Bollettino

As readers of my previous post can tell, LI is in a bit of misery right now. Free fall, hysteria, calls to my brother, walks over bridges with an eye to trajectory, fall, unconsciousness, drowning.

But let’s get away from the personal, shall we? And take up the subject of models. Economic models.

In the Summer of 2001, the Journal of Social Research published a special issue on numbers and economics. This turns out to have been a timely topic, for at the moment, we are seeing economic numbers bifurcate in an unusual manner. On the one hand, we are in the midst of a strong business recovery – on the other hand, we are in the midst of a credit bubble, a wage meltdown, and a growth in unemployment and partial employment that is effecting us all – LI’s desperation, which see.

One aspect of this disturbance in the global economy is the three year collapse of economic forecasts. Although the Bush tax cut model was really not about sustaining us in a recession, the forecasts that have emanated from the White House are not just mendacious. They are underpinned by orthodox economic models. If the economy was recovering from a post-World War II recession along regular lines (given the absence of anything like an oil shock), we shouldn’t be seeing the sluggishness in the job market, or the slowdown in income increases, that we are seeing. Everybody, I think, agrees about that. In the Outlook section of the Washington Post today, there is an amusing article that uses Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as a template for understanding the current anxiety about outsourcing. In Stephenson’s dystopic America, the only things that Americans produce competitively, any more, are micro-coding, t shirt slogans, and pizza delivery. As the author, an editor at U.S. News remarks, we might not be producing micro-coding competitively any more.

Read WP's article along side this thumb-sucker from the NYT. The pizza deliveryman future is no joke. The article cites Bill Gates recent campaign to get more students in IT classes:

[Gates cites] recent Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for 2002 to 2012 indicating a 57 percent increase in the number of jobs (up by 106,000) for network systems and data communications analysts and a 46 percent rise (up by 179,000) in positions for software engineers in applications.

But some economists point to those same federal forecasts to poke holes in the argument that the key to job creation is more sophisticated education and knowledge. Yes, the greatest increase is expected to be for registered nurses (an increase of 623,000 jobs) and college and university teachers (an increase of 603,000).

But according to forecasts issued last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7 of the 10 occupations with the greatest growth through 2012 will be in low-wage, service fields requiring little education: retail salesperson, customer service representative, food-service worker, cashier, janitor, waiter and nursing aide and hospital orderly. Many of these jobs pay less than $18,000 a year. Forecasting an increase of 21 million jobs from 2002 to 2012, the bureau predicted 596,000 more retail sales jobs, 454,000 more food-service jobs and 454,000 more cashier positions."


LI, when not hitting the walls, is curious about the deep structure of the theoretical problem here. What are economic models, anyway?

In Measure for Measure: How Economists Model the World into Numbers, by a Dutch economist, Marcel Boumans, the answer is: models are instruments for seeing.

Here’s how he states his argument.

“This paper will argue that in economics, models function as such instruments of observation--more specifically, as measuring instruments. In measurement theory, measurement is the mapping of a property of the empirical world into a set of numbers. This paper's view is that economic modeling is a specific kind of mapping to which the standard account on how models are obtained and assessed does not apply. Models are not easily or simply derived from theories and subsequently tested against empirical data. Instruments are constructed by integrating theoretical and empirical ideas and requirements in such a way that their performance meets a previously chosen standard.”

Boumans’ first section starts with an intriguing quote:
“…Morrison and Morgan (1999) have shown that models in economics still function as if they were physical instruments. They can function as such because they involve some form of representation. This representative power enables us to learn something about the thing it represents. But,
we do not learn much from looking at a model--we learn more from building
the model and manipulating it. Just as one needs to use or observe the use
of a hammer in order to really understand its function, similarly, models
have to be used before they will give up their secrets. In this sense, they
have the quality of a technology--the power of the model only becomes
apparent in the context of its use (Morrison and Morgan, 1999: 12).”


This is a deconstructive moment. Boumans has presented the model, in his abstract, as a way of seeing – but what he seems to be tending towards is a way of reading. The conflation of reading and seeing is at the heart of the Derridian renewal of ecriture – a renewal that seems to have been forgotten, even among Derridians. That it is forgotten is generated by its structure – the difference between seeing and reading functions, in the Derridean version of Western metaphysics, as a self-erasing concept – it emerges only to vanish. The problem with the deconstruction is that it seems impervious to historical contingency. Actually, we think that deconstruction’s a-historical structures can be usefully historicized, and that Derrida’s attention to privileged metaphors and examples reflects the way the structure is historicized. Hence, that Heideggerian hammer that turns up, unexpectedly, in Morrison and Morgan’s quote.

