Remora
LI's brothers live in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For their affection and votes, two men were running for the House of Representatives in the Republican Primary this year: Bob Barr and John Linder.
LI knew who the right choice was there, all right. It was Barr, all the way.
Barr, though, was defeated, and polite liberalism everywhere seems to find this only proper. Here's the WP editorial about it:

"There was no nastiness or acid-dripping one-liner that was too much for Bob Barr. He proudly broadcast a commercial depicting himself as a bulldog. Voters in the 7th District, though conservative, had no use for a spotlight-craving politician who lives for the insult."

Living for the insult isn't such a bad thing to do if you are good at insulting. Bob Barr was to conservativism what Gorgeous George was to wrestling -- a man who made a minor art form out of a fixed and venal venue. To call Linder, his opponent, non-descript is to exaggerate. Apparently at one point, Linder, in a debate with Barr, alluded to his 39 year marriage. Well, that is about the sum of the man's accomplishments -- he is able to perform monogamy.

Barr and Linder shared rightwing records, but the good thing about Barr was that he was, eccentrically enough, a civil libertarian. He sponsored a bill with Barney Frank to abolish drug forfeiture law, and it even passed. It was later vetoed by Clinton, ever afraid of not appearing tough on crime, even if that means countenancing the transformation of police departments into banditti. And banditti, moreover, who prey on blacks -- racial profiling being, in one of its aspects, the expropriating of 'inappropriate' sums of money from black men on our nations highways, from New Jersey to Louisiana. Barr was, like Linder, a good second amendment man -- and LI does have a weakness for that second amendment. But the love affair with the pistol does seem to have awakened him to some of the more onerous encroachments of the government on our civil liberties. There was a story in the American Prospect, last year, about the alliance between Barr and the ACLU to modify the more barbarous strippings of our freedom proposed, in the name of the Heimat, by the Bush coup team:

"The day after the attack, Halperin [with the ACLU] began e-mailing his colleagues. By the time they called their first press conference on September 20, they had a name (Organizations in Defense of Freedom), a 10-point statement of principles, and even spin-offs (such as Computer Scientists in Defense of Freedom). They also had a secret weapon: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, scourge of the liberals, conservative guru par excellence. "The Bush administration said, 'We've got a bill that we've gotta pass right away,'" recalls Norquist. "As soon as I heard that, I began to get worried."...

"Almost immediately, prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill began to sound a lot like Ted Kennedy. "Why is it necessary to propose a laundry list of changes to criminal law generally and criminal procedure generally and cast such a wide net?" Republican Congressman Bob Barr demanded in the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on Attorney General John Ashcroft's antiterrorism proposals. "And why is it necessary to rush this through?"

It strikes LI as nutty that some liberals think electing Linder is a victory. It isn't. It seems like a victory only if you confuse partisan wrangling -- for instance, Barr's prominence as a Clinton impeacher -- with real political goals. If you do, you will always have a home with the DNC.

Note: LI looks around the world, or its representation, today, and what do we see? Breaking news on Enron (from the flipping of one of Andie Fastow's crucial boys to the odd, unremarked arrest of the past chairman of Wessex Water, an Enron spin-off, for bribery), global warming (ignored by coup leader Bush) on the agenda in Johannesberg, and the ever present Iraq war. But instead of politics -- it is much too hot for politics -- we are thinking of putting up an old essay we wrote for Feed on Celebrity Biographies. Feed's editors, as a matter of fact, didn't like the piece, so after several tries we parted ways, with LI out of pocket to the extent of having spent the time to do the thing. Anyway, the CB essay is entitled, 13 ways of looking at a Celebrity Biography. At some point today, we are gonna put it up.

Remora
Remora

LI is surprised, this morning, that the Bush administration came through on an old American promise, and released documents on the 1970s Terror in Argentina.

