Bollettino

LI recommends the new weblog, The Loom, by a science writer, Carl Zimmer. We especially recommend this piece on William Hamilton, who is one of LI’s favorite intellectuals of the last fifty years. Zimmer reports that Hamilton, who died (as Zimmer does not distract himself to explain, died -- beginning of excursus -- while trying to find support for the thesis about AIDs propounded by Ed Hooper in The River – a thesis that has been ‘disproven’ only to the extent that Hooper’s extended point, which is that AIDS was actually activated by a polio serum, is probably wrong – but that it was spread by that serum remains, to our mind, a startlingly good thesis – end of excursus) in 2000, had been working on a theory about why leaves turn red and yellow in the fall. The larger details of the theory are here.

Bollettino

"The IMAGINATION, then, I consider as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human PERCEPTION, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of CREATION in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its cogency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all event, it struggles to idealize and to unify." -- Coleridge

A week ago, my best bud and alter ego, D., sent me a news item from the NYT. The item was about Sharon’s speech. The speech didn’t surprise me. Sharon proposed that the Wall would be the basis for a line between Israel and Palestine. There was nothing unexpected in this, if you know Sharon’s history. D. was indignant, to the extent he ever gets indignant.

This, too, wasn’t unexpected. All my lefty friends at one time or another get indignant about Israel. When Israel bombs a refugee camp and kills Palestinian kids, they get red thinking about what a criminal state it is. When Palestinian kids blow up Israeli kids, they get suddenly rational: it is only a matter of the just struggle for the liberation of Palestine, blah blah blah.

I have experienced the other side too, from people who seem to think that the Palestinians should conveniently vanish, like the Cherokees or the Tasmanians. A couple of years ago, in L.A. I was having lunch with two friends, and one of them began a long rant about what a pissy character Yassar Arafat is, and how he bungled the chance for peace in 2000. Etc. The guy’s gripe was the idea of Return – that Arafat supported the right to return of Palestinians who were evicted from their land. This would make more sense if Israel didn’t also have an extensive policy giving French or Russian or Greenland Jews a right to Return – and dumping them in settlements on Palestinian land.

Now, Israel doesn’t excite my passions in quite this way. I see, on the left, the displacement of the Palestinians provoking tears and fellow travelers, martyrs that put themselves in the path of bulldozers, etc. etc. Where is the indignation about, say, the Arabization of Kirkuk, or the slave raids on Southern Sudanese Christian tribes? To mention only two examples. These, apparently, are indignations best left to specialists. On the right, of course, there has been this odd conjunction between the traditional anti-semitic Christians and the neo-cons. To criticize Israel, or not even Israel, but Sharon’s Israel, is to commit the blood crime of anti-semitism.

We can all get indignant, one way or another, about Israel.

I’ve written about Israel before. My position is well known. It is crystal, ahem, clear. It is, uh (where’d I put those notes?) the position of conscience (hey, did you hear the one about the rabbi, the rabbit and the priest? Oh, another time…) of an independent intellectual proud … did I say proud? Conscience, yeah I said conscience. Okay, drum roll please…

Okay, I don’t have a position about Israel. I have several, and some contradict each other.

That Israel unjustly drove out the Palestinians, or many Palestinians, seems beyond a doubt. That this founding act of violence was succeeded by the creation of a viable state seems beyond a doubt. There are many things to like about Israel. Other states have engulfed aid in amounts as huge as Israel’s, and the aid has basically swollen bank accounts in Switzerland. Israel, perhaps because the original founders preserved the old Socialist ethics, never went that route. All things being equal, Tel Aviv should be, to the Middle East, what Beirut was to it in the fifties – the financial center of the world. This is due, in part, to Israel bombing the shit out of Beirut in the eighties. And so it goes, ethical/dialectical tic tac toe.

I don’t think a treaty will bring peace to Israel or Palestine, although it will be a start. Rather, a more essential change has to happen.

That Israel, unlike other states in the post-colonial world, was expressly the product of the same European romantic nationalism that produced Germany and Italy (and failed to produce Scotland and Corsica) is the heart of the fascination of the place, and its current dilemma.

Bracket the violence. Bracket the struggle between Israel and Palestine. Even if you have a strong Marxist belief that the essence of the state emerges from struggle, it is still distinct from that struggle. What I think has been lost, in the talk of peace treaties and suicide bombers, is the question: what is Israel?

In 1949, Israel was pretty clearly the homeland of the Jews. But is that true in 2003? Is Israel forever identical to the homeland of the Jews?

There’s a story in the NYT today that presents this question under the guise of comedy. There is a small tribe in India that apparently embraced Judaism in the twentieth century. Their own story is that they are descendents of a lost tribe. So there is an organization, Amishav, who sponsor them. The Indians are dumped in Palestinian territories and given lessons in Hebrew. Between bouts of incomprehensible teaching, there is always kosher curry.

This is funny. It is also cruelly sad.

