Remora

LI believes that the first question about taxes should be: what are they buying? In the case of the current administration, there seems to be a desire to buy quite a lot, including a war. On the other hand, there is also the Enron philosophy to which Bush and Cheney subscribe. That is, they believe the company exists to reward its upper tier management -- or, in the case of a company nation, its upper class. So they seem willing to employ certain Enron accounting tactics to do this. Enron would give bonuses to its management based on projected profits -- profits that most often didn't materialize. Thus, Rebecca Mark, for instance, was rewarded with tens of millions of dollars for running projects that lost billions of dollars. In the same way, the Bush administration has apparently decided to destroy any progressivity in the tax system to reward the already inordinately rewarded top tier of the wealthy in this country. The proposal to end the dividend tax is a trademark Enron deal. It will lose the country billions of dollars, it will reward an investing class billions of dollars, and it will produce very little wealth for the rest of us. In fact, it will take away wealth from the bottom forty percent. Why?


Well, by now we have a history of de-regulating financial capital and assuring investors of greater returns on their investments by creating a panoply of tax dodges and lowering taxes generally on the upper income percentile. This creates incentives for investing in those enterprises with the greatest immediate returns. These are not synonymous with those enterprises that employ the greatest number of people. Take energy. After the wild ride of de-regulating energy and allowing a de-regulated energy market, what are we finding? That energy companies are still steady, but slow, profit generators. The earnings growth that you can pump out of them is never going to match the earnings growth you can pump out of, say, Microsoft ... unless you screw around with the numbers. To try to grow a power company at twenty percent per year is like trying to grow a rubber plant into a redwood. It ain't going to happen. However, if you encourage investors to expect the kind of returns you get from the de-regulated markets of the nineties, you'll get the same shenanigans of the nineties, as all sectors compete, desperately, to attract investors.

Which is just another way of saying that treating the de-regulation, and the de-taxing, of the financial sector as if that sector invested neutrally is nuts.

The tax policy center has a nice data base that compares the tax brackets from 1940 to 2002. In 1950, which might be the epicenter of New Deal America, incomes above 400,000 dollars paid an 84 % tax. Theoretically, of course.  Still, the attempt was being made to curb excessive wealth. That same income bracket, in 2002, paid (again theoretically) 34%.  Meanwhile, the corporate income tax contribution to the U.S. budget has been steadily dropping. According to this U.S. News article :


"The corporate levy�which raised $151 billion last year, down from $207 billion in 2000 when profits were easier to come by�may be an endangered species in its current form. Last year's take was the lowest since 1994 and accounted for only 7.6 percent of federal revenue, down from 26.5 percent in 1950. Individuals, meanwhile, are picking up a bigger share of the income tax burden. In 1950, corporations kicked in 39.9 percent of the total collected, while individuals ponied up 60.1 percent. Last year, corporations paid 13.2 percent, while individuals forked over the remaining 86.8 percent."



Any progressive party in this country should take account of these stats and ask what happened. That isn't all --- what Bush is proposing, now, is, in an odd way, a response to these statistics. It is a form of conservative progressivism. It would be hard to justify cuttng the corporate income tax rate further -- although of course the conservative argument, out there, is that since the corporate rate has been cut so much that it only amounts to 7.6 percent of federal revenue, why not cut it to zero and let companies use that money to employ people. Still, the affection people at large feel for corporations is much colder than the affection for them felt by the likes of Bush and Cheney. The elimination of the dividend tax is a covert way of achieving a massive tax cut for the people who own corporations.



That said, there are parts of the tax cut that make sense, or would make sense in some form, especially given the losses of the last three years to the retirement funds of average income Americans.



We'll go into this more in our next post.

NYT publishes a helpful Q. and A. about the Bush proposal.


Q. So what's this "double taxation" everyone's talking about?







A. That term can be a little misleading. A company does not raise its tax burden simply by deciding to pay dividends. But companies have to pay their own income taxes before they can pay dividends.



The federal and state governments tax as much as 40 cents of every dollar in a company's profit. If the remaining 60 cents is paid to shareholders as a dividend, the governments may collect about 24 cents more � 40 percent again � as personal taxes. Most companies, of course, retain much, if not all, of their profit to reinvest in their business. But of the share that is paid to taxable owners, as little as 36 cents of every dollar in profit goes into their pockets.



