Bollettino

Casualty counts: "At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation.The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll if it is ever tallied is sure to be significantly higher."

Hobhouse

The extraordinary things you can find on the Internet. John Cam Hobhouse is a name that will be familiar to any Byron devotee. He was the occassion for some of Byron's best, because most spiteful and most explicit, letters. Well, there is a site that is putting up his diary. A rum thing, as Hobhouse himself might have said. Mr. Roast Beef in Venice is pretty funny. The first entries, which describe a circumcision with all the fuss of a man who is both a prude and bears a strong prejudice against Jews -- Hobhouse's snooty anti-semitism is of a very English kind - is a complete hoot. We recommend it. Here are a couple of grafs from it:

I went to the circumcision room � the rabbins were not to be known by their dress, nor did I make out that any ceremony had commenced, when two men in plain clothes sat down next to each other and sung recitative out of two little books, talking to each other and the company at intervals. Presently two enormously stout fellows threw strips of silk over their shoulders, and one, sitting down in a chair, put three or four pillows on his knees. The instruments were in a dish prepared � a sort of thin prong to hold the prepuce over the glass and prevent the latter from being cut, a sharp thin knife, a pair of scissors and a lancet, together with some balsam and a rag. The poor little red child, only eight days old, was brought in � the singing continued between the two who now stood up and approached the man with the pillows � the infant being stripped below was then laid on the pillows � the rabbins stood by and sung � the operator in half minute threw the prepuce, a considerable piece of flesh, in the plate, and I saw the infant covered with the blood. He screamed violently � the operator then ran his thumbnail violently round between the teguments of the [ ]ended rim of the flesh and sucked the parts. Owing to some mistake, the wine with which he was to wash his mouth was not ready, and was at last given to him in some confusion by the rabbins, who still continued their mummery and recitative, the child screaming and the father crying in the corner.

A Jew told Lewis [ Monk Lewis, staying with Byron at that moment] that the fault of the family was troppo di sensibilit�15 � the operator then powdered the wounded part and then covered it with a balsamed rag and powdered it again � then bandaged it up raw and bloody and delivered the child to a nurse. The singing ceased, and the men pulled off their silk and the ceremony was declared over.

The foreskin was carefully preserved in a bottle, and became the trophy of the operator who I understood had 800 such, and would bury them with him. Lewis, however, supposed that the prepuce is buried with its original owner. We made enquiries, and found that any man may operate who has served an apprenticeship and has suffered his thumbnail to grow to a proper length. I was shown a thumbnail then in a state of pupillage for the purpose: long, dirty.

This is a brutal ceremony � lasts longer than I thought and is more bloody � and I should think, painful. It is the height of indecency to ask women to assist at it. My young ladies, the doctor�s daughters, told me that the moment the child was taken out of the room � on a signal given, all the women cried, or seemed to cry, and continued until the young Jew was brought back. The name is given on this occasion. The conversazione lasted for some time � afterwards cakes and chocolate and water dashed with aniseed were handed round and the ladies and gentlemen began again to mix and to make merry upon the morning�s exploit. I came home and read a little, dined, walked out by myself in the evening � supped at Byron�s � read Tales of my Landlord at night."

Hobhouse has always been simply a name to me. The site is devoted to Hobby-O. As is evident from the diary, although prudish, Hobhouse was not a man to blanche at a description. He wanted Byron's memoirs published -- but of course they were burnt by the odious Thomas Moore, sentimental fig eater that he was. LI, in this age in which the forces of progress have once again joined up with the forces of puritanism to try to ban everything that can be construed as unhealthy (such as smoking in bars -- a ban which we trust, here in Austin, is on its way to being overturned, thanks to the defeat of Margot Clarke for City Council), while of course hypocritically ignoring what is really unhealthy - namely, the conditions in which our meat is slaughtered, or our petrochemicals are woven into useable molecular patterns down there in Cancer Gulch in Louisiana, or the way in which each American citizen drains as much energy from Gaia in a year as a sperm whale -- anyway, LI has a lively sympathy for figures who live in ages of transition between a dominant proper appreciation of the body's appetites and a dominant abhorrence of same, finds Hobhouse an interesting figure. The diary entries on the web were supposedly repressed when his diary came to be published:

"John Cam Hobhouse�s diary is one of the two major texts written about Byron by his contemporaries which has (July 2002) still to see the full light of day � though it is about much more than Byron, for Hobhouse became, as he cast off his Byronic shackles, a significant political figure in his own right. The sections on his two Napoleonic French excursions � on both of which he went without Byron � are worth books in themselves. His weeks in Newgate, just before he was elected MP for Westminster, will be included. However, the extent to which he played Sancho to Byron�s Quixote - Pylades to Byron�s Orestes - Hal to Byron�s Falstaff - Horatio to Byron�s Hamlet - Celia to Byron�s Rosalind � cannot be exaggerated, and will have justice done to it."

