Bollettino
I love history of science journals. Or, the higher antiquitarianism. So one of my favorite reads is Osiris. The winter issue of the journal is out, and it is all about the polis as the site of scientific research. We�d like to call the attention of readers of Limited Inc to two articles.
The first is by Theresa Levitt, �Organizing sight, seeing organization: the diverging optical possibilities of city and country.� It is the very Balzacian story of two men who engaged in a fierce debate over light in the 1820s in Paris. Here�s Levitt�s establishing graf:
�Francois Arago created the polarimeter in 1811, after discovering that polarized light, when passed through a doubly refracting prism and a piece of mica, divided into two, complementary-colored beams. This new instrument, whose colorful images indicated the presence of polarized light, was at the heart of what is often called the early-nineteenth-century revolution in optics. (1) Most histories characterize this event as a duel between the wave and particle theories of light. These accounts almost always end in 1821, when a very public and nasty debate between Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot concluded with a decided victory for the wave theory. In the aftermath, as the story goes, Arago and his band of undulationists reigned over Paris, while Biot, the last of the corpuscularians, slunk away in defeat to his country estate in Nointel.�
Even the names could have come out of la Comedie Humaine. We also love the giggle-worthy undulationists � Levitt is being naughty. Arago, it turns out, was a scientist showman. A breed that was thick on the ground in the nineteenth century. Faraday would give Christmas lectures to children on the physics of the candle � not a hobby one can imagine today�s physicists engaging in. Arago, of course, knew that his instrument needed a little theater in order to interest the salons. So this is what he did:
�Into the Parisian salons, Arago took a version of his original polarimeter modified for public viewing. He had instructed his instrument maker, Jean Baptiste Francois Soleil, to replace the thin sheets of mica with pieces of gypsum engraved with decorative images. The carving had been done in such a way that under ordinary light, nothing could be seen. But under polarized light, brightly colored images emerged, showing flowers, butterflies, and even Arago's name surrounded by laurel wreathes. The effect proved sensationally popular among the audiences--people collectively witnessing the visual display.�
Arago�s friend, the father of Prosper Merimee, popularized a system of complementary colors based on the science of the polarimeter. This system penetrated, by way of the salons, to Delacroix and Baudelaire.
According to this site, Arago's life story was taken as a model by Jules Verne for one of his tales. Oddly, Levitt doesn't mention this.
What about M. Biot, our corpuscularian? Alas, he went the way of Bouvard and Pechucet. Here�s what Levitt has to say about him:
�In 1822, when Biot purchased an estate near the small town of Nointel in Beauvais, he joined a widespread rush of French nobility back to the countryside following an 1821 law restoring property claims to emigres. (31) Biot's own move was hardly a restitution of family privilege. He was born and raised in Paris, the son of a midlevel functionary. Yet he was not shy about acting the part of the local notability, and throughout the 1820s, he engaged in a virtuoso self-reinvention as country gentleman, even signing his name "Biot, proprietaire." Soon after moving to Nointel, he ran for mayor of the town; once elected, he began presiding magnanimously over the local population.
Biot also began cultivating his land and making pronouncements on the proper relationship between agriculture, industry, and the central state. Indeed, breaking off his string of several-hundred-page memoirs on the physical sciences, the only item he published in the twelve years from 1822 to 1834 was an open letter in 1829 to the director of the Revue Britannique, expressing dissatisfaction with the Paris-centric agricultural system.�
To crown Biot�s retreat from enlightenment to reaction, he started hanging around with suspect Jesuits who were heavy on the light rhetoric. As in the light of reason dimmed by the light of God, and the secrets of God being darkness to the rational mind. Etc. etc. And, in a truly inspired move, he started rotating his polarimeter. Not for him the Arago stasis, so characteristic of urban decay. No, Biot, was set on discovering hidden rotary powers within the �lan vital itself.
Levitt�s essay is, among other things, a nice counteweight to critics, like Bloom, who have no use for the New Historicist school � among other matters, she sheds some light on Stendhal�s use of color that wouldn�t be shed by intuiting psychoanalytic causes for composing titles out of colors.
After Levitt, we liked Jens Lachmund�s Exploring the city of rubble: botanical fieldwork in bombed cities in Germany after World War II. Again, the title is rich in allusions. One thinks of Koeppen. Or of Grass.
Here are two grafs that present the problem:
�After 1945, rubble was a feature of virtually all German cities. Dresden, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Hamburg, and Kiel were among the most destroyed. The largest fields of rubble, however, existed in the center of the city of Berlin. According to a contemporary survey, about 28.5 square kilometers (the size of the city being 72) of the built-up area had been bombed. In all cities, steps toward reconstruction began soon after the war. Bombed areas were cleared and leveled, creating open spaces awaiting eventual construction projects. Sometimes kiosks or provisional storage places were erected in these spaces; sometimes they were fenced off with billboards. Following the example of Kiel and its Gayk Waldchen, the newly constructed park named after the city's mayor, Andreas Gayk, some cities decided to plant trees and bushes in the bombed areas and thereby turn ugly wastelands into parks. Often no larger than a single plot or an earlier block of houses, they, like the Gayk Waldchen, were supposed to be temporary places that would eventually be built over. As already mentioned, in Berlin the pace of this urban reconstruction was much slower than in other German cities. Not only was it less attractive to invest money in a politically isolated city whose economic future remained uncertain, but many areas of rubble were located on the borderline dividing the two Berlins. These were reserved as potential construction ground for rebuilding the center of Berlin should reunification ever occur.
Rubble mounds became another feature of postwar cities. When they cleared the bombed areas, the cities used a large amount of the rubble for construction work; but there remained a lot of material, which had to be disposed of within the urban area or its surroundings. (5) Due to the size of West Berlin and the extent of destruction, the amount of rubble was tremendously high and the problem of disposal became particularly pressing. Unlike elsewhere, carrying the rubble out of the city was rarely possible. The western part of Berlin not only lacked efficient transportation facilities but also was politically separated from its surroundings. After abandoning plans to pour a layer of rubble over the city's largest inner-urban forest, the Tiergarten, the government constructed several centralized dumping grounds, mostly on existing parklands and forests. Shaped as natural-looking hills and planted with dense vegetation, they were meant to enrich the landscape of the surrounding parks or forests.�
That they even considered paving, or rubbling, over the Tiergarten blows my mind.
Lachmund goes on to make up a word � ruderal � and talk, at systematic length, about the biologists who studied the flora that grew up in the rubble areas. Send this article to the Pentagon: they can include the study of ruderal flora as another sign of the happy, happy progress that is making life for Bremer�s Iraqis better and better.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Bollettino
You have read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the European scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Europeans who believe that 9/11 was a set-up. And you�ve read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the Middle Eastern scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Muslims who believe that 9/11 was the work of the Jews, or was planned by the Bush administration. Such exposes of mass gullibility have become a fixture in the American press, one answer to the perennial question: why do they hate us? Answer: they are cretins. A good example of this kind of thing is linked here: Anne Applebaum�s column about the Frankfurt Book fair for the Washington Post. She knits together the two popular motifs, moving from the claim that a German translation of Thierry Meyssan�s L�effroyable imposture, the most famous of the conspiracy books, had mounted to best seller status in Germany, to a news story about some German group that was demanding a victim status for the German dead in World War II and the period afterwards equal to the status of the Jews.
It is odd that Applebaum, who is as conversant with contemporary Russian history as any American journalist, should take for granted the sufficiency of this news story type. We feel there is something missing here. For surely the willingness to see conspiracy in the events of 9/11 is conditioned, in the European and Arab world, by a set of attacks that happened between September 3rd and 13th in 1999. This set of attacks has sunk into the background for most Americans. The attacks consisted of explosives planted at various apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk along with a string of explosions outside of Moscow, resulting in more than 300 deaths. These attacks are still used today to justify that second Chechnian war. The outrage that followed them allowed Putin to outdistance any electoral rival, thus providing Boris Yeltsin�s court with a loyal successor who, it turned out, went along with his part of the deal: none of the Yeltsin family, for instance, is in jail for massive peculation. The butchers, one might say, have covered the thieves.
The odd thing about these bombings is that there is very good reason to think they were not planted by Chechen terrorists at all. There�s very good reason to think that there was a conspiracy, directed by Russian security forces, to create a reason to go to war in Chechnya and � killing two birds with one sugar sack full of explosives � also creating an air of hysteria that would ensure the selection of Putin to the presidency. That very good reason isn�t hidden from Europe, or the Muslim world. The use of Chechens as a useful ethnic bait, the cynical manipulation of extreme Islamicists by forces close to Yeltsin in order to split Chechen nationalism, or at least discredit it, and the subsequent slaughter in Chechnya � which goes on, by the way; the latest reports say that the casualty figures for the Russians in the last year in Chechnya are the highest since the war began in 1999 � have not been obscured behind some veil.
