the magnetized age

In his entertaining Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s, Timothy Fulford writes:

BY DECEMBER 1795 PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM PITT WAS WELL ON THE way to crushing political dissent in Britain. he had tried reformers for treason, passed laws restricting the right of association and suspended habeas corpus, all without an outcry from British people about their loss of freedom. To one radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the people's quietude was an uncanny sign of a new malaise coursing through the body politic:

WILLIAM PITT, the great political Animal Magnetist, ... has most foully worked on the diseased fancy of Englishmen . . . thrown the nation into a feverish slumber, and is now bringing it to a crisis which may convulse mortality!'

Coleridge was not alone in seeing Pitt as an animal magnetist, mesmerizing his countrymen into a trance to be followed by the convulsions of war. According to James Tilly Matthews, returning to London in 1796 after imprisonment by the Jacobins, the Prime Minister had been "actuated" by "magnetic spies" sent from revolutionary France.2 Now controlled "like a mere puppet by the expert-magnetists," Pitt was himself a traitor, part of a Jacobin conspiracy to mesmerize the nation towards its destruction.

Puppet or not, Pitt acted decisively when Matthews repeated his allegations from the gallery of the House of Commons. he had Matthews locked up in Bedlam madhouse. On the ministry's reading, it was Matthews, and not the Prime Minister, whose mind had been "possessed"-Matthews had himself been an enthusiast of mesmerism, and had now been hypnotized by the practice he had gone to France to study.”

In a reactionary time, it does seem to a dissenter like society has fallen into some magnetic sleep. LI has also used the notion of zombies to explain the hypnotized followers of Bush – which is not to imply that the intelligence and character of Bush and Cheney find their natural counterparts in the set of British Prime ministers, like William Pitt. Rather, comparison should be made to the cast of the Dukes of Hazard. Let’s value our own times (die so grossen war) and our governing class with the contempt that both deserve, shall we? But the war of magnetic spies seems somehow appropriate, seems to call up images, that might be useful for looking at the war of drones and mirrors.

I am referencing Fulford’s essay to give us a fuller sense of the scientific image of mesmerism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was blurred, so to speak, across such disciplines as medicine and physics. We pay too little attention to this kind of thing when looking at philosophers – LI’s argument about Schopenhauer is that too great a preoccupation with establishing Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant and Hegel ignores other sources and models of the Will, that eminently 19th century category.

For instance, this anecdote, from Fulford, was just the kind of information that Schopenhauer would seize upon:

It was in this inchoate and contested medical context [of an insufficiently institutionalized medical culture] that Franz Anton Mesmer's therapy proved popular. It did so, in part, because the latest experiments suggested that it might be possible, by an act of will, to detect and transmit to others an imponderable life- giving fluid. When the anatomist John Hunter published his dissections of the torpedo and gymnotus fish (in 1773 and 1775), the anatomical organs for transmitting electricity were laid open. They revealed, Hunter concluded, "that the will of the animal does absolutely control the electric powers of its body; which must depend on the energy of its nerves."6 Joseph Priestley soon incorporated Hunter's demonstration into his theories7-if electricity could be transmitted at a distance through water, perhaps that was formed by a combination of electricity with other vital principles. The power of the fish, the medium through which it passed and the body receiving the shock must all be akin. Hunter noted that the "oscillation" produced by the gymnotus:

may be so strong, as not only to check and overpower those in the part which touches the fish, but also to propagate themselves along the skin and up the nerves, to the brachial ganglion, and even to the spinal marrow and brain; whence the person would first feel the stupefaction ascend along the arm to the shoulder, and then fall into a giddiness.

The very terms, here, are echoed in Schopehauer’s essay, which makes use of the phrase action at a distance in the same way – using it, further, as a scientific basis upon which to combat materialism. Similarly, when Marina Warner, considering the effects of the magic lantern slide show upon Western sensibilities, cites early 19th century classifications of the sleep cycle, we see this so distinctly echoed in Schopenhauer’s text that we can be confident of some influence:

In l825, Samuel Hibbert published a foldout chart about dream states, which he called a ‘Formula of the various comparative Degrees of Faintness, Vividness, or Intensity, supposed to subsist between Sensations and Ideas…’ With scientific method, he tabulated eight transitions in his full cycle, ranging from Perfect Sleep to Somnambulism by way of ‘the common state of Watchfulness’ to ‘the tranquil state’ to ‘extreme mental excitement’, and he graded no less than fifteen different phases in each of them. They start from ‘Degree of vividness at which consciousness begins,’ where it is still possible to impose the will on vision, to ‘Intense excitements of the mind necessary for the production of spectres.’”
Not to brag, but I would guess that LI is the first to point out this similarity – showing how badly the history of philosophy needs to expand its focus of study.
Which brings us to the issue that we started with: ghosts. The specter that has haunted the specter in this essay finally manifests itself in the one passage from the essay that has been extensively quoted – in anthologies of Ghost literature. At least, the first sentence is quoted. I’m translating the whole passage, and that will be the end of LI’s sermons on the Master Grouch of Philosophy. Still, it bears noticing that Schopenhauer seems to treat the Kantian Ding an sich, here, as a ghost. Something which would, of course, flutter the dovecoats if it were suggested in one of Derrida’s essays.

"To explain this explanation, the following general remark may serve. The ghost belief is innate among people. It is found in all times and all places, and perhaps not a single person is completely free of it. The great pile and the people, really of all lands and times, distinguish the natural from the supernatural as two fundamentally different yet equally present to hand orders of things. They prescribe miracles, omens, ghosts and magic unthinking to the supernatural, but also allow that in general nothing is thoroughly, down to its root, natural, but nature itself rests on the supernatural. Therefore the people understand themselves very well when the question is posed, “does that occur naturally or not?” Essentially, this distinction is in synch with the Kantian one between appearance and the thing in itself; only that the affair is treated more precisely and correctly in that the natural and supernatural aren’t two divided and split apart kinds of essences, but one and the same, which taken as it is in itself should be named supernatural, because only then it first appears – that is, enters upon the perception of our intellect and therefore goes into its forms, in which nature represents itself, whose phenomenal lawfulness is just what one understands by “the Natural”. I for my part, to repeat, have only clarified Kant’s expression when I named “Appearance” “Representation”. And if you still take heed that, many times, in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomenon, Kant’s thing in itself only emerges just a bit from out of the darkness in which he keeps it suspended, and lets us know it as the faculty of moral calculation in us, thus as the will – so you will also gain the insight, through referring to the Will as the Thing in Itself, how much I have simply clarified and completed Kant’s thought."

The hidden theatrical scene here, the thing-in-itself that dare not take its position on the stage – I could go on about how connected this is to the early nineteenth century entertainment of the Phantasmagoria, which in turn was connected to the theater of the magnetic sleepwalker. Kant, in this scenario, plays the master of the sonambule -- and Schopenhauer plays the master of Kant. I told you this would end in a wild Caligarian chase, as all the philosophers lure you to the madhouse, strap you down, and mutter, now I know the source of the disease!

Ah, but don’t worry – I’m not going to bore you with this any more! Also Sprach LI.

there are no accidents

LI was thinking of taking the day off from Schopenhauer’s essay and writing about the J.T. LeRoy hoax that is currently unraveling around a couple of San Francisco situationalists, Laura Albert and her husband, who made up and animated this faux HIV infected, trans-sexual naïf. And, from the accounts of the hoaxed – Susie Bright, Denis Cooper, etc. – it looks like the hook eventually settled in Laura’s mouth, as late night obsessive phone calls to the famous and titillated started growing their own personality.

But then we thought, fuck that. Let others talk literary scandal, at this blog we are all about the bucks and the popularity and the kind of pop stuff that Shirley Mansen and/or Winona Ryder and/or Carrie Fisher just goes crazy for: for instance, the deep probing of Schopenhauer’s more obscure essays .

Let’s put this post under a quote from The World as Will and Representation:

“Thus, although every particular action, under the presupposition of the definite character, necessarily ensues with the presented motive, and although growth, the process of nourishment, and all the changes in the animal body take place according to necessarily lasting causes (stimuli), the whole series of actions, and consequently every individual act and likewise its condition, namely the whole body itself which performs it, and therefore also the process through which and in which the body exists, are nothing but the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible, the objectivity of the will. On this rests the perfect suitability of the human and animal body to the human and animal will in general, resembling, but far surpassing, the suitability of a purposely made instrument to the will of its maker, and on this account appearing as fitness or appropriateness, i.e., the teleological accountability of the body. Therefore the parts of the body must correspond completely to the chief demands and desires by which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which they represent. Just as the general human form corresponds to the general human will, so to the individually modified will, namely the character of the individual, there corresponds the individual bodily structure, which is therefore as a whole and in all its parts characteristic and full of expression.”

Schopenhauer’s Spirit Seer essay, in all its eccentric embrace of magnetic somnambulism, clairvoyance, mesmeric healing and its explanation of ghosts, is logically derived from Schopenhauer’s central philosophical positions, and in particular two principles: a., the application of his Will as a sort of general solvent into which all matter dissolves and b., the Satz von Grund, the principle of sufficient reason. Since “Over the implications of spirit seeing” is too long for us to simply cull quotes to mark our breadcrumb trail through it, let’s drastically summarize the argument and get to the stranger bits about dreams.

This is how Schopenhauer procedes:

1. First, he gives us perhaps the first respectable physiological account of dreams. Schopenhauer sticks with the standard empirical account of sense impressions – intrinsic to the sensing of objects is that they be sensed outside the subject, which means mostly outside the body, or at most located in the body but outside of the terminus of the sense mechanism – the brain. However, dreams present us with the puzzle of sense images that are not derived from outside the body. Schopenhauer’s idea, taken from the physiology of the time, is that the bodies sensing system – its nerves and secretions – fall into two channels, one of which fits the standard empiricist account, and the other of which is interior. This former channel provides us, while we are awake, with a constant “noise” or screen of sensations that effectually mask the inner sensations. However, sleep, by suspending the activities of the senses, allows the ‘echo of the organism’s workshops” to be heard. The brain, then, can now receive, without interference, these weaker signals. But since the brain is oriented to the receiving of outward stimuli, it translates these weaker signals into the language of the senses. Schopenhauer’s theory was revived – without reference, of course, to Schopenhauer – by James Watson in the 90s. LI enjoyed Schopenhauer’s comparison:

“Because at all times it [the brain] will only speak its own speech; and so, into this, it interprets these weak impulses, stemming from the inside, that reach it during sleep, just as the strong and specific ones come from the outside via regular routes during waking. Thus the brain is given the matter to make images completely like those which arise from outer excitements, even though there is hardly a similarity between both kinds of impressions. Their relationship can be compared to that of a deaf person who, from the vocables that reach his ear, composes false phrases, or even with a madman, who brings his own wild, fixed ideas, corresponding to phantasies, to accidentally employed words.”

