and now... for the plague of christo-corporate leeches

Via Jim Henley’s blog, we went to see the latest blast of inanities from Chuck Colson, who – appropriately enough – was once a symbol of Watergate and how has a permanent leech position in the hilariously misnamed “Faith” section of the online Washington Post, managed by no less a faith playa than Sally Quinn. Sally was last seen placing her faith in the muscularity of Fred Thompson, and before that her faith in Ahmed Chalabi was as steady as a rock, and filled with thrilling currents of bygone days, when you just knew the Dark Skinned oriental crept around outside the military hq, full of treachery and lust for the European Woman.

Colson is, of course, not only a leech on the Washington Post, but a large and repulsive leech on the Republic itself, as his organization, the cultish evangelical prison fellowship, has tried ardently to produce a Christian gang out of prison inmates and, for their efforts, are shunted beaucoup government funding. As has been amply documented, Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministry operates by systematically denigrated any but the evangelical Christian faith, and does so while being supported by the monies collected from Catholic, jew, pagan and Buddhist. As so often, conservatism, here, has become another name for diverting government funds to some bloodsucker’s project or other. Luckily, there are organizations out there battling the bloodsuckers – notably the Americans united for separation of church and state, which won a battle against the funded fundies in Iowa last year. They have a blog, another one that I should put on my sadly neglected sidebar.



As the AU has pointed out, Colson is well known for attacking other religions. Recently he addressed the Southern Baptist convention in San Antonio, where before the prayer n lynchin’ meeting – always a favorite of the pastors, rousing their blood and all – he attacked Islam in the usual Foxfed terms:

Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Charles Colson recently addressed the Southern Baptist Convention’s Pastors Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Ethics Daily.com reports that the speech was a no-holds-barred attack on Islam and atheism.
“Colson derided the former for spawning “Islamofacism,” a religion-political ideology that is “evil incarnate.” “Islam is a vicious evil,” he said. Comparing Christianity to Islam, Colson said “these are two completely different views of life and reality. Islam is a theocracy, which means that it is a church state.” On the other hand, he said, Christianity promotes “free will,” each person’s right to “make his own choices.”
Given Colson’s concern for free will and non-theocratic rule, you’d think he would support at least some distance between church and state. On the contrary, he immediately urged the audience to proactively install a Christian theocracy in the United States!
“What is our purpose in life?” he asked the pastors. “It is to restore the fallen culture to the glory of God. It’s to take command and dominion over every aspect of life, whether it’s music, science, law, politics, communities, families, to bring Christianity to bear in every single area of life”

Ah, we are but the ants in the antfarm, while Colson and his minions are the Far Side lunkheads, taking “dominion” over every aspect of our life. No wonder he is contributing to the Faith column at the WAPO! Perfect geneology – from the felonious side of the GOP – perfect rhetoric – nonsense and bluster – perfect coordination with the Christo-corporate mindmeld that is, I guess, what passes for the program of the Bush administration.

Now that we’ve got down that Islam is evil, time to roll up our sleaves and get back at Paganism – especially since the Pagans, not on the government payroll, have much more to say to prisoners than the funded fundies do. In the timetested manner of all rightwingers, Colson defends his attempt to achieve a government sanctioned monopoly by piously opining that paganism is no religion, and if it is a religion, the U.S., being all Judeo-Christian and shit, shouldn’t be using our tax dollars to support it! Gall itself would blanche at this mouthy Tartuffe.

Here he is:

“It is debatable whether paganism is a religion, per say (sic). It is generally defined as a pre-Christian state, but it takes a wide variety of forms—all the way from relatively benign New Age-style nature worship, to pantheism, to witchcraft, and even human sacrifice.

Those who publicly identify themselves as pagans are at best a marginal number and are basically no different from dozens of other cults.

I see no reason why Wiccans or pagans generally should have the services of taxpayer-paid chaplains. It is perfectly appropriate, if a group meets court tests for religion, that outside priest/ministers be allowed to come into federal facilities and minister. But historically, with standards that have been spelled out carefully by the courts, chaplains are appointed to represent mainline religions.”

A good butter wouldn't melt beginning, giving us a refreshing blast of ignorance about pagans and then giving us a false interpretation of court rulings, which have already accorded Wicca religious status, as is pointed out by one of his commenters. So much for the sane Colson – now onto the rabid Colson whose words come out of a strain of legitimism that is pretty big among the ultra-right Christers. They have reluctantly recognized the secularism of Jefferson – and have, of course, pretended Tom Paine never existed – and they have done battle for years with the separation of church and state:

“… it is very clear from reading the writings of our founding fathers that a sound adherence to the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition—or at the very least, deism—was essential as a basis of the moral law that would sustain a free society.

The writings of all the founders are clear on this. I would refer anyone interested particularly to Michael Novak’s book On Two Wings, in which he describes the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition on one wing and the influence of the Enlightenment on the other. They were finally balanced in our founding. But everyone, devout believer or deist or otherwise, saw the necessity of a strong moral law which would provide self restraint. Without self restraint, free governments cannot succeed.

John Adams famously wrote, “We have no government, armed in power, capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion . . . our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” And George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Not being as familiar with paganism in its various forms, I do not wish to condemn it unfairly. But from what I know of it, I do not think it can provide the “indispensable supports” Washington wrote about.

So I would not appoint pagan chaplains, nor would I, as a personal decision but influenced greatly by the founders, vote for a pagan.”

I should give the On Faith section some credit, however. Although bringing this reprobate aboard as a regular commenter is offensive, at least they did spotlight the demo by Pagans on July 4. The military, which has a problem, actually, with a pretty active evangelical clique in places like the Air Force Academy, has been trying desperately not to hire any pagan chaplains, although it happens that there are thousands of troops – something like four thousand – who are pagans. Hire the chaplains, and purge the military of the small group of rabid evango-missionaries. Things on the national to do list that won’t get done anytime soon.

Loot

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, William Hazlitt produced a polemic in his highest style that presented the classical liberal way of looking at war in an essay entitled “War and Taxes”. He begins with the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and proceeds to show that war falls under the latter category. However, even if a project is unproductive, it must be paid for somehow. It has a cost:

“If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-acount of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted – of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kick-shaws of legitimacy.”

This is a vivid and captivating idea. LI has often plugged into the notion that war is paid for by the loss of liberty.

The question is: is it a true idea? Does it really describe modern war?

Hazlitt wrote this in 1816. This is what had happened over the past two decades: France, after overthrowing the monarchy, had borrowed money to pursue its wars by liquidating the estates of the church and the nobility and divvying them up as paper. These assignats have a complicated history – in fact, the spider web of loans consolidated into mandats, which were divided between those to which the nation pledged its sacred purpose to redeem and those that were, in fact, left unredeemed – in other words, a form of bankruptcy – plunged European markets into chaos and has plunged every succeeding generation of economic historians, seeking to understand the system, into chaos too. Suffice it to say that the interest on the loans to the French created pressure on the English, so that Pitt was forced to suspend the gold standard, and designed a great system for floating loans to conduct the war – conduct which involved, among other things, financially supporting the opponents of France, Austria and Prussia. By 1815, the National Debt seemed overwhelming.

To the average textile worker or artisan, the English economy must have looked hopeless in 1816. Add to that, in Hazlitt's case, the extinction of his hopes for liberty. Hazlitt supposedly wandered around in a daze after Waterloo. He could not get over the return of the Bourbons, the repression of liberty, and the seeming return of the revolutionary energies unlocked by 1793 to the dungeon of history. On all of these counts, he was... well, not utterly wrong, but definitely not right in foreseeing the apocalypse. Britain was about to expand as never before. To see why, one has to put the British system of financing the great wars against France in an even larger context – that of the British system that had brought England not only back into European history since 1688, but that made England – a relative non-entity in terms of world power in 1688 – the greatest world power a mere century later. The rise of Britain is a mystery shrouded in the complacent assumptions we bring to the idea that the British empire was some kind of eternal thing, or that the British were a well respected European power. They were respected mainly for their pirates until the Stuarts, a subsidy of Louis XIV, were chased out. How did they become such an event?

Lawrence Stone, in “An Imperial State at War; Britain from 1689 to 1815” puts the issues into a liberal political form that Hazlitt would have appreciated:

“It is only very recently that historians have begun to study this paradox of, on the one hand, the use of massive external military empire to block a rival hegemonic power and to create a maritime trading power and, on the other, the preservation of internal liberty and the rights of private property – a rare combination only paralleled by Periclean Athens and America from 1941 to the present day. Judith Sklar described 18th century Britain as ‘a commercial, extensive, non-military, democracy disguised as a monarchy.” This is largely, but not entirely, correct.” Stone points out that the non-military part disguised the use of mercenaries – he doesn’t correct the democracy part, which is obviously insane. And he writes: It is also true, however, that British politics and society were bound to be deeply affected by a prolonged war with France. In order to win, the ruling elite were prepared to spend immense amounts of treasure and also torun up the national debt on a scale comparable only to the activities of the Reagan-Bush administrations in the United States.” The comparison in that last sentence is severely understated. The U.S. during the Reagan-Bush years contained a manufacturing stock undreamt of in the 18th century, as well as a wholly transformed sector of human capital that is hard to compare to a society in which bare literacy was the norm.

