Bollettino

There's been some Iraqis restlessness about the switches in their democratic, freely chosen rulers. Imagine! The ingratitude! Massoud Barzani, the Kurd leader, is quoted by the NYT as expressing a wee bit of concern about the apparent US goal of maintaining Iraq as a vaccum into which we inject our intentions. And:


"He also expressed concern about Mr. Bremer's longtime association with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whom the Kurds blame for their betrayal in the intelligence wars between Iran and Iraq three decades ago."

A point that goes right over the massed heads of the American media, who are performing the Mobius maneuver in the wake of the Blair revelations at NYT, trying to see what they ate for breakfast a week ago.

LI says: who cares?

On other fronts: LA Times, which has consistently been more on the mark about Iraq than any other major newspaper, ran a large article about Ahmad Chalabi's wonderful adventure in the Jordanian banking system Sunday. It is definitely worth reading.

The New Yorker ran a profile of Zizek last week. We asked our friend T. about it, who is a big citer of Zizek. He reports:

"...its a rather campy version of the persona that doesn't really bring-out, exactly, the guy's sense of humor and what humor DOES, psycho-socially and rhetorically. Also missed the best example of an aspect of Zizek's "style" - the essay in "Enjoy Your Symptom!" on the films of Roberto Rossilini - Zizek had never seen a film by RR (along the lines of his comment that there are many movies that he hates, but provide a good theory about any one of them and he will assert that he loved it all along). Additionally, I think that there might be a factual error in the article: "...the number of people who are equipped to discuss the works of Jacques Lacan rivals the number of those who are fluent in Slovenian..."
Anyway, read it."


And finally, we are going to comment later this week on the British Imperialism fiesta hosted by Boston U., which is a round-table about Niall Ferguson in which the Great Ferguson himself participated.

Bollettino

The mandate of heaven is a cruel and capricious spirit. Take Smilin' Jay Garner. About a month ago, Iraqis everywhere awoke after a night of bad dreams and thought, collectively, gee we'd like this non-Arab speaking weapons salesman to be the absolute Jefe of our brand spankin' new country! We don't want electricity, garbage pickup, safety from robbery, or those stinkin' museums and libraries -- we want a well protected ministry of oil! we want every exile group, as long as it is led by Ahmad Chalabi, to be supplied with American arms! And we want to give them their choice of residence in the wealthy side of Baghdad! And we want hands off Garner to preside over it all! These messages, ectoplasmically and extrasensorally delivered to the very heartland of Iraq -- Washington D.C. -- were not ignored. Smilin' Jay made a triumphant tour of the country. To reassure the Iraqi people, Smilin' Jay even tried to institute a continuity of style with the previous regime: just like Saddam, he disappeared into the presidential palace and was seen rarely thereafter in public.

But alas. The Iraqi people woke up, liberated and democratic, a week ago after a night of pleasant dreams (oh, the tax cuts that danced like sugar plumbs in their heads!) and decided no, Smilin' Jay wasn't the embodiment of Iraqi history. That honor goes, instead, to Kissinger Associates l. Paul Bremer III!


His Thirdness, being blessed by Henry Kissinger, is preparing us for a delicious treat: the high squeals of Christopher Hitchens, who has to maintain his cred by dissing Kissinger - otherwise, he's just another rightwinger in the rat pack - while tergiversating madly to rationalize our pyrate rule in Iraq. This should be good.

The Washington Post recorded L. Paul's historic maiden speech in Iraq. Here's what he said:


"It's a wonderful challenge to help the Iraqi people basically reclaim their country from a despotic regime," Bremer said in a tarmac interview minutes after his plane landed in Basra.
He spent a short while in the southern city before flying to Baghdad, where the civilian reconstruction agency is headquartered.

Asked whether he was, in effect, directing a U.S. plan to colonize Iraq, Bremer said: "The coalition did not come to colonize Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we have done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny."

A wonderful challenge? Isn't this the neutral language of the over-coached CEO, plotting the downsizing of his company? Whatever else you say about the pirates of yore, at least there was some steel in their yeahs and nays. Here's an anecdote about Blackbeard:

"One night, drinking in his cabin with Hands, the pilot, and another man, Blackbeard, without any provocation, privately draws out a small pair of pistols, and cocks them under the table. Which being perceived by the man, he withdrew and went upon deck, leaving Hands, the pilot, and the Captain together. When the pistols were ready, he blew out the candle and crossing his hands, discharged them at his company. Hands, the master, was shot through the knee and lamed for life; the other pistol did no execution. Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered by damning them, That if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was."

Surely L. Paul should consider Teach's way of disposing of extra associates. It would at least add a colorful anecdote to our colorless pillaging expedition.