But let’s not go that route. Instead, let’s go to sections 4 and 5 of Boumanss paper, on calibration. Here, again, there is a dominant instrument – a familiar one – the clock. The clock is an example of what Herbert Simon, and Boumans, calls the artifact:
“To clarify this definition of an artifact, Simon uses the example of a clock. The purpose of a clock is to measure time. The inner environment of the clock is its internal construction. Simon emphasizes that whether a clock will in fact tell time is also dependent on where it is placed. The artifact is molded by the environment: a sundial performs as a clock in sunny climates, but to devise a clock that would tell time on a rolling and pitching ship it has to be endowed with "many delicate properties, some of them largely or totally irrelevant to the performance of a landlubber's clock" (6).
The designer insulates the inner system from the environment, so that an
invariant relation is maintained between inner system and goal, independent
of variations over a wide range in most parameters that characterize the
outer environment (9).
In contrast to physics, in which one is able to create stable environments for measurements, in economics one has often to take measurements in a constantly changing environment.”

If the environment keeps changing, the example of the clock suggests putting things into models that don’t change – invariants. Boumans provides a very interesting discussion of what those invariants consist of, and how they were formulated in the post War era. He touches on one set of invariants that proved very popular: Kaldor’s “stylized facts” of growth. Kaldor developed this typical pattern of growth, supposedly from comparing the paths of development in capitalist economies, and inscribed it in a template. This template then became a regulator – the parametric invariants to which models of business cyclic behavior would refer.

The problem, as Boumans acknowledges, is the deleterious effect of stylization on ‘fact.”

“Although we have seen that equilibrium business-cycle modelers aim to model from invariants, the choice to take these stylized facts as empirical facts of growth is dubious. Solow already remarked that "there is no doubt that they are stylized, though it is possible to question whether they are facts" (1970: 2). The danger is that stylized facts may turn out to be more stylized than factual. Hacche provided an account of the British-American evidence relating to Kaldor's six stylized facts and showed inconsistencies between economic history and Kaldor's stylized facts:
the data for the United Kingdom provide little support for the hypothesis
that there is some "steady trend" or "normal" growth rate of capital or
output or both running through economic history--which is what Kaldor's
stylised facts suggest--unless the interpretation of the hypothesis is so
liberal as to bear little meaning (1979: 278). “

It seems to us that we have run into a problem in the last three years – and really, a problem stretching back into the nineties. It is that the stylized facts of growth, derived from the Depression through the Reagan years, no longer give us accurate readings.

Boumans ends his paper on an excessively modest note: “To come back to the title of this paper, now put as a question--"How Do Economists Model the World into Numbers?"--my answer is that economists, after a century of mathematical modeling, now prefer very simple mechanisms with the faith that they will be calibrated in the future.”

Ourselves, we think that the essence of the problems now facing us come down to the problem of composition. That is, given the equilibrium models economists use to forecast the effect of policy, we have ignored, for too long, as an effect that can be theoretically cancelled out, shifts in the composition of an economy. These shifts, both in the relative wealth that defines the class structure and in the economy’s mechanisms for production and consumption, have been considered by economists to be secondary correlates, infinitely permeable, that derive from flows of capital that happily obey the equilibrium models economists set up.

Well, we are now seeing the revenge of composition on the models of the economists. A rare and terrible moment.

Bollettino

Hysteria

So I come home.

