What would the Gipper do?
In the devastated city of Falluja, the International Red Cross visited for the first time since the American-led military offensive last month, meeting with Iraqi engineers to discuss the city's sewage and water needs, The Associated Press reported. The Red Cross officials were unable to visit a potato-chip plant where several hundred bodies of insurgents and civilians are apparently being stored.
LI has been reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The secret history of the Cia, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001. We came across this interesting passage. Afghanistan, 1979:
A charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan called for jihad againt the communist usurpers that March and led his heavily armed Heart garrison into violent revolt. His followers hunted down and hacked to death more than a dozen Russian communist political advisors, as well as their wives and children. The rebels displayed Russian corposes on pikes along shaded city streets. Soviet-trained pilots flew bomber jets out of Kabul in vengeful reply, pulverizing the town in remorseless waves of attack. By the time the raids were finished, on the eve of its first anniversary in power, the Afghan communist government had killed as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone.”
If you wonder how the Soviets justified a massacre like that, go to this article in Slate that glorifies the American war crime of razing Fallujah. It would have been right at home in, say, the columns of Pravda in 1980. Apparently the editors of Slate, who love to nitpick NYT journalists’ mistakes, swallowed this with a big piece of American apple pie and ice cream:
“… Most of the beheadings featured on the Al Jazeera news network were committed in the city, carried out under klieg lights with written instructions how and when the CDs should be delivered to make the evening news. The city's warlords, Janabi and Hadid, paid obeisance to the arch terrorist Zarqawi and competed for his favor by assassinations and bombings. They bragged their "martyr battalions" would cut to pieces any American force entering the city.
:Deciding otherwise, the residents fled the city, leaving a few thousand jihadists to their fate. In a swift offensive, American soldiers and Marines swept in and hunted them down, destroying every house and mosque where Zarqawi's soldiers stood and fought. Seventeen-thousand buildings were searched, uncovering cache after cache of weapons. The numbers were staggering: Over 100,000 explosives found in just one section of the city.”
An account that simply skips the American bombing of the city, the buildup to the assault, the American effort, announced for a month, to empty the city, the American blocking of the routes out of the city, the American culling of the males in the city, the American bombing of civilian sites in the city, the American refusal to put up any kind of refugee center for the fleeing population, the American refusal to let anybody in the now razed city except propagandists of the type that Slate favors, the American targetting of hospitals, etc., etc.
Although LI thought Reagan was a rotten president, he said something rather sweet about the Soviet war crimes in Afghanistan.
“The year 1984 was an especially hard one for the Afghans. The Soviets have become frustrated with their inability to crush the spirit of the Afghan Freedom Fighters and are increasingly turning their military might against the civilian population of the country, forcing hundreds of thousands more innocent people into exile away from their homeland.
Reports of Soviet atrocities and human rights violations are increasingly gaining the attention of the world's public. Respected organizations such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch have recently released studies detailing the terror that the Soviets and the Karmal regime regularly inflict on the people of Afghanistan. Karmal's tenuous, and brutal, hold on power continues only because his rule is supported by more than 100,000 Soviet occupation troops.
All Americans are outraged by this growing Soviet brutality against the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan. Moreover, the entire world community has condemned the outside occupation of Afghanistan. Six times, in fact, the UN General Assembly has passed strong resolutions -- supported by the overwhelming majority of the world's nations -- which have:
-- called for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan;
-- reaffirmed the right of the Afghan people to determine their own form of government and choose their economic, political, and social systems;
-- reiterated that the preservation of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, and nonaligned character of Afghanistan is essential for a peaceful solution of the problem; and
--- called for the creation of conditions that would enable the Afghan refugees to return voluntarily to their homes in safety and honor.”
Transposing a few phrases, this accurately sums up what is wrong with the American occupation of Iraq. We particularly like the strong condemnation of terror tactics used against civilians – so civilized! So, in the name of Ronald Reagan, I think we can safely condemn as an act of American brutality against the freedom-loving people of Fallujah (wow, freedom-loving even back in 1984!), call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign, i.e. American and British and their coalition of the servile, from Iraq, as well as the creation of conditions that would allow refugees in Iraq to return voluntarily in safety and honor, with reparations, to Fallujah. We think reparations can be put at roughly 100 thou per person.
Do it for the Gipper.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Friday, December 10, 2004
LI has pondered the parodoxes of the upcoming election in Iraq. In the past, the U.S. has used fake elections to try to legitimize its foreign policy adventures. South Vietnam, El Salvador, Panama – the m.o. has a dreary consistency.
This case is different insofar as the Iraq occupation is different. While the election is being held in an atmosphere that renders it illegitimate as a democratic process – the massive censorship, the arrest of opposition leaders, the way American military strategy has normalized war crimes, etc., etc. – this matters less than the fact that the elections are the first step in relieving Iraq of its biggest problem: the Americans. On Ghazi Yawer’s latest trip to this country, he made that explicit – as he foresaw it, the elected government would ask for a timetable of withdrawal. Yawer was talking about a year. We’d like to see six months. In American eyes, the elected government’s biggest task is to write a constitution. Americans love constitutions. But the impetus gained from having a power, however weak, that had actually communicated with the Iraqi people opens up the possibility of doing many things: getting American hands off Iraqi oil money; negotiating, themselves, for the end of reparations to Kuwait; the introduction of Iraqi concerns into the internal governance of the country; destroying the last remnants of Bremer’s economic legacy to Iraq (all of that privatizing nonsense). The outcome for the Americans, over the next three or four years, isn’t going to be upbeat. We doubt the U.S. has a new, reliable ally in the region. But the U.S. has too much at stake to exaccerbate the natural hostility any Iraqi government would feel towards its recent oppressors.
While LI has viewed Allawi, throughout, as a thug, his latest suggestion about the election is a surprisingly good one: in Sunni areas, the election time must be extended. In fact, in all areas.
The withdrawal of American troops does have a definite downside. As long as they are tied down in Iraq, the Bush gang doesn’t really have the resources to bedevil the rest of the world. However, with combat ready troops available, we know that America, a perennially belligerant country being lead by a man whose popularity crucially hinges on making the American masses identify with his brand of acts of irrational violence, will be on the lookout for another deployment. This is partly why we are ambiguous about the Bush project of privatizing social security. On the one hand, it is class warfare that will, as always, continue the impoverishment of the average American as money is directed to the investment class – Bush’s version of Pinochet-ism. From the standpoint of the American citizen, it should be resisted at all costs. But the standpoint of the American citizen is no longer the standpoint of the cosmopolitan liberal. The gap between America and the rest of the world has widened to the point that what benefits the American economy feeds into the American imperial psychosis. The borrowing required to rob social security will almost surely sink the U.S. into a pretty deep recession. This is especially true insofar as the Chinese, eyeing the U.S.’s military, will be less than enthusiastic in financing another round of the Bush Saturnalia for the wealthy. The lack of money to maintain an aggressive foreign policy might well blunt the Bush gangs’ natural homicidal instincts. But there’s a large caveat hereL it is important to remember that the society Bush’s America most resembles – Peronist Argentina – was susceptible to war hysteria even in the grey tumult of recession.
This case is different insofar as the Iraq occupation is different. While the election is being held in an atmosphere that renders it illegitimate as a democratic process – the massive censorship, the arrest of opposition leaders, the way American military strategy has normalized war crimes, etc., etc. – this matters less than the fact that the elections are the first step in relieving Iraq of its biggest problem: the Americans. On Ghazi Yawer’s latest trip to this country, he made that explicit – as he foresaw it, the elected government would ask for a timetable of withdrawal. Yawer was talking about a year. We’d like to see six months. In American eyes, the elected government’s biggest task is to write a constitution. Americans love constitutions. But the impetus gained from having a power, however weak, that had actually communicated with the Iraqi people opens up the possibility of doing many things: getting American hands off Iraqi oil money; negotiating, themselves, for the end of reparations to Kuwait; the introduction of Iraqi concerns into the internal governance of the country; destroying the last remnants of Bremer’s economic legacy to Iraq (all of that privatizing nonsense). The outcome for the Americans, over the next three or four years, isn’t going to be upbeat. We doubt the U.S. has a new, reliable ally in the region. But the U.S. has too much at stake to exaccerbate the natural hostility any Iraqi government would feel towards its recent oppressors.
While LI has viewed Allawi, throughout, as a thug, his latest suggestion about the election is a surprisingly good one: in Sunni areas, the election time must be extended. In fact, in all areas.
The withdrawal of American troops does have a definite downside. As long as they are tied down in Iraq, the Bush gang doesn’t really have the resources to bedevil the rest of the world. However, with combat ready troops available, we know that America, a perennially belligerant country being lead by a man whose popularity crucially hinges on making the American masses identify with his brand of acts of irrational violence, will be on the lookout for another deployment. This is partly why we are ambiguous about the Bush project of privatizing social security. On the one hand, it is class warfare that will, as always, continue the impoverishment of the average American as money is directed to the investment class – Bush’s version of Pinochet-ism. From the standpoint of the American citizen, it should be resisted at all costs. But the standpoint of the American citizen is no longer the standpoint of the cosmopolitan liberal. The gap between America and the rest of the world has widened to the point that what benefits the American economy feeds into the American imperial psychosis. The borrowing required to rob social security will almost surely sink the U.S. into a pretty deep recession. This is especially true insofar as the Chinese, eyeing the U.S.’s military, will be less than enthusiastic in financing another round of the Bush Saturnalia for the wealthy. The lack of money to maintain an aggressive foreign policy might well blunt the Bush gangs’ natural homicidal instincts. But there’s a large caveat hereL it is important to remember that the society Bush’s America most resembles – Peronist Argentina – was susceptible to war hysteria even in the grey tumult of recession.
Over at Crooked Timber, they are having another silly bout of deciding who was the great philosopher of the twentieth century. We don’t know why this compulsion to name the greatest philosopher has suddenly sunk its memish jaws into the Zeitgeist: Leiter did a similar thing a couple of months ago, and Mark Taylor, in his op ed piece about Derrida, was moved to call Jacques one of the century’s three great philosophers (the others were Moe and Curly).
The candidate from greatest of one of the CT-ers is David Lewis. David Lewis! It is like calling the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century Antoine Arnauld.
One philosopher never mentioned in this embarrassing sweepstakes is Franz Rosenzweig. Yet LI would venture to say that, of those philosophic tomes composed on little notecards or in little journals by soldiers in world war one, only two have stood the test of time: The Tractatus-Logico and Stern der Erloesung. (pdf file)
We’ve been reading the Star of Redemption since we found it on the web. Shamefully, we read Heidegger and Benjamin in grad school and never picked up Rosenzweig. Yet, as everybody knows who reads the introductions to Benjamin, Rosenzweig was a big deal for both Benjamin and Heidegger. Karl Löwith wrote that Heidegger’s true philosophical contemporary was Rosenzweig. Heidegger claimed never to have read him.
Claim and counter-claims. This is a tissue that LI sees no sense in exploring. One thing is certain: Stern der Erloesung does not begin like a David Lewis essay. It begins: “The knowledge of everything begins with death and the fear of death. To shed the anxiety of the earthly, to take the poison needle from death, the breath of the plague from hades, is precisely what is missing from philosophy.” (Vom tode, voen der Furcht des Todes hebt alles Erkennen des All an. Die Angst des Irdischen abzuwerfen, dem Tod seinen Giftstachel, dem Hades seinen Pesthauch zu nehmen, des vermißt sich die Philosophie.” Rosenzweig ends this passage thusly:Man shouldn’t try to rid himself of the fear of the earthly; he should remain in the fear of death.
(Der Mensch soll die Angst des Irdischen nicht von sich werfen; er soll in der Furcht des Todes – bleiben).
It is pretty easy to imagine how the fear of death, and its image as the fear of an earthly creature, one on earth and made of earth, would occur to a soldier in the Balkans in 1916. There is a gap in our historical consciousness of what World War I meant – we transpose, in America, the realization among intellectuals that mass, mechanized killing is the unexpected fruit of Western culture, to a post Holocaust period. In U.S intellectual history, the erasure of the first World War operates as a necessary moralizing prelude to the anti-communism of the Cold War. Lenin is then reduced, by way of Churchill’s phrase, to a bacillus released in Russia – a pathogen apart from history. This is flattering to Churchill, whose history in World War I consisted of a rumsfeldian fuckup in Gallipoli. This is also flattering to the governing classes, directly responsible for the deaths of millions in that war.
Rosenzweig wrote the Star of Redemption after having been a part of the Neo-Kantian movement – after having written a well received book on Hegel and the State. He could witness how, within a liberal, rational culture that presented itself as the creator of organizations that operate with rules to create an optimum of tolerance, wealth, and liberty, the same organizations could apply the same rationality to create vast killing machines, that whole ensemble of hundreds of thousands of men, trenches, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, and planes set in motion to kill each other again and again, for pointless gains, with an intensity and duration never before experienced on earth.
“The fear of the earthly must be taken from him only with the earthly itself. But so long as he lives on earth, he must also remain in the anxiety of the earthly. And philosophy betrays him in this “must”, insofar as it weaves the blue haze of the thought of everything (allgedankens) around the earthly. Because of couse: an All doesn’t die, and nothing dies in the All. Only individuals can die, and everything mortal is individual. This, that philosophy must make the individual vanish out of the world, this de-creation of the Something is the reason it must be idealistic. Because Idealism, with its denial of those things which divide the individual from the All, is the instrument with which philosophy works over its recalcitrant material until it no longer counters its general (Ein-und Allbegriff) concept with any resistance. Once this mist has been spun around everything, death is clearly swallowed up: if not in eternal victory, yet, even so, in the general night of nothingness.”
…
Eventually, we want to comment about the essay of Tom Nairn over at Open Democracy. Nairn is trying to understand the apparent seizure of irrationality in the U.S. philosophically – reclaiming the legitimacy of the nation (as opposed to the nation-state, that thing continually bartering itself to the IMF); tracing the working through of patterns that arise naturally from the hegemony of the American capitalist system, etc., etc. Nairn assumes – and we agree – that the major task in the world today is to curb American power. Americans are reckless, sporadically immoral, ignorant, and create much too little for the amount they suck out of the world system. There are, however, self correcting mechanisms at work that Nairn doesn’t mention. We’ll return to this later. We should say, Nairn’s article is written in an alarm clock style (which is something of an LI specialty): it is as if every sentence had to keep the reader awake. However, the style tends to get in the way of the sense. Metaphors keep being sent out to do battle in sentences that witness their melancholic last stands, over and over again (see – sentences like that). However, he racks up a good ratio of commonsense to drivel.
For later.
The candidate from greatest of one of the CT-ers is David Lewis. David Lewis! It is like calling the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century Antoine Arnauld.
One philosopher never mentioned in this embarrassing sweepstakes is Franz Rosenzweig. Yet LI would venture to say that, of those philosophic tomes composed on little notecards or in little journals by soldiers in world war one, only two have stood the test of time: The Tractatus-Logico and Stern der Erloesung. (pdf file)
We’ve been reading the Star of Redemption since we found it on the web. Shamefully, we read Heidegger and Benjamin in grad school and never picked up Rosenzweig. Yet, as everybody knows who reads the introductions to Benjamin, Rosenzweig was a big deal for both Benjamin and Heidegger. Karl Löwith wrote that Heidegger’s true philosophical contemporary was Rosenzweig. Heidegger claimed never to have read him.
Claim and counter-claims. This is a tissue that LI sees no sense in exploring. One thing is certain: Stern der Erloesung does not begin like a David Lewis essay. It begins: “The knowledge of everything begins with death and the fear of death. To shed the anxiety of the earthly, to take the poison needle from death, the breath of the plague from hades, is precisely what is missing from philosophy.” (Vom tode, voen der Furcht des Todes hebt alles Erkennen des All an. Die Angst des Irdischen abzuwerfen, dem Tod seinen Giftstachel, dem Hades seinen Pesthauch zu nehmen, des vermißt sich die Philosophie.” Rosenzweig ends this passage thusly:Man shouldn’t try to rid himself of the fear of the earthly; he should remain in the fear of death.
(Der Mensch soll die Angst des Irdischen nicht von sich werfen; er soll in der Furcht des Todes – bleiben).
It is pretty easy to imagine how the fear of death, and its image as the fear of an earthly creature, one on earth and made of earth, would occur to a soldier in the Balkans in 1916. There is a gap in our historical consciousness of what World War I meant – we transpose, in America, the realization among intellectuals that mass, mechanized killing is the unexpected fruit of Western culture, to a post Holocaust period. In U.S intellectual history, the erasure of the first World War operates as a necessary moralizing prelude to the anti-communism of the Cold War. Lenin is then reduced, by way of Churchill’s phrase, to a bacillus released in Russia – a pathogen apart from history. This is flattering to Churchill, whose history in World War I consisted of a rumsfeldian fuckup in Gallipoli. This is also flattering to the governing classes, directly responsible for the deaths of millions in that war.
