Bollettino

So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.

Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.

What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. The reporter, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.

But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.

And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

Bollettino

So we are having an election between two candidates who both think going into Iraq when we did was just fine and dandy. One believes in magic thinking, as Freud called it – that his thoughts directly operate on the world. It helps that God, in the usual trinity shape – your Dad, Dick Cheney, and the holy ghost of CEO America – has spoken to you directly. One believes in complicated thinking—that is, he believes that you have to amass a bodyguard of excuses to justify hope being on the way as you carefully avoid making any commitment to any action whatsoever. One believes in the Coalition of the Willing, the other believes in the Coalition of the Unwilling -- that somehow other allies are going to take a look at the shark filled pool in Iraq and want to jump right in, given a sweet invitation with an RSVP attached. One asks the question, knowing what we know right now, would you have gone into Iraq, and the other answers yes, proving that Mutual Destruction is not only a theory of nuclear deterrence but an apt description of the Bush/Kerry contest.

Meanwhile, the polls show the majority of Americans would answer no. Those people don’t have a candidate.

What the war is about – what the mission accomplished – is glimpsed in this offhand report from the WP. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61168-2004Aug12?language=printer The correspondent, who is obviously having an identity crisis (am I a war correspondent or a rodeo rider?) begins with a few macho references to 'dip', as though he'd been embedded in a baseball dugout. But he proceeds to describe, in detail that cannot be excrutiating enough, the senseless deaths of two American soldiers, one a boy of 19, the other a father, patrolling, for reasons that nobody understands, a region of Western Iraq that we had no business occupying, and that we are busy enacting our Pavlovian passive aggressive foreign policy on. Here's what happens -- a sniper kills one guy, a bomb kills another, and a town is searched for the sniper; an Iraqi military officer is consulted, and he unrolls the Allawi world vision -- shoot one person from each residence -- that has "same as the old boss' written all over it. It is evident, just from the description of the Iraqi young men that were forced to lie in the dirt with their hands behind their backs while soldiers broke locks on various shop doors, that another reason to hate America is being generated in this little affair. If there were any justice, the names of the guys -- Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, and Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19 -- would be tatooed on Bush's butt.

But they won't be. There is no justice. This war shows, among other things, how far this country has drifted from having political mechanisms that are ultimately controlled by the people. The only thing the people can control are their tears, as they count up the losses and fight undignified battles with a government for a bare minimum of benefits.

And Kerry -- ready to report for duty Kerry -- would have said yes to this marriage to the bride of Frankenstein? I can't think of a sicker statement.

Bollettino

“Genocide by force of habit”


We highly recommend Alex de Waal’s essay on Darfur in the London Review of Books. de Waal has been in contact with Darfur since the seventies. The piece is full of heartbreaking contrasts. For instance, de Waal presents a Bowles-like picture of meeting one of the leaders of a nomadic group in Darfur, the Jalul, a nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985.
“I met the elderly nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985. His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism - water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags and an old rifle. He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end. At that time, Darfur was gripped by drought and disturbing changes were afoot. The Saharan winds were blowing sand onto fertile hillsides, and when it rained the water was cutting gullies through the rich alluvial soil along the wadi. Worse, the villagers who had always played host to camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from using pastures and wells.”

It comes as a shock to read that this man’s son is Musa Hilal, the leader of the Janjawiid, the militia group used by Khartoum to massacre the Fur. Among other interesting things that go against the grain of the CV in the West and my expectations as a reader, de Waal writes about the spiritual founder of the current Islamicist regime, Hassan al-Turabi (who is now languishing in prison for disturbing the Bashir government with a little too much fervor) that he “broadened the agenda and constituency of the Islamist movement. For example, he insisted that women had rights in Islam, and today more than half of the undergraduates at Khartoum University are women. He also recognised the authenticity of western Sudanese and West African Islam, thus embracing the traditions exemplified by the early 19th-century Fulani jihads and the wandering Sufi scholars of the Maghreb.”

