Remora

Griboyedov.

Limited Inc imbibed Dostoevsky with our mother's milk, and have contemplated, for years, a sequel to the Underground Man entitled the Upside Down man (autobiographical, of course); Tolstoy was an event in our spiritual life that took two good years (20-22) to get out of the system, two years we will never get back, mind you; we've been a fan of Sologub's Petty Demon forever, The Master and the Margarita is one of the ur-texts in our inner cranial library, we've taken a prose style, down to dashes and parentheses, from Bely, we've read all the Nabokov one mortal could stand, Babel is a hero, Mandelstam and his wife are heroes -- what we are saying is that we are Russian out the ass. Always have been. But Griboyedov is pretty much a new one for us. So we enjoyed this Financial Times review of his biography. Griboyedov is known for one play. Apparently, that play is the Russian equivalent of Moliere's Misanthrope. But the review necessarily can't linger over the joys of a play that all seem to agree is inaccessible in English, so it quickly passes on to Griboyedov's very active life, spent as bon vivant, duelist, revolutionary of a sort, Arabist and Persianist, and diplomat. A full bill, this guy. We especially like knowing that, far from being an aberration, hostage crises at embassies in Teheran are folklore, like spelling bees and recitations of epic poetry. It seems that in 1829, a mob of angry Persians attacked the Russian embassy because, well, they were Russians, the stealth empire -- moving then, as it will always move, discretely in all directions. Our Griboyedov, Minister Plenipotentiary of the delegation there (and who knows what that meant, given the European propensity for scheming) was stabbed to death, his body paraded through the streets, members of the general public invited to do their patriotic duty and spit upon it. Another artist bites the dust.

A pity. Griboyedov is definitely my sort of guy. Here's two grafs from the article, which explain how he ended up in Teheran in the first place:

"Although his work in the theatre was increasingly successful, and he began serious study of Arabic and Persian, he paid a high price for his friendships with those richer and sillier than he. The scandal involving two young toffs from smart regiments, one 18-year-old ballerina and our subject sounds like something from light opera, but its consequences were deadly serious: Griboyedov was forced to take part in a partie carree, or four- sided duel, that left one of the challengers dead in the snow and the other participants exiled in disgrace by the Tsar.

His particular punishment - despite his pleadings that an artist such as he could not exist without "enlightened people, and sympathetic women" - was to be sent as attache to the first permanent Russian mission in Tehran."

Enlightened people and sympathetic women -- boil the bones off civilization, and this is what you have left --the base and bones of it. Griboyedov, mon frere, we salute you, who cry out for a few enlightened people, and a sympathetic woman or two!

Remora

Why do they hate us department.

Limited Inc means the CEOs of major corporations. And the us in question are the poor sweating masses who labor, pay taxes like suckers, and regularly get shellacked on both ends -- corporations who claim that utter faith in the market should prevent any government interference in spreading their costs to third parties (witness revelations about Monsanto's pollution fiesta in a small Alabaman town in the WP:

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic.") or going about their financial actions with riotous abandon of pirates on board a ship full of nuns, as in the case of 'Ken Boy''s company; and then, when downside time hits, those same corporations racing for the government tit, in a scramble that makes old Gipper Reagan's legendary welfare queen look like a piker.

Paul Krugman's op ed in the NYT this morning can be summarized in the words of that old Beatles standard: have you seen the little piggies/in their starched white shirts... In the last administration, the donors list revolved through the Lincoln bedroom as though Mr. and Miz Clinton were running a bed and breakfast for cheesy tv producers on federal time; in this administration, forget the bedroom. Give em a cabinet post, give em offices, give em lax or no enforcement of anti-trust regulation, give em the store, the keys, the ear of every policy maker cranked out by some crackpot rightwing thinktank. With so many friends in high places -- like Cheney, who believes an energy crisis means power company equities aren't achieving the cap levels his broker tells him they should be -- this country is being run openly as a country club for the rich, with tax breaks to fatten up the portfolios of the undeserving upper 5% in a public policy version of some Scrooge's wet dream.

