Bollettino

"cacerolada"

We had a friend who used to get so wrapped up in soap operas that she would write to them, adumbrating her own original views of the ongoing dilemmas agonizing the characters. It was as if she considered these characters real in the sense that they could benefit from her advice. In a way, LI thinks that we are engaged in a similar bout of unfettered fantasy. All we do on this site, lately, is ruminate endlessly about a war we are powerless to change.

So -- we recognize we are demented. Okay? Sometimes, common sense dictates that fantasy overwhelm common sense.

So let's zip around to interesting stories. The NYT has a small piece about a Spanish protest that seems much more clever than lying down in the streets. Banging pots. We always love pot banging. Pot banging doesn't have an ideology. They banged pots against Allende in Chili. I'm sure there was some pot banging in Venezuala last year. Surely this goes way back. In Piero di Cosimo's The Discovery of Honey, circa 1499, Satyrs bang pots to drive bees to a tree. I wonder if the custom of banging those pots is related to this obvious folk custom? Of course, in the Allende case, it was supposed to represent the empty pots of the middle class.

In any case... now they are banging pots against our intrepid coalition ally, Aznar, the man whose support for Bush has resulted in Spain sending a battalion of spirtual troops to accompany our boys. Yes, the ghosts of Cortez and Franco have been dispatched, post haste, to Kuwait --- that'll put the fear of God into em!


Here are the intro grafs:

"ADRID, March 27 � The lights in Madrid and Barcelona went off tonight and the kitchenware came out, as thousands of people responding to a call for an antiwar blackout banged pots and pans together in a noisy protest against the war in Iraq. An environmental group urged citizens to join in a noise-making "cacerolada" in Madrid's Plaza Mayor at 10 p.m., to coincide with another call to turn out the lights.

But the protest seemed to spread spontaneously across the city, with many neighborhoods resounding to the sound of banging metal. Adding to the cacophony in Catalonia, drivers honked their horns, while fire-stations sounded their sirens."


Krugman bangs his usual pot in his op ed today. It makes a beautiful sound; but, of course, it could be one hand clapping for all the attention it will get. He points out that Cheney's energy commission, convened during the California brown outs, was thoroughly misguided, mistaking a problem that resulted from industry-wide collusion for one that was caused by too much environmentalism. As Krugman also points out, since Cheney conferred almost solely with the colluders, it isn't surprising that he pooh-poohed the communist, or at least Democrat, idea of corporate manipulation. Who, us manipulate? That view is now the official view of Bush's own FERC. As a final kicker, we won't know whether Cheney's friends profited themselves, or how clued in he was to the reality of the situation, since access to the records of his meetings have been completely blocked.

And finally -- Richard Perle, that patriot of patriots, has reluctantly put personal profit over officially sanctioned warmongering and resigned his semi-official position with the Bush administration. The story here has been building for the last two weeks, ever since Perle stupidly denounced an article by Sy Hersch in the New Yorker by saying that Hersch was a 'terrorist'. Since then, Perle's finances have been investigated by the Times. He's responded not by keeping quiet, but by stirring up the rightwing troops. Here's a bit of the interview he gave NewsMax:

According to a recent editorial by New York Times columnist and full-time Bush-hater Maureen Dowd, Perle may have a conflict of interest in that he is a member of the Pentagon�s Defense Advisory Board. Perle called Dowd�s claims a fabrication. "Absolutely, categorically untrue," he said."Maureen Dowd's view of this is very misleading. Ms. Dowd's recent editorial suggested that I was retained to 'help overcome Pentagon resistance' to the proposed sale of Global Crossing to Hutcheson Whampoa. That is not why I was retained," Perle asserted."I have not been retained by Hutcheson Whampoa, nor have I been retained by Global Crossing to represent them in any way with the U.S. government. I have been retained by Global Crossing to help them put together a security arrangement that is acceptable to the U.S. government."

Which, of course, isn't true. This story burned Perle because the rightwing campers aren't about to get all soft and mushy about Global Crossing. They hate Global Crossing. They hate the idea of Global Crossing going communist. Wierdly enough, the same NewsMax people who are putting Perle under 24 hour protection against the wild Bush haters out there in the spreading darkness published a three parter just last month that could have been entitled, how do I hate thee, Global Crossing? Let me count the ways...