So I come home and I am already unhappy. So I come home and I already know that once again, four weeks after I sent the invoices to these various places I’ve worked at, there will be no check in the box for me. So I come home, and I have a rash, a poison ivy rash, because I worked pulling out weeds and tangled up vines and rogue lantana and shit for my man, and there must have been poison ivy among the mix, and though a rash on my arms is take-able, I’ll lose a little sleep, yes, with the desire to scratch, the bad thing is that this poison ivy rash has somehow got on my dick, which hasn’t happened to me before, how it got there I’d rather not think, although actually, the hand to dick thing peeing at the hamburger place after pulling up the weeds must have done it, not that I am so unaware that I usually don’t wash before I pull it out when I suspect I might have been around poison ivy, but I must have. So I come home and I’m walking home wondering the usual wonder in my head, that money whisper, how am I going to make it, how am I going to make it. So I come home and there is a green notice on the door, last thing I need, very last thing. So it is from the electric company, I sent them sixty but no, the electric company has lately been putting its thumb on the deadbeats and the poor, and I have had to fight with them every month. So I come home and see this and burst into tears, because with the poison ivy on my dick and the no money in the mailbox and the no future that I can see spreading out, one more year, before me of fighting with the electric company and pulling weeds and not getting paid for my work all so that I can survive in this little efficiency like a fly dying in a bottle, I am not happy. So I am not at all happy and crying and dialing the number printed on the green ticket, and of course the number takes me to a fucking forever menu of choices, one of which, the disconnect or problems with the bill, is my choice of choices. So I’d like to disconnect. So I’d like to disconnect permanently. So I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and I’m pacing and crying and cussing the electric company, and time goes rudely by, fifteen minutes. So I finally hear a voice at the other end, coming through the receiver I’ve put down, and I take the receiver up and I get into our shit, the electric company’s and mine. So I begin by noting the rudeness of the wait, and how typical that rudeness is, and how I’ve paid sixty, and the man at the other end is how I have to pay one hundred sixty more, I have to pay the whole bill, no way I can pay the whole fucking bill, sir watch the language, this is the back and forth, this is the discourse coming out of our mouths, this is the shit we are getting into. So I am I don’t fucking care about my language, I don’t have one hundred sixty, do you want to suck my blood, do you want me to die, I can maybe come up with twenty, fucking twenty, and he is you are late on your payment plan so you have to pay the whole thing. So I am yelling now, and he is do you want to speak to my supervisor, and I am yeah, let’s do that, knowing that that was going to happen, it always happens. So I am not feeling strong, or good, or able here, and the phone gives me the disinterest and fake-y music, classical music, for another five ten minute interval, corrupting whatever that music was into the usual corporate doorstop that they stuff in my ear, if my ear was attached to a guy dumb enough to be pressing the phone for all that length of time. So the other guy finally comes on, and exhaustion has set in, and he offers me a deal – in a week, if I can come up with forty two dollars, I can actually keep my electric service until next month. So of course I’m grateful, I mean how long has it been since I’ve had any marrow whatsoever in my spine, I bend over, I kiss ass, I would kiss so much ass if ass was presented, and I say to the guy, I say, tell the gentleman I was talking to that I apologize for the language. So I say that. So tonight I feel exactly as though I’d been excreted into my worst nightmare of a world, there are acidic threads, there are balls of fat, there is a world of brown before my eyes like I'm drowning in browns down toilet crytic halls, and what I want to know is how do they do it? So how do they off themselves, these Wall Street guys, the ones that have everything and then the bad bet comes in and the stock is worthless and they fling themselves from high windows, or the gas in the garage, or maybe take out the family. So how do they get the courage to do that, and why have I never even held a serious knife to my veins, in spite of my stock having been worthless in every department in every sad sexual existential monetary human way for five to ten years at least, at least, at least...

Liberty and Virtue! When! oh When will your Ennemies cease to exist and or to persecute!
Our Country will be envied, our Liberty will be envied, our Virtues will be envied. Deep and subtle systems of Corruption hard to prove, impossible to detect, will be practised to sap and undermine Us and the few who penetrate them will be called suspicious, envious, restless turbulent ambitious -- will be hated unpopular and unhappy
But a Succession of these Men must be preserved, for these are the salt of the Earth. Without these the World would be worse than it is. Is not this after all the noblest Ambition. Such Ambition is Virtue. Cato will never be Consull but Catos Ambition was sublimer than Caesars, and his Glory and even his Catastrophy more desirable.
--John Adams


Well, it is Kerry in the one corner, and deep and subtle systems of Corruption hard to prove in the other. Except those systems aren’t really impossible to detect – we know all about Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. As for Kerry, his vote to give the Prez power to declare war on Iraq shows that he’s given his heart to Corruption before. This is the point the Dean people make, and they are right.

However, oddly enough, this election, we don’t care. We think that Bush has to be pushed out. Kerry’s the man to do it. All his vices – his pomposity, his flip flops, his vanity – have been changed into virtues in this campaign. They have made him seem serious, seem to hew to the radical center, seem presidential. It is easy for a presidential candidate to seem more presidential than a man who utters phrases like “bring it on” when asked about our war dead. Bush habitually speaks like someone’s retarded child trying to hold the picture of Jesus right side up as he reads his Sunday School book report. Contra the asinine spin purveyed by Todd Purdem in today’s NYT(“Mr. Bush has shown himself to be a sharp, disciplined, resourceful political infighter when his back is against the wall. "No more Mr. Nice Guy" may now be the phrase of the day.”), Mr. Bush has had the luck never to really campaign with his back against the wall. As a class clown, it was hard not to like him against Al Gore’s imitation of a smug class valedictorian. As Mr. Mission Accomplished, I think he will amply exploit his opportunities to look ridiculous. It is a matter of the Dems seeing through the media spin to the man. If they do, they will nail this campaign.

