Must homefront reading

Must homefront reading about our brilliant war in Afghanistan, or reasons to never forget and never forgive.

I especially thrilled to this portion:

"Gopal, a Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor reporter, investigates, for example, a US counterterrorist operation in January 2002. US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, had identified two sites as likely “al-Qaeda compounds.” It sent in a Special Forces team by helicopter; the commander, Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, was attacked by an unknown assailant, broke his neck as they fought and then killed him with his pistol; he used his weapon to shoot further adversaries, seized prisoners, and flew out again, like a Hollywood hero.

As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated. In Gopal’s words:

The toll…: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies."

Ah, but we didn't saw the head of the governor off on video, so all is well! Only terrorists do that. I saw the first show of Homeland 4 last night and this sawing of heads off is what the show uses to separate the bad guys (arabs) from the good guys (mostly white americans). The latter only whack the innocent in the traditional way, god damn it. So lets belly  up to the bar and lay down another trillion for the next Middle Eastern war. We did such a bang up job on the last couple of them.

What a jolly 13 year war it has been, boys and girls.

Fade out to the tune of I fought the war but the war won.

against the "writer's voice" 1

Of all the commonplaces that deserve to be treated briskly with the business end a baseball bat, the “writer’s voice” might not rank up there on everybody’s list. It ranks up on mine, though, perhaps because it combines the half truth of the cliché with the snobbish mysticism of the sentimentalist, which is a thing I can't abide.
I am surrounded, all day, by reading and writing – texts to edit (as a freelancer), texts to write, books to read. After A. goes to work and Adam goes to school, this is the world I fall into. There’s one thing about it: it is silent. No page speaks to me, not the one I read, not the one I write. I’ve been doing freelance full time since 2003, and – as any freelancer will admit – the missing element is the human voice. Any voice. I go out to coffee shops sometimes to catch the human voice – the person telling his girlfriend, “he has five go-to conversations”. The old man telling the other old man, “the deal, when you do the math, brings in 9 percent a year – but I want 90.” The woman explaining to her friend,” they have a secret society and they chose who wins. So it doesn’t matter how you vote, cause they goin chose the winner.” 
Historians of reading speculate that silent reading was uncommon in the ancient world. Our first description of a man reading silently comes in Augustine’s Confessions, where he wrote about meeting Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan:
« When he read his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."
It is impressive that Augustine goes to such length to describe an act of reading which, today, would pass utterly unnoticed – today, it is reading aloud that is unusual enough that it is usually staged in some way – as the parent reading to the child, or the author giving a reading to an audience. Texts at that time were mostly bare of punctuation, and of course the convenient form of the book, which allows one to read and write in the margins or on a notebook or when eating, etc., was still uninvented. As Jesper Svenbro has pointed out, we have examples in Aristophenes play The Knight s of silent reading, which takes us back to 400 B.C., but everything we read about rhetoric or poetics from the ancients, and everything we know about the technology of the « page » points to a culture that saw the text as a medium for the voice, a transitional object, even if a cumbersome one, something come down from clay tablets and stone walls to lodge on papyrus or vellum – a change no doubt as shocking to the unconscious as the change from metal to paper currency. 
But here is the thing for me now. When I write, I am not « finding my voice » - rather, phenomenologically, I am losing it. The transitional object has changed. If there is a voice, here, it is in the special sense of some kind of speaking in my head. The breath that made Aristotle speak of the voice as having ‘soul’ is reduced to the barest possible pulse, an electic discharge on the microscale – or so the scientists say. To me, it is like a voice. I walk down the street or sit at a table and I am turned towards these words that seem almost said before I put them down on a surface.
This is one sense in which the « finding your voice » trope actually inverses the process of writing.
There’s another, stronger sense in which « finding your voice » is exactly what doesn’t happen for me in writing, since I write very much for that moment of loss, of voluntary disarmament. I dislike being the captive of my voice. I would much rather be a mockingbird than a nightingale, a thief of voices rather than a developer of my own. It’s mimic joys I’m after.

all the young dudes carry the news

All the young dudes carry the news

When the left cut its throat in the eighties, the mainstream media analysis was that the left had outlived its purpose. Walls were coming down, and the story went like this: after an unpleasant interregnum during which the liberal interdiction on state interference in the economy was universally despised and contravened – bringing about those natural moral scolds, inflation and the decline of productivity – the old values robustly reasserted themselves. They took on the entrancing form, too, of a revolt for freedom, which couldn’t help but entrance the kids. We were now primed to resume our world historical broadcast from the place it had been interrupted in the Gilded Age, and this time we’ d democratize the Gilded age, as whole populations would become investors. The state would move aside, confining its role to a provider of morally uplifting action movie reality shows hosted on various military theaters around the world. As in a high concept movie, the State, a bad guy domestically, would turn out to be a hero abroad, always intervening for the sake of humanitarianism, and thus making the bystanders – the populations of those military theaters – eternal grateful as the troops marched down the streets of their neighborhood or village.

This story explained the left’s demise in terms of a milk toast Hegelianism devoid of Marxist taint – the spirit of history would become a sort of CEO Holy Ghost again. History was all about ideas. It was ideas that made history.

This was a story that, after some initial hesitation, the leaders of the leftier parties throughout the old developed countries  rather started to like. Freed from the obligation of having to represent the worker – or, God knows, listen to one – the party leadership  decided to switch constituencies. The leadership became even more friendly with the New Economy tycoons, who bloomed as the financial sector took on an imperial heft. At the same time, the Left was digesting the lessons of the great Civil Rights movements of the sixties, reshaping itself in an image of the progressive bourgeoisie of the new Gilded Age.

Two oppressed groups in particular were championed: women (gay or straight) and gays. I don’t think it is a coincidence that these two groups are seeded across the class spectrum. They are as likely to be represented in the ownership class as in the wage earner class. This is not the case, however, with races. It is much less likely for an African American in the U.S., for example, to be represented in the ownership class, whether staight or gay, male or female. By a sort of unconscious natural selection, where the leftist parties broke with their old constituencies, the working class, they also broke, as was in the nature of the economic structure, with the oppressed ethnic groups or races. However, it was easy to absorb the Civil Rights leadership into the ownership or managerial class, so to the leftist establishment it looked like they were realizing the entire agenda of the Civil Rights movement, even as, behind their back, they were at least compliant in the big story of the new Gilded Age – the criminalization of the unfavored racial or ethnic groups.  This, as it happens, was also the story in the old Gilded Age, at least in the States, as the Reconstruction gave way to the Reconciliation and Jim Crow was preceded by that crude but efficient modality of surveillance, prison.  In other countries, such as Britain and France, this process worked a bit differently, outside the “homeland”, among the colonized, where the necessity to destroy the resistance of the native and to lure into compliance the native elite also used prisons in a mix of processes – the major one being the monetizing of the economy – that had a different shape than the American one.

This, by the way, is not a sneaky ploy to identify racism with class struggle. I simply want to understaned the effect of the latter in reproducing new forms of the former. Another story could be told about the processes in the “interregnum” in which white dominated organized labor and the state operated in tandem to create a regime of discrimination against select races and ethnic groups. There’s a certain nostalgia on the part of older lefty survivors for the fifties and forties – why can’t we, for instance, mount infrastructural projects and employ people like in the old days? This ignores one of the major effects of those projects, which were directed broadly against racial communities.  The old slogan – they built white man’s roads through the black man’s home – was true about that time, whether or not the  “man” sticks out here like a sore thumb. The destruction of urban neighborhoods through urban renewal and highways was not a just a “bug”.