2. Unlike James Watson, though, Schopenhauer doesn’t take the physiological theory to mean that dreams are as meaningless as the sounds you might get by dropping stuff on a piano keyboard. Dreams weave together into apprehensions and meaningful messages, depending on the dreams origin in one or another part of the dream cycle. Schopenhauer spends a lot of time distinguishing one phase of sleep from another, and then investigating “magnetic somnambulism,” or hypnosis, which he takes to be parallel to sleep. Schopenhauer was very impressed with research into mesmerism, just as Balzac was, and many of the Victorians. Because 19th century philosophy is taught will little reference to 19th century psychology, we tend to miss this kind of thing. This is one of the reasons that this essay of Schopenhauer’s has been studiously avoided. If you stripped Freud and Skinner out of the history of twentieth century philosophy, you would have some puzzling patterns on your hand.

3. Schopenhauer has the idea that the dexterity of magnetized sonambules shows that the “dream organ” has a curiously instinctive sense of the world. If we recall that the world is the objectified will, and that our information about it, via our waking senses, is about surface phenomena – in a sense, is an ornament produced by the experience’s instinctive forms, time and space, which have merely the interactive reality that comes from experience – Schopenhauer has philosophical reasons to justify believing that dreams tell the truth – or foretell the truth. In fact, he “proves” this with a story from his own experience. One day, while writing, he absent mindedly reached out his hand to sprinkle sand on the page he had just penned, but accidently dipped his hand in ink and scattered it on the page and on the floor. One of his maids came in and cleaned it up, and she remarked that she had dreamed that this would happen the night before. Schopenhauer questioned her, and she claimed that she had mentioned this to the other maid earlier in the morning. Schopenhauer being Schopenhauer, he immediately rang for the other maid and demanded to know if she had been told anything by the first maid that morning. Upon the story being confirmed, Schopenhauer drew various satisfying conclusions. Firstly, the seeming accident of scattering ink was foreseen, which meant that it was not an accident. Schopenhauer’s philosophy had already, of course, shown this – everything that happens happens by necessity! One imagines he imparted this important message to the maids. And the second conclusion was that the unitary force of experience was weakened during sleep, so that time’s secondary structure of past, present and future was, in a sense, dissolved.

Okay, one more post and then I’ll have this thing done. We all have our obsessions. What can I say?

random walks of the old mole

While Schopenhauer’s essay begins with ghosts, ghosts are not the figures that haunt the essay: sleepwalkers are. One believes one is wandering into a production of Hamlet, but it turns out that this is Kleist’s the Prince of Homburg.

All of which is to say that Schopenhauer’s notion that the analysis of spirit seers should be left to the experts – the philosophers and physiologists – gives him the framework for the next move in his essay – a departure from the empiricist tradition that tries to keep faith with the empiricist principle of tracking ideas to the senses.

But LI would be remiss if we didn’t point out that the philosophical topic of ghosts has been, apparently, picked up again by Dennett. George Johnson begins his review of Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON in Scientific American with these finely turned out two grafs:

“If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs--computer like models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world. Even after the simulation outlasts the simulated, we continue to sense the strong presence of a living being. Sitting beside a gravestone, we might speak and think for a moment that we hear a reply.

In the 21st century, cybernetic metaphors provide a rational grip on what prehistoric people had every reason to think of as ghosts, voices of the dead. And that may have been the beginning of religion. If the deceased was a father or a village elder, it would have been natural to ask for advice--which way to go to find water or the best trails for a hunt. If the answers were not forthcoming, the guiding spirits could be summoned by a shaman. Drop a bundle of sticks onto the ground or heat a clay pot until it cracks: the patterns form a map, a communication from the other side. These random walks the gods prescribed may indeed have formed a sensible strategy. The shamans would gain in stature, the rituals would become liturgies, and centuries later people would fill mosques, cathedrals and synagogues, not really knowing how they got there.”

The origin of religion in the ghost story is an old story itself – reverence for the dead being the kind of ritual that interests both a Durkheimian and a Freudian, and that has had quite an impact on 20th century anthropology.

Oddly enough – and perhaps this oddity shapes the essay – Schopenhauer does not mention the dead with relationship to ghosts in his introductory paragraph. In fact, the dead are sublimated into what is present and what is absent, as if life were a matter of secondary metaphysical import. The random walk Schopenhauer wants us to follow is the somnambulist’s, to whom Schopenhauer attributes a Caligari like ability to navigate obstacles.

But… let’s give you a flowsheet of the essay, and not get ahead of ourselves. In the next post.

haunting schopenhauer

Schopenhauer’s essay on spirit seeing begins like this

“Ghosts, which in the recently elapsed, superclever century, in spite of tradition, were not so much banned as despised, have been rehabilitated in the last 25 years in Germany, much like magic was before them. Perhaps not unjustly. Because the proofs against their existence were in part metaphysical (which stood on shaky ground) and in part empirical, which only proved, that in those cases where no accidental or intentionally designed delusion was discovered, nothing was present which could have had an effect by means of the reflection of lightrays on the retina or vibrations in the air on the eardrum. But this speaks merely of the presence of bodies, whose presence nobody had observed, and whose manifestation on the aforesaid physical manner would have negated the truth of the spirit phenomenon; since the concept of a spirit actually lies in the fact that its presence is announced in a wholly other way than that of a body. A spiritseer who understood his business and knew how to express it would observe that this is simply the presence of an image in the apperceiving intellect, completely undistinguishable from that which, under the medium of light and the eyes would be left behind by bodies themselves, and yet without the real presence of such bodies. The same thing, in regard to present audible phenomena, noises, tones and sounds in the subject’s ear being brought forth, without the presence or movements of such phenomena. Here lies the source of the misunderstanding which goes through everything that is said for and against the reality of spirit phenomena: that the spirit phenomena presents itself as a bodily phenomena. Yet it is none, and must be none. This difference is perhaps difficult to illustrate and demands technical knowledge of the philosophical and physiological kind. Because it requires that we conceive that an effect from a body doesn’t necessarily presuppose the presence of a body.”

Someone once called mesmerism the materialism of anti-materialists. Something is going on in this essay that has the same pattern. In Schopenhauer’s case, the idealism for which he is known, in the dictionaries of philosophy, doesn’t predict the way in which he deals with these phenomena which simulate the body as to effects upon a subject's body without themselves being a body – in fact, which are necessarily disembodied. The thought intrigued him because, by means of the possibility of the “spirits” he was able to advance to the mechanism, as he thought of it, of dreams, and from there to sleepwalking, and from there to the phenomena of premonition, or second sight.

LI thinks this is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least those having to do with the first half of the nineteenth century’s way of dealing with the super-clever materialism of the eighteenth. The eighteenth century killed a certain kind of argument. This is the argument that supernatural stuff happens. Arguments die for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that they are refuted. I would say that the supernatural argument died from shame. And, indeed, Schopenhauer was so famously an atheist that one imagines that he could not but be scornful of the mass of “paranormal” phenomena thrown out by folk belief and treasured, for various strategic reasons, by the Romantics. So I found this beginning a little unsettling.
More on this tomorrow, I think.

great and anti-schopenhauerian news

Well, I was going to do a post about Schopenhauer today, but I received very anti-Schopenhauerian news this morning from Barcelona. Congratulations, Bernat and Cheryl and welcome to the world, Arlet!

Life on the sofa for Cheryl, reading Middlemarch, is suspended as of today.

schopenhauer's spooks

LI was looking around our bookshelf, the other day, for a book by an author whose new book we are reviewing. The new book is so, to be frank, non-book length that we were thinking of doing the long view – the other books that came before kind of business. We had been sent a bunch of this author’s books at one point in our miserable freelancing history, but – we either cut them up (sometimes, to make little collages, we have to make some sacrifices of our spiny backed friend, the book) or sold them or threw them out. Whatever. Out of the minor dust hurricane, we hauled another book – a little volume of Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena. So, with that absent mindedness that marks the loser, we got lost in reading certain of S.’s essays. Particularly one entitled Über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt, which has been officially translated as: "Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected There-with.” We aren’t sure about the everything, and we would translate it much less literally as over the implications of spirit seeing. But what the hey.


In any case, we found it a very entertaining essay – but when we went looking for commentary “therewith and thereupon”, we came up with an almost perfect blank. Which led to some headscratching – where are my fellow deconstructionist droogs when you want them? An essay that begins by considering that the “superclever” eighteenth century, in dismissing ghosts, misunderstood the whole criteria of proof for a ghost, is surely worth a look – especially given Schopenhauer’s notorious atheism. And an essay that contains a goofy, but not dismissable theory of dreams, second sight, and why it may be the case that human beings can foresee the future is surely to be of some interest to those of us who see, in the early nineteenth century’s gothic revival, a social complex that tells us a lot about religion, political legitimacy, and the shaky status of the emancipated philosophe.

So we thought, why not spend a little quality time with this little known essay?

a few humble suggestions

H.L. Hunt was a genius in many ways – or perhaps the better word is idiot savant. One of his firm beliefs was that the wealthier you are, the more votes you should get. Hunt’s prophetic vision, which was poo pooed in the sixties, has proven itself to be the bedrock of current American politics. As D.C. insiders look at the Abramoff scandals, they are as one in having this kind of response, from the WP’s Tom Edsall:

“If history is any guide, there may well be some forms of lobbyist reforms passed but there will continue to be as much or more money flowing in the system. There are some benefits if new laws increase transparency, but attempts to restrict the influencing of legislators has in the past simply created roadblocks that soon can be driven around.”

