Remora

This is the NYT front web page article :
"US. Again Placing Focus on Ousting Hussein
By PATRICK E. TYLER
With Muslim backing, the option of taking the war against terrorism to Iraq has gained significant ground in recent weeks, according to administration officials."

Now, the eye-catching with Muslim backing makes one expect, well, some Muslim backing. The article, instead, recites the diplomatic coughing of Turkey, and this:

"In the past two weeks, at least one prominent Arab envoy in Washington has reversed his view that an American-led military operation in Iraq would be a disaster, or that it would fan the flames of Arab dissent and perhaps lead to the overthrow of some weaker rulers. (His reversal, though important, is not shared uniformly in Arab capitals.)

The diplomat, who refused to be identified, noted that most countries in the region harbor a latent desire to be rid of Mr. Hussein. He argued that the current military success in Afghanistan, the demonstration of a new model of warfare there and the undermining of Osama Bin Laden's radical message have created a new opportunity to act in Iraq.

"I now think it is doable," the diplomat said, adding that his own government might oppose such an operation in public until it became clear it was going to succeed. "This would require a lot of governments to accept big political risks, but I believe that in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, the governments are strong enough to hold the people and not have an uprising."

There you have it folks, Muslim backing in a nutshell. If this doesn't seem like a wave rolling from the Jordan to the Straits of Gibraltar to you, you aren't with the program. "At least one prominent Arab envoy" -- wow. I mean, even for newspaperdom, in their infinite bending over before the Bushy Blitzkrieg, this is pretty extraordinary stuff. Here's my suggestion: NYT should pluck some of the Style people to cover foreign affairs. At least they would know how to spot a trend, as opposed to how to desperately spin a conservative political agenda.

Remora

Limited Inc is, as our many happy readers know, ahead of the curve. Perhaps our more unhappy readers are doubtful; perhaps our happiest reader also writes this rag. A week or two back, Limited Inc was talking about death toll politics. We shopped our pitch around, actually, trying to awaken various editors to the brilliance of our idea, and the need to pay us for putting it all in a nice cohesive shape, but of course a prophet is without profit in his own country, and our pitch was pitched.

Now here's the WP, Sunday: What Counts
The Death Toll Is Far Less Than Feared. Can We Accept That? by Peter Freundlich.

This is the graf that makes his point - or rather points his question. And remember, kids, the question mark is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for tragedy. Which is why newspapers really hate it -they prefer their tragedies to be car accidents.

"Is it that we need the higher number, to shore up our fury? Is it that the sight of those sinking skyscrapers, in which, God knows, 10 times as many people might just as well have died, opened a hole in us that simply won't close? Does it somehow seem a betrayal of the dead to reduce their number? Or is this perhaps American grandiosity -- a desire to dwarf other tragedies the way the Trade Center towers for a short time dwarfed all other buildings in the world?

As if 3,000 people weren't enough. Or as if the intent weren't clear."

Revenge feeds on numbers. Elias Canetti was not the first to notice this, but was the most thorough explorer of the dark side of crowd psychology. We wonder how all the people we know were in there got out. The escape story still needs to be told, in some bold and beautiful way.

Remora


A heady column this morning from the LA Time's Robert Scheer. Scheer is, perhaps, exaggerating when he writes that Enron's rise and fall is the stuff of major presidential scandal; there is a whiff, a smell, a certain ripeness there. There is the always potent netting of Texas capitalism, there is what we know of how the network works from the S and L scandal and the culture that just moved on, no lessons learned. Never learn. Like remember the Alamo, it is a slogan with a certain force. If there were no war going on, Bushypoo would be on the spot right now about his friendship with Ken Lay. Enron, the beached whale that was a whale balloon, all the time. We can poke gingerly at it, but remember: whales or their simulacra make friends with all types. It wasn't Bushy's era, it was Clinton.

Scheer's column doesn't present any new content. What he does is pose the right questions. The dead and dumb Dems won't pose them, until people like Scheer makes a big enough stink in the press. Now, here's a litmus test for you: what media vehicle would dare to do that right now? Where's Hardball, where's MSNBC, where are all the aghast outlets of yesteryear, the death of outrage pumping in their seedy veins?

