentage points?

The argument against this is not an efficiency argument. That is a stupid argument. The argument is, rather, that somehow, business can absorb the extra unemployed. Which means that the right is saying that, in the next year, the private sector can expand 4 or 5 percentage points to assume its usual standing in the economy.

Do you believe this? Does anybody? No tax break tax cut bullshit should take anybody’s eye off that ball. The question is: how can the private sphere possibly expand to absorb the 4 to 5 percent of the unemployed?

In reality, the right is saying, let the unemployed grow. And underneath that is the notion that if we can actually diminish the salary of the average worker, then businesses will be inclined to hire them. This, without the bullshit, is the right’s position. The recession is an opportunity for business to gain permanent tax cuts and hire people at reduced rates. 

Now, the only way this will actually bring business back up to its traditional 80 percent position is if the pie shrinks. 

I foresee that laying out the numbers in a way that everybody can understand them will not happen. Rather, we will have more endless droning about endlessly bogus functions from conservative economists, who will be countered with ever more esoteric models from liberal ones. The point will be to cover up the real situation, so that we will be fogged in, and deprived of the ability to use our own two eyes to see what the situation is, and decide for ourselves what we want done.”

What I wrote in 2009 has proved to be the case since. The Democrats have silently acceded to the agenda of shrinking the government, which means that the pressure to keep wages down in the private sector becomes much more powerful, and the surplus labor value thus released flows to the wealthy in a sweet, sweet stream of honey.

This will keep going and going and going. Given the Democratic policies that we have now, we are giving America’s children the chance to experience what it would have been like if the government hadn’t stepped in to stop the Great Depression.

 

strike out against the culture of impunity!

When the military junta in Argentina folded in 1983, President Alfonsin came to power, and started proceedings against certain members of the military high command who had participated in the Dirty War, as well as the leaders of the Monteneros (those who survived) for kidnappings and murders. However, the trials affected only a few. In 1986, the full stop law was enacted, the limited suits to those that would be enacted within 60 days of its passage, all others to be rendered null, and the due obedience law, in 1987, which halted the trials that had passed the full stop law. Then, when Menem wasw elected in 1989, he began issuing mass pardons, mostly for the military but some of them for the Montenero leadership (which, it must be said, has always been suspected of actually being led by agent provacateur, notably in the case of the leader, Mario Firminich – see Martin Edwin Andersen’s Dossier secreto for details).

Collectively, Alfonsin’s decrees were known as the impunity laws. In this way, the State covered up for the almost thirty thousand murders committed by the military junta.

Against this coverup, a civil rights organisation began to hold Tribunals against Impunity in Buenos Aires in 1990, with the aim of revealing as many facts as possible and shaming the state.

I’ve been thinking about this vis-à-vis the United States. It seems to me that we have been living through the era of Impunity, here: from the horrors committed in the name of fighting terror to the invasion of Iraq through the Obama directed drone war; from the unwillingness of the Justice department and the SEC to reign in or jail anyone for the financial meltdown of 2008 to the widespread fraud by the banks in the paperwork they have submitted to courts concerning mortgages; from the abolition of jury trial in the case of suits for damages to corporations to the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to lend cover to any plutocratic attempt to buy elections and change laws in their favor. On the cultural front, there is the impunity enjoyed by those in the media who have cheered along all these things, and who have never lost a dime for being not just wrong, but disastrously wrong; not just mistaken in their reporting or analysis, but being willing conduits of propaganda and lies.

And I’ve been thinking – wouldn’t it be nice if the occupy organizers did something on the Argentina model. With the masses of information made available by Snowden, with what what we know about the massive frauds in the financial sector, and finally, with what we can find out about the massive buying of the federal legislative and executive branches – the revolving door between officeholders and business, and the more secret doors that link the hiring of their relatives and associates – their clans – by the corporations they are supposedly regulating, it would make for, at least, entertainment. RFK in the sixties took a subcommittee to various locales in this country to investigate poverty. On similar lines, a tribunal against impunity could go to Cleveland and take testimony on the sack of that city in the 00s by mortgage lending bottom feeders – could go to Atlanta and show how laws against fraud were fundamentally abandoned by get rich quick state legislators – could go to New Orleans and show how few people have suffered for the negligence in Katrina – could go to Reston, Virginia, where the CIA is located, and show how the CIA systematically constructed and operated an  international network of torture sites. This is just the tip of the impunity iceberg, of course.

I had a dream… 

Celebrating Slate Magazine always wrong coverage of the War on Terror for the last eleven years!