This view of the everduring power of corruption, which is also known as the lie there and enjoy it doctrine, should be used to reform how we do our national business. LI thinks that the biggest reform, one that is urgently called for, is to stop letting States elect representatives. Rather, corporations should. We know, for instance, that the current House Republican contest between John A. Boehner, who is listed as representing a district in Ohio, and Roy Blunt, who is listed as representing a district in Missouri. This is much like LI claiming to be a citizen of Dekalb Country, Georgia, which we last lived in decades ago. Obviously these two men took the earliest opportunity to flee the hinterlands, as so many go-getters do. Once launched, they hooked up with like minded people who could see, at a glance, that these men were the kind of guys Post-Reagan America is built on – wired for servility, unscrupulous, greedy, and willing to implement a win win plan to piss on their grandma’s graves if it meant they could eat a free lunch tomorrow.

So, having shaken the dust of Ohio and Missouri from their expensive shoes (dollars to donuts that eventually, when they retire or are defeated, they remain in D.C.), who does Boehner and Blunt really represent?

Blunt is easiest. He represents Philip Morris. It is really an injustice that yokels in Missouri who don’t have a pot to piss in or a McMansion to lounge around in have anything to do with his seat in Congress. Adjusting the law to allow Phillip Morris’ stockholders the right to elect him would align, we think, the interests of the people who count in the country with the governing class. Boehner, who is more of a Renaissance man, represents the Baby Bells, the Tobacco industry, and Sallie Mae, according to the Post. He also gives fabulous parties, apparently. I think that here a law that forced him to choose – does he represent SBC, or Sallie Mae – would be best for all parties.

A House of Representatives that was elected by the stockholders of the corporations they represent would, we think, get the approval of such D.C. observers as Edsall. The liberating disappearance of hypocrisy would also do us good in our war against terrorism – for what is good for the D.C. establishment is automatically good for our war against terrorism. I hope no reader of this blog doubts that.

Finally, after our reforms are enacted, we might think of building some kind of monument to H.L. in D.C. – I’d suggest tearing down the Vietnam memorial to do so, since that memorial is defeatist and doesn’t include the names of those of our men who bravely guarded our own soil, like our President and Vice President, during our time of peril back in the Sixties. If we keep harping on casualties, as we know, we are doomed as a great power.

sin camp for me

LI’s work load has suddenly shot up. This means that we are going to be a little less diligent in filling out our readers days with those happy juxtapositions that make this blog so much like the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

In the meantime – we rather missed all the Beatles folderol last autumn, but we must recommend this link for the deeper meanings of Paperback writer: Into the Abyss, by Thomas Ramirez, author of Troop Tramp, of Girls for Gil Savage, and of course Sin Camp. All sixties paperbacks put out for the heavy breathing crowd as quickly as you can put things out. LI definitely enjoyed the atmosphere:

“Many of my alleged plots came out of my own fevered brain. But after awhile, as expected, I was bound to run out of ideas. Thus I took to borrowing plots from fellow authors. A couple examples: Sin Camp [by Anthony Calvano, NB1545, 1961] was a spin on James Jones’ epic From Here To Eternity. Once I even stole some Buenos Aires carnival stuff from Rona Jaffe.
National Geographic became a major resource as I set my stories in every place under the sun – the diamond fields of Brazil, Arabian oil sheiks, Denmark, Germany, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Etc. Read the article, study the photos – my readers were there! My plots featured bootleggers, the aforementioned white slavers, mobbies of all sorts, the fashion industry, the cosmetics industry, and one even delving into the electronics racket – the first flat TV screen was featured in one of my novels. (Was I ahead of the curve or not?) Another book, based in Appalachia, later appeared on TV as The Waltons. Can you believe? Dirty crooks! “
Ramirez and his wife Fern were willing to take time off from his dayjob to experience the derangement of the senses necessary to create his masterpieces:
“An overnight in Tijuana, Mexico (definitely on-the-scene research) on May 11, 1962 on my way to San Diego to do other library-lookup was used and embellished extensively in Lust Slave [MR457, 1962]. (See pps. 98-107 starting with “The Red Door.”)
That night Fern and I somehow got suckered in by one of the gypsy cabbies – “Taxi to zee border, señor?”– who promised a party. What did we know? We ended up at a crib and were settled in a waiting room until the sleazy male host appeared to ask about our special kinks. Did we want to watch, how about a guy for the wife or a gal for me? Or maybe ménage a trios?
We settled for viewing a grainy, black-and-white porno film – made back when the men wore black socks during screw scenes – while on a couch across from us, another guy was doing pre-fuck drills with his Mexican whore. To this day I can still visualize that long, gloomy hall where we entered, looking down the line where the dozen-or-so prostitutes – many of whom couldn’t have been over thirteen, fourteen – sat in chairs outside each crib, waiting on business. “

Ramirez burnout is, mas o menos, what LI went through two years ago, giving up book reviewing:

“So it went, year after year. Along about Nightstand number 70, I began to agonize over the sameness of it all. I was getting burned out. Was I going to be writing crotch the rest of my life? It got harder and harder for me to bring anything new to my novels. By this time (I once received a note from an editor asking for partial rewrite, and in an aside he asked why I was such a pussy in my sex scenes – couldn’t I bring myself to write fuck, tits, cocks?) I was using all the words and, God, weren’t they so deadly wearisome?”

smoke, mirrors, nonsense

LI doesn’t think that, at this point, reason will prevail about the so called war on terrorism. Still, it is a good idea to repeat: the U.S. is spending about 400 million dollars per terrorist head. Mostly, the terrorists are illiterate, unemployed guys like the ones profiled in the NYT Magazine article by Jonathan Mahler. Mostly the money is dispersed to National Security industry types who spend it hosting conferences in chic hotels about distributing largesse in Wyoming and such. We know exactly where most of the terrorists are – we don’t even need to tap phones for that. They are practically listed in the phone book. We’ve known where they are for the last five years. We have no intention of actually spending any money or real effort to get rid of them. We prefer them to be on tap. Nothing is better for a large security industry than a couple of attacks per decade. Not of course that the Bush administration’s incredible inability to do almost anything real about terrorism since 2002 is simply dishonest. I’d credit them with massive stupidity, too. Never let it be said that LI is unfair.

And, due to unemployed taxi drivers in Yemen, it appears we have to crush the Bill of Rights like a dirty Dixie Cup and trust Dick Cheney.

LI doesn’t think you can fool all the people all of the time. To do that, you need objective journalism. But even with all the Washington Post’s editorial writers and all the King’s men, eventually Americans might wonder why we are fighting people, on the one hand, and preserving a terrorist organization, on the other hand. It might begin to make no sense.

Not, of course, that nonsense has ever been a bar to policy.

from pirate to preacher -- the civilizing mission

"Aged 44. Fell into sea … Witnessed by a lady called Mrs Foley with three young children. Body not found - weather terrible. Did not appear to attempt to swim. No visible efforts. Screams. She tried to reach down. Suddenly he was swept under and disappeared. He was upright in water. Was wearing boots."

That was the end of one of LI’s favorite novelists, J.G. Farrell. It came in 1979, when he was at the height of his powers, having just finished Singapore Grip. LI reviewed Singapore Grip for Newsday a couple of years ago, in a summer Sunday supplement devoted to rediscovering older novels. Alas, a cursory search via Google and Factiva has found no trace of our compressed masterpiece, but we like to think that it did some good – after all, last year NYRB books reissued Singapore Grip, along with Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur. These three books – one set in Singapore in 1940, one set in Ireland in 1920, and one set in India in1856 – made up Farrell’s Colonial trilogy. The standard writer with whom to compare Farrell is Paul Scott, whose novels also deal with the British imperium – at least, the Raj. But Farrell is much funnier than Scott. If, as a Victorian historian once famously said, the British put their empire together in a fit of absent mindedness, Farrell’s novels provide us with the agon of absent mindedness – Oedipus at Collonus wondering where he’d put the dratted binoculars, don’t you know.

Although I read Troubles and the Singapore Grip, I had never read The Siege of K., the most famous novel in the series, since I couldn’t seem to find it at a bookstore or in a library – save the University library, where I would have to read it. I don’t mind going to the U.T. library, flopping down on the sixth floor, and reading some French or German guy, but not Farrell. He definitely requires a comfortable pillow and an intimate enough space in which one’s laughter doesn’t draw stares. Anyway, last week I found it – so I’ve been reading it and, of course, laughing – and admiring. Figuring out.

I’m aware that my description of Farrell’s work might make one think of him as some professional nostalgist, like the writer of all those Navy historicals. He is nothing like that. The battle of Krishnapur, of course, never took place because Krishnapur never took place – it is a made up city. Farrell, however, has a wonderful sense of how history doesn’t happen so much as wander around. And he sees, correctly, that the Indian Mutiny or the Sepay Revolt or the first war of Indian independence – the latter being the most accurate title – was a transformative Victorian moment. The attitude of the British rulers of India, in the first half of the 19th century, was very different from the attitude of the British rulers in the latter half of the 18th century. The unexpected outcome of the Impeachment of Hastings and Burke’s effort to make known the mass massacre and robbery being committed in India was that the robbers moved from the tolerance – the Enlightenment relativism – of Hastings and William Jones to the moralism of Macaulay. Macaulay’s preserved the Whig ideal of progress by merging it with a new view of the ‘Asiatik’ in which reverence was replaced by contempt – the whole of Indian civilization, in this view, was nonsense. The British role was to replace that nonsense with the most advanced products of real civilization: the calculus of utility, the steam engine, and of course Christianity. In this, Macaulay was following in the footsteps of a Scot, Charles Grant. Grant wrote a famous paper, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain."that was actually printed by the House of Commons in 1792 -- a date that is, not coincidentally, also a time of great anxiety about the French Revolution. Grant’s view was the opposite of the old toleration:

“It has suited the views of some philosophers to represent that people as amiable and respectable; and a few late travellers have chosen rather to place some softer traits of their characters in an engaging light, than to give a just delineation of the whole. The generality, however, of those who have writ ten concerning Hindostan, appear to have concurred in affirming what foreign residents there have as generally thought, nay, what the natives themselves freely acknowledge of each other, that they are a people exceedingly depraved.”