Revolutionary changes in the political form of a society don’t have to exert themselves in sudden and overt events – however, they will lead, in time, to changes in the socio-economic from of a society. There’s no substructure superstructure, there are only sifting sands, and the houses built thereupon. So here we are.

amnesia - don't go to the two minute hate without it!

The two minute hate used to be so easy! The soviets! Drug cartels! Saddam Hussein! Alas, now the two minute hate needs footnotes. Take our latest hate. We hate ISIS! And the NYT, with proper indignation, has watched as Turkey has refused to relieve our brave allies who are being besieged by ISIS on the Turkish border. So we can have a good two minute hate against Turkey too.

But what’s this? In the town of Kobani, who are the heroic freedom fighters who so bravely defend everything we love against the headchoppers? Why, it is the PKK. Now, it is a funny thing, but while the US wants Turkey to ally with the PKK, if a US citizen allied with the PKK, they’d go to jail or Guantanamo. Why? Well, hate compagneros, the PKK, before last week, were on the list of evil terrorists, next to al qaeda. The PKK has a nasty habit of doing things like kidnapping German citizens in retaliation for the Germans banning the PKK as a terrorist organization. Now, usually, the two minute hate frowns on the kidnapping of Westerners – and by god, blonde ones at that.

So it is a bit of a puzzle. The best way out of the puzzle is just to forget that yesterday, PKK were Marxist terrorists, who had admitted in court to killing civilians, kidnapping, dealing in narcotics and the rest of it – and concentrate on the fact that they are now freedom fighters in our struggle against ISIS, Syria, and Iran, for peace and justice for all.

Oh, one other fact to forget – the PKK used to be allied with the new Hitler, Assad, in Syria. Luckily, they are now freedom fighters for democacy, but that was the company they used to keep when they were worse than the Khmer Rouge.

Amnesia is an essential part of the DC foreign policy establishment kit. Don’t go to your two minute hate without it! Luckily, the NYT, in its wisdom, is leaving out the juicy bits about the PKK, as it would muddy the waters in our war to the death with ISIS.

Henry James and Aphrodite

Even for those who enjoy the obliquities, dark passages, and the meanings buried with a shovel of Henry James’ late style, The American Scene is a trial. The sentences here are so hedged that sometimes the meaning they are drifting towards – driving towards would be too vulgar, as it was just the kind of thing Americans were always, shockingly, doing, driving here, driving there - seems to have entirely escaped them. This, one feels, is not an entirely peaceful enterprise – there is something altogether aggressive about passages in which murkiness seems to abound for its own sake.

Here’s an example:

“Who, for that matter, shall speak, who shall begin to speak, of the alacrity with which, in the New England scene (to confine ourselves for the moment only to that), the eye and the fancy take to the water? - take to it often for relief and security, the corrective it supplies to the danger of the common. The case is rare when it is not better than the other elements of the picture, even if these be at their best ; and its strength is in the fact that the common has, for the most part, to stop short at its brink ; no water being intrinsically less distinguished, save when it is dirty, than any other. By a fortunate circumstance, moreover, are not the objects usually afloat on American lakes and rivers, to say nothing of bays and sounds, almost always white and wonderful, high-piled, characteristic, fantastic things, begotten of the native conditions and shining in the native light ? Let my question, however, not embroider too extravagantly my mere sense of driving presently, though after nightfall, and in the public conveyance, into a village that gave out, through the dusk, something of the sense of a flourishing Swiss village of the tourist season, as one recalls old Alpine associations : the swing of the coach, the cold, high air, the scattered hotels and their lighted windows, the loitering people who might be celebrated climbers or celebrated guides, the resonance of the bridge as one crossed, the gleam of the swift river under the lamps. My village had no happy name; it was, crudely speaking, but Jackson, N.H., just as the swift river that, later on, in the morning light, to the immediate vision, easily surpassed everything else, was only the river of the Wildcat – a superiority strictly comparative.”

The end of my passage is not the end of the paragraph, so it might well go unnoticed that the final phrase is a bit out of whack as regards to sense. For what could possibly be the opposite of a superiority that was strictly comparative? One that arise absolutely, jettisoning comparison and wrapping itself Hegelianly in itself? It would seem that the river shares, with all things mortal, that fall from superiorities without comparison. Why would James want it otherwise?  

This is in a paragraph in the early part of the book, and what it tells us, to be naked about it, is that James went to a New Hampshire resort. Why Jackson should be a name that required a certain crudeness to pronounce – in contrast to, say, London, England – is a matter of those distinctions that James is always making in his own breast, where they make sense, but very rarely explaining to the world outside that consciousness when he produces them as somehow enlightening to his theme – as though the reader would only betray his own native crudeness by asking.

William James, in a letter to his brother written in 1887, speaking about his New Hampshire house – which one imagineswas the object towards which Henry James, in 1907, was striving - wrote  teasingly about the James’ strained sensibility with regard to the crude: “With house provided, two or three hundred dollars a year will support a man comfortably enough at Tamworth Iron works, which is the name of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity makes you shudder…” In one way, Henry James’ American Scene is just a long shudder, evoked by the American things William James rather loved.

Here I think is a key to the aggression of the style, which is an argument, or rather, the performance of an argument, against pragmatism and the world view that, for Henry James, it represented. Pragmatic prose, which tests itself –its truth - against its use in the world, would tend to plane away and break up the sentences and congeries of reference with which James loads up the books of his last period. Of course, by this time James was writing with a secretary, and the note of the oral, of the dictated, which overflows the orderly stops of the written had seeped into the written, which consequently swelled with modifications, irrelevancies, sudden and seemingly off topic references, and the kind of obiter dicta that, examined in the cruel light of logic, was not quite sound. In a sense, if pragmatic prose installed that collegiate thing, the “test”, as the supreme ritual to which all writing must bow, James fought back by pressing on the original notion of the test, which was of bodily strength, or muscular accident, and sought to create overwhelming effects. In the society where all things are put to pragmatic text, the old is doomed to be cleared away, and even the new is constructed to be taken down and replaced at the first profitable opportunity. For Henry James, the creative side of creative destruction is a little too heartless, a little too dumb to understand or sympathize with the destroyed, and in that falls below the value of the latter, which so often understands all too well the motives and feelings of its destroyer.

Of course, there is more than a note of this in William James’ work, too – he was scathing about the Chatauqua culture, and wrote an essay deploring American nervousness in the same decade that his brother wrote The American Scene, where that nervousness was portrayed as an all-devouring monster.

But although Henry James’ book displays a gigantic distaste for what the country in which he was born had become (a distaste that sometimes plunges into crude xenophobia and latent anti-semitism in the famous passages about immigrants in New York), there is also a moment, a rather startling moment, when James displays something else, something that is coordinate with another thing going on in 1907 in the world of art – the re-evaluation of the primitive.

