There�s an interview in Salon with Joe Queenan, who is one of those people, like James Wolcott, who has a reputation for fierceness that is belied by his actual work � these are strictly Wizard of Oz lions, with claws that tear not, and teeth that do not bite, nor mangle the oh so tender flesh.

That said, Queenan does throw a stone against the �Greatest Generation� garbage. That�s nice � I don�t really understand the current wave of delayed gratitude for Victory over Berlin, except as a ploy to re-invest the war movie with audience interest. Nobody, really, is going to pay to see too many movies about our brave bombers in Serbia, right?

Still, this generational patronizing is not only insulting, but betrays a severely limited historical scope. Well, that such as Tom Brokaw exhibit severely limited historical scope, or none at all, perhaps goes without saying, but the promotion of this G.G. trope through book reviews, and the elevation of conservative historians like Stephen Ambrose, makes me want to put myself athwart the tide and yell stop. What, after all, about the generation of 1789? Or how about the 1620s generation � you know, Blaise Pascal and that lot? At least intellectually, surely civilization peaked about 1670. It has been downhill ever since.

Now, it isn�t that I am wholly without admiration and even nostalgia for the post World War II order � although I could do without the military industrial complex, McCarthyism, and the manic building of missiles. But I am definitely sentimental about Truman�s tax policies � it makes me all old fashioned inside, taxing the rich at about 60-70 percent of their incomes. Plus the encouragement to unionism, another feature of the trente annees glorieuses, as the French call the Keynsian era � roughly from about 1945 to 1975. But spare me the generational talk. It is the supreme historical pseudo-category � spawned by the conservative philosopher/sociologist, Wilhelm Dilthey, for those of you out there curious about the genealogy of this nonsense (the link is broadly about Dilthey, and is, yes, in German), and given its resonance by those who insist that a commonality of knowledge about the hit songs of 1964 is the most important thing about 1964. This is not only a trivial pursuits-like foreshortening of history, but of personal experience, too � slipping the death mask of the eternal over the ephemeral so that we can�t even look into the mirror of our lives without the knowing rictus of pop culture staring back at us.

Hey, my review's up! It's at THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.

Here's a nice site about the FBI -
TRAC: FBI Site - Comprehensive, independent, and nonpartisan information about FBI. I don't know about you, but the crime that fascinates me even more Chandra Levy's abduction by minions of the evil Condit � oops, I�m just speculating, really no need to get out your libel lawyers - is the continuing saga of Whitey Bolger, the eminence coupable of South Boston, who is being chased using the usual Keystone Cops method by an FBI that has every reason not to want him caught. Bolger, for those of you who haven�t read BLACK MASS, had the Boston FBI pretty much on his salary in the 80s. And if recent stories are true, the Boston office has always had a chummy relationship with certain gangster types in the Boston area � they even, obligingly, hid evidence to frame a guy for murder in the 60s, because the faux perp was a great cut-out for the real perp, who was being protected as an �informer.� See Boston Herald's coverage in particular - . I know, it is a Murdoch-y paper, but I do love the classic tabloid crime coverage - Weegee in Boston style.

One of the great myths of the FBI, abetted by movies and television, was that of an incorruptible national police force. There�s a historic background to that myth. In the late twenties, the FBI evolved out of the very corrupt Bureau of Investigation. There's a nice little summary of the history at CCrime Library. Prohibition gave the then Bureau of Information an impetus to corruption that was not present when Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, was rousting anarchists - rousting them, in fact, right out of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Politicals are notoriously an impoverished lot. But practicing the raid, the employment of informers, the agent provocateur, on the anarchists provided wonderful exercises in policework that could be applied on rum-runners and bootleggers - and it was. Under Harding, however, these tools were simply potential - the Bureau of Investigation was apparently on the cutting edge, seeing in the suddenly enlarged pool of �criminal� behavior a definite source of graft.

When Harding's corrupt cronies were exposed, an interesting thing happened - instead of questioning the definition of drinking as a crime, the press presented the issue as one of honest law enforcement versus corruption. Honest law enforcement is thus quietly separated from the laws it enforces, even if they are inherently dishonest. This binary opposition has carried over to this day.

In fact, there's no reason to suppose that the FBI is any less corrupt than any other large police organization. The unappealing fact that Hoover refused to even recognize that the Mafia existed up until the 60s, and his well known dislike for messing with it, have always been attributed to some quirk in his character, even though Hoover's sex life and penchant for gambling are now pretty well established facts about his life, and excellent handles for either subtle forms of bribery or blackmail.

