Dope

...and of no avail, O my master, is a twice told tale!

So the inspection period is over, and we can see it for what it is: a tale out of the Arabian Nights.

Yesterday we leafed through Robert Irwin's Companion to the Arabian Nights. A.S. Byatt refers to Irwin's book as gripping, which it is, indeed. Byatt's essay on the Mille et Une Nuits, by the way, begins like this:

"The best story ever told? Perhaps the story of the two brothers, both kings, who found that their wives were unfaithful, took bloody vengeance, and set out into the world to travel until they found someone less fortunate than they were. They encountered a demon who kept a woman in a glass chest with four locks; she came out while he slept and showed them 98 rings she had collected from chance lovers and insisted on having sex with the princes to make it a round 100. The princes decided that the demon was more unfortunate than they were and returned to their kingdoms. There the elder brother, Shahrayar, still angry over his wife's betrayal, instituted a reign of terror, marrying a virgin each day and handing her to his vizier for execution at dawn. The vizier's daughter Shahrazad, a woman both wise and learned, beseeched her father to give her to the king. On the wedding night, the bride asked that her younger sister, Dinarzad, might sleep under the bed, so that when the king had "finished with Shahrazad," the younger girl, as the sisters had agreed, might ask Shahrazad to tell a story to while away the time until dawn. When dawn came, the story was not finished, and the curious king stayed execution for a night. Shahrazad continued to tell tales, which gave rise to other tales, all of which were unfinished at dawn. The king's narrative curiosity kept Shahrazad alive, day after day. She narrated a stay of execution, a space in which she bore three children. And in the end, the king removed the sentence of death, and they lived happily ever after. "

Byatt, wonderfully, makes the following comment: "... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends."

One of the wonders of the Net is the hypertext Burton's Arabian Nights. It isn't quite finished yet. It can be found here.
It includes Burton's footnotes, which are one of the bizarries of literature.

Irwin, in his chapter on the translators of the Nights, records the origin of Burton's project. He was originally a friend and informant of Payne. John Payne's translation was intended to replace Lane's, which was much beloved by the Victorians. Lane bowdlerized the text. He was also, apparently, a pretty eccentric guy -- the Arabian Nights, to Lane, were a mere supplement to his great work, the Arabic-English lexicon. According to Irwin, "Lane became so steeped in this great work that he used to complain that reading English writing hurt his eyes." In any case, Payne's translation was stuffed with copious ethnological notes. Burton, deciding that he, too, would have his notes, made them even wilder than Payne's. They included his racial theories, autobiographical reflections, and much, much comment about sex. For instance, here is the part in the framing story where the wife of the shah lewdly disports herself, so to speak:

"Thereupon Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. They walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water; then they stripped off their clothes and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight."

As Irwin points out, nothing in the Arabic justifies the big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes remark. But Burton isn't done yet. There is a footnote for this slobbering blackamoor. It reads:

"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the "deed of kind" takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Ims�k = retention of semen and "prolongation of pleasure," I shall find it necessary to say more."

He does find it necessary to say as much as possible.

Irwin, to my sorrow, points out that some of the great tales (Ali Babba and the forty thieves, Aladdin and his lamp) were probably created out of thin air by the French translator, Galland -- himself worthy of a post. He also points out that the second French translator was a friend of Proust's, Joseph Charles Mardrus. Mardrus's wife, apparently, "presided over a coterie of literary lesbians." Her salon was frequented by Marcel. There is a French critic who has pointed out that A la recherche... takes two texts as models -- Saint-Simon's journals, and the Mille et une nuits. Indeed, the idea of the insomniac tale, the tale that emerges in some interval of wakefulness and is told in lieu of sleep -- a dream substitute -- with a dreamlike branching of other tales, is one of Proust's leit-motifs.

Now, how would Sheherazade have told the tale of this war? I imagine something like this, taking its cue from the cruel morality of the barber's brothers tales:

The tale is about a powerful wicked king and a less powerful wicked king, who had once been allies. The powerful wicked king desired to depose the less powerful. However, he desired an excuse. So he made it his excuse that the less powerful king had arms. Indeed, the more powerful king knew of these arms, since his kingdom had sold them to the less powerful king. Ignoring this past history -- for are not the deeds of the powerful memorable only as the powerful would have us remember them? -- the more powerful king claimed that the less powerful king's weapons were a menace to peace. To show he was reasonable, the more powerful king suggested that a simpleton find the less powerful king's weapons and destroy them. And so, it was thought by the more powerful king's courtiers and flatterers, the less powerful king would be trapped, and war -- upon which king's fasten, as flies fasten on dying animals -- would be the result. But alas, man proposes and God disposes! For the simpleton, whose name, Blix, was like the movement of the eyelid, a thing so minute and quick that it is ignored by all men -- as indeed was Blix himself -- he began to succeed in finding and destroying the lesser king's weapons. The more powerful king was wroth at this, and so were his courtiers and flatterers. And so he thrust aside the simpleton, invaded the lesser king's kingdom, slew him and looted it of all its goods. For the justice of powerful kings consists only in this, that the evil in their hearts find a path through the world of men.