Rosenzweig wrote the Star of Redemption after having been a part of the Neo-Kantian movement – after having written a well received book on Hegel and the State. He could witness how, within a liberal, rational culture that presented itself as the creator of organizations that operate with rules to create an optimum of tolerance, wealth, and liberty, the same organizations could apply the same rationality to create vast killing machines, that whole ensemble of hundreds of thousands of men, trenches, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, and planes set in motion to kill each other again and again, for pointless gains, with an intensity and duration never before experienced on earth.
“The fear of the earthly must be taken from him only with the earthly itself. But so long as he lives on earth, he must also remain in the anxiety of the earthly. And philosophy betrays him in this “must”, insofar as it weaves the blue haze of the thought of everything (allgedankens) around the earthly. Because of couse: an All doesn’t die, and nothing dies in the All. Only individuals can die, and everything mortal is individual. This, that philosophy must make the individual vanish out of the world, this de-creation of the Something is the reason it must be idealistic. Because Idealism, with its denial of those things which divide the individual from the All, is the instrument with which philosophy works over its recalcitrant material until it no longer counters its general (Ein-und Allbegriff) concept with any resistance. Once this mist has been spun around everything, death is clearly swallowed up: if not in eternal victory, yet, even so, in the general night of nothingness.”
…
Eventually, we want to comment about the essay of Tom Nairn over at Open Democracy. Nairn is trying to understand the apparent seizure of irrationality in the U.S. philosophically – reclaiming the legitimacy of the nation (as opposed to the nation-state, that thing continually bartering itself to the IMF); tracing the working through of patterns that arise naturally from the hegemony of the American capitalist system, etc., etc. Nairn assumes – and we agree – that the major task in the world today is to curb American power. Americans are reckless, sporadically immoral, ignorant, and create much too little for the amount they suck out of the world system. There are, however, self correcting mechanisms at work that Nairn doesn’t mention. We’ll return to this later. We should say, Nairn’s article is written in an alarm clock style (which is something of an LI specialty): it is as if every sentence had to keep the reader awake. However, the style tends to get in the way of the sense. Metaphors keep being sent out to do battle in sentences that witness their melancholic last stands, over and over again (see – sentences like that). However, he racks up a good ratio of commonsense to drivel.
For later.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Chesterton and the "ownership society"
Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? - The Man who was Thursday
He defended the common man and his freedom; therefore he defended the institution of property and particularly defended and preached the doctrine that property to survive must be founded on so considerable a division of land and the instruments of production that widespread ownership should be the foundational institution of the state. He appreciated, of course, as all must, the immense difficulty in re-establishing property in a society which has become, as ours has, proletarian and controlled in every activity by an ever-narrowing plutocracy. He saw that the weapon to be used against this mortal state of affairs was perpetual influence by illustration and example upon the individual. It was his to change as far as might be the very lethargic mind of his fellow-citizens in these affairs. This political preoccupation of Gilbert Chesterton's was of special importance because it is the major temporal concern of our time.
The group to which he and I belonged recognized that the main social event of our generation was the destruction of freedom through the universal growth of Capitalist monopoly, and the ruin of economic independence in the mass. – Hillaire Belloc, On Chesterton.
I have been asked to republish these notes--which appeared
in a weekly paper--as a rough sketch of certain aspects of
the institution of Private Property, now so completely forgotten
amid the journalistic jubilations over Private Enterprise.
The very fact that the publicists say so much of the latter and so
little of the former is a measure of the moral tone of the times.
A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise.
But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket
is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism
and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really
preached the extension of business rather than the preservation
of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket
with some of the virtues of the pirate. The point about Communism
is that it only reforms the pickpocket by forbidding pockets.
- Chesterton, An outline of sanity
Since LI has been writing so much about Voltaire – who did so much, perhaps more than any other single figure, to produce what the Vatican lamented last week as “Christianophobia” in Europe – I thought I’d write a little about the opposite mindset. Or opposite in the common view – Belloc, who managed to find Danton a perfectly respectable Roman Catholic, might have had another view.
Chesterton’s humor is the perfect opposite of Voltaire's wit. Humor always preserves sincerity as a virtue; wit always suspects it as a hypocrisy. A few weeks ago, my friend T. bought Chesterton's Orthodoxy to read on the train to work. He sent me some good bits in a couple of emails – Chesterton always made his prose a mine from which you could extract good bits – but I felt like his excitement with the book cooled as he read it. Or was it my imagination? I know with myself, reading Chesterton is an exercise in short term reading satisfaction. I go through the same cycle reading his Father Brown stories and his essays -- they lead me on, one to the other, until suddenly I am more than crammed with Chesterton – I am slightly disgusted. I am slightly appalled. It isn’t the fullness, say, of reading too many Sherlock Holmes stories. I permanently read too many Sherlock Holmes stories when I was twelve. Now I read them less for excitement than for the calm they give me, the familiar progress, the phrases that have grooved themselves into my mind, the way in which, mysteriously, they have become like Bible parrables. The Father Brown stories, on the other hand, I forget immediately – until I read them again. Then it all leaps back rather dismayingly into life. I forget by which trick Father Brown catches his man, but I don't forget (or forgive) that it will be a trick. Perhaps that is the genius of Doyle's Watson -- he absorbs Holmes' trick into his larger astonishishment, taking the sting out of them.
A few of Chesterton’s books don’t suffer like this. The masterpiece is, of course, The Man who was Thursday. I’ve read that three or four times, and will no doubt read it again one of these days. It is completely one piece – it doesn’t exhaust itself, or the reader, with self-enclosed passages of cleverness. There’s the History of England, which Shaw so much admired. A few tracts.
I suspect that the Bush slogan of the Ownership Society came into his speechwriter’s mind from some Chestertonian/Bellocian holdouts among the Right. Neuhaus, the presiding spirit of First Things, is of the school of Chesterton. The old National Review crowd, from the sixties, was packed with Chestertonians. Gary Wills, Buckley’s discovery, was one.
But the quotes above should disabuse anybody who seriously wants to back up “compassionate conservatism” with Chesterton’s defense of private property – or Belloc’s criticism of the Servile State. The idea of the workingmen of America investing their money in equities would have appalled them. Equities were the original evil – the crack that opened between ownership and presence. When the boss is an appointee, when the owners consist of mutual funds – it is this that Chesterton condemns as piracy and pickpocketing, without the flair of pickpocketing. When Chesterton wrote, “The practical tendency of all trade and business to-day is towards big commercial combinations, often more imperial, more impersonal, more international than many a communist commonwealth-- things that are at least collective if not collectivist,” he meant it. NAFTA wouldn’t have surprised him at all, although he would have found it funny that the same people who want ever more NAFTA turn around and criticize the U.N. for abridging American sovereignty.
Chesterton and Belloc were products of the late Victorian age – an age influenced, to a point very unappreciated today, by John Ruskin. Gandhi was in the same boat. The two former writers took, from Ruskin, a highly romantic view of the Middle Ages. While Ruskin progressively lost his faith, Chesterton and Belloc discovered a whole new faith – in Roman Catholicism – which they then decided was arch-English. Or rather, Chesterton did – Belloc was always longing for the old Catholic Europe. It goes without saying that the old Catholic Europe had no place for Jews. This is an old dispute: did Belloc influence Chesterton with his anti-semitism, or was Chesterton even an anti-semite?
He was probably the last popular English writer to believe in every bit of the traditional order, down to the political disenfranchisement of women and, of course, sexual mores that St. Francis of Assisi could swear by. Even Evelyn Waugh, ever the crusty, or even crustacean, conservative had his little male flings when he was at Oxford, and seemingly looked back with a becoming lack of shock at the whole thing.
D. Keith Mano, a novelist whose work is at present oddly neglected, wrote an essay about Chesterton, once, in which he quoted the passage from The Man Who was Thursday with which we started this post. The whole passage goes: "Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? ... So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter." For Mano, that was the most glorious creed of conservatism imaginable. In certain moods, LI would subscribe to it too. But we would insert a codicil about the particular order in question that would be very un-Chestertonian. You see, I am the real man who would be Thursday.
Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? - The Man who was Thursday
He defended the common man and his freedom; therefore he defended the institution of property and particularly defended and preached the doctrine that property to survive must be founded on so considerable a division of land and the instruments of production that widespread ownership should be the foundational institution of the state. He appreciated, of course, as all must, the immense difficulty in re-establishing property in a society which has become, as ours has, proletarian and controlled in every activity by an ever-narrowing plutocracy. He saw that the weapon to be used against this mortal state of affairs was perpetual influence by illustration and example upon the individual. It was his to change as far as might be the very lethargic mind of his fellow-citizens in these affairs. This political preoccupation of Gilbert Chesterton's was of special importance because it is the major temporal concern of our time.
The group to which he and I belonged recognized that the main social event of our generation was the destruction of freedom through the universal growth of Capitalist monopoly, and the ruin of economic independence in the mass. – Hillaire Belloc, On Chesterton.
I have been asked to republish these notes--which appeared
in a weekly paper--as a rough sketch of certain aspects of
the institution of Private Property, now so completely forgotten
amid the journalistic jubilations over Private Enterprise.
The very fact that the publicists say so much of the latter and so
little of the former is a measure of the moral tone of the times.
A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise.
But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket
is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism
and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really
preached the extension of business rather than the preservation
of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket
with some of the virtues of the pirate. The point about Communism
is that it only reforms the pickpocket by forbidding pockets.
- Chesterton, An outline of sanity
Since LI has been writing so much about Voltaire – who did so much, perhaps more than any other single figure, to produce what the Vatican lamented last week as “Christianophobia” in Europe – I thought I’d write a little about the opposite mindset. Or opposite in the common view – Belloc, who managed to find Danton a perfectly respectable Roman Catholic, might have had another view.
Chesterton’s humor is the perfect opposite of Voltaire's wit. Humor always preserves sincerity as a virtue; wit always suspects it as a hypocrisy. A few weeks ago, my friend T. bought Chesterton's Orthodoxy to read on the train to work. He sent me some good bits in a couple of emails – Chesterton always made his prose a mine from which you could extract good bits – but I felt like his excitement with the book cooled as he read it. Or was it my imagination? I know with myself, reading Chesterton is an exercise in short term reading satisfaction. I go through the same cycle reading his Father Brown stories and his essays -- they lead me on, one to the other, until suddenly I am more than crammed with Chesterton – I am slightly disgusted. I am slightly appalled. It isn’t the fullness, say, of reading too many Sherlock Holmes stories. I permanently read too many Sherlock Holmes stories when I was twelve. Now I read them less for excitement than for the calm they give me, the familiar progress, the phrases that have grooved themselves into my mind, the way in which, mysteriously, they have become like Bible parrables. The Father Brown stories, on the other hand, I forget immediately – until I read them again. Then it all leaps back rather dismayingly into life. I forget by which trick Father Brown catches his man, but I don't forget (or forgive) that it will be a trick. Perhaps that is the genius of Doyle's Watson -- he absorbs Holmes' trick into his larger astonishishment, taking the sting out of them.
A few of Chesterton’s books don’t suffer like this. The masterpiece is, of course, The Man who was Thursday. I’ve read that three or four times, and will no doubt read it again one of these days. It is completely one piece – it doesn’t exhaust itself, or the reader, with self-enclosed passages of cleverness. There’s the History of England, which Shaw so much admired. A few tracts.
I suspect that the Bush slogan of the Ownership Society came into his speechwriter’s mind from some Chestertonian/Bellocian holdouts among the Right. Neuhaus, the presiding spirit of First Things, is of the school of Chesterton. The old National Review crowd, from the sixties, was packed with Chestertonians. Gary Wills, Buckley’s discovery, was one.
But the quotes above should disabuse anybody who seriously wants to back up “compassionate conservatism” with Chesterton’s defense of private property – or Belloc’s criticism of the Servile State. The idea of the workingmen of America investing their money in equities would have appalled them. Equities were the original evil – the crack that opened between ownership and presence. When the boss is an appointee, when the owners consist of mutual funds – it is this that Chesterton condemns as piracy and pickpocketing, without the flair of pickpocketing. When Chesterton wrote, “The practical tendency of all trade and business to-day is towards big commercial combinations, often more imperial, more impersonal, more international than many a communist commonwealth-- things that are at least collective if not collectivist,” he meant it. NAFTA wouldn’t have surprised him at all, although he would have found it funny that the same people who want ever more NAFTA turn around and criticize the U.N. for abridging American sovereignty.
Chesterton and Belloc were products of the late Victorian age – an age influenced, to a point very unappreciated today, by John Ruskin. Gandhi was in the same boat. The two former writers took, from Ruskin, a highly romantic view of the Middle Ages. While Ruskin progressively lost his faith, Chesterton and Belloc discovered a whole new faith – in Roman Catholicism – which they then decided was arch-English. Or rather, Chesterton did – Belloc was always longing for the old Catholic Europe. It goes without saying that the old Catholic Europe had no place for Jews. This is an old dispute: did Belloc influence Chesterton with his anti-semitism, or was Chesterton even an anti-semite?
He was probably the last popular English writer to believe in every bit of the traditional order, down to the political disenfranchisement of women and, of course, sexual mores that St. Francis of Assisi could swear by. Even Evelyn Waugh, ever the crusty, or even crustacean, conservative had his little male flings when he was at Oxford, and seemingly looked back with a becoming lack of shock at the whole thing.
D. Keith Mano, a novelist whose work is at present oddly neglected, wrote an essay about Chesterton, once, in which he quoted the passage from The Man Who was Thursday with which we started this post. The whole passage goes: "Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? ... So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter." For Mano, that was the most glorious creed of conservatism imaginable. In certain moods, LI would subscribe to it too. But we would insert a codicil about the particular order in question that would be very un-Chestertonian. You see, I am the real man who would be Thursday.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
During his visit, Mr. Bush wore a specially tailored Marine tanker jacket, the all-purpose, all-weather jacket for officers and enlisted men, said Maj. Jason Johnston, a Marine spokesman. Mr. Bush's jacket had custom touches like his name and designation as commander in chief embroidered across the front. -- New York Times story, Bush visits Camp Pendleton.
LI just half listened to another NPR broadcast about intelligence reform. While we would like to investigate this thing in depth and come up with a meaty beaty analysis for our readers, basically we find the whole thing boring, stupid and vapid. We know, from the hearings last year, what happened in 2001:
1. neither the government nor the airlines wanted to come up with the money to finance a security system at airports;
2. various people in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies sniffed out that something was wrong, and were stifled by their higher ups;
3. in spite of not being in the domestic pipeline, D.C. was bathed with information from the CIA that an attack was coming, culminating with a warning to Bush in August, 2001, which he ignominiously ignored.
Knowing this, the public went ahead and elected the inept and dishonest Bush to take another whack at the American pinata. No reform is going to replace the man who, both pre and post 9/11, simply doesn’t get terrorism. The idea of reforming the intelligence agencies around him has the appropriate tone of the way you arrange your household when you have an alcoholic father – you try to find ways to keep it going in spite of him.
One wonders how OBL is assessing his last four years. A state of the disunion address from him, this January, would be interesting. He’s done well. True, opposing a gang composed of people who have wrapped their essential ineptness in ideological anger isn’t that difficult. OBL can look back with satisfaction at destroying 3 thousand some American lives without suffering too heavily for it. He’s extended his operations over the past four years too, from Morocco to Indonesia. Saudi Arabia is an on again, off again thing – a matter of getting the right personnel.
As for his home situation, that’s pretty comfortable. The trail has gone “cold” on him, according to his former ally, Musharraf. OBL benefits from the peculiar dirtiness of the history between Pakistan and the U.S. Since the 70s, when Americans supported genocide in Bangladesh, we have been in bed with the worst of Pakistan’s society – the perpetual putschists, the death squad intelligence service, etc., etc. – putting them in contact with the worst of our society – the CIA veteran, the Republican party operative – and have produced a synergy that keeps finding its equilibrium on lower and lower levels. That the Pakistan president could triumphally tour this country while basically lying through his teeth about Al Qaeda and the Pakistan’s government extensive collaboration with the spread of nuclear weaponry know how is a nice symbol of where things stand, vis a vis the ‘war on terror’ committed to by the Bush republic, at the end of 2004.