De Waal has found himself in the predicament, so flattering to the vanity of the expert, and so indicative of the disaster that has befallen his particular field of expertise, of appearing in all the papers and magazines that give us the instant wisdom about Sudan. He wrote a book about a previous famine in Darfur. However, one must also admit there is something tired about de Waal’s vision – it is as if he had fatalistically accepted the fact that other nations will simply talk themselves through the Darfur famine/massacre. They will neither prevent the burning, looting, raping and mass murder, nor satisfactorily alleviate the deaths from hunger, dehydration, and various ensuing diseases. Ghost after ghost will burn.
LI has been in correspondence about Sudan with a conservative friend, who thinks it is all the French. This is a weird idea, stemming from the misconception that the French have a large, vital economic stake in Sudan’s oil fields. In actuality, Total/Elf’s stake, although large in acreage, is actually a dead loss to the company, since the stake hasn’t produced for some twenty years.
Beyond the French, this friend’s challenge to LI has been, what would you do? And LI’s answer is that if we had the power, we would like to see some no-fly cordon thrown over Darfur like the cordon that was thrown over Northern Iraq in the early nineties. Apparently, the Janjawiid, use helicopters to make their raids. Apparently, those helicopters are supplied by the Russians and the Chinese. These, we think, should be knocked down. Similarly, convoys or encampments of Janjawiid should be dispersed.
There are a lot of problems with our “solution.” The first one is – a man can’t glance in the papers once every decade, read about a distant battle between unknown forces on a terrain he has never seen, and pluck his solutions from the air. My solution is one endorsed by many visiting experts and op ed handjob artists. But they are not, themselves, going to suffer if it fails. Here are some problems I foresee: its potential for inciting the Sudanese government to once again go psycho; or, alternatively, creating a zone in which the Fur people feel comfortable enough to massacre the Arabs.
This is what de Waal writes: “The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament is that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish a working local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and gradually isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took a decade then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there more weapons now, but the political polarities are much sharper.”
Samantha Powers, who has another view, is interviewed by Liberation and has this to say:

And what to do if Khartoum refuses to bend?

Build a diplomatic coalition to pressure the government, which brilliantly exploits the least division in the occidental camp. And encourage the deployment of a international standing for composed of African contingents in order to avoid Sudan playing the card of the Occident against the Moslems. The West’s essential role would consist of the delivery of these troops.

Bollettino

LI feels pretty shamefaced that we are way behind a breaking story. Corinne Maier is an economist at Electricité de France. She works part time. She usefully used her free time to write a guide to fooling around at work, Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness. Sensibly enough, she knows most of us, while filled with bitterness and mockery towards the corporate behemoths, still labor in our little cubicles to make them happy. What are we to do – become revolutionaries? That’s a bit out of date, and they pick you up and put you in unpleasant prisons and whatnot. So Maier advises the art of reading the newspaper discretely, missing meetings, taking long lunches, and leaving early. Also – never go out in the hall without a file under your arm.

The poor woman somehow attracted the attention of the bosses. Her pamphlet was published by a small press, but somebody must have slipped a copy under some muckety muck’s door. According to Liberation:

En mai, Corinne Maier, chercheuse économiste d'EDF, publie un pamphlet sur le monde de l'entreprise : Bonjour paresse, de l'art et de la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise (1) (Libération du 10 mai). Deux mois après, elle est convoquée pour un entretien en vue d'une sanction. Motif : «Non-respect de l'obligation de loyauté manifestée à plusieurs reprises : lire le journal en réunion, quitter les réunions de groupe, révélateur de la stratégie individuelle clairement affichée dans l'ouvrage Bonjour paresse, visant à gangrener le système de l'intérieur.» [Aiming to gangrene the system from within? Shades of Stalin’s wreckers!!!] Et avoir fait état de sa qualité d'agent EDF sans autorisation.
Prétextes. «Depuis douze ans, je suis une salariée sans histoire, s'étonne Corinne Maier. Et subitement, ils découvrent que je suis une pétroleuse car je sèche une réunion...» Les motifs affichés par la direction ne sont que des prétextes, estime l'intersyndicale montée pour l'occasion : de nombreux chercheurs EDF écrivent articles et livres sans jamais être inquiétés. «Quant à lire son journal en réunion, n'en parlons pas, rigole Yann Cochin, de SUD Energie. Arriver avec une pile de dossiers et travailler dessus en pleine réunion pour montrer qu'on est débordé, c'est le top du top... [As for reading her newspaper at meetings, don’t even say it,” chuckles Yan Cochin, of SUD Energy. “You come with a pile of files and you work on them in plain sight to show how overwhelmed you are, that’s the top of the top]. Au mieux, la réaction de la direction est un gag grotesque. Au pire, un acte liberticide : l'entreprise veut tenir un rôle grandissant dans la société et nous n'aurions pas le droit de la critiquer ?»