Dope

What is to be done?

The first stage of the antiwar movement is clearly over. We receive emails that urge us to demonstrate on the first day of the war, and we have to ask: what kind of gesture is that? It�s an oddly ineffectual and resigned move � surely the emails should have been pouring in to have us demonstrate during the last three days, or the last week.

In any case, we expect that the conventional wisdom is right, and that the fighting against Saddam H. will be a matter of the demonstration of overwhelming American power and the quick collapse of his forces. If the conventional wisdom isn�t right, then Americans will have a very hard time justifying this war over the course of the next two weeks � for the only reason I can think of that would explain the prolonged resistance of a country that has been at war, or under sanctions, since 1979, to an invading force of the size and quality of the Americans is that the resistance is popular.

My friend, Alan, at his Gadfly site, has posted a comment that the only thing left to do is pray. Well, we�ve heard that comment from others, and we have to say�. What are we praying for, exactly? Peace? A swift end to the disorder? Big, happy oil contracts for Haliburton?

I�m anti-prayer, myself. This site, at least, thinks that the next stage is to oppose American pillaging of Iraq; to oppose the dissolution of the current governmental structures in Northern Iraq; to oppose the appointment of an American head of Iraq after Saddam is defeated; and to support an accelerated withdrawal of American troops from Iraq so that they are not in the country for two years is also a goal. Make that six months, max.

In the last Gulf War the protests were in some disconnect with the real inhumanity of the American assault on the Iraqi army and population, which suffered much greater casualties than we knew at the time. The protests, in other words, went mushy from lack of info. So the short range goal seems to me to be to use the internet to get around corporate media�s willingness to obscure the real nature of the war in order not to shock prayerful Americans out of their various private raptures. This is where antiwar blogs can be of some service. So we will try to plug into and link to as much uncensored information as possible.

Remora

This just in ... it is hilarious!

As we've pointed out, there is a gap of about 120 billion dollars between what the U.S. wants to do in Iraq and the way it says it wants to pay for it. Now, Bush, having floated himself through the nineties in Texas via cigarette money (a strategy that has collapsed, now, as Texas faces about a nine billion dollar shortfall) has obviously decided to paper over his problems in the same way. Thus, the surprise announcement by the Justice Department today:


"U.S. Seeks $289 Billion in Cigarette Makers' Profits

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, March 17 � The Justice Department is demanding that the nation's biggest cigarette makers be ordered to forfeit $289 billion in profits derived from a half-century of "fraudulent" and dangerous marketing practices.Citing new evidence, the Justice Department asserts in more than 1,400 pages of court documents that the major cigarette companies are running what amounts to a criminal enterprise by manipulating nicotine levels, lying to their customers about the dangers of tobacco and directing their multibillion-dollar advertising campaigns at children."

Just when you think the Bush administration has pushed the limits of fraudulence, they try a trick like this. The same administration, mind you, that has made a crusade out of cutting back liability and jury awarded settlements for job injuries.

The foulness that emanates from this White House is becoming a Ripley's believe it or not item. LI believes that Bush has now set the piece in place for his second line defense of the tax-cuts-plus-war budget. Watch this thing play out.

Dope

As I've said before in a previous post, I can only retain my sanity in these maddening times by using second hearing -- which is rather like second sight, except that it goes backwards. I've been hearing the War through Burke -- but Bush's address last night overwhelmed the rather ornate and beautiful structures of Burke's thought. One needs something more scabrous. I looked up a piece Swift wrote, on the art of political lying.