Hazlitt and in some way Stone speak of war, then, purely in terms of a cost – a waste. The accursed portion, the sacrifice, to use the more elevated rhetoric of Bataille. In this way of thinking, the older notion of war – war as looting – is left behind. The looting system is divorced from the new system of paying for war – which was the genius of the British system. From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Loot had not been forsaken as a motive to war. On the contrary, by 1794, the British were in possession of India and bleeding it for all it was worth. But the art of looting had gone up to another level.

The system wasn't, of course, flawless. Even the most beautiful system of finance does face the fact that payment must be made on debt. Here is another area in which war can have an unexpectedly blessed result. One of the takers on the British bonds was the Dutch, which had the most developed financial infrastructure on the Continent. What it did not have was a large army. When, in the 1790s, the French threatened Holland, the Dutch naturally turned to the British. Eventually the French occupied Holland, with the Dutch banks fleeing before them and relocating in London. By 1815 London had displaced Amsterdam as the world center of banking.

All of which is a way of saying that the distinction Hazlitt makes, the distinction that is still made, between productive and unproductive labour, is a much softer distinction – and is sometimes no distinction at all – than Hazlitt, and after him a whole liberal tradition, would like to be the case. As the Cambridge Economic History of Europe puts it, nicely: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

The new system of financing war produced a whole new system of looting. The wealthy, in the anglosphere, have never forgotten this lesson. Those in “receipt of lower incomes” have never, ever learned it. And the liberals pretend, by and large, that it never happened.

Dogs against Romney - go post your dog pics on this site

Hey, if you own a dog and have pics, go over to the dogsagainstromney site and post them and a message from your pooch. The dogs over there say, Romney is mean! Not only should he not be president, he should get help!

Happy fourth, North!

And to all our LI readers!

the peapod of evil

In my last post, I made the point that George Bush isn’t a fascist or America’s worst king. But go to the Obsidian post to understand why he is your typical lamebrained, countryclub accessory to kidnapping and murder, ie that Texas corn-promise between the your middlin' peckerwood's desire to lynch people, especially black people, and the need to respect the spirit of the law as it functions in railroading people into the death chamber.

My shit’s imperial

Disrespect my click, my shit's imperial
Fuck around and made her milkbox material
You feel me? Suckin dick, runnin your lips
'Cause of you, I'm on some real fuck a bitch shit, uhh.. – Notorious B.i.g, Get Money

Bush is not a fascist. Is he the worst American king? I doubt it. Match him insignificance with the insignificances of the pygmy American kings – the Pierce’s, Hayes’ Arthur’s, Coolidge’s – and he is at home in it, a pig in shit. As for the pharaohs, a Kennedy, an Eisenhower, a Reagan, they all contrived moments of horror infinitely more dangerous than Bush’s pipsqueak war on terror. However, the common perception of fascism that haunts the lefty commentariat and has spread to the liberals is not wholly wrong. As in the 1930s, before our eyes and under our noses the democracies are rotting. And as in the 30s, there’s a palpable rise in the level of political frustration. It is as if the political process has ground to a halt. At the same time, the political stakes, at least rhetorically, rise higher and higher. It is the auction effect – the objects upon which we bid are second rate, and we even know that there are more important objects, ones that our lives depend on, that aren’t included in the auction, but we are under the spell and can only bit as the auctioneer manifests some other object – here’s the Libby trial and commutation, here’s the wiretapping and the illegal torture prisons, here’s Cheney’s claim that his office is somehow separate from the executive branch, here’s the lying attorney general. The auctioneer has been selling cheap knock offs since the Berlin wall fell, and we know it, but we are afraid to leave the auditorium. The slogan of the nineties – no alternative – which found its disgusting prophets in Friedman and Fukayama, is now where we live. That hurts. And yet the living is good – the middle class, it is true, stagnates, but its credit cards are ever hopeful, the CEO class has impressed upon the worlds most advanced economy a Brazilian like inequality and no one cares or can even see it, the American army in Iraq is but a ghost coming home in ghost coffins or shut up in the VA hospitals where the bits are extracted from their brain stems and they are sent home to merry lifetimes full of unremittingly violent nightmares but that is their business, party contributions from the blogosphere are rising and rising and candidates have broken through to that blockbuster movie level where the amounts by which they are bribed have become a competition we can all look on with pride. It’s paradise. Everybody thinks the country is on the wrong track and the future is black, but don’t send your son or daughter marching into it without an I-phone and tutorials in raising the SAT score. Perhaps they won’t be useful when the world turns belly up, fucked out and poisoned, but we’ll hopefully be dead by then.

Hazlitt, talking about a similarly poisonous calm in 1816, wrote that the Jacobin’s “hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood.” Soooo true – as one misfit liberal can testify.

So these are the similarities that bring us back to – the Bataille essay! So let’s plunge into it:

“In opposition to the impoverished existence of the oppressed, political sovereignty initially presents itself as a clearly differentiated sadistic activity. In individual psychology, it is rare for the sadistic tendency not to be associated with a more or less manifest masochistic tendency. But as each tendency is normally represented in society by a distinct agency, the sadistic attitude can be manifested by an imperative person to the exclusion of any corresponding masochistic attitudes. In this case, the exclusion of the filthy forms that serve s the object of the cruel act is not accompanied by the positioning of these forms as a value and, consequently, no erotic activity can be associated with the cruelty. The erotic elements themselves are rejected at the same time as every filthy object and, as in a great number of religious attitudes, sadism attains a brilliant purity. This differenciation can be more or less complete – individually, sovereigns have been able to live power in part as an orgy of blood – but, on the whole, within the heterogeneous domain the imperative royal form has historically effected an exclusion of impoverished and filthy forms sufficient to permit a connection with homogeneous forms at a certain level.” – Bataille, The psychological structure of fascism.

Having developed an overview of society in which the homogeneous and heterogeneous tendencies are defined, functionally, with relation to each other as they make up the social whole, and defined, substantially, with relation to utility, Bataille can now address the specific topic of the psychological structure of fascism. For Bataille, fascism is not an exception to other forms of rule, but rather is an exaggeration of previous tendencies in the fraught relation of the sovereign to the ruled. This relationship has several levels of concurrence and of conflict. As in the quote above, the form of the relation should be sexual, and yet in practice it is systematically a-sexualized. Policy is the anti-fuck. The evacuation of a sexual content from the sexual form is reflected, actually, in the violent, sexual language of political polemic, which has always been full of assfucking, dicksucking, being fucked over, shitting, pissing – an orgy of malign frustration that whirls through Mazarinades and revolutionary tracts and the whole subliterature of politics, even up to now. In a sense, politics is sex without arousal.

Bataille was very impressed with a religious fact that also impressed James Frazer in The Golden Bough: the untouchability of the sacred person. Any theory of sovereignty that avoids the issue of untouchability, to Bataille, detours around the central sovereign function, and in fact misses the social configuration in which that sovereignity gains its real power – which is not the power to be obeyed, to use Weber’s metric, but the power to infuse a certain standing moral panic within the homogeneous social part.

Taking this view, Bataille sees in the fuhrer prinzip merely the latest outcropping of an old and archaic form of power:

‘There is hardly any need to suggest at this point that the possibility of such affective formartions has brought about the infinite subjugation that degrades most forms of human life (much more so than abuses of power which, furthermore, are themselves reducible – insofar as the force in play is necessarily social – to imperative formations). If sovereignty is no considered in its tendential form – such as it has been lived historically by the subject to whom it owes its attractive value – yet independently of any particular reality, its nature appears, in human terms, to be the noblest – exalted to majest , pure in the midst of the orgy, beyond the reach of human infirmities. It constitutes the region formally exempt from self-interested intrigues to which the oppressed subject refers as to an empty but pure satisfaction. (In this sense the constitution of royal nature above an inadmissible reality recalls the fictions justifying eternal life.) As a tendential form, it fulfills the ideal of society and the course of things (in the subject’s mind, this function is expressed naively: if the king only knew…). At the same time it is strict authority. Situated above homogeneous society, as well as above the impoverished populace or the aristocratic hierarchy that emanates from it, it requires the bloody repression of what is contrary to it and becomes synonymous in its split-off form with the heterogeneous foundations of the law: it is thus both the possibility of and the requirement for collective unity; it is in the royal orbit that the State and its functions of coercion and adaptation are elaborated; the homogeneous reduction develops, both as destruction and foundation, to the benefit of royal greatness.”

