Bollettino

On August 31, we wrote about the sleazy, backscratching connection between Boeing and the Defense Department, with Darleen Druyun, who eased from the Pentagon to Boeing, leaving a trail of slime behind her, being the center of a controversy about Boeing's greedy lease to buy scheme. Yesterday, she was fired. Here are two grafs from the NYT article:

"Ms. Druyun, who was vice president and deputy general manager of the company's missile-defense business, is also being investigated by the Defense Department's inspector general over accusations that she gave proprietary financial data to Boeing about a competing aerial tanker bid from Airbus while she was still an Air Force official. She joined Boeing last January after having resigned from the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary the previous November.

"Boeing's action can be seen as an indication that it wants to get ahead of any government investigation into its actions and polish an image that has already been tarnished. In July, the Air Force withheld $1 billion in rocket launching contracts from Boeing and barred it from that business for 60 to 90 days after determining that the company had illegally acquired thousands of pages of proprietary documents belonging to the rival Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was the stiffest punishment imposed on any major military contractor in decades."

Bollettino

Last week, LI suffered from a runny nose, sneezing, fever, and headache. The usual. LI is allergic to something in Austin, as are most people who live in Austin. It is a cyclical thing: for me, October and March are bad times. There�s mold, cedar pollen, ragweed. Supposedly, cedar trees shed pollen when the temperature suddenly changes. I have to navigate with a bloodstream full of whatever is released from the cheap antihistamines I buy into my bloodstream when the temperature suddenly changes. The bitch of this is, the core bitch of this is, that autumn is the prettiest time in Austin. The skies are big and blue, the temperature is mild, the wind picks up in the morning, there�s an ache outside the window that makes you want to not be inside � and then to be sneezing violently throughout this. It seems so grossly unfair.

The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, everybody�s favorite journal, has an article in the Summer issue by Gregg Mitman on how, in the late nineteenth century, allergy sufferers among the upper classes would vacation in allergy free zones, like mountains. Allergy, mountain resorts, and the money to stay in them forms the nexus he examines in Hay Fever Holiday, Health, Leisure and place in Gilded Age America.

We went from Milman�s article, which names John Bostock as the first person to identify hay fever, on a search for information about this Bostock. Bostock rang no bells. So we looked up a Lancet article from 1993, which had some very interesting information about Bostock. Apparently, the kind of catarrhal dysfunction suffered by Bostock was very rare in the early nineteenth century. Bostock came from North England � significantly, one of the early zones of industrialization. The Lancet author uses Bostock, who believed his �summer colds� were temperature related, and another Northern English doctor, Charles Blackley:

�Bostock did not relate his condition to pollen but believed that its seasonal incidence was due to physical factors, possibly temperature. Charles Blackley, a physician in Manchester who also suffered from hay fever, collected some grass pollen in the summer and stored it in a bottle until the middle of the winter. He then removed the top of the bottle and inhaled the pollen. This immediately caused an acute attack with streaming eyes, running nose, and sneezing. This simple and elegant exeriment proved that hay fever was a sensitivity to pollen.

"These historical facts raise the question as to why the first accounts of hay fever and its mechanism came from two physicians from the north-west of England--which was at that time very far removed from the centres of medical excellence and academia such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Berlin. To this may be added the question as to why hay fever first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. The most likely answer to both these questions relates to a third question--was there anything special about the north of England at the beginning of the 19th century? The obvious answer is the Industrial Revolution which began in this area and led to massive chemical pollution for the first time in human history. Chronic chemical damage to the nasal mucosa would facilitate the entry of pollen antigens, leading to immunological sensitisation.

"According to our current understanding hay fever is due to an allergy to pollen in sensitive subjects. The allergic or sensitivity state is manifested by a high IgE which is probably inherited as an autosomal dominant on chromosome 11q.(n8) This explanation does not, however, explain the rarity of the condition before 1800 or its greatly increased prevalence since; grass has been a feature of the landscape for many thousands of years. A genetic mutation leading to a raised IgE could not be the explanation because a mutation in 1800 could not spread to 10% of the population in less than 200 years. This paradox only becomes explicable if chemical pollution is entered into the equation, coincident with the Industrial Revolution in about 1800.

