Bollettino

What country actually financed Al Qaeda and got special thanks in the bipartisan commission on 9/11? What country’s secret service was connected with the hijackers, and might even have wired them a bit of bread now and then, to keep them going in those cold nights that sweep down from the American hinterland? Not Iraq. Not Iran. Not even Saudi Arabia. Pakistan.

Since then, the U.S. has given the Pakistan government a premium perverse incentive to look for Osama bin Laden at least until 2050, at which point the IP rights on Osama’s Buns of Steel video run out. Check out this Slate story about the latest Pakistan arms fair. You can’t get better than an arms fair – you can smell the death of the peasantry in the air! Cotton candy and mustard gas for everyone!


“As delegations from a veritable Who's Who of pariah states—North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan—make the rounds, a Pakistani company shows off its new cluster bombs (which, the company press release notes, "can be used against soft targets"). A Bangladeshi delegation looks approvingly at a display of Pakistani tanks.

Pakistan's missiles, including the nuclear-capable Shaheen II, are displayed outside, behind a sign reading "Technological Demonstration—Not for Sale." It seems to be an oblique reference to the most notorious past IDEAS exhibitor—A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and now the apparent mastermind of a global nuclear smuggling network. Four years ago, his company, Khan Research Laboratories, was at IDEAS handing out glossy brochures advertising specialized equipment for making a nuclear bomb.”

Bush claims that he does know Saddam Hus… Osama bin Laden attacked us. He knows that! He was told it on that scary plane ride he had that day. But he seemingly doesn’t know that our great ally is a big backdoor for arms to every regime he ever marked down as evil. Or, rather, he doesn’t care. Because the truth is, nothing changed in the Bush White House on 9/11. For those guys, terrorism is still small potatoes, and the real deal is the same plan Wolfowitz hauled out for Daddy in 92 – hyperpowerdom, concentrating on making sure that no “rival superpower” emerges to challenge the U.S. In other words, through the murk, the great neocon fear is still Russia and China. But by one of those ticking contradictions by which the coyote in the Road Runner cartoon is undone, the “easy conquest’ of Iraq has made the U.S. much more dependent on China, which has basically floated the financing of the war and the tax cuts by buying U.S. dollars and t notes.
…

Another floating bit of news for the past couple days has amused LI: Chalabi, according to a couple of stories, is courting Muktada al Sadr. And so Hitchen’s Lion of Freedom lies down with the Shari’a lamb of God, while Islamofascism comes full circle. Or something like that. It was all nonsense anyway. But the neocons, who have the sense of reality of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936, don’t really care. They do care about retaining courtier’s status in Bush’s court. They do intend to keep on the Wolfowitz course. And if this country gets ruined on its way to greatness, well, it is a survival of the fittest world out there.

Bollettino

But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore – Isaiah

For long ago I broke your yoke
and burst your bonds;
but you said, ‘I will not serve.’
yes, on every high hill
and under every green tree
you bowed down like a whore.
Yet I planted you a choice vine,
wholly of pure seed.
How then have you turned degenerate
and become a wild vine? – Jeremiah

A plea for whores

The poetic revolution, in contrast to the political one, sinks to the very bottom of language, its lowest level, where the neurons are barely firing in the sludge, where it is perpetually 3 am in the stall in the bar’s bathroom, down, down to the era that invented agriculture, the just out of Eden moment when insults were designed, to render its essential act. The derangement of all the senses, the transvaluation of values, has to begin somewhere. I begin at the word “whore”.

Interesting, that word. It has been adopted enthusiastically, I’ve noted, by bloggers on both the left and the right. The media are whores. The lawyers are whores.

Myself, I think the media, the lawyers, the celebrities, the politicians, the all in all, wander around with the same zombified relation to sex, the same splitting headach fear of orgasm, that makes the system work. I would not call them whores, although I might call them johns.

The word whore comes out of the King James Version of the bible. Now, 17th century England was not quite the same as 4th century B.C. Judea – 17th century whores were caught up in a system of exchange that was, in many ways, significantly different. But across the two thousand years there were still enough similarities that tyou could still put your fingers on the word and feel the vibe, the fear of Babylon, in it. For Isaiah or Hosea, for the prophets, the whore spoke in the tongues of pussyland of different Gods, the gods of other people, and that was the burden and the curse that went into the whore, that made her particularly unclean. Yahweh didn’t disbelieve in those other gods, but he certainly didn’t want them poaching among his people. His were a people who obscured, by a system of taboos, the secretions and glimpses of the flesh, and had built a story about those taboos that sited them at the center of the cosmic order, the dawning moment when Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked. A story, admittedly, handed down from other sources in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but a story that loaned its emblematic force to their prohibitions and insults.