First two grafs went:


"Li Ka Shing has lost the first round in his effort to take over Global Crossing. Li's bid for the defunct telecommunications giant failed before a U.S. national security committee charged with oversight.
"The credit for causing Li's failure must be distributed evenly to both NewsMax and our readers for passing so many valuable tips about the reclusive billionaire to the FBI. In the end, Li had to withdraw his offer to buy Global Crossing because he knew it would fail."

There are certain rules that apply even to the aberrant right. One of them is that your readers can't be passing many valuable tips to the FBI, on the one hand, and then be expected to admire a man hired by the group the FBI is supposed to be suppressing, on the other.

However, this does say something about Perle's hubris. Did he really expect to get away with getting more than a half mill from Global Crossing? He might as well have contracted to do PR work for Saddam Hussein. The man is obviously a little ... shall we say, vain?

The Bush haters (otherwise known as the NYT) had the satisfaction of reporting that Perle has resigned:

"WASHINGTON, March 27 � Richard N. Perle resigned today as chairman of an influential Pentagon advisory board in the wake of disclosures that his business dealings included a recent meeting with a Saudi arms dealer and a contract to advise a communications company that is seeking permission from the Defense Department to be sold to Chinese investors."

However, the letter of the victory is less than the spirit. He is still a member of the damn board. His contract with Global Crossing is premised on him making 600,000 dollars if he gets results. I'd still bet on him making his 600 grand.

Bollettino

Are we so obvious? You know, we thought it was a good gag, pretending that Tony Blair was being played by a double. We thought it rather magnificently parodied the misinformation coming out of the Pentagon, and made a little poison point. But alas, our little jest seems to have been independently discovered by loads of other people. For the funniest double joke, read the Guardian article about the Dubya double.
We admit, these grafs are good:

"Most of those who regularly monitor Mr Bush's speech patterns believe that it was the genuine article who spoke at Central Command HQ in Florida yesterday, pointing to a characteristic tendency toward quasi-biblical phrasing - "There will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing in near" - and an almost total absence of words of more than three syllables.

Other experts disagree, pointing out that these consistencies originate with speech writers rather then the president himself, and that Bush's main vocal technique - the bewildered pause - is only too easy to imitate."

Which reminds us -- we heard the Bush-Blair press conference this morning, and the leader of the free world was cruising in his retarded frat boy mode. Bush is obviously petrified by the prospect of getting asked questions by journalists. It tortures him. When asked about the absense of a coalition in this war, Bush responded -- this is from memory: "We got allies. We got allies and allies and allies." He was obviously trying to remember the name of one. Too bad he didn't come up with Cameroon -- just to see how he'd pronounce it. Blair eventually interjected himself, in a fatherly way, and the question was diverted Blairishly, which is almost as good as being answered.

Bollettino

There's a funny article in Slate today going after Johnny Apple, the NYT's instant theory man. Apple's had the black mark on his forehead ever since Bush called him an asshole in a public forum, and was overheard, and was embarrassed. It's an indirect form of lese majeste, but Apple must suffer for it. Jack Shafer, who is doing his duty to guard his country, makes the point that Apple was exaggeratedly negative about our great adventure in Afghanistan -- which is turning, in the light of our current war, into the pundit's golden age. Weren't we the boys back then!

Apple apparently once wrote a piece saying we risked getting into a quagmire in Afghanistan. Look what happened: we toppled the Taliban toute suite! Now Apple writes a piece that we risk getting into a quagmire in Iraq; thus, by the rule of substitution, Saddam Hussein must be in the bag.

This is an excellent example of the reasoning power of those journalists who are embedded in that most dangerous front-line city, D.C. In fact, Shafer seems so emboldened by Apple's piss poor forecasting record that he allows himself a funny:

"Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco."

Which goes to show that Shafer must explore much rougher sections of San Francisco than are advised even by the most hardcore S/M guides. For the latest on the governability of Afghanistan, here's an excerpt from a recent Boston Globe article:


"KABUL -- US forces have clashed with fighters loyal to an Afghan warlord in an incident that could turn the renegade commander, a former US ally, against the Americans and undermine the shaky peace in a sensitive border area, Afghan officials said yesterday.

There were differing accounts of the fighting, which may have killed as many as 13 of the warlord's men, including his eldest son."