Bollettino

LI recommends an essay, Anecdote and History by Lionel Grossman in this spring's History and Theory. Grossman uses the etymology of anecdote to show how the thing's semantic charge changed over time. Anekdoka was, apparently, the title of Procopius's Secret History. As it was translated into European languages, anecdote took on the meaning of unpublished, and the secondary meaning of secret history. Anybody who has read Procopius's history knows how salacious the book is: the vague reputation for tasty salacity became attached to anecdotes. Voltaire, according to Grossman, exhibited extreme contempt for the genre. In particular, the anecdote disturbed Voltaire's notion of what history -- the history of historians -- was all about. Although Grossman doesn't exactly show this outright, Voltaire's agenda, as a historian, was to rescue it from the collectioneering science of the antiquarians. For Voltaire, history's moral bound was defined by scale: history was an account of great events. Of course, Voltaire's perspectivism nuanced his idea of great events. Not every king or noble was great. The social hierarchy did not define greatness, but it did tone it.

In this way, Voltaire, far from being the grinning undertaker of the ancien regime, was its great and final ideologue. Grossman quotes, in this respect, an interesting review of Rousseau's Confessions that, while not penned by Voltaire, reflected the Voltairian vision:

Voltaire�s mostly negative judgment of anecdotes was also determined, however, by the same classical, fundamentally conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Ann�e Litt�raire to condemn Rousseau�s Confessions as an act of literary arrogance and presumption. �Where would we be now,� they protested in 1782, �if every one arrogated to himself the right to write and print everything that concerns him personally and that he enjoys recalling?�

We don't believe that Voltaire's position can fairly be called conservative. But otherwise, this is a highly revealing sentence.

According to Grossman, by the end of the eighteenth century the transition from secret history to symptomatic event was being slowly achieved -- felt, in fact, in the etymological sinews of the language. Grossman concentrates on some important figures, and quotes a marvelous anecdote of Chamfort's:

"As early as the last third of
the eighteenth century some of Chamfort�s anecdotes appear to have had such symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance�who,being drunk one night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted with the fact by the horri.ed innkeeper, calmly replied: �Add it to the bill��
seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifference of the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomatic of the personage described, the Duke of Hamilton, and�beyond him perhaps�of the social relations of a particular historical moment, that of the ancien r�gime."


Since the romantics, we have all been imbued with the idea that the essence of history is secret -- that secret histories are the truer ones. Gnosticism is thus revived among us. LI is tempted by that belief himself. Nick Tosches wrote, somewhere, that the history of this country is the history of a number of handshakes between men in dark corners of restaurants and clubs. Or he wrote something like that. Well, we think that the handshakes can be as public as the front page -- that the secret and the overt are usually not so separate, and that the best hiding place is behind the universal indifference to what doesn't disturb one's own repose for the next week.

Bollettino

Forbes has it right today in its first graf about the distasteful Richard Scrushy:


"NEW YORK - Innocent until proven guilty is still the norm in American justice, unless, of course, you are an accused drug dealer, terrorist, immigrant who looks like a terrorist or someone accused of murder. In those kinds of cases, many have been locked up before trial or have had their assets frozen. Business executives like Richard Scrushy, the fired chief executive of HealthSouth, are not on this list, so a federal judge in Alabama, exercising the default option, said he can have access to all of his assets as he prepares to defend himself against civil and potential accounting fraud charges that have been swirling around the company he founded in 1984."

Ah, yes. The danger posed by illegal immigrants to the average American citizen is immeasurably greater than the danger posed by the pillagers of pensions, the superheros of larceny, the inflators of bubbles... Not.

Let's compare a couple of randomly selected drug crimes:

Here's a story from Deerfield, Illinois. Officers there seize some 106 pounds of "high grade" marijuana. The officers immediately slap a street value on it -- as is customary -- and put five people in prison who were in the business of selling it. "If convicted, the five arrested men could face prison sentences of between six and 30 years. At a March 24 bond hearing, their bonds were set at $10 million, according to a statement released by the Deerfield Police Department."

And here's a drug crime from the Star Ledger in New Jersey:

"Citizen helps cops with arrest Thursday, May 08, 2003 A vigilant resident armed with a cell phone led Bayonne police to arrest a Jersey City man on drug charges, reports said. An unknown resident called police headquarters at about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday and said three men had just completed what appeared to be a drug deal on 17th Street and Avenue C, reports said. The resident stayed on a cell phone and told police the men were walking west on Andrew Street toward Kennedy Boulevard, reports said. A patrol car headed to the area, and officers saw Heston Hazelwood, 23, of Fulton Street, who appeared to be unwrapping something in his hands, police said. The officers showed their badges to Hazelwood, who dropped a cigar to the ground and put something in his pocket, reports said. The officers recovered a small bag of suspected marijuana from Hazelwood's pocket, reports said. Police said Hazelwood asked the officers, "Just let me go. It's only trees," using a slang term for marijuana. Hazelwood was arrested and charged with possession of less than 50 grams of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia, reports said."