In the Boston chapter, after James makes a point of the fact that the couples he sees strolling around Beacon Hill on Sunday are speaking Italian (and the point is not meant to underline some beautiful cultivation of the American mind that embraces the opportunity to exercise the language of Dante in the heights of Boston, but rather to hint at the the degradation of the American stock via the immigrant from Naples), he almost makes up for the drop into suburban prejudice by contemplating, in the Museum of Fine Arts then on Copley Square, one of the statues in the collection that is also an immigrant to the New World:

“It is of the nature of objects doomed to show distinction that they virtually make a desert round them, and peace reigned unbroken, I usually noted, in the two or three Museum rooms that harbour a small but deeply-interesting and steadily-growing collection of fragments of the antique. Here the restless analyst found work to his hand only too much ; and indeed in presence of the gem of the series, of the perhaps just too conscious grace of a certain little wasted and dim-eyed head of Aphrodite, he felt that his function should simply give way, in common decency, to that of the sonneteer. For it is an impression by itself, and I think quite worth the Atlantic voyage, to catch in the American light the very fact of the genius of Greece. There are things we don't know, feelings not to be foretold, till we have had that experience which I commend to the raffiné of almost any other clime. I should say to him that he has not seen a fine Greek thing till he has seen it in America. It is of course on the face of it the most merciless case of transplanting - the mere moral of which, nevertheless, for application, becomes by no means flagrant. The little Aphrodite, with her connections, her antecedents and references exhibiting the maximum of breakage, is no doubt as lonely a jewel  as ever strayed out of its setting ; yet what does one quickly recognize but that the intrinsic lustre will have, so far as that may be possible, doubled ? She has lost her background, the divine creature has lost her company, and is keeping, in a manner, the strangest ; but so far from having lost an iota of her power, she has gained unspeakably more, since what she essentially stands for she here stands for alone, rising ineffably to the occasion. She has in short, by her single presence, as yet, annexed an empire, and there are strange glimmers of moments when, as I have spoken of her consciousness, the very knowledge of this seems to lurk in the depth of her beauty. Where was she ever more, where was she ever so much, a goddess and who knows but that, being thus divine, she forsees the time when, as she has “moved over,” the place of her actual whereabouts will have become one of her shrines? Objects doomed to distinction make round them a desert, I have said – but that is only for any cross confidence in other matters. For confidence in them they make a garden, and that is why I felt this quarter of the Boston Art Museum bloom under the indescribably dim eyes, with delicate flowers.”

To catch in the American light the genius of Greece – this is a sentence worthy of one of the modernists; but since James has been presenting himself here more in the guise of the Ancient American Mariner, come to port and finding crudeness, vulgarity and impatience dealing deathblows to the country from which so long ago he had embarked,  I don’t just want to annex it to the movement that found what was most ancient to be what was most new – the paleolithic  sculpture, the first epic, etc.

Lautreamont, who Henry James doubtless never read, had already written of the beauty - comparative, it must be said – of the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Henry James did not present himself as the kind of writer who was bent on seeing the sublime in the abject, or the marvel in the junkheap, but the juxtaposition of this Aphrodite with the American light, and the curious idea that this immigrant, in a nation whose immigrants have been given a baleful stare by Henry James, will gain in the move over, does make us pause. First, because we tend to forget, in the authority that James lends his judgements, that he himself has moved over, he himself is an immigrant in an England in which the American accent is suspect. And second, because if all there was to Henry James was a protest against American vulgarity, he could stand in line – who hasn’t protested against that? It is, in fact, the most vulgar thing in the world.

But the superiority in whose name he is protesting is not that of any established order that he could really point to. In all of James’ novels set in Europe and Great Britain, it is clear that the characters, even as they lounge in the country homes,  are surrounded by a Dickensian squalor that supports those country homes. This is not just there in the foreground of Princess Casamissama, but it is on the edges of all his great novels – it is the region into which Kate Croy, in the first chapter of Wings of the Dove, proposes to plunge, and in plunging drown herself, when she goes to visit her father, a man who is basically a class conman, a pretender – a stinker.

It is on behalf of another order that James, or at least the better spirit in James, recoils in the American Scene. In this order, there is a chance for both naiveté and refinement – there is a chance, that is, for the civilization of sensibility in which his characters, down to the telegraph clerks, move, alert for every nuance in the Other, and to that extent giving the Other the ultimate tribute of possessing nuance, rather than being wired for the better deal. Although the mood in The American Scene seems to write finis to the possibility of such a civilization flourishing in a society that so agressively sells all that it has – for there is nothing that turns naiveté so quickly into a crafty strategy like the cult of sales and its attendent, the cult of the celebrity – the Aphrodite moment proposes something else, something at the end of the creative destruction that has written Henry James so largely, or so he thought, out of the script. 

history without years

There’s a certain magical attachment in history to years. A year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary.

dictionary of untranslatables

Since the time I was knee high to a lexicographer, I have loved dictionaries and encyclopedias.  For Umberto Eco, these are two text-types that cast a giant shadow over all texts. In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Eco makes much of both the opposition between the dictionary and the encyclopedia and their metamorphoses one into the other. A dictionary may seem like the simpler form – it consists, at the base, of an inventory of words in a language arranged in the order given by a writing system and attaching to each word a definition  – but of course, as Eco shows, this seeming simplicity disguises a host of complex ideological decisions. Eco gives the example of a dictionary that defines bull as an “adult male bovine animal” as opposed to tiger, which is defined as “a loarge tawny black striped Asiatic flesh-eating mammal related to cat”, to help us see that the decisions that go into what forms a definition never wholly correspond to the logic of one system. Eco goes back to Porphyry’s image of a tree in which the branches are the particular, the species,the  genera, etc. – which would imply branches from one trunk – to a broader forest in which hierarchies multiply, and in which definition becomes interpretation. That is to say, more shortly, that there is an art to definition. We move through a Porphyrian forest into deeper patches where the mere correlate, the definiens, becomes the object of the essayist’s attention. As Eco says, the dictionary is dissolved into a potetnially unordered and unrestricted galaxy of pieces of world knowledge. The dictionary thus becomes an encyclopedia because it was in fact a disguised encyclopedia.”.

Eco doesn’t use the word essay, but one could think of the equivalence embedded in the definition as an essay waiting to get out – or we could think of the essay as a definition that has put on fat. Except that the latter is true for only a certain restricted species of essays. I think of those essays as cowardly – for the truest essay must have the courage of its polyvocity, or, if you like, its contradictions.

We are getting somewhere, although it might look like we are taking a random path to nowhere. We are getting to the book entitled “Dictionary of untranslatables”, which is edited by Barbara Cassin and has quickly installed itself among the books that should be within easy reach of toilers in the humanities.