It isn’t that al qaeda is a particularly smart organization – the dream of actually implementing the al qaeda idea in some national territory is still distant, and would no doubt shatter in reality. For every move that al qaeda has made, its real enemy – the “shi’ite crescent’, as the King of Jordan put it in the WP this morning – has made two or three. It seems that al qaeda is fated to be the best man, and never the bridegroom. Also, al qaeda has had to bear costs itself over the last four years. You don’t run a successful terrorist organization without costs. That the Taliban was knocked out of Afghanistan is a cost, for instance; but not one that probably bothers OBL too much. Allies – the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Sudan – come and go. In a sense, he’s landed in a better situation – he’s protected by a country that has both subcontracted the ‘hunt’ for him and made it clear that it has no interest in actually capturing him. When the hunt for you is monopolized by a timid and disinclined hunter, you can start thinking of other things than mere survival.
LI just half listened to another NPR broadcast about intelligence reform. While we would like to investigate this thing in depth and come up with a meaty beaty analysis for our readers, basically we find the whole thing boring, stupid and vapid. We know, from the hearings last year, what happened in 2001:
1. neither the government nor the airlines wanted to come up with the money to finance a security system at airports;
2. various people in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies sniffed out that something was wrong, and were stifled by their higher ups;
3. in spite of not being in the domestic pipeline, D.C. was bathed with information from the CIA that an attack was coming, culminating with a warning to Bush in August, 2001, which he ignominiously ignored.
Knowing this, the public went ahead and elected the inept and dishonest Bush to take another whack at the American pinata. No reform is going to replace the man who, both pre and post 9/11, simply doesn’t get terrorism. The idea of reforming the intelligence agencies around him has the appropriate tone of the way you arrange your household when you have an alcoholic father – you try to find ways to keep it going in spite of him.
One wonders how OBL is assessing his last four years. A state of the disunion address from him, this January, would be interesting. He’s done well. True, opposing a gang composed of people who have wrapped their essential ineptness in ideological anger isn’t that difficult. OBL can look back with satisfaction at destroying 3 thousand some American lives without suffering too heavily for it. He’s extended his operations over the past four years too, from Morocco to Indonesia. Saudi Arabia is an on again, off again thing – a matter of getting the right personnel.
As for his home situation, that’s pretty comfortable. The trail has gone “cold” on him, according to his former ally, Musharraf. OBL benefits from the peculiar dirtiness of the history between Pakistan and the U.S. Since the 70s, when Americans supported genocide in Bangladesh, we have been in bed with the worst of Pakistan’s society – the perpetual putschists, the death squad intelligence service, etc., etc. – putting them in contact with the worst of our society – the CIA veteran, the Republican party operative – and have produced a synergy that keeps finding its equilibrium on lower and lower levels. That the Pakistan president could triumphally tour this country while basically lying through his teeth about Al Qaeda and the Pakistan’s government extensive collaboration with the spread of nuclear weaponry know how is a nice symbol of where things stand, vis a vis the ‘war on terror’ committed to by the Bush republic, at the end of 2004.
It isn’t that al qaeda is a particularly smart organization – the dream of actually implementing the al qaeda idea in some national territory is still distant, and would no doubt shatter in reality. For every move that al qaeda has made, its real enemy – the “shi’ite crescent’, as the King of Jordan put it in the WP this morning – has made two or three. It seems that al qaeda is fated to be the best man, and never the bridegroom. Also, al qaeda has had to bear costs itself over the last four years. You don’t run a successful terrorist organization without costs. That the Taliban was knocked out of Afghanistan is a cost, for instance; but not one that probably bothers OBL too much. Allies – the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Sudan – come and go. In a sense, he’s landed in a better situation – he’s protected by a country that has both subcontracted the ‘hunt’ for him and made it clear that it has no interest in actually capturing him. When the hunt for you is monopolized by a timid and disinclined hunter, you can start thinking of other things than mere survival.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
To return to the subject of the fanatic…
What LI finds fascinating is that the role played by the figure of the bigot or the fanatic in the Enlightenment is played, now, by the fascist. The fascist, in one sense, is useful to the degree that he doesn’t exist. In Italy, where there is a real fascist party, or in France, where La Pen plays with the fascist label, the cry of fascist has a different sense than it has in the U.S. The lack of existence, here, opens up a linguistic opportunity – such figures can become pure figures of discourse, filled in by the play of the language. Not that there are no criteria or determinants for creating a “fascist” – myth, in Barthes sense, is never that liberated from the social whole. But the strictures are those that adhere in the composition of a fiction – that is, the fascist can be reconstituted, his elements can be rearranged, new properties can be attributed to him, others can be erased, and so on. It is even possible to create fictions that use him – for instance, the absurd hybrid, Islamofascist, can carry a real weight. This is because nothing like an Islamofascist exists. In a sense, this inaugurates the real work of imperialism – the imperialist only fights those enemies over whom he first asserts the ethnographic primacy that consists in assuming a complete right to the Name. To plant your flag on the other’s name is the essential step in any conquest. The Spanish conquistadors made this a ritual – they would read, in Latin and Spanish, an official document claiming an area before some gathering of uncomprehending natives in order to legalize their theft. An amusing parallel occurrence: Jay Garner, in the first month of the occupation, gathering various American approved Iraqi politicians together and cobbling together some document and then comparing this bogus process to the "Convention of 1787" (see LI post, Tuesday, April 15, 2003).
Amazing how the pattern persists. In Western eyes, renaming officially negates, with all the sad comedy of an obsessive compulsive ritual, the history of the territories the imperialist claims.
Americans are especially good at negating the history of their various enemies, because they have applied the same operation so often and so consistently to their own history. Since our short term memory loss country only retains a few fragments of history at all, we use those fragments to refer, systematically, to other cultures and territories until we think we are talking about them the way they talk about themselves. Read any NYT report from Baghdad over the past two years for a comic instantiation of this national quirk.
…
On the Left, it is fascinating to see the constellation of authoritarian elements that collect around the Republican party transformed into the figure of the fascist by a conventional rhetorical transformation that leaps from analogy to political ontology.
While we think this kind of verbal aggression is intrinsic to the rules of polemic, we also think that these figures are strategically limited. Which gets us back to the career of the fanatic in the Enlightenment, for the fanatic – unlike the fascist – was a successful invention.
Voltaire was the great inventer of the figures of the Enlightenment polemic. In the fight against the power of the aristocracy and the church, his invention of the fanatic – not that he was alone, but he was the most persistant and creative purveyor of the figure -- did incalculable and wonderful damage to the ancien regime. To see how it gained its force, and how it gradually lost it, is a case study in rhetorical/political strategy.
It is also useful since the fanatic (in the Voltarian sense) is obviously on the rise in Red State America.
What LI finds fascinating is that the role played by the figure of the bigot or the fanatic in the Enlightenment is played, now, by the fascist. The fascist, in one sense, is useful to the degree that he doesn’t exist. In Italy, where there is a real fascist party, or in France, where La Pen plays with the fascist label, the cry of fascist has a different sense than it has in the U.S. The lack of existence, here, opens up a linguistic opportunity – such figures can become pure figures of discourse, filled in by the play of the language. Not that there are no criteria or determinants for creating a “fascist” – myth, in Barthes sense, is never that liberated from the social whole. But the strictures are those that adhere in the composition of a fiction – that is, the fascist can be reconstituted, his elements can be rearranged, new properties can be attributed to him, others can be erased, and so on. It is even possible to create fictions that use him – for instance, the absurd hybrid, Islamofascist, can carry a real weight. This is because nothing like an Islamofascist exists. In a sense, this inaugurates the real work of imperialism – the imperialist only fights those enemies over whom he first asserts the ethnographic primacy that consists in assuming a complete right to the Name. To plant your flag on the other’s name is the essential step in any conquest. The Spanish conquistadors made this a ritual – they would read, in Latin and Spanish, an official document claiming an area before some gathering of uncomprehending natives in order to legalize their theft. An amusing parallel occurrence: Jay Garner, in the first month of the occupation, gathering various American approved Iraqi politicians together and cobbling together some document and then comparing this bogus process to the "Convention of 1787" (see LI post, Tuesday, April 15, 2003).
Amazing how the pattern persists. In Western eyes, renaming officially negates, with all the sad comedy of an obsessive compulsive ritual, the history of the territories the imperialist claims.
Americans are especially good at negating the history of their various enemies, because they have applied the same operation so often and so consistently to their own history. Since our short term memory loss country only retains a few fragments of history at all, we use those fragments to refer, systematically, to other cultures and territories until we think we are talking about them the way they talk about themselves. Read any NYT report from Baghdad over the past two years for a comic instantiation of this national quirk.
…
On the Left, it is fascinating to see the constellation of authoritarian elements that collect around the Republican party transformed into the figure of the fascist by a conventional rhetorical transformation that leaps from analogy to political ontology.
While we think this kind of verbal aggression is intrinsic to the rules of polemic, we also think that these figures are strategically limited. Which gets us back to the career of the fanatic in the Enlightenment, for the fanatic – unlike the fascist – was a successful invention.
Voltaire was the great inventer of the figures of the Enlightenment polemic. In the fight against the power of the aristocracy and the church, his invention of the fanatic – not that he was alone, but he was the most persistant and creative purveyor of the figure -- did incalculable and wonderful damage to the ancien regime. To see how it gained its force, and how it gradually lost it, is a case study in rhetorical/political strategy.
It is also useful since the fanatic (in the Voltarian sense) is obviously on the rise in Red State America.
Monday, December 06, 2004
LI does not own a tv. We haven’t for years. But we keep up as we can – watching the Simpsons in bars, spending Christmas vacation with relatives, soaking up Seinfeld re-runs, and the like.
From this amateur’s glance at tv, we have to rate Fox highly. Surely, the Simpsons is the best thing ever put on FCC regulated airwaves. That Fox news, and the man who owns Fox, strike us as comically ignorant (the former) and like Goldfinger, only with a less elevated sense of morals (the latter), just shows that capitalist enterprises are full of surprising interstices.
So we were cheered that Fox is challenging the FCC about the fine given to the network for showing some digitally obscured strippers being covered with whip cream on some show – Millionaire Bachelor Parties or something. This is one battle we hope Fox wins. We are solidly behind whip cream on strippers – except of course if the strippers have allergic reactions to whip cream, in which case we are sure there are soy milk substitutes that will do.
On the other hand, there is an irritating strain among progressives that is not all for putting whip cream on strippers. Not, that is, unless it is for the sake of art. Ah, art. Robert Scheer ‘s column in the LA Times Sunday castigates the American public for telling Gallup pollsters that they don’t go for sex, strippers, whip cream, or anything that doesn’t have bunny rabbits and suitably neutered angels in it, by a 70% margin. Or at least that is what I make of Scheer’s first graf.
“What does it mean that a whopping 70% of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values? It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve.”
Scheer points out that, despite the Gallup numbers, Americans prefer Millionaire Batchelor Party to Grandmother Quilts For Abstinence, a Hallmark Hour special. This is good news. While I have expressed my skepticism about the cultural attainments of homo americanus, we think that there is something healthy about setting the channel changer to the channel with semi-nudity and heavy breathing after a workday criminally lacking in same. But Scheer doesn’t:
“On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D.H. Lawrence's exquisite depiction of Lady Chatterley's affair with her gamekeeper if he hadn't been able to find printers who valued cash over the church's approval. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity. Catering to our base desires also finds us eagerly paying for video games in which one can spend the afternoon slaughtering innocents and monsters alike, while our prime-time television is dominated by "Survivor"-style shows whose logical conclusion seems to be Piggy's execution by the mob in "Lord of the Flies."
My my, that Lawrence fella ain’t writing for TV any more? A shame. I remember his I love Lucy episodes. I particularly cherished the episode where Ricky and Fred wrestled naked in the light cast by the fire in the fireplace. Exquisite depiction, I said.
Scheer’s object is to label the evangelical set wrong, and their congregations hypocritical. The evangelicals blame liberals for Desperate Housewives, which is wrong, and the congregations watch it, which is hypocritical. We think Scheer is wrong, both in his strategy and his lack of sympathy with the great unwashed fantasies that float above the rooftops every night. By Scheer’s own reckoning, Desperate Housewives is number one even in Utah. So why should liberals disclaim the credit? Instead, liberals should welcome the evangelical charge. Yes, they should shout, we are responsible for the most charged up, sexiest tv you ever dreamt of. Give us a chance! Emmanuelle – the REAL X files – at 10! Fanny Hill’s College Days – oops, forgot that crucial digital distortion for a second! – at 11! Talk about an issue that we can ride into the White House.
Liberal culture has made sex one of the regular bourgeois pleasures. The evangelicals are right. Let them gnash their teeth in the dark. Two cheers for liberal culture.
ps -- Media week inveigled some truly timeless stats from the FCC, which has been acting like American sexual standards, circa 2004, should please Torquemada or your average Oklahoma senator, circa 1590:
"... For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation.
But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals. (The smaller total was first reported by Internet-based TV writer Jeff Jarvis; Mediaweek independently obtained the Enforcement Bureau’s calculation.)"
Well, those 23 invididuals are getting Rolls Royce treatment -- unless, of course, one considers that the fines are part of the general sliminess of a corrupt Bush administration that panders to the lowest element in the electorate. But LI considers that only a hypothesis. You understand, we are trying to be fair to the junta that rules us.
However, what about other complaints about all that indecent tv?
"The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”
What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group."
Well well. Who would have thought? Of course, Powell does have the courage, the dignity, to ignore complaints. For instance, the complaints that the FCC was rolling over like a pliant oenophile to allow media monopolies in metropolitan media markets, due to the fact that surely, all the Republican members of the FCC will find lucrative posts as members of boards of various of the major benificiaries of that permission.
From this amateur’s glance at tv, we have to rate Fox highly. Surely, the Simpsons is the best thing ever put on FCC regulated airwaves. That Fox news, and the man who owns Fox, strike us as comically ignorant (the former) and like Goldfinger, only with a less elevated sense of morals (the latter), just shows that capitalist enterprises are full of surprising interstices.
So we were cheered that Fox is challenging the FCC about the fine given to the network for showing some digitally obscured strippers being covered with whip cream on some show – Millionaire Bachelor Parties or something. This is one battle we hope Fox wins. We are solidly behind whip cream on strippers – except of course if the strippers have allergic reactions to whip cream, in which case we are sure there are soy milk substitutes that will do.
On the other hand, there is an irritating strain among progressives that is not all for putting whip cream on strippers. Not, that is, unless it is for the sake of art. Ah, art. Robert Scheer ‘s column in the LA Times Sunday castigates the American public for telling Gallup pollsters that they don’t go for sex, strippers, whip cream, or anything that doesn’t have bunny rabbits and suitably neutered angels in it, by a 70% margin. Or at least that is what I make of Scheer’s first graf.
“What does it mean that a whopping 70% of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values? It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve.”
Scheer points out that, despite the Gallup numbers, Americans prefer Millionaire Batchelor Party to Grandmother Quilts For Abstinence, a Hallmark Hour special. This is good news. While I have expressed my skepticism about the cultural attainments of homo americanus, we think that there is something healthy about setting the channel changer to the channel with semi-nudity and heavy breathing after a workday criminally lacking in same. But Scheer doesn’t:
“On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D.H. Lawrence's exquisite depiction of Lady Chatterley's affair with her gamekeeper if he hadn't been able to find printers who valued cash over the church's approval. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity. Catering to our base desires also finds us eagerly paying for video games in which one can spend the afternoon slaughtering innocents and monsters alike, while our prime-time television is dominated by "Survivor"-style shows whose logical conclusion seems to be Piggy's execution by the mob in "Lord of the Flies."
My my, that Lawrence fella ain’t writing for TV any more? A shame. I remember his I love Lucy episodes. I particularly cherished the episode where Ricky and Fred wrestled naked in the light cast by the fire in the fireplace. Exquisite depiction, I said.
Scheer’s object is to label the evangelical set wrong, and their congregations hypocritical. The evangelicals blame liberals for Desperate Housewives, which is wrong, and the congregations watch it, which is hypocritical. We think Scheer is wrong, both in his strategy and his lack of sympathy with the great unwashed fantasies that float above the rooftops every night. By Scheer’s own reckoning, Desperate Housewives is number one even in Utah. So why should liberals disclaim the credit? Instead, liberals should welcome the evangelical charge. Yes, they should shout, we are responsible for the most charged up, sexiest tv you ever dreamt of. Give us a chance! Emmanuelle – the REAL X files – at 10! Fanny Hill’s College Days – oops, forgot that crucial digital distortion for a second! – at 11! Talk about an issue that we can ride into the White House.