Here are one and a half grafs:

"The real questions about Enron's relationship with the administration involve what happened before the energy trader hit the skids. That's when Mr. Lay allegedly told the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that he should be more cooperative if he wanted to keep his job. (He wasn't, and he didn't.) And it's when Enron helped Dick Cheney devise an energy plan that certainly looks as if it was written by and for the companies that advised his task force. Mr. Cheney, in clear defiance of the law, has refused to release any information about his task force's deliberations; what is he hiding?

"And while Enron has imploded, other energy companies retain the administration's ear. Just days before the latest Enron revelations, the administration signaled its intention to weaken pollution rules on power plants; late last week it announced its decision to proceed with a controversial plan to store radioactive waste in Nevada. Each of these decisions was worth billions to companies with very strong connections to Mr. Bush."

Remora

Limited Inc. was temporarily out of our gourds, this morning. Look, once you settle on a term, it sticks -- like a bad tattoo, maybe, but so it goes. So we apologize to our many constant, passionate readers for this aberration, and hope we haven't harmed our brand. We are going to focus group about that, later.

Will Hutton has a very enjoyable time knocking around that old corrupt mushball, Enron, in his Guardian column. Most startling graf in the column is not in the bludgeoning of America's political culture, but in the dissing of American productivity. Could this be true?

"... Enron could not have made the progress it did without the intellectual backdrop that all regulation and taxation is bad - and that the more the US deregulated, the better its economy performed. This was, and is, balderdash. Recent work by economists, notably at investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, shows that after making the necessary accounting adjustments and including downward revisions, productivity growth in the US has done no more than match that in Europe. Indeed, countries like France and Germany have higher absolute productivity and faster rates of growth than the Americans, despite their approach to regulation and taxation. The deregulation philosophy that enriches Ken Lay and his cronies does not necessarily enrich anybody else. "

Well, we know last year was a spectacular for accounting revisions -- the capitalist version of redoing history, for which the Soviets used to be so reviled by right thinking rightwingers. Where's Trotsky, these rightwingers would cackle at the pap turned out by USSR history hacks that put Stalin in the catbird seat right next to his old buddy Lenin, and quietly whiteinked the more photogenic (and vastly more important) T. Increasingly, though, Soviet historiography looks like a method ahead of its time, especially for the clever accounting firm -- consulting with its right hand, and doing its books with its left hand. Erasing figures from photographs is one thing, but you need real skill to strip and recombine figures until they don't add up to themselves anymore -- yes, millions of dollars like Cheshire cats, appearing one year as four legged, tail twitching profit, and the next year as merely a fading smile.

Still, Europe has never been known for its accounting transparency. Steinherr, in his book on Derivatives (isn't tout le monde reading that adorable tome? right up there with Harry Potter in most homes), gives the example of Daimler Benz, which when it came to the states (had to, since it was swallowing Chrysler), had to comply with the US GAAP requirements, which is how we do numbers in the New World. German numbers showed a moderate profit, but sieved through GAAP, the company showed an immoderate loss.

So I'd love to know where this Credit Suisse study comes from. I'm not doubting Hutton, just wondering how to face this kind of revisionism.

Acoustic shadows

This is the new name Limited Inc has chosen to head media-linked posts, instead of Remora. It isn't poetry, reader. If you will dig through the Echos newsletters in your closet -- you know, the ones the Acoustic Society of America sends you -- you will find an explanation in the winter, 1999 issue:

"Unusual acoustics due to atmospheric conditions or to terrain are sometimes given the catch-all name "acoustic shadows." The first recorded incidence of the phenomenon occurred during the Four-Day Battle in 1666. The naval battle was fought between the coasts of England and Holland, and sounds of the battle were heard clearly at many points throughout England but not at intervening points. Passengers on a yacht positioned between the battle and England heard nothing. A number of other examples have been recorded since that time. Guns fired at the funeral of Queen Victoria in London in 1901 were heard in Scotland, but not across a wide region in between. The German bombardment of Antwerp in World War I was heard clearly for a 30-mile radius, then beyond 60 miles from the Belgian city, but not in between."