Behind the campaign, however, there is the sickly state of the State. The Economist published a pretty harsh article last week entitled “The Phoney Recovery.” In it, they skewered, with their conservative economic sense, the ‘biggest credit bubble in history.” In other words, our economy, circa 2001-2004.

We loved these two grafs – and by the way, the romance with Greenspan seems to be on its last legs:

“Although concerned about budget deficits, Mr Greenspan argued this week that the recent surge in household debt is relatively harmless for the very reason that it has been accompanied by big gains in household assets. According to such an interpretation, the drop in household saving, to only 1.5% of personal income in December, is no cause for alarm: households no longer need to save, because rising wealth in shares and homes will do it for them.

The snag is that the "wealth" being built up is partly phoney. In a recent report, the Bank of England argued that rising house prices do not create genuine wealth in aggregate. Those who have yet to buy a home suffer a loss of purchasing power, so rising prices redistribute wealth, they do not create it. More serious is that the price of homes or shares can fall, while debts are fixed in value. In the long run, the only way to create genuine wealth is to consume less than income, and to invest in real income-creating assets.”

In other words, like everybody’s favorite Oscar movie this year, Americans are opting for the hobbit economy. Build those hobbit houses and mortgage those hobbit houses and sing those Celtic songs, boys, cause the jobs ain’t coming back. Or something equally elvish.

The article also contrasts the most startling evidence, to our mind, for the effect of trying to maintain an economy with the most unequal distribution of wealth since the thirties with a burden of entitlements that were accrued for a very different economy from the forties through the nineties.
“Strikingly, although GDP has grown by a robust 4.3% over the past year, wage income rose by barely 1% in real terms. According to Kurt Richebacher, an independent economist who publishes a monthly newsletter, wages and salaries have, on average, increased by 9% in real terms in the first two years of previous post-war recoveries, but have been almost flat over the past two years, thanks to the sickly jobs market.”
We think the last phrase is a bit misleading. It isn’t only the sickly jobs market, it is that wages in jobs, for the employed, are pretty much at a standstill. In other periods of globablisation, the tremendous wealth amassed by the top 1 percent has been redistributed, by the force of unions and a militant working and middle class, downward. Not this time. So the reserve army of the unemployed can’t be the entire cause of the flatness of wage increases.

Bollettino

The thriller as history

The news that France is dealing with a mysterious AZF – a group or an individual – who is threatening to put ten bombs on ten train tracks resembles a less than A list Frederic Forsyth novel. Here’s a translation of Liberation’s sidebar article about one aspect of the incident:

“The mysterious group AZF that is attempting to blackmail the minister of the Interior with a bomb – with proofs at hand and an actual bomb laid on the Paris-Toulouse line on February 21, on the level of the viaduc of Rocherollers, near Limoges – put in place a system of communication with the investigators of one branch of the national police that operated uniquely with personal ads in Liberation.
The investigators have found themselves constrained to obey the instructions put into place by the blackmailers, a sort of terrorism against the commons, meaning that they had to organize their rendez-vous and contacts by way of the personals of Liberation, become the involuntary support of this merchandise since mid February. One of these personal announcements went as follows: “My big wolf, don’t take any unnecessary risks; the sooner the better. Give me your instructions, Suzy.”

Unreal.

Bollettino

Edith Wharton was twenty five when she and her husband dined out for the first time with Henry James. Wharton recalled her idea of impressing James: “to put on my newest Doucet dress and look my prettiest.” For a lot of critics, this says it all: Wharton is James in a Doucet dress. Wharton herself, who started in the decade after meeting James, was immediately dubbed as his imitator, which must have justly irritated her. Besides which, in the time she was closest to him, around 1905 to 1910, she was not at all an admirer of what she considered the balderdash indirections of his late style.

LI is not at all an admirer of Edith Wharton. Or even, I should say, a detractor. There are certain American writers to whom I feel I owe a debt of reading. Willa Cather, John O’Hara, and Edith Wharton are among my ghostly creditors – even though the debt they would have paid back poses a very Derridian question – is there a debt of reading that is paid by reading? But I will hold off on that for another day. My debt to Wharton has now been at least partially paid. I’ve read The Reef . I say partial payment because I have an idea that this novel is not, like The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth, Wharton’s most characteristic piece. Those who know Wharton best, at least, make that claim.