Liberal culture has made sex one of the regular bourgeois pleasures. The evangelicals are right. Let them gnash their teeth in the dark. Two cheers for liberal culture.
ps -- Media week inveigled some truly timeless stats from the FCC, which has been acting like American sexual standards, circa 2004, should please Torquemada or your average Oklahoma senator, circa 1590:
"... For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation.
But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals. (The smaller total was first reported by Internet-based TV writer Jeff Jarvis; Mediaweek independently obtained the Enforcement Bureau’s calculation.)"
Well, those 23 invididuals are getting Rolls Royce treatment -- unless, of course, one considers that the fines are part of the general sliminess of a corrupt Bush administration that panders to the lowest element in the electorate. But LI considers that only a hypothesis. You understand, we are trying to be fair to the junta that rules us.
However, what about other complaints about all that indecent tv?
"The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”
What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group."
Well well. Who would have thought? Of course, Powell does have the courage, the dignity, to ignore complaints. For instance, the complaints that the FCC was rolling over like a pliant oenophile to allow media monopolies in metropolitan media markets, due to the fact that surely, all the Republican members of the FCC will find lucrative posts as members of boards of various of the major benificiaries of that permission.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
According to Charles Beard, George Bancroft was the historian who was to blame for the theory that the U.S. was founded as a particularly religious nation.. Bancroft, who studied under Schleiermacher in Germany in the 1820s, wrote a history of the formation of the U.S. Constitution in his dotage, the 1880s, in which he attributed the outline of it to the busybodyiness of the divine mind. Apparently, the divine mind couldn’t resist sticking its nose into the affairs of a bunch of provincial planters and middlemen in the rum tradde. By the 1880s, such an interpretation was congenial to the respectable classes, and they swallowed it down with the alacrity that their ancestors imbibed the aforesaid rum.. Beard, writing in the 1930s, attributed the Constitution to more mundane forces, i.e. economics. Although Beard is not popular at the moment, his hypothesis seems much more sensible, even if not sufficient.
At about the time Bancroft was injecting a mendacious and nauseating piety in the National story, Josiah Royce was starting his career. Royce is probably the most original religious philosopher ever to be hatched in these states. Unlike the man who had been blinded by the perfumed pettifogeries of romantic Protestantism when a mere pup, Royce had to struggle with tougher philosophical currents – pragmatism, Darwinism and the like – which disinclined him to merely, patriotically, dribble. In his clear eyed sense of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century (and the U.S. was nothing if it wasn’t a quintessential product of that century) what stand outs is the loss of the inner life: In this passage, he compares the century of the philosophes to that of Spinoza:
“When I undertake to describe such a time, 1 therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious but profound sort of piety which we were describing in the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. His world bad but one sublime feature in it, one element of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the divine substance. But then this one element was enough, from his point of view, to insure an elevated and untroubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and that of the author of the "Imitation of Christ." This sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philosophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people of that time want is more light and fewer unproved assumptions. As against the earlier seventeenth-century thinkers, who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are characterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza bad relied. In other words, whereas the men of the middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason Alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesitatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms? Can you permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the mere creature of the assumptions with which your system happened to start ? The men of the new age are not ready to answer " Yes " to such questions. They must reflect, they must peer into reason itself. They must ask, Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought of the time is driven more and more, as we have already said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the exclusive study of the physical universe. The whole range of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all something suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness of the seventeenth century is still in the air ; but Spinoza's sense of sublimity is gone.”
From the enlightenment point of view, of course, it all looks quite different. It looks like the re-discovery of happiness – and if sublimity is lost in the exchange, good riddance. Actually, though, sublimity, within the bounds of pleasure, wasn’t so much expelled as given a sort of reservation, composed of artfully arranged grottos and Pirenesi perspectives and, among certain chateaux, Sadean orgies. The eighteenth century made possible the respectable society of the nineteenth centiury. The nineteenth century returned the favor by systematically distoriting, censoring, and being shocked at their forebears.
The discovery of happinesss was cast as a“rediscovery”, given the Enlightenment obsession with the (mostly fictitious) pre-suppositions of the ancients. The Enlightenment thinkers needed this legitimating fiction, this alter image against which they could judge Christianity. This is why the figure of the fanatic was so important for the philosophes. Diderot condensces the Enlightenment thematic to its essential elements when he remarks, ‘however difficult it is to discern the limits that separate the empire of faith from that of reason, the philosopher does not confound the objects; without aspiring to the chimeric honor of conciliating them, as a good citizen, he has for them both attachment and respect. From philosophy to impiety, it is as far as from religion to fanaticism. But from fanaticism to barbarism, there is only a step.”
PS -- We have one more post on the figure of the fanatic in Voltaire, and a letter from our correspondent T. For a fascinating discussion of the migration of the vocabulary of enthusiasm to literary criticism in the 18th century, see this essay by Jon Mee. We can't resist excerpting a paragraph:
"Geoffrey Hartman has traced the origins of modern literary criticism in English to a tradition of "civility" designed as a defense against what he calls "enthusiasm, religious or secular, private or collective" (177). Using Addison and Steele's essays for the Spectator as his primary example, he suggests that "literature" came into being at the turn of the eighteenth century as a category defined against the intemperate ranting and preaching of hacks and evangelists. Hartman's primary concern is to defend the literary essay as such against the incursions of latter-day hacks and evangelists among whom, I fear, he would number myself. For what I do in this essay is to treat Hartman's historical claims about the relationship between enthusiasm and literature seriously and examine their significance for a later period as a form of cultural control. By 1735, the Gentleman's Magazine could publish a definition of enthusiasm in terms of "any exorbitant monstrous Appetite of the human Mind" (Grubstreet Journal 203). The secularization with which Irlam is concerned can be witnessed in such definitions, but it is not a transformation that makes the term safe. Rather, the term retains the association with the vulgar passions of the crowd, and the confusions of appetites with profound feeling. Two years later, the same magazine reported a parliamentary speech confirming that "the lowest Class of People [...] have, generally speaking a turn to Enthusiasm, and so strong is the Influence, such is the force of Delusion, that they can work themselves up to a firm Persuasion and thorough belief that any Mischief they are able to do, is not only lawful but laudable" ("An Account" 458). For the Romantic period, whether in its religious or secular forms, enthusiasm remained dangerously intertwined with the idea of the being transported into the amorphous and unstable hyper-sociability of the crowd."
Embedding 'enthusiasm' in class conflict works, to an extent, for England. But it doesn't for France. What's missing in France are the class "go betweens' -- the dissenting ministers. In the place of England's Richard Prices, in France you get Denis Diderots.
And -- on the topic of using religion to legitimate a configuration of state power -- LI suggests that the reader go to the Constitution site and compare such English declarations as that of Charles II renouncing the intention of prosecuting puritans, or the declaration of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual that defended the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England, and the rejection of James II. If you want to know what a real specific religious reference looks like, look at a phrase like "Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom..."
Jefferson's "nature's God" is, by comparison, a relatively benign gaseous substance, with the same relationship to the Protestant God as Mr. Priestly's recently discovered Oxygen had to Phlogistan.
At about the time Bancroft was injecting a mendacious and nauseating piety in the National story, Josiah Royce was starting his career. Royce is probably the most original religious philosopher ever to be hatched in these states. Unlike the man who had been blinded by the perfumed pettifogeries of romantic Protestantism when a mere pup, Royce had to struggle with tougher philosophical currents – pragmatism, Darwinism and the like – which disinclined him to merely, patriotically, dribble. In his clear eyed sense of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century (and the U.S. was nothing if it wasn’t a quintessential product of that century) what stand outs is the loss of the inner life: In this passage, he compares the century of the philosophes to that of Spinoza:
“When I undertake to describe such a time, 1 therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious but profound sort of piety which we were describing in the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. His world bad but one sublime feature in it, one element of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the divine substance. But then this one element was enough, from his point of view, to insure an elevated and untroubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and that of the author of the "Imitation of Christ." This sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philosophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people of that time want is more light and fewer unproved assumptions. As against the earlier seventeenth-century thinkers, who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are characterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza bad relied. In other words, whereas the men of the middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason Alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesitatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms? Can you permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the mere creature of the assumptions with which your system happened to start ? The men of the new age are not ready to answer " Yes " to such questions. They must reflect, they must peer into reason itself. They must ask, Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought of the time is driven more and more, as we have already said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the exclusive study of the physical universe. The whole range of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all something suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness of the seventeenth century is still in the air ; but Spinoza's sense of sublimity is gone.”
From the enlightenment point of view, of course, it all looks quite different. It looks like the re-discovery of happiness – and if sublimity is lost in the exchange, good riddance. Actually, though, sublimity, within the bounds of pleasure, wasn’t so much expelled as given a sort of reservation, composed of artfully arranged grottos and Pirenesi perspectives and, among certain chateaux, Sadean orgies. The eighteenth century made possible the respectable society of the nineteenth centiury. The nineteenth century returned the favor by systematically distoriting, censoring, and being shocked at their forebears.
The discovery of happinesss was cast as a“rediscovery”, given the Enlightenment obsession with the (mostly fictitious) pre-suppositions of the ancients. The Enlightenment thinkers needed this legitimating fiction, this alter image against which they could judge Christianity. This is why the figure of the fanatic was so important for the philosophes. Diderot condensces the Enlightenment thematic to its essential elements when he remarks, ‘however difficult it is to discern the limits that separate the empire of faith from that of reason, the philosopher does not confound the objects; without aspiring to the chimeric honor of conciliating them, as a good citizen, he has for them both attachment and respect. From philosophy to impiety, it is as far as from religion to fanaticism. But from fanaticism to barbarism, there is only a step.”
PS -- We have one more post on the figure of the fanatic in Voltaire, and a letter from our correspondent T. For a fascinating discussion of the migration of the vocabulary of enthusiasm to literary criticism in the 18th century, see this essay by Jon Mee. We can't resist excerpting a paragraph:
"Geoffrey Hartman has traced the origins of modern literary criticism in English to a tradition of "civility" designed as a defense against what he calls "enthusiasm, religious or secular, private or collective" (177). Using Addison and Steele's essays for the Spectator as his primary example, he suggests that "literature" came into being at the turn of the eighteenth century as a category defined against the intemperate ranting and preaching of hacks and evangelists. Hartman's primary concern is to defend the literary essay as such against the incursions of latter-day hacks and evangelists among whom, I fear, he would number myself. For what I do in this essay is to treat Hartman's historical claims about the relationship between enthusiasm and literature seriously and examine their significance for a later period as a form of cultural control. By 1735, the Gentleman's Magazine could publish a definition of enthusiasm in terms of "any exorbitant monstrous Appetite of the human Mind" (Grubstreet Journal 203). The secularization with which Irlam is concerned can be witnessed in such definitions, but it is not a transformation that makes the term safe. Rather, the term retains the association with the vulgar passions of the crowd, and the confusions of appetites with profound feeling. Two years later, the same magazine reported a parliamentary speech confirming that "the lowest Class of People [...] have, generally speaking a turn to Enthusiasm, and so strong is the Influence, such is the force of Delusion, that they can work themselves up to a firm Persuasion and thorough belief that any Mischief they are able to do, is not only lawful but laudable" ("An Account" 458). For the Romantic period, whether in its religious or secular forms, enthusiasm remained dangerously intertwined with the idea of the being transported into the amorphous and unstable hyper-sociability of the crowd."
Embedding 'enthusiasm' in class conflict works, to an extent, for England. But it doesn't for France. What's missing in France are the class "go betweens' -- the dissenting ministers. In the place of England's Richard Prices, in France you get Denis Diderots.
And -- on the topic of using religion to legitimate a configuration of state power -- LI suggests that the reader go to the Constitution site and compare such English declarations as that of Charles II renouncing the intention of prosecuting puritans, or the declaration of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual that defended the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England, and the rejection of James II. If you want to know what a real specific religious reference looks like, look at a phrase like "Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom..."
Jefferson's "nature's God" is, by comparison, a relatively benign gaseous substance, with the same relationship to the Protestant God as Mr. Priestly's recently discovered Oxygen had to Phlogistan.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
The Bush era is a strange amalgam of conservative beliefs that have their roots in Latin American juntas rather than British toryism. One of the beliefs that is sadly lacking is the belief in a free market. If the Bush people actually believed that currencies are subject to market pressure, they would be trembling in their beds. Why? Reading the NYT story, today, about the Japanese and Chinese position in American dollars explains why.
Intro grafs:
“As Americans embark on another season of debt-supported holiday spending, they might want to give thanks that Masatsugu Asakawa is still buying in America, too.
Mr. Asakawa, 46, is the top official at the Finance Ministry here responsible for managing the largest portfolio of United States government securities in the world, worth a staggering $720 billion. As the dollar has slumped this fall, many investors have started to worry that Mr. Asakawa and his counterparts elsewhere in Asia will be tempted to pare their holdings, perhaps causing the currency to plunge much further and setting off a round of interest rate increases in the United States that could send the global economy into a tailspin.”
Basically, America has been playing a con game with Japan. There’s a tradition here. Supposedly, in the early nineties, when an investment bank wanted to make a quick killing, it would devise some truly gross financial instrument – some derivative Frankenstein compounded of options on a peso-baht ratio or other equally mad bets – and stuff them down the throats of Japanese bankers. What did Japanese bankers get out of it? They were able to disguise their enormous losses, the result of the collapse of the Japanese bubble, through shifting the figures, by way of options, so that they didn’t appear on the accounting ledgers as such. However, you can only disguise reality for so long.
Con game might not actually capture the flavor of this. I'm reminded of the scene in Goodfellas where the owner of a restaurant goes to see a capo about receiving protection for his place. The owner's idea is that the capo should get a piece of the restaurant -- a tribute, out of respect. The owner takes it -- his men start ripping off the restaurant big time -- the owner can't pay his legitimate bills -- and the wiseguys end up torching the place for the insurance.
That, in abbreviated form, is Bush's fiscal policy.
Perhaps, as we watch the other legacies of WWII being destroyed under Bush – social security, education loans, the whole system of entitlements that have made life better in America for three generations – the irony is that we can afford to do it because of the most lasting WWII legacy – Japan’s semi-colonized status. Even Italy, at the end of the Cold War, experienced a profound shift in its governing structure. But Japan is still ruled by the same old oligarchy that the Americans vetted during the occupation, and that oligarchy has the same principles it did in 1950: please the Americans in order to stay in power.
Supporting the Americans is one thing, but markets are another. There is no way that this is going to continue:
“For all the interest in the other players, currency markets remain focused on Japan, which has aggressively bought dollars, doubling its investment in Treasuries over the last two years. During a 15-month period that ended in March, the Japanese government bought $340 billion of dollar-denominated securities with its yen. The buying spree so stunned speculators that Japan has not had to intervene in the markets since.
But now with Japan's huge stake in the dollar losing value, the question is, What will Tokyo do next?
The problem for Japan is that it is in so deep that to a large degree it is chained to its American debtor.
"Imagine that tomorrow people hear, 'Hey, Japan has decided to divert from U.S. dollars to euros,' " Mr. Asakawa said. "That would create a hugely undesirable impact on the U.S. Treasury market, and we have no intention at all to make an unfortunate impact on the U.S. Treasury market."
This is the kind of situation set up for currency traders to bet against. As the dollar falls and the Bush people pay no attention (military adventurism gets you attention in D.C., not dealing with the government’s debt), the horde of the Nibelungen storesd in Japanese banks will be turning so obviously into fool’s gold that no hocus pocus or chorus of Valkyrie will disguise it.
In this climate, the Bushies want to privatize social security, which could cost, in terms of borrowing to pay out current obligations, as much as the ill fated pill bill – 500 billion?
We’ll see. At least the Bush foreign policy is coherent on both the military and economic front: unmitigated piracy. LI’s suggestion: a truth in flags law that would replace the stars and bars with the skull and crossbones.
PS -- For those interested in things Derridian, LI posted this response to Leiter's attack on Derrida at Butterflies and Wheels.
Intro grafs:
“As Americans embark on another season of debt-supported holiday spending, they might want to give thanks that Masatsugu Asakawa is still buying in America, too.
Mr. Asakawa, 46, is the top official at the Finance Ministry here responsible for managing the largest portfolio of United States government securities in the world, worth a staggering $720 billion. As the dollar has slumped this fall, many investors have started to worry that Mr. Asakawa and his counterparts elsewhere in Asia will be tempted to pare their holdings, perhaps causing the currency to plunge much further and setting off a round of interest rate increases in the United States that could send the global economy into a tailspin.”