Well, we at Limited Inc are always firing guns at funerals, in a manner of speaking. And we like to think that our absolute lack of effect in the immediate area simply means we are being picked up in Scotland, in a manner of speaking. Actually, a friend from Barcelona called us yesterday and claimed that our posts are being used as fodder for idea starved Catalonian columnists. This is Scotland, indeed.

Meanwhile, we had to borrow some change yesterday because we are down to pennies. As in, for instance, not being able to afford a stick of deodorant. Luckily, we found a lender willing to supply us with the necessary for the next couple days. After that, well, c'est le deluge. Life, for Limited Inc., is gonna be tough.

Dope

Since no one responded to the "replace Remora" contest, Limited Inc spent some time bent over our dictionary, then the Shakespeare, then surfing through various columnists. So far, we haven't settled on a name. So we will continue to use "Dope" and think about linguistics until inspiration strikes.

Well, the headlines are Enron inspired, as the news wakes up to the fact that Enron was in bed with the Bush Administration. This is as unexpected as hearing that some Hollywood starlet is sleeping around. The Bush administration was pretty damn proud of its bedmate until recently. But like some chastened, though still eminently corrupt financial "advisor," the Bushies are pulling back on their investment. It is hard to see this as more than a passing scandal, however. The press still doesn't understand Enron's collapse; the biz press is unanimously on the side of "de-regulation." And the public is acquiescent, even to the extent that polls have shown no resistance to de-regulation even though they have also shown a majority expects that de-regulation will entail a price hike. If the nineties were about anything, they were about the crushing of the will to resist. Although it is gratifying to see anti-WTO protesters throng the streets when the WTO is in town, it isn't enough, right now. In the backlash atmosphere of Bush year one, it is easy to foresee questions about Enron's role in directing Bush policy being labelled unpatriotic. Don't forget, this prez is on a Heros bubble gum card now.
The WP story includes this characteristic Bushy touch:

"Bush reimbursed Enron for the use of its corporate jet during his presidential campaign, and was feted by company officials at Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros, seven months before the election. The Houston Chronicle has reported that Bush conferred a series of nicknames on Enron chief executive Kenneth L. Lay, including "Kenny Boy.'"

Dope

As my readers can plainly see, the contest for renaming the Remora category on this site fell still-born from the press -- not that Limited Inc is greatly surprised, since falling still born from the press does seem to be the fate attaching to every post I've written on this site, from July onwards.

We are not amused; because we are, in our own humble opinion, amusing. Although can we trust our own own humble opinion? because we also firmly believe the great intellects of the past pale in relation to our merest subclause. It has been pointed out to us that we suffer from egomania.

Alas, today we suffer from a physical, rather than metaphysical, ailment. Fever racks my bones. Mysterious aches are playing the boogie woogie on my spinal column. Luckily we were visited a friend of mine, mentioned in previous posts, who plays a role in my life similar to Scheherazade -- not that I am planning on beheading her. No, the deal with this woman is that she can tell me 1001 stories in one night. I was hoping she would come by, and so when she did, I had a Proustian moment, the invalid's feverish hope realized in an entrance. She bore healthful gifts -- chicken soup, grapefruit, and water. This friend sets great store by water, so I even drank it: of course, Limited Inc is always reminded of the great W.C. Fields joke about not drinking water, because fish fuck in it. The problem with modern water is that fish don't fuck in it. Often, instead, they suffocate in it, in great Dead Zones, or are poisoned by run-off, or invaded by parasites suddenly endemic to artificially warmed currents. But that is for another day.