The bombings of September, 99, were, from the start, rather murky affairs. Especially odd was the fact that the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB, seemed so clueless about catching the perps. That did not prevent the wholesale arrest and deportation of the Chechen community in Moscow. But as to the evidence at the explosion sites � well, that was treated with an almost criminal negligence.
Rumors soon began to fly that FSB incompetence was motivated, to say the least. And they concentrated on an incident that happened in Ryazan. This incident is explained by an ex FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko in a book entitled The FSB is blowing up Russia. The book is the most detailed account of the curious incidents of September 22-23. On that night, two men and a woman in a track suit planted a sugar sack in the basement of an apartment in Ryazan. The sugar sack almost surely contained an explosive, hexogene. Luckily, the men were spotted. The apartment building was evacuated. The sacks were taken out of the basement. They were tested and found to have hexogen. Then the men who planted the sacks were found. Here�s where things get interesting � the men were FSB men. Suddenly, the FSB gets involved in the investigation. The first thing that it finds is that the sacks contained sugar alone. How about the tests that showed hexogen? That came from the hands of the investigator, who, it was claimed, a week before, had somehow touched hexogen. And apparently not washed his hands in a week. What were the FSB men doing? It was an �exercise.� A preparedness drill.
The FSB cover story is so weak that it was surely compounded as an afterthought. That the security forces could be so sure of impunity that they created a story that wouldn�t fool a moron indicates the astonishing level of cynicism here. Who, after all, is going to tell?
There was a reason for that cynicism beyond the mere accretion of power on the part of the FSB. The people who knew about the explosives at a higher level knew � and were part of -- the whole web of connections that tied Yeltsin�s court to various factions in Chechnya. Most notoriously, there was a seemingly inscrutable connection between oligarch Boris Berezovsky and various Chechen Islamicist groups. The group that launched the raid on Daghestan from Chechnya in 1999 was headed by a group who seemed to be entirely funded by Berezovsky. Since 99, Berezovsky has fallen out with Putin � who, it turns out, is the kind of godfather who doesn�t tolerate competing oligarchs. Berezovsky�s various lootings are now on the docket in the Moscow judiciary, while the man himself is on the lam, claiming that he has evidence of the link between the FSB and the bombings in Moscow.
How has the Russian govenment responded to these accusations? By condemning Litvinenko as a traitor in court -- an old and familiar gesture. This is an excerpt from an interview with Litvinenko:
�In an unexpected development, an official Russian government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, in its March 30 issue, published a lengthy interview with Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB, who recently received political asylum in Great Britain. Some excerpts:
Interviewer: "You took part in preparing the film 'Assassination [Attempt] against Russia,' in which the participation of the FSB in the explosions of the [apartment] houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk and the preparing of an explosion in Ryazan' are discussed. Do you seriously believe that?"
Litvinenko: "I have direct proof in relation to the attempt to blow up an [apartment] house in Ryazan. I am in possession of facts that not sugar, as the FSB maintains, but [the explosive] hexogen was placed under that house, and that it was employees of Patrushev [the director of the FSB] who placed it there."
Interviewer: "Are you prepared to present this proof?"
Litvinenko: "I am prepared. Not to the [Russian] procuracy--that is, a criminal organization. And not to the FSB--that is a terrorist organization. When the public commission which is presently being formed by [Duma deputy] Sergei Yushenkov has been created, then under the condition that honest people make up that commission I will give them all the materials which I have in my hands concerning the crimes committed by the leadership of the FSB.... Yesterday through the Internet I appealed to all officers of the FSB who participated in the 1999 explosions to come forward and admit it."
For us, the interesting thing is that hints of most of this information had leaked out by 2000. It didn�t take long. And yet, in the West, Putin, like Yeltsin before him, was treated as an ally. The tepid condemnations of Russia�s moves against Chechnya � moves that were every bit as savage as Milosovic�s moves against Bosnia � was a liner note to the more important harmony between the Russian regime and the American. That harmony has been strengthened, even, during the Bush period. Oddly enough, an administration that seems to want, not so subconsciously, to bomb Paris, is incredibly chummy with Putin, who is as anti-war as any major leader.
What does this say to the Arabs, the Germans, the Indonesians, etc.?
This is my guess: it says that the West will condone a high degree of fraud, even amounting to the creating atrocities against one�s own citizens, in order to perpetrate foreign policies that are directed, by some coincidence, against mainly Islamic ethnic groups.
The fraud in the system of governance that is continually generating references to itself as democratic can�t help but be ultimately crippling. I have yet to see any connection made between the Muslim reception of 9/11 and the Muslim reception of the war in Chechnya. I would, however, guess that the frauds of September, 99, have had a strong bearing on the idea that the attack in September, 2001 was of an all too familiar shape and form. This isn�t to discount overt anti-semitism. It isn�t to discount anti-Americanism. But to dwell on these as the sole generators of the belief in super-power fraudulence is to blind yourself to a significant, although underinvestigated, piece of recent history.
You have read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the European scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Europeans who believe that 9/11 was a set-up. And you�ve read this before: the news story or opinion column that surveys the Middle Eastern scene and emphasizes the spooky number of Muslims who believe that 9/11 was the work of the Jews, or was planned by the Bush administration. Such exposes of mass gullibility have become a fixture in the American press, one answer to the perennial question: why do they hate us? Answer: they are cretins. A good example of this kind of thing is linked here: Anne Applebaum�s column about the Frankfurt Book fair for the Washington Post. She knits together the two popular motifs, moving from the claim that a German translation of Thierry Meyssan�s L�effroyable imposture, the most famous of the conspiracy books, had mounted to best seller status in Germany, to a news story about some German group that was demanding a victim status for the German dead in World War II and the period afterwards equal to the status of the Jews.
It is odd that Applebaum, who is as conversant with contemporary Russian history as any American journalist, should take for granted the sufficiency of this news story type. We feel there is something missing here. For surely the willingness to see conspiracy in the events of 9/11 is conditioned, in the European and Arab world, by a set of attacks that happened between September 3rd and 13th in 1999. This set of attacks has sunk into the background for most Americans. The attacks consisted of explosives planted at various apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk along with a string of explosions outside of Moscow, resulting in more than 300 deaths. These attacks are still used today to justify that second Chechnian war. The outrage that followed them allowed Putin to outdistance any electoral rival, thus providing Boris Yeltsin�s court with a loyal successor who, it turned out, went along with his part of the deal: none of the Yeltsin family, for instance, is in jail for massive peculation. The butchers, one might say, have covered the thieves.
The odd thing about these bombings is that there is very good reason to think they were not planted by Chechen terrorists at all. There�s very good reason to think that there was a conspiracy, directed by Russian security forces, to create a reason to go to war in Chechnya and � killing two birds with one sugar sack full of explosives � also creating an air of hysteria that would ensure the selection of Putin to the presidency. That very good reason isn�t hidden from Europe, or the Muslim world. The use of Chechens as a useful ethnic bait, the cynical manipulation of extreme Islamicists by forces close to Yeltsin in order to split Chechen nationalism, or at least discredit it, and the subsequent slaughter in Chechnya � which goes on, by the way; the latest reports say that the casualty figures for the Russians in the last year in Chechnya are the highest since the war began in 1999 � have not been obscured behind some veil.
The bombings of September, 99, were, from the start, rather murky affairs. Especially odd was the fact that the FSB, the Russian successor to the KGB, seemed so clueless about catching the perps. That did not prevent the wholesale arrest and deportation of the Chechen community in Moscow. But as to the evidence at the explosion sites � well, that was treated with an almost criminal negligence.
Rumors soon began to fly that FSB incompetence was motivated, to say the least. And they concentrated on an incident that happened in Ryazan. This incident is explained by an ex FSB officer, Aleksandr Litvinenko in a book entitled The FSB is blowing up Russia. The book is the most detailed account of the curious incidents of September 22-23. On that night, two men and a woman in a track suit planted a sugar sack in the basement of an apartment in Ryazan. The sugar sack almost surely contained an explosive, hexogene. Luckily, the men were spotted. The apartment building was evacuated. The sacks were taken out of the basement. They were tested and found to have hexogen. Then the men who planted the sacks were found. Here�s where things get interesting � the men were FSB men. Suddenly, the FSB gets involved in the investigation. The first thing that it finds is that the sacks contained sugar alone. How about the tests that showed hexogen? That came from the hands of the investigator, who, it was claimed, a week before, had somehow touched hexogen. And apparently not washed his hands in a week. What were the FSB men doing? It was an �exercise.� A preparedness drill.
The FSB cover story is so weak that it was surely compounded as an afterthought. That the security forces could be so sure of impunity that they created a story that wouldn�t fool a moron indicates the astonishing level of cynicism here. Who, after all, is going to tell?