In that Swiftian way, he begins by admiring the devil for inventing the lie, but then registers an objection: the devil's lies, as is often the case with the initial run of a product, were full of glitches. Luckily, man has added an infinite amount of features to the devil's machine, making it much more useful for all ocassions And among the most useful of those occasions is the government of man, herds of which can be entranced by very simple lies, sworn to vehemently by a bunch of cut-throats who are otherwise known as "men of peace," "presidents," "undersecretaries of defense," "editiorial writers" and such others (known, since school days, to be lackies, taletellers, cheats, braggarts and snobs) who are attracted to power but who lack the courage to assault the innocent in the street by night; and so, to the temproary applause of the cowed populace, devise mass murders in their offices by day. About the political lie Swift has this to say:

"But the same genealogy cannot always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by a rabble. Sometimes it is pronounced a monster, and licked into shape: at other times it comes into the world completely formed, and is spoiled in the licking. It is often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it; and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth, and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here it screams aloud at the opening of the womb, and there it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which, although too proud and great at present to own its parents, I can remember its whisperhood. To conclude the nativity of this monster; when it comes into the world without a sting it is stillborn; and whenever it loses its sting it dies.

No wonder if an infant so miraculous in its birth should be destined for great adventures; and accordingly we see it has been the guardian spirit of a prevailing party[2] for almost 20 years. It can conquer kingdoms without fighting, and sometimes with the loss of battle. It gives and resumes employments; can sink a mountain to a mole-hill, and raise a mole-hill to a mountain: has presided for many years at committees of elections; can make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish foreign ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of the nation. This goddess flies with a huge looking-glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin. In this glass you will behold your best friends, clad in coats powdered with fleurs de Us and triple crowns; their girdles hung round with chains, and beads, and wooden shoes; and your worst enemies adorned with the ensigns of liberty, property, indulgence, moderation, and a cornucopia in their hands. Her large wings, like those of a flying-fish, are of no use but while they were moist; she therefore dips them in mud, and, soaring aloft, scatters it in the eyes of the multitude, flying with great swiftness; but at every turn is forced to stoop in dirty ways for new supplies."

But what am I doing? This is not satire, but pure fact, and as such surely seditious in the best traditions of our wondrous attorney general.

Storm, clouds, and crack your cheeks.

Remora

The WP headline reads: Baghdad Panicky as War Seems Imminent and the first graf reads:

"People cleared stores of bottled water and canned food, converted sacks of Iraqi currency into dollars and waited in long queues for gasoline. Merchants fearful of looting emptied their stores of electronics and designer clothing, while soldiers intensified work on trenches and removed sensitive files from government buildings. Cars stuffed with people and household possessions drove out of the city."

Surely there must be a mistake. Isn't it the Washington Post that has insisted for over a year that Iraqis will greet American soldiers with flowers? I imagine they are simply stocking up on those essential items now, before their streets, buildings, florist shops, kids and pets are flattened by liberating American bombs. It is so hard, climbing through the rubble, to find good orchids.

This weekend we listened to a call in show -- yes, we are going crazy -- about the war. A woman called in and commented that she supported it. She remarked that the government needs to keep us secure from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. She said that 9/11 proved this.

She seemed like a reasonable American citizen. She wasn't bloodthirsty. There is a standard comment that floats around about this time to the effect that no one wants war. Of course that is nonsense. The Bush administration has wanted war since early 2002. But this woman didn't strike me as the warmongering type. The host of the show was resolutely anti-war. But, as is the case with so many anti-war people, he asked her questions about the morality of killing people. He asked her, in other words, about justifying the war morally. This, we think, is merely doing the devil's work for him. The case against the war doesn't begin with the morality of war in general. It begins with looking at the justification of this war in particular. Remarks like this woman's are simply passed off as unobvious. This P.O.V. has been released into the American system for a year by the media and the government, to devastating effect. The goal of propaganda is to make you believe what you are told instead of what you see. Here is what we have seen. We have seen two giant structures, two skyscrapers, collapse. We have seen around 3 000 people killed. And we have seen the Weapon of mass destruction that did it. It was two jet airliners. And we have discovered how they did it -- they were hijacked by men bearing boxcutters. We have seen this, and we have decided not to believe it. We have decided, instead, to believe we are threatened by secret weapons stockpiled in secret places that only the U.S. seems to know about. We have decided that Saddam Hussein is not only our enemy, but a threat that requires the deployment of 200,000 troops, the shock and awe of 3,000 missiles, and a conflict that will, according to all accounts, be extended to a two year occupation of Iraq.

The 19 hijackers cost around 1 million dollars, to wine, dine, and train. If our new doctrine is that American security over-rides international law, let's forget the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse. Any country that is both hostile to the United States and can cough up 1 million dollars is, according to this doctrine, justifiably a target.