I've always been a hypochondriac. But my hypochondria takes the form of imagining strange and obsolete diseases, like Gout, or Dropsy, that I might have. Today I was thinking I had pellagra. Since I don't know what pellagra is, I decided to check out a helpful site, and get the scoop.

... And what a scoop. Here are the symptoms of pellagra, just in case you were thinking you had it too:

"In the United States, pellagra has often been called the disease of the four D's -- dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.'

The NIH site celebrates one of those pioneering doctors whose fictional analogues haunt the pages of Balzac and Zola -- medicine was, after all, positivism on the grass-roots level. And science, of course, required a view of the human body at odds with ten thousand years of doctrine. For ten thousand years, the human body was subject to witchcraft. It was subject to analogy. It was subject to the universal idea of eternal life -- a view of the body that is hard for today's average Joe to envision, in spite of the light sprinkling of out of body death experiences that Readers Digest eagerly purveys.

But let's cut to the chase -- the doctor, Joseph Goldberger, has quite a story.

""Bored and intellectually restless in private practice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the young, shy physician joined the United States Marine Hospital Service, (later the U.S. Public Health Service or PHS) in 1899 at the beginning rank of Assistant Surgeon earning an annual salary of $1,600. Ironically, the immigrant from central Europe began his public health service career inspecting immigrants in the port of New York. However, it was not long before his epidemiological skills earned Goldberger the reputation of a tenacious and clever epidemic fighter.


Between 1902 and 1906, Goldberger heroically battled epidemic diseases. He fought yellow fever in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and Louisiana, contracting the disease himself His efforts earned him a promotion to the rank of Passed Assistant Surgeon in 1904 and later, an introduction to Mary Farrar, grandniece of Varina Davis, the widow of Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. In 1906, the immigrant Jewish physician from New York's Lower East Side married the daughter of a wealthy and socially prominent Episcopalian attorney from New Orleans over the religious objections of both families."

Wow, Jeff Davis' grandniece. The bones of that old racist must have been rattling in his grave.

Once in the South, Goldberger decided to track down the Pellagra germ. But he soon grew convinced that the germ theory, which was to that time what the genetic theory of disease is to ours, was wrong in this case. He got the governor of Mississippi to give him twelve healthy prisoners. Hey, they were promised freedom, if they only ate a very restricted diet. They soon came down with pellagra. So Goldberger triumphed, right? Oh no, he was attacked as a fraud for years. And in the twenties, his predictions about an epidemic of pellagra in the poor South were greeted as a slander on Southern manhood.
The South, as we know, has a higher percentage of meatheads in it than other parts of the country. And before the peanut gallerys starts lofting shells at me, remember: Limited Inc is from Georgia.

Ironically, Goldberger never isolated the vitamin that was deficient in pellagra cases. It was niacin, Vitamin B.
So I don't think I have pellagra -- I ate my cornflakes this morning.
A question hangs here, though -- what about those prisoners? Did the good guv'nah of Mississippi give them their freedom, as the guys in O brother where art thou, or did he renege. Or did they even survive that last D -- it's a killer.

Remora

Readers should note Le Monde's beautiful, and somewhat fallacious, essay by Albert Manguel about the end of Argentina. All countries, he claim, rest on the shared fiction that they exist. A philosopher might call them intensional objects, meaning those entities which presuppose the agreement of subjects that they are as long as the subjects agree they are. This is a little different than what we mean by saying that mountains, or rivers, or trees are. Intensional things are as long as there are subjects for whom they are. These things are like dreams are. So nations, as fictions, extrude themselves crudely in anthems and slogans, in ads and editorials, in law courts and prisons. The nation is the Song of itself, the supreme act of subjectivity; it negotiates the distance between Descartes cogito ergo sum and Louis XIV's l'etat, c'est moi -- the state thinks itself into being in the heads of its citizens.

