Remora
Comrades one and all....
There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.
Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.
"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which � the scientists now tell us � we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who�ve had sex, but their many children. That�s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in �04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I�d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush�s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"
The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:
"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in �04, as you claim."
Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies.Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.
"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we�ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."
Let's hope that debate never comes off.
Friday, March 14, 2003
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Remora
LI recommends our long suffering readers turn to Carlos Fuentes piece in the LA Times today. It is as clear as baby's breath: Mexico has always followed the policy of opposing unilateral, unprovoked intervention by the U.S. in Latin America, and it should continue to follow that policy in the Middle East. In other words, gently but firmly dissent from the Bush juggernaut.
"Mexico actively opposed U.S. aggression and intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s; and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Granada in the 1980s. During the Central American wars, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda Sr. built, with French minister Claude Cheysson, the Franco-Mexican accord that gave political status to the Salvadoran guerrillas over the objections of the United States. Then-Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda was the engine behind the Contadora Group -- Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela -- that sought solutions for peace. In these last two cases, Mexico's opposition to the U.S. was riskier than a U.N. vote on Saddam Hussein.
In the face of open aggression and intervention by the Reagan administration against Central America, Mexico worked for a peaceful solution that took the initiative away from Washington and placed it in the hands of the Central Americans. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias' Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 is a testament to that. In all those instances when Mexico has shown its independence, Washington signaled its anger but did nothing against Mexico. It didn't do anything because it couldn't. In the name of what?"
Of course, the below the surface story here is probably intriguing. Fuentes was as shaped and honed by the old PRI system as the widespread graft and one party elections of yore. He was the son of an ambassador, and went to school in D.C. His politics, fashionably soixante-huitarde at one time, have gravitated well to the right. On wonders how much of what Fuentes is writing is a signal sent, discretely, across the border by Bush's friends below it. Even Fuentes, however, sees what the current dust-up is all about:
"Mexico's political independence in the case of Iraq will contribute forcefully to what the world most needs: a counterpoint to U.S. power. The real danger in our time is not the miserable Hussein. It is a unipolar world dominated by Washington. Creating that counterbalance is a political necessity. Future governments, but especially the democratic government of the United States, will end up thanking France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Russia and China for their efforts to create a counterpoint to the United States."
The counterpoint to the U.S., in truth, will come not in the shape of a diplomatic hybrid of varied nations -- it will come in the form of the natural, internal brake exerted by 400 billion dollar deficits, plus 800 billion dollar giveaways. The structure will buckle under that much weight. As usual, it will be the population that doesn't make as much in a year as Dick Cheney will get back in tax refunds that will bear the insupportable costs of foreign policy adventurism. And so disaster shadows us, the flood tide just beyond the horizon.
LI recommends our long suffering readers turn to Carlos Fuentes piece in the LA Times today. It is as clear as baby's breath: Mexico has always followed the policy of opposing unilateral, unprovoked intervention by the U.S. in Latin America, and it should continue to follow that policy in the Middle East. In other words, gently but firmly dissent from the Bush juggernaut.
"Mexico actively opposed U.S. aggression and intervention in Guatemala in the 1950s; in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s; and in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Granada in the 1980s. During the Central American wars, Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda Sr. built, with French minister Claude Cheysson, the Franco-Mexican accord that gave political status to the Salvadoran guerrillas over the objections of the United States. Then-Foreign Minister Bernardo Sepulveda was the engine behind the Contadora Group -- Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela -- that sought solutions for peace. In these last two cases, Mexico's opposition to the U.S. was riskier than a U.N. vote on Saddam Hussein.
In the face of open aggression and intervention by the Reagan administration against Central America, Mexico worked for a peaceful solution that took the initiative away from Washington and placed it in the hands of the Central Americans. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias' Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 is a testament to that. In all those instances when Mexico has shown its independence, Washington signaled its anger but did nothing against Mexico. It didn't do anything because it couldn't. In the name of what?"
Of course, the below the surface story here is probably intriguing. Fuentes was as shaped and honed by the old PRI system as the widespread graft and one party elections of yore. He was the son of an ambassador, and went to school in D.C. His politics, fashionably soixante-huitarde at one time, have gravitated well to the right. On wonders how much of what Fuentes is writing is a signal sent, discretely, across the border by Bush's friends below it. Even Fuentes, however, sees what the current dust-up is all about:
"Mexico's political independence in the case of Iraq will contribute forcefully to what the world most needs: a counterpoint to U.S. power. The real danger in our time is not the miserable Hussein. It is a unipolar world dominated by Washington. Creating that counterbalance is a political necessity. Future governments, but especially the democratic government of the United States, will end up thanking France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Russia and China for their efforts to create a counterpoint to the United States."