By contrast, interest on debt counts as a cost, and companies pay interest out of pretax revenue. That gives many companies an incentive to hoard cash or borrow rather than distribute profits to stockholders in cash.

Remora

Paul Krugman makes the case, in his latest column, that the Bush administration's fumbled strategy for containing North Korean military capability contravenes basic game theory. Krugman's canned explanation of game theory goes like this:
"During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with Ph.D.'s in economics, like Daniel Ellsberg, wrote background papers with titles like "The Theory and Practice of Blackmail." The intellectual quality of these analyses was impressive, but their main conclusion was simple: Deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior."

One of Krugman's quirks is to show, at every opportunity, a vocational reverence for "men with Ph.D's in economics." He can't help himself. His larger point, however, is plausible: American power is not increased by the increase in belligerence of American rhetoric. That rhetoric, LI is convinced, is strictly for home consumption. In the case of North Korea, the belligerence has been met with an increase of belligerence on the North Korean side. Belatedly, we are discovering that we have upped the stakes without having any serious cards.

As any anti-war activist will tell you, our sudden mildness and benignity vis a vis North Korea calls into question the premises of "infinite justice," our war on Iraq, or, uh, on terrorism. In December, as we passed the stage of Iraq's 12,000 page weapons inventory, obligingly censored by the UN -- and with that censorship acceded to by the supine press, which did not question the national security imperative for disguising who sold what to Iraq -- the U.S. claimed, in a bout of heroic speed reading, that it was all a mockery. Of course, the press echoed this sentiment. But the press didn't tell us why it was a mockery. For all the disparaging noises emanating from D.C., nobody has pointed to some specific instance of a tabu weapon in S.H.'s arsenal. Rather, we are fighting the potential tabu weapon. This is an almost infinitely plastic casus belli. Thomas Friedman, another NYT op-eder, pretty much concedes this in his Sunday column. He takes on the anti-war slogan that the war against Iraq is about oil, not justice. It is, Friedman thinks, about oil. And so what? But he backs up and gives two conditions for saying that the war, if it happens, is immoral. Or, as he rather disgustingly puts it, is "seen to be immoral':

"I have no problem with a war for oil � if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation. But when we tell the world that we couldn't care less about climate change, that we feel entitled to drive whatever big cars we feel like, that we feel entitled to consume however much oil we like, the message we send is that a war for oil in the gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival � but our right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral."

What this means is beyond our comprehension. If Friedman seriously thinks that the Bush administration is about to curb SUV use in the USA, he is definitely living on another planet, earth minus Cheney. What it really means is that we have to gear up a lot of meaningless rhetoric about energy consumption. In other words, boiler plate Democratic presidential candidate rhetoric. Meaningless attacks on the administration, unsupported by any desire to really act on the words in any significant way.

His second condition is that we not impose another dictator on Iraq:

"And that leads to my second point. If we occupy Iraq and simply install a more pro-U.S. autocrat to run the Iraqi gas station (as we have in other Arab oil states), then this war partly for oil would also be immoral.If, on the other hand, the Bush team, and the American people, prove willing to stay in Iraq and pay the full price, in money and manpower, needed to help Iraqis build a more progressive, democratizing Arab state � one that would use its oil income for the benefit of all its people and serve as a model for its neighbors � then a war partly over oil would be quite legitimate. It would be a critical step toward building a better Middle East."

This is the crux of the matter. An anti-war stance doesn't have to be a pro-S.H. stance, pace Hitchens ... The more general anti-war point is that Friedman's liberal imperialism is not in the American interest. It simply isn't a good idea to install an American force in Iraq for the next two or three years. It is an invitation to disaster, a la Beirut, 1983. And if the idea is that the implementation of democracy requires such a force -- and that is what the Wolfowitz/Friedman line is all about -- then we are back to a Vietnam era mistake. That is, we justify intervention by making a well intentioned goal that requires more intervention, and that increased intervention subverts our well intentioned goal. Notice that we are conceding that our goal is well intentioned. Actually, we don't believe that the Bush administration does have good intentions -- we believe that they want to use the war for domestic political ends.