 There’s a review of the book by Michael Kinnucan  in Asymptote, the journal of translation.  This sums up the paradoxical book pretty thoroughly:

“In this it is astonishingly successful: comprehensive entries on hundreds of words, running to 1400 dense pages in the English edition, incorporating the work of 150 scholars in the original French and dozens more in the English translation—almost all entertaining and revealing, the few I was qualified to check strikingly complete and correct. Flipping through it I found myself increasingly fascinated by Cassin herself: how had the qualities of a Heideggerian-inflected scholar of the pre-Socratics come to coexist in one soul with such megalomania, and such a talent for generalship? For all its virtues, though, the Dictionary is haunted by a sort of joke at its own expense—a joke which accounts for much of its charm while implying that it is not perhaps quite what it thinks it is.” - See more at: 

The joke is, of course, double. On the one hand, the dictionary of untranslatables is itself translated, which seems to make the title invalid. And on the other hand, the very notion of a untranslatable seems to defy the equation at the center of the dictionary – that is, that a word equals its definition. Even if, with Eco, we grant definition a much broader space, we are still stuck with the fact that these terms can’t be exchanged, can’t be substituted, in the languages outside of which they are native.

There’s room for many dissertations here.

The dictionary is particularly strong on the Greeks, naturally. For instance, the entry on fate gives us a cluster of Greek words revolving around the concept. Here’s ker, meaning not just death but death as the shadow self:

“In a famous scene in the Iliad, Zeus weighs the kêres of Achilles and of Hector ( 22.209ff. ); we do not know whether the two kêres are personified or not. Both are described as the “kêres of painful death,” that is, the destiny of death that each of the heroes has as his double, or phantom, or personal demon. What is curious is that they have a weight, and they can be weighed. Zeus places the two kêres on the scales, and Hector’s kêr drops and falls into the house of Hades. Apollo abandons the hero, and his fate is sealed.”

This has both the brutal realism of Greek thought and its gnomic peculiarity. From death as a certain weight to the throwweight of ballistic missiles, I can sketch a shaky line.  At some point on the line would be Rilke’s Eurydice, pregant with her own death.

Und ihr Gestorbensein 
erfüllte sie wie Fülle. 

|And her mortality

Filled her like a weight”

Which is of course not a translation at all – but doesn’t every translator go into the depths and come back with shadows?

 - 

short term patchwork long term disaster

John Quiggins at Crooked Timber has a post about the incoherence of the US' s Middle Eastern policy in which he writes that the US has only done one thing consistently in the Middle East, which is slavishly follow Israel's policy.
Nice as it would be to have some compressed and easily understood guide to US policy, I don't think this one is is. 
Actually, it is not just Israel that acts as a driver of US policy – although in actuality I think this is a two way driver, and that Israel does a lot of things that the US government wants them to do while pretending to condemn them or hold them at a distance – but Saudi Arabia. Why should the US, which is buddies with all the authoritarian Gulf states and calmly watched as the Saudis invaded bahrain and suppressed a democratic revolt, care about Assad? I mean, we have no real reason to overthrow Assad. It will actually make US policy much more difficult if Syria fragments. But the Saudis fear Iran, and thus want to damage their ally. That’s it. Similarly, when Pakistan illegally steals the technology and designs to build nuclear weapons, and are financed in this endeavor by the Saudis, we do… nothing. When Iran openly pursues nuclear power and, we presume, a nuclear weapon, we go apeshit.
If the US had taken a far sterner stance towards Saudi Arabia and had established a relationship with Iran in 1989, like Israel, at that time, was advocating, we would surely not have had 9/11, and there would surely be no ISIS.
I would define the US problem in the Middle East differently. Our patchwork of short term policy decisions reflect an unthought out long term framework that has long been broken. It isn’t just the Israel connection that is responsible for this. Rather, it is literally the politics of the oil companies which has brought us to this point.

the unwanted word

Frank Kermode begins The Genesis of Secrecy with an invocation of Hermes, the god of Hermeneuts, and thieves, and crossroads, and puns, to name just a few of the worthy causes he patronized. In enumerating his qualities, Kermode writes: “He also has to do with oracles, including the dubious sort known as klēdōn, which at the moment of its announcement may seem trivial or irrelevant, the secret sense declaring itself only after long delay, and in circumstances not originally foreseeable.” Oh the Greeks, with their eternally fascination terms of art! I couldn’t quite figure out, from Kermode’s elegant but ambiguous gloss, what a klēdōn was. Was  it the kind of insignificant minutia that the murder leaves behind him and is spotted by the sharp eyed police inspector? Was it a clue, such as the track left behind by a hunted animal? To find out, I looked up the word in William Halliday’s 1913 Greek Divination, a study of its method and principles. Halliday evidently was of the Golden Bough school, where one folk practice initiates comparisons to other folk practices among widely disparate people. Thus in discussing kledonomancy, he goes from Homer to a custom on the Isle of Man. His example of divination by kledon is clear enough, though:   “At Pharai in Achaia an analogous rite was practised under the official patronage of Hermes, the market god. “In front of the image is a hearth made of stone, with bronze lamps clamped to it with lead. He who would inquire of the god comes at evening and burns incense on the hearth, fills the lamp[s with oil, lights them, lays a coin of the country called a copper on the altar to the right of the image, and whispers his question, whatever it may be, into the ear of the god. Then he stops his earss and leaves the market-place, and when he is gone a little way outside he takes his hands from his ears, and whatever words he hears he regards as an oracle.”

This is more like it. As a latter authority, Ogilvie, writes (in relation to Aeschylus’s use of the kledon): “It was a form of divination to pick up a chance word or remark and to accept it in a sense other than that intended by the speaker.”

Overhearing, eavesdropping – I have long thought that these are severely neglected topics in the philosophy of language and literary criticism.  In the Pharai example, the inquirer intentionally overhears. He or she intentionally appropriates the word spoken and applies it to the question asked. But of course that an utterance can be inhabited by a wholly other spirit than that in which it is spoken gives us an eery sense of how the gods operate in the world. There is a great deal of this in the modernist novel. To give just one example that occurs to me right now, this was the sort of thing Evelyn Waugh loved. In Black Mischief,  Basil Seal, making love to Prudence Samson, the daughter of the British envoy to Azania tells her she’s a grand girl and “I’d like to eat you up.” A phrase that the reader is not especially called upon to remember – it is all just lovey-dovey, innit?  Yet, in the final chapter, when Basil attends a dance of the Azanian tribe that has overthrown the Azanian emperor and captured his entourage, including Prudence, he  is treated to a feast at which he asks the headman where the white girl has gone, and the headman responds by rubbing his belly and saying “why here – you and I and the big chiefs have just eaten her.”  

This is the overheard word that is not overheard by the person who speaks it – it is rather commandeered. All of us have surely had those moments when, in the thick of some bad situation, we think back to something we have said without thinking that seems to point to the future mysteriously.

However, I would like to broaden the idea of eavesdropping, or overhearing, to the “ontogenesis of language”, as Quine puts it in Words and Things – that is, to how babies learn to talk. I’m going through this now, and the lesson is rather un-Quinian. Classic scenari: the parent at the computer encounters some glitch that he can’t figure, out, and knows is going to take an hour to repair. He says “fuck”, with conviction – only to hear the baby repeat it. Scene ends with parents laughing and telling each other that they will have to watch their language.

Interestingly, it is dirty words, cuss words that make the parents aware of eavesdropping and its power. It is as if, from the first, there is a portion of language learning that is cursed –that the word overheard is the shadow-sibling of the word pointed out. The latter is the wanted word, the former the unwanted one.

The primal writer’s act, in my opinion, is a fierce fascination with and loyalty to the unwanted word. The unwanted word comes to us as a riddle, and seems inhabited by something else, some future we can’t otherwise see.