Hmm. I don't remember Willie Brown, the mayor of S.F., experiencing the loss of his son to a firefight with the U.S. army, but I guess we can take Shafer's word that the S.F. and Afghanistan are mirror images of each other. Perhaps Slate, as an experiment, ougt to unscrew the guy from his D.C. desk and lauch him into the streets of Gardez to experience the wonders of the order the contemptible Mr. Apple predicted would be difficult to establish. Here's what is happening there:

"Khan Zadran alienated both the Afghan government and the Americans by rocketing cities to wrest power from his rivals, including a notorious attack on Gardez in which 13 locals were killed. His brutal methods raised questions about the US military's judgment in choosing Afghan allies; he was dropped from the coalition last fall. But his militia fighters still operate roadblocks where local people complain of harassment, extortion, and kidnapping."

The wonders of the democracy that we have unleashed on these people, like the ways of a man with a woman, and the ways of the fish undersea, make me praise the almighty. In fact, it makes me feel all Hitchenish all over!

Belligeranti

There is a tic to which the belligeranti have become much addicted. A rhetorical tic.

To illustrate, take this rather typical piece from Christopher Hitchens. He is in full regalia, bucking us up in a Daily Mirror piece called (hats off to Kipling) We must keep our nerve. Hitchens goes through the drill -- the so called peace marchers are hypocrites. Saddam Hussein is the bloodiest thing since heart surgery sans anaesthetic. Peace marchers love Saddam Hussein. The coalition forces are brave boys. The coalition forces are making fine progress. The Iraqi soldiers are terrorists. The Iraqi people would really be strewing flowers in the streets if they weren't so fearful about the above mentioned tyrant -- did I mention that Saddam Hussein is a bloody tyrant? The peace marchers protested against the Afghanistan war, didn't they, the peace, or so called peace, or really friends of totalitarianism, marchers. They are weak headed or sinister. Etc.

That about covers the cognitive content. He was obviously telephoning this one in. Or perhaps sending it in with an automatic guidance system, like one of his much beloved cruise missiles.

But then C.H. reaches deep into his personal feelings. He, too, would be upset telling Mrs. Bum in East Bum that her hubby or son had lost a leg, or perhaps his or her life, depending, in the course of this bold and just war, if he had to. Yes, if the Government for instance hired him for that job, and he'd been fired from Vanity Fair, or somethihg. Yes, even C.H. might shudder a bit, but he'd do his part. Message: we must keep our nerve.

Then we get the drumroll: "However, there is both honour and glory in being able to demolish the palaces and cellars of a murdering dictatorship, inflicting so few incidental casualties (and taking such obvious care to minimize them) that the propaganda of Saddam's goons can produce almost no genuine victims to gloat over."

And then we get this little driblet of prose:

"I feel disgust for those who blame this week's deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein."

The "I feel disgust" locution, and its cousins, have become very popular among the belligeranti. As we noted in the last post, Kanan Makiya was feeling disgust for all those clueless antiwar friends of his calling him up and saying bummer about the bombing, dude. And Andrew Sullivan feels disgust on almost every post.

Now, disgust has been much discussed in recent years, partly due to William Miller's book, Anatomy of Disgust. I've only read Miller's book on courage, but there is an extensive and interesting essay by Martha Nussbaum on Miller's book that articulates his theory and Nussbaum's objections.

According to Nussbaum:

"Miller's book has three goals: to analyze the emotion of disgust; to give an account of when and where people experience disgust in daily life and in the sexual realm; and to investigate the role of disgust in morals and politics. Many writers about disgust have treated it as a bare feeling, with little or no cognitive content. Miller argues powerfully that this approach is inadequate. Disgust actually has a very complex and sophisticated cognitive content. Disgust is "about something and in response to something." It is not like a stomach flu: it "necessarily involves particular thoughts, characteristically very intrusive and unriddable thoughts, about the repugnance of that which is its object." These thoughts revolve around the notion of a particular type of danger for the self, "the danger inherent in pollution and contamination, the danger of defilement." Disgust evaluates its object both as base and as a threat. Thus it is closely linked both to fear (for the self) and to contempt (for the object).'

Actually, the idea that the antiwar people might contaminate Hitchens or pollute him is not implausible. At one time, after all, he was with the "Left" -- a resume that he is going to retire on. You cannot really be a rightwing writer without once having been a leftist. It gives you credibility. This is a puzzle: on the left, having once been a rightwinger gives you no credibility at all. Why should repentence should be so attractive to one side, and so unattractive to the other? Hmm.

But to get back to the "I am disgusted" locution.