The counterpoint to the U.S., in truth, will come not in the shape of a diplomatic hybrid of varied nations -- it will come in the form of the natural, internal brake exerted by 400 billion dollar deficits, plus 800 billion dollar giveaways. The structure will buckle under that much weight. As usual, it will be the population that doesn't make as much in a year as Dick Cheney will get back in tax refunds that will bear the insupportable costs of foreign policy adventurism. And so disaster shadows us, the flood tide just beyond the horizon.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Remora
The response to 9/11 -- that Magna Carta for a heady dose imperialism with the riding whip, according to the Bushies -- is most interesting in the refusal to, well, see 9/11. How many articles begin just like this one, from John Lloyd, in March 7's Financial Times:
"Violence," says Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, "is democratised. War has been privatised. The price of entering a communications network is very low. Terrorists can operate much more easily, do much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began." That technological advances have put mass destruction in the hands of small groups or individuals has become a familiar concern. The mobilisation of tanks and army units around London's main international airport at Heathrow recently was assumed to be against such a threat: several newspapers sketched a lone rocketeer peeking out, SAM missile-launcher on shoulder, from behind bushes on the flight path."
In fact, the technology for what the 19 hijackers did has been available for the last fifty years. The main difference, perhaps, between a 9/11 in 1955 and a 9/11 in 2001 was the size of the plane, and the size of the buildings it brought down. But Nye's comment about terrorists operating "much more easily, do [ing] much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began..." is driven more by a theory that requires this to be the case than what the case is. What we know about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is -- the leadership escaped on horseback. What we also know is that Afghanistan and Sudan were the headquarters -- not Silicon Valley. We know that that this terrorism wasn't state sponsored -- rather, states' paid off Al Qaeda, the way the Byzantine empire paid off wandering Bulgars. And, in the two years since the Al Qaeda operation, not once have I seen, in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine, the merest hint about what, exactly, the charity networks traversing the Middle East are all about. The assumption that Middle Eastern states and Islamic charities exist in the same kind of relation as the Red Cross and Switzerland has never been penetrated -- but from the little LI can gather about the subject, Islamic charity has a much richer history than that, is much more connected to the way people get by in, say, Somalia or Yemen or Egypt, and have gotten by since the Ottomans. Decimating those networks, as we are intent on doing, means replacing them with more state sponsored networks at a time when the revenue of the states is going more into paying past debts than into creating safety nets.
So why do we get people like Nye spouting obvious nonsense, and newspapers like the Financial Times publishing it? Because the idea that it ISN'T necessary to acquire a lot of technology to attack the U.S. -- that you can do as much damage with a passenger airliner as you can do with the most advanced bomb --hurts the self-image of the U.S. We have a vested interest -- we vest 300 billion dollars in it per annum -- that the more James Bondian our weaponry, the more overwhelming our successes. The idea, so far, that you have merely to strap a gasoline tank to you and set fire to it in a crowded bus is one that hasn't sunk into the official U.S. mindset -- so much so that no one draws the connection between the suicide bombings in Israel/Palestine and the potential for same in a U.S. occupied Iraq. Discussion is always getting detoured about how the natives, after we greet them lovingly with our 3 000 smart bombs, will be rushing to the Baghdad florists and candyshops to buy our GIs flowers and candies. It is almost enough to make the smart investor want to invest in some Iraqi Lady Godiva Chocolatier before the fete is over. But hey -- what if the natives are less than appreciative of our smart bombs? What if they grow restless being bossed about, for two years, by Donald Rumsfeld's old senile friend, Jay Garner, the apparent heir to the Iraq satrapy?
We are headed into a situation that is perfect for the kind of fighting that the Spanish did with Napoleon's troops, two hundred years ago -- stringing out 60 to 100 thousand U.S. soldiers over a territory bigger than Yugoslavia, and expecting them to stay there for two years.
Amazing. There's a very nicely turned phrase about a man who overshoots his mark in P.G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather, where Wodehouse comments that he had the look that Samson must have had when he heard the pillars crack. LI definitely thinks we are heading for a Samson moment.
The response to 9/11 -- that Magna Carta for a heady dose imperialism with the riding whip, according to the Bushies -- is most interesting in the refusal to, well, see 9/11. How many articles begin just like this one, from John Lloyd, in March 7's Financial Times:
"Violence," says Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, "is democratised. War has been privatised. The price of entering a communications network is very low. Terrorists can operate much more easily, do much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began." That technological advances have put mass destruction in the hands of small groups or individuals has become a familiar concern. The mobilisation of tanks and army units around London's main international airport at Heathrow recently was assumed to be against such a threat: several newspapers sketched a lone rocketeer peeking out, SAM missile-launcher on shoulder, from behind bushes on the flight path."