Go to it, reader. Download. Enjoy.

Bollettino

Further thoughts on Israel and Palestine.

As we said before, we doubt that the roadmap to peace is either a roadmap, or one that leads to peace. The problem, as we see it, of Israel and Palestine is that both are states claiming legitimacy as representatives of a mystical ethnic group: the Jews, on the one side, the Palestinians, on the other. This isn't to say that ethnic division isn't sufficient for the claim of nationhood - this would be way too unrealistic. Our point, rather, is that ethnic purity is not a claim that a nation can put forward - at least, a civilized nation. We've seen this war fought before - in 1860, in the U.S. - in 1939, in Europe - and in the innumerable small skirmishes that make up the resistance to apartheid, in South Africa.

Martha Nussbaum wrote a famous essay on the cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism - at least it was famous in the 90s. She references the cynic, Diogenes, as the first man who said he was a citizen of the world - and she digs into what that meant for the Stoics, who adopted it during the eclipse of Greek state-nation power. The stoic ideal had, of course, a tremendous influence on the humanists, and on the philosophes. Since the Bush White House is supposedly bursting at the seams with eager Straussians, perhaps they will want to plunge into their copies of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace - a sort of cosmopolitan manifesto, insofar as Kant was capable of writing a manifesto. The first two points are interesting:

1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War"; and 2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation" One can take the last point as the typical reactionary defense formation of the small German states in the face of the threat of Prussia - or France. But Kant, who is a thoroughgoing philosopher, binds the second point to the wording of his more famous categorical imperative. Just as the duty forbids treating a person as an object, so, too, the usurpation of the power of one state by another is a violation of a state's subjective autonomy: it is to treat the state as a thing: "A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived."

We've never thought Kant's argument about thinghood, and its morally low status, was very convincing; but we recognize its resonance with the whole moral thematic of liberal politics. Actually, if it wouldn't entail a long detour, we think we could make a convincing case for cynical thinghood as the moral basis of cosmopolitanism -- but never mind that. The thing to hold in mind here, qua Israel and Palestine, is that enforced respect which, at least, allows the cosmopolitan moment. Practically, that would mean the building of certain transnational institutions between Palestine and Israel, such as a court that could fairly try both the encouragers of suicide bombing and the killing of civilians by soldiers. This would provide another route for retaliation, instead of the routes followed by both parties, as in today's paper -- and tomorrow's, and tomorrow's...

LI doesn't believe our suggestion is going to be followed, of course � we hasten to say that. But we do think a real peace plan would address the causes of hostility, instead of endlessly bargaining settlers against the repression of terrorists. Finally, there's a lot to be said for Kant's sixth point:

"6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State";
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision, the issue of the conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment of God") decides on which side justice lies. But between states no punitive war (bellum punitivum) is conceivable, because there is no relation between them of master and servant."

Oops. The Straussians aren't going to like that phrase about there being "no relation between them of master and servant." Kant, as always, goes too far! Out with the guy -- let's get another court philosopher. How about Tom DeLay?

Bollettino

First, the weekend casualty count. One soldier and five others were wounded near Tikret on Saturday, which provoked the usual wierd dissimilarity in casualty count reports -- and this from this morning:

"BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a U.S. soldier at a checkpoint in western Iraq, a military statement said Monday. U.S. troops returned fire, killing one person and capturing a second.

An undetermined number of attackers pulled up late Sunday to the roadblock near the Syrian border and requested medical help for a person in the car. They then pulled pistols and shot the soldier, said a statement released by the U.S. Central Command.

Troops responded, killing one person and capturing a second. At least one other assailant fled in the vehicle."

Second, Lew Wasserman.