This is why I, at least, have a harder time with edifying literature, the literature of order – the police procedural with the inevitable catching of the culprit, or the novel that follows closely its time’s norms, whether these are the identity politics of today or whether they are the Victorian eras Christianity-n-Capitalism. These strike me as the progeny of the wanted word. Of course, in all literature, mostly it is the wanted word, mostly the social order as it is triumphs. But I like to think that the rarer literature of the unwanted word has a more long distance say, and that it propounds riddles that are never quite completed. It is a literature by and, to an extent, for the pre-eminently unwanted: the outsider.

D.C and the secret

It is sort of like Comedy of Errors - if it were staged in a butcher shop.
Apparently if you chose to intervene in a chess game by knocking black players off the board, the white side will gain. This is coming as a great shock to D.C. Nobody loses in the political elite. Oh sure, you lose an election, but this just allows you to pluck a desireable job in lobbying or wall street and buy a bigger house. It is a world of up and up!Meanwhile, the US effort is premised on the idea that when a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it didn't fall. So, we watched 3000 to 10000 ISIL "terrorists" decisively defeat an Iraqi army of 500000 armed with 30 billion dollars of US military equipment and benefiting from five years of training. What does this mean? Why it means we put our fingers in our ears and go nah nah we can't hear you. Then we pump some stateless "freedom fighter" group up with 10 million dollars and weapons captured in Libya and they will just blow a hole in IS and we are done. And of course said group will then easily defeat Assad.
Back in the benighted days of George Bush, one of the tells that the Iraq war was going to go wrong was the inability of the US to credibly mount a force that could both defeat Saddam H. and occupy the country. The US didn't have the soldiers and refused to institute a draft. After all, patriotic Americans wanting to taste Saddam's blood might not be so thirsty for it if their sons and daughters were out there in the desert being blown up. So the US waged a war on the cheap, which both blossomed to a trillion dollar war and was decisively lost by the US side.
ISIL shows what you can do if you have dedicated troops and enough money to take advantage of shock troop tactics, but they still don't have the kind of troops to occupy their territory. Eventually I expect they will dissolve in some civil broil. At the moment, though, they represent the Sunni part of the breakup of Iraq. Pretending this isn't so because where's the happy ending, Uncle Sam? And don't we have to do Something? doesn't change the facts that are kicking us in the face.
I sorta blame Oprah. At one point in her show, she publicized a woman who wrote a book called The Secret. The secret consists of cutting out pictures of things you want, pasting them to a piece of paper, and wishing very hard to have them - and presto, you'll get them! Obviously, the Secret became the playbook for the State Department and the D.C. press corps and establishment.
There ain't no Secret.

Karl Marx on how to start a flame war and sell your book

Marx is not often pointed out to aspiring writers for his imitable work in publicizing his masterpiece. However, the correspondence of Marx and Engels, in 1867 and 1868, is filled with strategies for making Capital known on a broad scale – from Engels suggestion that Marx should take seriously the idea of a “portrait” in the Leipzig Illustrated Paper to the campaign of reviews meant to pump the book.

Among the letters is one that is quoted extensively by Schlomo Avineri in his essay trying to prove that the connection between  Marx and Darwin came about as the result of a hoax. Avineri cherrypicks a bit in this essay: Marx, who was no biologist, was alternatively impressed by Darwin and scornful of the way he took Malthus’ method and applied it to nature (I should say, from comments of Darwin’s this is what Marx took Darwin to be doing, although of course the issue is more complex than that). Still, it gave Avineri the chance to quote a quite amazing letter in which Marx pens a review of Das Capital that criticizes its “subjective” anti-capitalist tendencies while praising its general tenor. Its quite an amusing text:   

“As regards the little Swabian paper, it would be an amusing coup if we could hoodwink Vogt’s friend, the Swabian Mayer. It would be easy to contrive the thing as follows. D'abord to begin by saying that whatever one may think of the draft of the book, it is a credit to the ‘German spirit’, for which reason, too, it was written by a Prussian in exile and not in Prussia; Prussia having long ceased to be a country where any scholarly initiative, especially in the political or historical or social field, is possible or is actually to be found, it now being the representative of the Russian and not of the German spirit. In respect of the book itself, a distinction has to be drawn between two things, between positive developments (’solid’ would be the second epithet) given by the author, and the tendentious conclusions he arrives at. The former are a direct addition to the sum of human knowledge, since actual economic relations are treated in an entirely new way by a materialistic (‘Mayer’ has a liking for this catchword, on account of Vogt) method. Example: 1. the development of money, 2. the way in which co-operation, division of labour, the machine system and the corresponding social combinations and relations develop ‘spontaneously’.

Now as regards the tendency of the author, another distinction has to be drawn. When he demonstrates that present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form, he is only showing in the social context the same gradual process of evolution that Darwin has demonstrated in natural history. The liberal doctrine of ‘progress’ (c'est Mayer tout pur) embraces this idea, and it is to his credit that he himself shows there is hidden progress even where modern economic relations are accompanied by frightening direct consequences. At the same time, owing to this critical approach of his, the author has, perhaps malgré lui , sounded the death-knell to all socialism by the book, i.e. to utopianism, for evermore.

The author’s tendency to be subjective, on the other hand — which he was perhaps bound and obligated to assume in view of his party position and his past — i.e. the manner in which he represents to himself or to others the ultimate outcome of the present movement, of the present social process, bears absolutely no relation to its real development. If space permitted this to be more closely examined, it could perhaps be shown that its ‘objective’ development refutes his own ‘subjective’ fancies.

Whereas Mr Lassalle hurled abuse at the capitalists and flattered the backwoods Prussian squirearchy, Mr Marx, on the contrary, shows the historical necessity of capitalist production and severely criticises the landed aristocrat who does nought but consume. Just how little he shares the ideas of his renegade disciple Lassalle on Bismarck’s vocation for ushering in an economic millennium he has not merely shown in his previous protests against ‘royal Prussian Socialism’ but he openly repeats it on pp. 762, 763, where he says that the system prevailing in France and Prussia at present will subject the continent of Europe to the regime of the Russian knout, if it is not checked in good time.

That is my view on how to hoodwink the Swabian Mayer (who did after all print my preface), and small though his beastly rag is, it is, nevertheless, the popular oracle of all the Federalists in Germany and is also read abroad.”

This purely gleeful side of Marx is what makes him a manyhandled author – note the scorn connected with the world “materialist”, and the surprisingly turn at the end of the pseudo-review in which Capital is taken as the death knell of socialism. In fact, this view of the book has, outside of Marx’s “hoax”, endured, with the “rational expectations” Marxists of the 80s – I’m looking at you, Jon Elster – making it the centerpiece of their radicaly purified Marxism.

So, here’s Marx’s advice to young writers: get your friends to write reviews of your book in which they praise it for its objective merits, but qualify the praise by saying that the author’s viewpoint is, unfortunately, completely wrong.

Marx was ahead of his time: what he was doing was inventing the flame war as a way to sell his book.

heidegger as stinker

As every sentient human adult (and especially department secretaries) knows, intelligence doesn’t exclude stinkerhood. Many are the geniuses who are also stinkers.

