Remora
I recommend reading the Far Eastern Economic Review this week -- a lot of the articles are on line, and the magazine, which is owned by Dow Jones, is pretty on spot about Asian issues. And the war or non-war or shadow war or whatever thing looming and lurching towards us like the as yet unseen serial killer in a teen slasher flick is definitely a classic, Kipling style East of the Suez deal.

There's a piece by Enzio von Pfeil which inadvertantly shows how tightly superstition and art are intertwined in economics:
THE 5TH COLUMN -- September 27, 2001

Economics, for the past two weeks, has publicly put on its consolatory face, while underneath the investors, the electronic herd once lauded by Tom Friedman, have been running off various cliffs. Like almost all post-Keynsian econ-masters, von Pfeil actually seems to believe in the hoary chestnuts of monetary theory, and retails such bogus analogies as the following:

"Policy mixes involve monetary and fiscal measures. On the monetary front, the world's leading central banks have been injecting more liquidity into the system, intensifying an existing excess supply of money. In the United States, the Federal Reserve pre-emptively slashed rates ahead of the stockmarket reopening. This was expected, and already had resulted earlier in even firmer bond prices, driving down yields. Lower yields mean even lower mortgage rates--and so, eventually, up go housing starts and with them, consumption. True, in the near term, people won't be spending. But once the dust settles, lower rates will fuel consumption. Looking back at the U.S. on its entry into World War II, we see that though consumption fell 2% in the first full year following, it accelerated each year after until 1945, by 2.6%, 3.6% and 7%, respectively. Slowing consumption will be a temporary setback. Like in World War II, people will adjust."
Anybody who believes the logic here is chemical -- just add element X to Element Y and get compund Z - should take a glance at Von Pfeil's proof. The WWII analogy is, to say the least, bizarre. In the US, the necessary gross expansion of military industrial output to meet the needs of the war in the 40-45 period was extraordinary. To think that the pattern of consumption had to do with the hypodermic of Fed policy -- the trickle trickle into the bloodstream of easy money -- is close to insane. And to think that the shadow war is going to cause the Government to rev up its old warplane factories in Washington State is so off the mark that one wonders if von Pfeil wrote this passage in his sleep. There is a kind of analogical desperation behind this -- one selects one's historical comparisons after one has one's theory down, rather like the alchemists used to do to prove that at some point in the past, some esoteric master did, after all, transform base metals into gold.

For a more reasonable analogy, look at what Japan's central bank did in the nineties -- an unprecedented amount of pump priming. That did no good -- and the reason? The Japanese consumer wasn't prepared to take on the kind of debts the American consumer doesn't even give a second thought to. The recession, if we have one, is not going to be managed by a Central Bank.

Remora:
Since the market Humpty-Dumptied last week, I thought readers might like a cheerful article from 1998 about the Asian collapse by Murray Sayle, a veteran journalist now settling into his bungalow years in Japan. It is from a Japanese English mag.
OutsideR Online -Nonember 1998
Sample grafs:

"Can it possibly be 1929 again, out East? Where are the suiciding stockbrokers, the criminal scandals uncovered by the falling markets? Well, six officials connected with the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan have hanged themselves (traditional swords having become scarce and expensive, like most Japanese objets de vertu) and so has a Japanese MP of Korean origin, not a good thing to be in Japan when trouble strikes. Two small-fry finance officials are out on bail for allowing themselves to be entertained by overlent bankers at something called a No Pants shabu-shabu, a raunchy restaurant whose waitresses serve at table
minus underwear (in the Shoguns days, silk-robed officials met with favour-beseeching merchants in brothels, hence the Japanese euphemism for a bribe, sodenoshita, a little something in the sleeve. So what else is new?) But it all does rather fit, no?"

Remora.
The US has finally decided to abandon the extremely dumb position it took last week. You'll remember, when the Taliban demanded evidence that bin Laden was involved in the assault on the WTC, the administration refused, saying it 'wasn't going to negotiate.' The refusal was puzzling and stupid. Puzzling, because presumably it wouldn't be hard to provide evidence linking bin Laden to terrorism. Stupid, because, once again, an American government was treating a non-European people like second class humans. If France or Germany or Lithuania had demanded evidence before turning over a wanted individual, the US would have done it unhesitatingly. That is what extradition procedures are all about. Since if we attack Afghanistan, whether to extract bin Laden from his camp or to overrun the country extensively, we are going to have to rely on Pakistan, this was not a good way to start that kind of tricky operation. Back in America, where any mindless display of defiance is now greeted with cheers, the administration might be looking good, but this is a ploy that will ultimately cost American lives.
Hey Presto: Condoleeza R. and Colin Powell, who between them hold the brainpower of the entire tBush administration, woke up. A little too late, but let's not bitch.
NYT has the story:
U.S. to Publish Terror Evidence on bin Laden

lede graf: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 � The Bush administration plans to make public evidence linking Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda network to the terror attacks on the United States in an effort to persuade the world, and particularly Muslim nations, that a military response is justified.
The evidence will embrace new information gathered by law enforcement and intelligence agents on the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as material used in indictments against Mr. bin Laden in the bombing of American Embassies in East Africa in 1998, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today."