The so far clearest indication that Enron held undue influence with the Bushies is in a graf midway through the column:

"This emerging scandal makes Whitewater seem puny in comparison; clearly there ought to be at least as aggressive a congressional inquiry into the connection between the Bush administration and the Enron debacle. Facts must be revealed, beginning with the content of Lay's private meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney to create the administration's energy policy...

"What was Lay's role in the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert Jr. as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman? As the New York Times reported, Hebert "had barely settled into his new job this year when he had an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth L. Lay, [in which Lay] prodded him to back ... a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid to companies like Enron." Lay admits making the call but in an unctuous defense of his influence peddling said, "The final decision on [Hebert's job] was going to be the president's, certainly not ours." Soon after, Hebert was replaced by Texan Pat Wood, who was favored by Lay."


ABC news has a different take on Hebert, but they, too, claim that Lay, in sinister convention with our odious VPotus, damned him with the black spot of non-cooperation. Hebert wasn't a team player, evidently:

"As Bush assumed the presidency, Enron had unusual access to the new administration's deliberations about energy policy and appointments to important posts. Lay served on the Bush transition team and helped interview candidates for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the gas pipelines and electricity grids that are key to Enron's business. Earlier this year, the commission's chairman, Curtis Hebert, who was being considered for reappointment by the White House, declared himself "offended" by Lay's lobbying efforts. Hebert later quit the panel.

When Vice President Dick Cheney drafted a new energy policy, he met with Lay and other Enron executives. Enron was reportedly the only company to be granted such a meeting.

Lay declined to be interviewed for this story."

John Ashcroft was quoted as saying that it must might be the case that questioning Bush's connection to Enron is helping the terrorists.

Ahh, got ya! Ashcroft hasn't said anything like that.... yet.

Limited Inc, with our unholy talent for screwing up -- there must be an equation for this showing that Limited Inc's single life of screwing up is equal, in number of screwups, to the total of at least three other people put together (one named Larry, one named Mo, and one named Curly) -- made a mess of our income, survival chances for winter, and mental health yesterday. We've been writing on money laundering, we've been on the phone to fabulous Paris and London -- and by the way, the British phone service has gone the way of so many things in Post-Thatcher England, from convenience to nuisance -- we've talked to investigators and libertarian freaks and friends of the Somali peoples and what happens, what happens with this overload of carats? We come in with a piece that is too long and too late. We don't know yet if the newspaper that commissioned it on spec is going to throw it back at us, but we are afraid, very afraid. And the worst part is that we very much wanted to bootstrap from this article to another article about Mexico's dirty war, the secrets about which are now starting to spill.

Limited Inc's excuse for this state of affairs is so piss poor it doesn't deserve to survive in prose. But we will no doubt return to our private Tora Bora, our cave of misfortune and chaos, at another time.

In the meantime, the News! Yes, we are aware that crazy Sharon is staging a firesale of Israel statehood (everything must go!); we are aware that bin Laden might be captured any minute now; we are aware that the first collateral damage from Enron's collapse is hitting; but none of these things move us, no, enchant us like Robert Gottlieb's review, in the NY Obs, of Uplift: The Bra in America


Is this the way to begin a review or what?

"You may have worn a brassiere, you may have helped a friend or two take off a brassiere, but have you ever really thought about the brassiere? It�s not too late. �Brassieres must do more than fit a multitude of bodies �. They must accommodate the same body as it changes through the monthly cycle and through the life cycle. They must provide for movement of the torso and arms in many directions without chafing or binding and without slipping out of position. As if that were not enough, brassieres must also retain their own structure through multiple wearings and launderings; must not abrade in contact with clothing; must remain, as a rule, inconspicuous beneath the outer clothing while harmonizing with the desired silhouette; and must be priced to sell to many customers. No wonder hundreds of attempts have been made to design the ideal breast supporter over the past 140 years.�

Remora


Definitely check out ALEX KUCZYNSKI's article, in the NYT, on how the elite go to prison. Ah, the rich are imprisoned different from you and me - they employ prison consultants, of course, to get the best penal deal. Post-conviction consultants, excuse me, is what they call themselves. Does Limited Inc find it ironic that the sharpest criticism of capitalism you are gonna find in the NYT comes in the Style section? What do you think, honey? Although let's be fair: the style section of almost any newspaper from a fair sized metropole is going to have news of more stunning import, re the class war, than a year's subscription of the Progressive. It is the nature of the beast to be beastly, and where else is it going to show itself in full stretch, all the odors, the fur, the claws, the stinking maw, and the rest of it on parade? Conspicuous consumption includes conspicuous odiousness -- there's an analogy between the status one accrues by wasting magnificently and the status one accrues by wasting the moral codes magnificently.