This paragraph will lead us into a consideration of another modality of the heterogeneous: war.

The gods and deceit

The Mesopotamian gods were sensitive sleepers. They were always complaining about noise. Also work. They had to work all the time. Finally their complaints about the work load became too much, so they agreed to create human beings. Human beings could do the work:

“They called up the goddess, asked
The midwife of the gods, wise Mami,
You are the womb-goddess, to be the creator of Mankind!
Create a mortal, that he may bear the yoke!
Let him bear the yoke, the work of Ellil
Let him bear the load of the gods!
Nintu made her voice heard
And spoke to the great gods,
On the first, seventh, and fifteenth of the month
I shall make a purification by washing.
Then one god should be slaughtered.
And the gods can be purified by immersion.
Nintu shall mix the clay
With his flesh and blood.
Then a god and a man
Will be mixed together in clay.
Let us hear the drumbeat forever after,
Let a ghost come into existence from the god's flesh,
Let her proclaim it as her living sign,
And let the ghost exist so as not to forget the slain god.”


The stories all tell, in one way or another, of the creation of man. But immediately upon creating man, the gods will all play tricks of one type or another. Yahweh levels prohibitions that only make sense after the prohibition has been violated – thus demonstrating not only his power to Adam and Eve, but the problem with badly ordered sets. The Mesopotamian gods just wanted a break and a siesta, but they did mix in enough of the slain god into the essence of the human so that the human would always be half ghost. As for the Greek gods, the tricks they played on humans were innumerable. However, there is an obscurity in the Greek myths about who created man and woman anyway. Was it Zeus or was it Prometheus? In Hesiod’s Theogony, men already seem to exist, but not women. Women are a trick themselves. Prometheus pulls a trick on Zeus by covering up some bones with some likely looking fatty meat at a meal and asking all the gods to take a portion. Zeus takes the bones, which implies that he was tricked, but Hesiod claims that he was not tricked - as is often the case, in myths as in dreams, negation is avoided by bifurcating the story, telling both sides of the contradiction as if they were both true. From thence ensues a complicated fight:

“For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone, even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to befool the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, covering them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat. Then the father of men and of gods said to him:
`Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!'
(ll. 545-547) So said Zeus whose wisdom is everlasting, rebuking him. But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick:
(ll. 548-558) `Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids.' So he said, thinking trickery. But Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men which also was to be fulfilled. With both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit when he saw the white ox-bones craftily tricked out: and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars. But Zeus who drives the clouds was greatly vexed and said to him:
(ll. 559-560) `Son of Iapetus, clever above all! So, sir, you have not yet forgotten your cunning arts!'
(ll. 561-584) So spake Zeus in anger, whose wisdom is everlasting; and from that time he was always mindful of the trick, and would not give the power of unwearying fire to the Melian (21) race of mortal men who live on the earth. But the noble son of Iapetus outwitted him and stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk. And Zeus who thunders on high was stung in spirit, and his dear heart was angered when he saw amongst men the far-seen ray of fire. Forthwith he made an evil thing for men as the price of fire; for the very famous Limping God formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Cronos willed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athene girded and clothed her with silvery raiment, and down from her head she spread with her hands a broidered veil, a wonder to see; and she, Pallas Athene, put about her head lovely garlands, flowers of new-grown herbs. Also she put upon her head a crown of gold which the very famous Limping God made himself and worked with his own hands as a favour to Zeus his father. On it was much curious work, wonderful to see; for of the many creatures which the land and sea rear up, he put most upon it, wonderful things, like living beings with voices: and great beauty shone out from it.
(ll. 585-589) But when he had made the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing, he brought her out, delighting in the finery which the bright-eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her, to the place where the other gods and men were. And wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.
(ll. 590-612) For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.”

This is a bizarre story, for among other things the gods seem to be fully sexed already, so that it is hard to see how they were astonished by woman. Woman does become a marker dividing the divine from the human in this story – for only the gods can see woman as sheer guile, whereas mortals – men – can’t – on the contrary, they are overcome by it. Again, this is odd when you consider how often the gods end up chasing human women.
However confusing all these stories are – there is always some lack of clarity in the creation story, as if the teller had forgotten the most important part, somehow, and was piecing it out with half remembered details - the creation of the human race is almost always tied up with some trickery, some deceit.

However, if the Gods trick mankind, mankind repays the favor by overturning the gods. Heine’s little sketch, the Gods in Exile, is about what happens to Gods that have fled from that particular human revolt called Christianity. He takes an old conceit, which is that the Gods became demons, or that the celestial was driven underground, and uses the logic implied in it to show how the Gods become secularized. They devolve, in a sense. Not only do they descend into the human division of labour, but they abdicate their geographic realm – the sunny gods of Greece flee to the cold north. The most powerful of the Gods go the furthest north – at the end of the Gods in Exile, Heine tells the story of the horrible end of Jupiter, trapped in the suspended animation of a long senility on an island surrounded by ice.
To be continued

Dog Torture: the key to victory for GOP candidates?

They came to New Zealand with the dogs. They came to Hawaii with the dogs. They came across the Bering Strait with the dogs. As human beings settled new territories, they always brought two animals in tow – dogs and rats. The rats have always been the happy, if unintended, beneficiary of the human habit of littering and building up environments of filth. The dogs, though, were part of a happier symbiosis. Now, as we are chuckling our way to the end of Sixth Extinction, dogs might be the last reminder that human beings once were civilized beasts – not the forked, planet destroying parasites currently trying to turn Gaia’s atmosphere all Venusian and shit.

So we at LI have been especially fascinated by Mitt Romney’s new appeal to the right: torturing the family dog. American politics is about character. In the liberal midst of the sixties, the character desired combined some mixture of tolerance and leadership. The tolerance was of your average sit com type, where Dad put up with the crazy neighbors with a fistful of one-liners. The leadership consisted of giving the American populace a joy ride every two or three years, bombing here, invading there, all in good fun. Foreign corpses are not anything to get too excited about, and don’t we love shock and awe!

But in these dire days after 9/11 changed everything, we want something more. Something stronger. We want someone with both the courage to keep his mind in a state as permanently empty as our own, but at the same time someone who knows that old norms just won’t do – you can’t tear down the remnants of civilization if you are unwilling to break some eggs…

Or torture the family dog! Luckily, the GOP has come up with a man for this historic occasion: Governor Romney. As LI reader’s probably know, Romney told the following story to the Boston Globe (yes, they told it to the Globe. They used this story to illustrate Romney’s character to the Globe. The Romneys are evidently proud of this story):

“The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario.

As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. The destination for this journey in the summer of 1983 was his parents' cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney would be returning to the place of his most cherished childhood memories.

Even for someone who had always idolized his father, the similarities between his path in life and the one George Romney had cut before him were remarkable. Husband to his high school sweetheart, father to a brood of young children, bishop of his local Mormon church, and businessman on the threshold of life-altering success.
If anything, 36-year-old Mitt, who had just been tapped to lead a new venture capital firm, was on track to achieve more at a younger age than his famously overachieving father.
His father had known poverty as a child, Mitt only privilege. His father had succeeded without a college degree while Mitt was launched with the finest educational pedigree. Given all his advantages, Mitt seemed restless to make his mark sooner.
Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.
Then Romney put his boys on notice: H

e would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.
The ride was largely what you'd expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ''white whale.''

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”

The moronic inferno can find so much to love in this story. The privileged son of a famous father – does it strike a chord in your hearts, reader? And of course, having packed up all that luggage, you just have to take the family dog, Seamus. Oh, sure, you could have left him behind, but blissful days of electroshocking him, beating him with sticks, chaining him up with no food for days on end – all the things your regular family would do – would be left on hiatus. Emotion free crisis management called out for a solution, and solution was found.

I give a lot of credit to Anna Marie Cox for picking out the blatant weirdness in this story. The one time I interviewed Cox, when she was doing the Wonkette gig, I did not come away impressed. But she has become a lot more impressive since she’s been working at Time. For one thing, she has perfected the combination of political satire and the drunk act. It used to make American audiences howl to watch a comedian pretend to be drunk – it became part of Dean Martin’s stock in trade, for instance – but PC put the keebosh on funny while stoned. I’m glad to see it is making a comeback. Cox’s Time gig comes with a lot of limelight, and she did the right thing here:

“Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was less circumspect. PETA does not have a position on Romney's candidacy per se, but Newkirk called the incident "a lesson in cruelty that was ... wrong for [his children] to witness...Thinking of the wind, the weather, the speed, the vulnerability, the isolation on the roof, it is commonsense that any dog who's under extreme stress might show that stress by losing control of his bowels: that alone should have been sufficient indication that the dog was, basically, being tortured." Romney, of course, has expressed support for the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques when it comes to terrorists; his campaign refused to comment about the treatment of his dog.”

