Remora

Lag time.

Let history show that while the bombs and cruise missiles were falling on Kabul, I, Roger Gathman, was doing the two step with a friend to the music of B.B. King at the Ausin Blues Festival.


The crowd at the festival, when we got there in the afternoon, was subdued. I hadn't listened to the radio or read the newspapers that morning, deciding, in a fit of absent minded good will, to make a lemon pound cake instead. Lemon pound cake, alas, was verboten - the fascists at the entrance sniffed it out like I was smuggling in cocaine, and quickly scotched my gesture as the shabby anti-capitalist ploy it was. The order of the day was, get your food at the booths for a considerable markup, or else. Who was I to think that somehow, at a blues concert, we could have a brief glimmer of coolness? So the whole cake had to go briskly into the trash. The musicians -- including Stevie Ray Vaughn's old group, Double Trouble - played to a field that was weirdly divided between seats and blankets -- with the seats a higher price. Although this probably paid for the lineup, it had the disadvantage of collecting the most geriatric and mute section of the audience in the key position right before the stage. It was as if the music had to traverse an acre of vacuum before hitting the groovers in the blanket section. By nightfall, however, we had all agluttinated into one throbbing mass, and even the geriatrics made a show of rushing the stage for Buddy Guy, throwing caution to the wind.

I heard about the attack from one of our party, but our discussion of it was truncated. Who wanted to discuss it?

And I still find myself in an odd position, at least for me: I have nothing to say.

This isn't just emotional exhaustion. I have nothing to say, partly, because we really dont know what the engagement in Afghanistan is like. If this war is anything like our two previous military outings, in Kosovo and Iraq, what we have to say now will form around erroneous perceptions and half understood information. After all, can any of my readers really envision Kabul? There's a lag time in modern war - while the weapons have become technically much more real time, benefiting tremendously from computer systems that have revolutionized the dart game between the world, always a vast target, and the shooters, the long distant manipulation of war means that, in a real political sense, we - and I include here Washington decision-makers - know less about what is going on than we did before. When damage is a relationship between the oh too weak and yielding flesh and the de-humanized system of delivery, a vital feedback is cut out of the system. That vital feedback is -- traditional military casualties. It is hard to imagine that this war will not be fought by infantry, in the end, rather than navy cannon tenders and bombadiers, so this might not be true. But we are learning that old style war, with its piles of battlefield bodies, evolved a feedback system that is lacking in newstyle war. Those bodies were markers of committment by both sides, and the feedback was about just how strong the committment was. Old style war contained, in other words, a system of internal limits. Newstyle war contains different limits. The lag time I am talking about is more intense. Those decisions that limit and shape aggression, when concentrated utterly on targetting rather than mobilization, make us spectators instead of participants. That this war might have its greatest effect in Indonesia, as the Washington Post reported this morning, is something that, as spectators and decision-makers, we don't expect or understand. In other words, the limits of war, on one side, have been pushed out, but on the other side, the side of the less technologically advanced recievers of our glorious weaponry, the response has been to make war viral -- to spread it by low tech means in many places.

All of which means -- I have nothing to say.

Check out, however, what John Lloyd has to say about Berlusconi's famous remark about Western Civilization being superior to Islam. Ah, Western civilization is such a good idea that we should try it some time, as Oscar Wilde or Mohatma Gandhi said. I'll say more about the Italian Prez, the current Orlando Furioso of Western Civ later.

New Statesman - Focus

Remora

Gretchen Morgenstern, how do I love thee?

In the nineties, I used to read Tom Byron's articles in the New York Observer as my guide to what was going on in the world of Money. He was wry, he was sardonic, he was on top of bullshit, he was having a great time, as the bubble inflated, pecking away at some of the peculiar intellectual corruption that creeps into eras of enthusiasm.

Let me count the ways...

And then, for a while, I was writing for Ken Kurson's Green magazine on business. Reviewing books that were, broadly, business oriented. So I immersed myself in business journalism, and I discovered -- not shockingly -- that business journalism is mostly bad. On a daily basis, the most erroneous news and views can be found on your local business section. The reaason is simple. Whereas reporters covering politicians are allowed to have a healthy dislike for politicians, no such critical distance is allowed between biz reporters and your neighborhood confidence men. So biz reporting becomes mainly rolling out the conventional wisdom.

I love thee to the heights, and depths...

Looking around for models, I was struck by the much higher quality of British reporting and reporters. My favorite book during this time was Devil Take The Hindmost, by Edward Chancellor, the Financial Times journalist -- still a scorching look at the Efficient Markets Theory which is behind most legislation on banking and investment. I also fell in love with Frozen Desire, John Buchan's extended meditation on money. Unfortunately, as a columnist and reporter, Buchan isn't as good. I know -- several biz books I reviewed, he also reviewed. And my reviews were deeper. It isn't that I'm an egotist -- actually, I found that surprising. Buchan knows a lot more than me about how markets work. He is just not willing to go all out on an occasional piece.

