Bollettino

If this report is true, it would certainly cause a minor meltdown in D.C. According to the Asia Times, the US is seeking to negotiate with the Taleban. The report claims that the US has even tried to find acceptable Taleban leadership:


"The hard truth is that US intelligence simply does not really know what is going on in the Taliban and al-Qaeda camps. This is evidenced by the countless raids that have been launched in recent times, none of which have resulted in the capture of anyone in Afghanistan.

In an effort to find a breakthrough, US authorities recently made two initiatives involving the Taliban. (See US turns to the Taliban, June 14) In the first, they tried to establish a new Taliban leadership through Mullah Ghous and other Taliban leaders who were expelled during Taliban rule from 1996-2001. This failed virtually before it was born. A second attempt was then made to forge contacts with "real" Taliban, with the idea being that they provide any acceptable leadership (ie, not Mullah Omar) to take a significant part in the running of the country so that peace could be established. This, too was rejected.

Another attempt to give Afghan clerics an important role in power politics is in the US cards in Afghanistan, but like the other attempts, this, too, looks like another shot in the dark."

There is a crooked sense in this, if it is true. The Bush-ites have decided, for their own reasons, to turn a blind eye to Pakistan. So the country that supplied North Korea with nuclear materials and know how is getting 3 billion dollars in aid. This might not cause any collateral political damage in the US, but it is bound to let other countries know that the US has no real standard when it comes to nuclear proliferation. And at some point, this will impinge on the pressure being brought upon Iran.

We wonder, though, at the complete contrast between reporting on Afghanistan elsewhere and that in the Asia Times. Wilder things have happened, but really -- it would simply destroy the legitimacy of the Karzai regime even to think of negotiating with the Taleban.

Bollettino

The hawks have been saying, for months, that reconstruction is on schedule. That it is moving forward. That things are getting better in Iraq.

What we need to test these propositions is some comparison. A nice one is with the reconstruction that happened after 1991.

In 1991, the Iraqi infrastructure was much more damaged than it was this last April. Yet, as has been pointed out by Iraqis, the electricity came on-line quicker under Saddam:


"After security, one of the most common complaints of postwar Baghdad residents has been unreliable electricity.

"Why is the electricity only on eight hours a day?" one resident asked last week. "In 1991, Saddam had the electricity on sooner than this, and all the power stations were bombed."

Another two enlightening grafs from the same article:

"In 1991, the damage was much greater because the damage was concentrated not only on the substations but the power stations," said Adnan Wadi Bashir, who worked as a power generation and transmission engineer for the government for 24 years. "Most of the attacks were on the transmission lines, and the repair of these is much easier. We restored part of the power in 1991 within six weeks of the ceasefire and we supplied the whole Iraqi system without any shortage in five months. The job now could have been finished within a month" of April 12.

Starting literally from scratch, engineers in 1991 managed to generate about 1000 MW of power six weeks after the war ended, Bashir said. Last week, nearly eight weeks after the American effort began, about 3450 MW were available countrywide, 1000 MW less than were available before the invasion."

Admittedly, tyrants are always reputed to make the trains run on time. But we suspect that the real difference is that in 1991, the Iraqis weren't being second guessed by a bunch of advisors largely shipped over from a foreign country and possessing, among them, skills in basic Arabic that a five year old Iraqi could easily overshadow. There's an incalculable advantage in having on-site people do on-site work. And if advice is necessary, the people giving the advice should have something at stake.

We've often gone on, and on, about letting Iraqis run Iraq. Here's a corollary to that position: if we have advisors in place in government agencies, or actual order givers, those people should be paid out of the same funds, and using the same scale, as their Iraqi colleagues.

This would be the simplest way to align the interests of the Americans with the interests of the Iraqis.

Bollettino

I have never read a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth. LI's vast readership is astonishingly literate -- you all are out there devouring Alain Badiou's difficult essays on Dedekind's mathematical ontology and such, I know -- yet it is a good bet that none of you are familiar with the thrills of Rookwood, or the clever drama of Jack Sheppard.

Is this because of the Courvoisier murder?