According to Millicent Bell’s tremendously intelligent essay tracing the influences, such as they were, of James upon Wharton, The Reef was the novel in which Wharton finally got it – that is, got what she could get from James, apart from the theme of international rich folk. In Bell’s nice phrase, Wharton replaces the “chaotic compound of points of view” characteristic of her earlier work with “the elaborate working out on all sides of a central situation.” Which means that she carefully plots her incidences and the way they are articulated according to some strong anchoring p.o.v. – the perspectives, in fact, of two characters, George Darrow and Anna Leath. Bell compares the construction, here, to the Golden Bowl: “in neither novel is there a crowd of minor characters to give a sense of social density, a Balzacian perspective of milieu such as James had once aimed for.” But The Reef, according to Bell, was as far as Wharton would take her late Jamesianism. In the novels that came after, she “returned to a form that was more natural to her.” The lesson in perspective, which is the lesson of the master, can now be used to advance Wharton’s own sense of the more crowded, more Balzacian world, as you can use a flashlight to advance in a dark cave.

Perhaps this is why I found The Reef so compulsively readable – I’m a sucker for the late James. I am using Bell’s essay as my critical anchor instead of Anita Brookner’s intro to the Penguin I’m reading, because Brookner’s essay is so ineffably stupid. It is the worst of introductory essays – it is not only stupid in itself, but an invitation to stupidity on the part of the reader. Brookner’s idea is that the modern reader will simply be irritated by Anna Leath’s scruples, since the modern reader has long ago cut all the Gordian knots of sexual ethics. This is not only incredibly smug, with the small world smugness of the upper class British liberal, it isn’t even likely. In 2004, it is very likely that a woman who discovers that the man she is about to marry has slept with the woman her stepson is about to marry would tend towards a lot of mental casuistry. It is as if Brookner prefaced an edition of Oedipus Rex by remarking that, nowadays, Oedipus would simply have been cured by a therapist, or a bracing spell on an electroshock bed. Such thinning down of the text, such formal stupidity, clears the ground for Brookner to give us her soap opera-ish perspective on the book – we don’t like Anna Leath for being a worrier, or George Darrow for being controlling, or Sophy Viner for being a whiner – and hey, who should play them in the Masterpiece Theater version?

However, I have come to praise Edith Wharton, not to bury Anita Brookner. Or rather, to point out a certain thrilling Nietzschian thread in the book.

The drama of the last part of The Reef is all in the way in which Anna Leath alternately accepts and rejects her belief that George Darrow was involved in some kind of intrigue with her daughter’s governess (and fiancé of her stepson), Sophie Viner . The movement between acceptance and recoil is not just about the sexual core of Darrow’s relationship with Viner, but it hangs within the deeper current of her gradually gathering perception that she could only truly know the meaning of that relationship by having led a different kind of life, one in which both the abject and sublime nuances of sex and feeling were available to her as experiences, rather than as the mere content of the rules of social decorum. Ironically, Darrow offers her the chance to have just that experience, and in offering her that chance, illuminates just the poverty of her experience up to this moment. She realizes, through Darrow, how solitary she has really been – even though she has been married, and had a child. As Anna conceives it, her solitude consists in an abnormal chastity of experience. She feels a cumulative want of contact. As she gains a deeper sense of the fact that Darrow’s offer comes only with her acknowledgment, for good and bad, of Darrow’s own sexual experience, she conceives her choice as one that thrusts its options upon her as between pardoning Darrow and remaining loyal to her own total past.

To make this point, Wharton uses a really interesting reference to classical culture.

Here is Anna, confronting George in Paris:

“For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.”

Wharton reinforces this metaphor a few pages on, after Anna is embraced by George:

“He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All
her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a
different feeling from any she had known before: confused
and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it,
yet richer, deeper, more enslaving.”

Wharton does some interesting things with Anna, who starts out as a rather insipid widow in a French chateau. The dialectically resplendent image of slaves dressed as freeman whose freedom would depend on recognizing each other as slaves corresponds to Anna’s odd liberation. It is a liberation into a world that isn’t free, a world in which the slaves wear slave costumes and signal to each other with abandon. And it is also a world in which feeling slips away from confidence in feeling. That’s an interior shift that Anna cannot, in the end, quite endure. We wondered, reading these paragraphs, if Wharton had ever read Melville; and in particular, Benito Cereno.

It is always good to keep in mind that Nietzsche, who wrote about slaves, never met any. But any American writer who wanted to could meet them, at least before the Civil War, and could meet ex slaves after the Civil War. For an American, there was no distance between the slave and master relationship and his own history. Slavery was in our blood, and the blood of slaves was in our money. And let's not forget either -- as I did, the first time I wrote this paragraph -- that the American writer could have even been a slave.