Basically, America has been playing a con game with Japan. There’s a tradition here. Supposedly, in the early nineties, when an investment bank wanted to make a quick killing, it would devise some truly gross financial instrument – some derivative Frankenstein compounded of options on a peso-baht ratio or other equally mad bets – and stuff them down the throats of Japanese bankers. What did Japanese bankers get out of it? They were able to disguise their enormous losses, the result of the collapse of the Japanese bubble, through shifting the figures, by way of options, so that they didn’t appear on the accounting ledgers as such. However, you can only disguise reality for so long.
Con game might not actually capture the flavor of this. I'm reminded of the scene in Goodfellas where the owner of a restaurant goes to see a capo about receiving protection for his place. The owner's idea is that the capo should get a piece of the restaurant -- a tribute, out of respect. The owner takes it -- his men start ripping off the restaurant big time -- the owner can't pay his legitimate bills -- and the wiseguys end up torching the place for the insurance.
That, in abbreviated form, is Bush's fiscal policy.
Perhaps, as we watch the other legacies of WWII being destroyed under Bush – social security, education loans, the whole system of entitlements that have made life better in America for three generations – the irony is that we can afford to do it because of the most lasting WWII legacy – Japan’s semi-colonized status. Even Italy, at the end of the Cold War, experienced a profound shift in its governing structure. But Japan is still ruled by the same old oligarchy that the Americans vetted during the occupation, and that oligarchy has the same principles it did in 1950: please the Americans in order to stay in power.
Supporting the Americans is one thing, but markets are another. There is no way that this is going to continue:
“For all the interest in the other players, currency markets remain focused on Japan, which has aggressively bought dollars, doubling its investment in Treasuries over the last two years. During a 15-month period that ended in March, the Japanese government bought $340 billion of dollar-denominated securities with its yen. The buying spree so stunned speculators that Japan has not had to intervene in the markets since.
But now with Japan's huge stake in the dollar losing value, the question is, What will Tokyo do next?
The problem for Japan is that it is in so deep that to a large degree it is chained to its American debtor.
"Imagine that tomorrow people hear, 'Hey, Japan has decided to divert from U.S. dollars to euros,' " Mr. Asakawa said. "That would create a hugely undesirable impact on the U.S. Treasury market, and we have no intention at all to make an unfortunate impact on the U.S. Treasury market."
This is the kind of situation set up for currency traders to bet against. As the dollar falls and the Bush people pay no attention (military adventurism gets you attention in D.C., not dealing with the government’s debt), the horde of the Nibelungen storesd in Japanese banks will be turning so obviously into fool’s gold that no hocus pocus or chorus of Valkyrie will disguise it.
In this climate, the Bushies want to privatize social security, which could cost, in terms of borrowing to pay out current obligations, as much as the ill fated pill bill – 500 billion?
We’ll see. At least the Bush foreign policy is coherent on both the military and economic front: unmitigated piracy. LI’s suggestion: a truth in flags law that would replace the stars and bars with the skull and crossbones.
PS -- For those interested in things Derridian, LI posted this response to Leiter's attack on Derrida at Butterflies and Wheels.
Friday, December 03, 2004
Our friend Paul has been on LI’s back for some time about upgrading this site. Putting in, for instance, the standard roll of links.
We resisted. LI has been around for three years and some fraction. During this time, we have done an admirable amount of linking from our posts. We admire it, at least. Most of that linking, the diligent reader will discover, is not to other blogs. This doesn’t reflect the fact that we don’t go to other blogs – we do. But, in LI’s view, the blogocentric viewpoint of the Web taken by all too many bloggers actually impoverishes the ‘surfin’ experience’. Blogs, journals, pix, stories, texts – there is an incredible diversity out there. The flora and fauna are as outlandish as were the plants and animals of the New World to the first European travelers.
However, it is time to surrender to the debile Zeitgeist. LI is going to be making some changes and trying to become more popular. There is one reason for this: November 2. LI originally wanted this site to be as caviar to hoi polloi – not to everybody’s taste. Snobbishness, for us, is not just an attitude – it’s an aesthetic imperative. But the election has left us with a sense of ulcerated alienation that has made us crave popularity the way a psycho gunman on a tower craves more moving targets.
Beyond the psychopathology, however, LI still aims to serve. So our list of links is not going to include links you probably have. If you are reading this and you don’t go to Crooked Timber, for instance, you should. It is the best blog on the web, in our opinion. Not the best written, or even the most creative, but the most consistently interesting, the one blog that we can think of that can compete with a magazine like Slate. Nor did we include the Online Library at UPenn on our list, since we presume that you know about it. Black Mask, however, which, along with a for profit download part, essentially hijacks texts from around the Net and conveniently puts them into various readable formats, is perhaps less known. We could have linked to our archive of articles at the Austin Chronicle, but that somehow didn’t appeal to us. Does any reader of LI really want MORE Roger G.?
If you have a link you want us to put in, send it to us. Use the comments section, or send it to rgathman@netzero.net.
We resisted. LI has been around for three years and some fraction. During this time, we have done an admirable amount of linking from our posts. We admire it, at least. Most of that linking, the diligent reader will discover, is not to other blogs. This doesn’t reflect the fact that we don’t go to other blogs – we do. But, in LI’s view, the blogocentric viewpoint of the Web taken by all too many bloggers actually impoverishes the ‘surfin’ experience’. Blogs, journals, pix, stories, texts – there is an incredible diversity out there. The flora and fauna are as outlandish as were the plants and animals of the New World to the first European travelers.
However, it is time to surrender to the debile Zeitgeist. LI is going to be making some changes and trying to become more popular. There is one reason for this: November 2. LI originally wanted this site to be as caviar to hoi polloi – not to everybody’s taste. Snobbishness, for us, is not just an attitude – it’s an aesthetic imperative. But the election has left us with a sense of ulcerated alienation that has made us crave popularity the way a psycho gunman on a tower craves more moving targets.
Beyond the psychopathology, however, LI still aims to serve. So our list of links is not going to include links you probably have. If you are reading this and you don’t go to Crooked Timber, for instance, you should. It is the best blog on the web, in our opinion. Not the best written, or even the most creative, but the most consistently interesting, the one blog that we can think of that can compete with a magazine like Slate. Nor did we include the Online Library at UPenn on our list, since we presume that you know about it. Black Mask, however, which, along with a for profit download part, essentially hijacks texts from around the Net and conveniently puts them into various readable formats, is perhaps less known. We could have linked to our archive of articles at the Austin Chronicle, but that somehow didn’t appeal to us. Does any reader of LI really want MORE Roger G.?
If you have a link you want us to put in, send it to us. Use the comments section, or send it to rgathman@netzero.net.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
While idling through the blogs, yesterday, I came upon a rightwing blog that referred (disapprovingly) to a news story from Alabama.
The story goes like this:
“A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."
There were further entertaining touches in the story, including Allen’s suggestion that Tennessee Williams plays be banned and his idea that, since “novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed,” the thing to do would be to “dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.”
So, I copied the article and pasted it into an email and made a few sarcastic comments and was about to send it off to a friend when I thought – what am I doing?
This is a story of a type that Mencken liked to collect for the Smart Set: cretinous Americana. Both the right and the left, on the web, love to find stories that report some aberrant act or another and pass them around. It is a genre that has, as yet, not found its Barthes.
There are several things that are interesting about this type of story.
1. It aims at a visceral response. My response to it is pre-set: well, here’s another example of what Bush America is about. Actually, I know that if Bush America was really just about bozos like Allen, it would be very easily disposed of. I also know that the sour gastric juices that constitute the Allen Politik do have a use-value for the Politik of Karl Rove. It has use-value in two ways -- first, that it exists pleases many of the Bush constituency -- and that it is put down pleases even more of the Bush constituency. One gains an advantage just by ingeniously depending on one's opponent to do the job of putting down these kinds of efforts.
2. Being visceral, the response blanks out the circumstances. In truth, Allen has proposed other anti-gay legislation, and it has failed – as the story points out. So Allen doesn’t represent the Alabama essence. He does probably represent poor, benighted Cottonville. Allen’s sensual image of burying gay books in a hole is such an obvious substitute for his own ill concealed s/m fantasies that the unconscious, here, is operating carelessly on the surface. He is going down a well travelled route, one that has been trod by many an evangelical preacher before him. It all ends up with some tawdry, blurry snapshots from some tawdry blurry hotel room featuring his naked butt and and somebody else’s. It is all so meaningless. Furthermore, part of me knows this.
3. But it is also all so mean, this sending of stories, broadcasting of stories, commenting on stories. The point of these stories is, in a sense, the opposite of the sociological sample – we know that the story doesn’t really illuminate some normal disposition of affairs, but it does light up our fantasy version of affairs – our fantasy, on the left, that Bush is really like Hitler, or the fantasy on the Right, which makes much greater use of these kinds of stories, that Liberals are really the disciples of the Marquis de Sade. When reality is used specifically to assume a substitute role, we know, we Freudians, that we are in the realm of the fetish. In the realm of the fetish, another logic rules. In this logic, the verbal is subservient to its intensity. You can see this happening in comments sections on certain blogs – the intensity of anger mounts in the counterpointing of comments in a very sexual way. It is a sort of anger jerk off.
What isn’t remarked upon enough is how important the anger jerk off is to our present state of politics. In fact, it is why American politics seems to be in a state of permanent after-burn. Where’s the old Village Voice when you need it? Where’s Norman Mailer? These are the sexual politics we just aren't talking about.
What, the question should be asked, is being substituted for what in the political logic we are tracing? It is not as evident as it first appears. For the desire I have, in the case of Allen, is that Allen’s desire be acknowledged to be the true desire of the Right. In other words, the fantasy, on my part, is that the truth about the Right is the fantasy entertained by the Right, which in turn is denied by the Right. My fantasy is about their fantasy – my desire is that they should show their desire – their differing of that desire – their denial that it is their desire – arouses a response of anger (finding its verbal equivalent in the ‘accusation’). That anger is that my desire to see the Other’s desire is thwarted by the Other – and that thwarting I take to be the strategy by which the Other intends to achieve its real desire. And what is that strategy? Seduction. And who is the seduced? Ah, the seduced is the Other’s other – not me, who sees through the false desire to the real one, but some innocent outside of me, lacking my knowledge.
When that other outside of me falls – when the other outside of me takes the bait, so to speak – my own latent identity with that other becomes a possible channel of pollution.
4. Fanaticism. I referred, in a previous post, to the essential dialectical role of the fanatic for Enlightenment thinkers. This will require another post. Which I promise I will write.
The story goes like this:
“A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."
There were further entertaining touches in the story, including Allen’s suggestion that Tennessee Williams plays be banned and his idea that, since “novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed,” the thing to do would be to “dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.”
So, I copied the article and pasted it into an email and made a few sarcastic comments and was about to send it off to a friend when I thought – what am I doing?
This is a story of a type that Mencken liked to collect for the Smart Set: cretinous Americana. Both the right and the left, on the web, love to find stories that report some aberrant act or another and pass them around. It is a genre that has, as yet, not found its Barthes.
There are several things that are interesting about this type of story.
1. It aims at a visceral response. My response to it is pre-set: well, here’s another example of what Bush America is about. Actually, I know that if Bush America was really just about bozos like Allen, it would be very easily disposed of. I also know that the sour gastric juices that constitute the Allen Politik do have a use-value for the Politik of Karl Rove. It has use-value in two ways -- first, that it exists pleases many of the Bush constituency -- and that it is put down pleases even more of the Bush constituency. One gains an advantage just by ingeniously depending on one's opponent to do the job of putting down these kinds of efforts.
2. Being visceral, the response blanks out the circumstances. In truth, Allen has proposed other anti-gay legislation, and it has failed – as the story points out. So Allen doesn’t represent the Alabama essence. He does probably represent poor, benighted Cottonville. Allen’s sensual image of burying gay books in a hole is such an obvious substitute for his own ill concealed s/m fantasies that the unconscious, here, is operating carelessly on the surface. He is going down a well travelled route, one that has been trod by many an evangelical preacher before him. It all ends up with some tawdry, blurry snapshots from some tawdry blurry hotel room featuring his naked butt and and somebody else’s. It is all so meaningless. Furthermore, part of me knows this.
3. But it is also all so mean, this sending of stories, broadcasting of stories, commenting on stories. The point of these stories is, in a sense, the opposite of the sociological sample – we know that the story doesn’t really illuminate some normal disposition of affairs, but it does light up our fantasy version of affairs – our fantasy, on the left, that Bush is really like Hitler, or the fantasy on the Right, which makes much greater use of these kinds of stories, that Liberals are really the disciples of the Marquis de Sade. When reality is used specifically to assume a substitute role, we know, we Freudians, that we are in the realm of the fetish. In the realm of the fetish, another logic rules. In this logic, the verbal is subservient to its intensity. You can see this happening in comments sections on certain blogs – the intensity of anger mounts in the counterpointing of comments in a very sexual way. It is a sort of anger jerk off.
What isn’t remarked upon enough is how important the anger jerk off is to our present state of politics. In fact, it is why American politics seems to be in a state of permanent after-burn. Where’s the old Village Voice when you need it? Where’s Norman Mailer? These are the sexual politics we just aren't talking about.
What, the question should be asked, is being substituted for what in the political logic we are tracing? It is not as evident as it first appears. For the desire I have, in the case of Allen, is that Allen’s desire be acknowledged to be the true desire of the Right. In other words, the fantasy, on my part, is that the truth about the Right is the fantasy entertained by the Right, which in turn is denied by the Right. My fantasy is about their fantasy – my desire is that they should show their desire – their differing of that desire – their denial that it is their desire – arouses a response of anger (finding its verbal equivalent in the ‘accusation’). That anger is that my desire to see the Other’s desire is thwarted by the Other – and that thwarting I take to be the strategy by which the Other intends to achieve its real desire. And what is that strategy? Seduction. And who is the seduced? Ah, the seduced is the Other’s other – not me, who sees through the false desire to the real one, but some innocent outside of me, lacking my knowledge.
When that other outside of me falls – when the other outside of me takes the bait, so to speak – my own latent identity with that other becomes a possible channel of pollution.
4. Fanaticism. I referred, in a previous post, to the essential dialectical role of the fanatic for Enlightenment thinkers. This will require another post. Which I promise I will write.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Perhaps I do not go too far when I say that, next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of improvement. It is an event which may produce a general diffusion of the principles of humanity, and become the means of setting free mankind from the shackles of superstition and tyranny, by leading them to see and know 'that nothing is fundamental but impartial enquiry, an honest mind, and virtuous practice, that state policy ought not to be applied to the support of speculative opinions and formularies of faith'. 'That the members of a civil community are confederates not subjects, and their rulers, servants not masters. And that all legitimate government consists in the dominion of equal laws made with common consent, that is, in the dominion of men over themselves, and not in the dominion of communities over communities, or of any men over other men.' – Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and The Means of making it a Benefit to the World, 1785
Perhaps nothing is as comic, in Bush America, than the idea that the United States was founded on religious principles.
Only among a people who have been taught nothing about their own history, and are proudly ignorant of anybody else’s, could an idea like this be paraded around like a circus geek, performing its astonishing feats in the outlying provinces (Alabama, Mississippi, etc.)
In fact, it is easy to see how this molding of rank prejudice into factual claims could only happen in a state like Alabama, which officially voted, in the last election, that the State has no obligation to provide an education for its citizenry, and which would certainly vote down any politician who possessed the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin “right quick.” As in so many of the Red states, the preservation of the yahoo like fantasies of the average citizen is considered to be the first duty of the government. The reality principle, whether it consists of evolution or the fact that eventually, a government has to pay for its services through taxation, is devoutly to be skirted, or even derided.
In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written, there existed no state in Europe that did not claim the sanction of being a Christian commonwealth. From the Calvinists of Geneva to the Bourbons in Paris, the legitimacy of state power was expressly dependent upon an official belief in divine history.
This is what is unique about the Declaration’s God. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The trumpet flourish of Nature’s God makes it clear from the outset that this is not the God of the fathers – this is not, in fact, God the Father at all. This is God as the ultimate variable. Freeing the populace to fill in that variable had the meaning that Richard Price, the dissenting minister we quoted above, recognized and welcomed.
Price, you will recall, was the immediate stimulus to Burke’s Considerations on the French Revolution. Under that gorgeous onslaught, Price rather disappeared, into footnote status. But during his lifetime he was connected with a network of English radicals, including Joseph Priestly, who recognized, in the features of the American Revolution, the great emergence of a secular civil society.
The break, of course, though large, retained some of the oppressive legacy of the past – notably the notion that there were such things as nature’s laws. One must remember that the Declaration faces two ways. One way is the official separation from a Christian commonwealth, Great Britain. The other way is to the official sanction on a society that imported slaves and held its territory in the very blood of the Indians it slaughtered. Here, the sanction of Nature’s Law was, a flimsy disguise for the arbitrary exercize of power.