This is one of those articles that suffers, bleeds, from being parceled out for your pleasure. But here, just a taste, as they say in the cocaine trade:

"Does the client play tennis? There's a federal prison camp for him in California. Will she volunteer for community service, or has the client given generously to charitable organizations? It might be grounds for a reduced sentence from a federal judge, who can choose to make an influential recommendation to the Bureau of Prisons. Will the client admit to a drinking problem? Then he can be admitted to an alcohol rehabilitation program in prison, which also serves as a way to reduce total sentence time."

and a few grafs down:

"Like a crazy riff off a Suzanne Somers infomercial, Mr. Sickler's literature [Mr. Sickler is the Dickensian name that runs the penal search consulting firm] showcases bright testimonials from happy customers. One client, Charles Ravenel, is a former South Carolina gubernatorial candidate who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in October 1995 for his role in the failure of the Citadel Federal Savings Banks, which prosecutors described as one of the biggest bank frauds in the state's history."

And... but you can get Ravenel's story yourself. Limited Inc has written a little review of a book about the Rikers Island prison in the New York Observer (July 22), and with our beady collagist's eye, we see the irresistability of the juxtaposition of ourselves and the style article. Bad habit, you say, to start quoting yourself? Admit it, we don't do this much. Now:

"Imagine this scenario: The young Al Gore�who, we know from his own mouth, possessed and used illegal drugs on "rare and infrequent" occasions during the 70�s�is living in the South Bronx in the 1990�s. Strip him of his family and money and paint him another color; let him then be captured in a drug sweep by the police and accused of selling an ounce of marijuana�a prison offense. Alternative Al has the typical characteristics of a Rikers Island newbie: 92 percent of the Rikers population is black or Hispanic; one quarter can�t afford, or can�t find somebody else to put up, bail of $500 or less. The predominance of blacks and Hispanics in the system doesn�t mean that whites never encounter the criminal-justice system�on the contrary. The large majority (71 percent) of under-18�s arrested by the police are white, but even in that age group, the selection bias is tilted against minorities: apply the alchemy of the justice system, and two-thirds of the under-18�s who actually end up in jail turn out to be black or Hispanic.

After Al exchanges the clothes he was arrested in for the Rikers greens worn by his 20,000 or so fellow inmates, he�ll discover that he has an official commissary account with a $150 charge against it. He has to come up with that sum before he can purchase such luxuries as deodorant or cigarettes. If he leaves the island without paying it back, he can be arrested for it. However, he can discharge the debt with 10 weeks of menial labor. Mind you, at this point he hasn�t been convicted of a crime�he�s merely being detained for trial, like three-fourths of the Rikers population."

Remora

"But what Franzen and like-minded critics seem to have forgotten is that the novel's very form has resolutely middlebrow origins; the early novels of the eighteenth century were the Sopranos and ER of their day. Moreover, middlebrow culture�as opposed to truly lowbrow culture, like teen movies or trash TV�has always been the route by which the educated middle-class (and sometimes, this being America, the uneducated underclass) travels to high culture. I read Stephen King before I read Shakespeare..." Yes, and it shows, darling, it shows.

Thus Scott Strossel in the Atlantic.

The idea that Franzen has 'forgotten' that "the novel's very form has resolutely middlebrown origins" is unlikely -- every pornographer, screenwriter, and extra on Gilligan's Island has at one time or another told us that Dickens and Shakespeare were bestsellers. They always say it, too, with this appealing brightness, as if here's a plum of a fact that nobody has gnawed on before. Dickens! As if they were all sitting around reading Little Dorrit in Oprah's green room.