Some of that mana has survived through the millennia. The whore is not yet totally exchangeable with the prostitute. The whore’s power is also to give sex – a power that implies a system of giftgiving that has been officially buried beneath capitalism, except at Christmastime, where the dread has been drained, with a marketer's precision, from the gift. Psychologically, the dread is, of course, very much alive, a Caspar the Ghost who is not at all friendly and stinks like a corpse, which is why Christmas is the true holiday of depression. In the universe of the blues, Baby Jesus is really baby Melancholia, world without end.

The whore’s power, of course, systematically enrages the outliers, whose very existence is on the border between the supposed givens of the official ideology and the givens of our experience of the system itself. The outliers can’t manage that much schizophrenia, but they function to guard the borders for us. Thus, the whore becomes the perpetual target of the serial killer and the cop.

Myself, I am for the whore. I am for the party that uttered the Non serviam: Henry Miller’s party, Rimbaud’s, Joyce’s, the devil’s.

Bollettino

(Sorry in advance to everybody out there who is bored stiff with political posts. LI is, at the moment, swept up in the mad estrus of this campaign)

Mining the debate transcript for gold – or, in Bush’s case, fool’s gold – is easy.

From what we have read, little attention has been paid, so far, to this incredibly revealing exchange:

“LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a "miscalculation" of what the conditions would be in postwar Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: No, what I said was that, because we achieved such a rapid victory, more of the Saddam loyalists were around. I mean, we thought we'd whip more of them going in.

But because [Gen.] Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't.”

“I thought they would stay and fight”? Could this possibly be correct? Could Bush really have thought that an enemy force, exposed to the withering technological superiority that made any battle like stand against the Americans suicidal, would cheerfully fall into bowling pin formation and wait for us to knock them over? Apparently, yes. Apparently, the “bring em on” remark stems not from callousness but from a deep seated cluelessness about the nature of warfare. The only thing sillier than that remark – and it is one of the silliest remarks ever uttered by an American president – is the little lie in it about laying down their arms. This makes it seems like the American force was big enough to have received a traditional surrender. Of course, it wasn’t and they didn’t. The arms were kept, the soldiers didn’t ‘disappear” – they were never captured to begin with – the arms dumps from which the insurgents resourced their violence were unguarded, and are, basically still, and the situation, ripe for guerilla fighting, is now such that the American military is doing something no invading force has ever done before: bombing the cities that they occupy.

This says everything about Bush’s confusion between cheerleading, at which he is very good, and leading. LI is extremely dubious about the business literature re leading – actually, about all biz literature tout court, which we have, at one point in our life, had to review, discovering the seven efficient joys of management babble – but there is one principle that seems pretty well tested. While one hopes for the best case scenario, one plans to avoid the worst.

However, Bush’s administration has only one way to deal with the worst case scenario: denial. Optimism and denial seem to be the hallmarks of their failure in almost every department. Which isn’t odd – optimism and denial seem to be the hallmarks of Bush’s career up to the governorship. The leadership style that doomed his first company, and that doomed his Harkin oil role, is the same style, amplified, that has doomed his Iraq project.

The mindset of blind optimism was written all over Bush’s performance. For instance, he repeated, to a question about the future in the case that Kerry was elected, that he planned on being elected himself. Period. Well, the weave of American history through the numerous duds and dudes that have been our presidents has had one unifying note: every president who was succeeded by a candidate from the opposite party has made way, however ungracefully, for that candidate. There have been no scorched earth presidencies. Until now. How appropriate: a president who came in on a coup is basically running on a coup platform. Any military junta worth its salt guards its position by threatening to destroy the mechanisms of the state if it is overthrown.

As we have said before, the best way to look at the Bush presidency is not to find parallels with past American presidencies, but parallels with coups in third world states. That's the pattern of his patter.

Bollettino

LI, being a superstitious type, takes some credit for Kerry’s victory in the debate yesterday. We’ve noticed that Kerry is better when LI isn’t observing him. Here’s a mystery for quantum political mechanics.