I unfortunately duplicated the item below, and now I'm trying to erase one of the copies.
Let's hope this works.

Yesterday the LA Times had a very interesting book section devoted to the Spanish Civil War. I love the LA Times Sunday book section. Even when it is weak, it displays an editorial personality absent from the NY Times Sunday book section.
Of particular note are the two essays by Bernard Knox and Christopher Hitchens. Knox writes as an old veteran of the International brigades, and would no doubt be jeered at as a dupe by the New Republic crowd. Hitchens has a nice piece on Orwell, prompted by a collection of Orwell�s pieces on the Civil War � which, of course, Orwell fought in. By accident, Orwell was able to experience the hunting down of the POUM, Andres Nin�s party � for which Serge tried, vainly, to get Trotsky to speak up � and which was defeated partly because Nin was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Stalinists. I�ve always thought Neruda�s part in these events was particularly dirty. Last year I read a biography of the photographer, Tina Modotti, and I was surprised to discover that she and her husband, a Soviet agent, played a part in this business � in fact, her husband might have been one of Nin�s torturers.
But I�m getting off topic � what is nice about Hitchens� piece is that he touches on a tension in his own perception of his intellectual forebears by contrasting Orwell and Auden. This is nice, since Hitchens too often lets Orwell off all the hooks. I admire Orwell, but there is a distinct streak in him of Puritanism � in a sense, it is this streak that made him such a bad prophet. Over and over again in the forties, Orwell took the lesson of the thirties to be that hedonistic societies had no chance against societies with strong anhedonistic ideologies � like fascism and communism. There had to be more steel in the liberal mix, in other words, for the democracies to survive. That lesson, though, was precisely wrong. An argument can be made that it was just the disgust with steel, its obsolescence as a motivation for collective action, that eventually undid the Soviet Union. The Russians wanted stuff. While the hedonistic West experienced, after Orwell, an explosion of hedonism. Orwell was very uncomfortable with that kind of thing, which is one reason he mistrusted the U.S. � there�s a very (unintentionally) funny essay Orwell wrote in the forties about American fashion magazines, which filled him with despair and disgust. That austerity was naturally not going to respond to Auden�s sensibility.
Finally, the lead review, of Radosh et. al.�s edition of documents relating to the Spanish Civil War culled from the Soviet Military Archives, is by Stanley Payne. Payne seems to bring a conservative p.o.v. to his reading of Radosh�s work � the point of which seems to be something like: the model of the Stalinist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe was developed in the 30s in Spain; projecting from that takeover, the better course was that Franco win, as he did. I think that the first thesis is partly true, and that the conclusion is nonsense. Payne thinks

Calendar Live - For Whom the Bell Tolls
The truth is that each of the Spanish leftist parties desired its own form of "People's Republic" or all-left republic, with all conservative political and economic interests liquidated. This was the root cause of the Civil War.

That, of course, is nonsense, like saying that the �root cause� of the American Civil war was Northern industrialism or something. It sets up the idea that Franco�s aggression, his invasion of the Republic, was some surface cause � some negligible event. It also divorces the Spanish Civil War from the history of Spain, a history in which, for the most part, the right had ruled � from the end of the Napoleonic wars all the way up to the early thirties. And that rule had been marked by the most ignorant, anti-semitic, anti-labor clericalism � by the wholesale oppression of unions, anarchists, and regionalists � and by the insufferable maneuvers of a dying ruling class to maintain an economically disastrous colonial system, with a swollen military. What Payne and Radosh are doing, actually, is quietly reviving the appeasement view of the thirties � it is a view that ignores the Nazi recognition that Franco was an ideological ally, and, further, surreptitiously, urges the Oswald Mosley line of 20th century history � if only Chamberlain had allied with Hitler and driven back the red menace. If only the democracies hadn�t provoked the fascists with that distressing pact with Poland. Of course, Payne would probably protest that this is not what he meant at all, but historic judgment doesn�t necessarily work better backwards � it works by having some notion of what the imminent effect of one�s judgments are. Orwell had it right � the failure of the democracies to support the Republic was vicious, stupid, and ultimately counter-productive.

Wow - I just posted a long bit, and the blogger ate it. I don't really understand that. Nor am I pleased.
Okay. Since it was a long and funny, or so I thought, diary piece - I'll just have to swallow the insult to my creativity and start again, right? Which is the really stupid thing about computers - when something misfunctions and you lose something of value, it is a real confrontation with absense - it isn't like losing something which is retained, somewhere, in the system, it is more like dying.

[BigBody]