In fact, the technology for what the 19 hijackers did has been available for the last fifty years. The main difference, perhaps, between a 9/11 in 1955 and a 9/11 in 2001 was the size of the plane, and the size of the buildings it brought down. But Nye's comment about terrorists operating "much more easily, do [ing] much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began..." is driven more by a theory that requires this to be the case than what the case is. What we know about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is -- the leadership escaped on horseback. What we also know is that Afghanistan and Sudan were the headquarters -- not Silicon Valley. We know that that this terrorism wasn't state sponsored -- rather, states' paid off Al Qaeda, the way the Byzantine empire paid off wandering Bulgars. And, in the two years since the Al Qaeda operation, not once have I seen, in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine, the merest hint about what, exactly, the charity networks traversing the Middle East are all about. The assumption that Middle Eastern states and Islamic charities exist in the same kind of relation as the Red Cross and Switzerland has never been penetrated -- but from the little LI can gather about the subject, Islamic charity has a much richer history than that, is much more connected to the way people get by in, say, Somalia or Yemen or Egypt, and have gotten by since the Ottomans. Decimating those networks, as we are intent on doing, means replacing them with more state sponsored networks at a time when the revenue of the states is going more into paying past debts than into creating safety nets.
So why do we get people like Nye spouting obvious nonsense, and newspapers like the Financial Times publishing it? Because the idea that it ISN'T necessary to acquire a lot of technology to attack the U.S. -- that you can do as much damage with a passenger airliner as you can do with the most advanced bomb --hurts the self-image of the U.S. We have a vested interest -- we vest 300 billion dollars in it per annum -- that the more James Bondian our weaponry, the more overwhelming our successes. The idea, so far, that you have merely to strap a gasoline tank to you and set fire to it in a crowded bus is one that hasn't sunk into the official U.S. mindset -- so much so that no one draws the connection between the suicide bombings in Israel/Palestine and the potential for same in a U.S. occupied Iraq. Discussion is always getting detoured about how the natives, after we greet them lovingly with our 3 000 smart bombs, will be rushing to the Baghdad florists and candyshops to buy our GIs flowers and candies. It is almost enough to make the smart investor want to invest in some Iraqi Lady Godiva Chocolatier before the fete is over. But hey -- what if the natives are less than appreciative of our smart bombs? What if they grow restless being bossed about, for two years, by Donald Rumsfeld's old senile friend, Jay Garner, the apparent heir to the Iraq satrapy?
We are headed into a situation that is perfect for the kind of fighting that the Spanish did with Napoleon's troops, two hundred years ago -- stringing out 60 to 100 thousand U.S. soldiers over a territory bigger than Yugoslavia, and expecting them to stay there for two years.
Amazing. There's a very nicely turned phrase about a man who overshoots his mark in P.G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather, where Wodehouse comments that he had the look that Samson must have had when he heard the pillars crack. LI definitely thinks we are heading for a Samson moment.
Monday, March 10, 2003
Remora
�I have no hope that things will go right or that men will think reasonably until they have exhausted every mode of human folly�.
-- James Froude
The Salisbury Review is a hugely enjoyable enterprise. Every quarter it is filled with weepy forebodings about the future, imprecations of the present, and misty yearning towards the past. The past as scripted by Walter Scott, we believe. The quote from Froude is taken from an article about him in the Winter, 2000 issue. One gets a whiff, here, of a sort of Bertie Wooster Toryism that is relieved, marginally, by the sex appeal of Margaret Thatcher, but reverts to a pottering melancholia as instinctively as the groundhog reverts to his burrow:
"The race to which Victorian England was committing itself in his day � which I suppose is what ordinary people now refer to as the �rat race� � has provided the Labour Party and the Liberals (in all their varieties) with the opportunity to recover every item of clothing stolen from them by the Conservatives over the last 150 years. This competitive society has spawned an education system which is seen by most parents as a means of enabling their children to rise in the volatile social scheme of things. It is the very reverse of the older order which said �Like father, like son�. John Ruskin described it unforgettably in Sesame and Lilies:
But, an education �which shall keep a good coat on my son�s back; - which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors� bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house; in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; - this we pray for on bent knees � and this is all we pray for.�
That's the spirit! A John Coleman wrote the Froude article. An Alfred Sherman writes a paen to the S.R. as a voice crying in the wilderness, which wilderness has overtaken civilization for some time -- 200 years at least. British conservatives are so much more advanced than American ones -- while Americans pine for Victorian virtues, the Brits realize that everything was lost around 1688. Here, let's pour on some prose:
"Conservatism restored is a construct unlike natural conservatism, which in its day entailed hallowing the status quo because it was the status quo, �all that is is right.� By 1982, very little of that was left. The Labour victory of 1945 had changed not only the face of Britain but also the Conservative Party. It had become Butler's party in all but name, a variant of socialism.
...
In 1982, when the Review was founded, was a time of hope, Margaret Thatcher reigned with bold Conservative rhetoric. But decades of disappointment continued to follow. During the following twenty years our awareness of the rigours, of deception grew pari passu with the oppositional stance of the Review, which has of necessity become a voice crying in the wilderness. Margaret Thatcher remains a key figure in British politics of the last quarter of the century, subject to continuous reinterpretation. That she towered above our narrow world like a colossus is beyond argument..."