So ... war is gently drifting upon us, like bad weather. The headline in the WP today is about massing 100,000 American troops -- although where they are to be staged from is unclear:


"The U.S. military is assembling a ground force for a possible invasion of Iraq that could exceed 100,000 troops and include three to four heavy Army divisions, an airborne division, a Marine division and an assortment of Special Operations forces, according to defense officials and analysts."

Notes

The odds and ends have piled up around LI. We should gesture occasionally to the duty of the blogger to gather esoteric links and recommend them. We have two such links to recommend.

The first is this Prospect magazine article by Bella Thomas, a tv producer. The article penetrates the smug assumption cultivated among Americans by flunkies in the press that our tv programs are the world's progams. This assumption has been alluded to as the explanation for anti-Americanism in the third world -- how are you gonna get em back from the jihad, once they see Jerry Springer? Thomas plausiblibly refutes that theory in favor of her own schema, which goes something like this: when Asia or the Middle East or Sub-sahara Africa experiences the tv boom -- and, according to her, tv sets are more plentiful than telephones in rural China and Egypt -- the first things broadcast to the little boxes are definitely made in the West: the soaps, Dallas, Baywatch, etc. The whole inane litany. But then... Well, here are her thesis grafs:

"In 1998, according to Screen Digest, there were more than 2,600 television channels operating in the world, most of them private. What sort of programmes are these channels transmitting? Two trends stand out. The first is the growth of entertainment programmes in relation to current affairs-such that news programmes themselves have often become a form of "infotainment." Miss Egypt, for example, now reads the news on Egypt's Dream TV. In the transition from the Soviet Union to today's Russia, the broadcasting time for fiction grew by 44 per cent (with cartoons up by 176 per cent); for entertainment by 192 per cent. Transmission time for information programmes fell by 61 per cent.

Second, countries in the first stage of globalisation tend to experience a wave of western programming; but in the second and third waves of globalisation, local versions of western programmes or genuinely local programmes become more visible. Terhi Rantanen, a media analyst at the LSE, says of Russian television that "the novelty value that western programmes and advertisements once had was lost in the 1990s." Increasingly, Russians watch Russian programmes."

This makes sense to LI. America's famous provincialism, we've always thought, isn't really so different than the provincialism to be found in Lyon, or Kiev, or Madras. Naturally, x-s want to watch other x-s on tv. Also, it makes sense that favored narrative types will eventually be shoehorned into the standard American tv narrative. Watchers of Dallas in Morocco have been interviewed by anthropologists, and the anthropologists have found that Dallas looks different to these watchers -- family dynamics are interpreted differently, or even deliberately misinterpreted.

Incidentally, Thomas also records an excellent joke from Egypt:

"In 1980s Cairo, a popular joke used to go around about backward peasants from Upper Egypt, called the Sa'idis. A Sa'idi goes into an appliance store and asks, "how much is that television set in the window?" The owner yells, "get out of here you stupid Sa'idi." He comes back dressed as a Saudi Arabian. The owner yells the same thing-and again, when he comes back disguised as a European. Puzzled, the man asks, "how could you tell it was me?" The shop owner answers, "that's not a television, it's a washing machine."


We'd also recommend an article from Esoterica magazine: UNLEASHING THE BEAST: Aleister Crowley, Tantra and Sex Magic in Late Victorian England BY Hugh Urban

Urban views the Crowley phenomenon under the well worn schema of Bataille's concept of transgression, and helps himself to a dose of Foucault as well. Reading the article, however, we were more impressed by Crowley as an entrepreneur of transgression, rather than as a transgressor in Bataille's dark sense. Veblen seems a more apposite reference than French theory. Urban contends that Crowley has been ignored by academia -- but he doesn't have a story about why this should be the case. We think the story is bound up with Crowley's transgressive persona. What the sex stuff was about was not, as in the case of D.H. Lawrence (Urban, inevitably, quotes Lawrence), serious transgression, but the transgression of seriousness. Alas, there is way too little curiosity about how seriousness, and its complement, unseriousness, are made -- how they operate as forms that mark genres of discourse. In fact, unseriousness doesn't really have a name -- LI must use the negative form of seriousness to demarcate what isn't serious. Ludic doesn't work, nor does frivolous. We are transiting into the real deep structure here, so I'll back up ... don't wanna frighten my ever faithful readers!