Crooked Timber periodically hosts a fest mocking Charles Krauthammer's promise, in 2003, to retract his beliefs if the US didn't find the WMD in Iraq. In that spirit, LI has long wanted to mock a buncha targets for their administrative asslicking and general stupidity in the great war bubble period between 9.11 (which, the press assured the American public, somehow proved that George Bush was a great president, perhaps the greatest) and Mission Achieved day May 1, 2003.

I keep coming back to Slate, the home of the always wrong contraro-belligerati, Christopher Hitchens - whose columns on Iraq can even now provide hours of sick humor - and such astute warhawk liberals as Jack Shafer. Shafer, somehow, sticks in my head because he took it upon himself to mock Johnny Apple, the NYT thumbsucker-reporter, for harboring any doubts about our great and glorious victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here's a quote from a Shafer piece that, word for word, could be used as a sort of standard unit to measure stupid. An SUS, if you will.

From March 27, 2003, Shafer begins with what he obviously thinks is a delicious quote from his low hanging liberal fruit. Shafer sizes him up with the standard Slate smarm, then delivers what he obviously thinks is a knockout blow:

Like other leaders facing larger, technologically superior forces, [Saddam] has found ways to improvise and to take advantage of the fact that the fighting is taking place on his home ground. He is waging a campaign of harassment and delay. It is not likely to change the outcome of the war, but it will prolong the fighting, make it more costly for his adversaries and profoundly affect the way it is seen in other Arab countries and around the world. [Quote from Apple]

Apple doesn't use the word "quagmire" to describe the allied effort as he did on Oct. 31, 2001, during the early, shaky days of the Afghanistan campaign. (See "Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.") But the gist of his Afghanistan piece and today's Iraq piece is the same. The United States has bitten off more than it can chew; the allied war effort is underpowered; we've underestimated the enemy—again!; air power is overrated; and guerrillas can do U.S. forces great damage as they did in Vietnam.

Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco."

This, this is the guiding spirit of Slate, its faith. For a long time, slate has been a sort of goldplated SUS for the media. Shafer, of course, is the stupidest of the stupid, meaning he is enamored of his own brightness and credentials, and is the sort of fellow you want to invite to a talk show.

But there are many Shafers out there - it was his talent to wrap up, in one heaping helping, the CW of the press, which collaborated as much as they could in making the Middle East and Central Asia a place of dizzying and endless violence.

Ha ha! That stupid liberal, comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam. And in a way its true: we've been in Afghanistan much longer than we were in Vietnam.

Slate- were glib analysis based on shaky factoids goes to die.

the second week and Rousseau

The second week. 

Every morning Adam boils over when we finally arrive at the school, and clings to me – but with less and less conviction and fear. Today, I got him to his classroom through the kitchen area. There is a sliding door between the two areas, so as soon as Miss Britney swept him up, I closed the door, stocked his box in the refrigerator, and snuck around to see how he’d do through the windows of the class, which face the hall. In Miss Britney’s arms he was wearing an air of contentment, and she brought him to his little scoop seat and sat him down with the rest of the kids. As she was doing so, some child yelled, “Adam!”

A friend!

One of the reasons we are breaking Adam’s heart each morning and exposing him to the discontents of civilization, such as they are, in a pre-school is that he has only been around adults. He is, after all, an only child. He’s a sociable one too – it doesn’t surprise me that he is soon calm and contented in his teacher’s arms, because he seems to have a knack for adults. What he needs, of course, is to pull away from his parents into childhood – the ‘hood of other children. It is an odd bond, this between parent and child – it grows by splitting.

Rousseau, in the Discourse on Inequality, writes:

“Were we to suppose savage man as trained in the art of thinking as philosophers make him; were we, like them, to suppose him a very philosopher capable of investigating the sublimest truths, and of forming, by highly abstract chains of reasoning, maxims of reason and justice, deduced from the love of order in general, or the known will of his Creator; in a word, were we to suppose him as intelligent and enlightened, as he must have been, and is in fact found to have been, dull and stupid, what advantage would accrue to the species, from all such metaphysics, which could not be communicated by one to another, but must end with him who made them?”

It isn’t true that everything Adam thinks ends with himself, since he loves to babble to us, have us chase him, have us change the video (taking my hand and pressing it on the tablet’s screen to indicate we’ve had enough of this episode of Petit Ours Brun), hug us, laugh with us, disagree with us about his clothes, tell us in no uncertain terms that it is not bedtime, etc.  This is not civilization and its discontents, however. Adam is perhaps not old enough yet for the child who yelled Adam! But it is a good sign to me.

Adam!