Change and decay in all I see, cried one of Evelyn Waugh's characters.
In another article, the questionis posed: Is the European Union the new Soviet Union?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. Vladimir Bukovsky, the author of this article, is amazed at the allowance of democratic elections in such places as Poland, and the inexplicable bombing of Milosovic, a good anti-communist if there ever was one. Bukovsky's ramblings were vocalized, according to the article, in the House of Commons, where no doubt they did everybody a lot of good.
Sometimes we need a shot of the real rightwing stuff -- it is so far out that it is sort of hippie-like. This is politics of. by, and for hobbits
�I have no hope that things will go right or that men will think reasonably until they have exhausted every mode of human folly�.
-- James Froude
The Salisbury Review is a hugely enjoyable enterprise. Every quarter it is filled with weepy forebodings about the future, imprecations of the present, and misty yearning towards the past. The past as scripted by Walter Scott, we believe. The quote from Froude is taken from an article about him in the Winter, 2000 issue. One gets a whiff, here, of a sort of Bertie Wooster Toryism that is relieved, marginally, by the sex appeal of Margaret Thatcher, but reverts to a pottering melancholia as instinctively as the groundhog reverts to his burrow:
"The race to which Victorian England was committing itself in his day � which I suppose is what ordinary people now refer to as the �rat race� � has provided the Labour Party and the Liberals (in all their varieties) with the opportunity to recover every item of clothing stolen from them by the Conservatives over the last 150 years. This competitive society has spawned an education system which is seen by most parents as a means of enabling their children to rise in the volatile social scheme of things. It is the very reverse of the older order which said �Like father, like son�. John Ruskin described it unforgettably in Sesame and Lilies:
But, an education �which shall keep a good coat on my son�s back; - which shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors� bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ultimately in the establishment of a double-belled door to his own house; in a word, which shall lead to advancement in life; - this we pray for on bent knees � and this is all we pray for.�
That's the spirit! A John Coleman wrote the Froude article. An Alfred Sherman writes a paen to the S.R. as a voice crying in the wilderness, which wilderness has overtaken civilization for some time -- 200 years at least. British conservatives are so much more advanced than American ones -- while Americans pine for Victorian virtues, the Brits realize that everything was lost around 1688. Here, let's pour on some prose:
"Conservatism restored is a construct unlike natural conservatism, which in its day entailed hallowing the status quo because it was the status quo, �all that is is right.� By 1982, very little of that was left. The Labour victory of 1945 had changed not only the face of Britain but also the Conservative Party. It had become Butler's party in all but name, a variant of socialism.
...
In 1982, when the Review was founded, was a time of hope, Margaret Thatcher reigned with bold Conservative rhetoric. But decades of disappointment continued to follow. During the following twenty years our awareness of the rigours, of deception grew pari passu with the oppositional stance of the Review, which has of necessity become a voice crying in the wilderness. Margaret Thatcher remains a key figure in British politics of the last quarter of the century, subject to continuous reinterpretation. That she towered above our narrow world like a colossus is beyond argument..."
Change and decay in all I see, cried one of Evelyn Waugh's characters.
In another article, the questionis posed: Is the European Union the new Soviet Union?
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. Vladimir Bukovsky, the author of this article, is amazed at the allowance of democratic elections in such places as Poland, and the inexplicable bombing of Milosovic, a good anti-communist if there ever was one. Bukovsky's ramblings were vocalized, according to the article, in the House of Commons, where no doubt they did everybody a lot of good.
Sometimes we need a shot of the real rightwing stuff -- it is so far out that it is sort of hippie-like. This is politics of. by, and for hobbits
Saturday, March 08, 2003
Dope
Party Pooper Saddam
We do not live in the best of times -- Dicken's dichotomy should definitely be pitched into the can with yesterday's spaghetti. It is a worst of times moment. I know this by a simple glance at my checking account -- althought the truth is I never engage in that pointless exercise in scare-mongering, since I don't appreciate being trailed about during the day by the various ghosts of penury, ill-health, and homelessness.
Let's see. To add up other reasons that I'm jumping on Dicken's right-hand choice, there is the shocking state of one of my back teeth -- which incessantly radios S.O.S-es to me; the headlines; and the moody weather, which was trying out various shades of gray last week, and then suddenly got all giggly and put on an 80 degree bikini yesterday. Adjustment, you know.