.... and breadths my soul can reach....

Now, the reporter to read, oh, not just read, to fall head over heels for, is Gretchen Morgenstern. She is the NYT's shining star -- although I wonder how many people have noticed that? She's been consistently on the money for the past two years. Her Sunday pieces are so fine, so fine -- the bleak vision in the background, but never too bleak, never black on black, the contrarian mistake of such as James Grant, and, surpremely, with the consciousness, the full knowledge, of who she is quoting in the foreground. Most biz reporting goes wrong by going to all the usual suspects -- quoting the hot guru or the available analyst of the moment. And these people have an agenda, mes freres. With Gretchen, you know that she knows. She is so SMART.

Another thing -- biz reporters are encouraged to be lazy -- the positive spin has no downside, I guess that's the management idea. So they often put together information like a committee of the blind weaving a quilt --patches go in no particular pattern. But oh my brothers and sisters, read today's column by G.M. and watch how beautifully she does numbers. Numbers are the bane and wonder of biz reporting. If you don't know how to put them together, it is like listening toa child play chopsticks -- a painful experience. But G.M, the beauteous G.M., knows that the numbers aren't bullshit -- a too hasty nominalistic view. Rather, you have to know something about your categories, and your context, before the numbers start to sing. Some people simply figure that out. God bless the old crook, it was Michael Milken's genius, in the seventies, to figure out the numbers on high risk bonds. He was right, although this doesn't mean he didn't abuse his power, and that he got off easy for what he did to the economy.

So, this is my song of love -- which shows those skeptics out there that I do have a heart. And Gretchen rules it.
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Remora

There's an outstandingly dumb op-ed piece in the nyt today The 40-Year War Someone named Bill Keller has grabbed the wrong analogy and rides it to its frothing conclusion.

The analogy is that we are in the New Cold War. He gets rid of the inconvenient fact that, really, we aren't this way "There is, of course, no Soviet Union of terrorism, but as John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of cold-war historians, has been telling his classes at Yale since Sept. 11, there are striking parallels."

Striking parallels between a world wide clash between two nuclear armed nations and a disparate group of terrorists scattered about the Middle East with, at most, maybe 10 to 15,000 agents? Right. The striking parallel is between the thirst for some grand, unified thing like a Cold War among deans of cold war history and Georgetown cocktail diplomats. Actually, there is a parallel with an earlier 'war' in American history. That war, against the Barbary Pirates, was an easy victory. America's confrontation with terrorists is, similarly, a confrontation with a loosely organized group that relies on a context of sympathizers to retreat, and the low tech advantages of ambush to attack. The war against the pirates, in the Western Hemisphere, lasted two hundred years. It was never completely won, but piracy diminished because it became inconvenient for the states that had once sponsored it -- England and France -- and the object of piracy -- mainly the Spanish gold fleet -- became more of a cost to attack.The Barbary Pirates fell because they were easily located and routed.
Of course, piracy is ultimately driven by economics. Terrorism is driven by ideology. In that sense, only, one can find a Cold War parallel. As for the current salivating over the 'coming security state' -- I'll believe it when I see it. So far, we haven't even agreed to secure, at a minimum level, airports, although we were quick to secure the finances of airlines. I do sometimes wonder at the hysteria of intellectuals, who so much want there to be a moment beyond which 'everything is changed,' whether to satisfy their libertarian nightmares or their authoritarian daydreams. Those moments happen, no doubt. So far, though, the indicators are that the WCT attack wasn't one of them. Compare it to, say, the war on drugs, which kicked into high gear in the 80s after the death of basketball star Len Bias. You might think this is a grossly distorting comparison -- the WCT attack is certainly one of the great atrocities of our time. Alas, the shadows thrown by historic events can't be predicted by their gross emotional weight. While Bias' death kicked-started a disasterous set of laws punishing drug use, which in turn had a massive effect on American society, giving us proportionately one of the highest percentages of incarcerated people on earth, what has the WCT assault done? I see no comparable change in the domestic political landscape. TThere is a great desire for some great change, that is true. We want, somehow, to do something tthat is appropriately monumental as a sign of respect for the 6000 who died. But desire, here, has not yet found an object. As for the international landscape, Afghanistan can not long stay at the center of the world. All bets are off if Ben Laden is not captured or killed, but I'd certainly be cautious about predicting a forty year "Cold War."

Skip this post, it was an accident.

Remora

In these days of shadow war and shadow recession, the Bush administration is suddenly turning on a Keynsian dime -- or is it 120 billion dollars? with a vengeance. Question is: does this mean that the reign of Schumpeter, of creative destruction, was all a big mistake?