There was a reason for that cynicism beyond the mere accretion of power on the part of the FSB. The people who knew about the explosives at a higher level knew � and were part of -- the whole web of connections that tied Yeltsin�s court to various factions in Chechnya. Most notoriously, there was a seemingly inscrutable connection between oligarch Boris Berezovsky and various Chechen Islamicist groups. The group that launched the raid on Daghestan from Chechnya in 1999 was headed by a group who seemed to be entirely funded by Berezovsky. Since 99, Berezovsky has fallen out with Putin � who, it turns out, is the kind of godfather who doesn�t tolerate competing oligarchs. Berezovsky�s various lootings are now on the docket in the Moscow judiciary, while the man himself is on the lam, claiming that he has evidence of the link between the FSB and the bombings in Moscow.
How has the Russian govenment responded to these accusations? By condemning Litvinenko as a traitor in court -- an old and familiar gesture. This is an excerpt from an interview with Litvinenko:
�In an unexpected development, an official Russian government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, in its March 30 issue, published a lengthy interview with Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the FSB, who recently received political asylum in Great Britain. Some excerpts:
Interviewer: "You took part in preparing the film 'Assassination [Attempt] against Russia,' in which the participation of the FSB in the explosions of the [apartment] houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk and the preparing of an explosion in Ryazan' are discussed. Do you seriously believe that?"
Litvinenko: "I have direct proof in relation to the attempt to blow up an [apartment] house in Ryazan. I am in possession of facts that not sugar, as the FSB maintains, but [the explosive] hexogen was placed under that house, and that it was employees of Patrushev [the director of the FSB] who placed it there."
Interviewer: "Are you prepared to present this proof?"
Litvinenko: "I am prepared. Not to the [Russian] procuracy--that is, a criminal organization. And not to the FSB--that is a terrorist organization. When the public commission which is presently being formed by [Duma deputy] Sergei Yushenkov has been created, then under the condition that honest people make up that commission I will give them all the materials which I have in my hands concerning the crimes committed by the leadership of the FSB.... Yesterday through the Internet I appealed to all officers of the FSB who participated in the 1999 explosions to come forward and admit it."
For us, the interesting thing is that hints of most of this information had leaked out by 2000. It didn�t take long. And yet, in the West, Putin, like Yeltsin before him, was treated as an ally. The tepid condemnations of Russia�s moves against Chechnya � moves that were every bit as savage as Milosovic�s moves against Bosnia � was a liner note to the more important harmony between the Russian regime and the American. That harmony has been strengthened, even, during the Bush period. Oddly enough, an administration that seems to want, not so subconsciously, to bomb Paris, is incredibly chummy with Putin, who is as anti-war as any major leader.
What does this say to the Arabs, the Germans, the Indonesians, etc.?
This is my guess: it says that the West will condone a high degree of fraud, even amounting to the creating atrocities against one�s own citizens, in order to perpetrate foreign policies that are directed, by some coincidence, against mainly Islamic ethnic groups.
The fraud in the system of governance that is continually generating references to itself as democratic can�t help but be ultimately crippling. I have yet to see any connection made between the Muslim reception of 9/11 and the Muslim reception of the war in Chechnya. I would, however, guess that the frauds of September, 99, have had a strong bearing on the idea that the attack in September, 2001 was of an all too familiar shape and form. This isn�t to discount overt anti-semitism. It isn�t to discount anti-Americanism. But to dwell on these as the sole generators of the belief in super-power fraudulence is to blind yourself to a significant, although underinvestigated, piece of recent history.
Friday, October 17, 2003
Bollettino
LI likes to consider that we are a moral shrew � that we prod against the dead mass of atrocity in this world, to the extent that a Lilliputian can prod against a leviathan; that we unhesitatingly criticize our own country knowing that the only moral force that has ever moved America is that force which is unafraid to confront the crimes of the powerful and label them as crimes; that we are, in a word, militantly informed.
Such BS.
Well, we�ve been writing for two years, and we haven�t even delved into Chechnya. We haven�t said word one about the perhaps two million who have disappeared in the great ten years war in Central Africa. As a moral shrew, you�d have to say that LI is a very parochial moral shrew.
So let�s repair a bit of this. We have been trying to catch up with Chechnya, lately, reading the reports of Anna Politskovskaya, a Russian journalist who courageously went into the country in 99, during the course of the second great battle of the post Soviet state against the Checchnyian people. Or against the people in that territory on the map labeled Chechnya. We were horrified. Just the photographs from Grozny are like nothing we�ve seen in the post World War II era. A city of about half a million has been wiped out in the last decade. Wiped out more completely than Sarajevo. Bombed into a state of Hobbesian nature � that nature which comes after civilization has invented the instruments to express its discontent, that nature in which the beast becomes the brute, and the brute is drafted, armed, and considered dangerous. Nature plus kidnapping � that�s Chechnya.
To repair our lack of information, here, we�ve searched the web. There is an amazing site, sponsored by the conservative Hoover Institute (sponsored, the site will tell you, by the Jamestown institute, but a closer reading of the fine print makes it clear that this is Hoover�s baby). A simply scathing article entitled �RUSSIA HAS LOST THE WAR IN CHECHNYA by Andrei Piontkovsky is today�s must read. It compares, in clarity and despair, with the articles Pasolini wrote just before he was assassinated. It is a good place to start understanding the Chechnyan war. That war is linked, as though following some secret and subterrean influence to what happened in Bosnia, to what happened on 9/11, to what is happening in Afghanistan, and to Iraq. There are very good reasons Bush looked into the eyes of Putin and saw a soul mate. Putin�s election, based on selling an ill thought out war on terrorism, in 99, looks like it was copied by the Bush campaign people for the midyear election in 2002.
Piontkovsky fronts his article with three grafs of enormous polemical power:
�Russia has lost this war forever precisely because of the mass bombings of cities and shellings of villages, and the "zachistki" security sweeps and extortions of bribes and ransoms. The overwhelming majority of Chechens now hate us--and that includes those who are forced to collaborate with us. Our army, to which we assigned tasks unsuitable to its very nature, is now dissolving before our eyes as it is drawn ever more deeply into shady transactions with oil, with federal "reconstruction" subsidies--and with the kidnapping and selling of hostages.
Did we enter Chechnya in order to end the ransoming of slaves, or in order to go into that business ourselves? If the latter, what is the difference between the Russian military and the bandits? According to human rights advocates, more than a thousand Russian citizens have been kidnapped by members of our security agencies in the course of "zachistki." Either they have disappeared without a trace, or their corpses, mutilated by torture, have been sold to their families. But our authorities deny such findings. In April the procurator of the Chechen Republic stated that only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen. "Only" a few hundred--this of course is mass terror against one's own countrymen.
Especially striking was one particular point in President Vladimir Putin's appeal to the Chechen people just before the March constitutional referendum. Our president expressed his wish that the Chechens' fears of nighttime knocks on the door would disappear forever, that they would see a complete end to "zachistki" and to robbery at checkpoints. Excuse me, but the president of the Russian Federation is not Mother Teresa or a UN official. The president of Russia is commander in chief of those very same troops who are kidnapping and robbing. Is our commander in chief unable to stop our death squads--or does he just not want to? I don't know which answer is the more frightening. �
We take a ghoulish interest in that evaluation of life by the gross � the �only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen.� This is the mindset of incompetent despotism, Definitely, it is here. This is the happy happy happy mood of the conservative commentariat vis a vis Iraq. The bone underneath the clown's mask was revealed by a Republican congressman in Washington who recently said that the "the story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," adding, "it is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day." Or as Piontkovsky writes, quoting Macbeth:
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Iraq is not Chechnya � or at least not yet. Although the U.S. press has so played down Iraqi casualties that, in essence, the dead vanish (a word that was a favorite, when I was a kid, to describe the massacre of Indians on the North American continent � the Cherokees, the Mohawks, the Creeks, they would �vanish� as the frontier was settled), one of the things about the war, so far, has been the remarkable control of America�s WMD. If you do the war math, you get about 15 thousand Iraqi deaths � I take that figure from the reports I�ve read. Remarkably, among all the op ed writing that the war has unleashed, every one brushs past those numbers. It is as if we fought a ghost army. How is it possible to analyze a human situation in which certain deaths make less sound than feathers falling in the void? I throw that question out just to demonstrate my own naivete and stupidity. Obviously, the media has done a brilliant job of airbrushing those corpses from recent history. In this, the Russian media is the American model. Piontkovsky, again, about Putin:
�Chechnya is our collective neurosis, our collective diagnosis. Vladimir Putin is simply one of us.
After this obscure bureaucrat was made prime minister and heir to Boris Yeltsin, the political technicians of "the family" used their financial and propaganda resources to sell us a heroic myth: The energetic officer of our special services, who, with his precise, laconic orders, was thrusting our regiments into the heart of the Caucasus, bringing fear and death to our enemies. The female heart of Russia, yearning for a powerful commander, was captivated by the heroic young lover.