We did briefly turn on the radio, and heard Bush extensively hum and then haw. We also heard him actually have to say the name Osama bin Laden, which he characteristically botched – surely Bush’s bad conscience, like Macbeth’s, reveals itself in such telling verbal cues and phantoms:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,/
The handle toward my hand? Come , let me clutch thee:/
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still./
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible/
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but/
a dagger of the mind…/

Ah, the Osama of the mind – is that a beret moustache ensemble he is sporting, or a beard and a long white robe? At least we know one thing: Bush could well say, I have thee not and yet I see thee still.

In any case, we are happy. It isn’t so much a Kerry victory we want – although we do want that – as to make the inevitable avoidable. We want to expand the flaw in the glacier, the gaps in the avalanche, the thing that springs up in the masses and says: things don’t have to be like this.

It is a beginning.

Our other clue that Bush must have truly fallen flat is the media treatment of the debate, which echoes the treatment of the State of the Union address, or the interview with Tim Russert. It is at these times that the public glimpses the child prince who leads us, who is, above all else, childish. The media just hates the glimpse behind the curtain, and does what it can to mitigate our reasonable disgust. The cause, we think, lies not with the prejudices of the characters who make up the media elite. It is curious that journalists, by the bias inherent in their training and culture, tend to be liberal, but the current commentariat skews heavily to the right. We think that the reason for this is found not in the ideological commitments of the press per se – it makes sense to us that the dressage of journalism would skew to the left, just as the dressage of the oil executive would skew to the right, personal taste and ties being the largest sociological factor in ideological worldview -- but in its function. The media assumes a function in democracies that the court used to hold in monarchies. Since the legitimacy talk in democracies is oriented towards the value of truth, rather than the value of order, the press and tv news, etc., front the truth function – but in reality, they exist to support order. Since Reagan’s presidency, the new order has triumphed. It is the order of a radical inequality in wealth between classes, and a corresponding destruction of the New Deal view of government as a force that countervails corporate power. Clinton accepted the force of things, but sustained, in a minor key, the countervailing ethos.

Interestingly, the press frenzy about Clinton was basically a courtier’s frenzy. The glimpse behind the curtain showed us a bit of plebian sex. The reflex courtier’s action to this was to expel the king in order to preserve the court. Bush, on the other hand, is such a creation of the court that the press’s courtier heart can’t help but love him. Thus, the absurd mismatch between describing him as a swaggerer, as a tough hombre, and his real appearance, which has an effect of anything but. He is of a type quite common in Texas, a man whose trust fund operated to permanently arrest his emotional development. LI has been around these types for twenty some years, and we like them. They are great partiers. They are the heirs who become Buddhists, or goldbugs, or potsmoking evangelicals, etc., etc. They have no sense that intellectual consistency is a constraint, because they have no sense that the intellect has any real autonomy. Their instinct echoes Hume’s famous phrase. For them, reason truly is a slave to the passions. Hume thought this was good – he had no tolerance for the proto-liberal project of theory. He was a thorough going Tory. But Hume might be unpleasantly surprised at the culture of feelings his protest has spawned. The hibernation of reason has produced the illusion that the world of feelings corresponds to the world as it is – a position Hume was careful to skirt. By an ironic dialectical twist, theory now has its revenge, as the proof of its rightness or wrongness becomes dependent on the strength of the good feelings it summons. Our child prince is not so much a compassionate conservative as a sentimental one, thus combining the worst of all possible worlds.

Bollettino

Let others analyse the debates. LI is much too fearful to watch them – or listen on the radio. One reaches a point of saturation with the maunderings of Bush. Lately, Kerry has been on a roll. We hope that he continues to press the attack in this debate. But we are afraid of the timing – it is late to have to press the attack. The time for that was, properly, during and after the convention…

Well, no bitching, now. We cross our fingers.

And on to … Madame Bovary.

There is nothing better than reviewing the translation of an old classic. First, it allows the translator to discretely reveal his or her own incredible erudition. Second, one can pick at the text – curiously, few reviewers of novels really seem to care about close reading the things. Close reading your average novel, admittedly, is like trying to find a plot in the clothes going around in a drier. It isn’t worth it. But when it is worth it, it is worth it all the way – or so we have found. We are never happier than with a good or great novel to review, and an angle – a way of reading it that we want to bring out in the review.

The Atlantic this month offers Clive James on a new translation of Madame B. We have a few points to pick with him.