I think these remarks are pertinent to the latest round in the Heidegger controversy. There is a suprisingly good essay about this in the current NYRB by Peter Gordon.  With the publication of the black notebooks, we have even  more evidence that Heidegger was a Nazi all through the Hitler years. Of course, Lowith back in 1935 proclaimed that Heidegger’s “lean” towards naziism was no temporary aberration, done for the sake of the university. To that kind of special pleading, I think we can all say: suck my cock! But of course in a genteel and philosophische way. The black notebooks apparently add more proof to the case that Heidegger was also a provincial anti-semite as well. Case closed.

Of course, the Heidegger controversy has its political coloring. The same people who use Heidegger’s Nazi-hood to hit deconstruction or France or continental philosophy on the head – usually american academics traveling between the New Criterion and the New York review of Books circuit – have little to say about, say, Werner von Braun, or the whole flotilla of Nazis that were calmly taken up by the Americans in Operation Paperclip. Say what one will about Heidegger, he was not an SS commander in a concentration camp, which is what von Braun was at Peenemunde. It was Braun, not Heidegger, who was photographed with American presidents. But you very rarely see American intellectuals slagged for Braun, whereas French intellectuals are supposedly crypto-collaborationists for using Heidegger.

However the outrage, if outrageously selective, is still justified. And it is a good question as to how much Naziism penetrated Heidegger’s philosophical writings.

However, here is where the history of philosophy, as it is usually told, misleads us. As it is usually told, the history of philosophy is a pageant of heads. Here’s Plato, then his “student” Aristotle, and so on. Each great man clutches a book, and “influences” or “refutes” other great men.

This is a pitifully sad way of doing intellectual history. Great heads are as mired in their contemporary circumstances as little heads. To talk about Heidegger’s philosophy and Naziism, one has to foreground that philosophy in the tendencies with which it was contemporary, and with which it had dozens of capillary relations. A materialist history of philosophy would do away with great heads and insert innumerable small ones, looking for intellectual patterns that interpenetrate economic, political and social ones.  Sein und Zeit is properly placed with, for instance, Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erloesung, and with Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, and with  Mann’s Betrachtungen der Unpolitische, and with essays of Simmel’s and Lukacs’. It means putting it in relation to the anxieties concerning mechanization that were a commonplace of newspaper feuilletonists pre-1914 – notably Kraus’ notion of the “black magic” of the press. It means even looking at the severely marginalized, figures like Ludwig Klages. Etc. Heidegger didn’t come up with his texts in splendid isolation, after all.

In other words, it means pulling apart Heidegger’s philosophy like Roland Barthe pulled apart Balzac’s Sarrazine in S/Z. This isn’t to dispute that Heidegger’s philosophical texts were often full of genius, but that it was, so to speak, the genius of the clinamen – the genius of the swerve that is left after the combinatorial elements are mapped.

In a sense, one could say of Heidegger what Nietzsche said of the New Testament – that one should read his works wearing gloves. And I think that one should read them against the grain of the author’s stinko intent. Sometimes – as in the lectures on Nietzsche, which were so full of grandiose cliches that I have never been able to finish them – stinkerism overrides thought, here, for sure.

To return to the greater themes – definitely, in the world of philosphy, something was happening that all the figures I have named were responding to. On the one hand, there was the revolution in logic that seemed to allow philosophy to be dissolved in science, and on the other hand, there was the return to the transcendental thematic – shared by Husserl and the numerous graphomaniac neo-Kantians – which seemed to offer a discursive escape route from the positivist prison – which was a species of the iron cage of modernity that Weber was writing about. In Weberian terms, the philosophers and writers I’ve named were trying to carve out a region for charismatic legitimation, and in so doing often reified charisma as something that resisted and opposed the technostructure.

Retrospectively, it is easy to see that instead of opponents, these movements were often secret allies.

But this gets me far from where I wanted to go, which is simply: yes to Heidegger as a stinker, but also yes to Sein and Zeit, alas alas. 

blood from a stone

I did laugh at this NYT piece about the former president of the Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. 

Saakashvili, in his time, was a favorite of both the NYT and the Bush Whitehouse. Now we know that he fortified his backbone with “bite massage” while he was standing tall for democracy and against the current incarnation of Satan, Hitler and Stalin – Putin is who I’m obviously talking about, for those of you who are behind on today’s fave devils. Of course, being in power and challenging the enemy of all mankind is a tiring job, and we shouldn’t question the perks of office, like the state paying to fly out the  masseuse that gave him the said bite massage, Dorothy Stein. In fact, we shouldn’t question any of the money that disappeared during his time in office.

The NYT is, at least, down with the money:

“Since leaving office last November, this George W. Bush favorite — whose confrontation with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia led to a disastrous war in 2008 — has commandeered his uncle’s apartment in a toweron the Williamsburg waterfront, where he luxuriates in the neighborhood’stime-honored tradition of mysteriously sourced wealth.”

It is a funny thing about mysteriously sourced wealth. When it flies out of a country by way of dictators or funny presidents, the U.S. and Western european media people and scholars and governments tut tut about the corruption of these backwaters. They are so corrupt! And yet, apparently there is no taint in taking that mysteriously sourced wealth. Nicholas Shaxson, in Treasure Island, tells the story of the Corruption Index – a way of mapping the peculation of countries that receives a lot of press attention, and that lets us know just how filthy Nigeria or Iraq or Georgia is when it comes to bribe taking and the lot. This index, concentrating on that kind of dirty money, usually makes the US, the UK, Switzerland France and all the others seem like wholesome and uncorrupted paradises. But a lesser known index was established by the Tax Justice Network in 2009, to rank countries according to how much secrecy they provide to global finance. In other words, how many hidey holes they have for just that dark money. And on this index, the US is no. 1. The UK is number 5. And so on.

If, as some estimate, trillions of dollars have been taken out of the poorest countries over the last three decades, we know where it went. Miami. Houston. London. Paris. Geneva. Mysteriously funded Williamsberg.

And this is, somehow, not as funny.

It is not bite massage, but the vampire’s kiss.

fictionable world

“Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.” This is one of the wonderful lines in Wallace Stevens “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” – a poem that makes much of that “toward”, that motion which, seemingly, is oriented towards an endpoint that is itself on an absolute scale – it is supreme – and at the same time – being “a supreme fiction”  – seemingly, diminishingly, not the only one, leaving us rather puzzled about the entire movement and meaning that will be convened in the poem’s sweep.  

 I am thinking about this poem in relation to Michael Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. The book gestures a lot to Empson, since it is made up of Wood’s Empson Lectures given at Cambridge. Levi-Strauss once said that totem’s are good to think with, and one could say the same for this book: it is in that way evidently totemic. Like a good totem pole, it mounts one head on another, beginning with Henry James and ending with John  Banville – it is mostly novelists – and so we have can think of the tradition that is being performed. But there is also the strange notion of the taste of knowledge. Wood  procedes to mutilate or distort the idea of knowledge until we give up our simple idea that we know what knowing is, and take another look.

It is a book that quotes philosophers, but isn’t philosophy – rather, it is at the crossroads of philosophy and literature, which is not a spot haunted by many philosophers, unfortunately.