Three years passed. The more the authorities controlled, the more we began to sense that they were behaving in a strangely unauthoritative way. They were not succeeding in actually solving any of the country's serious economic or social problems, including those related to Chechnya. A growing number of people were calling for negotiations and an end to the war. The legend of Putin the hero was dissolving, and some of our oligarchs were beginning to develop an alternative myth: That of the young, energetic nickel-industry manager, a man so rich that he would not even need to do any further thieving. Putin's re-election in 2004--or, to be more precise, his re-appointment--began for the first time to seem less than certain. But then once again, as if by accident, a tragic event took place that breathed new life into the apparently exhausted Putin myth: Chechen guerrillas seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. From the standpoint of Putin's political interests, that episode ended brilliantly.�
And again: �On this issue he is a man of passions. See how his face is transformed and his eyes enflamed whenever the topic of Chechnya comes up, how his emotions break through his usual restraints to express themselves in the coarse slang of criminals.�
Bush is another type of leader. The stylistic quirk of reverting to cowboy language has been much remarked on � but our feeling is that this is merely show business. This is the coached Bush, the apt pupil, the Andover Texan. Who, with an idiot's mimicy, pantomimes those gestures his Dad was no good at. It turns out, Bush jr. is good at them. The real Bush is, here, the anti-Putin � a man whose grand emotions amount to the petty peevishness of a man driving an expensive car in a traffic jam: why don�t all the lesser cars get out of his way? Bush�s emotions are saved to be spent on himself alone. When Iraq looked like a way to political gain, he was engaged. Now that it looks like the sure way to political death, he is disengaged. After all, he has already pronounced the war done and had his party on the carrier. The rest is dross, something to be done by subordinates. This accounts for the tonelessness of the 87 billion dollar speech � we think that tonelessness is a truer gauge of Bush�s personality than the dead or alive language that so roiled up the Europeans. The truth about Bush is that he is a vacuum. Inanity propped up by fanaticism � that�s the hallmark of this presidency.
We'll do more weaving between Chechnya and Iraq next week.
LI likes to consider that we are a moral shrew � that we prod against the dead mass of atrocity in this world, to the extent that a Lilliputian can prod against a leviathan; that we unhesitatingly criticize our own country knowing that the only moral force that has ever moved America is that force which is unafraid to confront the crimes of the powerful and label them as crimes; that we are, in a word, militantly informed.
Such BS.
Well, we�ve been writing for two years, and we haven�t even delved into Chechnya. We haven�t said word one about the perhaps two million who have disappeared in the great ten years war in Central Africa. As a moral shrew, you�d have to say that LI is a very parochial moral shrew.
So let�s repair a bit of this. We have been trying to catch up with Chechnya, lately, reading the reports of Anna Politskovskaya, a Russian journalist who courageously went into the country in 99, during the course of the second great battle of the post Soviet state against the Checchnyian people. Or against the people in that territory on the map labeled Chechnya. We were horrified. Just the photographs from Grozny are like nothing we�ve seen in the post World War II era. A city of about half a million has been wiped out in the last decade. Wiped out more completely than Sarajevo. Bombed into a state of Hobbesian nature � that nature which comes after civilization has invented the instruments to express its discontent, that nature in which the beast becomes the brute, and the brute is drafted, armed, and considered dangerous. Nature plus kidnapping � that�s Chechnya.
To repair our lack of information, here, we�ve searched the web. There is an amazing site, sponsored by the conservative Hoover Institute (sponsored, the site will tell you, by the Jamestown institute, but a closer reading of the fine print makes it clear that this is Hoover�s baby). A simply scathing article entitled �RUSSIA HAS LOST THE WAR IN CHECHNYA by Andrei Piontkovsky is today�s must read. It compares, in clarity and despair, with the articles Pasolini wrote just before he was assassinated. It is a good place to start understanding the Chechnyan war. That war is linked, as though following some secret and subterrean influence to what happened in Bosnia, to what happened on 9/11, to what is happening in Afghanistan, and to Iraq. There are very good reasons Bush looked into the eyes of Putin and saw a soul mate. Putin�s election, based on selling an ill thought out war on terrorism, in 99, looks like it was copied by the Bush campaign people for the midyear election in 2002.
Piontkovsky fronts his article with three grafs of enormous polemical power:
�Russia has lost this war forever precisely because of the mass bombings of cities and shellings of villages, and the "zachistki" security sweeps and extortions of bribes and ransoms. The overwhelming majority of Chechens now hate us--and that includes those who are forced to collaborate with us. Our army, to which we assigned tasks unsuitable to its very nature, is now dissolving before our eyes as it is drawn ever more deeply into shady transactions with oil, with federal "reconstruction" subsidies--and with the kidnapping and selling of hostages.
Did we enter Chechnya in order to end the ransoming of slaves, or in order to go into that business ourselves? If the latter, what is the difference between the Russian military and the bandits? According to human rights advocates, more than a thousand Russian citizens have been kidnapped by members of our security agencies in the course of "zachistki." Either they have disappeared without a trace, or their corpses, mutilated by torture, have been sold to their families. But our authorities deny such findings. In April the procurator of the Chechen Republic stated that only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen. "Only" a few hundred--this of course is mass terror against one's own countrymen.
Especially striking was one particular point in President Vladimir Putin's appeal to the Chechen people just before the March constitutional referendum. Our president expressed his wish that the Chechens' fears of nighttime knocks on the door would disappear forever, that they would see a complete end to "zachistki" and to robbery at checkpoints. Excuse me, but the president of the Russian Federation is not Mother Teresa or a UN official. The president of Russia is commander in chief of those very same troops who are kidnapping and robbing. Is our commander in chief unable to stop our death squads--or does he just not want to? I don't know which answer is the more frightening. �
We take a ghoulish interest in that evaluation of life by the gross � the �only a few hundred citizens of Russia had been kidnapped by our servicemen.� This is the mindset of incompetent despotism, Definitely, it is here. This is the happy happy happy mood of the conservative commentariat vis a vis Iraq. The bone underneath the clown's mask was revealed by a Republican congressman in Washington who recently said that the "the story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," adding, "it is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day." Or as Piontkovsky writes, quoting Macbeth:
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Iraq is not Chechnya � or at least not yet. Although the U.S. press has so played down Iraqi casualties that, in essence, the dead vanish (a word that was a favorite, when I was a kid, to describe the massacre of Indians on the North American continent � the Cherokees, the Mohawks, the Creeks, they would �vanish� as the frontier was settled), one of the things about the war, so far, has been the remarkable control of America�s WMD. If you do the war math, you get about 15 thousand Iraqi deaths � I take that figure from the reports I�ve read. Remarkably, among all the op ed writing that the war has unleashed, every one brushs past those numbers. It is as if we fought a ghost army. How is it possible to analyze a human situation in which certain deaths make less sound than feathers falling in the void? I throw that question out just to demonstrate my own naivete and stupidity. Obviously, the media has done a brilliant job of airbrushing those corpses from recent history. In this, the Russian media is the American model. Piontkovsky, again, about Putin:
�Chechnya is our collective neurosis, our collective diagnosis. Vladimir Putin is simply one of us.
After this obscure bureaucrat was made prime minister and heir to Boris Yeltsin, the political technicians of "the family" used their financial and propaganda resources to sell us a heroic myth: The energetic officer of our special services, who, with his precise, laconic orders, was thrusting our regiments into the heart of the Caucasus, bringing fear and death to our enemies. The female heart of Russia, yearning for a powerful commander, was captivated by the heroic young lover.
Three years passed. The more the authorities controlled, the more we began to sense that they were behaving in a strangely unauthoritative way. They were not succeeding in actually solving any of the country's serious economic or social problems, including those related to Chechnya. A growing number of people were calling for negotiations and an end to the war. The legend of Putin the hero was dissolving, and some of our oligarchs were beginning to develop an alternative myth: That of the young, energetic nickel-industry manager, a man so rich that he would not even need to do any further thieving. Putin's re-election in 2004--or, to be more precise, his re-appointment--began for the first time to seem less than certain. But then once again, as if by accident, a tragic event took place that breathed new life into the apparently exhausted Putin myth: Chechen guerrillas seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. From the standpoint of Putin's political interests, that episode ended brilliantly.�
And again: �On this issue he is a man of passions. See how his face is transformed and his eyes enflamed whenever the topic of Chechnya comes up, how his emotions break through his usual restraints to express themselves in the coarse slang of criminals.�
Bush is another type of leader. The stylistic quirk of reverting to cowboy language has been much remarked on � but our feeling is that this is merely show business. This is the coached Bush, the apt pupil, the Andover Texan. Who, with an idiot's mimicy, pantomimes those gestures his Dad was no good at. It turns out, Bush jr. is good at them. The real Bush is, here, the anti-Putin � a man whose grand emotions amount to the petty peevishness of a man driving an expensive car in a traffic jam: why don�t all the lesser cars get out of his way? Bush�s emotions are saved to be spent on himself alone. When Iraq looked like a way to political gain, he was engaged. Now that it looks like the sure way to political death, he is disengaged. After all, he has already pronounced the war done and had his party on the carrier. The rest is dross, something to be done by subordinates. This accounts for the tonelessness of the 87 billion dollar speech � we think that tonelessness is a truer gauge of Bush�s personality than the dead or alive language that so roiled up the Europeans. The truth about Bush is that he is a vacuum. Inanity propped up by fanaticism � that�s the hallmark of this presidency.