One of those points is about cliché.

“Minting his every phrase afresh, Flaubert avoided clichés like poison. "Avoid like poison" is a cliché, and one that Flaubert would either not have used if he had been composing in English or have flagged with italics to show that he knew it came ready-made.”

This is of course exactly wrong. Flaubert’s love/hatred of bêtise would never stoop to italicizing a cliché – indeed, that would be doubling the howler. James has obviously forgotten that the clichés in Flaubert come, so often, in conversation, or in the reproduction of somebody else’s writing. To italicize, here, would ruin the whole texture of the thing. Cliches are very much like in jokes – to hear them as clichés requires that you have educated your hearing in a certain way. This has now become a little flattened -- any tv writer worth his subscription to teen People can create a "like" hobbled debutante for cheap giggles. But Flaubert, like Swift, felt cliches the way other people feel a toothache, or some other shooting body pain that somehow has to be compulsively played with -- they are both hilarious and deadly – a p.o.v. not unsimilar to Bloy’s. Leon Bloy, you will recall (no you won’t – as I pointed out above, vigorously exercising one’s erudition in some subject or other is one of the joys of reviewing the translations of the classics. Hey, James goes on about the texture of Turgenev’s prose in Russian, so I have an excuse) thought of clichés as encoding a deadly, satanic wisdom by which the bourgeoisie was drawing down upon its head the divine condemnation it so richly deserved. Flaubert had a more resigned, secular view of the bourgeoisie – he just thought of them as ending civilization and inaugurating a thousand year Reich of banality, or something like that.

This is why Flaubert’s richest use of the cliché is just in contexts in which he does not, grossly, underline it. The italics would ruin the whole thing. Funny that James doesn’t see that.

Then there is the matter of translation. James, I think justly, court-martials certain choices of the newest translator, Margaret Mauldon. Here he pops off, rather deliciously, with some needed pendantic intervention, as the AA people put it:

“Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178, on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."

Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la dépense ... Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela eût été trop bête!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly.”

So far, he has Mauldon in a corner and she is going down under the assault of the furious fisticuffs, or something like that. But then James refers to the previous Oxford translation, from the fifties. And here, we think, he isn’t using his ear:

“In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.”

To my ear, that “heaven’s no” is just so fake British toff-ish. Is Rodolphe an equivalent of a fake British toff? No, we imagine him to be much more in the vein of a provincial Musset – without the poetic genius. Often, Musset himself seems to forget the poetic genius, using it as an excuse for being a leach, letch and toady. No, the “heavens” comes, faintly but distinctly, from a whole other realm – it is something that a much more naïve, much more egocentric and less self-reflective man would say. Something, in short, that we can imagine in Trollope, but not in Flaubert. Not, we hasten to say, in this context, with this character – surely the cieux! exclamation is in Flaubert somewhere, perhaps in Salambo.

There. We’ve forgotten the debates. We’ve almost forgotten the current bêtise. But not quite.

Bollettino

The wonderful thing about money

George Packer’s article about the ethnic discontents in Kirkuk is a study in what happens when justice is conceived of as the restoration of the past. Kirkuk was Arabized under Saddam. The program Saddam followed doesn’t seem too different from the programs by which the Israelis displaced the Palestinians, or the way American city planners, in the fifties, displaced blacks in urban centers. Of course, neither the Israelis nor the Americans, in the end, used poison gas -- one should always remember that the degree of violence, here, makes all the difference. But one should also remember that the degree of violence doesn't transform anything basic about the relation between the exploiters and the exploited.

Packer's article is all a tissue of miseries, and of injustice piled on injustice. Kirkuk is now claimed by the Kurds and the Turkomen, while at the same time it is nominally under the control of the Iraqi state.

Packer mentions, in passing, a British woman, Emma Sky, who exists in the narrative as a counter-narrator. Her story is not the grim one in which Packer evidently believes, but a liberal story.

“The first representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul Bremer, the head of the C.P.A., was Emma Sky, a slim, brown-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman. Sky speaks some Arabic and once worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the invasion of Iraq, she volunteered to join the occupation authority. Upon arriving in Kirkuk, she saw that the most urgent task was to reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphant attitude of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them here. As Sky travelled around the province, her prestige among Arabs soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave her his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she’s a man, not a woman.”