The inevitable pushback has been as interesting, as the Bush base wrote heartfelt paens to the joys of torturing dogs. The most common theme is how dogs do enjoy the wind – they stick their heads out of the window when they are in stuffy cars. They are put in the back of pick up trucks. The first line of reasoning is cute – if dogs enjoy, say, drinking water, there is nothing they would like more than to be immersed in water for ten or twelve hours. The second line of reasoning is pretty unfair to Southern good old boys, who do like dogs. They like them enough not to put them into the back of a truck and zoom at seventy miles down a highway for ten hours with the dog taking the consequences.

Our favorite defense was that given in a comment by Anne Althouse, the GOP narcissist:

“How about the way they transport horses and cattle? It's not very pleasant, but we don't regard it with outrage. I'm sure some excrement emerges in the process.

Also, dogs like to stick their head out of the car and maximize the wind flow, so it's anthropomorphic to assume the dog hated it. I really don't think shit is that eloquent.”

Dogs, cattle, what the fuck difference does it make? I was surprised at Althouse’s putdown of shit, however, considering what she normally fills her site with. All this time I thought she thought she was being eloquent.

However, even among a 27 percent that lusts for tales of putting electrodes to Muslim genitalia, Romney’s valiant attempt to torture Seamus looks like it hasn’t had quite the desired effect. In the end, the ghost of Seamus might sink the ambitions of this awful, awful man. What do you know? There is a bit, a small small bit, of civilization left in these here states!

heterology yesterday, heterology today, heterology tomorrow

Continuing from the previous post:

Bataille’s notion that science is homogenizing and is an instrument of the tendency to the homogeneous pole in society is not only an epistemological claim, but an existential one. The scientific character of socialism may be used by the revolutionary, but the revolutionary derives – as a figure - from a whole other and previous lineage, and comes into contact with socialism in much the chance way that a sewing machine and an umbrella meet on an ironing board. For Bataille, the researcher in heterogeneity who is conscious of the necessity of not repeating the exclusionary gesture that would distort the value system implicit in the heterogeneous must, then, become a participant-observer. (Actually, the necessity for this isn't logical - here, Bataille is cheating a bit. He wants that necessity to be embraced, which is the activist component of Bataille's work at this time). The respect for scientific norms shouldn’t become, unconsciously, the need to conform to scientific institutions. This, in a sense, is the motivation behind the numerous different forms of writing Bataille tried – all of them dealt, in one way or another, with becoming-useless. In Bataille's life, the lure of becoming sacred himself led him in sometimes... odd directions. In 1933, it was leading him to consider whether a form of left fascism might not be possible. That possibility was, actually, pretty popular among French intellectuals in the thirties - although Bataille soon rejected it as untenable.

To return to the theory: taking usefulness to be defined by a sort of fort-da within the homogeneous sector of the social, a never absolutely founded value that absolutely founds all other values, Bataille sees the useless in terms of two poles - sovereignty and abjection, both of which gain their mean from the fundamentally sacred character of the excluded portion. His sense of the sacred continues a theme in Durkheim: “Durkheim faced the impossibility of providing it with a scientific definition: he settled for characterizing the sacred world negatively as being absolutely heterogenous compared to the profane. It is nevertheless possible to admit that the sacred is known positively…” It’s positive side is given to us in mana and the taboo. That is, in a useless energy, an energy that can’t enter into the equivalences of exchange, and a number of prohibitions that shape profane activity without being explicable within the profane sphere.

Beyond the properly sacred things that constitute the common realm of religion or magic, the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred things themselves form part of this whole). This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent value. Inlcuded are the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons, words or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses; the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets etc.)

This perhaps too broad and ad hoc view of the heterogeneous has proved to be amazingly suggestive, even if Bataille is often not acknowledged in various intellectual genealogies, since he goes to far. He always goes too far. For example, Orlando Patterson’s work on slavery as social death shares assumptions about exclusion and the sacred that are hinted at in various of Bataille’s passages about the offensiveness of poverty, the disgust invoked by poverty, the discourse that always seems to gravitate to sub or under – as, in the eighties, it gravitated to talk about the underclass. In the Marxist tradition, it is lumpen: “the lowest strata of society can equally be described as heterogeneous, those who generally provoke repulsion and in no case can be assimilated by the whole of mankind. In India, these impoverished classes are considered untouchable, meanting that they are characterized by the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things.” In advanced civilizations “The nauseating forms of dejection provoke a feeling of disgust so unbearable that it is improper to express or even to make allusion to it. By all indications, in the psychological order of disfiguration, the material poverty of man has excessive consequences.”

LI will not one other important aspect of the relation of heterogeneity to the homogeneous dominant forces before we end this post, which is mainly quoting. In the next post, there will be a bit more applyin’:

The reality of heterogeneous elements is not of the same order as that of homogeneous elements. Homogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined and identified objects (basically, it is the specific reality of solid objects). Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another in a more or less abstract fashion, almost as if the change were taking place not in the world of objects but only in the judgements of the subjects. The preceding aspect nevertheless does not signify that the observed facts are to be considered as subjective: thus, the action of the objects of erotic activity is manifestly rooted in their objective nature. Nonetheless, in a disconcerting way, the subject does have the capacity to displace the exciting value of one element onto an analogous or neighboring one. In heterogeneous reality, the symbols charged with affective value thus have the same importance as the fundamental elements, and the part can have the same value as the whole.

Bataille’s comments here might seem a bit obscure, but he is dealing with that odd fold in Western culture in which objects became something different from subjects, and the objectification of the subject became one of the taboos defining the realm of ethics. That escape from the object, or delapidation of the object, has a great importance for Bataille in his later work Here, we’ll just note in passing that the heterogeneous world, by endowing objects with mysterious charges and energies corresponding to systems that collapse in the face of rational reconstruction, is a world of fetishism unleashed, in which the “part can have the same value as the whole.” I am not sure whether Simmel influenced Bataille, but in Simmel’s model of modernity, there is a return to this reversal of the relation of whole to the part – the mediate becoming as valuable as the immediate, changing the direct relationships upon which social power is based into an unmoored system of variable power, tethered more and more to the very symbol of mediation, money. Ah, but LI is feeling an onset of jawcracker-ness – jargon, honey, will rot your tongue.

PS - IT has an essay up about WR.

How many licks: another effort at explaining Bataille

How many licks does it take till you get to the center of the
-Kimberly Jones


While it's true that LI enjoys the infradig like a boorish moviegoer enjoys an obnoxious ringtone, perhaps we should have been a bit more explicative vis a vis Georges Bataille in our last post. It might just be the case that not all readers of LI have immersed themselves in Bataille’s O.C. So we looked around yesterday for Bataille’s 1933 essay, The Psychological Structure of Fascism. Surprisingly, it is not to be found, in French or English, on the web. Somebody is holding tight to that copyright!

Boris Souvarine published Bataille’s essay in La Critique sociale. Souvarine moulders in the memory hole, now, but in the thirties he and a few likeminded souls – including the surrealists, one should remember (I forgive Breton a lot for punching out Ilya Ehrenburg in 1935, God damn it) – created the cold war anti-communist left. Of course, it took the cold war itself to make this political variety viable, but when the language flew at innumerable international conferences in the fifties, it would sound much like the language Souvarine used in his bio of Stalin. Souvarine’s group, the Cercle communiste democratique, included Simone Weil – which is perhaps how Bataille met her. Bataille used Weil for the character ‘Lazare’ in The Blue of Noon. (Sky Blue) It is funny to think of Weil, who has been the object of an intense Catholic cult for decades, and Bataille together. But a woman who practiced putting pins under her fingernails in Barcelona in 1934 (the year of a worker’s revolt), so that she could bear up under torture when the reactionaries captured her, was sure to get Bataille’s attention. For the CS, he wrote three articles that Francois Furet justly calls among the “most interesting ever written on political thought”: La Notion de Depense, La probleme de l’Etat, and finally La Structure Psychologique du Fascisme.

The Psychological Structure of Fascism was translated in 1979 by John Brenkman for New German Critique – it took that long to travel to America. But it was known to Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre and, in the sixties, became one of the classic texts in France, a reference point for Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, the Lacanians, the whole Family. So it has been a busy pollinator.