The thing about the Daily Mail column is that clearly Hitchens doesn't really feel disgust. There's no emotional fervor here. Perhaps, however, he is reporting a disgust he once felt, and is simply applying the conventional fiction that that particular feeling is prolonged in the report of it. Interestingly, according to Nussbaum, Miller finds the roots of disgust in a certain aversion to life itself -- its fats and sweats and sperm and smells -- and he also claims that the aversion to life -- a sort of death drive -- is characteristically transposed to sex. Disgust has an important role to play in ascesis -- it is, indeed, the favored disciplinary instrument. From St. Anthony regarding a corpse to Christopher Hitchens regarding a peace marcher, there is a clear conceptual continuity.

Still, let's say that C.H. feels disgust at one remove, why report it?

Miller follows a Freudian path about disgust -- that is, he sees disgust intimately connected to desire. This idea has been done to death in the last twenty years, with a lot of speculation built into the idea of the male gaze. The lure of disgust is not only that one will be disgusted, but that one will be aroused. Was it Martin Amis who wrote that the problem with watching pornography is that you never know when you will see something you like that you don't really ever want to know that you'll like?

Some interesting experiments have been done about the psychology of moral feelings, trying to disentangle, if possible, the emotional content of disgust from that of disapproval. Nicols Shaun, a philosophy professor at Charleston College, has written a little paper on this topic: Norms with Feeling: Towards a Psychological Account of Moral Judgment
Shaun considers a series of experiments involving psychopaths in British prisons (hey, the application of this to Hitchens, Sullivan et al. is up to you, gentle reader) that aimed at filling out a notion of Lorenz's about evolved aversion ot inter-species violence. Now, we think Lorenz's idea about this has been pretty well exploded by every study in ethology since. Still, Shaun's point isn't against Lorenz, it is that the experiments are skewed by a body of assumptions about the relation between affective and normative judgements.

There's a term used by Shaun that makes sense, when applied to the belligeranti -- distress cues. Let's take the idea of pack journalism literally, for a moment --that is, that the kind of pro-war journalism we've seen, and its reception by a circumscribed constituency, has created a pack, which is a particular kind of crowd. In a pack, reporting a distress cue like "I am disgusted" -- which, Derrideans among us would surely agree, encrypts another verbal report, I disgust, and repulses it in the same grammatical moment -- is a signal to attack. If disgust is a fear of contamination, the thing to be destroyed must be destroyed so that it doesn't contaminate. We must, in other words, be Friedenrein, in order to achieve real peace -- that is, peace without pollution.

This little phenomenological excursus is an attempt to understand a puzzling thing about certain of the belligeranti: the obvious, visible decay of their writing abilities. Christopher Cauldwell, who is as pro-war as any Weekly Standard writer, is still a fine writer. There's been no deterioration in his prose that I can spot. Christopher Cauldwell is rarely disgusted -- he is, more frequently, fascinated. He operates as a sort of Malcolm Gladwell of the right. But with Hitchens there has been an alarming collapse. I'd say that counterfeiting the distress cue of "I am disgusted by" -- by keying his piece, and most of his pieces, to pseudo-disgust -- Hitchens old lefty ideology is getting its revenge in creating a lifeless (corpselike, aversive) prose. Interesting that being disgusted by should lead, by such insensible steps, to being disgusting.

Bollettino

Ceasefire and the intellectuals

In Edward Lascelles Life of Charles James Fox, there�s a passage that describes the formation of the peace cabinet. The Whig opposition, at this point, had been guided both philosophically and strategically by Edmund Burke. The great unifying issue was peace with the North American colonies. In 1782, to negotiate the peace, a government formed under Lord Shelburne, but no cabinet post was found for Burke. This has always been a bit of a puzzle for historians. This is Lascelles explanation:

The exalted spirit of Burke might have upheld Whig principles in the Cabinet, but no place was found for him. His omission was probably due less to the aristocratic exclusiveness of a Whig administration than to the fact that the Whigs doubted whether Burke, with all his inspiring genius, possessed either the self-control or the judgment necessary for a cabinet minister.

Now, that is the kind of thing that drives Burke�s fans crazy. Whether it was true of Burke or not, it is surely true that the intellectual vice, in politics, is lack of self-control and judgment. We�ve been pondering this since reading Kanan Makiya�s intemperate, and pretty much politically suicidal, entries in his TNR weblog.