The bet here is that Hazelwood will serve more time for trees than Scrushy will serve for robbing HealthSouth of about 10 to 100 million dollars.

We searched about in Montesquieu for an appropriate comment on Scrushy. Here's one:

"Les gens des conditions les plus basses ne d�sirent d'en sortir que pour �tre les ma�tres des autres.

Il en est de m�me de la frugalit�. Pour l'aimer, il faut en jouir. Ce ne seront point ceux qui sont corrompus par les d�lices qui aimeront la vie frugale; et, si cela avait �t� naturel ou ordinaire, Alcibiade n'aurait pas fait l'admiration de l'univers. Ce ne seront pas non plus ceux qui envient ou qui admirent le luxe des autres qui aimeront la frugalit� : des gens qui n'ont devant les yeux que des hommes riches, ou des hommes mis�rables comme eux, d�testent leur mis�re, sans aimer ou conna�tre ce qui fait le terme de la mis�re.

C'est donc une maxime tr�s vraie que, pour que l'on aime l'�galit� et la frugalit� dans une r�publique, il faut que les lois les y aient �tablies."

Eventually, a threshold of inequality is crossed. We are crossing that meridien in this country, and we will reap the results, and we will not like it.

Bollettino

Let their way be dark and slippery:
and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.
7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit,
which without cause they have digged for my soul.
8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares;
and let his net that he hath hid catch himself:
into that very destruction let him fall .
-Psalm 35

You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse George Bush, but you can't legally threaten him.

So our question tonight is: what does that mean?

Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, that bunch of stinking losers.

There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:

"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5). On the other hand, our savior enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit, he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse.

Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay about cursing in the Studies in English Literature, winter 03 (unavailable on line, alas), by Mary Steibel, which takes the case of Jane Shore. Jane Shore was King Edward the IV's concubine. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:

"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"
Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.

Steibel tries to infuse a feminist color to her view of cursing:" If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his bo dy, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."

Well, we aren't sure about this. Is the curse really subversive? And is that subversion really tied up with the woman's position -- and is that position most typically that of a witch? This seems an overhasty conclusion, especially when the most powerful sequence of curses in the play come at the end, and they come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"

Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.

Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."



The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.

Miscellanea

Limited Edition is too charming for words -- especially for those of us who grew up reading Victorian novels and mentally immersed in the English countryside. The magazine takes an antiquarian interest in Oxfordfordshire, and sends its reporters out to get the scoop on such hot stories as the latest ancient pots exhibit in the Wallingford Museum. Ourselves, we loved this piece about Anthony a Wood. Here are the first three grafs:

"A conceited, impudent coxcomb, is how a contemporary described Anthony a Wood, a 17th-century historian and antiquary with a genius for alienating people.

Born in 1632 in a house called Postmasters Hall facing Merton College gate, he studied at Merton and lived almost his entire life in Oxford.

Wood occupied two garrets at the top of the family house, making himself a hermit�s cell there where he pored over his books and papers. When he did venture out he managed to feud with just about everyone he knew: scholars, family and friends alike."

Hmm. Sounds like LI. Here's a bit of unexpected confirmatory evidence for Elias' Civilizing process thesis, to which we alluded a few posts ago:

"Through its pages [Wood's journal] we see unruly scholars stealing geese at Wolvercote; the spread of the pox in Oxford; panic in the city as the sky darkens with smoke-clouds from the great fire of London; the disgraceful behaviour of Charles II�s courtiers who, on quitting Oxford, �leave their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, careless."

We have the same problem with Bush's courtiers.

Woods was a cantakerous fella, but he did like to play a jig now and then. He liked to disguise himself as a poor country musician and, with similarly disguised colleagues, stroll about from country green to country green regaling the interested with various airs. "After playing at Kidlington, however, they were overtaken by a group of soldiers who forced them to play in an open field and then left without giving a penny. �Most of my companion,� wrote Wood, �would afterwards glory in this, but I was ashamed, and could never endure to hear of it.�

And since we are strolling about the magazine scene, shouts out to our friend Lorin Stein for his piece in the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, you have to fork over bucks to read it on-line. Lorin reviews Aleksandar Hemon's novel, Nowhere Man. It is a very pretty review. So check it out at a news stand.

Bollettino

Michael Kinsley is a puzzle to LI. He could have been a much greater writer than he is -- he definitely has the elements. There are columnists like George Will who write much worse -- Will, in fact, has one of the highest proportions of drivel to memorable graf in the industry --but who have attained disproportionate respect because they are sporadically sesquipedalian. Forget them. There are times that the spirit of Murray Kempton himself seems to hover round Kinsley.

That he has chosen to bank his major time in editing and tv shows that writing isn't the lure for some... Go figure.

His column about Bad Bill Bennett's Gambling prob is a thing of beauty and a joy for a newscycle parasec. Here's the beginning of it.

"Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend�that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit�has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all."

The rest of it styles with as magnificent a swish. Lovely stuff.