To return to Urban's article, the man does highlight the Victorian adjuncts to Crowley's sex-theology. And he refers to a character LI had never heard of, one Paschal Beverly Randolph. Randolph was, like Frederic Douglass, a freed slave (from Madagascar, no less) and an abolitionist. He was also a sex theologian. Here's a graf about him:

"In the course of his wanderings in the Middle East, Randolph claimed to been initiated by a group of Fakirs in the area of Jerusalem, which may have been a branch of the mystical order of the Nusa'iri -- a group long persecuted by orthodox Islam because of their alleged Gnostic sexual rituals. Upon his return to the United States, Randolph began to teach a form of sexual magic that would have a profound impact on much of later Western esotericism. For Randolph, the experience of sexual orgasm is the critical moment in human consciousness and the key to magical power: "true Sex-power is God-power," as he put it. As the moment when new life is infused from the spiritual realm into the material, it is crucial moment one the soul is suddenly opened up to the spiritual energies of the cosmos: "at the instant of intense mutual orgasm the souls of the partners are opened to the powers of the cosmos and anything truly willed is accomplished." [49] The power of sex, then, can be deployed for a wide range of both spiritual and material ends. If one can harness the creative energy aroused by sexual contact, he can realize virtually any worldly or otherworldly goal. Not only can one achieve the spiritual aims of divine insight, but he can also attain the mundane goals of physical health, financial success or regaining the passions of a straying lover. [50] "

Wow. LI will have to find out more about this fellow.

Finally, a bit of correspondance. Our friend, T., in NYC, sends this reflection on Pilate.

"...so the Pilate thing is going not exactly where I thought it might, but it is going.
An indication of a thought: for myself, I have never given Pilate all that much thought; certainly not much beyond "Ecce Homo", or as the only "sympathetic" character in the New Test. (all that via FWN). I've always had a sort of Judas approach to the life of JC (probably a long lingering effect of a youthful affair with Kazantzakis). And so to this: how is a notion of Christianity conditioned by the assumption of either a Christ/Pilate or Christ/Judas "initial position"? I mean to say that depending on the conceptual personae that you hold at attention, I think that you get two very different JCs, and so I wonder what manner of person attends to one or the other? (sure, sure: inessential issues of cause-effect arise, but that is not the angle I want to think about)."

Remora

LI saw the movie Chicago yesterday. We are a sucker for musicals. We notice that the New Yorker movie reviewer, Anthony Lane, is referentially lost on this one. Wet behind the ears. He is all about Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Chicago is all about the Three Penny Opera and Caberet. Lane goes into an unfortunate disquisition about the way audiences of yore could accept the musical's premise -- that people break into song and dance in ordinary life -- while audiences of today are much more cynical about that kind of thing. This just goes to show that Lane is reading too many pop sociology articles in the New Yorker. The contemporary audience is one of the most sentimental beasts ever conjured to the circus by fakirs and jugglers, there to be overawed by the most primitive tricks. Trained on happy endings and special effects, and cretinized, since childhood, by the grossly improbable logic of the standard movie narrative, this is not a cynical audience, so much as one expecting situation comedy to lie around every corner -- or a car chase. Theirs is a baby cynicism. Lane should watch MTV to see how, contra his supposition, the musical has taken over everyday life. It was the older audience, which had some vestigial sense of the modes of artifice allowable in art, who accepted the musical's premise for what it was -- a bracketing of, and so, at best, an intensification of, real life.

Speaking of the cynicism of babies, that flip side of the their utter gullibility... Chicago has one scene that is a real knockout. The lawyer, played by Richard Gere, gives a press conference with his client, played by Renee Zellinger. The conference turns into a dance scene with the press as marionnettes and the lawyer as the puppet-master. Watching this, I couldn't help but think of the press and Iraq. Puppetry is an over-used metaphor for control, but LI has nothing against an over-used metaphor if it works. It works in Chicago. It works in that other musical, too: Bush's War against Iraq.


Take the great nerve gas scare. On December 11, Washington Post's Barton Gellman came out with a story, breathlessly attributed to leaks from higher ups, that Iraq had delivered VX, a nerve gas, to an succadaneum of Al Qaeda -- a terrorist group in Lebanon named Asbat al-Ansar.