Although some of the terms in Grant’s rhetoric are now moderated or changed, basically his Inquiry sets up a framework that still throbs just beneath the skin of the enterprise now unraveling in Iraq, with the same assumption that the invaders, who have just spent the last century pillaging and robbing, can now be regarded as moral arbiters, and the fruits of their civilization (gained, of course, by the profits accruing to the aforesaid pillaging and robbing) can be shared, for a price, with an ungrateful but ultimately redeemable native population. The performative audacity of the this act is distributed throughout the imperial mindset – it is, in essence, the imperial effect, which LI has written bored our readers with before. The neo-conservatives, or the Cold War liberals before them, entered a field that was mapped out…

''his wish is not to excite detestation, but to engage compassion, and to make it apparent, that what speculation may have ascribed to physical and unchangeable causes, springs from moral sources capable of correction"

Which, of course, brings me back to the particular excellencies of J.G. Farrell. I will put some excerpts in the next, or at least some future, post.

B58/732 was pulled in by mistake

David Ignatius has a nice profile of Cheney’s Cheney, as he calls him: one David Addington. Addington has the typical cold war criminal’s profile: active in Casey’s CIA as the illegal operations were mounted against the Sandinistas, a big supporter of torture, the kind of enabler who emerges in certain historic situations – the dirty war in Argentina, the conservative support for the jihadis in Afghanistan – always on hand to make sure that the worst are not only full of passionate intensity but have the blowtorches and the electric generators they need to put in a good eight hours:

“A special target of Addington's needling during the first term was John B. Bellinger III, at the time the chief legal adviser to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Addington would attack any sign of caution or wariness from Bellinger about proposed policies, breaking in to say, "That's too liberal," or "You're giving away executive power," remembers a colleague. Bellinger is now Rice's legal adviser at the State Department.

Addington's most bruising fights have been with colleagues at the Justice Department and the Pentagon who challenged his views on interrogation of enemy combatants. He pushed Justice's Office of Legal Counsel to prepare a 2002 memo authorizing harsh interrogation methods. When that memo was later withdrawn, Addington was furious. Last year, he successfully blocked the appointment of one critic, Patrick Philbin, as deputy solicitor general, even though Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted him in that role. Also last year, Addington was so adamant in resisting the efforts of a Pentagon official named Matthew Waxman to limit interrogation that Waxman eventually quit and is now moving to the State Department.”

Which of course reminds me of two scenes from one of my favorite movies about the Bush administration:


“KURTZMAN is pacing anxiously. SAM walks into the office.
During the brief opening and closing of the door we just
manage to hear the piano player in "Casablanca" singing,
"... a kiss is just a kiss ...". KURTZMAN is too worried
to notice. He is holding a piece of paper gingerly as if
it were contagious. He waves it frantically as SAM enters.

KURTZMAN
(hysterically)
Thank God you're here! We're in
terrible trouble! Look at this! Look
at this!

He thrusts the piece of paper at Sam.

SAM
(taking the paper)
A cheque.

KURTZMAN
The refund for Tuttle!

SAM
(startled)
Tuttle?

KURTZMAN
I mean, Buttle! It's been confusion
from the word go! He's been wrongly
charged for Electromemorytherapy and
someone somewhere is trying to make
us carry the can!

SAM
I've never seen a Ministry cheque
before.

KURTZMAN
We've got to get rid of it! There's
been a balls-up somewhere, and when
the music stops they'll jump on
whoever's holding the cheque!

SAM
Send it to somebody else. Send it to
Buttle. It's his cheque.

KURTZMAN
I've tried that! Population Census
have got him down as dormanted, the
Central Collective Storehouse
computer has got him down as deleted,
and the Information Retrieval have
got him down as inoperative ...
Security has him down as excised.,
Admin have him down as completed

SAM
Hang on.

SAM sits down at the console and punches keys. He does
this very efficiently, muttering to himself and generally
demonstrating an expertise which obviously leaves KURTZMAN
way out of his depth, until -

SAM
He is dead.

KURTZMAN
Dead! Oh no! That's terrible! We'll
never get rid of the damned thing!
What are we going to do?

SAM
Try next of kin.”


But Addington’s role, when the movie is made, should really be played by Michael Palin. Who can forget him as Jack Lint?

JACK
How much do you know?

SAM
Not much.

JACK
Enough though, eh?

SAM
(getting sucked into this
exchange)
Not really, no.

JACK goes over to the sink and turns on the taps full
blast, splashing the water noisily into the basin.

JACK
OK. OK. Let's not fence around ...
This is the situation. Some idiot
somewhere in the building, some
insect, confused two of our clients,
B58/732 and T47/215.

SAM
B58/732, that's A. Buttle isn't it?

JACK
Christ! You do know it all!

SAM
No, no, I don't. I'm just beginning
Honestly. Sorry, carry on.

JACK
Well, your A. Buttle has been
confused with T47/215, an A. Tuttle.
I mean, it's a joke! Somebody should
be shot for that. So B58/732 was
pulled in by mistake.

SAM
You got the wrong man.

JACK
(a little heated)
I did not get the wrong man. I got
the right man. The wrong man was
delivered to me as the right man! I
accepted him, on trust, as the right
man. Was I wrong? Anyway, to add to
the confusion, he died on us. Which,
had he been the right man, he
wouldn't have done.

SAM
You killed him?

JACK
(annoyed)
Sam, there are very rigid parameters
laid down to avoid that event but
Buttle's heart condition did not
appear on Tuttle's file. Don't think
I'm dismissing this business, Sam.
I've lost a week's sleep over it
already.


That last sentence about sums up the moral sense of the crewe of thugs who rule us. At one time we thought that the New Left was essentially bogus, making up caricature monsters of oppression against which to let fly their cries of outrage. And now those caricature monsters exist. Life imitates art once again.

Vince Young, mon amour

I saw the best football game I will ever see tonight. With rabid U.T. football fans, five babes and four year olds strewing toys all over the floor, and beer, which I wasn't planning on drinking this week (this was juice/purify the body week) in my belly and roaming the fretted paths of the consciousness.

U.T. -- Champions. A lovely, lovely game. And Vince Young owns this town.

ps

Last night, I finagled a spot watching the Rose Bowl game with two friends who were going to a third friends house. The house was down in Kyle, in a new, rather raw subdivision, one of those cruel exposures of wood and glass and brick to the pitiless Texas sky, the trees and other vegetation having been thoroughly routed by bulldozer and just creeping back into precarious existence via the aboriculture of some of the more green-thumby householders. There were approximately four infants scattered around the living room, three of them appropriately dressed in burnt orange, before the large screen tv that could do amazing things (my own tv can’t really get tv channels – rather I switch from one cloud of staticy unknowing to another, with figures vaguely looming out and disappearing - so I use it solely to watch dvds, and am rather out of the loop re tv technology – which is why I audibly wondered at the marvels available via remote – for instance, stopping a show and going backwards – like any yokel from the sticks with shit on his boots, and my friends explained to their friends that I was a bit retarded, but generally harmless). There were three male U.T. fans and two female U.T. fans. There were a variety of plastic blocks and toys fanned out across the rug. There was at any time four bottles of beer or two glasses of wine being drunk. There was much denunciation of the obvious media bias towards USC (led by yours truly, always keeping a nasty eye out for bias). And my friend’s friend was a fan of my type: bobbing up and down, yelling at the tv, and in general subject to mild epileptoid fits of appreciation or vituperation that rated well up on the calorie scale. My friend’s friend claimed that if U.T. won, he would celebrate with me by smashing all the car windows in the neighborhood (since I pointed out that the appropriate way to celebrate winning a championship is, traditionally, a riot). But we didn’t break any car windows or even burn any tires. We did race outside screaming at the top of our lungs. If we had been in Austin, ours would have simply been part of the chorus of voices – but Kyle is quieter, and I think we were the only people in the neighborhood making a ruckus. Then, going home, we got caught in the spontaneous parade down Guadalupe of college kids in pickup trucks (the most bizarre use of a pickup truck is that of transporting an eighteen year old from his apartment a half a mile from the campus to a university in which he invests a mile of driving time to looking for a parking space, as if it took an extra ton of metal to accomplish this noble deed), and watched a cop decide to let the four way stop on Guadalupe and 14th work its own knots and peculiarities out.

any primary products for you today, ma'am?

If LI were Evo Morales – a thought out of H.G. Wells, no? – we would definitely be taking notes about the recent Russia-Ukraine tiff. Putin "hates" Mr Yushchenko and is happy to try to undermine him,” according to the Financial Times in an article that overviews the recent, slow return of resource companies to state control.

State control does not mean total state control, however. It means that the state has a majority share in Gazprom and Rosneft, oil and gas groups. This, we think, is a logical fit for Russia. Both groups have private investors, but given the Russian national economy’s strengths and weaknesses, it never made sense to make Russia into neo-liberal heaven – consideration of the right mix of private to public enterprises should have made the state very cautious about giving away its crown jewels. In fact, no country in its right mind gives away its high value resource extraction industries – witness the recent dustup in this country when China made an offer for Conoco.

“In the past two years, [Putin] has set about creating those groups. Using occasionally questionable methods, he has restored to state control energy assets that were privatised cheaply a decade ago. Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, in late 2004 bought the main production arm of Yukos, the oil company built up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky - now serving a nine-year sentence in a Siberian prison for fraud and widely seen as the victim of a politically motivated campaign.
Last autumn, the Russian state increased its stake in Gazprom, the gas giant that controls about 20 per cent of the world's natural gas reserves, from 38 per cent to 51 per cent, moving from de facto to de jure control. Gazprom then bought Sibneft, the oil group controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea Football Club owner, for Dollars 13.1bn in Russia's biggest merger.

Finally, Mr Putin has just signed into law measures to lift long-standing restrictions on foreigners owning Gazprom's remaining 49 per cent free float. Some analysts believe the influx of international investors could double Gazprom's market capitalisation to as much as Dollars 300bn (Pounds 172bn, Euros 250bn), putting it among the world's top companies. Rosneft, meanwhile, is being prepared for an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange this year that Russian officials have suggested could value it as high as Dollars 72bn.”