"Work in laboratory animals points to an interaction between allergens and pollutants such as SO2, NO2, O3, and vehicle exhausts. Thus exposure of guineapigs to ozone at 5 parts per million increases the likelihood of sensitisation and anaphylaxis after inhalation of an albumen aerosol.(n10) Intraperitoneal sensitisation of mice to Japanese cedar pollen occurs with concurrent administration of diesel exhaust-particles but not without��

Another fine mess this industrial revolution has gotten us into! Odd, really, that we put up with so much unnecessary misery in this civilization, all for the sake of our petro fix. Sneezers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your prescriptions for stronger anti-histamines! Ratify that Kyoto treaty!

Bollettino

The Washington Post�s Sally Quinn profiles Ahmed Chalabi with the affection of a true D.C. insider. It is a profile that is heavy on the names of other D.C. insiders. As for the Iraqis, who are presumably going to be gifted, in Quinn�s opinion, with this amusing dinner guest, they don�t receive much mention. Quinn, of course, has the racism and snobbery inherent to her fragile hold on a doyenne�s position in what is, after all, an outrageously provincial town. The Post�s Style section belies the fact that the town has none. Hence for Quinn, the crucial question is who has the table manners. Being a hostess has given her an eye for these things. The Chalabis know how to use the salad forks � and can be forgiven for pocketing a few, especially if their pocketing is mostly confined to odious foreign money, Jordanians and whatnot. But as for the Iraqis, why, they just can�t be allowed to rule themselves. I mean, it is a look what the dogs brought in situation, mon cher. Here, for instance, is Quinn�s tres amusante description of a Council Member, Zebari, who obviously lacks Chalabi�s training in American table manners. In fact, Zebari brings out in Quinn those oily metaphors from her childhood that have died, in other places in this country, fifty years ago. The greasy Mexican, the wog, the buck nigger enjoying his melon � these are the figures that populate Quinn�s cramped mental space:
�After the Biden visit there is no time for a long lunch that Chalabi had planned, so it is decided that the Senate dining room will have to do. Both Chalabi and Zebari tuck their napkins into their collars. Zebari is fat and nervous, with eyes that dart around as if he can't believe he's here meeting with all these important people. Pachachi, on the other hand is tall, white-haired and elegant, with Old World manners, well traveled and totally comfortable in the corridors of power. According to Sethna, they've been worried about whether Zebari will know how to handle himself. "We're keeping our fingers crossed," says Sethna. "The foreign minister is new to this. He's not good in meetings with the senators."
It is clear that Zebari is not ready for prime time. After devouring his lunch, he has so many grease spots on his suit that he looks like he's had a head-on collision with a jar of olive oil. And this is before the White House meeting with Rice.�
The article is peppered with the usual WP habit of covering Iraq with complete inaccuracy. Quinn, for instance, quotes some poll about Chalabi�s popularity among Iraqis without bothering to source it, or consider the, uh, shall we say problem with taking polls in a war zone. And the article ends with a phone interview with Chalabi that is quite funny. Quinn, throwing in a novelistic patch, has earlier remarked that Chalabi lowers his eyebrows when he makes a self-flattering remark. Forgetting that she has just introed her penultimate grafs with: At midnight on Wednesday, after the U.S. reversal on the timing of sovereignty, Ahmed Chalabi was a happy man. "We made a deal," he exulted in a phone call from Baghdad,� she happily throws in her little novelistic technique: �And Chalabi is definitely optimistic about the future of Iraq. "Where we were and where we have gotten now is 80 percent of the road. I've had some influence," he added, lowering his eyelids, "but it would be foolish for one person to take the credit."
One wonders: does Chalabi say the last bit with a Peter Lorre accent?
Do read the article � it is such an unerring and unconscious parody of D.C.�s current radical right chic.

Bollettino

George Packer is following in the footsteps of Robert Shaplen at the New Yorker. Shaplen wrote long pieces about Vietnam that every journalist read. Packer�s piece on Iraq in this week�s New Yorker is the same big picture reporting. It�s good. It�s also a bit confusing. Internal textual clues indicate that much of it was written this Summer, when the Coalition authority was doing fairly well, and it was finished off this Autumn, when that wasn�t the case. Packer takes a much more benign attitude towards the Coalition program than LI. However, it was the last couple of grafs that pinpointed our Iraq problem. Packer meets a U.N. official who was an aid to the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in an explosion in September. The official warns against holding elections too soon, before the moderates can be organized.