Comments
Alan recommends this link to the New Republic today, with this comment:

I have no sympathy with this guy's attack on "the left and its candlelight
vigils," or for the jingoism that the New Republic has displayed in the last
couple of issues. Robert Fisk is a journalist who has my particular
admiration for having once picked up the pieces of an exploded shell that
had killed two Palestinian women, noting the serial number and
manufacturer's name, and taking it back to the engineer who had designed it.
I'm just curious about what you guys think about what he has to say about
the embargo on Iraq & its effects on the civilian population thereof. What
he says sounds plausible to someone like me who is shamefully uninformed
about the issue.
BTW, Roger, great post today.

Lorin wrote, re the tears post:

"That is wonderful. You know Jean Starobinski has a big chapter on Rousseau and
the political meaning of tears in HmmHmm and Transparency?"

Which I didn't. Google search reveals that to be Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, 1988).

I'm planning, this week, to do two or three posts on The Earthquake of Lisbon, with references to the Current Crisis. I thought I'd prepare my faithful readers.

Now, my thoughts have been straying to the literature about the Lisbon earthquake ever since the collapse of the WTC. Some might say that comparing the two situations is unsound -- the Lisbon quake was a natural event, the WTC assault was thoroughly man-made. What I am hunting for, though, is not an exact comparison of the events themselves, but of their effects on the cultural mood.

The Enlightenment was a definite cultural mood -- a mix of sentiment and intellectual habits self-consciously promoted by an amorphous group with definite self-selecting initiatory practices and habits. One of its most salient features was the optimism that came from the at first muted, and then more self-confident, announcement of modernity -- modernity as a virtue, modernity that dared to speak its name. This was the kind of thing savaged by Swift in Tale of the Tub, with passages like this one:

"When I consider how exceedingly our illustrious moderns have eclipsed the weak glimmering lights of the ancients, and turned them out of the road of all fashionable commerce, to a degree, that our choice town wits,[1] of most refined accomplishments, are in grave dispute, whether there have been ever any ancients or no in which point we are like to receive wonderful satisfaction from the most useful labours and lucubrations of that worthy modern, Dr. Bentley: I say, when I consider all this, I cannot but bewail, that no famous modern hath ever yet attempted an universal system in a small portable volume of all things that are to be known, or believed, or imagined, or practised in life."

Swift's satire predicts an enterprise he would have heartily disapproved of -- The Encyclopedia. What was happening in Swift's time, and Montesquieu's, and Voltaire's, was a distinct change in Time-sentiment. The past, with its source, literally, in paradise, was slowly losing its position as the ultimate arbitor of legitimacy. The belief in the Garden at the beginning of the world was wilting. This transformation entailed a further transformation in the perception of the modern -- it became not the unfolding of the fall, but an interval within an inevitable progress. An interval that had to anchor its organization in something beyond precedent. This something, of course, was reason.

Although a culture is greater than the people who write the books and attend court functions, it is this change in time-sentiment and the definite set of assumptions, the overriding mood of optimism, which concerns me -- or will, for the next couple of posts. From such events as the Battle of the Books (to which Swift refers -- a controversy that started in France, with the querelle des anciens et des modernes that whirled around Perrault's address to the Acadamie Francais in 1670, but which truly found a language and an attitude around 1720, and began to be attacked around 1760. The Lisbon Earthquake happened on November 1, 1755. It isn't too far fetched to connect the change in mood with the event.