The question is, can this daydream of reason exist after the daydreamers have committed every vicious act in its name? We know that in one sense it can, and in one sense it can't. Germany survived Hitler -- but only because the Germans convinced themselves, at first, that Hitler never existed. That is, he existed in spite of the Germans. Generations have passed, and this fiction has been discarded, but only because it can be, in the same way that Hollywood can now show Indians as the noble warriors from whom a continent was wrested. Hollywood isn't crazy -- nobody is planning on giving the continent back. That nation, in those heads, ceased. From this point of view, history is a game of deniability. Those who are ostensibly proudest of the actions of our forefathers have no intention of indemnifying the sons and daughters of the slaves of our forefathers -- this is to take the daydream a little too far.

Here's what Manguel says about Argentina:

Il existe une tournure d'esprit que nous avons (� tort) qualifi�e de machiav�lique, celle qui porte � croire que l'on peut tout se permettre dans le but de s'agrandir, y compris d'enfreindre la loi. Les tyrans grecs, les c�sars romains, les papes et empereurs la poss�daient ; elle a d�clench� des guerres, justifi� des atrocit�s, caus� des souffrances indicibles ; en fin de compte, elle a toujours provoqu� l'effondrement des soci�t�s dans lesquelles elle s'�tait enracin�e. En Argentine, elle s'est manifest�e d�s l'aube de la R�publique, avec le meurtre du jeune r�volutionnaire Mariano Moreno. Elle est devenue officielle au XIXe si�cle sous la tyrannie de Juan Manuel de Rosas, acceptable au temps des oligarques et des propri�taires terriens au d�but du XXe, populaire sous Per�n. Enfin, sous la dictature militaire, elle a min� la soci�t� sous tous ses angles, ignor� toute l�galit�, fait de la torture et du meurtre les instruments quotidiens du gouvernement, infect� le langage et la pens�e.

Limited Inc.'s translation: "There exists a humor that we have (falsely) qualified as machievellian, which tends to assure us that we can permit ourselves anything in the process of growing great, including violating the law. The greek tyrants, the roman cesaers, the popes and emperors possessed this turn of mind; it started wars, justified atrocities, caused unspeakable suffering; and in the end, it has always provoked the collapse of those societies in which it has rooted. In Argentina, at the very dawn of the Republic it manifested itself in the murder of the young revolutionary, Mariano Moreno. It became official in the 19th century, under the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas, acceptable in the time of the oligarchs and the landholders of the beginning of the 20th centruy, popular under Peron. In the end, under the military dictatorship, it totally undermined society, ignoring all equality, making of torutre and murder the quotidien instruments of government, infecting the language and the thought."

Well, Limited Inc is inevitably reminded of our own condemn�s. We received a letter from one of our far flung correspondants today. She enclosed a Salon article about a scholar at a Florida University in Tampa who has been fired for having spoken out against Israel on the Bill O'Reilly show. Fla.'s guv, the ludicrous Bush brother, Jeb, applauded. The man in question, Sami Al-Arian, turns out to hav had the rich, rancid experience of Uncle Sam's hot breath on his neck before: the FBI arrested his brother-in-law,
"a soft-spoken scholar named Mazen Al-Najjar, for unspecified terrorist associations. Al-Najjar -- the brother of Al-Arian's wife, Nahla -- had arrived at Tampa in 1981 and earned a doctorate at USF. Al-Najjar was arrested under then new antiterrorism laws allowing suspects to be held on the basis of secret evidence, without the precise charge being revealed in court. For the next three and a half years, Al-Najjar would remain in Bradenton prison without anyone -- not his lawyers, not even the judge --
ever seeing the purported evidence against him."

Can such things be? Limited Inc understands that mix of fear and smugness that reduces the canned suburban masses to silence, or to short term self-interest, or to right-wing myth. Still, Limited Inc would urge some effort, some strength of will here. The military in Argentina took hold in conditions of similar black magic. You think it can't happen here? Wake up, honey. It's all happening..