LI is for those moderates. We�d love us some moderates. But elections aren�t about electing who you want � they are about the risk of electing who you don�t want. To think that the first elections should be rigged is, well, typical bureaucratic thinking. And, we fear, the idea working like a deathwatch beetle behind the panel of U.S. policy. What impressed me most about Packer�s reporting was not anything that was said or described, but something that Packer ignores. With an occupation that, as Packer pictures it, is so often clueless and out of touch, it is amazing that it isn�t being resisted more vigorously. It is a measure of the bankruptcy of Saddam�s Iraq that his supporters, the Ba�athists, can�t seem to take advantage of the American ineptitude. Why? Because they represent zip. They represent the pure rapacity of zip. While the Sunnis have the traditional fear of elites in unstable times, even the Sunnis know that going back to a sanction period for the sake of Saddam is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, I still don�t think the effect of the sanctions has been understood among the Americans, who view the devastation as some kind of condemnation of state-ism. The Iraqis understand very well that state-ism worked just fine in the seventies and into the eighties. That was when it stopped working fine. State-ism became aggression, which became unsustainable borrowing, which became defeat, which became sanctions. Americans are proposing a cure for the wrong disease when they make their favorite profound economic changes in Iraq. One of the ironies, here, is that these changes are going to come about, in a more moderate form, anyway, since no economy in the global system can no operate without them. Look at Iran � the student protests, recently, weren�t set off by the violations of democracy, but by the attempt to privatize some Iranian higher education.

However, by putting their greasy fingerprints all over these laws, Americans have probably increased the chance that they will be resisted or overturned.

�

Enough. Packer discovered that the Coalition Authority people were all going around reading big history books this summer. Among others, he mentioned Horne�s history of the Algerian war, which we just read. In that vein � we�ve been reading a fascinating, thick history by Philip Mansel. We highly recommend Mansel�s history of Constantinople, 1435-1923. His latest on these shores, Paris between Empires, 1814-1852, is irresistible. And it throws some light on occupations � after all, 1814 was the year the Cossacks watered their horses at fountains in Paris. We are gonna write about this in another post, soon. In the meantime, here are two grafs from the review of the book in the Economist in July, 2001. That slight British disdain for the foreigner � how it oozes through!

�You might think that writing about Paris between empires-between the fall of Napoleon I and the rise of his nephew, Napoleon III-is a slightly odd enterprise. The former made Paris the centre of European power; the latter, by transforming the city into a showpiece of modernity, turned it in the eyes of many into "the capital of the 19th century". But Philip Mansel demonstrates that Paris in decline had its peculiar attractions. As in Weimar Berlin, or Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1990s, or indeed like Paris itself in the 1950s, the collapse of power drew a picturesque crowd seeking social, artistic and financial opportunities.
From the Duke of Wellington down, the victors and their hangers-on came to spend their money on high and low adventures. Paris was cheap, so people who did not greatly count in London could make a splash. Successive French kings were anglophiles-perhaps genuinely and certainly politically-so British tourists could be courtiers for a day. The richer and more ambitious could buy splendid mansions from Napoleon's impoverished marshals and have the Comtesse Juste de Noailles draw up the guest lists for their parties.�

Bollettino

There�s a story in the WSJ on Kazakhstan. It provides an ironic commentary on the supposed Bush agenda of Democracy in the Middle East.

The WSJ is bullish on Kazakhstan. �For the U.S. -- and investors such as ChevronTexaco Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and AES Corp. -- Kazakhstan offers stability in a Central Asian region worried by the kind of Islamist fundamentalism that spawned Afghanistan's Taliban and local terrorist groups.� The figures look good:. �The economy has grown 10% a year since 2000, and a Norway-style national fund to save oil income has built up reserves of $3 billion, about 10% of GNP. A rickety banking sector has been tidied up into what the IMF calls "an independent and transparent financial system." Inflation is a steady 6%; reserves have grown to make Kazakhstan a net creditor to the world, with the highest per capita private bank deposits in the former Soviet Union.�

But there is the little problem of the man who runs Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev. As Hugh Pope, the writer of the article, notes further down from the optimistic grafs:

�Kazakhstan is still the kind of place where militiamen can force a planeload of passengers on a regular internal flight to stand outside for five hours in the snow with no explanation. A number of journalists who have stepped out of line with criticism of the regime have been beaten, jailed and, in one case, sent the headless body of a dog. Yet there are few problems with Islamist fundamentalists in Kazakhstan, which is half-Muslim and half-Christian. Mr. Nazarbayev attributes the lack of religious strife to the nomad Kazakhs' relatively late adoption of Islam.
Meanwhile, scandals have clouded the country's economic success. Mr. Nazarbayev said he "paid no attention" to a recent U.S. indictment of his former American adviser on oil deals, investment banker James H. Giffen, who allegedly directed a bribery scheme. U.S. prosecutors also are looking into $78 million paid by oil majors into Swiss bank accounts, including one in the president's name. "American companies should be grateful [to Giffen] because he brought them to Kazakhstan," Mr. Nazarbayev said.�

Dariga, Nazarbayev�s daughter, has founded a political party. Daddy has pledged to leave office in 2010, and Dariga looks set to take over. The usual thing. We loved Nazarbayev�s comment about the issue: �We prefer that [the succession] will happen as in the Bush family."
Funny � Wolfowitz doesn�t seem to be on the case, here. We expect any moment now he�s going to challenge the country to develop a robust civil society and kick the nepotists out.

EuroAsia net has an article about the latest doings of the Nazarbayevs by a journalist who, for some reason (probably having to do with an aversion to headless dogs) prefers to remain pseudonymous.
�

LI was pleased to hear from a man we quoted this week � Jay Bergman, over at Central Connecticut. We wrote about his article on how Trotsky was misled by his penchant for a particular historical analogy. Dr. Bergman wrote us to say that he was glad we liked it.

Bollettino

In the NYT today, there is a story with the news that � gosh! � a democratic Iraq will probably reflect the fact that the Shi�ites hold a 60% majority in the country. I guess D.C.�s best and brightest got out the encyclopedia. While such coming to grips with reality, while belated, is welcome, the inevitable response of the ideologues in the Pentagon is to weave this into their favorite bed-time story: the one in which Chalabi, friend of Douglas Feith and staunch advocate of making Iraq into a little Chili, is elected, or somewhat elected, prime minister, or something like prime minister, in Iraq. The persistence of this fantasy is one of the wonders of the world, at the moment. In the Daily Telegraph, there is an article by David Frum, who is going to be covering Bush�s visit (one wonders why they didn�t just chose Laura Bush) who regales his readers with a comic litany about the influence of Blair on Bush. Frum has a double purpose: to claim that Blair is no poodle, and to exonerate Bush by blaming the Brits for every bit of the current bungle in Iraq. It is funny to see the two imperatives struggle with each other. But of course, Chalabi figures in this cartoon epic as, once again, Iraq�s Churchill (not DeGaulle � no French, please):

�The second reason for the misperception of Britain's place in the alliance is that the bad consequences of the policies advocated by the Blair Government have convinced many British leaders that the less said about them, the better. There was only ever one possible provisional government for Iraq: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi. Important sections of the US government - the State Department, the CIA - disliked Dr Chalabi for petty bureaucratic reasons of their own. The yearning of the British Government for an Iraqi Mubarak or Musharraf - a Western-oriented strongman backed by military power - lent extra force to the anti-INC faction. But because there was no plausible alternative to the INC, British advice helped bring the coalition to a point where six months after the fall of the dictator, Iraqis perceive themselves to be ruled without their consent by an English-speaking proconsul.�

There you go. Ahmed, with his black shirted militia, was about to be crowned by adoring Baghdadi crowds (who were all set to pull him, with maximum ardor and enthusiasm, out of Uday�s mansion, which he�d taken over in Baghdad), when the Brits, those wily anti-democratic foxes, persuaded Bush to avert this divinely appointed consummation.

This kind of fantasizing is what should be hit, and hit again, by the opposition. People on the right are always asking where the signs are condemning Saddam Hussein. Uh, well guys, if you want to make some signs and join the demonstrators, go right ahead. But LI wonders why the protestors aren�t taking up the occupation challenge � why they aren�t demonstrating for Democracy, now in Iraq. That means � don�t use this time as an excuse to impose insupportable economic policies on Iraq. Nor to impose exiles who, as we can pretty much guess by this time, have no constituencies in the country.

LI�s guess is that there must be a plan circulating around in the swamps of the Pentagon outlining how they could run Chalabi the way we ran the Christian Democrats in Italy in 49. To counter the threat of the Commies, secret money flowed into the campaign of 49, and a lot of deals were brokered, including, notoriously, deals with the mafia. Italy has suffered from that post-war effort ever since.