Gellman was much interviewed for this scoop, no doubt with the approval of WP's management. After all, it was good for the paper. He was on NPR and CNN, throwing off non-sequitors like:

"...there is no evidence that this transaction was approved or known by Saddam Hussein. There is a presumption that it would be very hard to take any of Iraq's secret cache of weapons out of Iraq without the government's knowledge. If the government did cooperate, it's also speculation, but the CIA reported it publicly not so long ago that the likeliest reason that Saddam would do so is if he believed he was in imminent danger of being unseated."


As Don Dwyer, a columnist in the Chicago Tribune pointed out, Gellman's story was gold to the Bush administration. The administration denied it -- but of course, the point was to get the story out there:

"Not surprisingly to Washington insiders, Bush administration spokesmen spent the day Dec. 12 denying the Post's report when other news organizations asked about it. It was thus able to have its cake and eat it too: It had gotten "evidence" of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection out to the American people through a respected reporter at a prestigious newspaper noted for its government reporting, while retaining the ability to deny the whole thing."

Iraq denied it too -- but the Iraqi government's denials are as convincing as their election results.

So -- the story is out there. The tattered honor of WP was gallantly upheld by the WP ombudsman, Michael Getler, who noted a week later that the story wavered between speculation, denial, and credible sources that were incredibly biased towards producing evidence of an al Qaida-Iraq tie in -- and were probably not leaking members of Asbat al-Ansar. But we all know that rumor, that many mouthed creature, perched (as Virgil saw) on the city gates, is what matters. The lawyer in Chicago didn't really care about the plausibility of his news releases, so much as the pervasity of them. So, too, the Bush administration can put the buzz in our ear and no later retraction, especially by an ombudsman, is going to be remembered.. Questions, of course, are for the unpatriotic.

Why, we ask unpatriotically, was Asbat al-ansar the intermediary in this little exchange of terror capital? The Center for Defense Information -- definitely steak tartar people -- has this to say about the group:


"Asbat al-Ansar has had a rather ineffectual history compared to many of the other groups on the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), yet its control of a tiny but significant piece of southern Lebanon threatens to return the country to civil war and derail the Middle East peace process."

The Council on Foreign Relations spots them at around 300 members. They share the al Qaida obsession with bringing back the caliphate. Now, if there is one thing Saddam Hussein is not all about, it is bringing back the caliphate. That would be the end of him. So we are forced back to the CIA's idea: Hussein, desperate to strike at the US, has decided to let this little matter of the caliphate lapse, and convey nerve gas through a group that is notorious for internal feuding to al Qaida. The upshot is that either Asbat al-Ansar or al-Qaida has the nerve gas.


The Guardian's Brian Whitacker has the best description of Gellman's story. The Guardian story came out four days after WP gave us the scoop:

"The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed - not for want of effort - to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as "credible", none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.

The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist."

"Sensible" begs Lenin's question: who benefits?

As for the WP -- what has happened in the three weeks since this paper clinched the tie between Saddam and Al Quaeda? There's been an odd silence. Look up Asbat al-Ansar on their search engine and you come up with no recent stories -- although one would expect a rush, as we try to determine if these mad 300 people possess the weapons to decimate D.C. and Falls Church, Va. in one fell swoop. We suspect that the story isn't going to be followed up. It has served its purpose.

Our upcoming war with Iraq is turning into a sad affair for the press -- it is all too reminiscent of the biz press pumping the bubble in '99. With bloodier consequences.

Dope

LI took a bumpy flight to Atlanta last Monday. I went to spend Christmas with my family. My friend S. was patiently along for the ride, and displayed an admirable calm, as well as a blue cowboy hat perched at a jaunty angle on her head, while we dipped into various troughs and got our memento mori moment .

S. was a singleton child -- no other siblings in sight when she was growing up. Merely the one on one with those gradually diminishing household giants, the parents, with their gothic voraciousness, their sudden, irrational ukases, their illogic, their dense weave of habit -- the afterwork tasks, the sitting before the tv, the petrified idioms of their conversation, what they found funny or disgusting or respectable -- and their own consciousness of a forward motion in time that is invisible to the singleton, for whom the parent comes as a complete and finished unit. This is a bit more visible to those who start out either before or after some other human bodies at the table. The weight, the height, the grades and the birthdays make growth and aging a matter of population rather than an (for a long time) incomparable process. The singleton is a maroon. I grew up with two brothers and two sisters, which makes for considerable differences in tactics and strategies. For children in large families, the POV becomes, necessarily, an amalgam; the one on one with the parents is, if sometimes sharp, always subject to sudden switches of focus. For a singleton, the family is a novel. For the children in a large family, it is a newspaper. Furthermore, my family has a tendency to competition and gregariousness that makes us seem, sometimes, very like a tree full of starlings. However, S. enjoyed us; and when she didn't, she sat back and let us gabble on and thought, herself, of other things.