"Sky believes passionately that Kirkuk can be a model for an ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum thinking,” she told me in Baghdad. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate regions, where people don’t have to deal with other groups. But can you have a country where people are happy with each other, where people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” Compared with the problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk’s can be solved relatively easily. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn’t have irreconcilable differences—yet.”

We don’t know if Packer, who evidently believes the situation in Kirkuk is tending unstoppably towards a mini-civil war, or Sky is right. But we do know that the Kirkuks of the world are monuments to a world before money. That’s a very attractive world to the romantic consciousness. Myself, having little or no money most of the time, I often rage against filthy lucre. But it does embody one great and peaceable characteristic: by abstracting the possessors of it into the pure subjects beloved by Kantian idealism, it uproots this whole world of hatreds.

Surely a similar thought (minus the crack about Kantian idealism) must have occurred to Adam Smith, given the similar history of Scotland. The Scottish highlands were being decimated by the English in Saddam-ist style in the eighteenth century, since the highlanders language, customs and loyalties were suspect to London. This, of course, motivated (to use a bland word for having a bayonet thrust in your ass) the great Highlands immigrations to America. The breaking up of the clans, and the re-structuring of property claims, left a huge impress even now on Scotland.

“Scotland has the most unequal distribution of land in western Europe and it is even more unequal than Brazil which is well-known for its land injustices. In a country of over 19 million acres, over 16 million acres is privately owned rural land. Two-thirds of this land is owned by 1252 landowners, (0.025% of the population). And these estates are extremely large. One quarter of the privately owned rural land is in estates of 30,700 acres and larger, owned by just 66 landowners (Wightman: 1999).”


Smith may not have sympathized with the Highland clans, and certainly, as an ideologist, he was ready to do a death dance over the complicated feudal system of land ownership. However, chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations is still one of the great analyses of the kinds of civilization that are defined by their internal structures of production and their external chances for exchange – it is the kind of analysis that we now call Marxist – and in that chapter Smith says much that is relevant to the current situation in Kirkuk. To quote a little of this chapter here would mean choosing not to quote it all – and it is all quotable. Smith takes for granted that vanity is as great a mover of human history as sympathy, and he shows the stages by which the great landed proprietors essentially gave away their power over their retainers, a power that rested upon a certain socially necessary generosity, in order to divert wealth to their own individual satisfactions. In order for this to be accomplished, there had to be a market that would supply such luxuries and goods as would be worth spending money on. The culture of consumerism, once it got a foothold, inevitably decayed the culture of feudal power, without central authority having to lift a finger.

We think this model is full of exceptions, but it is still a wonderfully organized vision of social change. Here Smith comes to the end of the process he is describing. He pulls back, and extends his gaze to other, pre-capitalist societies around the world:

“The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but, in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesmen in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb
its operations in the one, any more than in the other.

It does not, perhaps, relate to the present subject, but I cannot help remarking it, that very old families, such as have possessed some considerable estate from father to son for many successive generations, are very rare in commercial countries. In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, they are very
common. The Arabian histories seem to be all full of genealogies; and there is a history written by a Tartar Khan, which has been translated into several European languages, and which contains scarce any thing else; a proof that ancient families are very common among those nations. In countries where a rich man can spend his revenue in no other way than by
maintaining as many people as it can maintain, he is apt to run out, and his benevolence, it seems, is seldom so violent as to attempt to maintain more than he can afford. But where he can spend the greatest revenue upon his own person, he frequently has no bounds to his expense, because he frequently has no bounds to his vanity, or to his affection for his own person. In
commercial countries, therefore, riches, in spite of the most violent regulations of law to prevent their dissipation, very seldom remain long in the same family. Among simple nations, on the contrary, they frequently do, without any regulations of law ; for among nations of shepherds, such as the Tartars and Arabs, the consumable nature of their property necessarily
renders all such regulations impossible.”

"No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. – Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 1862

The reference to other nations is by no means incidental to Lincoln's understanding of what was at stake in America's conflict. In history's ongoing struggle between despotism and self-government, he was prepared to believe that America was earth's "last best hope"-not as the world's economic colossus or imperial hegemon but as an exemplar of what politics, with all its limitations, can accomplish. – Jean Bethke Elshtain


My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there, I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me, that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President's struggle in this case. – Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the War with Mexico, 1848

LI was reading James Chace’s review of John Gaddis’ brief for Bush’s foreign policy in the NYRB yesterday, when we came across the “last best hope of the earth” quotation, and realized something: we'd been seeing that phrase a lot. The more we thought about it, the more we thought that the use and misuse of this phrase tells us a lot about the neo-con use and misuse of history. The neo-cons, it seems, have gotten into Lincoln’s phrase like termites getting into a house. Elshtain is typical of the lot. The quote above is from the exile Clinton years, where the longing for a grand purpose -- in other words, Machtlust -- was in the air.