�
LI recommends the Sunday Times (London) article on Baghdad by Simon Jenkins. Jenkins makes the common sense point that opposing the war doesn�t mean supporting an immediate pull out of the troops. It does mean getting serious about monitoring the American occupation there. Here are a few grafs:

�Baghdad's greatest scenic asset must be Saddam's Republican Palace, now headquarters of the Coalition boss, Paul Bremer. Its sprawling site some three miles round lies in the heart of town, like Beijing's Forbidden City or the Bourbons' Louvre. Villas sit amid lawns, canals and eucalyptus groves. In the palace itself the great ballroom is now offices and the astonishing throne room with its "Scud murals" has become a chapel. The whole enclave should have been donated to the people of Baghdad when Saddam fell. Instead the Americans are laying down concrete car parks, chopping down trees and building a perimeter "Baghdad Wall". It is sad.�

And this is the end of his report, about the prisons in Iraq:

�Inside the prison is supposedly the son of a college lecturer, Omar Hamodi. He was last seen in June at a Baghdad wedding where guests fired into the air in traditional salute. A passing, jumpy American patrol seized the first three boys it could catch. One was Omar, despite another boy admitting to the soldiers that he alone had fired the shots.

Omar's parents later heard that he was in a prison far to the south in the port of Um Qasr. He was then transferred as prisoner No 116417 to Abu Ghraib, where he has been for three months.

� Omar's parents are educated Iraqis and no supporters of Saddam Hussein. They are simply appalled that an occupier proclaiming "freedom and democracy" should treat an innocent boy in this way. �

Abu Ghraib is becoming Iraq's Guantanamo Bay. I only hope that someone hunkered down in the Republican Palace might read this, and return prisoner No 116417 to his mother.�

Bollettino

I'm extremely dissatisfied, at the moment, with the anti-war movement. It seems as though the movement is frozen in time, and that, if they just protest loud enough, the troops won't go in...

This is, well, ignoble. There's real pressure that can be put on Bush at the moment. While the Bush administration says it is for democracy, it is for a democracy without elections. Very convenient. This is a simple point, that can be put on a placard. Iraq--Elections now. How simple is that? As for the troop pullout, that's a great idea, but nobody thinks it is a great idea to do it while the guerrillas present a threat -- not of terrorism, but a threat of retaking power on behalf of an evidently bankrupt system. The problem isn't, as the odious Hitchens insists, that the left is "for" the Ba'athists. The problem is that BushnBlair are clueless in the face of this threat. How clueless/ How about bombing cities you already occupy. I mean, if Saddam the H. is going to go to meet his maker, at least he is getting a good laugh beforehand. This is counter-insurgency as parody. Solution (I have to write this way because I'm going to mop a floor. Work, you know. So I'm telegraphing, rather than Henry Jamesing) the Iraqis who are not part of the resistance have to have something to fight for. How about: their own country? As in, let's not continue to pump the air out of Iraqi civil society in order to please the rightwing deologues in D.C., who mean, by free, free enterprise.

But are these the major features of the protests in London? No.

I get all red in the face thinking about this. In my life, I have seen nothing so worthy of being opposed as what Bush has done, is doing, and plans to do. From bad pre-conceptions to faulty follow through -- the guy's a mess. And I have seen nothing so depressing (okay, I have, but I wanted that sentential balance, you know) as the inability of the organised opposition to present reasonable and pursuasive reasons to oppose the bastards. Slogans should follow, not lead, policy.

Now that the U.S. has officially adopted reality -- that Iraqis have to defend Iraq -- the next step is to get them to adopt even more reality -- that Iraqis have to run the politics and the political economy of Iraq. Swallow it, guys. Swallow it without Chalabi, even. The narcissistic relief one gets from insulting Bush is what one of those commies called infantile leftism. Or is it left infantilism?

These people should really learn something from past mobilizations. The mobilization against the war was led by the dullest group of law student types imaginable. They did the organizing, and made it a success, while some Yippees freeloaded and made themselves celebrities. It is long past time for the dullards to come to the fore.

Talking about which -- I have been exchanging emails on the literary life with my friend T.S. in New York, and he just wrote me an email that discretion forbids me from pasting whole. However, here's the last couple of sentences, re the topic of Academic discombobulation in the face of Bush. Enjoy.

Academia! Fuck it! Of course it does criticism of Dauphin le Shrub so badly, because it doesn't do anything well but crunch numbers. Dissent and non-conformity (beginning at the absolute zero that is one's contempt) is simply not done; dissatisfaction is about all it can muster when its knickers really get twisted. As my old mentor Nelson Algren once wrote (I don't recall where, or even if he wrote it, once or multiple times, or at all) "a certain ruthlessness and alienation from society is as essential to writing as it is to armed robbery."
t