Since Mom died, the family has changed a lot. My father, for instance, found another wife -- or so I suppose, not having been invited to the wedding, or even knowing if there was one -- not knowing, too, what 'finding' means, exactly, here, since finding implies looking, and was my Dad looking? or was the woman looking? -- and has, my Dad, astonishingly enough, spent most of the last four or five years having nothing to do with us. Aggressively. That's a painful desertion, but it has been muted by the fact that we are all of us middle aged. We are, frankly, not going to mope over Dad when we have such other, rich themes to mope over: lack of romantic partners, unsatisfactory romantic partners, money, news, whether God exists, etc. My sister J. lives in Shreveport; she wasn't present for this Christmas. Deidre's two kids were, for me, the highlight of Christmas. Molly is eighteen, Emerson is, what, eleven? (I am, of course, using false names -- ever the discrete one, LI is). I can never remember if Emerson is eleven, twelve or thirteen. In any case, Christmas is about giving gifts to kids. Adults of course like gifts, but they like gifts that derive from less communal holidays, like birthdays, or Valentines day. Gifts, in other words, that are aureoled with a certain intimacy of gift giver to gift getter. Christmas, however, is less about the refinements of love and more about the basic roux. Like Christmas dinner -- which is all hearty, blatant flavors, aiming for the the bovine warmth of the full stomach rather than some epicurian mid-state -- the perfect Christmas gift should acknowledge the child's concupiscence for stuff rather than signal the givers own taste in the choice of it.

The gifts were just right, as Goldilocks says of the little bear's porridge. And, to acknowledge LI's own lust for stuff, we are typing this post on one of them -- a laptop computer.

Dope

What would Pilate do?

Well, LI learned, the other day, that we were not the first to spot the significance of Pilate in the controversy between Mill and Stephen -- a writer for the Economist, Ann Wroe, in her book on the figure of Pilate, alludes both to the controversy and to the colonial background:


"With this contemporary problem [of empire] in their minds, the Victorians turned again with some interest to the trial of Jesus. Had Pilate been justified in crucifying Christ, or not? On one side stood John Stuart Mill, the great liberal thinker, who naturally took the view that the trial itself was a travesty and Pilate's sentence an outrage against freedom of speech and freedom of religion. On the other side stood James FitzJames Stephen, the uncle of Virginia Woolf, who argued that Pilate's moral absolutes would have been different. If a ruler, he argued, was charged to keep the peace, that naturally became his first priority. He was not required to be tolerant of free speech or religion if that meant he would have a riot on his hands. Pilate's first concern was the glory of Rome; his second, the preserving of his own skin, and both depended absolutely on keeping the peace in Jerusalem."

Our notion is that there is much more to be squeezed out of the Pilate example, in this case, than Wroe gives us here; in a sense, the Trial of Jesus encompasses the whole paradox of Christian imperial governance in the age of democracy. However, we must (grudgingly) acknowledge Wroe's precedence (big of us, huh?).

Voltaire refers to Pilate in two crucial places: in his essay on Tolerance, and in his Philosophical Dictionary. The latter reference is in the entry on Truth. Pilate appears in the light of Voltaire's irony as a figure with whom the philosophea were all too familiar: the sympathizers within the state, the hangers-on of the enlightenment. The nobles, officials, churchmen who expressed, as is the way of the circles of the powerful under political tyranny, sympathy for dissent -- an enlightened view of official superstitions -- a discomfort with old institutions - and who, when the time came, would unhesitatingly betray their enlightened friends. Pilate, who, following an old convention, Voltaire obviously sees as a disenchanted old officer, is willing to surrender to establishment pressure rather than stand up against it. He knows the better thing, and does the worse. Truth, then, gets mixed up, from the very beginning, with resistance against the structure of falsehood. It is, in other words, politicized.