So the war has inched so close to us that, according to the NY Observer, it has intruded upon fashionable Manhattan parties. The quote from Christopher Buckley about sums it up: "You really know it�s going to be bad if they do the dinging-the-side-of-the-wineglass with their spoon," said Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI. "People react the way Quasimodo reacted to the ringing of the bells: �Oh shit, here it comes.�"
The shock and awe bombing strategy pales by comparison. Baghdad may crumble, Basra may fall, but the dinging-on-the-side-of-the-wineglass -- well, Mr. Magoo would put something like that right down, by George! And, as Chris B. points out later in one of the quotes in the article, those wineglass ringers are just doing it to get attention:
"I find that people who bring it up, they tend to be people who are not in the business of opinion-giving," he said. "If you�ve got 10 people who are all chatting happily over what are you doing this summer, or what are your kids doing in school, or the new Degas exhibit, or what is your new S.U.V., or what about the new Byron edition, and someone says, �What about Iraq?,� I think it�s a desire to be an attention-getter. That�s code for, �Now I�m gonna tell you what I think of Iraq.� It�s a counterfeit invitation."
Like the mercury in a thermometer rising to unaccustomed heights in a heat wave, a thought, a sincerely crafted, real thought can, in a moment of national crisis, even rise up, up, up into the brains of the blue blooded and overflow into their parties, leaving everybody a little sticky. Really, as a Mr. Hoge is quoted as saying, ""I think there�s a body that�s building of, �Let�s get it over with."
Surely this is as good an argument for war as any made in D.C., n'est-ce pas?"
Party Pooper Saddam
We do not live in the best of times -- Dicken's dichotomy should definitely be pitched into the can with yesterday's spaghetti. It is a worst of times moment. I know this by a simple glance at my checking account -- althought the truth is I never engage in that pointless exercise in scare-mongering, since I don't appreciate being trailed about during the day by the various ghosts of penury, ill-health, and homelessness.
Let's see. To add up other reasons that I'm jumping on Dicken's right-hand choice, there is the shocking state of one of my back teeth -- which incessantly radios S.O.S-es to me; the headlines; and the moody weather, which was trying out various shades of gray last week, and then suddenly got all giggly and put on an 80 degree bikini yesterday. Adjustment, you know.
So the war has inched so close to us that, according to the NY Observer, it has intruded upon fashionable Manhattan parties. The quote from Christopher Buckley about sums it up: "You really know it�s going to be bad if they do the dinging-the-side-of-the-wineglass with their spoon," said Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI. "People react the way Quasimodo reacted to the ringing of the bells: �Oh shit, here it comes.�"
The shock and awe bombing strategy pales by comparison. Baghdad may crumble, Basra may fall, but the dinging-on-the-side-of-the-wineglass -- well, Mr. Magoo would put something like that right down, by George! And, as Chris B. points out later in one of the quotes in the article, those wineglass ringers are just doing it to get attention:
"I find that people who bring it up, they tend to be people who are not in the business of opinion-giving," he said. "If you�ve got 10 people who are all chatting happily over what are you doing this summer, or what are your kids doing in school, or the new Degas exhibit, or what is your new S.U.V., or what about the new Byron edition, and someone says, �What about Iraq?,� I think it�s a desire to be an attention-getter. That�s code for, �Now I�m gonna tell you what I think of Iraq.� It�s a counterfeit invitation."
Like the mercury in a thermometer rising to unaccustomed heights in a heat wave, a thought, a sincerely crafted, real thought can, in a moment of national crisis, even rise up, up, up into the brains of the blue blooded and overflow into their parties, leaving everybody a little sticky. Really, as a Mr. Hoge is quoted as saying, ""I think there�s a body that�s building of, �Let�s get it over with."
Surely this is as good an argument for war as any made in D.C., n'est-ce pas?"
Remora
Intelligence and its discontents
LI comes from a long line of cop Pyrrhonists. In our family, the announcement on tv or in the newspapers that the police have come to the conclusion that X is guilty is usually provoked the comment that X was probably being railroaded. This attitude was re-enforced by my brothers' experience of the policeman's art. Both of my brothers worked, at one time, in the apartment game, as maintenance supervisors. Now apartment complexes sometimes acquire security on the cheap by letting a cop have an apartment free. In return, the moonlighting gendarme was supposed to keep an eye on things. In this way, my brothers got an anthropologists eyeful of cops. For instance, they learned the phrase, "patroling the residence." This meant going home and watching tv of a lazy week day afternoon. Another thing they learned was detection. Robberies and the occasional suicide liven up apartment life. In the case of robberies, the policeman's first suspicion usually fall on the robbed. Insurance, surely. This saves shoe leather. Also, since nobody in an urban area is going to get their stuff back, the cops feel they haven't done their duty if they don't finger some suspect. And hey, they are serving the powers that be -- i.e. insurance companies. Cops have instinctive status quo-o-philia.
One of the reasons LI is big on gun rights is that we think it is simply naive to allow an armed police force to confront a disarmed populace. Gun control advocates, who never tackle this issue, are exuding that typical American exceptionalism thing -- it can't happen here because we have such nice white suburbs.