Phillip Allingham provides a potted bio of Ainsworth on the Victoria Web site. It's an impressive 19th century life. As a boy, Ainsworth was inspired by the romances of Walter Scott, along with all of literary Europe and, to its misfortune (according to Mark Twain), the South. Ainsworth even knew Charles Lamb. He scored a big success with Rookwood, a historical that painted, among other things, a dashing highwayman, Dick Turpin. The money poured in, Ainsworth bought the appropriate gaudy pile, and then the wife dies. Beloved, of course, and young, of course, providing the standard unities for that pious exercise of melancholy Victorians liked in widowers and widows. Then came an even greater success, Jack Shepherd. Here Ainsworth makes the conscious artistic decision -- at least according to Allingham -- to break with the picaresque. This was especially interesting since Jonathan Wild is one of the main characters, taken less from history than Fielding -- or perhaps one can say that Fielding's Wild is more historically real than the historically real Wild himself. Such is the form of fate that generally befalls the celebrity.

Jack Shepherd has not been transferred to the less than silver screen by the good elves at Gutenberg, so I am relying on Allingham here:

"Jack Sheppard (1839) reveals Ainsworth at his best in terms of characterisation and plot construction. Wishing to avoid a loose succession of incidents in the picaresque style, Ainsworth introduces two characters (the historical Jonathan Wild and the fictional Thames Darrell) to create a unifying thread in this tale set in eighteenth-century England. In a manner reminiscent of various television and film versions of The Fugitive, the thief-taker Wild relentlessly pursues the subtle and cunning Jack Sheppard, thief and house-breaker. Because Jack's mother has rebuffed Wild's sexual advances, Wild seduces Jack's father and then Jack himself into committing crimes that will inevitably lead them to the gallows. While Jack chooses the path of vice, his foil, Thames Darrell (like Jack in youth apprenticed to Mr. Wood the carpenter, and like Jack, the son of a father who has died violently after abusing his wife) chooses the path of virtue. Thames ultimately prospers with the aid of Jack's second-in-command, Blueskin, and wins the hand of the lovely Winifred, his master's daughter. Although the protagonist, Jack, is reconciled with his mother and saves both Thames and Winifred from Wild, he is ultimately hanged for his crimes. Poetic justice, however, is served when the narrator reveals that within seven months Wild himself is hanged.

Thus, the book illustrates the Hogarthian theme of the lazy and diligent apprentices that Dickens vivifies in Great Expectations and elsewhere, and which had already been dramatised in George Lillo's The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell(1731), a domestic tragedy based on the seventeenth-century ballad which appears on Percy's Reliques. In the ballad, young Barnwell is a London apprentice who falls in love with a Shoreditch prostitute (Sarah Millwood). In return for her favours, the apprentice gives her �200 which he has stolen from his master; again to supply the harlot with cash, he robs his uncle, a Ludlow grazier, and beats him to death. The hussy and the varlet impeach each other, and are subsequently hanged at Tyburn. The literary progeny of the tale is the so-called Newgate Novel, popularized by Thackeray, Dickens, Ainsworth, and Bulwer-Lytton."

Allingham doesn't mention the ill consequences of Jack Sheppard. But this amusingly account of the murder of Lord William Russell -- amusing because it drops noble names and titles like some dotty butler doing door duty at a ball - does. We take this up because we are still in search of a response to Oscar's contention that art has no moral effect. Or, rather, we are in seach of the kind of moral panic that art can provoke.

If it is true that Ainsworth was shunned after the rumor circulated that Lord Russell's murderer was unduly excited by Jack Sheppard, then this explains, perhaps, why he never made the canon. We aren't totally satisfied that Jack Sheppard backballed the man, but after the Courvoisier trial, he certainly had to fend off charges, and he seems to have been deserted by the ever timid Dickens.

So consider this an effort to make some headway towards a rather Wildean truth -- which is that just because art has no moral effect doesn't mean that morality has no artistic effect. That effect is less in the text than in the selection -- the unnatural selection that evolves a canon.

To get to the case -- Courvoisier, like Sheppard, was a servant. And like Sheppard, he considered himself held down by brute force, and that force embodied in the riches and life of his employer, Lord Russell.