I’ll use the rest of this post to describe and quote from it, then I’ll go on and on and on about it in some other post. In LI’s campaign against happiness triumphant, Bataille’s concepts, percolated through our wary experience, do play a big part.

Bataille sets the terms of this essay by dividing the socius into two parts, or rather ideal tendencies – one is the ideal tendency to homogeneity, the other to heterogeneity. Homogeneity encompasses the classic economist (and Marxist) sense of the system of production:

“Production is the basis of social homogeneity. Homogeneous society is productive society, namely useful society. Every useless element is excluded, not from all society, but from its homogeneous part. In this part, each element must be useful to another without the homogeneous activity ever being able to attain the form of activity valid in itself. A useful activity has a common measure with another useful activity, but not with activity for itself.”

The common measure, in this situation, takes on a more than metric force. The common measure is money, of course. And the homogeneous tendency is embodied in the homogeneous individual, which is the homo oeconomicus of the classical school, set loose upon the landscape and marrying and giving in marriage and, in all things, tending to the middle. “In industrial civilization, the producer is distinguished from the owner of the means of production, and it is the latter who appropriates the products for himself; consequently, it is he who, in modern society, is the function of the products; it is he – and not the producer – who founds social homogeneity.” So far Bataille will go with the classic Marxist model, but he is already substituting another form of socialization – social homogeneity – for the classical Marxist notion of exploitation. This seemingly small shift determines the larger theme in the essay, which portrays the violence at the center of the socius not as a struggle between classes, but a struggle between asymmetrical functions – on the one hand, the homogenizing function, on the other, the heterogeneous function, the useless. The proletariat, in this picture, is placed on the side of the heterogeneous merely as a temporary ally – there is no intrinsic reason that a better rearrangement of the distribution of the social product – Keynesian economic policy, for instance - won’t bring him over to the side of social homogeneity.

Here Bataille makes his first thrust at Marxism, although the swordplay is muffled enough that only those who have the ears to hear it – who are familiar with the dreary 30s idea that Marxism is “scientific socialism” – will catch what is happening:

“Thus, the heterogeneous elements excluded from the latter [the homogeneous field] are excluded as well from the field of scientific consideration: as a rule, science cannot know heterogeneous elements as incompatible with its own homogeneity as are, for example, born criminals with the social order – science finds itself deprived of any functional satisfaction (exploited in the same manner as a laborer in a capitalist factory, used without sharing in the profits.) Indeed, science is not an abstract entity: it is constantly reducible to a group of men living the aspirations inherent to the scientific process.”

Bataille’s second move is to fill in the dynamic of exclusion. Here, I think, Bataille foreshadows what I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability that formed the global culture of the Cold War era, and that remains with us in a more farcical form, as the War on Terror.

“As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.

The state is not itself one of these imperative elements; it is distinct from kinds, heads of the army, or of nations, but it is the result of the modifications undergone by a part of homogeneous society as it comes into contact with such elements.”

The state, in Bataille’s schema, doesn’t exist as a homogeneous constant, but as a variable that functions to enforce homogeneity, either through command and control authority – in the despotic form – or by coordinating with the ‘spontaneous’ enforcement of homogeneous norms in democracy. But here’s the thing for Bataille – in 1933 – in an era in which democracy seemed to be failing some essential test of social experience: the state can be captured by heterogeneous factions. Before fascism exists as a fact, it exists as a possibility inherent in the state:

“Even in difficult circumstances, the State is able to neutralize those heterogeneous forces that will yield only to its constraints. But it can succumb to the internal dissociation of that segment of society of which it is but the constrictive form.”

Oh oh. I can see that I am going into post nova – I could go on like this for pages, thus destroying the patience of the blog reader, accustomed to reading short, spiffy paragraphs, usually about Paris Hilton, pro or con. Oops. Well, I will continue this later.

the decline of degradation, or abjection kitsch

The real showstopper, though, is in Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales.” As an exotic dancer — introduced as the “scariest, sexiest, most dangerous girl in the world” — she storms a strip-club stage, pet Rottweiler in tow, and proceeds to entwine tongues with the slobbering dog. – NYT

“Having already provoked parents, women’s groups and the ratings board with explicit ads for the coming torture movie “Captivity,” Mr. Solomon and his After Dark Films now intend to introduce the film, set for release July 13, with a party that may set a new standard for the politically incorrect.

For starters, Mr. Solomon has ordered up what he calls the three “most outlandish” SuicideGirls available from the punk porn service, even if they’re as frisky as the ones he is told once set a Portland, Ore., restaurant on fire. Some lucky fans will get to take the women as dates for party night, July 10, on two conditions: “People take the date at their own risk, and everybody on the Internet gets to watch.”

Cage fighting too is likely. Mr. Solomon’s planners are angling for Kimbo Slice, the bare-knuckle bruiser whose vicious backyard brawls are a Web favorite and who made his Mixed Martial Arts debut on Saturday.”

I was pleased to see that IT’s KinoFist group (or here) is going to be showing Dušan Makavejev’s WR – Mysteries of the Organism, since, by an amazing coincidence, I just watched WR myself. It is impossible to take against a film in which a glacial female voice in something that sounds like Serbo-Croatian encourages all Comrades to take full advantage of the 4,000 orgasms we experience, on average, over a lifetime, as a sepia iconostasis of revolutionary fucking flickers encouragingly before us.

The film’s protagonist chief actress and protagonist – if it is possible to be the protagonist of a scrap book – Milena, seeks that moment in which the convergence of revolution and transgression produce… well, not the zipless fuck that Americans in the 70s were so bent on procuring, but a moment of bliss that would knock down the sedimented oppression of old, exploitative economic and patriarchal ties. Fucking, here, is the revolution’s sympathetic magic – by relieving the productive norms that weigh like nightmares on the fuckers, we will relieve the productive norms that weigh like nightmares on our industrial system, wedded, as it has been since Hitler’s eureka moment, to war. New War is not an accident that happens to the system, a snafu, but a positive element of the economy, a central value. The looting associated with old war is replaced with an inherently mobile, never to be realized goal legitimating all waste. Not that looting becomes obsolete, of course, but it is put on a business basis. Is it possible that this is simply a neurotic disposition writ large? Can we fuck our way to rationality?

A good question - but let's admit there is a bit of an antique glaze about the film. It was made at a time when transgression was undergoing a sea change. Where transgression had been the great weapon of the outlaw up until the sixties, it was becoming the marketer and coolhunter's great weapon in the sixties. Transgression, in other words, was being annexed by the ethos of Happiness Triumphant.

A small personal interlude. I was sitting in the University library at Montpellier in the early eighties. I had the first volume of Georges Bataille’s OC in my hand. I was reading the Story of the Eye. I’d never heard of either Bataille or the Story of the Eye before. For those who don’t know the book, The Story of the Eye involves a series of improbable events, linked together by a claustrophobic erotic urgency, in which the narrator and his lover Simone, who are in their teens, perform a number of sexual and sexually metaphoric acts, insinuate the shy Marcelle into their activities and basically turn her into a catatonic, and then flee their parents’ houses and join up with an English lord. At one point, the group arrives at a church. They lure the priest of the church from the confessional. Simone seduces him, and then the priest dies of a strangulation/ejaculation combo – at which point Sir Edmond kindly cuts the priest’s eye out and gives it to Simone. She playfully stuffs it up her cunt. The narrator says:

“Now I stood up and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine waits for a neck to slice. I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror; in Simone’s hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the steaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness. I held the thighs open while Simone was convulsed by the urinary spasm, and the burning urine streamed out from under the eye down to the thighs below.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have the book with me, so I am quoting from the English translation. It is hard, in English, to convey the … the elegance of Bataille’s prose. If I were to translate that passage, I would probably write “guillotine waits for a neck”, not a neck to slice – sometimes, you have to bow to English bluntness to convey the more abbreviated sense of the French. In any case, I remember the total shock I felt, reading Bataille. The book reached out and pulled my nose, stroked my cock, and bit me on the ass, all at the same time.

After all, I’d come to Montpellier from Shreveport, Louisiana. I wasn't used to this kind of thing.

So in the early eighties, Bataille’s notion of transgression was truly important to me. However, looking back, I can see how retarded I was – I never paid any attention to what was happening in popular culture back then. Not only did I not own a tv in the eighties, I rarely even glanced at one. I just didn't care. I didn't give a fuck about Reagan kultur. Thus, I had no clue that transgression had become a sitcom norm – it was a farting, nosepicking, let’s stuff body parts up my asshole world out there, and transgression had settled in to become just a b movie plot, before one moved on to action movies and the like. The Surmale quickly became the everymale, and the everymale immediately sought out his own. While, on the one end, political correctness sent up a fog to disguise the reality of the Gated Community, on the other end, it was endless tits and ass, not, of course, as fuckable matter, but as platform for incredible business opportunities in aesthetic surgery. The time was right for rubber, for pod happiness, for a Burroughs routine that swallowed all other routines:

“But the warren of live torture rooms is a must. As Mr. Solomon envisions it, individuals in torture gear will wander through the West Hollywood club Privilege grabbing partygoers. All of which is a prelude to an undisclosed main event that, he warned last week over slices of pizza a few doors from his company’s new offices on the Sunset Strip, is “probably not legal.”