The Web, in its wisdom, offers up a digital festschrift in honor of Peter Drucker that contains Drucker's essay, Modern Prophets: Schumpeter and Keynes?

It's a brilliant piece. I disagree with Drucker's summary dismissal of Keynsian economics, which makes especial use of two time periods and, at least as he glides over the 81-82 period, is magisterially unfair; on the other hand, Drucker draws a mean geneology. He does net the connections between Keynes and the whole classical school, and unlike other conservative economists, gives the devil (aka Marx) his due as an economist. But since Drucker's heart is in Schumpeter's differance; the meat of the piece is laying out, with maximum compression, what Schumpeter's work is all about.

Here's two grafs about Schumpeter that are worth reading even if you don't follow my link to the piece (but do -- it is the weekend, right? And there's a 120 billion dollar economics proposal floating around D.C. And, like, that's a chunk of change. It makes, what, four Gates. Which I do believe should be some kind of official metric).

"Classical economics considered innovation to be outside the system, as Keynes did, too. Innovation belonged in the category of "outside catastrophies" like earthquakes, climate, or war, which, everybody knew, have profound influence on the economy but are not part of economics. Schumpeter insisted that, on the contrary, innovation - that is, entrepeneurship that moves resources from old and obsolescent to new and more productive employments - is the very essence of economics and most certainly of a modern economy.


He derived this notion, as he was the first to admit, from Marx. But he used it to disprove Marx. Schumpeter's Economic Development does what neither the classical economists nor Marx nor Keynes was able to do: It makes profit fulfill an economic function. In the economy of change and innovation, profit, in contrast to Marx and his theory, is not a Mehrwert, a "surplus value" stolen from the workers. On the contrary, it is the only source of jobs for workers and of labor income. The theory of economic development shows that no one except the innovator makes a genuine "profit"; and the innovator's profit is always quite short-lived. But innovation in Schumpeter's famous phrase is also "creative destruction." It makes obsolete yesterday's capital equipment and capital investment. The more an economy progresses, the more capital formation will it therefore need. Thus what the classical economists - or the accountant or the stock exchange - considers "profit" is a genuine cost, the cost of staying in business, the cost of a future in which nothing is predictable except that today's profitable business will become tomorrow's white elephant. Thus, capital formation and productivity are needed to maintain the wealth-producing capacity of the economy and, above all, to maintain today's jobs and to create tomnorrow's jobs."

This is the shit. But it's implications for understanding business unfold when one understands that innovation can be tied to multifarious forms of profit-making -- including using the power of the State in various ways, from promoting regulation to using the judicial power, to make money. This simple fact of business life is systematically overlooked by the right and most of the left, who define themselves with regard to a false picture of state-private enterprise interactins.

Drucker goes on to talk about how WWI monetized economies. Read the essay. When the Web offers you stuff like this for free, you have to admit, it is pretty cool.

Remora
Sometimes you come upon a fact that you know has an essayistic depth to it, if you only had the time, or the mental capacity, to write the essay. For instance: last night I read this anecdote about Hans Christian Andersen. Since he lived in fear of awakening in a coffin, "he always carried a card with him saying, "I am not really dead," which he put on the dressing table whenever he stayed at a hotel abroad, to prevent some careless doctor from wrongly declaring him dead." -- Buried Alive, by Jan Bondeson.
Now the Walter Benjamin in me takes that as an image applicable to every modernist artist -- didn't they all carry with them, at least metaphorically, some card saying 'I'm not really dead?' And what kind of sentence is that, anyway? Who, after all, is the speaker? What kind of truth claims can the dead make? There's a good reason that wills begin with a declaration of health -- we only trust the living.

Remora
Did you know that war reporters have their own association? Well, now you do. This link is to an article by Michael Griffin laying out the depressing Afghan specs: a famished country, bickering warlords with onerous pasts, and the Taliban, a far from medieval creation -- as everybody likes to call it. It is, instead, an ultra-modern creation, a faith based militia wrung from the despair of the poor.
Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Griffin's assessment of the Northern alliance sounds alarmingly like those groups that the US propped up to resist Saddam H. in Iraq. They are simply without a vision, or any support beyond the money they can get from somebody to pass around. . Rabanni, one would think, would have learned a few things by being dumped by the Taliban army. Last graf, and one hopes that the US is taking this to heart:

"And they are far from unanimous in supporting Zahir Shah, the former king, as the UN-recognised president, Rabbani, has bluntly dismissed any suggestion that the monarchy should be restored, while the Uzbek, Tajik and Shia have little loyalty to a Pashtun king who has spent the toughest years of the war in an Italian villa."