However, that's the milder form of our skepticism. Even my bros accept the need for the local cops. But we'd like to politely suggest that the world would be a better place if the FBI, the DEA, the AFT, and the CIA were disbanded. These are minions of the worst kind of state power. Their injuries to the nation they supposedly serve have been massive, their countering benefits few. Collectively, they have roots in the kind of militaristic, bureaucratic empire-building that has always done the worst things in America and around the world.
Which is why we were interested in this column by Paul Foot about the Lockerbie explosion. We lazily assumed that the Lockerbie case was, at least, all sewn up. The Libyans did it, and Qaddafi, after being squeezed, has basically shrunk into a petty, absurd despot. Paul Foot disagrees. His column leaps from the recent embarrassment about Mr. Bond -- a retired businessman in South Africa who was slung into jail after the FBI mis-identified him as an absconding felon -- and attaches to the mysteries of Lockerbie:
"The reliability of the FBI was tested in a case I knew something about: the biggest mass murder in British history - the bombing of a plane over Lockerbie in 1988. For a long time the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic believed the Lockerbie bombing was in retaliation for the reckless destruction by a US warship of an Iranian plane six months earlier. Suspicion fell on a group of terrorists based in Syria.
But then Syria joined the US and their allies in the first war against Saddam Hussein and suddenly vanished from the Lockerbie frame. In its place as chief suspect was Libya. The forensic link to Libya was allegedly established by a tiny piece of circuit board from a timer, mysteriously found in remote countryside after the bombing, and traced by the FBI to a Swiss manufacturer who sold timers to Libya.
The genius behind this detective work was FBI agent Tom Thurman. For reasons that were never clear Mr Thurman was not called to give evidence to the hugely expensive trial of two Libyans three years ago. The US authorities and their media, however, were full of praise for Thurman and his work. In November 1991, for instance, he was named "Person of the Week" on the TV Network ABC. The rivers of praise dried up rather suddenly when The Person of the Week's work at the FBI Explosives Unit was investigated by the Department of Justice. Their inquiry found that Thurman "had been routinely altering the reports of scientists working in the unit". Fifty-two such reports were investigated. Only 20 had not been altered."
As Foot then points out, America, which is the brave New World of second chances, has accorded one to Mr. Thurman, who is teaching his unique method of detective work as a professor of criminology at some fine American university.
American Radio Works has done a good job in exposing the flaws in the Libyan investigation.-- not that anyone is paying attention.
What, we wonder, would Mr. Pilbeam make of it all?
Mr. Pilbeam P. Frobisher Pilbeam was the appalling detective who refused the case of the purloined pig in Wodehouse's Summer Lightning. You will remember that Ronnie Fish stole Lord Emsworth's prize pig in order to restore it, at the critical moment, in order to receive the benefit of Lord Emsworth's undying gratitude, plus a little of the ready, which would make it possible for him to marry Sue Brown, whom he suspected was dancing behind his back with his best friend Hugo. But even Pilbeam, odious as he was (it turned out that he was madly in love with Sue himself) knew better than to frame Libyans for the caper.
So -- here's the plan. Let's find some modern day Pilbeam, and turn the detecting -- all of it, the whole lot, everything the FBI does -- over to his capable hands. First thing he'll do is disgard the profiling crap --from racial profiling to the pseudo-science of psychologically profiling serial killers. Second thing he'll do is buckle down on the anthrax case -- after all, we know that the killer was mailing things off from a little post office in New Jersey in the hyper-aware autumn of 2001 -- Pilbeam would be on the spot, asking questions and looking at maps. And thirdly, he'd get rid of the colors for the security alerts -- surely the government can make money, a la David Foster Wallace, by selling the alerts to various corporations? We are going to need that money for the tax cuts and our Middle Eastern arabesque. Surely.
Intelligence and its discontents
LI comes from a long line of cop Pyrrhonists. In our family, the announcement on tv or in the newspapers that the police have come to the conclusion that X is guilty is usually provoked the comment that X was probably being railroaded. This attitude was re-enforced by my brothers' experience of the policeman's art. Both of my brothers worked, at one time, in the apartment game, as maintenance supervisors. Now apartment complexes sometimes acquire security on the cheap by letting a cop have an apartment free. In return, the moonlighting gendarme was supposed to keep an eye on things. In this way, my brothers got an anthropologists eyeful of cops. For instance, they learned the phrase, "patroling the residence." This meant going home and watching tv of a lazy week day afternoon. Another thing they learned was detection. Robberies and the occasional suicide liven up apartment life. In the case of robberies, the policeman's first suspicion usually fall on the robbed. Insurance, surely. This saves shoe leather. Also, since nobody in an urban area is going to get their stuff back, the cops feel they haven't done their duty if they don't finger some suspect. And hey, they are serving the powers that be -- i.e. insurance companies. Cops have instinctive status quo-o-philia.