“The women’s groups definitely will love it,” Mr. Solomon hinted. “I call it my personal little tribute to them.”

Mr. Solomon, a fast-talking 35-year-old, and his genre-film company were barely noticed until outrage at the “Captivity” billboards — which chronicled a young woman’s torment, with frames titled “Abduction,” “Confinement,” “Torture,” “Termination” — led to a rare censure by the Motion Picture Association of America this spring.”

The Motion Picture Association of America finally put its foot down about torture … for pleasure. Torture, as the MPAA knows, should only be seen, enjoyed, and distributed for the sake of duty. Hence, 24. But never masturbate after you torture Moslems. We do have some codes left in this country, after all!

That abjection has become kitsch does make me laugh. Behind Bataille’s elegance, perhaps, there always lurked the gag. In Norman Klein’s Marx-y reading of 1930s cartoons, Seven Minutes, the golden age of cartoons – the age that produced the ageless diva, the Simone of cartoonland, Betty Boop - is discussed in relation to the transposition of the gag – a vaudeville routine – to the machina versatilis that produces the elastic cartoon body. The dreamlike liberation of objects from their objecthood is one way of viewing the goal of Bataille’s via negativa – one sinks as far as one can into becoming a big toe, a dislocated eye weeping urine in a teenage cunt, and at that moment one becomes … a cartoon, much like Porky Pig or Paris Hilton. For a moment, toonville characters think they can escape...

And who am I to say they can't? I was going to give this post a nice dying fall, a little pessimistic sendoff, a little hint that the system is total, we are doomed, no exit, all that shit, but really, I'm not going to take the bait, get into the outrage orgy, care... care in the least about the fast talking thirty five year old Mr. Solomon. I'm just going to collect him here, in this post, and then forget all about him.

UM is coming - Michael Erard's new book

A book is coming out from a friend and supporter of this site, Michael Erard. The book, UM, is about, among other things, the mysteries of that sublime linguistic object, 'um' - or erm, as the Brits put it, or hein, as it appears in French, to the bewilderment of all students of French, forever and forever. Here's the site for the book. I can testify that Michael does not look like the solemn guy whose phiz graces that page - but bookjacket pictures are always a fucker, an uncertain compromise between the dyspeptic seriousness of a man whose been locked in a closet and chuckleheaded foolishness of a man who should be secured in a straight jacket. They eternally grate against an author's vanity, which is why, when an author shot, by some miracle, comes out right, the author has a tendency to use it book after book, giving the book jacket a slightly Dorian Gray feeling. Beryl Bainbridge's novels are a perfect example - novels that you know were written by a 50 to 60 year old woman are graced by a picture of a thirty year old woman, at the most.

Now, go to the UM page, PEOPLE!

Yahweh, Marx and LI: a group discussion

Sleep. LI actually got 8 hours of z-s last night. Or almost. We’ve been suffering a massive insomnia attack, which is much like a denial of service attack, except that instead of being mounted by angry hackers, it is mounted by angry brain cells. There is nothing like going through the day on the dimmest wattage – ghosting your own self.
…

So, we have not been pouring out the deathless prose re: Heine’s Gods in Exile essay, like we promised last week. The tears of our readers have, no doubt, been shed copiously in consequence.

But dry those eyes! Getting back to that post, you might want to ask – we asked, actually, this morning, trying to figure out what the fuck we were talking about – why we jumped up and down about the fact that the great mythical systems actually encode their own dissolution. There are two aspects that cause our heart palpitations. One is this: to our mind, the moment the myth tells about the downfall of the mythical system – projects a Götterdämmerung – is the moment that history becomes possible. It is the recognition of the system within the system, and, at the same time, the recognition of the system’s contingency, which gives history both an object and elbow room.

And that’s pretty cool. The second aspect that interests us is tied up with what we have called the logic of figuration – all this poetry we’ve been pouring out about sages and buffoons. What God is is not just a question that interests us in itself – rather, it extends to what a woman, a man, a child, a sage, a slave, a manager, a president, etc., etc. is. It is an archetype - from the beginning, it has always been a question of the split between the god and his image. The Yahweh that flees from his graven image is the Yahweh that tries to solve this question by main force. Plato, living in a very different society, captures the issue and its secularization pretty well in this passage in the Laws, spoken by the Athenian stranger:

“There are ancient customs about the Gods which are universal, and they are of two kinds: some of the Gods we see with our eyes and we honour them, of others we honour the images, raising statues of them which we adore; and though they are lifeless, yet we imagine that the living Gods have a good will and gratitude to us on this account. Now, if a man has a father or mother, or their fathers or mothers treasured up in his house stricken in years, let him consider that no statue can be more potent to grant his requests than they are, who are sitting at his hearth if only he knows how to show true service to them.
…
Oedipus, as tradition says, when dishonoured by his sons, invoked on them curses which every one declares to have been heard and ratified by the Gods, and Amyntor in his wrath invoked curses on his son Phoenix, and Theseus upon Hippolytus, and innumerable others have also called down wrath upon their children, whence it is clear that the Gods listen to the imprecations of parents; for the curses of parents are, as they ought to be, mighty against their children as no others are. And shall we suppose that the prayers of a father or mother who is specially dishonoured by his or her children, are heard by the Gods in accordance with nature; and that if a parent is honoured by them, and in the gladness of his heart earnestly entreats the Gods in his prayers to do them good, he is not equally heard, and that they do not minister to his request? … May we not think, as I was saying just now, that we can possess no image which is more honoured by the Gods, than that of a father or grandfather, or of a mother stricken in years? “

The parallel in the relation between the ‘unliving cult statues’ of the Gods and the Gods, and the parents and the Gods, is a way of underscoring the double role of ‘parent’. Social roles and functions, in other words, function in a double register, at once social and celestial/chthonic. Marxism, reproducing the gesture of Yahweh, seeks to compress the doubleness, making it derive from one material fact: the division of labor. Myself, I am with Plato and the poets – there is a destiny of the figures outside of the system of production.

Okay, enough, enough! Basta. Time to move on to Heine’s essay.

another day, another opportunity to send Dick Cheney to jail

"How high do you want me to jump?"


Since beginning this blog, LI has been giving friendly little heads ups to the governing class, that oh so cute but sometimes sorta ditzy elite. It is the Paris Hilton among governing classes: soulless, talentless, and smug. Alas, there are so many fronts to cover, fuck ups to point to, clockwork grinding busily bloodwards to worry about. Sometime LI falls behind!

And then there is Cheney. Lately, LI’s attitude towards Cheney is much like Police Inspector Dreyfus’ to Detective Clouseau. We get a physical twitch when the name comes up. Herbert Lom got a twitch in the eye. Us, we get an unbearably stiff neck. The stiff neck seized us, for instance, last night, when we read the first of what the Washington Post promises to be a series of articles about Cheney. We recommend reading it with two caveats.

One is that the whole this is, as always, sugared by the kissass establishment fear of ever stumbling upon a truth – so that, for instance, before telling us that Bush is basically following a program laid out by his odious fruitcake of a V.P., Barton Gellman lays on this bullshit:

“Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore. Bush has set his own course, not always in directions Cheney preferred. The president seized the helm when his No. 2 steered toward trouble, as Bush did, in time, on military commissions. Their one-on-one relationship is opaque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events. The two men speak of it seldom, if ever, with others. But officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the vice president, detect a strong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is serving Bush's aims.”

The choice of words in that paragraph – for instance, of Bush ‘seizing the helm’ – signals, well enough, what the message is to insiders (whose assessments we are magically supposed to listen to – never has a paper been so awestruck, so much about insiders as the Washington Post – it is the Teen People of Insiderville). It signals that we are coming close to a time when it is alright to actually say, hey, we are are ruled by a living embodiment of attention deficit disorder who is a cutout moved around by competing court circles, one of which is headed by a man of meager intelligence and no scruples, the ever thuggish Cheney. But respect before all things for our monarch!