Notice how Elshtain uses it to defend an imperialist view of America’s destiny. Notice, too, that the spiritual heirs of Jeff Davis, having taken over the present GOP, have decided to take over its past, too. In the context of Lincoln’s message to Congress, it is hard to see the message that Elshtain implies: that of considering America eschatologically justified in pursuing a messianic foreign policy. One recalls that the Abraham Lincoln Elshtain is remaking in the image of an anti-communist stalwart was, in reality, the Congressman who lost his seat by strongly and stoutly opposing the Mexican war.

The Mexican war is, in fact, a much better analogy to the imperialist adventure in Iraq than the Civil War. One should recall that the original Texas revolt against Mexico was motivated, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of Mexico’s tyrant, Santa Ana, and, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of that Mexican law that forbade slavery. The Truth goes marching on.

In any case, if we took Elshtain’s distortion of Lincoln’s words at face value, we ought to ask: how true are they? Is America the earth’s last best hope?

The short answer is no. Not the last – many hopes have arisen since the civil war. Gandhi, for instance, not only provided a definite hope for mankind, but turned – not to Abraham Lincoln, but to Tolstoy and Ruskin. And Gandhi’s example, in turn, became the great hope of – the Civil Rights movement in the heart of the last great hope itself, America, which was toiling in the maze of official apartheid up through the sixties.

Did the US bring hope to Central and South America since the time of Lincoln? No. It has brought tyranny, mass murder, and mass exploitation. The record of US imperialism in Central America is comparable to Stalin’s record of “liberation” in Eastern Europe – a dismal chronicle of small killings and large thefts. And that policy has left behind the same impoverishment. Did the US bring hope to Europe? Yes. In World War I and II, the U.S., both from policy and from the domestic renewal of the democratic temperament, used its force against the worst of the earth’s forces. The Cold War is a much more mixed story. The struggle between superpower’s tempered the American tendency to obnoxiousness (see Central and South America, above). From force of circumstance, America favored global policies that were certainly to the advantage of Europe.
Our reference to struggle brings out another point lost in the messianic drool of such as Elshtain. To talk of America as the bearer of moral, or universal, interests is much like talking about some tech company as the bearer of scientific advances. It is a misunderstanding of the role of competition in the whole system. We understand that companies work best when they compete, and work worst when they monopolize. Likewise, when the U.S. monopolizes, as it has done in South and Central America, it rapidly degenerates into an oppressor. Like other imperial oppressors, it justifies its extortions and the blind triumph of its advantage by an appeal to universal, or moral, values. In reality, those values only serve particular national interest. Conservatives, who are skeptical of the Gnostic elevation of the state to the status of some mystical representative of reason, do characteristically tread a dialectical circuit that brings them, in pursuit of their own sense of order, to their own form of gnosticism – a patriotism that assumes exactly the same role as that accorded the state by liberal thinkers. You can see this happening with Burke, as he moves from opposition to the French Revolution to support for Pitt’s ideological war against the French Revolution. The principles that cause Burke to decry the power grab of the ‘theorizers” in the Reflections fall to the rhetoric of a crusade that can only be justified on the grounds of “theory” – and so Burke undermined his own position, and supported acts of the state which brought to an end the traditional English order for which he fought.

The moral frivolousness of the war in Iraq requires two delusions. One is the delusion that America is a moral, instead of a political, entity. The other, and dependent delusion is that America thus represents the desire, or the hopes, of the Iraqi people. And so Americans shield themselves from the emotional and political results of slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians in pursuit of a goals that are, really, of no business to this country – for instance, the war against the ‘thuggish’ Sadr on behalf of the ‘thuggish’ Allawi. In his wildest dreams, Lincoln couldn’t have imagined that the last best hope on earth would leave the scorching mark of its inspiration on the town of Najaf, located in a far away Ottoman province. The triumph of the filibusters in the GOP is one of the sadder signs of our political degeneracy.