While the 90s certainly do not form an epoch, the optimism of the 90s, at least from 96 on, was also unmistakeable. Granted, cultural moods are hard to define, hard to test, and easy to get wrong. They are supremely soft objects -- fuzzy parameters. But anybody who trolls through an internet search on Google can find the ruins and monuments of that time, from the 30,000 Dow people to the bleached bones of biztech zines featuring teen millionaires. If the phrase, "America is changed forever," is being repeated like a zombie mantra by every perky pundit within hearing distance of a tv mike, that doesn't mean the phrase is wholly wrong (although I am always reminded, when I use a cliche, of what Leon Bloy said in Exegese des lieux communs -- cliches are only true when you read them through a mirror, darkly). There's a change in the air, though, we all know it, even if everything isn't changed, changed utterly. The optimism is gone. While it is too soon to call this pessimism, it feels ominous, like an alcoholic's thirst for the next binge. We have gone back to sucking down the biles and salts of the Reagan era, the stupid prejudices and kneejerk patriotism, even though we know, in the back of our minds, that this is not a good idea. Yes, it isn't a good idea, people. The modish word in the 90s was smart -- smart business, smart tech, smart people, etc., ad nauseum. Think: when was the last time you heard someone use smart like that? It is a small thing, but when a term disappears from the population of buzz words, there's usually a reason.

Remora
This story is going to come out in pieces, and the alert reader will have to do the cut and paste. The intelligence failure that allowed the successful hijacking of four planes has a backstory, but we haven't heard it yet. So like some jigsaw puzzle, we will have to look around for the odd news item to piece it together. This article.
FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools (washingtonpost.com) in the WP is extremely noteworthy. Graf two:
"Three days after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."

Graf three:
"A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools. However, the official said there was no information to indicate the flight students had been planning suicide hijacking attacks."

The last sentence has more than the whiff of deniability. Oh, so there might have been indications that they were planning plain vanilla hijackings?

Dope.

I have a review out this week in the Austin Chronicle. My editor there, Clay Smith, is undoubtedly the best editor I work with, and I'm happy with the work we've done in the last three years - has it been three years? Jesus.
But the Chronicle is going through the pain shooting through the print media since advertising money took a hike at the beginning of the year. The obvious place to cut out the fat is books -- I've posted about this before. In consequence, my review this week was intolerably squeezed. So I'm doing something I should, perhaps, not do -- I'm pasting in my full review of The Corrections. I wouldn't do this if I thought this site was attracting thousands, but it attracts tens, so I'm pretty sure I'm safe.
In Slate this week, Christopher Caldwell and Judith Shulevitz wrote about The Corrections, too. I love Slate's Book Club -- it is, I think, a brilliant use of the Net. And this week's dialogue was fascinating to me because, as a man who reviews @ ten books a month, I've thought a lot about what reviews do. With Non-fiction, it is somewhat easier to figure out a review. Unless the book is extraordinarily well written, non-fiction is pretty easy -- you reach in there, grab the pearl of content, and run away with it in a direction of your chosing.

Fiction poses a much more delicate task. I have no interest in book reporting -- the details of the plot you can gather from the book jacket, as any college student knows. I think I am of the impressionist school -- I want to want to know how a book makes an impression on the sensibility of an educated reader. On the other hand, I think too much impression ruins a review -- there has to be internal and external constraints in the review. It is hard to spell these out. You have to check yourself for unfair shots -- for instance, when Shulevitz uses her knowledge of Franzen's article about his Dad's alzheimers to criticize his portrayal of Alfred Lambert, the father in the novel, that was an unfair shot. You have to think hard about treatment - novels are made from a hard-to-analyze mixture of character, style, and plot, and there are those who favor one of those factors over the other, and there are authors who are manifestly incompetent at one (Dreiser, for instance, with his notorious prose clumsiness) who are brilliant at another. This is where I particularly like the way Slate's book club brings these usually hidden buoys and markers in the reader's soul to the surface. It exteriorizes the reviewers internal constraints by making one reviewer confront another. If you regularly read the New York Review of Books, you'll notice that most of the novel reviews suck. Why? Because the NYRB doesn't exactly know how to approach fiction, unless it is fiction written by a dead or a safely Central European writer -- same diff. Perhaps this goes back to the reign of Gore Vidal, who in the seventies exercized a malign influence on the fiction reviewing in that mag. It has never recovered. Vidal didn't recognize any constraint on his impressions other than his overbearing ego. He was the armored reader, and his hostility made it impossible for him to read. His review of Gravity's Rainbow is a classic of its type -- it is like reading an armadillo critique haute cuisine. Here we have a a conflict of tastes so manifestly baseline that we know the conjunction is a mistake.
So here is the longplaying version (although not long enough) of my review.

The Corrections
Author: Franzen, Jonathan
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux $ 25.00

"The Correction, when it came, was not an overnight bursting of the bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year long leakage of value�"

The English Romantics, circa 1800, came back with a wonderful term from the continent: zeitgeist. It was probably Coleridge, with his esoteric cast of mind, who fastened upon the word first, but it was William Hazlitt who, wonderfully, anglicized it as "the Spirit of the Age."