The crime and its detection are described amply by McCann. We like his description of the scene of Courvoisier's execution:

"The execution was carried out at Newgate, on the 6th of July, 1840. The hangman was the notorious Jack Ketch and the trial was attended by both Charles Dickens (a regular at these events) and William Makepeace Thackeray. The latter published an article about the execution in Frazer's Magazine later in the month. A third novelist of the period had a rather different experience. This was William Harrison Ainsworth, then famous for his nlovel about the higwayman Dick Turpin. However, he had also published, in the previous year, a sensational novel about another notorious criminal, Jack Sheppard. The latter had been a violent robber who escaped from Newgate four times before he was finally hanged at Tyburn in 1742. The novel was adapted to the stage by John Buckstone and it opened at the Adelphi in the Strand on October 28 1839. It was the hit of the season and ran for 121 performances finishing the run on April 11th 1840. It went on a tour of the Provincial theatres in May, not long after the murder. During Courvoisier's trial it was put about that he had either read Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard or attended the play before committing the murder. This provoked a wave of concern at the effects of cheap, theatrical adaptations on working-class youth culture. The popular opinion was that the charge against Ainsworth seemed incontrovertible. Unfortunately, his status as a good Victorian and a serious literary novelist never fully recovered even though he went on to write some of his more famous historical romances in the following years. Dickens managed to avoid similar problems, but, despite the fact that Ainsworth had been a major influence on his early career, with his characteristic selfishness he publicly and privately distanced himself from Ainsworth."

Thackeray's account, entitled "Going to See a Man Hanged", is on the Net -- oh, there are so many things on the Net nowadays. It is an interesting piece. For one thing, Thackeray politicizes the crowd -- it is odd that Benjamin never, to my knowledge, referred to this piece, but it would have done his heart good. Or perhaps not -- unlike Hugo, Thackeray was completely secular. No messianic moment in the character, just that puzzling English confidence in Good Will . Thackeray is a writer who always surprises us -- both by his accesses of sentimental swill, and his hard-edged comedic vision. Here's a bit of a rather long political passage re the crowd:

Throughout the whole four hours, however, the mob was extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured. At first we had leisure to talk to the people about us ; and I recommend X-'s brother senators of both sides of the House to see more of this same people and to appreciate them better. Honourable members are battling and struggling in the House; shouting, yelling, crowing, hear-hearing, pooh-poohing, making speeches of three columns, and gaining "great Conservative triumphs," or "signal successes of the Reform cause," as the case may be. Three hundred and ten gentlemen of good fortune, and able for the most part to quote Horace, declare solemnly that unless Sir Robert comes in the nation is ruined. Throe hundred and fifteen on the other side swear by their great gods that the safety of the empire depends upon Lord John; and to this end they quote Horace too. I declare that I have never been in a great London crowd without thinking of what they call the two "great" parties in England with wonder. For which of the two great leaders do these people care, I pray you? When Lord Stanley withdrew his Irish bill the other night, were they in transports of joy, like worthy persons who read the Globe and the Chronicle? or when he beat the Ministers, were they wild with delight, like honest gentlemen who read the Post and The Times? Ask yonder ragged fellow, who has evidently frequented debating clubs, and speaks with good sense and shrewd good-nature. He cares no more for Lord John than he does for Sir Robert, and, with due respect be it said, would mind very little if both of them were ushered out by' Mr. Ketch, and took their places under yonder black beam. What are the two great parties to him, and those like him? Sheer wind, hollow humbug, absurd clap-traps; a silly mummery of dividing and debating, which does not in the least, however it may turn, affect his condition."

And so it goes, Thackeray capturing the political as a question of the balance between two crowds -- a thought that is much deeper than he himself could plumb. Still, there it is.

Famously, at the end of the essay, Thackeray reflects on his repugnant participation in killing a man:

"There is some talk, too, of the terror which the sight of this spectacle inspires, and of this we have endeavoured to give as good a notion as we can in the above pages. I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder ; but it was for the murder I saw done. As we made our way through the immense crowd, we came upon two little girls of eleven and twelve years. One of them was crying bitterly, and begged, for Heaven's sake, that someone would lead her from that horrid place. This was done, and the children were carried into a place of safety. We asked the elder girl - and a very pretty one - what brought her into such a neighbourhood? The child grinned knowingly, and said, "We've koom to see the mon hanged!"