We read the excerpts from Connie Bruck's bio in the New Yorker. Frankly, we were a bit disappointed. Lew Wasserman was the evil genius head of MCA. The man, if Dan Moldea is to be believed, who made Ronald Reagan. The man, we believe, who created the blue-print for the business organization of the nineties: that blending of technostructure and entrepreneurial scurrying, with its outrageous bonuses and its hole-ridden accounting. The conduit for the mob style in American capitalism -- which is appropriate, as the mob simply decoded and encoded the older style of American capitalism, the strike breaking formula from the 1880s and 90s, applying that violence towards the tender markets in those chemistry experiments we all love to perform on our bodies.

Richard Schickel, one time movie reviewer for Life Magazine, has a nice review in the LAT. Here are two grafs rendering a thumbnail sketch that is a pleasant reminder of what Luce magazine writers could do, unloosed on a subject:

"Wasserman was a sleek, taciturn man, except when people gave him answers he didn't want to hear. Then he became a screaming tyrant, capable of reducing grown men to tears. He would not take "no" for an answer. Or, for that matter, a busy signal. His secretary was obliged to fake emergencies so Lew could break right through to his next victim. Since power begets power, he became the man Washington listened to on all sorts of matters. There's no doubt that all his libidinal energy went into the business. He and his wife had separate bedrooms, and, according to Bruck, she had a number of discreet affairs, which her husband tolerated. Why not? He knew no stud, however adorable, could match the potency of his power.

Was some of that power derived from organized crime? MCA in its band-booking days had a rich web of connections with Chicago's gangland, and the mobsters moved west about the time MCA did. Bruck, like Kennedy before her, labors hard to link Wasserman and his company to the "outfit." We do not for a moment doubt that link. After all, his best friend for 50 years was Sidney Korshak, whose position as mouthpiece for the Chicago syndicate was a matter of long-standing suspicion. But no more than Kennedy can she document a connection. That's the way these things work -- a nod, a smile, a frown, and useful outcomes occur. It may be that ultimate power resides in the ability to make underlings anticipate its desires."

A couple of years ago, in Los Angeles, LI had breakfast with a man who was full to the gills of injuries Israel had received from Yassar Arafat. LI, not as knowledgeable about this subject, was full, at least to the butt, with the ills Israeli had inflicted on Palestinians. The conversation proceeded down the usual dead end, although we didn�t end up throwing the usual acrimonious phrases at each other. It was breakfast, and it was L.A., for God�s sake.


We've thought about this argument since then. Since Bush made his Middle Eastern tour, the newspapers have been dutifully filled with analyses of the chances, this time, that the roadmap to peace will get us somewhere. And readers, I would guess, except for those most passionately involved in the issues, have drifted off. In the reign of good King Jimmy Carter, this was a new and vibrant thing. Since, it has become one of the ornaments of American presidencies � each one of them has to have their brand new plan for peace in the Middle East. Each one, of course, fails.

It is easy to say peace, and there is no peace. Jeremiah is still right, but since God is dead, I demand another explanation (Or was that Isaiah?) In our humble opinion, the main issue isn�t the settlements. It isn�t the violence. It is the very framework from which each side works. Unlike India, or France, or China, Israel and Palestine both base themselves on an ideal of ethnic purity � but unlike Japan, which can get away with that, they are not on an island out in the Pacific. The ideal has a necessary evolutionary function, but both sides have passed beyond that point. Only when that framework is loosened will there really be two states. There�s a name for this ad hoc loosening of the rituals of ethnic identity: cosmopolitanism.

In an article provocatively entitled, Citizens of Nowhere in Particular, published a few years ago in National Identities, a scholar from UVA, Sophia Rosenfeld, examined how the cosmopolitan image declined in the latter half of the Enlightenment era. Here is how she puts the problem:

Despite the internationalism of the great literary figures of the age, from Hume
to Voltaire, and their much vaunted universalist philosophical orientation, the political
stance associated with explicit cosmopolitanism seems to have come under increasing
suspicion as the Old Regime in Europe drew to a close. In 1762 the Dictionnaire de
l�Acade�mie franc�aise defined the cosmopolitan as �someone who adopts no country
[patrie] � and is not a good citizen.� That same year, from a very different vantage
point, Rousseau noted in his Social Contract that a cosmopolitan was, in fact, someone
who �pretended to love the whole world in order to have the right to love no one.�

The reason for the emergence of such attitudes lies most obviously in the growing
power of the concept of the nation, an idea just beginning to take on its modern
meaning at this same moment. In the late eighteenth century, the nation and one�s
fellow nationals were already on their way to forming a critical focus for individual
political loyalties. Since then it has nearly become an article of faith that the nation
alone provides the framework in which the political identity and, consequently, political
engagement and participation associated with citizenship becomes possible for private
persons and, eventually, the masses. For only the nation seems to supply the rootedness
and emotional centering, along with the guarantee of rights, that the identity of
�citizen�, with all its potential for sacrifice, requires.