Another article about her is in the Telegraph, which gives the colorful list of her chapter titles: “Chapter titles include "The cretins who sit next to you", "Business culture my arse" and "Why you lose nothing by resigning".

Googling her name, I discovered that she is, all so discretely, a Lacanian. Who says the Lacanian Maos are dead? We are just sleeping, darlin'.

“…nay, is not the Universe itself, at bottom, properly an Intrigue?” – Thomas Carlyle

In the late nineties, Norma Baig was in trouble. She had, for instance, the FBI on her tail. They were interested in whether she had tried to defraud her mother, Asma Bagain, by claiming that her mother’s house was her own in order to borrow money against it. Then there was the court complaint that she had beat her mother in law and threatened to kill her, which was part of the general mess, apparently, of being married to John Toliopoulos. During one of her separations from Toliopoulos, she stayed with a woman named Brandy Murphy. According to the Australian paper The Age, Brandy only learned that she was living with a genius when Norma left:

"Norma left Chicago on the Labour Day weekend in August 1999. I had been her best friend for five years. We were inseparable. I thought I knew everything about Norma, so when she left I was really upset. I used to sit in her room and cry."
…

"She once told me that she was writing a book," Ms Murphy said, "but that it was too private and personal to show me. After she left, I found some things she had written which were pure fantasy about her father, and how she wanted to die and thought she was evil. It was really heartbreaking stuff."

One likes to hear stories like this. It is like an anecdote in Vasari – one of those about a famous artist who was discovered, all naïve and shepherding and shit, drawing some perspective laden scene by another artist, and taken up and educated in a studio. For Norma’s little sketch pointed to the larger life ahead of her as a Fake. Not a minor fake, not an everyday seller of promises that never pan out, not a down on her high heels confidance man – no, that wasn’t Norma. The sketch about being, to use Alice Walker’s disgusting verb, incested, was all about an instinct. Yes, in the early nineties, if you were going to make it big in the confession game, incest was what it was all about. Daddy peeping in on you, Daddy and you in the shower, the return of all your repressed memories via the wonders of modern therapy, with its rediscovery of an innocence within children of all sexual knowledge that a psychoanalyst could only gape at. Roll over Sigmund Freud and tell Mrs. Grundy the news. This was when we were living in a nation that believed, in its tiny little heart, that day care centers could double as Satanic cult drive-ins; this was a nation willing to arrest, in one case, almost a whole police force (in Olympia, Washington), on the charge that they had been making with the big cloven hoofed guy and forking babies and such. This, as we now know, was the acme of progress and Western Civilization.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Norma left that sketch behind because, I believe, she knew, with the instinct of a great artist, that the time for mere tales of sodomizing were past. The fake’s art consists of finding just the right combination for the historical moment. Norma, fleeing the US with her husband in 1999, arrives in Australia. And then – another Norma appears. Norma Khouri. This Norma has a heartfelt tale to tell, a tale to make you cry. It is an especially heartwarming and shocking tale in the age of the new Crusade, the Post 9/11 era when the West discovered how civilized it was, after all, especially compared to the Middle East. In the era of the New Crusade, the right, which formerly gave its considered opinion about feminism by coining the term femi-nazi, was suddenly very, very upset at the condition of women in Moslem countries. In the Clinton years, Wendy Shalit could write a feeble anti-feminist book that ends on a note of respect for the Taliban’s enforcement of the laws of chador, and that book would be praised by no less than George Will; but in the era of the New Crusade, it turns out that feminism is one of the things that make us Good – as compared to the Bad, which was, in general, anything Middle Eastern (save Israel). Whether from instinct or from sheer brilliance, Norma Baig dropped the memoir about being ‘incested’ and wrote a book that conformed perfectly to the new victim vogue. How much better to show how much better we were than our enemies -- who, it turns out, weren't even Christian! So was born a seering memoir of Norma’s adventures in Lebanon, and the death of her best buddy Dalia. Dalia, the ravishing daughter of a Moslem brute, falls in love with a Christian. Secret, chaste meetings ensue, but Daddy (borrowing the murderous patriarch theme from Norma’s previous sketch) lurks, dagger in hand, in the shadows. With twelve blows of the dagger he dispatches his fair daughter, with only Norma left to tell the tale.