Two is that, of course, as in all ‘news’ reporting, the series comes five years too late. The job of the newspapers, over the course of the reign of the Junta, is to report the truth only when it is too late to do anything about it. In the meantime, sedulously copying and diffusing the bullshit is the no. 1 aim of rags like the Post – hence, their nonsensical effort to insert propaganda about Iran in every story reporting American deaths in Iraq – the IED deaths will inevitably be followed by the accusation that they came from Iran. That there’s no proof for this, that Iran supplying Sunni insurgents with IEDs is about the stupidest lie that the White House and the D.C. clique has ever tried to broadcast, doesn’t matter. Nor will these reports ever include the phrase, financed by the Saudis. That’s an independent truth, it floats around without a sponsor, and unsponsored truths are poison to the papers – until, say, six years have passed.

The Cheney series comes on the heels of the brief headlining of a story that has been out there for years, namely, the Vice President’s illegal shielding of information from an obscure department designed to account and audit classified information. The Vice President has refused to disclose even that information that it has an obligation to, such as who works in the office of the Vice President and who visits that office. Disobeying the executive order, Cheney’s office made the unique defense that it was not part of the executive branch. This has caused much laughing and goofawing in the press, which saves its indignation for important things, like interviews with OJ Simpson. And then there is the soi-disant opposition…

Ah, that opposition. On the Crooks and Liars site I came across this youtube video of Senator Durbin’s reaction to the news that Cheney has claimed not to be part of the executive branch of government. It is as fine a piece of centrist performance art as you will ever see. Durbin summons up all the gravitas and eloquence of a wet hen finding out about Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time. Warning to adults and children: watching this video can cause twitches, aches, and the longing to live in some other country far, far away. Durbin swales a perfectly easy case – Cheney has committed a crime and should be called to account for it – in such loads of fatty tissue pomposity, such unfocused verbiage, such a stump show of obsolete gestures, that you cannot watch it without knowing, immediately, that Cheney will get away with anything he damn well pleases. It reminds me of the old T.S. Eliot line, ‘this is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper.’

JT Leroy loses

JT Leroy’s saga was quite enjoyable while it unfolded last year. One thing it wasn’t was a conspiracy to defraud Antidote International Films. LI was bummed that the jury returned a verdict against Laura Albert.

The authors of novelized versions of victimization are a dime a dozen, but the carriers out of literary hoaxes as successful as the creation of JT Leroy are extremely rare – we are lucky to get one in a generation. That AIF sued Albert for damages is surprising. Do they not really see that she sold them a property even more valuable now? JT Leroy is no longer an incestuous Hollywood-SF cult, but both a tribute and a mockery to the incestuous Hollywood-SF axis.

The age demanded a freak. Why not? The newspapers and tv are created by freaks, about freaks, commented upon by freaks – the difference being that the establishment freaks are much smugger about their incorrigible perversities, their taste for proxy blood, their laughable notion of ‘value added”, their contempt for the planet, their fetishism of the lines of the acceptable, drawn in their own baby shit, by which they sort out the acceptable from the unacceptable, the nightmare they have bequeathed to us outside the gated community, the Pandaemonium suburb to their city on the hill. Chic has contrived that each now wants his own freak. What the glitter set wanted was a freak from the furthest corner of the known world – West Virginia. So Laura Albert, who wasn’t exotic enough, in herself, gave them their fucking artificial nigger, wrapped it in an unplaceable southern accent and whispered it over the phone.

Alas, she was finally exposed as just your plain hold neighborhood freak. Institutionalized as a teen – her mother testified that for her 14th birthday, she dropped her daughter off at a psychiatric hospital, a birthday present from hell – and pathologically shy, Albert became a master of the phone call.

“Life at home, meanwhile, was bad enough. Ms. Albert ran away. She landed in the punk scene, in the East Village, with the hustlers and the addicts. This was around the time of her initial trip to a psychiatric ward. She was still in her early teens.

Eventually, she said, her parents sent her to a group home, where she lived as a ward of the state. (She considered Mayor Koch to be her father.) The stories of the girls she met were incorporated later into fiction, not unlike the stories of the punks from Tompkins Square.

Then, in 1989, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a maid and a baby sitter and sold her blood in order to survive. She also worked as a phone sex operator and perfected a sultry Southern accent she would later put to use in interviews as JT Leroy, including one, played in court, with Terry Gross, the NPR host.

It was in San Francisco, she said, that she started calling suicide hot lines from a pay phone on the street. Incapable of speaking as herself, she adopted the personas of various teenage boys.”

LI isn’t going to shed too many tears for Albert just yet. The age will reward her now for having done a freak dance by putting her on for the Barbie and Ken freaks to interview, on all their fucking morning news show, thus adding another small metastasizing cell to our collective groupie cancer. There will be another contract, surely. Oh, don’t ask why. Oh, don’t ask why.

Single male god seeking single female goddess...

“...everything … isn’t dead that is buried” – Heinrich Heine, Elemental spirits

In Psalm 95 we read: “For the LORD is a great God,/and a great King above all gods”. Justin, an early and influential father of the church, translated elohim, the word for gods, into daimonion, and from there on out it had a merry career – if you translate “above all gods” as “the gods of the heathens are demons”, you have a nice little program to interpret the stubbornly polytheistic world. Notice, however, that the program does not go so far as to say that the gods of the heathens don’t exist. The saying in Psalm 95 and the admonitions of the early church fathers were a powerful input into the demonization of the pagan gods. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, is merely pressing an old, old historical key when he writes: “For the wedding of the Frankish king Sigebert and the Visigothic princess Brunhild (566) Fortunatus composed an epithalamium (VI, 1), in which Venus and Cupid bless the marriage. But in his metrical Vita s. Maritini (written 573-4) the same writer reports that the saint threatened the demons by calling them by their names; he said that Mercury was an especially evil enemy but that Jupiter was a stupid lout. Christianity did not allow the antique gods to die in peace. It had to degrade them into demons – because they lived on in the subconscious.”

Indeed, the myths of the Greeks actually encoded a myth of the overthrow of the gods. As did the myths of the Norse. A Götterdämmerung. Zeus and his siblings gained power only by killing the old God, Chronos, their father. And the threat that Zeus would be overthrown in turn is the basis of the Prometheus myth, which the romantics took up.

LI is interested in this cycle within the structure of myth because we take myths to be fundamental to roles and figures. Alan, commenting on LI’s happiness post the other day, justly criticized us for being rather vague about the place of the figure in our claim that figures “symbolize a human life through time." They both mediate between the social whole and the individual and operate as trans-individual myths. If you are looking around for them, look in the ad sections of newspapers – the help wanted sections and the personals ads, together, give you a sense of some of the mythical creatures that roam our America. The beautician, the banker, the administrative assistant, the SWM seeking SWF, the sexy middle aged man wants younger woman, here they are, demi-fabulous. One of my aims, in leveling an impossible, Quixote like lance against happiness, is to understand how these figures have changed over time.

Which is why I am going to do my next post about Heine’s funny little essay, the Gods in Exile.

But let’s put in a foreground note:

Paul Veyne wrote a fascinating book, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths, in which he contrasts the modern functionalist view of myth, which he dates back to Fontenelle in the late 17th century, with the Ancient philosophical view of myth, which saw them as stories arising, originally, from the acts of some heroic individual, and accruing legends over time. This was the Euhemerist idea, although as Veyne points out it, too, accepted the Greek division between the gods and the heroes.

“The Greeks distinguished between two domains; gods and heroes. For they did not understand myth or the mythmaking function in a general way but evaluated myths according to content. Criticism of the heroic generations consisted in transforming heroes into simple men and giving them a past that matched tht of what were called the human generations, that is, history since the Trojan war. The first step of this criticism was to remove the visible intervention of the gods from history. Not that the very existence of these gods was doubted in the least. But in our day the gods most often remain invisible to men. That was already the case even before the Trojan War, and the whole of the Homeric supernatural is nothing but invention and credulity. Criticism of religious beliefs indeed existed, but it was very different. Some thinkers purely and simply denied either the existence of a particular god or, perhaps, the existence of any of the gods in which the people believed. On the other hand, the immense majority of philosophers, as well as educated people, did not so much criticize the gods as seek an idea worthy of divine majesty.”

It is majesty – dignity, status, position – with which we are dealing here. When Justin and the early Christian fathers degraded the pagan gods, they were also making a comment on the whole of pagan culture. The nature of the gods was tied up with the decline or increase of a culture not just by the Psalmists or the Christian apologists, but also by pagan theologians. When Plutarch writes an essay about why the oracles have ceased to speak, he sets it in a conversation between, among others, Cleombrotus of Sparta, a traveler who has come back from Egypt, and one of his favorite interlocutors, Ammonius, a Pythagorean. First, Plutarch piously warns us away from a too iconoclastic view of myth:

“The story is told, my dear Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles or swans, flying from the uttermost parts of the earth towards its centre, met in Delphi at the omphalus, as it is called; fand at a later time Epimenides of Phaestus put the story to test by referring it to the god and upon receiving a vague and ambiguous oracle said,
Now do we know that there is no mid-centre of earth or of ocean;
Yet if there be, it is known to the gods, but is hidden from mortals
Now very likely the god repulsed him from his attempt to investigate an ancient myth as though it were a painting to be tested by the touch.”