But here’s the thing I latched onto in reading Wood’s book – the idea of fictionable worlds. The lovely phrase comes originally from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, where it is a play on the fashionable world. Wood sees the immense idea that could be here, and how it helps us to think about fiction by asking whether there could be a world without fiction. How could a world actively resist its fictionability? Perhaps this is the melancholic idea behind Adorno’s famous phrase about there being no more poetry after Auschwitz.  There is a point in which the fictionable impulse dies.  

That at least is one possible reading of the limits of the fictionable world. However, realistically,  there has been poetry after Auschwitz, and there have even been novels about Auschwitz.

So lets find another point of entry to the fictionable world, one that Wood doesn’t deal with, even as he intimates the direction I want to go in. That point of entry is the error, the mistake, the misperception.

The comedy of errors is, in Shakespeare, essential to comedy at all. Without mistakes of identity, disguises,  mishearings and misinterpretations – think of Malvolio, for instance -  there would be no comedic business.

Two of the great novelists of the twentieth century – Nabokov and Queneau – are specialists in the mistake. Pnin, for instance, is wound around a mistake that is signaled at the very beginning of the book by the omniscient and ominous narrator – Pnin is on the wrong train. From whence he proceeds to the wrong bus. Queneau, in Chiendent, sets the plot in motion with a mistaken inference by the terrible Madame Cloche, who thinks that Pierre Le Grand and Etienne Marcel are planning to rob pere Taupe. This misunderstanding has many levels. It derives from a misunderstanding of a phrase that Cloche overheard; and it leads her to infer that Pere Taupe, contrary to his appearance as a miserable quasi-bum, is actually a mythical miser.

If the world and logic were one and the same thing, these errors would cancel themselves out. They couldn’t cause anything, because they wouldn’t have any substance. From the moment that we see that logic and the world are two separate things, we see how the world is fictionable.  We see the work of error, we see how it blooms in the world. Michael Wood touches briefly on a question that was once vexatious – what use is art, or how can art be useful – to get to the question of how literature knows things. This locution – taking an object that is known and making it a knower, as in such book titles as “what buildings know” or “what poems know”, etc., is a contemporary fashion that, I can’t help but think, was helped along by the fact that computers, which we all use, seem to do things like knowing. In the early modern era, the displacement of knowing from the consciousness to the object was a principle in alchemy and, in general, occult knowledge. Even then, the fact that a place “has a memory” – a theory of Cornelius Agrippa – was not attributed, ultimately, to the place, but rather to spirits.  The question of the cognitive function of literature is, though, a bastard continuation of the great aesthetic debate between the old purists, the high modernists, for whom literature was autonomous and removed from the world of use, and the counter-modernists, the realists (socialist and otherwise), for whom literature was a means to an end – usually consciousness raising, sometimes outrage, sometimes pointing out a social ill.

That debate, while it is no longer conducted on the lofty, Adorno-ian plane, is still definitely around. My own tastes are mostly for the high modern monuments, but I don’t think my tastes encompass all literature, and it is easy to see how a literary work  could also be didactically important, or raise consciousness, etc.

We could look at this another way by using elements of Victor Turner’s idea of “ritual process”, and in particular the ideas of anti-structure and liminality. Turner writes of these things under the general notion of communitas – a non-structured, non-hierarchical gathering that inevitably hardens into organization.  But I think of this non-structured thrusting of the liminal as something larger than communitas. It is, in fact, the fictionable world, the world in which mistakes actually produce ontologically real events – in which the nothing of falsehood is a cause. The world in which we pretend logic and the world are identical bears a name: the serious world. But the world in which logic and the world suddenly separate is harder to name. It is the ludicrous world. It can be terrible, or terribly funny, or both.

That is an aspect of the world that fascinates me. 

the war of the geriatric fantasists

Going to war with ISIS without even a discussion seems to be the order of the day.

Myself, let me play the crow and croak doom upon the whole business.

There were two news items recently that made me think that, once again, the war will be fought in such a way that it will be unwinnable. Not that IS might not collapse, but it will only give way to some similar organization.

The two news items are:

1.      The NYT story about IS oil that includes this graf:

Western intelligence officials say they can track the ISIS oil shipments as they move across Iraq and into Turkey’s southern border regions. Despite extensive discussions inside the Pentagon, American forces have so far not attacked the tanker trucks, though a senior administration official said Friday “that remains an option.” 

And the hearings today included this passage:      

2.    “It really comes down to building a coalition,” Dempsey replied [to senator Lindsey Graham], “so that what the Arab Muslim world see is them rejecting ISIS, not us…”

“They already reject ISIL,” Graham interjected. “Do you know any major Arab ally that embraces ISIL?”

“I know major Arab allies who fund them,” Dempsey replied

“Yeah, but do they embrace them? They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn’t fight Assad. They were trying to beat Assad. I think they realized the folly of their ways. Let’s don’t taint the Mid East unfairly.”

I don’t think a lot of people have noticed the undercurrent in that exchange. They don’t just fund them because they were trying to beat Assad, they were urged on by Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator McCain to fund them. The tainting Graham doesn’t want is the tainting of his own hideous record. There was a nice article about it in the June Atlantic.

“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.

McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.

Butshortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullahrelieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was then transferredtoSaudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just twoweeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar had alsobeen removed from his position as head ofSaudi intelligence—according to official government statements, at “his ownrequest.” Sources close to the royal court told me that, in fact, the kingfired Bandar over his handling of the kingdom’s Syria policy and othersimmering tensions, after initially refusing to accept Bandar’s offers toresign. (Bandar retains his title as secretary-general of the king’s NationalSecurity Council.)”

It will of course go down the memory hole that today’s hawks were yesterday’s material allies of ISIS. Today’s doves – myself for instance – will of course be lined up as avid supporters of our beheading friends when we point such things out, now that we have decided, in the typical American way, to declare war (except not a really really war so we can tiptoe around the constitution) against those terrorists.
The American way of war, both in D.C, and the press, is to look at it like a video game. And like a video game, the forces appear where they are when you turn it on. They are programmed into the game. Thus, there is no real history between the players.
And since they are programmed in, there is no need to ask questions about even the recent past. You would think, if we are at war against IS, that we would talk about their run of luck. After all, what we are proposing is that our allies come up with forces and throw them into battle against ISIS. Hmm, but what we are ignoring is… we already have trained allies and they have already thrown themselves into battle against ISIS and so far ISIS has destroyed them. I have not read all the transcript of the Senate hearing, but I can’t imagine that any senator spoke up and asked, let’s go over what happened in Mosul, when ISIS took it in June, and then proceeded to grab most of the Sunni heavy region of Iraq. Patrick Cockburn put the case very well back when that happened in the Independent, June 15, 2014:
“It is difficult to think of any examples in history when security forces almost a million strong, including 14 army divisions, have crumbled so immediately after attacks from an enemy force that has been estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000 strong.”
But once again, this fact – that the US not only assembled an army but a huge army, armed it with the latest equipment, and trained it, and watched it fall to pieces against ISIS – is treated as an irrelevancy, a little something to be sucked down the memory hole and not bother an important general with. Because this time we are going to train an army, a huge army, from various moderate terrorist groups on our side – oops, I meant freedom fighters – and this army, which will have had no experience, is going to be vastly well equipped, and it wil just roll ISIS like a heavyweight KOing a featherweight. Now, that the recent past shows that this is an absolute fantasy doesn’t mean that we can’t turn off the video game and then turn it on again and start over. And besides, as I have read in many a news report, it is the “universal” conviction in DC that we have to stop the ISIS.