And so Norma’s memoir appears, and Norma is everywhere – Norma Khouri, the woman who fled from Lebanon. Tears spring to her eyes, a fund is mounted for the victims of honor killing, there are readings in high schools and art festivals, and appearances on American tv to promote Honor Lost – the title of the book for the American market – and everything is going swimmingly. In the background, it is true, there is the nattering of Arab women – Jordanian women, actually. According to the Christian Science Herald:

“The National Commission for Women in Jordan had independently discovered more than 70 errors in her book and sent this information earlier to Random House and to Simon & Schuster. Random House replied at the time that they stood by their author after being satisfied that she had changed names and places to protect people in Jordan.”

Alas, as the spirit of the New Crusade has dwindled, we have discovered a lot of, uh, intelligence errors. That first fine bloom of Western Civ triumphalism – that period after 9/11 when some of our greatest intellectuals, like Italian prime minister Berlusconi, proclaimed the unadulterated superiority of the West, or that portion of it with white faces, over the East, a sneaky and retrograde part of the Earth that needs a good invasion to set it straight – has rather wilted.

And so too has Norma’s story. The Sydney Herald investigated Norma Khouri and found Norma Baig. They found a married woman, not a single one; they found a refugee from Chicago and debt, rather than Lebanon and honor killing. And they published the story.

In so doing, they have elevated Norma Khouri. As a victim, Khouri was minor. As a Fake, however, she’s become a Rorschach test for the Zeitgeist. The crossing over of a particularly malignant strand of liberal decay – therapeutic liberalism, with its blind identity of victimhood with goodness – with conservative resentment finds its great artistic achievement in Norma. Her book could be praised not only by Ms. magazine, but by the National Review. A particularly heartfelt review of the book appeared in the American Outlook, penned by a NR contributor, Katherine Lopez. It begins with the standard Rightwing windup:

“To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.
Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.

Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.”

You will not see such an outpouring of sympathy from the NRO about, say, the statesponsored kidnapping of the children of lesbians in this country, or the stabbing to death of some prostitute and the malign neglect of the ensuing police investigation. But for one brief shining moment, the party of Phyllis Schlafley was on the barricades with Gloria Steinem.
This was not simply an accident. Norma’s book, like all great Cons, is designed to confirm the beliefs of its marks. There is a delicacy in these things that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are two parts of Norma’s work that are particularly beautiful and must be saluted.

One was the creation of Dalia. As the daughter of a Moslem, of course she longs for fairer, Christian men. The opera must go on! But if Norma’s drama were set in, say, America, Dalia would have probably been, shall we say, physically intimate with her Christian knight. But no – Dalia, in her twenties, was entirely chaste! For a crowd that advocates the teaching of abstinence with truly Taliban like fervor, this was a dream come true. However much the New Crusaders vaunted the freedom of women, briefly, in that small post 9/11 moment, they were still the standard anti-abortion, anti-sex, and pro-family crowd we’ve all come to know and love. The same people who consider the showing of Janet Jackson’s nipple a major cause for legal reform. Norma’s infallible instinct here is truly dialectical. It elevates her, to my mind, from mere con artist to artist, period.

An artist, as opposed to a con artist, longs for a signature. And this is the second brilliant thing about Norma. In that wicked Eastern land where, unlike the U.S. or Australia, men are brutes to women, a certain dream logic takes hold. Just as Shakespeare set one of his romances in a Bohemia with a seacoast, so, too, Norma’s individuality revolts in her very text and discretely devises a signal that says: I am the maker of this thing. This supposed refugee from Lebanon gives her country a border with Kuwait.

The New York times ran an op ed piece by an Australian writer who asked the question: how did she get away with it? For Norma was more than a writer – she was a personality. She loved the spotlight. One is reminded of Carlyle’s essay on the Affair of the Necklaces. That affair was recently a movie, starring Hilary Swank – which is how we get our history out here in the sticks. Jean de la Motte, aka Valois, tricked the Cardinal de Rohan into buying a diamond necklace, ostensively for Marie Antoinette. Jean found some strumpet to play Marie, pocketed Rohan’s money, and sold the diamonds before she was caught. Ever afterwards people have wondered how Rohan could fall for such an obvious dupe, and how Jean could have hoped to get away with it. Carlyle writes:

“Cheerfully admitting these statements to be all lies; we ask, How any
mortal could, or should, so lie?

The Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake: that of
searching, in every character named human, for something like a
Conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for most part, and
feeling that Morality is the Heart of Life, they judge that with all the
world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go
on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the
essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more
universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts,
Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and
Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires
and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before
nor after, any farther than the Larder and State-room, which latter is
properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no Worldtheory,
Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the
world to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is
a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness
is the type of him; only shiftiness or shiftlessness.”

Which is all there is to say about Norma, probably. One so hopes she doesn’t spoil everything by reverting to plan A (Daddy abused me). An artist should not go back on her work. At the moment, she is in seclusion, compiling evidence that she really has been living on the coast of Bohemia. A parallel news story caught our eye, however, as we were relishing Norma. Among the complaints about Norma is that the money that has supposedly been collected, through her agency, to help the suffering victims of honor killings in Jordan has seemingly disappeared en route. In keeping with Norma’s perfect sense of the Zeitgeist, the WP, similarly, reported that the U.S., tenderly stewarding the oil wealth of Iraq for the Iraqis, has inezplicably spent that money (who’d have thought it!) on big American defense contractors:

“For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.”
Surely, if Norma is utterly shamed in Australia, she should have a job waiting for her at the Pentagon.

Bollettino

LI can’t pretend to understand the atrocity unfolding in Sudan – the latest atrocity. The “government” of Sudan is a criminal organization that happens to run a state – or at least fulfill the one state function of directed violence. The direction had been towards fighting the South – with the division between Arab Moslem and African Christian being the rubric by which bystanders tried to make sense of the thing.

It was obvious, however – and we noted this in our posts on Libya in December – that the next problem in Sudan was going to be in the West. What is happening there is a more traditional mass murder, on ethnic lines. We recommend the article by John Ryle in this week’s NYRB on “the harrowing of Darfur.”

“In the case of the south, where the victims were non-Muslims, the official rhetoric justifying the attacks used the vocabulary of holy war, of jihad. Murahaliin were transformed into Mujahideen. But the unofficial rhetoric of the conflict was racial, employing the terms abid (slave) and zurga (literally "blue," meaning black, i.e., not Arab, in Sudanese language), words that bear the weight of a history of discrimination and exploitation in Sudan, where ethnic groups claiming Arab descent assume a superiority over others. In the case of Darfur, the inhabitants are all Muslim, with the exception of some displaced southerners, but the province is a patchwork of Arab and non-Arab groups, of which the Fur are one of many. In the present conflict, in the absence of religious difference, it is racial rhetoric that has come to the fore. Adherents of the two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM, are drawn, in varying proportions, from the three major non-Arab or "African" groups in the province, the eponymous Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa, while the Janjawiid are drawn from a number of pastoral Arab tribes who move in the same territory and compete for natural resources and political power.”

What we are seeing in Darfur is actually a window into the forces that have made world history – if we take away the helicopters and the automatic weapons, this is how the conquistadors came into the New World, how the slavers populated that new world with an enchained labor force, and how the loss of the population that made up that labor force, wrenched by the millions from an Africa in which the traditional forms of bondage and warfare were refunctioned to “fit” an international machine, made the various kingdoms and tribes of Africa vulnerable to further conquest by the Europeans. The same thing happened in the North, in Morrocco, for instance, and on the East Coast, with Arab slavers. Of course, once Europeans had accumulated enough capital, through genocide and theft, to move on to the next ‘stage” of civilization, they reversed themselves on the question of slavery, and used it as an excuse to conquer, colonize, and further exploit Africa – a neat trick.

Interestingly, according to Ryle, the scrim by which we on the outside understand what is happening in Darfur – another atrocity underwritten by radical Islamicists – distorts the actuality of Darfur. Both the Darfur rebels and the Khartoum government are animated by some Islamicist ideology:

“The current military regime of General Omar al-Bashir, which is known as the Ingaz (Salvation) government, came to power in a military coup in 1989, after overthrowing the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi. The power behind the throne in the Salvation government, until a split in 2001, was the Islamist thinker Hassan al-Turabi, who is Sadiq's brother-in-law. Turabi was the architect of a new Islamist program that reached beyond the Arab elites to include Muslim African peoples in Darfur and elsewhere. But Turabi now languishes in Kober prison in Khartoum, accused of links to one of the rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement. The Salvation government, like its civilian predecessor, seems to have reverted to an Arabist agenda, attempting to control the west of the country, as it attempted to control the south, by divide and rule.”