Yet the beauty of the Declaration is the tension between the two functions it assumes. By granting human events an autonomous history, Jefferson actually losens the iron and oppressive grip of natural law. It is a breach that will only get wider as human events sweep us into an ever more human world, one from which we chase even the last God – Natura. Rather than a brooding, protective spirit, Nature can well become, as happens in the next century with Darwin, an infinite series of games.
In fact, there were hints that this was so even in 1776. Remember, that date marks not only the writing of the Declaration, but also the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which rediscovered, seventeen hundred years after St. Paul, the unknown God. This one consists of only one attribute : an invisible hand.
Perhaps nothing is as comic, in Bush America, than the idea that the United States was founded on religious principles.
Only among a people who have been taught nothing about their own history, and are proudly ignorant of anybody else’s, could an idea like this be paraded around like a circus geek, performing its astonishing feats in the outlying provinces (Alabama, Mississippi, etc.)
In fact, it is easy to see how this molding of rank prejudice into factual claims could only happen in a state like Alabama, which officially voted, in the last election, that the State has no obligation to provide an education for its citizenry, and which would certainly vote down any politician who possessed the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin “right quick.” As in so many of the Red states, the preservation of the yahoo like fantasies of the average citizen is considered to be the first duty of the government. The reality principle, whether it consists of evolution or the fact that eventually, a government has to pay for its services through taxation, is devoutly to be skirted, or even derided.
In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written, there existed no state in Europe that did not claim the sanction of being a Christian commonwealth. From the Calvinists of Geneva to the Bourbons in Paris, the legitimacy of state power was expressly dependent upon an official belief in divine history.
This is what is unique about the Declaration’s God. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The trumpet flourish of Nature’s God makes it clear from the outset that this is not the God of the fathers – this is not, in fact, God the Father at all. This is God as the ultimate variable. Freeing the populace to fill in that variable had the meaning that Richard Price, the dissenting minister we quoted above, recognized and welcomed.
Price, you will recall, was the immediate stimulus to Burke’s Considerations on the French Revolution. Under that gorgeous onslaught, Price rather disappeared, into footnote status. But during his lifetime he was connected with a network of English radicals, including Joseph Priestly, who recognized, in the features of the American Revolution, the great emergence of a secular civil society.
The break, of course, though large, retained some of the oppressive legacy of the past – notably the notion that there were such things as nature’s laws. One must remember that the Declaration faces two ways. One way is the official separation from a Christian commonwealth, Great Britain. The other way is to the official sanction on a society that imported slaves and held its territory in the very blood of the Indians it slaughtered. Here, the sanction of Nature’s Law was, a flimsy disguise for the arbitrary exercize of power.
Yet the beauty of the Declaration is the tension between the two functions it assumes. By granting human events an autonomous history, Jefferson actually losens the iron and oppressive grip of natural law. It is a breach that will only get wider as human events sweep us into an ever more human world, one from which we chase even the last God – Natura. Rather than a brooding, protective spirit, Nature can well become, as happens in the next century with Darwin, an infinite series of games.
In fact, there were hints that this was so even in 1776. Remember, that date marks not only the writing of the Declaration, but also the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which rediscovered, seventeen hundred years after St. Paul, the unknown God. This one consists of only one attribute : an invisible hand.
LI question of the day: what country harbors terrorists who openly threaten, on tv broadcasts, to kill the leader of a democratic country? What country was involved in a failed coup attempt against that country? And finally, what country benefited from the assassination of the prosecutor looking into how that coup attempt was put together?
No – this isn’t Russia and the Ukraine. This is the U.S. and Venezuela.
Christopher Hitchens, who has to keep a shred of lefty credibility in order to be included in the dreary lists of “liberal” hawks – and to get those juicy tv appearances – recently wrote, once again, about Kissinger and Chile. Apparently, Hitchens still thinks it is a bad thing for the U.S. to sponsor military coups in Latin America. Hitchens also wrote a laughable column for the Mirror about the smart guys – his buddies – around Bush. The intent of the latter column was to scoff at the famous Mirror post-election headline, “how could 53 million Americans be so dumb?” Hitchens conjures up a nightmarish vision of himself, Wolfowitz and Karl Rove, smarties all, chuckling about their Iraq caper. No doubt the cigars and brandies flowed freely. One wonders if he haa thought to ask his buddy Karl or Paul, hey, how about that coup in Caracas two years ago?
In a hit that had the old history of the twentieth century wrapped around it: Danilo Anderson, the prosecutor looking into who was behind the 2002 coup (and in particular a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy that promotes democracy (defined as government by rich people who pay international lenders back by stealing from poor people) around the world, was blown up with a bit of plastique in his car last Thursday. Funny, American papers didn’t devote the headlines to it that they have devoted to the situation in the Ukraine. Can’t imagine why.
Here’s the AP story:
“Anderson was investigating 400 people who backed an interim government that took power during the brief April 2002 coup against Chavez, who quickly returned to power. Previously, Anderson investigated an opposition mayor, eight policemen for shootings during an opposition march, and 59 dissident military officers.
Chacon asked the United States to support Venezuela's efforts against terrorism, after Chavez announced a new "Anti-Terror Plan" Saturday.
Venezuela has asked the United States to extradite three dissident military officers blamed by a Venezuelan court for bombings in early 2003 against Spanish and Colombian diplomatic missions in Caracas.”
Now, what are the chances that the U.S. is going to extradite these guys? Remember, the Bush doctrine is that a lesser power – say, Syria – that hosted a group that was televising threats to, say, assassinate Allawi would render itself therefore worthy of corrective incursion. In this country, however, according to this Newsday report, Miami tv broadcasts some wonderful stuff:
CARACAS, Venezuela - The tone was light, but the dapper comedian's words were sobering as he outlined his vision for regime change in leftist Venezuela.
"It has to start with the physical disappearance of the top dog, at a minimum," Orlando Urdaneta opined in reference to Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez. Asked who would do the disappearing, he replied: "Men with rifles and telescopic sights who do not miss."
Chavez’s government is airing Urdaneta's comments, made in an October interview on a Miami television station, to underscore its claim that Venezuelan exiles in Miami may have played a role in the car-bombing assassination Thursday night of a prosecutor probing 400 suspects in the coup that briefly unseated Chávez in 2002.
Government officials here contend the exiles are working with Cuban commando groups who in the past have launched attacks against their country in an effort to oust Chávez's mentor, Fidel Castro. They demanded a U.S. investigation of the expatriates.
Though the Venezuelan exiles often call for Chávez's ouster, and some have even claimed to have trained with Cuban militants in the Florida Everglades, U.S. officials and many political analysts say there is no hard evidence of subversion. Moreover, they note, the exiles' comments aren't necessarily more inflammatory than those made by some U.S. citizens against President George W. Bush.”
…
There are a number of anti-Chavez sites on the Net. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are not of the usual Latin American right, with its racism, calls for violence, and an ideology built solely around securing riches for the rich. But on none of those sites does one hear the criticism of Chavez put into the context of Venezuala’s recent history. For that, go to this Public Integrity site.
Chavez’s opposition keeps failing not because of Chavez’s oppressions, but because they keep promising the same outrageous policies as were pursued, to the country’s detriment, in the past. The same blind urge to privatize, the same economic policies which only worsen the vast inequalities that have been built into the system, instead of seeking to close them. The voice of the opposition is the voice of an oligarchy in exile. They definitely don’t like the exile. But until they learn to stop speaking as though they were ordering the maid back to work, we can’t see them toppling Chavez. The problem is, their frustration provides the Bush administration with a supply of coup material. And the Bush administration intends, obviously, to use it.
No – this isn’t Russia and the Ukraine. This is the U.S. and Venezuela.
Christopher Hitchens, who has to keep a shred of lefty credibility in order to be included in the dreary lists of “liberal” hawks – and to get those juicy tv appearances – recently wrote, once again, about Kissinger and Chile. Apparently, Hitchens still thinks it is a bad thing for the U.S. to sponsor military coups in Latin America. Hitchens also wrote a laughable column for the Mirror about the smart guys – his buddies – around Bush. The intent of the latter column was to scoff at the famous Mirror post-election headline, “how could 53 million Americans be so dumb?” Hitchens conjures up a nightmarish vision of himself, Wolfowitz and Karl Rove, smarties all, chuckling about their Iraq caper. No doubt the cigars and brandies flowed freely. One wonders if he haa thought to ask his buddy Karl or Paul, hey, how about that coup in Caracas two years ago?
In a hit that had the old history of the twentieth century wrapped around it: Danilo Anderson, the prosecutor looking into who was behind the 2002 coup (and in particular a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy that promotes democracy (defined as government by rich people who pay international lenders back by stealing from poor people) around the world, was blown up with a bit of plastique in his car last Thursday. Funny, American papers didn’t devote the headlines to it that they have devoted to the situation in the Ukraine. Can’t imagine why.
Here’s the AP story:
“Anderson was investigating 400 people who backed an interim government that took power during the brief April 2002 coup against Chavez, who quickly returned to power. Previously, Anderson investigated an opposition mayor, eight policemen for shootings during an opposition march, and 59 dissident military officers.
Chacon asked the United States to support Venezuela's efforts against terrorism, after Chavez announced a new "Anti-Terror Plan" Saturday.
Venezuela has asked the United States to extradite three dissident military officers blamed by a Venezuelan court for bombings in early 2003 against Spanish and Colombian diplomatic missions in Caracas.”
Now, what are the chances that the U.S. is going to extradite these guys? Remember, the Bush doctrine is that a lesser power – say, Syria – that hosted a group that was televising threats to, say, assassinate Allawi would render itself therefore worthy of corrective incursion. In this country, however, according to this Newsday report, Miami tv broadcasts some wonderful stuff:
CARACAS, Venezuela - The tone was light, but the dapper comedian's words were sobering as he outlined his vision for regime change in leftist Venezuela.
"It has to start with the physical disappearance of the top dog, at a minimum," Orlando Urdaneta opined in reference to Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez. Asked who would do the disappearing, he replied: "Men with rifles and telescopic sights who do not miss."
Chavez’s government is airing Urdaneta's comments, made in an October interview on a Miami television station, to underscore its claim that Venezuelan exiles in Miami may have played a role in the car-bombing assassination Thursday night of a prosecutor probing 400 suspects in the coup that briefly unseated Chávez in 2002.
Government officials here contend the exiles are working with Cuban commando groups who in the past have launched attacks against their country in an effort to oust Chávez's mentor, Fidel Castro. They demanded a U.S. investigation of the expatriates.
Though the Venezuelan exiles often call for Chávez's ouster, and some have even claimed to have trained with Cuban militants in the Florida Everglades, U.S. officials and many political analysts say there is no hard evidence of subversion. Moreover, they note, the exiles' comments aren't necessarily more inflammatory than those made by some U.S. citizens against President George W. Bush.”
…
There are a number of anti-Chavez sites on the Net. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are not of the usual Latin American right, with its racism, calls for violence, and an ideology built solely around securing riches for the rich. But on none of those sites does one hear the criticism of Chavez put into the context of Venezuala’s recent history. For that, go to this Public Integrity site.
Chavez’s opposition keeps failing not because of Chavez’s oppressions, but because they keep promising the same outrageous policies as were pursued, to the country’s detriment, in the past. The same blind urge to privatize, the same economic policies which only worsen the vast inequalities that have been built into the system, instead of seeking to close them. The voice of the opposition is the voice of an oligarchy in exile. They definitely don’t like the exile. But until they learn to stop speaking as though they were ordering the maid back to work, we can’t see them toppling Chavez. The problem is, their frustration provides the Bush administration with a supply of coup material. And the Bush administration intends, obviously, to use it.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
LI apologizes in advance for today’s post. Usually we stick to the non-fiction side of our oeuvre in these parts. However, we’ve been having fun writing the following story. Usually, when we write a story, we shop around for some small journal to send it to. Or, if we throw in a lot of sex, some adult mag to send it to. But this story seems appropriate for a weblog.
Don’t worry. We aren’t publishing the whole thing in one post. We will publish bits of it, though. For readers who come here looking for LI to whack something, we will be back to that in our next post.
Working title of this thing is: Dostoevsky translates Henry James
…here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? – Thomas Pynchon, V
Abstract: Dostoevsky scholarship has largely ignored Dostoevsky’s translation of Henry James’ Altar of the House of the Dead. In this paper, we both reprint the translation and attempt to chart the hitherto unremarked influence of James on Dostoevsky. James, at the time Dostoevsky encountered his work in Paris, was almost unknown in the English speaking world, although this was a fate that he shared with most of the great Russian writers of the time. It wasn’t until Constance Garnett translated James’ work at the turn of the century that he became known, first to the British, and then to the American, public. Dostoevsky’s translation was superceded by Garnett’s superior version. We argue that James’ passionate struggle to mold an image of Christ in terms of Russia’s unique redemptive role profoundly effected Dostoevsky’s conception of his own fundamental task, which was, as he put it, “ to disclose the abjured figure, the wrecked aboriginal, the buried Caliban, in the great American carpet.”
Dostoevsky purposely so dissolved the boundary between his fiction, his “lying muse” and his biography that the formalist tenet of the impersonality of art, besides being pertinent more to a mode of art of which he was the conscious, and uneasy, precuror than to his own aims or methods, simply must throw up its hands in despair at a case so hard as to be virtually uncrackable.. Thus, to understand how Dostoevsky came not only to read the Altar in the House of the Dead sitting in a Parisian café with a “brand new copy” of L’Observateur de Deux Mondes in 1870, but to understand further how the necessitous grip of the story was of such a degree that it interrupted the flow of his own work on the novel that eventually became The Possessed (1876), we must adduce the ‘personality of the artist,’ and, indeed, horror of horrors, his very historical circumstances, which were, after all, the stock of newspaper headlines. Although the translation acted as an interruption, one which other commentators have overlooked as so much not to the point, we see both sides of the coin, here: the other side was a release “devoutly to be wished,” upon the completion of which Dostoevsky embarked upon a series of novels and stories that were of a markedly different quality – indeed, his own quality, the ‘Dostoevsky’ who became, along with his beloved Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, the abiding American novelist – than the comparitive hack work he had done before.
In 1870, Dostoevsky was thirty years old. Five of those years he’d spent in prison in California for attempting to assassinate the governor. As he wrote of the narrator in his autobiographical novella, In the Cage:
I had hoped, in visiting Paris again, to commune with the young man I had been, as I was assured by others if not, wholly, by the direct proofs and confidences of my own memory, at nineteen. But the lesson I learned was, perhaps, as old as Achilles, who though knowing that his invulnerability extended only to cover the majority of his public person, and not his very all, never in spite of this returned to douse himself, with a final completeness, in the holy water of the River Styx, no doubt instructed by the oldest of human instincts that tells us that fate transacts its business all at once, with the immediate brightness and crash of a lightning bolt, and that no dickering, no returning, no excuses, no, as it were, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, counted with that covert power. So too, douse as I would in the mellow air of that incomparable thing, a Paris Spring, I could never, as it were, touch bottom – so that, indeed, there were mornings of a grimness in my room at the Jockey when, in a fantastic mental rush, I was returned to hopeless days sitting in much less promising quarters, the smell of my own extruded necessity assaulting my nostrils. There was something in the memory that deprived me of breath, something that seemed to disclose a darkness as of a deep, an endless well, narrowly constructed, in which I fell further and further from the pale glare of the light that signalled the mouth and possible, or impossible, exit to the architecture. What had happened to me once could happen to me again – nay, could happen to any man. It was hard, then, to see the complacent paletot, the bourgeois opera hat, the bustle around some extraordinary product of the hour’s chef, without envisioning it all collapsing in a like darkness. I was, in a word, bad company
Don’t worry. We aren’t publishing the whole thing in one post. We will publish bits of it, though. For readers who come here looking for LI to whack something, we will be back to that in our next post.
Working title of this thing is: Dostoevsky translates Henry James
…here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied; did real time plus virtual or mirror-time equal zero and thus serve some half-understood moral purpose? – Thomas Pynchon, V
Abstract: Dostoevsky scholarship has largely ignored Dostoevsky’s translation of Henry James’ Altar of the House of the Dead. In this paper, we both reprint the translation and attempt to chart the hitherto unremarked influence of James on Dostoevsky. James, at the time Dostoevsky encountered his work in Paris, was almost unknown in the English speaking world, although this was a fate that he shared with most of the great Russian writers of the time. It wasn’t until Constance Garnett translated James’ work at the turn of the century that he became known, first to the British, and then to the American, public. Dostoevsky’s translation was superceded by Garnett’s superior version. We argue that James’ passionate struggle to mold an image of Christ in terms of Russia’s unique redemptive role profoundly effected Dostoevsky’s conception of his own fundamental task, which was, as he put it, “ to disclose the abjured figure, the wrecked aboriginal, the buried Caliban, in the great American carpet.”