The idea that the Sopranos and Jane Austen are just all part of the same rich stew, ain't they --- shows no appreciation for either Jane Austen or the Sopranos. And very little sense of the historic context -- because, frankly, middlebrow culture wouldn't recognize itself in the early nineteenth century. Then, the culture was still heavily clerical -- middlebrow Volk were prone to read sermons much more than either Jane Austen or Dickens. They were also fond of Latin tag ends. And as for knowledge, any knowledge, of the science/tech complex -- knowledge that allows your average burger in Pittsburgh to sound off about genes at the dinner table, smugly replete with misinformation from Time Magazine -- that didn't have any authority. To pretend that there was an equivalent is to misunderstand how large a part the discourse of science has in establishing who is and who is not educated, and how small a part, say, Calvinist theology now plays in the status system. One could go on and on, but the point, for such as Strossel, is that Franzen's comments on Oprah don't really lead us to some epiphany about where the culture is today.

Furthermore, the idea that Oprah is a populist rests on the very shaky premise that out there, out there in the grassroots, nobody is playing the game of distinction. Since The Corrections is about just those games, played at all levels, I can see why Strossel would diss it. Although he isn't dumb enough to diss it all the way -- otherwise, that early taste for Stephen King would start to stick out a little more.

Strossel's envoi is as, well, obtuse as the rest of the essay, which bears the marks of squeezing out the last juice from the Franzen controversy:

"...it is one thing to be elitist in your aesthetic taste, and another to want to exclude the uninitiated from reading your work�from breaching the high-culture barricades, as it were. Yet this is the message Franzen is sending with his anti-Oprah comments."

Strossel should go out into the real world and have a beer with a middle brow marketer. Or maybe watch the ads on TV, as well as that ER. He'd notice that no company advertises middle browness. Why? Because advertisers aren't as dumb as literary critics for the Atlantic. They know a clueless strategy when they smell one. People want the Lexus, the blond, the less than egalitarian benefits of wealth: crimes you get away with like O.J. druguse like an Interscope record exec, sex with J-Lo, and the waste, and the life of potlach, and the volupte, etc., etc. Fantasy, Strossel, fantasy. Win the lottery, you don't go to Walmart anymore. You think that's limited to Franzen & Co.?

Mr. Strossel, get out of the office and take a good whiff of the hoi polloi before you tell us how Jonathan Franzen has wounded their tender hearts.

Remora

Sierra should be a better magazine than it is. It goes for the faux John Muir touch when it should go for the jugular. Granta has better nature writing, Mother Jones, of course, better investigative writing. Take this article, by Dean Rebuffoni, about the Mississippi As far as it goes, it is unobjectionable. It tells us a bit about the Army Corps of Engineers dastardly, eighty year project to channelize the most unchannelizable of rivers. It goes on a bit, at first, about Mark Twain. It mentions the inevitable result of Mississippi River pollution (propulsed by the afore-mentioned Army Corps of E., who have the idea that the river is a big pipe that can shoot water into the Gulf of Mexico without consequences). Here's a nice graf about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico:

"By the time the Mississippi reaches Louisiana, it carries the collected municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastes of the nation's largest river basin--and keeps on going. Beyond the Mississippi delta, the pollutants and nutrients borne by the river have created the infamous Dead Zone, an oxygen-deprived region in the Gulf of Mexico in which fish, crabs, and other aquatic creatures cannot survive. This summer, it grew to the size of Massachusetts."

Still, there's no mention of one of the great public policy puzzles we are eventually going to have to face about the Miss: keeping it in its present channel, instead of letting it naturally divert via the Atchafalaya, is starting to exert a terrific environmental cost. On the other hand, letting it divert means killing New Orleans and the strip of industry all the way to Baton Rouge. In other words, it means letting Louisiana hang out to dry like a tired work shirt. Do you want to tell those people, sorry, had to let the river do its thing? Nobody wants to talk about this, because the ideology, for one thing, doesn't give you clues. Is it left wing or right wing to say no to the Corps? Meanwhile the mudbanks underlying the coastline of Louisiana are slipping, slipping, slipping, and the Gulf is rising. I suspect that the world's greatest diversion project and this mud-tectonic event are connected. But you won't find a nice account of that in Sierra. You'll find it in Ocean's End -- and here's an enthusiastic review of that book. Why can't Sierra get off its duff and do some real magazine work on an article about the Miss? Because that would scare contributors. They want to row gently, gently gently down the stream, so Sierra obliges. It is sooo sad.