Tender law, that brings out babes upon such errands and provides them with such gratifying moral spectacles!"

Bollettino

"The bodies of two U.S. soldiers missing for days were discovered early Saturday northwest of Baghdad, as the toll rises past 200 for Americans killed since war started in Iraq.

News of their killings came amid a torrent of guerrilla-style attacks and sabotage that has marred U.S. efforts to re-establish order since Saddam Hussein's ouster. About a third of U.S. troops killed in the Iraqi conflict have died in attacks or accidents since major combat was declared over May 1." -- Washington Post

And, to add to our casualties, this is the latest brilliant scheme from our resident representative in Bagdhad, Mr. Bremer:

U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders. -- Washington Post

From another graf:

'The most recent order to stop planning for elections was made by Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which controls the northern half of Iraq. It follows similar decisions by the 3rd Infantry Division in central Iraq and those of British commanders in the south.In the capital, Baghdad, U.S. officials never scheduled elections for a city government, but have said they are forming neighborhood councils that at some point will play a role in the selection of a municipal government."

The guerilla war is being lost at the outset. Can the US adopt a worse stretegy? Well, wait till they unroll their economic nostrums, and a seemingly permanent strata of Iraqi unemployed gets to mull over the American meaning of democracy.

As anybody with a memory that is larger than a flea's will remember, in 91 the Bush administration made the fatal mistake of calling for an intifada and then not backing it up. Why? Because that administration was petrified by the idea that Shi'a power might be installed in Iraq. The present colonial administrator seems to suffer from that same fear. This time, the intifada will be against the Americans.

How many times do we have to make the same mistake?
I guess as many times as there are Bushes around to make it.

Bollettino

"I come to Vienna to refresh my ambivalence," he said.

The profile of Frederic Morton in the NYT this morning is a little gift for us. Morton is the type of person LI looks up to absolutely -- the type of person we have tried to be, alas for our well-being, since the age of 20. The Viennese intellectual, who sharpens his teeth by savaging the Viennese intellectual -- which is the way of Karl Kraus.

Morton does seem less acerbic, less prone to bite, than such as Canetti or Musil. But that his books are being taken so seriously by Vienna says a lot about that place. Including why it isn't the Vienna of the Nervous Splendor that Morton writes about.

Perhaps Thomas Bernhard was the last of those savages -- the ones who tore, with bleeding claws, at a splendor they found to be half criminal in its beginnings and half rotten in its endings. Sentiment and petty pilfering, leading up to the auto de fe of the Jews -- that was pretty much the Bernhardian view. And the view of Canetti, I think. We are closer, however, to the geniality of Morton. We see less animal in the menschlische Maul than those three.

Nice article.

Bollettino

We quoted Oscar, for obvious reasons, yesterday. We want to get back to one of those quotes today -- this bit of repartee:

"C--You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book?
W--Yes.
C--May I take it that you think "The Priest and the Acolyte" was not immoral?
W--It was worse; it was badly written."

Now, we have been on mild kick about murder, and we've also been thinking of the peculiar immorality of public moralists. We were planning a post comparing William Bennett to Will Hays, the man who ran the Hays Office that censored films from the thirties to the sixties. However, Will Hays is a very hard man to pin down.

The Hays office has often been studied. It was actually started in the twenties, and was a mask for the studios, who were currently going through a cycle of scandals -- most notably, the railroading of Fatty Arbuckle for the rape of Virginia Rappe, a thing he was never convicted of doing. So the studios pulled Harding's postmaster general to Hollywood. According to an entertaining internet book by Paul Sann on the Lawless decade, the salary was more than decent for 1922 -- 100,000 dollars per year. And Hays knew that Harding's cabinet was ready for a fall. .