LI has no doubt they were sifted to remove various inconvenient names -- such as Kissinger's -- but it is one of the few applaudable American actions of the past couple of months. Here are two grafs:

"One embassy dispatch, for example, cites an Argentine source who says that captured leftist fighters, known as Montoneros, were all dealt with in the same way, through "torture and summary execution."

"The security forces neither trust nor know how to use legal solutions," the dispatch quotes the source as saying. "The present methods are easier and more familiar."

Now, LI has always thought that the great mystery of the Argentina terror was whether the Monteneros weren't ultimately led by an agent provacateur. This is the thesis put forth in a great book of political reportage, "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War," by Martin Edward Anderson. The leader of the Monteneros, the sinister Mario Firmenich, survived the military repression, and is now, we believe, languishing in jail, an odd scapegoat in the accord that basically allowed the fascist apparat in Argentina to escape, unscathed, with its crimes. According to Jorge Castaneda's history of the Latin American left, the money accrued by the Montonero's policy of systematic kidnapping went to Cuba, and thence to the Sandinistas, with Castro acting as a broker. There's a strange parallel in the course of action taken by the right and left in Argentina, with the right proceeding to install a cocaine-ish military regime in Bolivia and aiding the Contras with weapons and training, and the left helping the Sandinistas even up to training their secret police. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the guerrillas proudly proclaimed their responsibility for acts of violence some of which they certainly did not commit. Firminich seemed to have a passion for the planning and committing of acts that were, from the perspective of either damaging the regime or rousing the people, so grossly misplanned, and so criminal, that they seem congruent with the military's own on-going effort to legitimate its counter-terror to the population. And that population, of course, went about its business purposely not noticing the disapppearance of this or that person, or the body parts washing up on the banks of the La Plata. For what was special about Argentina was that the crimes were known as they were being committed.

Moral is, of course, don't think that the good middle class will necessarily rise up in revolt if some of its sons and daughters, and many of its troublemakers, are bloodied. In fact, in the U.S., how many have risen up, so far, and asked questions about the illegal detention of at least a thousand people since 9/11? Count em on your fingers. This is not even an issue going into the November election. And if these arabic named guys and gals disappear, does anybody imagine the American population drawing back in revulsion?

Now, Anderson's thesis would be absurd in the world as it is portrayed in your average daily paper. That is the newspaper, by the way, that publishes, with the utmost credulity, scare stories fomented by the Attorney General's office about the capture of terrorists with dirty bombs in the A section -- and publishes retractions of those stories months later, in the C section, if at all. But the figure of the agent provocateur is all too common in the political netherworld -- as Joseph Conrad shows in Under Western Eyes. And in Argentina, the idea that the Montonero high command could have been working on an agenda that converged with the military agenda has floated around for some time. In a memorial notice to the great Argentina journalist Rudolfo Walsh, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald recently discussed the possibility that his ambush and assassination was a set-up:


"At the moment of his death, Walsh, disguised as an old-age pensioner, was on his way to a meeting with Jos� Salgado, the Montonero and police officer who - in July 1976 - placed in the Central Police Department the bomb which killed 20 policemen and maimed some 60 others. Strangely enough, Walsh - who was a high-ranking member of Montoneros intelligence - did not know on that fatal morning Salgado had been captured months previously, tortured beyond recognition and executed. In other words Rodolfo Walsh was set up by his own Montoneros whose leadership may have been working with and for the armed forces. The point has never been clarified, but there can be no doubt some terrorists were serving both masters and not everyone was as committed to their ideals as Rodolfo Walsh was."

That Walsh, a moralist in the tradition of Kraus and Peguy, and a journalist in the mould of Seymor Hersch, could countenance Salgado, tells us something about the state of terror then existing. Walsh's daughter, incidentally, was killed in a shootout with the cops the year before Walsh was bushwacked. Walsh's career is not known in the U.S. -- he hasn't been translated -- so for our American readers, here's a summary of his career:

"He is credited with being the father of investigative journalism in Argentina. In 1957 he published Operaci�n Masacre - based on an interview with a survivor - which tells the real story of how a group of 34 men, most of whom had no connection with a recent revolt against the Aramburu dictatorship, were taken to a garbage dump in Jos� Le�n Su�rez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and summarily executed in a hail of machine gun fire. "All Peronists", said Per�n, "are indebted to the author of Operaci�n Masacre", but Walsh was now a marked man and anonymous death threats became part of his life.