Voltaire's reading of Pilate comes from the famous passage in John 18:

Pilate said to him, "you are the king?"
Jesus responded, "you say that I am the king; it is for this that I was born and have come into the world -- to witness the truth; let every man who is of the truth listen to my voice." Pilate said to him, "what is the truth?" and having said this, he parted.

Voltaire's gloss on this passage is in the highest vein of his style -- sparse, dry, doublesided:

"Il est triste pour le genre humain que Pilate sort�t sans attendre la r�ponse; nous saurions ce que c�est que la v�rit�. Pilate �tait bien peu curieux."

It is as if Pilate and Jesus were actors in one of Perrault's folktales. But Voltaire soon drives home his liberal point. Conceding that the truth is to say that which is; and conceding that that which was, or will be, can only be said in terms of its probability, and never in terms of its certitude; then to kill a human being for speaking his mind is to kill him on what was, or on a probability; furthermore, it is to kill him without, oneself, knowing the truth, insofar as present certitude is surrounded by a gulf of doubt, is to commit an act of lese majeste with regard to the truth. Voltaire, of course, expresses these things with his usual astringent humor:

" Mais comme vous n�aurez jamais de certitude enti�re, vous ne pourrez vous flatter de conna�tre parfaitement la v�rit�.

Par cons�quent vous devez toujours pencher vers la cl�mence plus que vers la rigueur. S�il ne s�agit que de faits dont il n�ait r�sult� ni mort d�homme ni mutilation, il est �vident que vous ne devez faire mourir ni mutiler l�accus�. S�il n�est question que de paroles, il est encore plus �vident que vous ne devez point faire pendre un de vos semblables pour la mani�re dont il a remu� la langue; car toutes les paroles du monde n��tant que de l�air battu, � moins que ces paroles n�aient excit� au meurtre, il est ridicule de condamner un homme � mourir pour avoir battu l�air. Mettez dans une balance toutes les paroles oiseuses qu�on ait jamais dites, et dans l�autre balance le sang d�un homme, ce sang l�emportera. Or celui qu�on a traduit devant vous n��tant accus� que de quelques paroles que ses ennemis ont prises en un certain sens, tout ce que vous pourriez faire serait aussi de lui dire des paroles qu�il prendra dans le sens qu�il voudra; mais livrer un innocent au plus cruel et au plus ignominieux supplice pour des mots que ses ennemis ne comprennent pas, cela est trop barbare. Vous ne faites pas plus de cas de la vie d�un homme que de celle d�un l�zard, et trop de juges vous ressemblent."

("Since you will never possess the entire certainty of any state of affairs, you cannot flatter yourself to know, perfectly, the truth.

Consequently, you ought always to lean towards clemency, instead of rigor. If if it is only a question of facts which have not resulted in homicide or injury, it is evident that you should not, yourself, either kill or mutilate. If it is only a question of words, it is still more evident that you ought not to hang one of your kind for the manner in which he moved his tongue. For all the words in the world are only thrashings of the air, at least if they have not excited to murder, and it is ridiculous to condemn a man to death for thrashing the air. So, let's put into one side of the balance all the idle words one has ever spoken, and into the other side the blood of a man, and you will see that blood carries the point. Thus he who they have brought before you, being only accused of some words that his enemies have taken in a certain sense, all that you can do would be to have him say the words in the sense that he himself would have them taken; but to deliver an innocent to the most cruel and ignominious torture for words that his enemies doen't understand, that is too barbarous. Doing this, you are making no more of a case for the life of a man than the life of a lizard -- and too many judges are just like you."

Voltaire prefigures Mill's argument for liberty of opinion from the fallibility of all opinions. However, he's simply funnier than Mill.

Remora

Venezuala.


LI averted our eyes from the news during the past week in this space -- at least officially. Like a robotically connected citizen, outside of this space we did keep a beady-eyed watch over the march of history in the newspapers. One story that hasn't stirred us is the general strike in Venezuala.

Why haven't we been stirred? After all, what word, to a romantic leftist, conjures up more vivid images of liberty, equality and fraternity than the general strike? The favored tool of the working class -- and yes, Virginia, there is a working class -- usually engages our sympathies. This one, however, has engaged our ambiguities.