We'll do more weaving between Chechnya and Iraq next week.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Bollettino
Tom Friedman is up to his old tricks again. At the moment, he is sounding much like Dick Nixon. At least Nixon had some reason to speak about a 'silent majority" of Americans in the 1970s. Friedman's grotesque parody of the Nixonian moment is to talk about the silent majority of Iraqis. You will be unsurprised that Friedman, equipped with superspecial ESP, has tapped into the libido of this group. Yes, Virginia, there is a silent majority of Iraqis stolidly husking the corn out there, and Friedman is their prophet. Much as the tailors in the Hans Christian Andersen tale demonstrated their skill with invisible thread, Friedman, having given his views this mass status, is free to represent the Iraqi man in the street. And why not? After all, it looks like the constitution, which will make Iraq a find and dandy permanent representative of the Republican party, is a bit off in the future -- say ten to twenty years -- so at present, the governing symbols of Iraq are up for grabs. Friedman, like Chalabi, knows a power vacuum when he sees one.
According to our prophet, then, what's been up with that silent majority? Why, they've been oohing and awwwing over the Bush�s program for their country. Today�s column, after lambasting Cheney, very properly, for getting out to infrequently � the poor guy suffers from ideological auto-intoxication � Friedman gets down to brass tacks:
�Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq's silent majority. Ironically, Iraq is the one place in the world where the Bush team has chosen not to become obsessed with terrorists, not to focus exclusively on them and their noise, but to just keep on building a better Iraq for Iraqis � the only way to counter terrorism in the long run � despite the bombs bursting in air.�
Now, listening to a silent majority must be something like listening to the sound of one hand clapping � a mystical experience for the initiated. Those of us who are uninitiated wonder about the patronizing tone of building a better Iraq for the Iraqis. Better? That�s the kind of bland talk that dispenses with such problems as who defines better, who pays for it, who does it, who profits from it. In actuality, better is being defined in D.C. instead of Baghdad � it is being defined by the free market types who can�t pursuade the U.S. to swallow the minimal state, maximal corporation policy, but think a supine Iraq might be just the place to try it out. Better is defined by people who are colluding in the continuing slide of Azerbaijan into a semi-monarchical despotism � where�s the talk about democracy there? There was a story in the Times yesterday about � remember? � the democratic wave in the former Soviet Union. Friedman was an enthusiast back then, plugging in with his magic ability to access the silent majorities of various cultures whose languages he doesn�t speak and whose day to day customs he doesn�t know. Here�s a snippet that revisits this past triumph of capital and civil society for all:
�It is a discouraging spectacle for those who proclaimed victory for democracy when Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago � and who speak of that event today as a model for what they envisage as a democratic transformation in Iraq and the Middle East.
"There is no consolidated liberal democracy in the former Soviet Union except for the Baltic states," said Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University. "There is the legacy of the state just dominating politics. It's not a level playing field, and Azerbaijan is an absurd example of that."
And so, today, we have a new prez in Azerbaijan who looks like the old prez -- cause he's his son! And not a peep from our present creators of Middle Eastern Democracy on the run.
As I recall it, one thing those places all had in common was � yes! � shock therapy economics. The imposition of wild west capitalism by all means necessary. And so -- to get back to the issue of betterness for all -- what's better for the Iraqis than more of the same. So lately, phase two of the occupation, the Bush-ites are pouring down the wide open maws of the Iraqi silent majority an economic policy that is conceded to have the probable effect of increasing unemployment. Just the thing for a place with a 60% unemployment rate. Luckily, there are some voices that are timidly saying, we prefer not to. They are even on the Council.
Now, the Council, having only nominal power and not having a hot-line to the silent majority of Iraqis, only counts when it rubberstamps the better-ness we are spreading all over Iraq. So we just won�t listen to, say, advice from the Finance minister:
�We suffered through the economic theories of socialism, Marxism and then cronyism," the official, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's East Asia Economic Summit meeting here. "Now we face the prospect of free-market fundamentalism."
Our advice to Friedman -- since he feels free to offer his advice to us -- is to turn his bat like ears to voices like this. Because what the Occupation is planning for Iraq is beginning to seem, best case scenario, like a mitigated version of Azerbaijan. A sort of Chalabi's Azerbaijan. We don't think that is worth 87 billion dollars.
Tom Friedman is up to his old tricks again. At the moment, he is sounding much like Dick Nixon. At least Nixon had some reason to speak about a 'silent majority" of Americans in the 1970s. Friedman's grotesque parody of the Nixonian moment is to talk about the silent majority of Iraqis. You will be unsurprised that Friedman, equipped with superspecial ESP, has tapped into the libido of this group. Yes, Virginia, there is a silent majority of Iraqis stolidly husking the corn out there, and Friedman is their prophet. Much as the tailors in the Hans Christian Andersen tale demonstrated their skill with invisible thread, Friedman, having given his views this mass status, is free to represent the Iraqi man in the street. And why not? After all, it looks like the constitution, which will make Iraq a find and dandy permanent representative of the Republican party, is a bit off in the future -- say ten to twenty years -- so at present, the governing symbols of Iraq are up for grabs. Friedman, like Chalabi, knows a power vacuum when he sees one.
According to our prophet, then, what's been up with that silent majority? Why, they've been oohing and awwwing over the Bush�s program for their country. Today�s column, after lambasting Cheney, very properly, for getting out to infrequently � the poor guy suffers from ideological auto-intoxication � Friedman gets down to brass tacks:
�Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq's silent majority. Ironically, Iraq is the one place in the world where the Bush team has chosen not to become obsessed with terrorists, not to focus exclusively on them and their noise, but to just keep on building a better Iraq for Iraqis � the only way to counter terrorism in the long run � despite the bombs bursting in air.�
Now, listening to a silent majority must be something like listening to the sound of one hand clapping � a mystical experience for the initiated. Those of us who are uninitiated wonder about the patronizing tone of building a better Iraq for the Iraqis. Better? That�s the kind of bland talk that dispenses with such problems as who defines better, who pays for it, who does it, who profits from it. In actuality, better is being defined in D.C. instead of Baghdad � it is being defined by the free market types who can�t pursuade the U.S. to swallow the minimal state, maximal corporation policy, but think a supine Iraq might be just the place to try it out. Better is defined by people who are colluding in the continuing slide of Azerbaijan into a semi-monarchical despotism � where�s the talk about democracy there? There was a story in the Times yesterday about � remember? � the democratic wave in the former Soviet Union. Friedman was an enthusiast back then, plugging in with his magic ability to access the silent majorities of various cultures whose languages he doesn�t speak and whose day to day customs he doesn�t know. Here�s a snippet that revisits this past triumph of capital and civil society for all:
�It is a discouraging spectacle for those who proclaimed victory for democracy when Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago � and who speak of that event today as a model for what they envisage as a democratic transformation in Iraq and the Middle East.
"There is no consolidated liberal democracy in the former Soviet Union except for the Baltic states," said Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University. "There is the legacy of the state just dominating politics. It's not a level playing field, and Azerbaijan is an absurd example of that."
And so, today, we have a new prez in Azerbaijan who looks like the old prez -- cause he's his son! And not a peep from our present creators of Middle Eastern Democracy on the run.
As I recall it, one thing those places all had in common was � yes! � shock therapy economics. The imposition of wild west capitalism by all means necessary. And so -- to get back to the issue of betterness for all -- what's better for the Iraqis than more of the same. So lately, phase two of the occupation, the Bush-ites are pouring down the wide open maws of the Iraqi silent majority an economic policy that is conceded to have the probable effect of increasing unemployment. Just the thing for a place with a 60% unemployment rate. Luckily, there are some voices that are timidly saying, we prefer not to. They are even on the Council.
Now, the Council, having only nominal power and not having a hot-line to the silent majority of Iraqis, only counts when it rubberstamps the better-ness we are spreading all over Iraq. So we just won�t listen to, say, advice from the Finance minister:
�We suffered through the economic theories of socialism, Marxism and then cronyism," the official, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's East Asia Economic Summit meeting here. "Now we face the prospect of free-market fundamentalism."