Rousseau, of course, is at the center of this moment, with that most powerful of the inventions in the realm of the sentiments, �love.� And of course the series of personal contradictions that immediately pop up: who, after all, was more rootless than Rousseau? A sometimes citizen of Geneva who spent his intellectual years in France, wrote the constitution of Corsica, and fought, in his last years, the multiple humiliations inflicted upon him by every royal or republican power with which he came in contact. Romanticism might be defined as Rousseau�s dream of the anti-Rousseau � the man whose social conditions allowed him to live.

Rosenfeld asks, sensibly, why we still accept Rousseau�s idea that the cosmopolitan is the opposite of the citizen:

�But has geographical rootedness always been the only truly viable foundation for
political activism? And must this necessarily remain the case even as the particularistic
humanism associated with national interests comes under increasing criticism in the
contemporary world? Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the history and potentiality
of transnational identity and transnational concerns as alternative (though closely
related) contexts for the development of political engagement. Or, to put it slightly
differently, perhaps it is time to look again at the relationship of universalism to both
localism and nationalism in the emergence of the modern understanding of the citizen
as commentator on and participant in the business of rule.�

Like any smart academic confronting an arbitrary, but emotionally defended, binary, she goes back to see how it was historically constructed � how these opposites found each other (it should be noted that deconstruction is the opposite of marriage counseling � in deconstruction, the divorce comes before the marriage, in marriage counseling, it comes after). Why did the Voltarian gesture of adhering to humanity gave way to the Rousseauian accusation of the emotional nullity of such a stance? A nullity, we are to understand, that is a facet of selfishness. A purely intellectual concern with a people we can�t communicate with, and whose ways we don�t know, must be the terminus of a flight from real caring � from authenticity. This theme is common to both Dickens and Heidegger. It is the common wisdom of modernity, reinforced by a thousand satirical portraits. Hell, it is the wisdom of the Pixies � there�s a beautifully acidic Pixies song that goes; �she�s a real left-winger/cause she�s been down south/held peasants in her arms�� that I always loved, because it described the bad faith endemic among a certain kind of politically active student current in the 80s.

(To be continued)

Bollettino

As usual, the LA Times is way ahead of the East Coast in describing hostilities in J-Lo Bremer's 'post-hostile" Iraq. The story, by Michael Slackman, is full of information -- that magic missing ingredient in most of the stories about Iraq! As LI has pointed out like a maniac, we live in a situation in which major newspapers -- the USA Today, the NYT, the Wash Post -- can't seem to agree on how many American casualties have occured in the last week. This is a little astonishing, and says something about the shadow of amnesia that has so quickly fallen over what is happening in Iraq. The LAT says that "about 40" American deaths, from accidents and hostile fire, have occured since Bush's infamous declaration that hostilities are at an end. That compares with 100 deaths while hostilities were going on.


LI also points you, today, to a nice little piece about Ollie North's drug trafficking record. Apparently -- ah, the bizarro aspects of the All American heart! -- North had been hired to give a guest lecture at a major Salvation Army event. The Salvation Army? The author of the piece, Celerino Castillo 3rd, a former DEA agent, and others naturally protested. The Salvation Army is not the Salvation Death Squad was the burden of their song -- justly. Castillo is releasing info that has been reclassified, conveniently enough, by the Bush administration -- information on that slander on America's name, the contra -coke connection.

LI posted a little astonished reaction to Mark Bowden's book on Pablo Escobar a couple of days ago. One of the truly egregiously stupid bits in the book was the implication that the Sandinistas were in it with Escobar, channeling that cocaine into sweet little American noses. As anybody who remembers that period knows, that is a laughably grotesque mistatement of the lay of the land. Bowden's "pro-democracy" Contras were financed, in part, through drug deals. As any drug dealer from the time knew, it definitely helped having the CIA helping squash your indictment. That's the simple fact. Here's a graf from Castillo's piece:


"Several years ago, the extreme right arm of the Christian Coalition selected to support Oliver North for U.S. Senate. Their support backfired and North became one of two Republicans who lost the elections that year. During North�s campaign, I traveled to Virginia, went out to the �grassroots� communities and educated them on who Oliver North really was. I went as far as challenging North for a debate. Of course, he refused. My first question would had been: Why did you campaign to obtain the release of Honduran army general Jose Bueso-Rosa from a federal prison, after his arrest for smuggling 763 pounds of cocaine and for murder? Bueso-Rosa�s partner in the venture was international arms dealer Felix Latchinian, who in turn was an ex-business partner of CIA agent (Cubano) Felix Rodriguez. During the 70s and 80s, Felix Rodriguez was tied to several terrorist organizations who terrorize both the United States and Latin America. Felix Rodriguez, also known as Max Gomez, was in charge of the Contra�s supply network in El Salvador, which was also involved in drug trafficking. If this sounds complicated just remember that all this drug trafficking was paid for with your taxpayer dollars."

From the Wilderness, a group ardently pursuing the Contra-Coke connection, cites the CIA report that was issued, with minimum fanfare, on the same day the House voted to impeach Clinton -- a great day to release a report that basically confirms the paranoid lefty belief in the CIA's complicity in drug-running.


"As reported by Associated Press, the report, "portrays the spy agency as reluctant to inform Congress or law enforcement of suspected drug activity by Nicaraguan Contra forces." The AP story continued to say that, "In classified briefings on Capitol Hill, CIA officials typically acknowledged only one major case of narcotics involvement by an anti-Sandinista group - the so called ADREN [sic] 15th of September group, which was disbanded in 1982. But the newly declassified report links to drug allegations 58 other individuals belonging to various Contra groups."A telling passage of the CIA report itself states that "In six cases CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA. In at least two of those cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so."In an apparent confirmation of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series The New York Times, in a brief story, picked out a paragraph from the report which acknowledged that Contra leaders in California and the Bay area specifically planned to deal drugs to raise money for the Contras."

The From the Wilderness people are trippy with info. Here they are howling at Ollie North's scent again:

"In another section [of the CIA report] on major trafficker Moises Nunez, who was being investigated for shipment of hundreds of kilos of cocaine through firms named Frigorificos de Puntarenas and Ocean Hunter (also NHAO contractors), the CIA lays out North yet again. They describe how cocaine was reportedly received at air strips owned by John Hull in Costa Rica and taken to ships owned by these two firms. The CIA report then states, "On March 25, 1987, CIA questioned Nunez about narcotics trafficking allegations against him."Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council (NSC). Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC (emphasis mine). Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."

Oliver North was the point man at NSC for all Contra support activities."

Oh, and one more irony, just for those who collect them. The name of Ollie North's inhouse death squad assistance bureau, at the NSC, was: The Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office.

Bollettino

LI is frankly indifferent to the fall of Howell Raines. We are interested, however, in the space it takes up. Since we are living in a shift in cultural power to the right -- which is reflected in the gradual erosion of the great establishment liberal papers, which are either turning hawkish -- the WashPost -- or are finding organizational problems used as fulcrums to create press coverage that leans to the right -- the NYT - we are interested in criticism that is happening outside the box. As James Wolcott, in a surprisingly toothy article in Vanity Fair puts it, the press is entirely down on both knees before the Bush P.R. machine. Wollcott is not coy about the implication of fellatio, which is still the primo image of servitude in this culture, for reasons we aren't going to explore right now. Anyway, we think it is odd, to say the least, that the press scandals du jour are about the misdeeds of some minor hacks, since really, Blair's mendacity about the sniper didn't 'do' anything, and Rick Bragg's prose extravaganzas about the swampy inlets of Dixie did even less -- but Miller's reports on Iraq, which simply channeled the standard pap from Chalabi, did a lot. John Power at the LA Weekly delivers left view of the sitch:

"This fixation [on the Times] comes as no real surprise; The New York Times occupies a privileged place in our ruling elite�s psyche. It is the establishment organ, the paper that must be reckoned with by anyone interested in wielding power (or even in distributing an indie movie). For those on the right, The Times is a perpetual bugbear and indispensable target � its pre-eminence lets them feel beleaguered even when they are running things. To them, The Times� recent tailspin is sheer jouissance, the giddy B-side of Fox News� orgasmic ascent. They�ll be breathing hard about it for months.

"Not so the establishment liberals, who have long treated the paper as a beacon of enlightenment. Indeed, it wasn�t so long ago that KCRW used to read Times stories aloud on the air (God, that was embarrassing), like dispatches to a primitive local culture. If you believe Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, The Times is the liberals� catnip, so you can imagine the head-clutching agony that greeted the sobering discovery that its reporters could be every bit as reliable as, oh, Geraldo Rivera."