Anna’s classical metaphor echoes a bit earlier in the book, too. The book begins with the long episode of George Darrow’s trip to Paris with Sophy Viner. He knows Viner, only vaguely, from the house of a (from all accounts) rather bohemian hostess, for whom she worked as a factotum. Sophy Viner is pretty; she is tough; she wants to be an actress, a desire that in itself marks her, in Darrow’s mind, as “artistic” – i.e. loose. But it is Darrow who seduces her, who holds her in Paris longer than she can even afford to stay there; it is Darrow who takes her to plays. One of the plays is Oedipe. Viner’s reaction to it is premonitory of the role that she will play in Anna and Darrow’s narrative. Darrow is bored with the piece. The couple go out to walk in the intermission, and he expresses his boredom. Sophy, however, can’t believe he isn’t enthralled, and gives him her reason for being enthralled:

“As if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings?" Her hands
were pressed against the railing, her face shining and
darkening under the wing-beats of successive impressions.

Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure. After all, he
had felt all that, long ago; perhaps it was his own fault,
rather than that of the actors, that the poetry of the play
seemed to have evaporated...But no, he had been right in
judging the performance to be dull and stale: it was simply
his companion's inexperience, her lack of occasions to
compare and estimate, that made her think it brilliant.

"I was afraid you were bored and wanted to come away."

"BORED?" She made a little aggrieved grimace. "You mean
you thought me too ignorant and stupid to appreciate it?"

"No; not that." The hand nearest him still lay on the
railing of the balcony, and he covered it for a moment with
his. As he did so he saw the colour rise and tremble in her
cheek.

"Tell me just what you think," he said, bending his head a
little, and only half-aware of his words.

She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly,
trying to convey something of what she felt. But she was
evidently unused to analyzing her aesthetic emotions, and
the tumultuous rush of the drama seemed to have left her in
a state of panting wonder, as though it had been a storm or
some other natural cataclysm. She had no literary or
historic associations to which to attach her impressions:
her education had evidently not comprised a course in Greek
literature. But she felt what would probably have been
unperceived by many a young lady who had taken a first in
classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread
sway in it of the same mysterious "luck" which pulled the
threads of her own small destiny. It was not literature to
her, it was fact: as actual, as near by, as what was
happening to her at the moment and what the next hour held
in store.

We love the way Wharton has set this up. We love the way she comes at us with this pre-emptive notion of luck, since of course her whole plot turns upon a piece of bad luck, a coincidence. And we love the way that destiny, in a slave society, becomes luck, in a free one. And how the atavistic yearning for the rituals of the slave society colonizes our passions, exists in the perpetual underground of the unconscious.

Bollettino

I wrote yesterday’s post after a fatiguing day sawing down and piling up cedar trees on a ranch – have to earn money any way I can. In any case, the fatigue showed.

Today, I read a quote from some interview with Mel Gibson, who was, indirectly, the subject of my last post. In the interview, Gibson took issue with those people who “blame the Church for the Holocaust.” He had a name for these people: secular Jews.

Unfortunately, in the effort to be evenhanded, and in the even greater effort to be non-controversial, the American media discusses the issue of the Catholic church’s rich Anti-Jewish history with caution. To give you a taste of what “radical” Catholic opinion was like back in the day, go to this site about the Croatian Ustashi. The Ustashi was the Croatian equivalent of the Nazi party. Its roots were clerical, its intellectuals taught at Catholic Universities, and when it came time to build the concentration camps, its priests were right there, blessing the mass slaughter of the Jews and the Serbs.

Here’s a typical excerpt from the Catholic press at that time:


"Up to the birth of Christ, Jewish atavism proved its sinful inclinations toward knavery, its lack of gratitude to God, its ruthless selfishness, its disobedience toward the heads of the state, its anarchism, its love of profit-making through the accumulation of worldly goods by means of corruption, bloodthirstiness, despotism, lasciviousness and homosexuality, incorrigible stubbornness and haughtiness ... Having realized all this, we dare to conclude that the Jews have always been destructive regardless of whether they governed themselves or were governed by others. The Jews will never change, because according to the laws of psychology their national soul cannot change for the better as long as the human race continues to exist."