One of the reasons LI is big on gun rights is that we think it is simply naive to allow an armed police force to confront a disarmed populace. Gun control advocates, who never tackle this issue, are exuding that typical American exceptionalism thing -- it can't happen here because we have such nice white suburbs.
However, that's the milder form of our skepticism. Even my bros accept the need for the local cops. But we'd like to politely suggest that the world would be a better place if the FBI, the DEA, the AFT, and the CIA were disbanded. These are minions of the worst kind of state power. Their injuries to the nation they supposedly serve have been massive, their countering benefits few. Collectively, they have roots in the kind of militaristic, bureaucratic empire-building that has always done the worst things in America and around the world.
Which is why we were interested in this column by Paul Foot about the Lockerbie explosion. We lazily assumed that the Lockerbie case was, at least, all sewn up. The Libyans did it, and Qaddafi, after being squeezed, has basically shrunk into a petty, absurd despot. Paul Foot disagrees. His column leaps from the recent embarrassment about Mr. Bond -- a retired businessman in South Africa who was slung into jail after the FBI mis-identified him as an absconding felon -- and attaches to the mysteries of Lockerbie:
"The reliability of the FBI was tested in a case I knew something about: the biggest mass murder in British history - the bombing of a plane over Lockerbie in 1988. For a long time the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic believed the Lockerbie bombing was in retaliation for the reckless destruction by a US warship of an Iranian plane six months earlier. Suspicion fell on a group of terrorists based in Syria.
But then Syria joined the US and their allies in the first war against Saddam Hussein and suddenly vanished from the Lockerbie frame. In its place as chief suspect was Libya. The forensic link to Libya was allegedly established by a tiny piece of circuit board from a timer, mysteriously found in remote countryside after the bombing, and traced by the FBI to a Swiss manufacturer who sold timers to Libya.
The genius behind this detective work was FBI agent Tom Thurman. For reasons that were never clear Mr Thurman was not called to give evidence to the hugely expensive trial of two Libyans three years ago. The US authorities and their media, however, were full of praise for Thurman and his work. In November 1991, for instance, he was named "Person of the Week" on the TV Network ABC. The rivers of praise dried up rather suddenly when The Person of the Week's work at the FBI Explosives Unit was investigated by the Department of Justice. Their inquiry found that Thurman "had been routinely altering the reports of scientists working in the unit". Fifty-two such reports were investigated. Only 20 had not been altered."
As Foot then points out, America, which is the brave New World of second chances, has accorded one to Mr. Thurman, who is teaching his unique method of detective work as a professor of criminology at some fine American university.
American Radio Works has done a good job in exposing the flaws in the Libyan investigation.-- not that anyone is paying attention.
What, we wonder, would Mr. Pilbeam make of it all?
Mr. Pilbeam P. Frobisher Pilbeam was the appalling detective who refused the case of the purloined pig in Wodehouse's Summer Lightning. You will remember that Ronnie Fish stole Lord Emsworth's prize pig in order to restore it, at the critical moment, in order to receive the benefit of Lord Emsworth's undying gratitude, plus a little of the ready, which would make it possible for him to marry Sue Brown, whom he suspected was dancing behind his back with his best friend Hugo. But even Pilbeam, odious as he was (it turned out that he was madly in love with Sue himself) knew better than to frame Libyans for the caper.
So -- here's the plan. Let's find some modern day Pilbeam, and turn the detecting -- all of it, the whole lot, everything the FBI does -- over to his capable hands. First thing he'll do is disgard the profiling crap --from racial profiling to the pseudo-science of psychologically profiling serial killers. Second thing he'll do is buckle down on the anthrax case -- after all, we know that the killer was mailing things off from a little post office in New Jersey in the hyper-aware autumn of 2001 -- Pilbeam would be on the spot, asking questions and looking at maps. And thirdly, he'd get rid of the colors for the security alerts -- surely the government can make money, a la David Foster Wallace, by selling the alerts to various corporations? We are going to need that money for the tax cuts and our Middle Eastern arabesque. Surely.
Friday, March 07, 2003
Dope
The enemy that I see
wears a cloak of decency
-- Bob Dylan
Is Bob Dylan the Very Jones of our time or what? LI has just finished to the funeste tones of our President. The poor man is being forced, dragged, pulled into a war that he wishes and prays he could avoid.
Yeah, right. That and a nickel won't get you a pack of bubble gum.
Press conferences have become embarrassing exercises in kissing the imperial behind anyway. After Nixon, the wolfish aspect of the press corps was pretty much brought to heel. We can take only so much lese majeste, as they say in the newsrooms.