Dostoevsky purposely so dissolved the boundary between his fiction, his “lying muse” and his biography that the formalist tenet of the impersonality of art, besides being pertinent more to a mode of art of which he was the conscious, and uneasy, precuror than to his own aims or methods, simply must throw up its hands in despair at a case so hard as to be virtually uncrackable.. Thus, to understand how Dostoevsky came not only to read the Altar in the House of the Dead sitting in a Parisian café with a “brand new copy” of L’Observateur de Deux Mondes in 1870, but to understand further how the necessitous grip of the story was of such a degree that it interrupted the flow of his own work on the novel that eventually became The Possessed (1876), we must adduce the ‘personality of the artist,’ and, indeed, horror of horrors, his very historical circumstances, which were, after all, the stock of newspaper headlines. Although the translation acted as an interruption, one which other commentators have overlooked as so much not to the point, we see both sides of the coin, here: the other side was a release “devoutly to be wished,” upon the completion of which Dostoevsky embarked upon a series of novels and stories that were of a markedly different quality – indeed, his own quality, the ‘Dostoevsky’ who became, along with his beloved Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, the abiding American novelist – than the comparitive hack work he had done before.
In 1870, Dostoevsky was thirty years old. Five of those years he’d spent in prison in California for attempting to assassinate the governor. As he wrote of the narrator in his autobiographical novella, In the Cage:
I had hoped, in visiting Paris again, to commune with the young man I had been, as I was assured by others if not, wholly, by the direct proofs and confidences of my own memory, at nineteen. But the lesson I learned was, perhaps, as old as Achilles, who though knowing that his invulnerability extended only to cover the majority of his public person, and not his very all, never in spite of this returned to douse himself, with a final completeness, in the holy water of the River Styx, no doubt instructed by the oldest of human instincts that tells us that fate transacts its business all at once, with the immediate brightness and crash of a lightning bolt, and that no dickering, no returning, no excuses, no, as it were, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, counted with that covert power. So too, douse as I would in the mellow air of that incomparable thing, a Paris Spring, I could never, as it were, touch bottom – so that, indeed, there were mornings of a grimness in my room at the Jockey when, in a fantastic mental rush, I was returned to hopeless days sitting in much less promising quarters, the smell of my own extruded necessity assaulting my nostrils. There was something in the memory that deprived me of breath, something that seemed to disclose a darkness as of a deep, an endless well, narrowly constructed, in which I fell further and further from the pale glare of the light that signalled the mouth and possible, or impossible, exit to the architecture. What had happened to me once could happen to me again – nay, could happen to any man. It was hard, then, to see the complacent paletot, the bourgeois opera hat, the bustle around some extraordinary product of the hour’s chef, without envisioning it all collapsing in a like darkness. I was, in a word, bad company
Monday, November 29, 2004
During the last fifty years, the U.S. has hunted four related but distinct devils in the Middle East. In an issue of Journal of Small Wars and Insurgencies from last year, Ghada Hashem Talhami, in Muslims Islamists and the Cold War, gives us a small, corrective counter-history to the usual American myth-making in this area. LI recommends reading the whole article. Talhami nowhere employs the language of demonology – but to LI, with our little faith in the ultimate rationality of American policymakers, the whole thing exudes a whiff of sulphur and brimstone.
Primo devil was communism. In the post war period, this devil was best fought by alliances with the regions various militaries. This was distinctive: while the U.S. had trained militaries in Central and Latin America before World War II, the spread of American influence through global militaries is still obscured by the by the historian’s preference for seeing the state as one unified entity, with military organizations identified with and subordinate to some governing organization. In LI’s opinion, America’s love affair with men in foreign uniforms had to do with the command and control mindset that dominated the postwar period. In places like Iraq and Iran, the military seemed to be the only command and control structure available. States were anything but; businesses played by puzzling local rules, and were, anyway, either too small or were being nationalized, which is what we were fighting against. The military seemed the best vector through which America could access these countries. An unexpected result of that was that the military often took over the state in these countries – but really, this wasn’t America’s problem. Thus, America could re-activate a cadre of pro-Nazi officers in Iran while at the same time quietly supporting Egypt’s nationalist officers, all in the same great cause: anti-communism.
Secundo devil sprang up from that same corps of Egyptian officers: Nasser. Nassaer was the cleverest of all the Middle Eastern Satans. At first, he seemed to promise to accomplish both he overt American goal [stopping communism] as well as our latent goal [diminishing the British influence in the Middle East]. But after 57, Nasser revealed the scaly tail. His nationalism became a threat to all we held near and dear, or at least to our allies – the King of Iraq, the House of Saud, Israel, etc. – in the region. Like all devils, he flew through the air – like all modern devils, he did this by way of the airwaves – and tunneled through that invisible territory, the hearts of the Arab masses. Suddenly, there was no King in Baghdad. Suddenly, there was OPEC. Suddenly, various oil rich countries started trying to extort the profits from pumping their oil. Suddenly, and most unforgiveably, Nassar started subverting the House of Saud.
As always, the devil is too clever by half. Nasser held out the promise of a secular nationalism, a brotherhood of Arabs. The counter-move was obvious. The Saudis had been suggesting it, to American indifference, all along: revive the religious sensibility of the Islamic world. Suddenly, that seemed like an awful good idea. And so it was that the Saudis started printing Qor’ans and building mosques and the Americans started aiding the Moslem brotherhood in Egypt. Nothing pleases Americans more than religion. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYT’s favorite American Marxist, Paul Berman, published a little tract in which he traced the ‘intellectual history’ of “Islamofascism” without once mentioning that, from 1957 to 2001, America loved and nurtured Islamofascism. But then again, Berman is what Marxists used to call a lackey – he exists to be pointed to by reactionaries on any topic in which the U.S. is proposing some small ethnic cleansing, some subvention of a death squad despot, in order to add catholicity to the project.
Now, although Americans just loved the idea, in the sixties, of colorful imams and veiled women (portrayed, in the movies, as invariably sex starved creatures) ruling various Middle Eastern places, the project of reviving Islam wasn’t really ‘believed in” by the American advisors. They still believed, ultimately, in command and control structures – Islamism was a psy ops. Ultimately, when American foreign policy isn’t oppressive, in the Middle East, it is frivolous. So yes, Americans will sponsor one eyed Sheik Omar as he trips around the world preaching jihad, and yes, under George Bush I, we will even let him settle in New Jersey (where he can plot the first assault on the World Trade Center), but we can never take him seriously. The attitude is: let the wogs have their little magical ceremonies.
Which is why we were so surprised by the third devil: Khomenei. As Reagan’s cake and bible bearing envoys might have put it: aren’t we on the same page? Well, it turned out we weren’t. Americans loved Iran’s shah – so colorful, such a relic from the past! But the ayatollah – a new word – it made us belatedly discover the virtues of the separation of church and state.
As so often, when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.Just as we had a new devil to contend with, the old devil made his move – into Afghanistan. And then occurred one of those Reagan era miracles, where everything just seems magically to coalesce. In other words, there was an absolute synergy between exorcists. The Saudis can refine their Islamism into an anti-Shi’ism; the Americans can indirectly fight the Russians; the Pakistanis can leverage several needed billions of dollars, build a nuclear bomb (with Reagan lobbying Congress not to punish them for it); and there’s no down side. Well, not unless one is extraordinarily sensitive to the million or so dead that are added up at the end of the Afghan conflict; not unless one is a crybaby about the destruction of Sufi culture, which in Afghanistan, as later in Chechnya, is singled out by Salafid heretic hunters. Devil three is as much on the mind of the exorcists as Devil one – so the ISI and the Saudi al-Istikhbarat al Ammah, their internal security police, can get together on promoting a Sunni Islamism that nourishes itself on anti-Shi’ite pogroms. In Reagan’s golden day, the Americans weren’t so grossed out about beheadings – after all, we watched the Saudis put down a revolt in 1979 with the massive use of beheadings of the rebels without a qualm or quiver.
So between the ISI, the Cia, and the Saudis, a terrible beauty is born.
The devil’s tricks, however, are infinite. When Devil no. 1 surrenders, the cartel of Exorcists International implodes.
But this is mere background noise in 91, when the last devil pops up: Saddam Hussein. Hunted down in his spider hole by forces under the command of the same guy who intermediated his mustard gas-n-charge war against Devil no. 3 almost twenty years before, the war against Devil 4 proves nothing so much as that demonology is a murky world. You don’t always know who you are fighting, or why. Americans have one infallible resource that has made them the world’s premier fighter of devils, however – purity of heart. They must have it – they proclaim it so often. Purity of heart means knowing that you are Right and Good. Knowing you are Right and Good means that you will prevail. That you will prevail means that only the picky, or the devil’s agents, will examine the means by which you prevail. To be a member of the Right and the Good means recognizing that, in the order of creation, the pure heart precedes any possible action that could define or confute it.
This is not a time for questioning or irony, but a time to free Iraqis. Freeing them, it turns out, has been the secret desire of ordinary Americans for decades. They only want to free them. Freedom and more freedom must be heaped upont them.
However, joyful as is the task of liberating our Iraqi brothers, Americans are too old in the devil hunting business not to smell something suspicious in the air. Is there a devil no. 5 emerging? Consider: we know that Osama bin Laden is only a mask for Saddam Hussein. Yet somehow, after the man under the mask was arrested, the mask still survives, and even makes mocking videos! How can this be? Unless… isn’t there something supernatural here? Cue the eery music.
Perhaps the new devil turns out to be the Sunnis. Perhaps our happy cooperation in the killing of Shiites back in the eighties – the way we watched the Saudis hunt their own Shi’ite population, and just found it adorable how they’d use those old fashioned simitar like things to behead radical leaders of same – perhaps that was a trick of this new devil. But our contemporary devil hunter confronts a daunting task – on the one hand, shoring up a President, in Pakistan, who sprang from the same milieu that materially supported Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers, on the other hand, razing to the ground Sunni strongholds in Iraq and dispersing their inhabitants, without a tent or a bottle of water, to the four winds. The last is not a war crime – by definition, Americans can’t commit war crimes. And then there is our most reliable ally in the Middle East, the Saudis. They must be startled by the new American policy of killing Sunnis. It is going to be harder and harder to explain that one.
Nobody ever said devil hunting was easy. We have to rely, once again, on our good intentions. God will provide the rest.
Primo devil was communism. In the post war period, this devil was best fought by alliances with the regions various militaries. This was distinctive: while the U.S. had trained militaries in Central and Latin America before World War II, the spread of American influence through global militaries is still obscured by the by the historian’s preference for seeing the state as one unified entity, with military organizations identified with and subordinate to some governing organization. In LI’s opinion, America’s love affair with men in foreign uniforms had to do with the command and control mindset that dominated the postwar period. In places like Iraq and Iran, the military seemed to be the only command and control structure available. States were anything but; businesses played by puzzling local rules, and were, anyway, either too small or were being nationalized, which is what we were fighting against. The military seemed the best vector through which America could access these countries. An unexpected result of that was that the military often took over the state in these countries – but really, this wasn’t America’s problem. Thus, America could re-activate a cadre of pro-Nazi officers in Iran while at the same time quietly supporting Egypt’s nationalist officers, all in the same great cause: anti-communism.
Secundo devil sprang up from that same corps of Egyptian officers: Nasser. Nassaer was the cleverest of all the Middle Eastern Satans. At first, he seemed to promise to accomplish both he overt American goal [stopping communism] as well as our latent goal [diminishing the British influence in the Middle East]. But after 57, Nasser revealed the scaly tail. His nationalism became a threat to all we held near and dear, or at least to our allies – the King of Iraq, the House of Saud, Israel, etc. – in the region. Like all devils, he flew through the air – like all modern devils, he did this by way of the airwaves – and tunneled through that invisible territory, the hearts of the Arab masses. Suddenly, there was no King in Baghdad. Suddenly, there was OPEC. Suddenly, various oil rich countries started trying to extort the profits from pumping their oil. Suddenly, and most unforgiveably, Nassar started subverting the House of Saud.
As always, the devil is too clever by half. Nasser held out the promise of a secular nationalism, a brotherhood of Arabs. The counter-move was obvious. The Saudis had been suggesting it, to American indifference, all along: revive the religious sensibility of the Islamic world. Suddenly, that seemed like an awful good idea. And so it was that the Saudis started printing Qor’ans and building mosques and the Americans started aiding the Moslem brotherhood in Egypt. Nothing pleases Americans more than religion. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYT’s favorite American Marxist, Paul Berman, published a little tract in which he traced the ‘intellectual history’ of “Islamofascism” without once mentioning that, from 1957 to 2001, America loved and nurtured Islamofascism. But then again, Berman is what Marxists used to call a lackey – he exists to be pointed to by reactionaries on any topic in which the U.S. is proposing some small ethnic cleansing, some subvention of a death squad despot, in order to add catholicity to the project.
Now, although Americans just loved the idea, in the sixties, of colorful imams and veiled women (portrayed, in the movies, as invariably sex starved creatures) ruling various Middle Eastern places, the project of reviving Islam wasn’t really ‘believed in” by the American advisors. They still believed, ultimately, in command and control structures – Islamism was a psy ops. Ultimately, when American foreign policy isn’t oppressive, in the Middle East, it is frivolous. So yes, Americans will sponsor one eyed Sheik Omar as he trips around the world preaching jihad, and yes, under George Bush I, we will even let him settle in New Jersey (where he can plot the first assault on the World Trade Center), but we can never take him seriously. The attitude is: let the wogs have their little magical ceremonies.
Which is why we were so surprised by the third devil: Khomenei. As Reagan’s cake and bible bearing envoys might have put it: aren’t we on the same page? Well, it turned out we weren’t. Americans loved Iran’s shah – so colorful, such a relic from the past! But the ayatollah – a new word – it made us belatedly discover the virtues of the separation of church and state.
As so often, when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window.Just as we had a new devil to contend with, the old devil made his move – into Afghanistan. And then occurred one of those Reagan era miracles, where everything just seems magically to coalesce. In other words, there was an absolute synergy between exorcists. The Saudis can refine their Islamism into an anti-Shi’ism; the Americans can indirectly fight the Russians; the Pakistanis can leverage several needed billions of dollars, build a nuclear bomb (with Reagan lobbying Congress not to punish them for it); and there’s no down side. Well, not unless one is extraordinarily sensitive to the million or so dead that are added up at the end of the Afghan conflict; not unless one is a crybaby about the destruction of Sufi culture, which in Afghanistan, as later in Chechnya, is singled out by Salafid heretic hunters. Devil three is as much on the mind of the exorcists as Devil one – so the ISI and the Saudi al-Istikhbarat al Ammah, their internal security police, can get together on promoting a Sunni Islamism that nourishes itself on anti-Shi’ite pogroms. In Reagan’s golden day, the Americans weren’t so grossed out about beheadings – after all, we watched the Saudis put down a revolt in 1979 with the massive use of beheadings of the rebels without a qualm or quiver.
So between the ISI, the Cia, and the Saudis, a terrible beauty is born.
The devil’s tricks, however, are infinite. When Devil no. 1 surrenders, the cartel of Exorcists International implodes.
But this is mere background noise in 91, when the last devil pops up: Saddam Hussein. Hunted down in his spider hole by forces under the command of the same guy who intermediated his mustard gas-n-charge war against Devil no. 3 almost twenty years before, the war against Devil 4 proves nothing so much as that demonology is a murky world. You don’t always know who you are fighting, or why. Americans have one infallible resource that has made them the world’s premier fighter of devils, however – purity of heart. They must have it – they proclaim it so often. Purity of heart means knowing that you are Right and Good. Knowing you are Right and Good means that you will prevail. That you will prevail means that only the picky, or the devil’s agents, will examine the means by which you prevail. To be a member of the Right and the Good means recognizing that, in the order of creation, the pure heart precedes any possible action that could define or confute it.
This is not a time for questioning or irony, but a time to free Iraqis. Freeing them, it turns out, has been the secret desire of ordinary Americans for decades. They only want to free them. Freedom and more freedom must be heaped upont them.
However, joyful as is the task of liberating our Iraqi brothers, Americans are too old in the devil hunting business not to smell something suspicious in the air. Is there a devil no. 5 emerging? Consider: we know that Osama bin Laden is only a mask for Saddam Hussein. Yet somehow, after the man under the mask was arrested, the mask still survives, and even makes mocking videos! How can this be? Unless… isn’t there something supernatural here? Cue the eery music.