Powers makes the point that the NYT is boring, arrogant, and reliably voices elitist positions -- whether these come out as left or right is secondary.

Anybody who has had the misfortune of running into a NYT man at a conference will have had a taste of what it must be like to be a peasant running into a Marquis at an inn. Arrogance is too mild a word. And we have to agree that the Times, since 9/11 at least, has not been the same. It has been boring. It has been incurious, to say the least, about the mounting list of the administration's lies and spin. It's coverage of the corporate scandals never scratched the surface -- try as some excellent reporters in the business section did to connect the dots. It's coverage of Iraq has been lackluster, riddled with error, and is now in full amnesia stage -- support the troops, but put the casualty counts near the real estate ads. Long ago Joan Didion pointed out that the NYT is not nearly as good as the LAT. We agree. Here's Power's view:

"Anxious to defend their profession�s honor, media columnists have spent weeks moralizing about Blair and Bragg�s dishonesty without ever grappling with the underlying reality that Michael Wolff first pointed out in New York magazine. The print world increasingly cares less about accurate reporting and more about vivid prose. Reporters� careers rise or fall on what Wolff calls their �tradecraft,� the ability to sweeten reality with style-conscious writing, even if that sometimes means pushing a bit beyond the literal facts to a kind of more artistic �truth.� (Think of all those stage-directed White House conversations in Bob Woodward�s books.) In their different ways, the run-amok Blair and vainglorious Bragg just pushed too far."

Actually, we wish this were the truth. But we think that the problem is very different. That "tradecraft" has become so cliche-bound that it is as unlikely a medium in which to broadcast the "truth" as a set of plumber's helpers would be with which to play Beethoven's nineth. The media has generated a whole subculture of experts whose job is to be quoted in the media. Thus, about Iraq, you were much more likely to hear what the 'Arab street' was thinking from a reporter who couldn't speak arabic, quoting a general who couldn't speak Arabic, quoting a think tank honcho who couldn't speak arabic. The astonishng thinness of context of the discourse about Iraq, leading up to, into, through, and passed the War is amazing.

The press in this country has always been opportunistically oppositional. Now, however, as they clot together in behemoth corporations like so many cholesterol molecules around a fat man's heart, they have become simply opportunistic. And being run, for the most part, by illiterate CEOs, they are eager to participate in the systematic looting of the American population's narrative intelligence -- its ability to read, to follow complex stories, to develop a rich sensibility about causes and psychology and fate and tragedy, etc., etc. The level of storytelling intelligence has been steadily lessened in this country, even as the amount of text, and the numbers passing through college, explode. Newspapers, which developed as the enlightenment develped the story sense -- for every newspaper, with its columns of different stories, its material organization, requires a reader who has, at least in a historical sense, passed the Tristam Shandy threshhold of narrative understanding -- have no interest in seeding future readers. They believe that appealing to younger readers means dumbing down the story-lines -- which is about arrogance. As anyone knows, kids develop, or don't, the ability to narrate as they get older. If they are stuck in an environment in which that narrative ability is contextually retarded, they will respond with less ability. That's why education has traditionally been about older people teaching younger people. It is now about older people exploiting younger people for money. And that is disgusting.

Luckily while the narrative sense might atrophy, the tacit knowledge that one is being robbed is still operative -- hence, the great turn-off with regard to the press. Dumbness is not fate -- but it will be selected, in the market, if the level of the market's taste is debauched.














http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/29/on-powers.php

Bollettino

Casualty report:

- Assailants opened fire with a rocket-propelled grenade Thursday, killing one American soldier and wounding five, the U.S. military said. It was the latest attack in a tense city where resistance against American occupation has been vocal and sometimes violent. -- AP

Forgery

Here's a story from the forgery front. It comes from Dennis Dutton from the usually more high brow Aesthetics-online site:


"The murder of Eric Hebborn on January 11th brought to a close one of the most illustrious careers of any twentieth-century forger. His body was found on a street in Rome, the city where he had lived since the 1970s, with his skull broken, probably by a hammer blow from behind. Only a few weeks before, he had published his second book, Il Manuale del Falsario (The Faker�s Handbook), a set of complete instructions on how to forge and market fake drawings and paintings from the European tradition."