Bush rambled on about intelligence reports that trumped anything mere arms inspectors from the U.N. could hope to accomplish. His enunciation, which seemed set, by some advisor, on the very slow and the very repetitive, reminded me of nothing so much as a Sunday School teacher denying a dangerous liason with some likely student. It radiated the ersatz dignity of the provincial. No questions, of course, were asked about the intelligence reports that were quoted by Colin Powell in his speech in the U.N., some of which turned out to be plagiarized by Tony Blair's PR team from a Ph.D student's dissertation. Nobody asked, even, if the scope of our omniscience, which can apparently pluck the thoughts from the missile shifting part of Saddam Hussein's cerebellum before they reach his tongue, shouldn't be trained on, oh, finding out who ground up anthrax spores and sent them through the mail for a week back in November 2001. And nobody asked whether the U.S. shouldn't share its intelligence with the arms inspectors. Questions about anthrax, by the way, have simply fallen through the cracks. Even the evening's obvious question -- if Iraq disarmed, but Saddam Hussein remained at the head of the nation, would Bush be satisfied? -- was not put.
When LI dislikes a person as much as we have grown to dislike Bush, we have learned to distrust our first hearing. We need second hearing -- listening outside of our own densities and voids, dreads and bents. And for second hearing we've increasingly turned to the past -- to dead writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and to the writers of the middle part of the twentieth. Alas, living writers have let us down. Second hearing is what they want to rob you of -- that conglomerate of D.C. media folk. Their reaction will be predictable -- sober when the president's words cry out for parody, frivolous when the president's questioners cry out to be more pressing.
At the moment, I get my second hearing from Burke. Odd, that.
Oh, and Very Jones -- if you don't know the American poet Very Jones, here's a link . And here's his poem The Canary Bird, which I've been memorizing:
I cannot hear thy voice with other�s ears,
Who make of thy lost liberty a gain;
And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears
Feel not that every note is born with pain.
Alas! That with thy music�s gentle swell
Past days of joy should through thy memory throng,
And each to thee their words of sorrow tell
While ravished sense forgets thee in thy song.
The heart that on thy past and future feeds,
And pours in human words its thoughts divine,
Though at each birth the spirit inly bleeds,
Its song may charm the listening ear like thine,
And men with gilded cage and praise will try
To make the bard like thee forget his native sky.
The enemy that I see
wears a cloak of decency
-- Bob Dylan
Is Bob Dylan the Very Jones of our time or what? LI has just finished to the funeste tones of our President. The poor man is being forced, dragged, pulled into a war that he wishes and prays he could avoid.
Yeah, right. That and a nickel won't get you a pack of bubble gum.
Press conferences have become embarrassing exercises in kissing the imperial behind anyway. After Nixon, the wolfish aspect of the press corps was pretty much brought to heel. We can take only so much lese majeste, as they say in the newsrooms.
Bush rambled on about intelligence reports that trumped anything mere arms inspectors from the U.N. could hope to accomplish. His enunciation, which seemed set, by some advisor, on the very slow and the very repetitive, reminded me of nothing so much as a Sunday School teacher denying a dangerous liason with some likely student. It radiated the ersatz dignity of the provincial. No questions, of course, were asked about the intelligence reports that were quoted by Colin Powell in his speech in the U.N., some of which turned out to be plagiarized by Tony Blair's PR team from a Ph.D student's dissertation. Nobody asked, even, if the scope of our omniscience, which can apparently pluck the thoughts from the missile shifting part of Saddam Hussein's cerebellum before they reach his tongue, shouldn't be trained on, oh, finding out who ground up anthrax spores and sent them through the mail for a week back in November 2001. And nobody asked whether the U.S. shouldn't share its intelligence with the arms inspectors. Questions about anthrax, by the way, have simply fallen through the cracks. Even the evening's obvious question -- if Iraq disarmed, but Saddam Hussein remained at the head of the nation, would Bush be satisfied? -- was not put.
When LI dislikes a person as much as we have grown to dislike Bush, we have learned to distrust our first hearing. We need second hearing -- listening outside of our own densities and voids, dreads and bents. And for second hearing we've increasingly turned to the past -- to dead writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and to the writers of the middle part of the twentieth. Alas, living writers have let us down. Second hearing is what they want to rob you of -- that conglomerate of D.C. media folk. Their reaction will be predictable -- sober when the president's words cry out for parody, frivolous when the president's questioners cry out to be more pressing.
At the moment, I get my second hearing from Burke. Odd, that.
Oh, and Very Jones -- if you don't know the American poet Very Jones, here's a link . And here's his poem The Canary Bird, which I've been memorizing:
I cannot hear thy voice with other�s ears,
Who make of thy lost liberty a gain;
And in thy tale of blighted hopes and fears
Feel not that every note is born with pain.
Alas! That with thy music�s gentle swell
Past days of joy should through thy memory throng,
And each to thee their words of sorrow tell
While ravished sense forgets thee in thy song.
The heart that on thy past and future feeds,
And pours in human words its thoughts divine,
Though at each birth the spirit inly bleeds,
Its song may charm the listening ear like thine,
And men with gilded cage and praise will try
To make the bard like thee forget his native sky.
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