This is madness. It is blindness. This war will not end when the press expects it to end, will be paid for out of the skin of the Iraqi people, will destroy the few shoots of civil society that exist in Northern Iraq, will entail an occupation that can only be a temptation, an overwhelming temptation, to the periodic staging of guerilla attacks, and, no doubt, the politiicization of those attacks as the Republicans try to jingo their way to re-election in 2004. The war is a crime, the excuses a sham, the warmongers a junta bound together by bad intents, and led by a man of outstanding ignorance. This is, I think, the beginning of a very bad cycle.

"It may easily be observed," wrote David Hume, "that, though free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who partake of their freedom; yet are they the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces: And this observation may, I believe, be fixed as a maxim of the kind we are here speaking of. When a monarch extends his dominions by conquest, he soon learns to consider his old and his new subjects as on the same footing; because, in reality, all his subjects are to him the same, except the few friends and favourites, with whom he is personally acquainted. He does not, therefore, make any distinction between them in his general laws; and, at the same time, is careful to prevent all particular acts of oppression on the one as well as on the other. But a free state necessarily makes a great distinction, and must always do so, till men learn to love their neighbours as well as themselves."

Goodnight David. Goodnight ladies. Goodnight sweet ladies. Good night.

Remora

Not funny, LI. Not original. Not eccentric. Not arty. Obsessive. One-noted. One- fingered. Over and over again.

Yes, we admit it. The war has sucked our very soul into the maelstrom. We see the war as more than simply the attack on Iraq -- we see it as a structure of rule. We see it as a sort of re-coding, a way of transferring and overwriting cellular codes for parasitic ends, for zombie purposes. How it is dead, and deadly, how it is leaden, how it trickles roach powder through the veins, how it perverts the fountains of inspiration and prophecy, how it pursues a cancerous course in the very ore under us and marrow within us, how it is a poison in our eyes, a narrowing of our breath, a sugar substitute in our sex. We see it as a return to deadly habits, a corpse like masturbation, churning with numb fingers the numb blind rod of no sensation whatsoever, De Sade's hoped for end, channeling a gray, waste seed into test-tubes, a sign of some essential deviation at the root, all paste and viagra and winey old men, breathed over by corruption, rich with fraud, succulent with beef fat stolen from every honest table. We see it as Gravity's Rainbow all over again.

How appropriate, as we heard on NPR today, that Stan Brakhage died this week.


Here's a quote from a Brakhage interview:

For me vision is what you see, to the least extent related to picture. It is just seeing -- it is a very simple word -- and to be a visionary is to be a seer. The problem is that most people can't see. Children can -- they have a much wider range of visual awareness -- because their eyes haven't been tutored to death by man-made laws of perspective or compositional logic. Every semester I start out by telling my students that they have to see in order to experience film and that seeing is not just looking at pictures. This simple idea seems to be the hardest to get through to people.

The War will not be subsidized.


In the dark months of 2001, as the U.S. was starting to campaign against the ever collapsable Taliban, D.C. rang with stories about post-Taliban Afghanistan. Of course, we knew that post-Taliban Afghanistan would be a paradise. US aid money flowing in. Reconstruction everywhere. Unveiled women, everywhere. Peasants and donkeys and chickens, all of them setting up little businesses, or... or franchises, on the American model, as you see it in Florida or one of those Southwest states. And when the war was won -- or when, at least, the Taliban had done its leaking act in Kabul -- the pledges became official. On April 18, 2002, Bush spoke at VMI and said:

"Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls, which works."

In order to achieve these aims, the Bush administration pledged $0.00 in its current budget. That's a little short of a Marshall Plan. That's, in fact, exactly the amount of money an absconding john leaves the whore who's in the bathroom. James Dobbins, who was Bush's envoy to Afghanistan, said about two months after Bush's statement that Afghanistan needs about 500 million dollars per year for the next few years in order to re-build. The Congress looks like it might cough up 250 million dollars this year.

One thing that should be noted about Bush's $0.00 pledge. It did not make headlines. It did not provoke controversy. It did not take up the newsspace taken up by, say, who was going to marry Joe Millionaire. It was noted by Jonathan Alter. It was noted by Josh Marshall. It might have been noted by a few more talking heads. But the country, on the whole, ignored it.

Whether that is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant. The fact is, there is no constituency for giving aid to Afghanistan. And there will not be one for giving Iraq, over the next two years, fifty to one hundred billion dollars.

Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:

1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.

2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.

3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.

4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.

The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."