"In 1969 he published �Qui�n Mat� a Rosendo? which tells how trade-unionist, Rosendo Garc�a, died in an Avellaneda pizzeria in a shoot-out between rival unionists, Raimundo Ongaro and Augusto �Wolf� Vandor (2). In 1973 he published �El Caso Satanovsky� which tells the sordid tale of the murder of a leading lawyer who was litigating against the military government. None of these cases were ever solved and Rodolfo Walsh became an unpopular name for many powerful people for having investigated them."

LI wonders whether the full story of what happened in the seventies in Latin America will ever be uncovered. But certain things can be uncovered by the determined individual investigator. Although I could not find a photo of Jose Salgado, I did find a picture of a kid -- Alfredo Daniel Salgado -- whose clear and present danger to the State was snuffed, no doubt by an airplane trip, or the bloody necessity of torture. The Sinolvido site, by the way, contains photos of 3,000 of the disappeared. The high school album.

Dope

LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?

Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.

So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:


"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.

This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.

Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."

This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.

But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.

Dope

LI heard from an old friend the other day, Tom S. Tom, it appears, is coming to Austin and wants to see his old drinking buddy. We immediately became soggy from nostalgia.

It was, what, twelve years ago? Fifteen? Yes, LI was as thin as a malnourished radish, an outlier in the U.T. Philosophy department. We had already decided that the academic life wasn�t for us. Or the academic life had made that decision � kicked out or quit, life�s eternal question, no? Our friend Janet Flesch, who was also in the department, was teaching an advanced philo class, and Tom was one of her students, which is how we met.

There�s that wonderful phrase of Goethe�s: elective affinities. Friendship is about alchemistry, the obscure movement of sensibilities, and the metallic symbols thereof. Right. The transmutations of base metals. Nietzsche and alcohol.

There is a certain personality that receives Nietzsche like evolution received that comet 65 million years ago � he gets rid of everything clumsy that has been crawling around, fearsome and stupid, on the planet of one�s life. LI admits, without shame, to that impact. We think Tom was undergoing something similar. Now, back then, LI was quite a sharp talker when it came to the Gotterdammerung. On the other hand, as much as we liked to drink, we were saddled with the above mentioned malnourished radish frame. We were 29, 30, and weighed 130 � and we�ve put on, on a good day, when we are soaking wet, at least ten pounds since then. So we would sit with Tom and his friends in a bar that, at the time, the University of Texas was kind enough to offer its over 21 year old students. A bar that is gone with the wind, assisted by the Puritanism of the Texas legislature, nowadays. We would drink until we were swimming on dry land. Then, in a haze in which we could actually see light make that transition from particle to wave and back � light was doing this all around us, it was actually getting to be a drag -- we would say goodbye to Tom�s table and try to make it out of the building. Usually at this point the architectural peculiarity of the building intervened � it was designed to become a maze for visionaries and drunk people, leading them to the nearest convenient bathroom. There we would stay, evacuating, at intervals, unnecessary nourishment in some beautiful stall, with informative graffiti about ethnic groups, available women, and the sexual derring do of various fraternities, all that oral ministration to random penises, illustrated with magic marker, until a university cop would knock on the door of the stall, gallantry offering assistance.

A golden age. Ah yes, I remember it welllll�

Remora

Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies

When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...

Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.

It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.

In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.

LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.

Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:


"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."

McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.

McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:


Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.

LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...

Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.

Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.

So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.

Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.

The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.

Remora

"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.

Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.

However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.

However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."

LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:

"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.

(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."

This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.

After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:

"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."

Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:

"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."

What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:

"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."

We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.