On the one hand, the picture is this: Hugo Chavez has all the appearances of that scourge of Latin American history, the military populist, of whom Peron is the great, dark exemplar. They arouse the contempt and fury of the propertied class, but one shouldn't infer, from that, that these military energumen are leftists. More often, they offer a corporatist answer to the civil and economic problems of the nation. It is a short range solution that, at the price of stifling liberty, pledges the nation to dependence on an elevated spoils system, usually centering around some exported raw material, or agricultural product. In the meantime, the despotic distribution of power creates a grass-roots motive for social violence. In Venezuala, where everything floats on oil and Chavez is enamored of his own charisma, all these elements are in place.

On the other hand, there's a certain rancid odor wafting above some of the groups opposing Chavez. An odor of the coup, the death-squad, and the sour snobbery of the elite. This snobbery is not a matter of who joins the club -- it is a matter of taking violent coercion as the chosen instrument of governance. It is a matter of freezing class divisions. It is a matter of under-educating, under-investing in, and actively repressing, the lower classes. We've seen this machinery in motion before.

The LA Times has been particularly hip to the turmoil in Venezuala, with a better archive of Venezuala news stories than are on offer at the NYT. The ambiguities of opposition are explored in yesterday's story, entitled Marxists, Management Unite to Oppose Chavez, with the explainatory graf:

"For more than two weeks of a national strike, the opposition has presented a solid front against Chavez, whom it accuses of conspiring to turn the United States' third-largest oil supplier into a communist redoubt like Cuba."


Today, they publish a profile of Raul Baduel, who "commands a fifth of Venezual's 45,000 troops." Baduel is Chavez' friend, and a mystic dabbler:





"The commander of Venezuela's most powerful military force sits behind a large dark wood desk surrounded by Virgin Mary statues and Buddhist prayer strips. The smell of patchouli fills the air. Gregorian chant music floats ethereally."



Gregorian chants, eh? Latin American military men do seem fatally inclined to mystagogic eccentricities. The Autumn of the Patriarch is the strict truth about this type of man.

The opposition, to judge by the rhetoric of one of its websites, seems, in part, mired in the ultra reactionary views that encouraged the death squads in El Salvador and the torture units in Argentina. Here's a graf from Vcrisis:

"Brazil's president Lula Da Silva, after giving the ministry of Economy and Finance to a pro capitalist-US educated businessman, has sent his top foreign policy adviser -- Marco Aurelio Garcia -- to Caracas to offer Brazil's help in solving the political crisis in Venezuela. However, Garcia said he will not meet with any opposition leaders because they are demanding that President Hugo Chavez resign. Da Silva is a co-founder with Cuban leader Fidel Castro of the Sao Paulo Forum, a hemispheric umbrella group for Latin American Marxist and socialist parties, former guerrilla organizations and active rebel groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Peru's Shining Path. Chavez has been a member of the Sao Paulo Forum since the mid-1990s."

The Houston Chronicle published an uncharacteristically thoughtful commentary on the Chavez situation Thursday.  Although the writer, Michael Marx McCarthy [a name that reeks of cognitive dissonance] counts Chavez out a little pre-maturely, his analysis of the post-Chavez landscape seems about right:




"Indeed, while the Chavez-led "Bolivarian revolution" might soon be dead, the president's impact on Venezuela has transcended the visceral association many lower-class supporters feel because of his mestizo skin color and anti-establishment rhetoric. It's important to recognize that the proverbial genie is out the bottle, and Venezuela's poor majority will demand that fundamental social issues be addressed.

During the two-day April coup, which was tacitly supported by the United States, the interim administration of business leader Pedro Carmona looked and acted like a 1950s Latin American civil-military junta, dissolving the National Assembly, throwing out the Supreme Court and unabashedly representing the elite. The opposition still wants the whole system revamped, from the name of the country -- "Bolivarian State of Venezuela" -- to the assembly and constitution. If the opposition again sacks the president, Chavez's supporters -- at least a third of the population, which in April took to the streets and brought their leader back to office -- will not hesitate to bear arms for the first president to offer them a legitimate stake in national politics."


Finally, for a left tilt to the news, Counter-Punch publishes Greg Wilpert's pro-Chavez journalism. However, do we detect a note of hesitancy in his writing? Instead of the usual cocktail of tabloid invective and lefty support, he seems to hesitate about characterizing Chavez' opposition as wholly reactionary. He does view the strike as ultimately a ploy of the management, but who is the managment of a state owned firm?