Our advice to Friedman -- since he feels free to offer his advice to us -- is to turn his bat like ears to voices like this. Because what the Occupation is planning for Iraq is beginning to seem, best case scenario, like a mitigated version of Azerbaijan. A sort of Chalabi's Azerbaijan. We don't think that is worth 87 billion dollars.
Bollettino
I�ve just reviewed one of those annual best of anthologies that picks poems, fiction, and that whore, creative non-fiction from the leading journals and tosses em up, in a huge, indigestible salad. There were maybe fifteen poems in the anthology. And here�s the thing: the poems weren�t even there enough to pronounce them as bad. They were a turned off tv in the room � a blank, blind gaze.
Why is poetry so bad right now?
There are maybe ten novelists and short story writers who broke into prominence in the nineties. At least five of them could be identified by any medium reader. You might not have read Infinite Jest, but you will recognize David Foster Wallace�s. You might not have read Secret History, but you will recognize Donna Tartt�s name. The same test would turn up approximately zero British or American poets.
This isn�t because of some great scandalous overthrow of technique. The make it new credo lasted, I�d say, about through Olson. I�m an eclectic kind of poetaster. Give me Lowell, give me the Black Mountain poets, give me George Oppen or Marianne Moore, and I can work with them. I know when I�m beat, I know when the poet�s demand that I learn how to read the poem is compelling, and when it isn�t. Today�s poets don�t really need to invent new forms, but I�d be happy to follow along if they did. In fact, they are very expert with forms. It�s just they have nothing to say. If they have something to say, usually, I guess, they move into fiction. Or creative �f., the aforesaid happy hooker. So instead, you get the dullest lines, ephemeral feelings that, in the catching, have no power to move even the prime feeler of them, and a quasi surrealistic jumble that moves the poem along, much as the janitor moves detritus down the hall with a big fat red cloth broom.. The poems all read like bad translations of themselves. There�s less logic in them, and less continuity, than you�d find in a Hollywood B movie. They are even more instantly forgettable than those movies, too.
What happened? I mean, through the seventies there was always some strong figure. Merrill, Plath, Thom Gunn. Even Anne Sexton, for Christ�s sake. I think the seventies is the last decade that I could name ten active American poets that I respected.
I know, the inevitable fallow periods. But this one is more fallow than most. You have to go back to the 1780s, perhaps, to find a decade where the poets are generally of such a low caliber. Even then, you had Crabbe. Perhaps it is that gathering the poets into huge poet reservations on campuses has denied them the kind of knock about experience they need. I mean, today�s Baudelaire has to get up early to photocopy his syllabus for the kiddies. While this isn�t really death to novelists, it seems to have killed poets. Poets need some roughing up. They need, well, some love for the English language � something that is sorely lacking in the poems I read. This isn�t HTML code, people. A little paste and copy and there you are -- but it is not something I'd want to do anything with, except maybe wipe my ass. Here's an old essay in the Atlantic Monthly that genteely dips into these waters. Alas, Goia has written the essay looking over her shoulder -- better not hurt anyone's feelings! -- which rather blunts the incisiveness of the thing. When she writes:
"Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture" -- you get the feeling of a seriously pulled punch. If great poetry is being written, it will eventualy find its place. The deal is, dude -- no great poetry is coming through. None. Nada. In any sense that I recognize as great poetry, viz, for instance, wanting to read it. Quoting it. Having it recur to me at odd intervals in my daily life. Having a sense that it is never fully plumbed. Etc.
Poetry magazine recently received something like a hundred million dollars � some fantastic sum. It is now a foundation. They should hire some researchers and figure this out.
I�ve just reviewed one of those annual best of anthologies that picks poems, fiction, and that whore, creative non-fiction from the leading journals and tosses em up, in a huge, indigestible salad. There were maybe fifteen poems in the anthology. And here�s the thing: the poems weren�t even there enough to pronounce them as bad. They were a turned off tv in the room � a blank, blind gaze.
Why is poetry so bad right now?
There are maybe ten novelists and short story writers who broke into prominence in the nineties. At least five of them could be identified by any medium reader. You might not have read Infinite Jest, but you will recognize David Foster Wallace�s. You might not have read Secret History, but you will recognize Donna Tartt�s name. The same test would turn up approximately zero British or American poets.
This isn�t because of some great scandalous overthrow of technique. The make it new credo lasted, I�d say, about through Olson. I�m an eclectic kind of poetaster. Give me Lowell, give me the Black Mountain poets, give me George Oppen or Marianne Moore, and I can work with them. I know when I�m beat, I know when the poet�s demand that I learn how to read the poem is compelling, and when it isn�t. Today�s poets don�t really need to invent new forms, but I�d be happy to follow along if they did. In fact, they are very expert with forms. It�s just they have nothing to say. If they have something to say, usually, I guess, they move into fiction. Or creative �f., the aforesaid happy hooker. So instead, you get the dullest lines, ephemeral feelings that, in the catching, have no power to move even the prime feeler of them, and a quasi surrealistic jumble that moves the poem along, much as the janitor moves detritus down the hall with a big fat red cloth broom.. The poems all read like bad translations of themselves. There�s less logic in them, and less continuity, than you�d find in a Hollywood B movie. They are even more instantly forgettable than those movies, too.
What happened? I mean, through the seventies there was always some strong figure. Merrill, Plath, Thom Gunn. Even Anne Sexton, for Christ�s sake. I think the seventies is the last decade that I could name ten active American poets that I respected.
I know, the inevitable fallow periods. But this one is more fallow than most. You have to go back to the 1780s, perhaps, to find a decade where the poets are generally of such a low caliber. Even then, you had Crabbe. Perhaps it is that gathering the poets into huge poet reservations on campuses has denied them the kind of knock about experience they need. I mean, today�s Baudelaire has to get up early to photocopy his syllabus for the kiddies. While this isn�t really death to novelists, it seems to have killed poets. Poets need some roughing up. They need, well, some love for the English language � something that is sorely lacking in the poems I read. This isn�t HTML code, people. A little paste and copy and there you are -- but it is not something I'd want to do anything with, except maybe wipe my ass. Here's an old essay in the Atlantic Monthly that genteely dips into these waters. Alas, Goia has written the essay looking over her shoulder -- better not hurt anyone's feelings! -- which rather blunts the incisiveness of the thing. When she writes:
"Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture" -- you get the feeling of a seriously pulled punch. If great poetry is being written, it will eventualy find its place. The deal is, dude -- no great poetry is coming through. None. Nada. In any sense that I recognize as great poetry, viz, for instance, wanting to read it. Quoting it. Having it recur to me at odd intervals in my daily life. Having a sense that it is never fully plumbed. Etc.
Poetry magazine recently received something like a hundred million dollars � some fantastic sum. It is now a foundation. They should hire some researchers and figure this out.
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Bollettino
In this country, the drug war is shaped by a cycle as inexplicable as the Mayan million year year. Every decade or so, a celebrity overdoses or generally gets in trouble with a drug. In the eighties, Len Bias, a basketball star, and -- it turned out - an avid tooter, suffered a heart attack, died, and was discovered to have traces of cocaine in his blood stream. Congress went bonkers, and built him their sweetest little memorial, all made out of millions of people�s lives, ticking away, 5- 15 years at a shot. Prison populations, you embrace multitudes, the Congress cried, faintly echoing Whitman. The thing was called the Drug Abuse act of 1986. The thing is with us still.
Unexpectedly, Rush Limbaugh, who one would imagine to have more trouble with bourbon than with heroin, is the celebrity for this year�s cycle. I�m not really interested in Rush Limbaugh as a person or as a controversialist, and I think it is rather funny that we are being treated to various snippets of what he had to say about the drug wars. Liberals dredge up his most neandrathalish pronuniciamentos and rightwingers counter with his occasional stabs at compassionate conservativism. Which certainly begs the question: is it true that the crimes committed by the upper class are excused if they aren't hypocritical? Is this the new rule? I didn't know. I thought that suborning your maid, apparently, to score meds for your stash was a black mark even in the account books of the wealthy.
More interesting than the verbiage, because more symptomatic of the cussed wrongheadedness of the drug war, is the idea that creeps into this discourse on little cat feet, viz, that a person is somehow less responsible for drug use if the use is to relieve pain. Rush, it seems, hurt his back. To relieve the pain, he used those habit forming prescribed meds. He found, like others have, that they were wonderfully soothing. Soon he wanted them around him. He wanted them available. He wanted a stash. Now, if he had just been a sixty year old with the hots for Florida party life, poontang, and medical heroine, that would have been terrible, and there'd be no question of him taking a break from an ongoing investigation so he can retire into a rehab center. No, that wouldn't have been right. Or so the discourse goes. Or so the implications underneath the discourse go. But wait: for the same action � soliciting quantities of prescription heroin illegally � there are two attitudes. One, which takes a grip on the fact that the drug abuse is about simply relieving pain (don't even think that the buzz that accompanies that is in any way a high, or in any way pleasurable), finds the full force and panoply of tragedy in it. The other, which gestures towards the fact that the drug is about frankly grooving on a high until the high grabs you like a devil and it grooves on you -- that is found to be disgusting and incarcerable. We�ve read more than a few comments that approximate that line of thought thrown at l�affaire Rush.