Bollettino

I’ve wanted to do a post about Joseph Glanvill for a while. Glanvill’s name has fascinated me ever since, as a kid, I encountered it in Poe’s story, Ligeia. That story is a typical Poe atmospheric, in which the matter seems to condense briefly out of a dense mental fog and proceed intermittently to some shocking horror that always just escapes the visceral. It is this flickering aspect of Poe that makes his stories seem like the way we remember our dreams – which is mostly what we mean by dream-like. Here’s how Poe begins the story:

“I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine.”

Notice the counterpoint between the tactile fact and the dreamlike doubt. The narrator starts out by not remembering something – an exceedingly odd way to begin a story. The confession of feebleness in the second sentence – which contests the pre-supposition of the narrator’s narrative competence that the reader brings to the reading of a story -- is in turn contested by the third sentence, which puts into doubt the epistemological grasp of narration itself – the Lady Ligiea “effect”, to use Barthes term, is produced at a level below that of the larger, grosser themes by which ‘story” grasps reality. And then the fourth sentence, a masterpiece of fogginess, descends to fact only to shirk before a proper name. The narrator ‘believes,” instead of remembers, that there were a series of meetings – where? In some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. In other words, in one of a fifty or more places. The decay of the city is underlined by the absence of the proper name – for as we all know, the extreme point of a city’s decay is when the proper name is forgotten. And we all knew that even better in the Romantic era, with its vogue for ruins and digs.

One of Poe’s stylistic tricks is to always leave a discrepancy, a perceptible gap, between what the reader knows and what his sentences say. The sentences accumulate on the page, and properly one knows that these sentences should each be adding details to a picture beyond the text, should be making clearer some essential content, just as one knows about how to be awake without being taught -- waking being a natural state, rather than learned condition . Mysteriously, though, as the sentences pile up, the reader feels that he is being left behind, as in one of those dreams in which one walks and walks and, due to some unbearable, invisible weight, some supervenient heaviness, one never gets anywhere – one’s position in the road becomes an agonizing, incremental crawl, one’s attempt to climb the stairs becomes a sweaty effort to lift one gigantic foot up and forward, leveraging forward with paralyzed slowness.

This is the effect in Ligeia, just as it is in Pit and the Pendulum, or even the Fall of the House of Usher. In other stories, of course, the normal relationship between reader and information is maintained. In the Purloined Letter, for instance, Dupin will leap ahead of the reader with information about what happened and then (with the reader neatly eavesdropping somewhere outside the door the police commissioner has hastily closed as he rushes out to inform the Queen) lounge in his chair and tell us all about it. The logic of sequence is preserved.

Ligeia is a much sicker story – it is narrative infected with the sickness unto death. Given this kind of story, Glanvill’s name can’t but acquire a certain glamour for the reader. A phrase of Glanvill’s is placed as the epigraph for the story (and we all know how important his quotations were to Poe – his most analyzed story, The Purloined Letter, ends on one of those culled masterpieces of eccentric erudition), and as the story jerks into its start and stop motion, with Poe’s description of the “beauty’ of Lady Ligeia’s face one of his better jokes: his description shows us not a beauty, but a nightmarish monster, a face with long raven hair and distended eyes mounted upon a tall, emaciated figure. A haunt before her death, dying she utters Glanvill’s words: "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will," which keys the entire fixation of the rest of the story.

Like the narrator of this story, my memory is feeble through much suffering, not to mention late payments for rent, and this splitting headache from the vodka cocktail last night. However, I believe I first read this story in a crumbling, suburban town, redolent every autumn of high school football fervors, near the banks of the Chattahoochee. I didn’t follow up that reading until years – and leaf driven years – and still more years – later. But in the decline of my mortal frame, I’ve sort of had a thing for reading 17^th century prose writers. And naturally I was lead, by this habit, to take down, in a figurative sense, or download, in a literal one, a volume or two of Joseph Glanvill’s.

Well, let’s get to that in the next post, shall we?