Will Hays, according to the interesting account in Allen's book on the "Lost Decade," knew what was going to come down because he'd got a piece of it. Hays was the last link in a long chain of graft, stretching back to a deal for leasing oil rights -- the Teapot Dome scandal. He accepted 150,000 dollars in liberty bonds that were bought with scammed money from a deal hatched between Standard Oil and a dummy Canadian company, one of whose beneficiaries was Harry Sinclair, president of the Mammoth Oil Company -- which was in secret collusion with the Secretary of Treasury, Fall. It isn't clear whether Hays profited personally from the deal -- he accepted the bonds on behalf of the Republican Party, of which he was chairman. He'd run Harding's campaign. He was also Postmaster General. A man of many hats. Perhaps he also knew that the orgies and intoxication of Hollywood were more than matched by the parties of the White House. We know more about the Harding administration since Mrs. Harding's diary was found a couple of years ago. There's an excerpt from her biography, published in the style section of the Washington Post, that is, well, a little unbelievable. We find this paragraph fascinating:

"The Strange Death of President Harding," written in 1930 by the notorious perjurer and former FBI agent Gaston Means, implied that Florence Harding poisoned her husband in retaliation for his adultery, but the book has long been dismissed as a fabrication. New evidence shows that while Means lied in details, he told general truths. He said that he was part of an FBI effort to seize and destroy a small, privately printed book, "The Illustrated Life of Warren Gamaliel Harding," that revealed Harding's affair with Carrie Phillips, the RNC blackmail payoff and Florence's out-of-wedlock child by a common-law first husband.

This turned out to be the only book suppressed by the government in peacetime. The entire action was illegal, and thus the boxes of books and updated manuscript inserts were taken not to any government property but to the McLean estate [Mclean, a friend of Harding's and a companion when they went, as they frequently did, to the whores, was the owner of the Washington Post], where they were all burned. Well, not all: An original with the author's notes sits with none other than Evalyn McLean's papers at the Library of Congress."

Will Hays seems to have been the most influential advocate of the idea that art must be moral since the Chamberlain's office started censoring theater in 18th century England -- driving Fielding to write novels, according to Shaw, and thus destroying English drama for the next one hundred years. But of the man himself, the footstep seems to be unclear.

We want to do one more post about this topic -- considering Ainsworth and the Courvoisier murder.

Bollettino

We quoted Oscar, for obvious reasons, yesterday. We want to get back to one of those quotes today -- this bit of repartee:

"C--You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book?
W--Yes.
C--May I take it that you think "The Priest and the Acolyte" was not immoral?
W--It was worse; it was badly written."

Now, we have been on mild kick about murder, and we've also been thinking of the peculiar immorality of public moralists. We were planning a post comparing William Bennett to Will Hays, the man who ran the Hays Office that censored films from the thirties to the sixties. However, Will Hays is a very hard man to pin down.

The Hays office has often been studied. It was actually started in the twenties, and was a mask for the studios, who were currently going through a cycle of scandals -- most notably, the railroading of Fatty Arbuckle for the rape of Virginia Rappe, a thing he was never convicted of doing. So the studios pulled Harding's postmaster general to Hollywood. According to an entertaining internet book by Paul Sann on the Lawless decade, the salary was more than decent for 1922 -- 100,000 dollars per year. And Hays knew that Harding's cabinet was ready for a fall. .

Will Hays, according to the interesting account in Allen's book on the "Lost Decade," knew what was going to come down because he'd got a piece of it. Hays was the last link in a long chain of graft, stretching back to a deal for leasing oil rights -- the Teapot Dome scandal. He accepted 150,000 dollars in liberty bonds that were bought with scammed money from a deal hatched between Standard Oil and a dummy Canadian company, one of whose beneficiaries was Harry Sinclair, president of the Mammoth Oil Company -- which was in secret collusion with the Secretary of Treasury, Fall. It isn't clear whether Hays profited personally from the deal -- he accepted the bonds on behalf of the Republican Party, of which he was chairman. He'd run Harding's campaign. He was also Postmaster General. A man of many hats. Perhaps he also knew that the orgies and intoxication of Hollywood were more than matched by the parties of the White House. We know more about the Harding administration since Mrs. Harding's diary was found a couple of years ago. There's an excerpt from her biography, ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������