Those who, in the nineties, were critical of ‘shock therapy’ will now get a chance to see if the model that worked so successfully after WWII – a private economy with a large state stake– will work for Russia. The danger to governance is obviously underlined by Putin’s use of natural gas as if it were his own private dagger. When there are no impediments to direct executive control of these enterprises, they are always going to be subject to this kind of gross corruption. State control shouldn’t mean straight executive control.

Read Chris Floyd’s analysis for comments on the hypocrisy of certain of those who are condemning Putin at the moment. And do remember, too, that the increase Putin is trying to extract from the Ukraine is, percentage wise, in the same ballpark as the increase in gas prices demanded by the IMF in Iraq, which has so far not created mass indignation among policymakers in the West.

This is probably the structural lesson for Morales. The other lesson should be situational. Bolivia does not have to market its natural gas to the U.S. The EU has every incentive to diversify its suppliers. This is a good time to have massive natural gas reserves.

philosophical taxonomy

Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels made an ingenious, but we think ultimately misleading, comparison the other day in a post about Gene Sparling’s discovery that the ivory billed woodpecker is not extinct. She finds the story inspiriting – as we do. But the philosophical moral that she draws from it we find, well, unsatisfactory:

“It's kind of a black swan story, kind of a story about falsification, and the difficulty or impossibility of being sure of a negative. It's about the fact we've talked about here more than once: the fact that not having found X does not necessarily mean there is no X to find. It could mean that, but it could just mean you haven't found it. And it can be very very difficult to know which.”

OB adds to this notion of finding and falsification the notion of a scale of far-fetchedness:

“Because Sparling wouldn't let himself think he'd seen what he suspected he'd seen, at first - in fact for quite awhile. Why? Because he didn't want to be ridiculed as a loony, a Big foot finder, an alien abduction believer. And he thought he couldn't have seen what he thought he'd seen. But actually, on consideration, the possibility that it was what he thought it might be except that it couldn't be (because Ivory bills are extinct, he said solemnly, they've been extinct my whole life) is really not nearly as far-fetched as either Big foot or alien abductions. And Big foot, in turn, is not as far-fetched as alien abductions. So there's a scale of far-fetchedness here: 1, 2, 3.”

We think that OB’s comparison between the fabulous search for the black swan, a example enshrined in American philosophy courses, and the search for the ivory billed woodpecker screens philosophically disjoint projects. One is the issue of whether there is such a thing as an x; the other is what kind of a thing x is. Whether a swan can have black coloring is a question of the swan’s properties. It is wrapped up in the larger taxonomic question, what is a swan? Whether the ivory billed woodpecker exists isn’t a question of a property – as Kant showed a long time ago, existence is not a property. It may be that there is an overlap in the method used to research both questions – you may search for black swans or you may search for ivory billed woodpeckers. Or you may even search for yeti. But the level of the scientific issue in which your search gains its meaning will be different.

That philosophers generally ignore taxonomy in preference to theory building is, perhaps, the result of the philosophical obsession with physics as the central natural science, and the search, in physics, for fundamental forces. But taxonomy offers its own philosophical dilemmas. Which brings us to Marc Ereshefsky and Mohan Matthen’s Taxonomy, Polymorphism, and History: An Introduction to Population Structure Theory in this Winter’s Philosophy of Science.

Ereshefsky and Matthen argue against a common taxonomic theory that is built into the various simple problems that have been canonized among philosophers (such as OB’s black swans – or sometimes ravens): the “homeostatic property cluster.” This theory incorporates our naïve way of distinguishing kinds by external properties, and brings it up to date by recognizing that there is a system in which these properties function – the living system, governed by natural selection. “Proponents of this view … hold that while there is no set of properties that all members of a species must share, there is a set of properties that tend to be coinstantiated among the members of a species. These properties …are maintained by “homeostatic mechanisms.” EM argue against this view, which they associate strongly with Richard Boyd, and for what they call Population Structure Theory.’

“What is needed, we suggest, is to move away from the focus on the properties individuals share and to take greater notice of populations and other more inclusive entities. These entities are causal actors in the evolutionary process, and they are so in virtue of their phenotype distributions and their population structures.”

To rephrase the black swan example in PST terms, here’s the question for philosophers: is it possible to find a swan with a chimpanzee genome? Here we are reaching down from the way in which we describe outward properties to properties of descent. That there is a lack of work on this kind of thing in philosophy points to the philosophic preference for logic over structure. And that has had the effect of making it seem like questions of structure are secondary. But of course they aren’t.

For instance: when we search for whether swans are defined by their coloration – for black swans, for instance – we think we are being guided by a correlation between what swans look like and what swans are. And because even duckling swans have certain recognizable traits that are similar to adult swans, we can still look among swan ducklings for the ugly one that grows up to be a different colored swan. But what about butterflies? To speak of monarch butterflies in a scientific sense, we have to incorporate both the caterpillar and the mature butterfly. They look so different that searching the appearances, here, has to be conducted according to much other lines than simply, monarch butterflies all have orange wings with black spots. And what about the differences brought in by species that have very distinct appearance differences between males and females? Hence, the polymorphism in EM’s title. We know that there are species that look so different during their life cycles that they have been erroneously classified as separate species. We know that certain seeming species – lichens, for instance – have turned out to be several species living symbiotically.

All of these things push us to ask questions about “looking for x” and the idea that falsification plays a central and defining role in science. Which we will take up again tomorrow.

the buzzard's prodigal relative

Opinion-makers are cheap. However, managing opinion-makers is still a profitable biz. Thus the interest in the unraveling of some of Lincoln Group’s tricks in today’s NYT. In the old days – the 1830s – the American expansionist typically inclined to coonskin caps, long rifles, the cheerfully racist views of slaveholders, and homespun penny sheets. Today’s filibusters are infinitely more sophisticated – at least, in their haberdashery.

While the old filibusters would recognize a kindred spirit in the Lincoln Group, they would also frankly recognize that the group is a collection of carrion eating pinheads whose lack of conscience would embarrass a buzzard. Here is the Lincoln Group in a typical moment, cannibalizing the dead, rolling in their viscera and insulting their memory in Pakistan, according to the Pakistan Press:

“Washington based Lincoln Group is demonstrating keen interest for continuous relief activity going on in quake hit areas of Azad Kashmir and NWFP. This was stated by Mark Gillespie, WP Business Development, of the group and Carol Fleming, Country Director Pakistan in a meeting with Minister for Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat here Thursday.”

“They further told Faisal that their group could shape opinion through strategic communications that focus on the culture community and people to create measurable results. The group works around the world in locations others may view as "inhospitable." The group prefers to call such locations "challenging." Mark Gillespie and Carol Fleming told Faisal that they rely on innovative creative ability, extreme flexibility, real experience, the quality of their people and a low profile to get the job done. Their expert teams immerse themselves in the environment to keep their finger on the pulse of local perceptions and behaviours.”

The economic opportunities growing out of the death of half a million people are limitless if you have the right go getting spirit. And the Lincoln Group has been keeping its talons on the pulse of perceptions in this country by putting tips in the garter belts of rightwing commentators, who, one would think, would not require bribes to support their vanity project war. The NYT has a nice little bit about a frequently quoted AEI guy, Michael Rubin, who was immersing himself profitably in both the highest reaches of D.C. imbecility and in Iraq itself on the Lincoln Group tab:

“Lincoln has also turned to American scholars and political consultants for advice on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq, records indicate. Michael Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research organization, said he had reviewed materials produced by the company during two trips to Iraq within the past two years.

"I visited Camp Victory and looked over some of their proposals or products and commented on their ideas," Mr. Rubin said in an e-mailed response to questions about his links to Lincoln. "I am not nor have I been an employee of the Lincoln Group. I do not receive a salary from them."

He added: "Normally, when I travel, I receive reimbursement of expenses including a per diem and/or honorarium." But Mr. Rubin would not comment further on how much in such payments he may have received from Lincoln.”

And just when LI was despairing that a public intellectual, a writer, can’t make a decent wage! We forgot all about honorariums. Plus, of course, all you can eat of the casualties.

“The Lincoln Group officials told the minister that they had realisation that efforts would have to be maintained for arranging US dollars 5. 2 billion for Pakistan to cope with the situation arising out of the quake devastation. Mark Gillespie and Carol Fleming told the minister their group had the ability to help reach, communicate and influence outcomes in the communities that mean the most.”

In the Bush culture, a scavenger is free to be all he wants to be – the sky, and the body counts, are the limit. Dig in, and while you are gobbling remember – that’s the sound of freedom you hear in the bloodscented wind!

sentimental post

Happy New Years to all our readers. We realize that sometimes LI goes off on tangents. That we exaggerate. That we exhibit symptoms of mania that would do Dr. Caligari proud. That we misspell. That the complex grammatical structures into which we are sometimes forced (like troops retreating in disorder over a hostile landscape) sometimes collapse upon themselves and surrender without reaching the magical moment of meaning.

But many of you come here anyway, if not day after day, at least with enough frequency that I am sometimes interviewed by people who want to know about blogs. Giving me an ersatz importance that I can look back upon with pride as I creep from day to day like one of Beckett’s tramps.

Especially heartening are all the comments, the emails, and the financial support. Paul comes here and gives me a corrective Augustinian karate chop every once in a while, and I hope he isn’t disappointed that I have STILL not left off my Gnostic politics. Mr. T, LI’s far flung correspondent, overflows with suggestions and comments – even though he is currently betraying LI by posting at The Cool Scene. Thanks to Alain, Brian, Winna and Patrick for all the great comments – I think that I have convinced Brian, at last, that I am not now nor have I ever been a cardcarrying anything, but I’m just a mildmannered Keynesian liberal – in political terms, a Mr. Peepers currently in a desperate hole, due to America’s being captured by bastards. Mr. Kmort, too, who sometimes rides into my comments like a desperado riding into a mining town for a three day drunk – still, I appreciate it. Harry, who has unfortunately had to liquidate his site, has now become a Net legend – if the Blogosphere was Gotham city, Harry would be one of those characters who, while outwardly a playboy millionaire, is inwardly fighting Gotham’s most feared evildoers. Although sometimes I wonder whether he isn’t outwardly a superhero and inwardly a playboy millionaire – I can never be quite certain. But the uncertainty principle is his crime fighting M.O.! And many others – Dave and the gravedigging crewe, Scott holding the fort out in Berkeley – who has definitely had an excellent year, my friend Derek in N.C., and Miruna, to whom I send these things, and who I am missing a lot this holiday season. IT, Bernat and Cheryl in Barce -- hey, this has gone on too long...