The distinction between recreational drug use and �medical� drug use is even inscribed in law. The habit forming drugs are legal, shooting out from BigPharma. The narcotics are illegal, shipped in by Big Mafia. So some go to jail for selling a couple of bags of spliff, and some have diplomas and dispense painkillers to the multitudes. Well, this is what we think. We think it�s the last rotten gasp of an old and honorable ascetic tradition. We think the division between recreational and non-recreational use, however helpful it might be in diagnosing the causes of behavior, shouldn�t be inscribed in the law at all.
If Rush had been using the drugs for pleasure, his use of it might actually have been easier to monitor and control. The pop image of recreational drug taking as an orgiastic enterprise is not generally true. However, it is true that shameful drug taking can lead to solitary excess, and the kind of seedy behavior that apparently went on in the Limbaugh household with the maid. Why? Because, as the social control of the drug is taken from the hands of the doctor to the hands of the solitary user, the kind of feedback that would spot problems, or that would ritualize the drug use in some way, is subverted. An interesting article from the eighties is all about this: Drug, Set, and Setting by Norman E. Zinberg. Zinberg cites the case of a bourgeois heroin user from South Africa. The first sentence is meant to be provocative: �Carl is an occasional heroin user.� Zinberg�s study was released before the Len Bias death, but it didn�t have much of an effect anyway. In the eighties, the old, Carter era liberalism was giving way to the new, Bennett era moralism. William Bennett, Bush I�s drug czar, famously said that drugs weren�t a medical problem, but a moral problem. He meant morale problem -- as in boosting the morale of the Republican electorate. By vastly accelerating the rate of incarceration for drug users, the Fed�s probably did untold damage to the eco-system of occasional drug use. Drug abuse is aggravated by drug crimalization insofar as the drug setting becomes an outlaw site � or it becomes the solitary mansion of a sixty some year old man in Palm Beach, Florida.
Zinberg was having none of it, back there in the eighties: �The new interest in the comparative study of patterns of drug use and abuse is attributable to at least two factors. The first is that in spite of the enormous growth of marihuana consumption, most of the old concerns about health hazards have proved to be unfounded. Also, most marihuana use has been found to be occasional and moderate rather than intensive and chronic.�
That, of course, is old stuff among hempheads. But Zinberg�s essay is not about the chemical concomitants of addiction or non-addiction, but the social forms that filter the addicted, the part time user, and the abstainer. This, to me, is the heart of the matter. Here are two grafs that lay out Zinser�s central contention:
�Of course, the application of social controls, particularly in the case of illicit drugs, does not always lead to moderate use. And yet it is the reigning cultural belief that drug use should always be moderate and that behavior should always be socially acceptable. Such an expectation, which does not take into account variations in use or the experimentation that is inevitable in learning about control, is the chief reason that the power of the social setting to regulate intoxicant use has not been more fully recognized and exploited. This cultural expectation of decorum stems from the moralistic attitudes that pervade our culture and are almost as marked in the case of licit as in that of illicit drugs. Only on special occasions, such as a wedding celebration or an adolescent's first experiment with drunkenness, is less decorous behavior culturally acceptable. Although such incidents do not necessarily signify a breakdown of overall control, they have led the abstinence-minded to believe that when it comes to drug use, there are only two alternatives�total abstinence or unchecked excess leading to addiction. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, many people remain unshaken in this conviction.
This stolid attitude inhibits the development of a rational understanding of controlled use and ignores the fact that even the most severely affected alcoholics and addicts, who may be grouped at one end of the spectrum of drug use, exhibit some control in that they actually use less of the intoxicating substance than they could. Moreover, as our interviews with ordinary citizens have shown, the highly controlled users and even the abstainers at the other end of the spectrum express much more interest in the use of intoxicants than is generally acknowledged. Whether to use, when, with whom, how much, how to explain why one does not use�these concerns occupy an important place in the emotional life of almost every citizen. Yet, hidden in the American culture lies a deep-seated aversion to acknowledging this preoccupation. As a result, our culture plays down the importance of the many social mores�sanctions and rituals�that enhance our capacity to control use. Both the existence of a modicum of control on the part of the most compulsive users and the general preoccupation with drug use on the part of the most controlled users are ignored. Hence our society is left longing for that utopia in which no one would ever want drugs either for their pleasant or their unpleasant effects, for relaxation and good fellowship, or for escape and oblivion.�
Exactly. Here's one way to show our sympathy with the poor addicted talk radio host: reform the Len Bias laws now.
In this country, the drug war is shaped by a cycle as inexplicable as the Mayan million year year. Every decade or so, a celebrity overdoses or generally gets in trouble with a drug. In the eighties, Len Bias, a basketball star, and -- it turned out - an avid tooter, suffered a heart attack, died, and was discovered to have traces of cocaine in his blood stream. Congress went bonkers, and built him their sweetest little memorial, all made out of millions of people�s lives, ticking away, 5- 15 years at a shot. Prison populations, you embrace multitudes, the Congress cried, faintly echoing Whitman. The thing was called the Drug Abuse act of 1986. The thing is with us still.
Unexpectedly, Rush Limbaugh, who one would imagine to have more trouble with bourbon than with heroin, is the celebrity for this year�s cycle. I�m not really interested in Rush Limbaugh as a person or as a controversialist, and I think it is rather funny that we are being treated to various snippets of what he had to say about the drug wars. Liberals dredge up his most neandrathalish pronuniciamentos and rightwingers counter with his occasional stabs at compassionate conservativism. Which certainly begs the question: is it true that the crimes committed by the upper class are excused if they aren't hypocritical? Is this the new rule? I didn't know. I thought that suborning your maid, apparently, to score meds for your stash was a black mark even in the account books of the wealthy.
More interesting than the verbiage, because more symptomatic of the cussed wrongheadedness of the drug war, is the idea that creeps into this discourse on little cat feet, viz, that a person is somehow less responsible for drug use if the use is to relieve pain. Rush, it seems, hurt his back. To relieve the pain, he used those habit forming prescribed meds. He found, like others have, that they were wonderfully soothing. Soon he wanted them around him. He wanted them available. He wanted a stash. Now, if he had just been a sixty year old with the hots for Florida party life, poontang, and medical heroine, that would have been terrible, and there'd be no question of him taking a break from an ongoing investigation so he can retire into a rehab center. No, that wouldn't have been right. Or so the discourse goes. Or so the implications underneath the discourse go. But wait: for the same action � soliciting quantities of prescription heroin illegally � there are two attitudes. One, which takes a grip on the fact that the drug abuse is about simply relieving pain (don't even think that the buzz that accompanies that is in any way a high, or in any way pleasurable), finds the full force and panoply of tragedy in it. The other, which gestures towards the fact that the drug is about frankly grooving on a high until the high grabs you like a devil and it grooves on you -- that is found to be disgusting and incarcerable. We�ve read more than a few comments that approximate that line of thought thrown at l�affaire Rush.
The distinction between recreational drug use and �medical� drug use is even inscribed in law. The habit forming drugs are legal, shooting out from BigPharma. The narcotics are illegal, shipped in by Big Mafia. So some go to jail for selling a couple of bags of spliff, and some have diplomas and dispense painkillers to the multitudes. Well, this is what we think. We think it�s the last rotten gasp of an old and honorable ascetic tradition. We think the division between recreational and non-recreational use, however helpful it might be in diagnosing the causes of behavior, shouldn�t be inscribed in the law at all.
If Rush had been using the drugs for pleasure, his use of it might actually have been easier to monitor and control. The pop image of recreational drug taking as an orgiastic enterprise is not generally true. However, it is true that shameful drug taking can lead to solitary excess, and the kind of seedy behavior that apparently went on in the Limbaugh household with the maid. Why? Because, as the social control of the drug is taken from the hands of the doctor to the hands of the solitary user, the kind of feedback that would spot problems, or that would ritualize the drug use in some way, is subverted. An interesting article from the eighties is all about this: Drug, Set, and Setting by Norman E. Zinberg. Zinberg cites the case of a bourgeois heroin user from South Africa. The first sentence is meant to be provocative: �Carl is an occasional heroin user.� Zinberg�s study was released before the Len Bias death, but it didn�t have much of an effect anyway. In the eighties, the old, Carter era liberalism was giving way to the new, Bennett era moralism. William Bennett, Bush I�s drug czar, famously said that drugs weren�t a medical problem, but a moral problem. He meant morale problem -- as in boosting the morale of the Republican electorate. By vastly accelerating the rate of incarceration for drug users, the Fed�s probably did untold damage to the eco-system of occasional drug use. Drug abuse is aggravated by drug crimalization insofar as the drug setting becomes an outlaw site � or it becomes the solitary mansion of a sixty some year old man in Palm Beach, Florida.