Solzhenitsyn, however he had set his face against the Soviet regime, never wished for bombs to rain down on Moscow. Even Adenauer avoided, as far as we know, celebrating publicly the mass incineration of Dresden. But here is the kind of thing that rolls right off of Makiya�s pen, and is referenced with approval by innumerable belligeranti:

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because "their" country is bombing "mine." To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.'

This is the sadder insofar as it is obviously a case of a man who has lost his sense of limits by allowing himself to be endlessly coddled by the ultra-hawks, who form a sort of guard of enablers around those who they grossly embrace (it is, by the way, a little hard to believe that Makiya is getting a lot of emails from antiwar activists. It must be spam). The same thing has been happening to Blair, even if, for him, the threshold of temptation is much lower. If, as I hope is still possible, a ceasefire is enforced in Iraq � a more interesting possibility at this point than when the war started, and more obviously to the American interest than anyone in the American press is allowing (is there anyone in the American press who is even considering it?) � one of the provisions of it, to please the ever liberating Bush administration, would be to include the exile community in the devolution of the power on the ground to Iraqis.

Self-censorship seems, according to an admiring profile of Kanan Makiya, to be a terrible struggle for the man. It�s easy to understand Makiya having the thought that the bombs should come down � LI has entertained a treasonous thought or too ourselves during the last week. But to express it is merely forging the knife that will be used to cut your throat. For what? What grand gesture needs to be made so badly?

Perhaps there is something to the theory that intellectuals and tyrants are secret sharers of each other�s characters. Tyrants, too, are enamored of metaphors. The elided 'like," the hidden 'as if" -- these seem impossible for the totalitarian mindset to sense. Only the intoxicating power of one's own rhetoric explains how Makiya could move from the idea that "country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp" to the idea that the bombing is music to his ears. Guess what? the people the bombs kill -- the school kid, the vending cart guy, the mother -- probably don't think of themselves as concentration camp inmates. In fact, given that metaphor, there is no reason for Saddam H. to build concentration camps, or political prisons -- what, after all, would be the point?

...And so all distinction is overthrown -- a very bad sign of the times.

bollettino

A wonderful reader, Ms. B. Bush from Houston Texas, writes:

"We often say that God has blessed America, but we really don't pay attention to the daily miracles proving that this is indeed so. We are so richly blessed as a nation! But I'm especially heartened by the the way God multiplies our enemies when we kill them. We first noticed this in Vietnam. We would kill 40 Vietcong, and overnight they would multiply to 80, and be reported as 90.. God was working along lines he'd first laid down in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, except that this time he was working with the U.S. Military; which is, frankly, a more prepared force than the itinerant preacher he favored in times of yore.

The miracle is happening again. Yesterday, the U.S. Military was engaged by the terrorist Iraqis. At first it looked like 150 fell -- but lo and behold! God multiplied those dead. Here's the AP Story:

"Defense officials also revised to 350 the number of Iraqi forces killed in fierce fighting Tuesday for a key Euphrates River crossing about 90 miles south of Baghdad. The number had been widely estimated Tuesday at more than 150 Iraqi fighters and possibly as many as 500. No American casualties were reported from the battle, which pitted an American armored division against Iraqi infantry."

Now, the U.S. Military's favor in the eyes of providence in this war is not limited to the dead. No sir, don't you think so! God has been working another miracle in our favor, the miracle of the prisoners. One thousand Iraqi prisoners will surrender to our side, and in an hour's time -- just in time for the media to report it, without fear or favor -- they will have multiplied to 8,000. In fact, the division that is fighting the British in Basra right now was reported to have surrendered lock, stock and barrel on the first day of the invasion. This is theologically puzzling, to me. But this letter, Mr. Limited Inc (what a funny name you have!) is more about a terrible loop hole in the ongoing miracle. It is this: let's say Saddam finds out about all this. He's evil and all. So let's say he surrenders his 60,000 troops to us -- they will multiply eightfold in a mere couple of hours. If he keeps doing this, within a week's time there will be more Iraqis than Americans! This is a weapon of mass destruction he cannot be allowed to get a-hold of!
On to Baghdad, say I, before he surrenders!"

Bollettino

I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.
-- Ken Adelman, WP


Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
-- Donna Summer

For the latest cake and casualties from Iraq, here's a link to abtv's shots of civilian casualties. Luckily, we are being protected from this kind of shocking image thing in the States. It might make us reconsider dessert, and it will certainly only help the terrorists. Now back to our regularly scheduled program, Pastries and Politics with President Bush.