Ernst Mach, making a point long ago about the myth of the given, wrote the following to break up our sense of the always the same.

My table is now brightly, and now darkly lit, and can be warmer or colder; spots of ink can appear on it. Its foot can break, it can be repaired, polished, it can be replaced one part after the other, and yet it remains for me the table I do my writing every day

My friend can wear another jacket. His face can look serious and then become cheerful. The tone of his face can change due to the lighting, or to emotional feelings. His shape can be altered, either by some incident or by movement. The sum of the enduring particulars remains but the gradual alterations are always so great, that the former recede. But it is the same friend with whom I make my daily stroll.”

Words that have a bit more pathos when you know that Mach, after writing them, had a stroke that immobilized half of his body. Anyway, the particulars at this blog may alter, but you can always take your daily stroll with …

LI.

When my family got together for vacation last month, my niece implied that she found her uncles – me and my brothers – were so darkly sarcastic at times, so pessimistic, that we were real bummers. I could see her point of view. This is true, this is a bad trait. I resolved to be a little less negative. But I keep falling into old habits, since there are so many temptations...

So when I read the NY Observer profile of Fareed Zakaria, I tried really hard. I tried not to laugh with that hollow laugh that signifies something that is so not funny that it is really funny, like an ICBM falling right on your head. I tried not to produce that self defeating, shit always rises to the top laugh, even as the details of l’enfance de la neo-con leaned out at me, begging to be throttled, begging for me to go into one of those sessions a la James Cagney in White Heat: manic potshots, delusion, the cops boiling up the ladder to take you down. Yes, I read this account of the asskissing, the jetsetting, the patriotism in the limousine, and tried, really, to hold myself in.

So I suppressed my laughter here:

While Mr. Zakaria is very focused on broadening his media platform—expanding his “reach,” as he likes to call it—he is also busy navigating the social one, the dinners, speeches and charity events through which he cultivates powerful mentors and allies. His patrons include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who invites him over for eclectic dinner parties, and Pete Peterson, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose journal Foreign Affairs provided Mr. Zakaria with his first publishing job.

“I look up to people who really make you think seriously about the big issues that are going on, that confront the world, either historically or today,” said Mr. Zakaria. “What I like are ‘idea’ books and ‘idea’ people.”

His affinity for such people revealed itself early on. As an undergraduate at Yale, where he took hold of the college’s political union, he brought in outside speakers such as William Buckley, George McGovern, Bob Shrum and Caspar Weinberger for debates and discussions with students. They would often leave as future Friends of Fareed.”

I tried hard not to take those debates and discussions with idea people, those dinners with Henry Kissinger, as marks that Mr. Zakaria had sold his soul to the devil even before he was an undergraduate at Yale. The eclectic dinner parties – I thought, how sweet for him. I thought this through gritted teeth.

And then, of course, there was this, out of Bouvard et Pecuchet, by way of the Weekly Standard:

“I’m not a reporter—I never have been. I don’t come out of that tradition at all, and I have a lot of respect for it,” Mr. Zakaria said. “I do a kind of analytic journalism—you know, public-intellectual kind of work—and what I like about the journalism part of it is, I’m trying to raise issues. I’m trying to do stuff with a purpose.”

Trying to lie, or do stuff, rather, with a purpose. I wish I had thought of that. I bet you that the respect, the deep, deep respect, for the journalism that Mr. Zakaria is willing to boldly proclaim is repaid, in kind, by the Cokies, the Howies, the Chrises, the Broders – all of that clique which we all admire for their indepth - can I call it indepth? – coverage of the p.o.v. of various Men in Full. So I did shuck off that dark sarcasm and I was really getting into the People target audience mode. And in that mode, I felt, reading the next passage, like… well, like someone who admires and cherishes, deeply, both Brad and Jennifer in this moment of crisis:

“Optimistic” is one word that could be used to characterize Mr. Zakaria’s positions on many subjects. For example, he said that concerns about a crisis in the news media are unfounded. “I think that in the world as I view it, journalism by and large is better today than it’s ever been,” Mr. Zakaria said. “Let’s be honest: The New York Times made plenty of mistakes 30 years ago. What’s different now is that people constantly catch them at it and correct them on it. I think the nostalgia for the good old days is completely overblown.”

Similarly, Mr. Zakaria doesn’t fault the press for its erroneous reporting during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. “We were wrong, the media was wrong, but I guess I don’t see it as a symptom of a kind of bad journalism, or journalism that was insufficiently skeptical or questioning of the administration,” Mr. Zakaria said. “Maybe there wasn’t enough debate about the war—that I might concede. But that’s a different issue.”

The “we” there made me feel so included! And yet, in the back of my mind, I was thinking that that we didn’t include, well, silly people who protested and such, but people who were important and had the brains of ostriches while reciting propaganda that wouldn’t fool a child of ten. But wait: these were people who counted. People who are optimistic. People at Sally Quinn’s parties, for instance. People who are go to people. People on tv. People who might even make the cut, when they write some simply fabulous thing, for having their stuff be selected by Laura to hand to George. Which is simply heaven.

As the article continues, the reader is in for a treat. The NY Observer reporter, who must have felt much like someone witnessing, say, Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Goethe and Schilling coming together, witnessed true history in action when she got to see Zakaria interviewing Tom Friedman, a very close, personal friend, for his show, Foreign Exchange, a show of bullshit and propaganda touting a delusional imperialist… um, well, that is what my dark, pessimistic side might say. It might go on to meditate on how a show can actually be broadcast on PBS with these two clowns in it and PBS keep its supposedly liberal audience. But my brighter side, the one that would love to sip some wine with idea people exchanging ideas, thought no. No, this is an informative, fact filled show on PBS that indicates how far Public Broadcasting has moved into the mainstream, with mainstream shows that count for mainstream audiences that matter. I would obviously have been thrilled, and perhaps peed in my pants, to just be part of this entourage:

“In many ways, Mr. Zakaria’s immigrant success story shapes his worldview. A few minutes later, in the town car on the way from Reagan National Airport to the studio, he said: “I basically am a big fan of this country and its potential.”

That day, Mr. Zakaria was taping two back-to-back episodes of Foreign Exchange, something he does to minimize his trips to D.C. The concept of the show is to have Mr. Zakaria interview only foreigners in order to introduce Americans to the outside world (although the Americans that Mr. Zakaria likes also seem to creep in). The result is that there are a lot of people with unfamiliar accents on the screen. The first segment was a roundtable discussion with three foreign journalists—Katty Kay, the BBC News correspondent; Hisham Melham, a Washington correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper Annahar; and Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal Online. After that, there would be a wonk-off: a full-episode one-on-one interview with friend and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.”

Nothing says in depth like your sign off line. Like Naomi Campbell, who not only did not have time to write her recent hot and trendy book, Swan, but also confessed that she didn’t even have time to read it, Mr. Zakaria is a little too busy, as a public intellectual engaged in analytic journalism, to do what he so very much likes to do:

“I’ve never had five-year plans or 10-year plans,” Mr. Zakaria continued. “I don’t at all mean to be immodest, but I feel like I’ve achieved some level of success, and now I’m sort of asking myself, ‘So what do I do with this now? What messages do I want to get across?’ I don’t want to just write for the sake of writing or write to become famous …. ”
When asked why he does so much if it isn’t due to some sort of motivation, Mr. Zakaria said, “No, it is a drive. But I guess what I mean is … I probably have a restless side to me where I move forward, but I don’t have a goal. I’m not trying to get to a place.

“The thing I miss most is the ability to read books,” he said.”

I betcha….

no pardon for gang leaders

This was, what, in 1988? Around then. I was biking home, home being at that time Newning street in South Austin, and I passed a group of demonstrators around the bank building just before the Congress street bridge. I naturally stopped and joined them, since at this time in my life I was always psyched to protest something. The something I was protesting, I learned from one of the demonstrators, was the destruction of the Barton Creek Watershed that was currently being supported by a consortium of developers under the leadership of Freeport McMoRan.

At that time, Austin knew all about James R. Moffett and the notorious corporate gang that he headed. As is the way with all rich thugs, his name eventually was plastered to a college building – in fact, a building at U.T. I believe his name and an ex wife’s are still chiseled into the side of some building on that campus.

Unlike other gang/corporations, however, Freeport McMoRan is not just a danger to its employees pension fund and its investors. It is a true gang, much more dangerous than, for instance, the Crips. While the founder of that gang recently had the plugged pulled on him by the State, Jim Bob Moffett has enjoyed all the usages and accoutrements that come to those who contribute heavily to political parties. He will not be damned in this life. Meanwhile, his gang has committed perhaps the greatest environmental crime ever committed against the earth by a private entity.

The NYT, who we often knock, did a great job of scratching at the surface of that crime in its article of the other day by Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner. The crime has been carried out since the eighties in Indonesia, on Papua. It is there that the Freeport-McMoRan gang landed, under the regime of the man Wolfowitz praised as a truly great leader, President Suharto, in the sixties. This was just after Suharto was cleaning up the blood of the later half of the 20th century's third largest state sponsored massacre, which killed, according to the CIA, about 500,000 people. The CIA should know – after all, they were sponsoring the guy. Freeport McMoRan adapted its best practices to those promulgated by Wolfowitz’ buddy, so as the years rolled by Suharto’s family showed up on the payroll, another jet set family of kleptocrats. Meanwhile, FM was digging the world’s biggest hole, with no environmental protection in place, in Papua. A paradise was turned into a hell by a bunch of American neandrathals so wired for greed and so lacking in morals that if you cut them, they bled sewage, tailings and hundred dollar bills.