Hebborn, Dutton reports, was an English eccentric on the grand, decadent scale. They always somehow drift to Italy -- the Aleister Crowleys, the Baron Corvos. Dutton was a working class boy. He was seduced, early, into the pleasures of fraud:


"While still a student, he went to work for a picture restorer named George Aczel. Restoration, it developed, meant much more that cleaning and retouching, and soon young Eric was painting large areas of old works, cleverly extending cracking into newly painted surfaces, and even �improving� old paintings by augmenting them. An insignificant landscape became, with the addition of a balloon in its grey sky, an important (and expensive) painting recording the early history of aviation. As Hebborn says, �a cat added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape� Popular signatures came and unpopular signatures went� Poppies bloomed in dun-coloured fields.�

Count on a murderer for a purple style, Nabokov's Humbert says in Lolita. Dutton remarks that Hebborn's art, under the disguise of more expensive signatures, was authenticated by such experts as his Highness's official art historian and Communist spy, Anthony Blunt, and by Sir John Pope Hennessy, a big name in art collecting circles.

Life was good for Hebborn for a while. He had a fellow forger as a lover, he had the ready, it was Rome in the sixties and seventies. We particularly like Dutton's account of all that:


His loves included a relationship with Graham [the fellow forger] that lasted for some years, until Graham became �sexually tired of me, and was constantly looking about for a change�even girls.� After that, he seems to have settled down with Edgar, and though he spent a night in Sir Anthony Blunt�s bed, nothing happened due to due to the drunken condition of both. �Brewer�s droop,� Hebborn calls it.

Humpty Dumpty always has his fall. Hebborn, of course, revenged himself on the art world by revealing his bad seed, and fingering paintings that probably aren't forgeries. While a hammer blow is certainly not the gentlest way to depart this mortal coil, Hebborn does not seem to have had an unhappy life, much as he was the occassion for it in others.

James Fuentes story of a more up to the minute forgery -- the forgery of Jean Michel Basquiat paintings, no less -- is much sadder. It comes from Blow Up, an on-line mag.

"Alfredo Martinez convinced art collector, Leo Malca, to purchase two paintings by Jean Michel Basquiat in the late winter of 2002 for a bargain price of $38,500. The pieces belonged to Tom Warren, a staff photographer at Sotheby�s and the forthcoming yearbook of New York�s cultural elite, The New York School. The work in question had appeared that December in an exhibition Martinez co-curated with me entitled, �Welcome to the Playground of the Fearless.� Alfredo took charge of returning the pieces to Warren, but before doing so, made his own versions. After returning Warren�s paintings, he mentioned that there was interest in the work from collectors who saw the show. He said he wanted to make copies of the certificates of authenticity before shopping the work around. Tom handed over the certificates, which Alfredo went on to forge as well. He then returned falsified certificates to Tom and sold fake paintings � with real certificates � to Malca. "

Martinez, like Hebborn, was a determined outsider to the art world. This is not your highness's grandmother's art world -- this is the disco art world that Warhol invented, and the devil has kept going ever since. This is Martinez's art career:

"Alfredo Martinez�s art career began in 1994 when his work was shown at the Pat Hearn Gallery. The show was �Skater Angels,� curated by David Greenberg and Diego Cortez. He went on to participate in the seminal �Bong Show� at Alleged Gallery, where artists such as Tom Sachs and Mike Kelly made elaborate bongs as sculpture. He reached the height of legitimacy after participating in two group shows � �Agent Artist� in 1994 and �Generation Z� in 1999 � at P.S.1, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. In the summer of 1999, famed art critic Roberta Smith reviewed an exhibition he curated, �Ne'er Do Wells,� for The New York Times. That same year, a dot-com millionaire by the name of Joshua Harris financed an indoor firing range designed by Alfredo for a millennial project entitled �Quiet.� Alfredo personally sound-proofed it and had it staffed with ex-Navy Seals. He literally shot his way through the new millennium with high powered, automatic weapons.

These were noteworthy achievements for someone who never graduated high school. In a community where an MFA may not even get you up to bat, Alfredo managed to go pretty far in the art world with no formal education. In this regard, he was a true folk artist � an elitist term synonymous with �outsider,� a derelict. The NY Post once described Alfredo as, �a hulking 300 pound gun-toting Puerto Rican madman.� Manhattan District Attorney, Andrew De Vore, described him as �homeless.� I consider Alfredo what I consider every good artist to be: a magician."

The heights of legitimacy. LI wonders what it looks like from such peaks.