We’ve been at war for thirteen years. We’ve learned absolutely nothing, and we are still led by geriatric fantasists.

sounds

Kant, in one of his obscure works (an essay entitled Speculations on the Beginning of Human History) writes that communication begins in the human desire to spread abroad one’s ego.
“ The instinct to communicate must first have moved the solitary person to proclaim his existence to  other living creatures outside them, chiefly to those who produced a sound which he imitated and which he by and by used as a name. A similar effect of this instinct can be seen even now in children and thoughtless people, who through snarling, screaming, whistling, singing, and other noisy activities (and also similarly in likeminded groups) disturb the more thoughtful part of the community. Because I see no other motivation here than that they want to proclaim their existence all over the place.”

In this passage, as in so much of the Gesammelte Werke of I. Kant, one sees the outlines of the rather sour Konigsberg bachelor emerging from beneath the verbiage of the scholar and one time Pietist. However, even though I can’t imagine that Kant ever paid too much attention to children, especially the whistling ones, there is certainly something in the idea that communication – or rather, utterance, soundmaking – derives originally from the instinct of self-assertion. Self aggrandizement. Snarling, whistling, singing and other noisy activities make one bigger. I would add cursing, which is definitely the way adults make themselves bigger, and shouting.
Since Adam has been going to school, and his mornings and afternoons have been peeled away from his Pop’s, he’s becoming much more verbal. He is full of surprises, coming out with thank you Dadi when I change his diaper (and I am told he said this, too, to Miss Tawana at school when she similarly cleaned him up) morning when I wheel him in the stroller in what is, indeed, morning, duck and truck and my. Oh what a lot of  my-s, settling especially around my ball.  Still, these words and phrases are caught in his other sounds, his private language, which is a crossword puzzle of sounds, the clues to which are too obscure for me to decypher them.
In the passage from Kant, one notices the subtle and not wholly coherent switch between imitation and assertion. This, too, is consistent with what I’ve seen with Adam. I can spend five minutes saying something that Adam will refuse to repeat after me – happy birthday, Maman, or toy, etc. – and then there will be times that Adam catches me by surprise by repeating after me when I was not trying to get him to repeat after me – especially when I am cussing for some reason. But mostly, Adam will address me with his blue gaze and go off into a presentation of obviously  conversationally purposed but purely opaque phonetic strings. The intonations are recognizable: question, statement, kidding, story.  And then there are the sounds that obviously he likes because he can make them - not crying, which is an ambiguous object (it makes you bigger to show that you are smaller), but screams and whoops that accompany a lot of running around and giggling. I love these sounds. I love all of Adam's sounds, really. And this is in contradiction to the global tendency of my old age, which is increasingly intolerant of noise, especially in restaurants (which I think of as an American disease, spreading across the world - the way everybody at every table screams like they want to get a message across to the viewing audience. There is no viewing audience, honey.)
I have doubts this makes me one of the thoughtful people in the community. It is sheer age and grouchiness.

ISIS son of surge

ISIS, son of surge

In today’s New Yorker, one of the several liberal hawks in the stable, George Packer, dons his favorite style – more in sorrow than in anger, burdened by the tragic task of bringing civ to the uncivilized, etc. – and asks what are the lessons of the fall of Saigon for Obama, facing ISIS. The short answer is that Packer gets an F – he seemingly is incapable of learning a lesson that goes against his burning desire to benefit all humanity by way of the Pentagon. Because of course we must, Packer thinks, get into the struggle against ISIS. And he hopes our president will be clear about what that means: “But he also needs to tell the country bluntly that there will almost certainly be more American casualties, and that the struggle against ISIS—against radical Islam generally, but especially in this case—will be difficult, with no quick military solution and no end in sight.”

Now, another person might think, hmm, no end in sight, struggle against radical Islam in general, American blood – well, the lesson of Vietnam is we not engage in anything that pointless. But not our masterthinker.

Why America is supposed to struggle against radical Islam is pretty unclear, especially as America – as Packer haughtily overlooks – is allied to radical Islam and has been for a long time (which is maybe why Packer doesn’t even talk about Saudi Arabia, much less the UAE). But not to worry, at least the struggle will be long and without any clear purpose. Sounds like a plan!

The rhetoric of the liberal hawks is the same old same old, same with the old hawks, but it is starting to penetrate the public and get them ready for another episode in America’s pointless wars. The terms in this  episode, like the last one, will be that those who oppose the war actually support ISIS, and chopping off heads, etc.

So, here are the futile facts. It is today's hawks who physically supported ISIS by making sure the Syrian rebels were good and armed, including arms that came from Libya. And it is by no means apologizing for ISIS to wonder about the meaning of the fact that ISIS, which at its largest is a twentieth the size of the Iraqi army, rolled over that army. The Iraqi army, remember, was armed with billions of dollars worth of US weapons and trained through other billions of dollars worth of aid. Thirty billion is an often mentioned figure. And what did they do? Why, they fled, in their hundred thousands, from ISIS's thousands. And what did the conquered population think? Well, as far as I can tell, the Sunni majority in the regions ISIS conquered are definitely glad not to be subject to the Shia militias protected by the Maliki government or the minions of that government who made a habit of  kidnapping, torturing and killing Sunnis in the old  fashioned way.

And why did this situation come about? More generally, of course, it was the occupation. But more particularly, the Sunni-Shiite split was ratified and frozen by the surge. You remember the triumphant surge, trumpeted in the press as our victory in Iraq? It came in two parts. One was surrender to the Sunni insurgents in their territory, plus bribery of the tribes. The other was creating physical barriers separating neighborhoods in urban centers. This accelerated and put an official stamp on the segregation of Sunni and Shiite, which, before the occupation, was officially verboten. From that segregation naturally arose a consciousness, among both parties, of themselves as separate entities. This, of course, has led to the current situation, which is a combination of ISIS and a good old fashioned Sunni rebellion. Ba’athist military men, not exactly a mainstay of “radical” Islam, joined ISIS. They joined because they wanted to fight the power in Baghdad.

So, Packer is proposing that we agree to fight a nebulous enemy instead of a specific and complex one, in a landscape devoid of any history except the American one – which consists of Americans heroically rescuing their Vietnamese pals, or their Iraqi pals, etc.

Here are the questions the  war hawks should answer: how can you couple defeating ISIS and reconciling the Iraqi Sunnis with the Iraqi Shiite state; how can you fight against Syria while simulataneously asking Syria to fight against ISIS; how can you defeat an enemy that has morale and skill with a foreign force from the air;  how can you restrain the landgrabbing of your allies, like Kurdistan; how can you restrain the resourcing of ISIS by your other allies in the Gulf?

My prediction is that none of these questions will even be asked, and that an empty and ultimately disasterous moral gesture  will take thousands of lives and produce exactly nothing.

But at least we will have done something! And isn’t that the sweetest little sop to our narcissism?