What did it mean? It meant that history was no longer reducible to chronology - no longer the clock God wound up, ticking off monarchs or presidents at regular intervals. No, history was an emergent property, a pattern straight out of the dark unruly unconscious of the people. History, like the Kingdom of God, is within you.

Franzen's novel captures the spirit of the age, specifically the nineties (a decade that began in 1996 and ended, in confusion and sorrow, with the stealing of a presidential election and the bombing of the financial center of the world). 90s America discovered a new frontier, marked on its extreme boundary by the Greater Fool - that mythical last purchaser of high cap, negative dividend stock. 90s winners were full of irrational exuberance, while the decade's discards were full of radio talk show resentment. Forty-six year old arbitrageurs learned to pronounce cool (kewwwl) like sixteen year olds. Sixteen year olds learned to arbitrage. This is what the postwar world looked like - the first postwar world, really, since 1919.

Frankly, I'm surprised, I'm fucking shocked, Franzen is this good. He was not a writer I thought capable of this novel. A couple of years ago, Franzen was put on Granta's "best novelists under 40" list - of which there is no more depressing gauge of the mediocrity of hip. I thought I had good reason for paying no attention to him.

I didn't. The trick of his authorial voice we have also heard in David Foster Wallace and David Eggers. It is all about having that perfect SAT score intelligence -- this is the adolescent side of it -- edged -- this is the adult side -- with that retracting irony which, of course, reflects a class contradiction - for as soon as our A+ student climbs up the ladder of meritocracy, he looks down and sees that it is disappearing under him; that dumb and dumber are the real thing in this country; that the standards are perpetually lowering, that his boss, the biz student, got through four to six years of secondary education and read nothing more challenging than "7 Habits of Highly Effective People;" that the serious books he read are dismissed by his contemporaries as adolescent, while the adolescent movies they watch are discussed as if they were serious; that, in short, he is, if not the Underground man, at least the Upside Down one.

At the heart of Franzen's novel is a classic American situation. The three Lambert kids - Gary, Chip and Denise - are on the outskirts of middle age. Their parents, Enid and Alfred, live in St. Jude - your basic composite Midwestern city. Alfred has retired, after working his whole life for a railroad company that was swallowed up and deconstructed in a typical quickie acquisition - the kind of thing economists counsel us to accept in the name of 'efficiency.' Enid is now having to put up with Alfred's decay, his Parkinson's, his silences, his inanition, his spiritual heaviness. Enid is your classic Vance Packard Status Seeker type, suffering from the lifelong frustration of getting no cooperation from her family. Now she wants the kids to come for one last Christmas celebration in St. Jude's, after which they will decide something about their father.

The book is structured around long sequences devoted to each member of the family - although the child's point of view is held onto to the extent that Enid and Alfred come as a set, inseparable until the horrible end. Chip is an ex-academic, bounced out for violating his college's sex code. He ends up partnering with an ex-deputy minister of Lithuania trying to pull off a dot.com fraud. Denise is a super-chef in Philadelphia whose sex life describes a Borromean ring: she's having sex with both the owner of her restaurant and his wife. Gary is a rich investment manager in Philadelphia, married to Caroline, a wealthy woman who, employing all the multiple strategies of passive aggression, has let Gary know his parents are d�class�.

A intricate subplot involving a wonder mood altering drug, Correcktall, is woven into these elements. Alfred patented the basic process being used by Axon, the start-up bio-tech company that is marketing Corecktall.

The panic at the heart of Franzen's comedy is easily recognized by anybody over 35 - it is the awful realization that we are turning out JUST LIKE OUR PARENTS. Denise's bisexuality, Chip's leather jacket and skim milk Marxism, Gary's incredibly cool Italian suits all prove insufficient to defer that fundamental recognition of creeping likeness.

There's a small pile of novels (Invisible Man, J.R., Infinite Jest) on my shelf that I've read three times at least - twice as a reader, for amusement, and once, as a writer, to figure out the magic tricks. The Corrections is going on that pile.

Remora

Very, very sad -- the drumbeat of anti-Middle Eastern discrimination. Read this NYT story .Some Passengers Singled Out for Exclusion by Flight Crew, that leads:
:
"In San Antonio on Monday, Ashraf Khan, 32, a mobile phone salesman who was trying to get to his brother's wedding in Pakistan, was ordered off a Delta Airlines flight. The plane's captain, Mr. Khan recalled, told him that the flight crew did not "feel safe flying with you."
A Delta spokeswoman said the airline was "aware of this incident and takes this matter very seriously."