What are they doing there? Mining:

“At one point last year, a ministry scientist wrote that the mine's production was so huge, and regulatory tools so weak, that it was like "painting on clouds" to persuade Freeport to comply with the ministry's requests to reduce environmental damage.
That frustration stems from an operation that, by Freeport's own estimates, will generate an estimated six billion tons of waste before it is through - more than twice as much earth as was excavated for the Panama Canal.
Much of that waste has already been dumped in the mountains surrounding the mine or down a system of rivers that descends steeply onto the island's low-lying wetlands, close to Lorentz National Park, a pristine rain forest that has been granted special status by the United Nations.”

You can’t go to see what they are doing, of course. In the globalized, transparent, free trade and free people world, the restrictions come from the truly sacred sources – the plutocrats and the military – and we must bow down.

“Freeport says it strives to mitigate the environmental effect of its mine, while also maximizing the benefits to its shareholders. The Times made repeated requests to Freeport and to the Indonesian government to visit the mine and its surrounding area, which requires special permission for journalists. All were turned down.”

The article does a little panning for sleeze in the various FM operations – the bribery of the military, the secret surveillance of environmental groups, the ‘administration of its own security force” – Yes, these are the new Lord Jim Bobs. Perhaps, though, the reference should be to that other Conrad novel, Victory, with its three villains, Mr. Jones, Pedro, and Ricardo who come to a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago to rob, steal and kill.

“In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker, faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier. By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely artless, helpless humanity -- pathetic in their innocent watch for the small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk on its hind legs.”

The analogy doesn’t work completely, however. Jim Bob seems more like Pedro than a starved spectre. Literature has its limits.

“An Australian anthropologist, Chris Ballard, who worked for Freeport, and Abigail Abrash, an American human rights campaigner, estimated that 160 people had been killed by the military between 1975 and 1997 in the mine area and its surroundings.”

LI is not going to summarize the amazing charges in the article, but you should – the evidence of bribing the military should be enough to get dormant American regulators to fine the company, but remember – we live under the Bush Regime, where the crimes of the oligarchs rapidly become state policy…

Eventually, destroying the Papuan cultures and leaving behind a landscape like some Martian disaster, FM will leave. One can only hope that the investors in the company choke to death on their gold.

Touchatout, c'est moi

Continuing from yesterday:

Berenice’s Gardens begins with the narrator, Philippe, a thinly disguised version of Maurice Barres, overhearing a conversation between Renan and Charles Chincholle. Chincholle is an obscure personage who supported General Boulanger, the rightist leader who was trying to overthrow the French Republic. Philippe hears them speak after the ‘celebrated election of General Boulanger in Paris’.

Renan, of course, is the author of The life of Jesus and a man who, at that time, had a reputation as the purest French stylist. He much impressed Henry James, for instance – although not Nietzsche, who found him vapid and saccharine.

Chincholle begins by asking the cher maitre if he is pro or anti Boulanger. Renan’s answer anticipates Chou Enlai’s famous comment about the French Revolution: that it is too early to tell what to think about it. This is what Renan says:

"Have you leafed thorugh Sorel, Thureau-Dangin, my eminent friend M. Taine? At the bottom of each page you will find thousands of small notes. Ah! According to recent methods there are so many sources to consult, so many contradictory documents, to do history! You have to gather together all the testimonies and then subject them to your critique. I haven’t undertaken that considerable task. I can’t claim to have a clear and documented idea of the revisionist party… The Jews, my dear monsieur, didn’t have universal suffrage, which gives to each his opinion, nor the printing press that receives everything, and yet I am having a devil of a time untangling their quarrels, which I have studied each morning for the past ten years. Would M. Reinach [an anti-boulangist] himself want to turn me away from the monument I am erecting to his ancestors? and where I am at least a little competent, and collaborate on his politics, where I would bear scruples to which he would have no answer?”

Then Renan makes a little point about being a boulangist or an anti-boulangist:

”It is the faith that I lack. That a true priest could have himself impaled in order to prove to the Chinese watching about him the truth of the catholic rudiments, this only half astonishes me. He is sustained by his great knowledge of roman martyrology: ‘so may pious confessors, he might tell himself, since 33 A.D. could not have suffered such varied torments for a vain cause. I might have a few reservations about the logic of the saintly gentleman (and I’d gladly discuss them with you one of these mornings) but in the end it is very human. I understand the martyr of today; the astonishing thing is that there was a first martyr.”

And then Renan says something very cute, which is why I am translating this. He says that in himself, as in his dear interlocutor, General Boulanger inspires curiosity. He links that curiosity (and it is curiosity to see not only if the General will succeed, but obviously, what can be done by an intellectual, a think tanker, with access to such power) to scholarship and says:
“Curiosity! It is the source of the world, it continually creates it: from curiosity is born both science and love… I have seen with some displeasure a children’s book where curiosity is disparaged: maybe you know this vividly illustrated opuscule called “The Misadventures of Touchatout? [Touchatout – touch everything]. It is the most dangerous of libels, a veritable pamphlet against the superior human spirit. But such is the force of a true idea that the author of that culpable text makes us see, on the last page, Touchatout tasting yeast and floating away out of his father’s window! Let the vulgar laugh – it is an exaggerated but striking image: Touchatout floating above the world. Touchatout is Goethe; Touchatout is Leonardo de Vinci; Touchatout is you, too, monsieur!”

the elegant protofascist

“The generation of 1890, however, only took from Nietzsche the elements it wanted and needed. 'All this modernity is what I am fighting against, modernity as defined by Nietzsche ...', said Maurice Barrès , the chief intellectual leader of French nationalism, the father of the French political novel, and one of the most intelligent founders of the fascist synthesis. His entire opus is devoted to the struggle against the 'rationalist idea', which he considered 'antagonistic to life and its spontaneous forms', and he berated Rousseau for sterilizing life by attempting to rationalize it. For a quarter of a century, Barrès waged a Nietzschean struggle against the French Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism, the Kantian categorical imperative, the rights of man, humanism, liberal democracy, the idea of progress and democratic education. But where Nietzsche favoured an extreme individualism, Barrès advocated the complete subordination of the individual to the community; where Nietzsche declared his horror of the masses and extolled an aristocracy of thought and will, the primacy of culture, intellectual independence and nonconformism, Barrès took the side of the multitude, the sole depository of great collective values. Nothing could be more foreign to Nietzsche than the historical, cultural and racial determinism of Barrès , his tribal nationalism, his cult of a strong state. Nothing was more agreeable to the nationalists of the generation of 1890, than a national, Catholic, Proudhonian, xenophobic, authoritarian and often anti-semitic state." – Zeev Sternhall, “Fascism: reflections on the fate of ideas in twentieth century history.”

One thing sticks out in French literature, distinguishing it at first glance from English literature: French literature is illuminated by its shits. First rate authors, but shits. The French have Baudelaire, the English have Swinburne. The English have Kipling, the French have Maurice Barrès.

Barrès isn’t well known in America. At most, he is known from his fake trial staged by Breton in 1921. For the hotheaded young men, Barrès represented a certain strain in the French culture – revanchist, ultra-nationalist, anti-cosmopolitan – that had buried so many poilu in so many trenches. At that trial, he was defended by Aragon, who later – in the 1940s, of all times – once said: S’il faut choisir, je me dirais barrésien. » Talk about emptying your revolver into a crowd.

In the eighties, Barrès became a sort of intellectual football in a political backlash against the Foucaultians of 68 among historians. Led by Zeev Sternhall, the “new” idea was that fascism originated not on the right, but on the left – that it emerged from populist Proudhon socialism, and that the anti-semitism that one could easily find on the left became concentrated in the kind of ‘nationalist socialism’ represented by Barrès -- who actually used the phrase when he was running for the French parliament in the 1890s. This debate, which became rancorous, was, to our mind, too narrowly focused on France – a glance at what was happening in Britain, where the liberal hegemony fragmented at the same time – and ignores the imperial effect. However, it did revive interest in Barrès. Aragon was quite right to see him as the inventor of the political novel – the modern political novel.

Which brings me to La Jardin de Bérénice. LI has been reading Le jardin de Bérénice this week. The novel is one in a series that Barres named le culte de moi. Barres politics was limited by his expressed sense that politics was the form in which he was shaping his ego, which had as much to do with his anti-Dreyfusardism, his nationalism, his loyalty to France’s pantomime of a pantomime of Napoleon, General Boulanger, who was promoted by various financial interests in the 1890s as a possible French dictator – his campaign was endowed with some of the same kinds of resentments and hopes that went into Perot’s presidential campaign in 1992.

The beginning of Le Jardin de Berenice presents a dialogue between Renan, who Barres was considering as his master (an odd compliment, since, in the perspective of the Barresian ego, the discipline here very clearly has the ultimate say so about mastership) and a friend. I’m going to translate a bit of that in my next post, as … well, an exercise in translation.

winter's tales

It is an interesting and somewhat terrible time to be poor in the developed countries. Poverty is not just deprivation, of course – it is a form of life. I know all about it, in one way. I’ve been poor for the last six or seven years, and I’ll probably get poorer as time goes on. So I have a day to day acquaintance with the how-to-get-by that makes up poverty in America. But I have no acquaintance with the culture of poverty for the simple reason that the culture of poverty has been so penetrated by cultural forms generated by the middle and upper classes that the older forms have disappeared. My only knowledge of them is from the vast literature that either touched on the poor or sprang directly from them between around 1600 to around 1930. In the U.S., the last bit of this culture fed into the flowering of the American novel in the 50s and 60s. Read Augie March or Native Son, and then pick up your average American literary novel today – on the recommendation of someone I met, I’ve been reading Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, Lunar Park. The latter has no down – or its downs are all chemical and emotional. It isn’t that the point of view of down has totally disappeared from the national consciousness, but when it does emerge – say, in Rap music – it pretty quickly merges with middle class norms, adopts the middle class way of seeing itself.