Zinberg was having none of it, back there in the eighties: �The new interest in the comparative study of patterns of drug use and abuse is attributable to at least two factors. The first is that in spite of the enormous growth of marihuana consumption, most of the old concerns about health hazards have proved to be unfounded. Also, most marihuana use has been found to be occasional and moderate rather than intensive and chronic.�
That, of course, is old stuff among hempheads. But Zinberg�s essay is not about the chemical concomitants of addiction or non-addiction, but the social forms that filter the addicted, the part time user, and the abstainer. This, to me, is the heart of the matter. Here are two grafs that lay out Zinser�s central contention:
�Of course, the application of social controls, particularly in the case of illicit drugs, does not always lead to moderate use. And yet it is the reigning cultural belief that drug use should always be moderate and that behavior should always be socially acceptable. Such an expectation, which does not take into account variations in use or the experimentation that is inevitable in learning about control, is the chief reason that the power of the social setting to regulate intoxicant use has not been more fully recognized and exploited. This cultural expectation of decorum stems from the moralistic attitudes that pervade our culture and are almost as marked in the case of licit as in that of illicit drugs. Only on special occasions, such as a wedding celebration or an adolescent's first experiment with drunkenness, is less decorous behavior culturally acceptable. Although such incidents do not necessarily signify a breakdown of overall control, they have led the abstinence-minded to believe that when it comes to drug use, there are only two alternatives�total abstinence or unchecked excess leading to addiction. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, many people remain unshaken in this conviction.
This stolid attitude inhibits the development of a rational understanding of controlled use and ignores the fact that even the most severely affected alcoholics and addicts, who may be grouped at one end of the spectrum of drug use, exhibit some control in that they actually use less of the intoxicating substance than they could. Moreover, as our interviews with ordinary citizens have shown, the highly controlled users and even the abstainers at the other end of the spectrum express much more interest in the use of intoxicants than is generally acknowledged. Whether to use, when, with whom, how much, how to explain why one does not use�these concerns occupy an important place in the emotional life of almost every citizen. Yet, hidden in the American culture lies a deep-seated aversion to acknowledging this preoccupation. As a result, our culture plays down the importance of the many social mores�sanctions and rituals�that enhance our capacity to control use. Both the existence of a modicum of control on the part of the most compulsive users and the general preoccupation with drug use on the part of the most controlled users are ignored. Hence our society is left longing for that utopia in which no one would ever want drugs either for their pleasant or their unpleasant effects, for relaxation and good fellowship, or for escape and oblivion.�
Exactly. Here's one way to show our sympathy with the poor addicted talk radio host: reform the Len Bias laws now.
Friday, October 10, 2003
Bollettino
Leonard Bast
If you rehearse the news of this week � the deaths and explosions in Iraq, the shredding of our excuse for a pre-emptive war, the double standard of an administration that, on the one hand, imprisons dark skinned men en masse for security reasons, and, on the other hand, claims the de facto right to leak illegal, punitive information, the continuing unemployment misery, the shadows cast by the mountain of debts piled up in two brief years by this country � you would think that now, if ever, was the progressive moment. That poses an ugly question, however: why, if this is the progressive moment, has a Republican actor been overwhelmingly swept into office in California?
We believe part of the answer lies in Howard�s End.
We�ve been reading Howard�s End with a lot of attention this week, as part of our on-going campaign to scope out things we can use in the classic novels. Foster is a wholly admirable writer. Here�s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass: �And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen�s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly�� This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate � and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn�t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader�s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel � whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. Thee reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking � that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.
Which brings us to Bast. Those who�ve read Howard�s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk � the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces �We are not concerned with the very poor.� The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn�t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly. And the lowly must be squashed. �He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.� This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man�s excess is the absence of another man�s bread.
What Lytton Strachey�s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There�s a fierce defense of caste encoded in it � a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells� characters were all about � as well as Dickens. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for caste into the liberalism of his favored caste, whose progressive role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards � between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.�
The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face. It is, in fact, denied within the very narrative. We already have measured Charles Wilcox's manners, and found them wanting. When we later learn about Bast�s incredible patience with Jacky, the unlikely down at heels bathing beauty with whom he is living, we know immediately that no rich man would be as kind, or as lovable, in this kind of relationship � that is, no rich man in a novel. Forster, while blatant, does lace his presentation of Bast with irony. We watch Bast read the Stones of Venice, an activity Foster pokes a lot of fun at. Bast, we are told, has been �trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the great master of English prose.� Of course, if we go back to the passage about the lights going on and off in the great flats opposite the Schlegels, we know that Bast isn�t the only one to absorb certain patterns of English prose from Ruskin. We know that the perfection of the dying phrase, �� which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly� certainly comes out of Ruskin�s influence, if not Ruskin. That is inescapable. But rarely has a great writer been so undercut by another great writer � for Ruskin, become Leonard Bast�s standard of greatness, can certainly not be Bloomsbury�s.
I think it says a lot about the Progressive community that Schwarzenegger's obviously awful behavior towards women and men -- towards any subordinate, in fact -- was simply shrugged off by the electorate. The aftermath of the trashing of such as Paula Jones is not going to go away so easily. It discredits almost every word out of the mouth of the various feminists who enthusiasticaly piled on that Arkansas secretary whose down at heels-ness was every bit as painful as Foster's Jacky. Hypocrisy, which has become the conservative vice, is one thing; but meanness for the sake of power is something a lot scarier. That's because anybody who exists in that realm of the "craving for food' knows that meanness every day. The progressive movement without labor becomes Bloomsbury, and Bloomsbury is only attractive to people who live in Bloomsbury.
Leonard Bast
If you rehearse the news of this week � the deaths and explosions in Iraq, the shredding of our excuse for a pre-emptive war, the double standard of an administration that, on the one hand, imprisons dark skinned men en masse for security reasons, and, on the other hand, claims the de facto right to leak illegal, punitive information, the continuing unemployment misery, the shadows cast by the mountain of debts piled up in two brief years by this country � you would think that now, if ever, was the progressive moment. That poses an ugly question, however: why, if this is the progressive moment, has a Republican actor been overwhelmingly swept into office in California?
We believe part of the answer lies in Howard�s End.
We�ve been reading Howard�s End with a lot of attention this week, as part of our on-going campaign to scope out things we can use in the classic novels. Foster is a wholly admirable writer. Here�s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass: �And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen�s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly�� This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate � and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn�t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader�s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel � whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. Thee reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking � that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.
Which brings us to Bast. Those who�ve read Howard�s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk � the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces �We are not concerned with the very poor.� The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn�t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly. And the lowly must be squashed. �He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.� This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man�s excess is the absence of another man�s bread.
What Lytton Strachey�s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There�s a fierce defense of caste encoded in it � a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells� characters were all about � as well as Dickens. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for caste into the liberalism of his favored caste, whose progressive role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards � between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.�
The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face. It is, in fact, denied within the very narrative. We already have measured Charles Wilcox's manners, and found them wanting. When we later learn about Bast�s incredible patience with Jacky, the unlikely down at heels bathing beauty with whom he is living, we know immediately that no rich man would be as kind, or as lovable, in this kind of relationship � that is, no rich man in a novel. Forster, while blatant, does lace his presentation of Bast with irony. We watch Bast read the Stones of Venice, an activity Foster pokes a lot of fun at. Bast, we are told, has been �trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the great master of English prose.� Of course, if we go back to the passage about the lights going on and off in the great flats opposite the Schlegels, we know that Bast isn�t the only one to absorb certain patterns of English prose from Ruskin. We know that the perfection of the dying phrase, �� which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly� certainly comes out of Ruskin�s influence, if not Ruskin. That is inescapable. But rarely has a great writer been so undercut by another great writer � for Ruskin, become Leonard Bast�s standard of greatness, can certainly not be Bloomsbury�s.
I think it says a lot about the Progressive community that Schwarzenegger's obviously awful behavior towards women and men -- towards any subordinate, in fact -- was simply shrugged off by the electorate. The aftermath of the trashing of such as Paula Jones is not going to go away so easily. It discredits almost every word out of the mouth of the various feminists who enthusiasticaly piled on that Arkansas secretary whose down at heels-ness was every bit as painful as Foster's Jacky. Hypocrisy, which has become the conservative vice, is one thing; but meanness for the sake of power is something a lot scarier. That's because anybody who exists in that realm of the "craving for food' knows that meanness every day. The progressive movement without labor becomes Bloomsbury, and Bloomsbury is only attractive to people who live in Bloomsbury.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT
We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a m...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...