I didn’t see the interview with Gibson, but it would have been nice if the interviewer was educated enough to ask revealing questions. My guess is that there was no mention, in the interview, of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp. It was here that the dirty spirit of one hundred fifty years of Catholic invective against the Jews finally came to fruition. A Franciscan, Miroslav Filipovic, was put in charge of the camp. The rules were a bit different than what one would expect from a follower of St. Francis of Assisi. Filopivic later claimed, in a probable understatement, that he’d ordered the killing of about 40,000 people at the camp. If you are in the mood for it, here’s the testimony of one of the survivors of the camp. Much has been made of the fifteen minutes of whipping time in Gibson’s film. Compare it to the tender mercies of Father Devil, as he was known:

Fra Filipovic's] voice had an almost feminine quality which was in contrast with his physical stature and the coarseness of his face... I was hardly seated, and as I sank into my sad thoughts, I heard the orders "Fall in - Fall in!"
...Old Ilija, an Ustasha, appeared in the threshold of the hut, a revolver in one hand and in the other, a lash... Before us passed six men, their hands tied before their backs with chains. The Ustashi had their revolvers loaded and aimed. Fra Sotona walked over and approached our group.
"Where is our new doctor?" I knew he meant me.
"He is here," someone replied. He came a little nearer, looking at me with an insolent, ironic, bizarre manner.
"Come here, doctor," he said, "to the front row, so that you will be able to see our surgery being performed without anesthetic. All our patients are quite satisfied. No sighs, nor groans can be heard. Over there are the head and neck specialists, and we have need of no more than two instruments for our operations."
And Fra Sotona caressed his revolver with one hand and his knife with the other ... Looking at these victims who, in a few moments would be in another world, fear written on each face, no one could penetrate the depth of their moral abyss. They silently watched the gathering crowd of more pitiful people, more condemned people like themselves.
Fra Filipovic approached a group of them. Two shots rang out, two victims collapsed, who began to twitch with pain, blood surging from their heads intermingling with the brain of one or the eyes of the other.
'Finish off the rest!' cried Filipovic to the executioner as he put his revolver away. “

Secular Jews make such fusses about such things, being, well, secular, and Jews, and all. Unsightly.

Perhaps, you will say, this is just some peculiarity of Croat Catholicism. Surely the Vatican eventually responded. This is true. They responded after the war. At the highest levels, they systematically smuggled Catholic war criminals out of Europe, so they could escape imprisonment by the Allies. Many of them went to Argentina. The effect was delayed, but the years of the Dirty War showed that packing these people off on the rat lines did make a difference.

Looking elsewhere, we find another state run by a Clerical Nazi Party – the Slovak Republic. Here, a Father Tiso became head of state, supported of course directly by the Nazi party. Catholic historians, who look around for evidence that the Vatican opposed the mass killing of the Jews, often cite the letters sent from the Vatican to Tiso about the deportation of Slovak Jews to the death camps. Indeed, this happened in 1944, and there is a nice, comprehensive account at the Catholic Information Network site . The Holy See protested the deportation of Slovak Jews from a labor camp at Sered to Bergen Belsen. This protest was seconded by Father Tiso.

But before we bestow the ADL man of the year award to Father Tiso, it is necessary to see what other action was taken by his government in relation to Slovak Jews.
- in 1939, on the accession of Father Tiso’s party to power in Slovakia, Jews were forbidden from certain professions.
- In 1940, with the cooperation of Eichman, who advised the Tiso administration, Jews were singled out for the yellow star. They were also committed to labor camps. Expropriation of the wealth of the Jewish Slovak community commenced.

You will not find the Holy See intervening to protest these measures.
The truth is, the Holy See never embraced and actively opposed, most of the time, the exterminationist agenda. The pre World War II Church was, indeed, anti-Jew (a word I prefer to the milky anti-Semitic), but wanted that prejudice embodied in certain cultural and legal restrictions on Jews, not in such things as labor camps or yellow stars. Given that the church’s agenda was to hold onto this prejudice, but to fight the de-humanization and murder of Jews, the Vatican did battle, by its own lights, with the Nazis. The fascisms of Tiso and the Ustashi were of a virulence that was not mainstream. The more decorous notions of order promoted by Catholic thinkers like Eliot are probably closer to the Catholic norm, with their complaint about the modernizing, atheistical strain in society that can be laid at the feet of the Jew.
There. If I was going to place Mel Gibson on the anti-Jew meter, he isn’t even close to Father Tiso. He is, however, typical of the American form of bigotry, which is more about blackballing from clubs, and jokes about Jews with the right listeners. And of course there’s his Dad, who is further in the direction of Father Tiso. These bigots can be recognized by the bristly defensiveness that emerges when they are called about their bigotry. There isn’t, really, any mystery here.

Oh, but before I finish this post with my oh so sophisticated dismissal of Gibson’s anti-Jewism, let me link to this account of a more disgusting and dangerous variant. It isn’t as if Father Tiso’s spirit is dead.