On a world wide scale, I’d call this (to use an ugly, sociological term) the sqalorization of poverty. The erasure of forms in question is about liquidating the dignity in how-to-get-by, and with the loss of that dignity goes the loss of a point of view. The point of view is then turned into something that is simply want. This suits the intellectual norms of the governing class to a tee – all sides of the ideological divide essentially define poverty in terms of want. It is a consumer group at low ebb.

Hmm, depressing stuff for the holidays there, Mr. LI. But it is important to remember certain cold human truths when reading economists. As in the article by RBA that we referenced yesterday.

RBA’s point in the article is to shoot down a few of the recent myths about international trade, aid, and less developed countries –LDCs, as they are known among the international headhunters. These myths fluctuate. Although RBA doesn’t point it out, the current controversies over agriculture demonstrate how the right can shift left and the left can shift right without anyone knowing or caring. In the fifties, when the literature on LDCs were born, there was one truth that was held to be self evident – the path to wealth was paved by diminishing the labor pool attached to the agricultural sector and building up the industrial sector. It was right wing economists, notably Peter Bauer, who criticized the nascent Cold War model – a model very influenced by what seemed to be the Stalinist success in industrializing a supposedly moribund and stagnant economy. Now, of course, it is the left that defends the indigenous structures that make up the agricultural sector, while the right calls for the end of trade barriers in order to bring about international agricultural efficiencies. In essence, the liberalization argument is that the wealthy economies, by subsidizing their agricultural sectors, are penalizing farmers in the third world by making third world goods too expensive to compete.

RBA shoots down this argument with relative ease, I think::

“Yet the reality is that liberalizing agricultural trade would largely benefit the consumers and taxpayers of the wealthy nations. Why? Because agricultural subsidies serve first and foremost to transfer resources from consumers and taxpayers to farmers within the same country. Thus, citizens of developed countries would derive the most benefit from having those subsidies cut. Other countries are affected only insofar as world prices rise. But the big, clear gainers from such price increases would be countries that are large net exporters of agricultural products-rich countries, such as the United States, and middle-income countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Thailand.

What about the poorer countries? For one thing, many poor countries are actually net importers of agricultural products, and so they benefit from low world prices. An increase in prices may help the rural poor, who sell the agricultural goods, but it would make the urban poor-the consumers--worse off. Net poverty could still be reduced, but to what extent depends in complicated fashion on the working condition of roads and the markets for fertilizer and other inputs, on how much of the gains are captured by poor farmers versus intermediaries, and on the poverty profile of each country.”

Underneath this reasoning, one sees the old idea still working away. To gain the technostructure of modern agriculture in order to capture the benefit from the liberalized regime, farmers would be subject to the same invisible hand that has swept across the U.S. and other developed countries, making it almost impossible for the family farmer to compete with agribusinesses. Not that it is absolutely impossible: niches are still viable: organic foods, some kinds of truck farming, etc. That hand has already moved across the third world, which is why the third world has gone to the cities. Stalin’s collectivization of the Ukraine was a criminal variant of the current of history, perhaps the most important current of history, of the past one hundred years: the collapse of the peasant culture. Perhaps it is this collapse that has lead to the squalorization of poverty – perhaps there is an intrinsic, but hard to suss out connection between peasant culture and the poverty’s former forms of life. The underground connection between these worlds – worlds of the urban masses and the rural masses – can be seen in Giovanni Verga’s wonderful novel, The House by the Medlar Tree, which chronicles the fall of the house of the Malavoglia. Malavoglia are fishermen, not farmers, and so inherently more mobile. But the mobility between the village and the metropolis is on very old routes of custom that you can see underneath all the realistic and naturalistic novels of the nineteenth century – from Lucien de Rubempre’s trip to Paris to Eugenie Grandet’s encounter with a dandy.

Wow, I’m not sure I want to keep going on such a downer subject. And it’s Saturnalia Eve!

Sorry. Good night, sweet ladies, good night, sweet ladies, sweet ladies good night.

a grim gray cloud in the form of a post

RBA – as I am going to call the collective authorship of How to Help Poor Countries – begin their article with a comparison between Nicaragua and Vietnam.

This is a clever comparison. Both countries were majorly fucked with by the U.S., both were Cold War hotspots, and each went a separate path – the Vietnamese went supposedly left, with the victory of the communists, and the Nicaraguans went supposedly right, with the victory of the anti-Sandinista forces.

So what has happened to these two countries? The small summary goes like this:

“Vietnam faced a U.S. embargo until 1994, and it is still not a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Despite these obstacles, it has found markets for its growing exports of coffee and other agricultural products and has successfully begun diversifying into manufacturing as well, especially of textiles. Nicaragua, on the other hand, benefits from preferential access to the lucrative U.S. market and had several billion dollars of its official debt written off in the 1990s. Yet its coffee and clothing export industries have not been able to compete with Vietnam's.”

The large summary would emphasize a couple of other features. For one thing, Nicaragua has never had the resources, size, educated population, or leadership that Vietnam has had. For a while, under Somoza, the most flourishing export industry in Nicaragua was, literally, blood. The largest blood bank in the world was located in Managua, and through that blood bank, as sloppy and corrupt affair as everything else Somoza touched, was diffused little gifts to the world – HIV, hepatitis C, syphilis.

Douglas Starr, in Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce,
penned that little history, although few economists have pondered the fact that paying for blood significantly increases the chance that the blood will be infected. (But see CT’s Kieran for an interesting paper here ). I could go on with another depressing tale from Central America that mingles magical realism and fact – for instance, the fact that the revolution against Somoza, which is usually dated to the assassination of the editor of the one opposition newspaper in Nicaragua, could be laid at the feet of the plasma center, since the assassination was carried out by “Pedro Ramos, a Cuban American entrepreneur whose business had been attacked by La Prensa. Mr. Ramos owned a plasma processing clinic—Plasmaferesis—which used to buy blood from any Nicaraguan and then send the plasma products to the United States. Plasmaferesis was commonly known by the people as the "House of the Vampires."

In any case, the situation of Nicaragua, looked at from the view point of the international economy, is, to say the least, challenging. Besides blood, what can the country export? And is it the case that export is its only hope? These questions are generally not asked when people write about Nicaragua, since the concern is with land reform, free markets, democratization, and the whole NGO neo-liberal nine yards. But as so often, cutting to the chase is sorta difficult, since the chase is in a maze of economic jargon and agendas that are developed for constituencies far from Nicaragua. The chase for this post is measured by whether the average citizen is getting richer or poorer. By that standard, according to the EU, Nicaragua is in bad shape: the average person has gotten poorer since 1993. But you wouldn’t know that if you read a gung ho Country report about Nicaragua. The latest one, issued in June, 2005, reads:

“According to the latest revision of official data, the Nicaraguan economy grew 5.1% in 2004; a remarkable recovery when compared with the sluggish 2.3% rate recorded in 2003. The Central Bank explained that one-third of the economic growth was due to public and private construction, and was fueled by the tourism sector. We forecast economic growth of 3.9% in 2005, backed by public and private investment,
consumption stimulated by family remittances, and an expanded supply of private credit. Political conditions, however, prevent a faster recovery. During the rest of the forecast period, we foresee continued growth driven by DR-CAFTA (assuming that the National Assembly approves the treaty).

We foresee a larger trade deficit in 2005, due mainly to the faster growth of imports related to higher prices and volumes. In the medium term, the reduction of interest payments on external debt tied to the debt relief and faster disbursements of external loans would offset the trade imbalance. Therefore, we can expect a drop-off of the current-account deficit in 2005 and beyond, which would strengthen international reserves, and comfortably manage the exchange-rate path toward its continued deceleration.”

You can access the current stats on Nicaragua here.

That the GDP growth rate can be divorced entirely from the average person’s own average person domestic product is the result of the usual policy of squeezing the orange. The Country Report is bubbling with enthusiasm that the government is cutting its deficit. In fact, many of the loans out to the government, which it is paying back, are tied to the government cutting its deficit. Now, do you wonder where the burden of that deficit reduction miracle is falling? Do you think the government is raising the amount it applies to education, and cutting any construction program that is merely graft, shunting money to a corrupt elite? Do you want to buy a bridge I own in Brooklyn?

We’ll end this post – a sort of laying out the problem in the style of Tristam Shandy, as it were - with a quote from RBA’s article, citing the experience of another country:

“Witness the case of Mexico. It has the advantage of sharing a 2,000-mile border with the world's greatest economic power. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, the United States has given Mexican goods duty-free access to its markets, has made huge investments in the Mexican economy, and has continued to absorb millions of Mexican laborers. During the 1994-95 peso crisis, the U.S. Treasury even underwrote Mexico's financial stability. Outside economic help does not get much better. But since 1992, Mexico's economy has grown at an annual average rate of barely more than one percent per capita. This figure is far less than the rates of the Asian growth superstars. It is also a fraction of Mexico's own growth of 3.6 percent per year in the two decades that preceded its 1982 debt crisis. Access to external markets and resources has not been able to make up for Mexico's internal problems.”

prolegomena to a snoozer

LI has noticed a holiday decline in readership, which is just as well, since we have a yen to write extensively about the problem of primary product exporters finding their niche in the world economy. This topic will definitely put the kids to sleep.

Still, Brian’s comments on our Bolivian post express a certain understandable weariness in the developed countries (which used to be called the industrialized countries – but industrialization is no longer the sine qua non of wealth, right?) about the resiliency of poverty, and the cycle of ideological policies that have been put in place to “cure” it in underdeveloped countries. Countries like Bolivia.

I am not nearly so pessimistic. Which brings me to the article in August’s Foreign Affairs, How to Help Poor Countries, written by three heavyweights in the development economics field: Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian. Actually, Subramanian is not a name I am as familiar with as Birdsall and Rodrik, but what the hay.

In my next post, I’m gonna dive into the article. It should be a real snoozer – but I am compelled by a strange power, like the hero in an Edgar Alan Poe story, to seek out the more bizarre realms of Morpheus as the house of Usher crashes into picturesque ruin behind me.

Oh, and a note for readers, if you please. This has been a terribly slow month for editing. My last job was last week, and it was a small one. If anyone knows of upcoming academic conferences anywhere, mail me the details. I’m mailing out my own spam/advert to the organizers of conferences in the vague hope that these people might post it, and I might gather a clientele.