Perhaps the new devil turns out to be the Sunnis. Perhaps our happy cooperation in the killing of Shiites back in the eighties – the way we watched the Saudis hunt their own Shi’ite population, and just found it adorable how they’d use those old fashioned simitar like things to behead radical leaders of same – perhaps that was a trick of this new devil. But our contemporary devil hunter confronts a daunting task – on the one hand, shoring up a President, in Pakistan, who sprang from the same milieu that materially supported Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers, on the other hand, razing to the ground Sunni strongholds in Iraq and dispersing their inhabitants, without a tent or a bottle of water, to the four winds. The last is not a war crime – by definition, Americans can’t commit war crimes. And then there is our most reliable ally in the Middle East, the Saudis. They must be startled by the new American policy of killing Sunnis. It is going to be harder and harder to explain that one.
Nobody ever said devil hunting was easy. We have to rely, once again, on our good intentions. God will provide the rest.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
“Attempts to reconcile science and religion are usually doomed to failure … because nearly all religions make claims about the real world - the domain of science - that don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Faced with these difficulties, advocates resort to circumlocution, sophistry or absurd speculations that offend both scientists and believers.” -- Coyne
Saturday – time for a backlog selection.
On May 16, 2002, LI wrote about a conference at Yale concerning the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The NYT reported on the conference with the faux infantile credulity that newspapers always give to the religious (as long, that is, as they aren’t Moslem). LI, at the time, obviously found the mental pap being purveyed in this conference a little hard to stomach.
We talked, this week, with a friend of ours who teaches at a well known university in Dixie. She complained about the young-earthers in her class, a term that was new to us. She explained: young-earthers actually believe that the earth has been around for 6,000 years. Give or take a divine day. This startling fact comes from that gorgeous relic of barbarism, the Bible.
My friend was thinking of going to the physics department and asking about how to handle these children, who come equipped with various stories about the unreliability of radioactive decay datings and such.
We didn’t take this too seriously until we read the latest Gallup poll on the subject. Now, LI has a healthy mistrust of polls on topics of deep belief, since we don’t believe that these beliefs can be successfully articulated in a narrow Q and A format. Nevertheless, there is something startling about the fact that only one third of the American public believes in evolution, and half believe that God created humans 10,000 years ago.
Well. We think that there is something lukewarm about rejecting Darwin and not going whole hog. Surely, if we are going with the Bible, the universe was created five days before those human beings, which means that the universe is about 10,000 years old. LI is distressed that the consequences of this are not enough known among those who would be bold for Christ. As it says in Revelations, "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."
Yes, friends, you risk hellfire by overlooking the Satanic component of Newtonian physics.
Consider: it wasn’t until around 1680 that the speed of light was calculated to be a finite number. A Danish astronomer, Ole Roemer, calculated the speed of light by noticing a discrepancy in the orbit of Io around Jupiter – a discrepancy according to the calculations that depend on the Newtonian science of gravitation – and using that discrepancy to calculate the time the light took to go from Io to the earth.
Roemer’s calculations have been refined since, so that we know that light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
Now, according to the astronomers, the stars we see in the heavens are not as we see them in the heavens, for precisely the reason that light isn’t instantaneous. Big setback, actually, to the astrologers. But if the universe was created 10,000 years ago, than the oldest stars we see in the heavens are merely 10,000 light years away.
We can make inferences from this about the closeness of those stars – a closeness which, by Newton’s laws, and by the magnitude of these stars, would result in a veritable fireworks display each night, as stars would be drawn into each others orbits. Furthermore, the kind of radiation that would result from these supernovas would surely have long wiped out life on earth.
Meaning – that Newton and Roemer are the children of the Deceiver. Boldness in Christ surely requires us to believe that light is instantaneous, or we might as well burn the Bible for trash. Heaven and earth might pass away, but if light was instantaneous for Moses, that's good enough for me.
It is time to put stickers on our high school science text books reminding our students that Newton’s laws are just theories.
Another note about this post – the philosopher we mention, Richard Swinburne, should really be cleaning up in Crusader America. To get a taste for just how bad a philosopher he is, go to this article. It is a tissue, from beginning to end, of dumb assumptions Christmas giftwrapped in the language of analytic philosophy (the better to impress the gulls). Notice in particular how he accedes to science in certain crucial ways – for instance, on the pesky speed of light issue – but then shoehorns in data from a collection of texts, the Bible, in which the whole picture of the universe was different – essentially different. We would have much less reason to believe Darwin if, in the Origin of the Species, he devoted a chapter to the inhabitants of Atlantis, who all lived to be nine hundred years old. Of course, the Bible is full of nonsense of that variety.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
A couple of days ago LI indulged in that infantile positivism that makes our fair readership grimace and pretend not to know us. We made fun, that is, of the Yale Philosophy department's "probability theory and Jesus is my fave philosopher" conference. Or whatever it was called. We might have even implied that, between the News of the World's interviews with the Alien that advised Clinton, and Yale's faculty's attempts to prove the verity of the gospels, integrity, honesty, and science are all on the News of the World's side. As a followup, we recommend Jerry Coyne's mugging of a soft focus book by Michael Ruse that attempts to meld Darwinism and Christianity into the cutest little choir of Christmas decorations you ever saw.
The first paragraph actually solves our problem with the probability argument for the resurrection. If you will recall -- or even if you won't -- the post was about a NYT story involving a man who seemingly combined all the charming physical characteristics of Santa Claus and Charles Manson -- a Mr. Swinburne -- dispensing this shaky, if not downright dishonest, argument:
"Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"
Mr. Coyne's article gives us an even better argument for Jesus' resurrection -- that is, if we are truth table freaks. Coyne reports on a recent radio interview given by some pius geneticist. The talk got around to the virgin birth. Well, the geneticist rather unhappily conceded, that is an, uh, anomoly. So where, a questioner wanted to know, did Jesus' Y chromosome come from? The geneticist dug through his bag of tricks, and came up with the answer that maybe Mary's two X chromosomes carried a piece of a Y chromosome. He didn't, according to Coyne, go any further with this fascinating discussion. But Coyne reminds us that for this to have happened, Mary would have to be a sterile man.
Well, the Light (capitalize that Light, editor) flashed before my eyes. Because but bien sur! If Mary were a sterile man, there is no Jesus. If no Jesus, no crucifixion. If we simply put this in truth table terms, we have two falses. Well, two fs make a t, as we all know. So Jesus not only resurrected, he trailed fishes and breadsticks out of that gloomy tomb! Mr. Swinburne should definitely write an article about this, making the argument that if c is true, that is Mary is a bachelor living in New York, and d is true, the Y chromosome determined Jesus' sex, there is a .97 percent chance that Giuliani is Jesus's father. No wonder the late mayor hated it when artists kept making fun of his bundle of joy!
Limited Inc is contemplating making a pitch to Yale. Surely, bearing such truths, a tenured position is waiting for us. We could definitely use the money.
Thursday, November 25, 2004
LI has just listened to the lovely propaganda minute on NPR in which various voices tell us how thankful they are to live in the land of freedom and tinkerbell, the good old U.S.A. Oddly, there was no expression of thanks that one didn’t live in a city that freedom and tinkerbell had resolved to have disgorge its women and children and retain its young men in order to slaughter the latter, bomb its buildings into rubble, and leave behind a desert of disease, stray sniper fire, and chaos.
LI has been pondering the strategy in Iraq the last couple of days. Blowing up Fallujah, breaking into Baghdad’s most famous mosque and shooting randomly, clamping down in Mosul – what this amounts to, we think, is the American response to the dilemma it faces in the elections.
The dilemma is this: given the state of opinion imperfectly revealed by even those polls conducted by biased American agencies, Allawi is not the most popular Iraqi politician. In fact, Sadr could easily give him a run for his money. Other Iraqi figures who have no fame in the U.S., but who register positively with the Iraqi public, are more popular than Allawi. Having failed to create a united confederacy of parties to present to the voters at election time (peculiarly, the U.S., in its role as occupier-democratizer, wanted to make sure that the elections were pre-rigged, and offered no choice whatsoever to the voter), the U.S. does face the slight problem that an unacceptable choice might actually take the prize in the election. That is, some party or personage representing a slightly anti-occupation bent might displace Allawi. Although it is unclear whether that is possible – this is an election for a transitional congress, not for the executive branch of the government. Still, that is the kind of embarrassment that the Americans would prefer to avoid.
So the task is: make Allawi popular in the next two months. How to do this? Taking a page from Milosevic’s book, the U.S. has evidently decided to take a wager on stirring up such ethnic/religious hatred as would inflate Allawi’s support. In the early stages of the occupation, there was a struggle in the Bush administration between those, mainly at the State department, who distrusted the Shi’ites, fearing Iraq’s becoming an Iran style theocracy, and those, mainly among the Pentagon Pump House gang, who urged the desuetude of this fear. The reality of the war against the occupiers has shifted the terms of the struggle, adjusting U.S. strategy not only to a pro-Shi’ite stance, but one that uses the revanchist tendency among the Shi’a, who have vivid memories of past oppression, to invigorate the flagging popularity of the American puppet government. They are doing this by associating Allawi with gross and powerful violence against the Sunnis. It was notable that Sadr himself did not protest, with his usual spirit, the razing of Fallujah. The Americans are favored here by the jihadist element in the war, with its face of comic book evil, Zarqawi. Zarqawi, from all that one gathers about him, is a trailer trash version of Osama bin. Al Qaeda has operated in Pakistan as, among other things, an on call death squad to effect anti-Shi’ite pograms. Zarqawi’s associates have the same program. Thus, there is a perfect demonic synergy between the horrors dreamt of by Zarqawi’s people and the horrors perpetrated by the Americans.
Still, it is not even the silence that greeted the displacement of 200,000 Iraqis by the Americans that is the strangest part of the recent episodes in the war. That honor goes to the raid on the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad. While the Mosque had been raided before, to raid it while Fallujah was being destroyed and to raid it in the manner reported could only amount to a provocation intended to send people out into the street. The better to shoot them down, my dear. These tactics have been so refined during the twentieth century among innumerable petty authoritarian states unti they have a dreary predictability. Resistance is many things -- a romance, a neurosis, a political program, a desperation -- but it is, under certain specific circumstances, a real opportunity for an uncertain governing power. The sudden crackdown on Sunni imams for committing “treason” by urging resistance to the Allawi government that is the real sign of the times in Iraq.
Allawi, with American assistance, is creating the usual authoritarian matrix: singling out some minority enemy, using that enemy to enforce censorship, using the recess from scrutiny produced by that censorship to imprison, torture and kill, and, finally, using the fear that emanates from that to reinforce his image as an impenetrable force. Also sprach Saddam, of whom Allawi is a dutiful pupil. As the election approaches, the conditions in which a free election has meaning are nullified one by one, ultimately to the gain of the current leadership. This, we think, is the ultimate meaning of the sudden American appetite for largescale violence in Iraq. It is a strategy that has worked in the past. We will see if it erodes the support of anti-occupation forces in Iraq in the next two months. We think Sadr, for one, definitely miscalculated by maintaining an unwonted silence in the midst of the latest round of violence. He, of all political figures, has the most to lose if Allawi identifies himself with a revanchist Shi’ite politics.
ps - This analysis of this Thanksgiving post is shored up by two items today: one is a post on Juan Cole’s site. The other is this WP story.
The upshot is this. One justification for the occupation that ran like a light fever through the apologies of the belligeranti was that Iraq needed a supervisory force to keep from slipping into civil war. Now that supervisory force are encouraging civil war. I mean, who would have thought that an insufficient force sent by an imperialist power into an oil rich region divided between different ethnic and religious groups would secure its fragile hegemony by using divide and conquer tactics? Such things are only done by nations, but as we know from the virtuous Mr. Blair, the coalition represents morality itself.
It is the intellectual misery of oppression to operate with a predictably few kinds of forms. It is the intellectual task of its apologists to disguise this fact, year in and year out.
LI has been pondering the strategy in Iraq the last couple of days. Blowing up Fallujah, breaking into Baghdad’s most famous mosque and shooting randomly, clamping down in Mosul – what this amounts to, we think, is the American response to the dilemma it faces in the elections.
The dilemma is this: given the state of opinion imperfectly revealed by even those polls conducted by biased American agencies, Allawi is not the most popular Iraqi politician. In fact, Sadr could easily give him a run for his money. Other Iraqi figures who have no fame in the U.S., but who register positively with the Iraqi public, are more popular than Allawi. Having failed to create a united confederacy of parties to present to the voters at election time (peculiarly, the U.S., in its role as occupier-democratizer, wanted to make sure that the elections were pre-rigged, and offered no choice whatsoever to the voter), the U.S. does face the slight problem that an unacceptable choice might actually take the prize in the election. That is, some party or personage representing a slightly anti-occupation bent might displace Allawi. Although it is unclear whether that is possible – this is an election for a transitional congress, not for the executive branch of the government. Still, that is the kind of embarrassment that the Americans would prefer to avoid.
So the task is: make Allawi popular in the next two months. How to do this? Taking a page from Milosevic’s book, the U.S. has evidently decided to take a wager on stirring up such ethnic/religious hatred as would inflate Allawi’s support. In the early stages of the occupation, there was a struggle in the Bush administration between those, mainly at the State department, who distrusted the Shi’ites, fearing Iraq’s becoming an Iran style theocracy, and those, mainly among the Pentagon Pump House gang, who urged the desuetude of this fear. The reality of the war against the occupiers has shifted the terms of the struggle, adjusting U.S. strategy not only to a pro-Shi’ite stance, but one that uses the revanchist tendency among the Shi’a, who have vivid memories of past oppression, to invigorate the flagging popularity of the American puppet government. They are doing this by associating Allawi with gross and powerful violence against the Sunnis. It was notable that Sadr himself did not protest, with his usual spirit, the razing of Fallujah. The Americans are favored here by the jihadist element in the war, with its face of comic book evil, Zarqawi. Zarqawi, from all that one gathers about him, is a trailer trash version of Osama bin. Al Qaeda has operated in Pakistan as, among other things, an on call death squad to effect anti-Shi’ite pograms. Zarqawi’s associates have the same program. Thus, there is a perfect demonic synergy between the horrors dreamt of by Zarqawi’s people and the horrors perpetrated by the Americans.
Still, it is not even the silence that greeted the displacement of 200,000 Iraqis by the Americans that is the strangest part of the recent episodes in the war. That honor goes to the raid on the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad. While the Mosque had been raided before, to raid it while Fallujah was being destroyed and to raid it in the manner reported could only amount to a provocation intended to send people out into the street. The better to shoot them down, my dear. These tactics have been so refined during the twentieth century among innumerable petty authoritarian states unti they have a dreary predictability. Resistance is many things -- a romance, a neurosis, a political program, a desperation -- but it is, under certain specific circumstances, a real opportunity for an uncertain governing power. The sudden crackdown on Sunni imams for committing “treason” by urging resistance to the Allawi government that is the real sign of the times in Iraq.
Allawi, with American assistance, is creating the usual authoritarian matrix: singling out some minority enemy, using that enemy to enforce censorship, using the recess from scrutiny produced by that censorship to imprison, torture and kill, and, finally, using the fear that emanates from that to reinforce his image as an impenetrable force. Also sprach Saddam, of whom Allawi is a dutiful pupil. As the election approaches, the conditions in which a free election has meaning are nullified one by one, ultimately to the gain of the current leadership. This, we think, is the ultimate meaning of the sudden American appetite for largescale violence in Iraq. It is a strategy that has worked in the past. We will see if it erodes the support of anti-occupation forces in Iraq in the next two months. We think Sadr, for one, definitely miscalculated by maintaining an unwonted silence in the midst of the latest round of violence. He, of all political figures, has the most to lose if Allawi identifies himself with a revanchist Shi’ite politics.
ps - This analysis of this Thanksgiving post is shored up by two items today: one is a post on Juan Cole’s site. The other is this WP story.
The upshot is this. One justification for the occupation that ran like a light fever through the apologies of the belligeranti was that Iraq needed a supervisory force to keep from slipping into civil war. Now that supervisory force are encouraging civil war. I mean, who would have thought that an insufficient force sent by an imperialist power into an oil rich region divided between different ethnic and religious groups would secure its fragile hegemony by using divide and conquer tactics? Such things are only done by nations, but as we know from the virtuous Mr. Blair, the coalition represents morality itself.
It is the intellectual misery of oppression to operate with a predictably few kinds of forms. It is the intellectual task of its apologists to disguise this fact, year in and year out.
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