The reality of Israel is that its success as a state has distanced it from its status as a symbolic object. As a state, Israel is populated by Israelis, not Jews. But that state is still dependent on its symbolism – dependent on a world wide Jewish community’s feeling for Israel as a homeland of the Jews. A homeland that that world wide community, in the U.S., France, Canada, Italy, etc., has no intention, by and large, of moving to.

In other words, Israel, the state, wears a mask. The mask is that Israel is the homeland of the Jews. The mask is suffocating the state.

Masks and Powers, a well known essay by Africanist Elizabeth Tonkin, fleshes out this metaphor in a fruitful way.

Tonkin goes to the quote from Coleridge I’ve given at the head of this post to distinguish two levels of the imagination. Corresponding to those levels, there are two kinds of analyses of masks. Her analysis of masks is connected to her field work in Africa, where the mask connects up to ancestral spirits. The mask event, as she calls it, requires that there be a sense of the dead captured by the mask; that there be a position open in the semantic field for the non-masked; and that the dead have power:

Here is a fascinating passage. Note -- Tonkin capitalizes Mask to mean something like a mask with a spirit:

"Every Mask is part of an event, which can only be intelligible when understood as a performance with complex interactions between Masks and non-maskers. Indigenous explanations show that these are seen either as the actions of power or as the actions needed for its production. Power, all reporters agree, resides in the Mask (and often also in the mask on its own). The Mask is the exponent of power, which is manifested in all its actions – not just those which may be deemed instrumental exerting ‘social control’ to express power is to make power."

Masks events collect around rites of passage. As Tonkin puts it, they are metaphors-in-action, “transform[ing] events themselves of mediat[ing] between structures.” Mauss, the thinker with whom Tonkin is in dialogue in this piece, claimed that the mask was the genealogical precursor of the soul concept. Mauss was impressed by the connection between masking and the dead – that the spirits of the dead are re-produced, reborn, in the mask. Tonkin questions the generalizability of Mauss’ insight, but she, too, affirms the connection between the mask and the dead.

These remarks point to the violent energy contained in the mask of the Jewish homeland. The dead, here, are the dead of the holocaust. There’s no getting around that. But there is also no getting around the fact that the mask, perpetuating a rite de passage, an intermediate structure by which the dead are escaped, has taken over the face of the living. This, in our opinion, is the real loss to Israel of being led -- held captive, entranced -- by one of the great spirits of the Mask: Sharon.

We have other things to say about this topic, but we’ve maundered on, typically, too long.

Bollettino

It’s rare to find every ideological position LI is allergic to on display in one article, but the NYT Magazine’s John Tierney comes close. The utopian conservative dream of an Iraq that is democratic (but without elections), that is prosperous (without a social net, and with a seventy percent unemployment rate), and that is, above all, privatized to the gills – this is what the Douglas Feiths and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world have been working towards.

The heroic unit in the piece is a business family led by Nader and Wathiq Hindo who have come back from exile in the States to make potloads in Iraq. That you can make potloads always seems to astonish American journalists, but it would be a familiar situation to anyone who lived through the liberalization of the economy in any Latin American country. While most of the country, which wipes the baby’s ass, mends the roads, serves the chickpeas, and so on, struggles under the twin burdens of unemployment and inflation, the segment of the country in whom Americans find their own lifestyle mirrored suddenly can afford vacations and digital toys, as the money floods in, either from immense foreign loans or from the sales of public properties -- sales that always go awry. In this case, it is a much juicier cash stream, direct from our government. Nothing is as sweet as 165 billion of Federal money. And so the Hindo family has attached itself, diverting a little stream to its own businesses. Voila, wealth.

Discovering these mirror Americans, the journalist typically emits tears of joy in the Washington Post, or NYT – and five years later there is a running series of backstories about collapsing governments and World Bank loans.
The crucial grafs are on the fifth page of the piece. Tierney quotes an obvious favorite, Zakaria, who has been a staunch defender of holding elections in places like Iraq in the year 2121, or some such time, after the healthful wash of free enterprise ideology has rooted out the dissatisfied and given everyone a cell phone for Christmas. Here, we think, is the heart of the American case, and the American dilemma:

''Iraq's civil society is so weak and decimated that there's a great danger of a new state abusing its power,'' says Larry Diamond, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the journal Democracy. He, Zakaria and other experts say it would be better to wait at least two or three years, or ideally as long as five, before holding national elections. Such a delay is probably impractical, but it would suit at least one bourgeois family in Baghdad.

During a rare moment off from their many enterprises, Nader and his parents sit around the conference table at their office debating when Iraq should hold national elections.

''Maybe in a couple of years,'' Nader says. ''We need Iraqi administrators to guarantee stability and contracts and property rights, but until we develop parties that are based on ideas instead of religion or ethnicity, we should hold off on elections.''

''Five years,'' his father says. ''That's enough time for a new generation to go through college.''

''Never,'' Nader's mother says, and it's hard at first to tell if she's kidding.