Then he allows Cleombrotus to bring up a rather ridiculous theory of the degeneracy of the times – to wit, that the very year is decaying.

“He had recently been at the shrine of Ammon, and it was plain that he was not particularly impressed by most of the things there, but in regard to the ever-burning lamp he related a story told by the priests which deserves special consideration; it is that the lamp consumes less and less oil each year, and they hold that this is a proof of a disparity in the years, which all the time is making one year shorter in duration than its predecessor; for it is reasonable that in less duration of time the amount consumed should be less.”

Ammonius in particular shows that the explanation of the priests is ridiculous through use of an argument from plausibility – Occam’s razor before Occam was around – but the lamp story sets the stage for the discussion of why the oracles no longer speak. For the most likely explanation is that humanity has decayed. It is an explanation that is consistent with the notion that the heroic age is divided from the present age. But in the course of the conversation, Plutarch has Cleombrotus expound the notion of the daemons – the kind of spirits who became very popular in Meditteranean cultures around this time. That these words are put in Cleombrotus’ mouth might mean that Plutarch is not entirely committed to them. Still, this is a crucial passage in our mythical history.


"You are right," said Cleombrotus; "but since it is hard to apprehend and to define in what way and to what extent Providence should be brought in as an agent, those who make the god responsible for nothing at all and those make him responsible for all things alike go wide of moderation and propriety. They put the case well who say that Plato, by his discovery of the element underlying all created qualities, which is now called 'Matter' and 'Nature,' has relieved philosophers of many great perplexities; but, as it seems to me, those persons have resolved more and greater perplexities who have set the race of demigods [Demons – LI] midway between gods and men, and have discovered a force to draw together, in a way, and to unite our common fellowship — whether this doctrine comes from the wise men of the cult of Zoroaster, or whether it is Thracian and harks back to Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian, as we may infer from observing that many things connected with death and mourning in the rites of both lands are combined in the ceremonies so fervently celebrated there. Among the Greeks, Homer, moreover, appears to use both names in common band sometimes to speak of the gods as demigods; but Hesiod was the first to set forth clearly and distinctly four classes of rational beings: gods, demigods, heroes, in this order, and, last of all, men; and as a sequence to this, apparently, he postulates his transmutation, the golden race passing selectively into many good divinities, and the demigods into heroes.

"Others postulate a transmutation for bodies and souls alike; in the same manner in which water is seen to be generated from earth, air from water, and fire from air, as their substance is borne upward, even so from men into heroes and from heroes into demigods the better souls obtain their transmutation. But from the demigods ca few souls still, in the long reach of time, because of supreme excellence, come, after being purified, to share completely in divine qualities. But with some of these souls it comes to pass that they do not maintain control over themselves, but yield to temptation and are again clothed with mortal bodies and have a dim and darkened life, like mist or vapour.”

Death knell for the babydoll look. So why is LI not smiling?

After six years of a wholly fraudulent war on terror and thirty years of watching a wholly ludicrous and dangerous gated community world spring up before their eyes, a world in which have nots get the booby prize of obesity and – as a special treat – can send their kids to die, proudly, in our party like its Vietnam war for the Son of George, the people – remember the people? United? who will never be defeated? - are finally in revolt, according to the NYT:

“I sometimes walk into a showroom full of baby-doll dresses and ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” said Lauren Silverstein, the owner of Amalia, a boutique in NoLIta. “ ‘Don’t you know people don’t want this anymore?’ ”

In its place her customers are craving a look she describes as “flowing, sensual, kind of sexy acid trip” — something akin to the dress Ms. Silverstein wore on Saturday afternoon, a sidewalk-sweeping halter dress from a line called Fourties, awash in Yellow Submarine tints of lemon mauve and green.

If those customers are in revolt, it is mostly against fashion literalism. Karin Bereson, a stylist and fashion retailer in New York, champions what she calls a hippie mix, “but one not done in a costume-y way.” Ms. Bereson, who favors clashing neon patterns that owe a debt to the psychedelia revived in the late ’80s at rave clubs in London, wears tailored men’s waistcoats layered over billowing maxidresses.

“My look is Pakistani tailor,” she said. At her downtown boutique, No. 6, she updates the flower-child style — all vintage Indian-printed voile dresses and bib-front coveralls — with unorthodox accents like unlaced white jazz shoes or studded gladiator sandals.”

“You tell me it’s the institution/why don’t you free your mind instead” as somebody once put it. It turns out that this here summer, folks, is another Summer of Love:

“It’s a new summer of love,” Ms. Hersh declared. “The look is Haight-Ashbury — straight out of the ’60s.”

“The resurrection of a style that first permeated the American mainstream in the mid-’60s and peaked in the sultry months of 1967, coincides with an influx of books, films and exhibitions commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco.

The florid romanticism — and drug-induced haze — of the vaunted psychedelic era is being revisited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in “The Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” a show of concert posters from rock emporiums like the fabled Fillmore East in New York, the Fillmore West in San Francisco and clubs like UFO and Fifth Dimension in London.”

Of course, that drug induced haze will get you ten to fifteen years in East Texas. Except if you are white. But things are kinda free on the hip streets, according to the Times. A few years ago, as the internet destroyed the music industry, it was suggested that bands would now live by selling their paraphernalia – t shirts and such. Now the paraphernalia is selling the bands. It is all about detritus, baby. It always is.

“The naïveté and renegade spirit of the hippie period, if not its aesthetic, are also alive on Broadway in “Spring Awakening,” a dark rock musical about adolescent sexuality and rebellion in 19th-century Germany. And it lives on on the runways in collections as diverse as those of Marc Jacobs, whose secondary spring line pulsed with patchwork effects and mixed floral prints, and Roberto Cavalli, who paraded a sweeping gown with Art Nouveau flourishes and butterfly sleeves on his catwalk for fall.”

LI shouldn’t be a sourpuss. We are happy that the hippies are gravediggers of the babydoll look – long may it stay buried! We are just unhappy that the hippies have been replaced with pod people. A bummer, that. A fucking bummer.

come back, bees!

LI hasn’t had a report from the bee front, recently.

So, here’s some catching up.

A story in the National Journal has everything you want from the mainstream media – smug entitlement, gross stupidity, and the idea that the environment – the planet in general – is a peanut compared to the awe-inspiring seriousness that goes on in D.C. If Richard Cohen’s heartfelt plea for Scooter Libby, today, has become an instant classic of the King Bush era – the lickspittle mentality etched in the illiterate-attacked-by-rabid-dog prose that the Washington Post editorial page is so proud of - the jokey National Journal story (“Summer's nearly here, and in the media that means science news, lots and lots of it. When the weather gets hot, the sources of "normal" news -- politics, government, business -- go on vacation. And into the void steps science, with its bottomless bag of discoveries about our bodies, the Earth, and the cosmos. Goodbye, Scooter Libby. Hello, stunning new findings about the moons of Jupiter.” Ha ha) is all about the clueless folks who think they rock our world.

After running through the terribly funny issue of the bee rapture, ticking off the points one two three, the article ends like this:

“4. Laugh. Jeff Pettis, a scientist at the federal Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., likes to make fun of people's wild explanations. He told Garreau that his "favorite theory" is, "The bees are out there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically pushing the crops down with their little legs." He told the same story to the AP in May. The joke's getting a little old, but its lighthearted spirit seems just right. Why panic? It's summertime, and the science is easy.”

To which, of course, we can only summon up a heartfelt and sincere fuck you. So much for one Monsanto-head tool.

The Philadelphia inquirer has a better article:
Farmers survive the lost colonies; With hives decimated, sun and trucked-in bees save pollination by Sandy Bauers

Bauers reports on the use of bees in blueberry farming. The blueberry farmers have found hives, and are paying a bigger price. But there is, as always, the problem of stress. If stress is making bees more vulnerable to colony collapse, then the healthy bees that are being used, if possible, even more this summer are going to naturally be vulnerable.
“It's possible the bees are too busy. Many hives are now headed for Maine's blueberries; others will pollinate New Jersey's cranberries and cucumbers and Pennsylvania pumpkins.
"What I'm holding my breath for," vanEngelsdorp [Pennsylvania's acting state apiarist] said, "is when the bees come out of blueberries in Maine and what they look like next November. I think this sickness and collapse manifests itself after stress."

Poor bees. I suggest, to those colonies about to rapture, that you first surround the national journal and sting all the guys there. They deserve it.