We especially liked the response of the current Slovak charge d’affairs regarding the laws restricting Jews in the professions. This is ur-Gibsonism:

“While he acknowledges that there was anti-Semitism in Slovakia during the wartime period, he argues that some of the first laws targeting Jews, specifically the ones restricting the number of Jewish lawyers and doctors, were not altogether anti-Semitic.
"I'm saying that particular one was not solely anti-Semitic," he says. "I think that one was based on the social justice of trying to get other people into those professions over and above the one minority.’”

Bollettino

I was out drinking with some friends the other day when the topic of Mel Gibson’s Jesus film came up. Now, I had experienced for myself Gibson’s dim religious wattage in the forgettable Signs, and from what I’d read about the Gibson movie, beyond the anti-jewish bits, it looked to me like the clunkiest Hollywood realism – which consists of an almost fetishistic appreciation of the artifacts peculiar to a historical epoch or situation, vitiated by the emplacement of the most physically unlikely specimen of California health -- the blond, dazzlingly toothed actor or actress -- in the midst of it. There was an article in the NYT about what Jesus looked like, a little froth on the Gibson publicity circuit, and the man who wrote it, who was mounting his own meticulously detailed Jesus bio-pic, was adamant that he must be a wiry peasant, about 5’3” – no Hollywood charmer.

Well, we wonder about the 5’3” – although we do concede the point that a man who wanders on foot the length and breadth of Judea is probably going to be wiry. It is hard to think of a man as fat as, say, Nero, as a messiah. For one thing, he was no pedestrian. Jesus was a pedestrian – how is that for a bumper sticker?

Anyway, my drinking friends were all going out to see the movie. One of them was interested to hear that I did not consider Jesus to be the son of God, and she remarked that she couldn’t imagine living without God. To which I made some conciliatory remarks about how I consider God to be what we are made of, and what everything else is made of. A goofy enough theology to get by when you don’t want to be pressed on the point. Another of my friends told about seeing a special about the movie – everybody seems to have seen a special about the movie – that showed how they manufactured a crucifixion, complete with a nail entering a hand. Hmm. My impulse was to say, how awful – the crucifixion as F/X shocks even me. But then I thought that this was par for the course as far as my reactions are concerned – only someone for whom religion is a matter of beautiful pictures and poetry would be discomforted by such tackiness. Tackiness, as Flannery O’Connor knew, was no bar to religious ecstasy.

For those interested in the portrayal of Christ, there’s an essay on the birth of the paradigmatic connection between image, power, and religion in this season’s American Journal of Philology, written by a Francis James. It is entitled Living Icons: Tracing a motif in verbal and visual representation from the second to the fourth centuries C.E. It is James’ contention that images – as in portraits, descriptions of persons with an emphasis on their visual aspect, instead of a stereotypical reference to the fact that they had a visual aspect – comes into textual play in these centuries. Not coincidentally, they come into play in terms of lives of holy men and Byzantine emperors. And they not only come into play, but they refer to their own quality of visualizing by making reference to painted or sculpted images. So an emperor, like Constantius, can be described entering into a town in triumph by referring to the way he looks like a painted image, and the way he looks like a painted image is referred to, consciously, by the way he is stiff, the way he glances with dignity at the crowds, etc., etc.

Here’s a graf from the article:

Thus it appears that it was the writers of the Second Sophistic who
specifically developed ekphrasis as a description of works of art, and in
so doing they explored and exploited the relation between word and
image for their own literary purposes. The author of the Philostratean
Imagines, arguably the most powerful work of ekphrasis in antiquity,
presents a tour of an entire gallery—possibly real, possibly imaginary12—
signaling a new departure in which viewer and object enter into a complex
reciprocally assimilating relationship. In Imagines the reader becomes
the viewer in the gallery. Preoccupied with “looking” at the pictures
and the learned interpretations of the docent character, the reader is
absorbed into the text and forgets that he or she is a reader. The acts of
reading and viewing are compounded, their boundaries blurred.13 Similarly,
and also from the late second or early third century C.E., Longus’s
novel Daphnis and Chloe purports to be an immense ekphrasis.14 The
distinction and conotation of verbal and visual representation was being
deliberately and artistically pursued at the very cutting edge of Roman
imperial high culture.

Indeed, the face is, as Deleuze puts it in Mille Plateaux, a social machine.

In an odd way, living without TV has cut me off from this machinery in its most frenzied historical phase. I am dying outside history, getting my images filtered through the constraints on the bandwidth of my computer. They are all, essentially, fuzzy. This is probably a good thing.