''Well, someday,'' Nidhal says, ''but I can't imagine when. People here have been through so much turmoil they're just not ready to vote.''

The “Never” obviously startles Tierney. The mirror Americans seem so … American. The maids, the rubber plants, the SUVs, the English, the jokes, the M.B.A.s, it all seems so refreshingly familiar and then… and then they emit some opinion that sounds like something some German businessman in 1938 would say about needing a strong hand to crack down on the Bolsheviks and Jews. There’s that small, telling crack in the mirror.

But isn't that why the Tierneys are there? The whole goal of mainstream American journalism is to make sure we don’t see the cracks in the mirror, even if the journalist can't quite hide it, that eerie sensation that the cracks make on him or her. And so, what better reference with which to finish off this post than Freud, god bless him, who explained the dialectically necessary return of the repressed in one of his great essays, Die Unheimliche. Read it -- in English, children, in English -- here.

Bollettino


The Washington Post reports on the Ashcroft version of ethnic cleansing – arresting anybody named Mohammed – that was allowed after 9/11. Many of the detainees were held in a Brooklyn jail and were routinely bounced off walls – meaning rammed into walls, kicked, held in restraints for up to seven hours, and had their conferences with their lawyers illegally taped and eavesdropped upon.

These were charges denied by the officials of the prison – a Federal prison – until a stash of videos were found recording it all. The videos, according to the director of the prison, had been ‘recycled.” During the investigation, prison officials blankly denied the charges. Are these prison officials going to be fired? That’s a good question.

The second and third grafs:

“An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement.
The report concluded that as many as 20 guards were involved in the abuse, which included slamming prisoners against walls and painfully twisting their arms and hands. Fine recommended discipline for 10 employees and counseling for two others who remain employed by the federal prison system. He also said the government should notify the employers of four former guards about their conduct.”

Of course, this is lenient to the point of lunacy. Fine was systematically lied to in his investigation, and the lies lead to the head of the prison, Michael Zenk. Zenk should certainly be fired and charged with assault.

Who is this Zenk, and why are we putting up with him?

He is a big advocate of that torture known as solitary confinement. Last year, he defied a judge’s order to release Peter Gotti from solitary.

There’s a glimpse of the bureaucrat in this account of an Indian man kidnapped by the FBI after 9/11 and stashed in Brooklyn. The man, Mohammad Azmath Jaweed, was taken off a train in Fort Worth, interrogated with the presumption that he was a terrorist, shuffled to Brooklyn with no charges or evidence to justify imprisonment, shackled, thrown against walls, awakened at night in his cell, which was kept perpetually lighted, and subjected to freezing cold – all, as he says, because “The warden used to tell his men not to show us any mercy.” Jaweed, who seems to be an utterly reasonable man, wrote to Zenk about this, and received this reply: “You are under investigation for terrorism. We have information from intelligence agencies you have terrorist links. This is the reason you are kept in solitary confinement.” Not, mind you, because you are being investigated in any particular act of terrorism. Not because of your individual behavior. No, solitary comes out of the accusation that is being investigated – an accusation that could be leveled at anyone.

At, say, Zenk himself, if he was put in prison for the complicity in assault and corruption – not to say that he is guilty of these things. We’d suggest that during the investigation to determine if he is guilty, however, he be put in solitary, shackled, and prevented from sleep. Don't slam him into any walls though! (wink, wink)

As for the system he serves – future Foucault’s might want to peruse this fascinating document, released this summer by the DOJ, full of contradictions and false information, but more importantly full of the most astonishing exculpatory language and classifications. Here, for instance, is the DOJ talking to itself in that inimitable mumble of acronyms that always results in injury and state sponsored terror for someone:
“The BOP initially classified all September 11 detainees it housed as Witness Security, or WITSEC, inmates.91 Witness Security inmates generally are individuals who agree to cooperate with law enforcement, judicial, or correctional authorities by providing evidence against persons or groups involved in illegal activities. Because their cooperation with the Government can place their lives in jeopardy, the BOP takes significant precautions to ensure the safety of WITSEC inmates. Accordingly, any information about WITSEC inmates is closely guarded, such as their identity, location, and status.
Normally, the arresting agency would inform the BOP of the person's status and the need for WITSEC protection, but the BOP classified the detainees in this category without any individual assessment of the circumstances of their arrests.
When applied to the September 11 detainees, the WITSEC classification resulted in MDC officials withholding information about the detainees' status and location.”
Is this clever or what? Witness protection used against witnesses who witnessed nothing, and were protected against their own use of their constitutional rights. Whoever thought this one up would have been promoted quickly in Stalin NKVD: it was just the kind of mindfuck Beria loved.

Bollettino
My previous posts are now up, but they are full of these -- things. I don't know. I'm giving up. Sorry about that. I'm going to write an entirely different post. If you want to know what I wrote before, send me an email at rogerwgathman@yahoo.com, and I'll send it to you.

Bollettino

(These two posts are to be read together)

My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.

For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.


However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.

However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.

To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.

West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.

If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.