Once, long ago, LI allowed ourselves to be talked into seeing one of the Star Wars series. We must have been in the late teens, early twenties. The blurry memory seems to indicate the talking into was done by a date. So we dipped our toe in the Great American Madness, and picked up from the experience a raging headache, aggravated by the squeals of Wookies. Besides those squeals, we have, honestly, no recollection of the business of the film whatsoever – the humans acting in it, the plot, if any, the S/FX justifying the whole sorry sequence. That we had watched a movie in which the dramatic momentum depended on things named Wookies seems, in retrospect, to eminently justify a little pain.
Every time one of that series comes out, there is a rush of interest, a true and naïve interest, in a thing that has such an intrinsically uninteresting story line, and has such a taste for visual gimmickry wholly separate from a taste for visual beauty, that we… can’t figure it out. It makes us feel a little alien – which, I suppose, is a sci fi sentiment in itself. Since this gives a pleasure that we can’t participate in, the human all too human thing is to think that it must be a lesser pleasure – or maybe a vicious one. We are enough of a puritan and a prig to measure our superiority on the gaps in our sensibility – and to label those gaps good taste.
Well, as Nietzsche once said, good taste be damned. The perdurably alien Philip Dick wrote an essay about Sci Fi which is much on our minds, lately: “How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.” Obviously, the perennial life of the Star Wars serial has accomplished that task – but Dick says something interesting about his title:
“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe— and I am dead serious when I say this— do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things are born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwarrdly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”
Dick says a lot of things in this essay that are a bit crazy – for instance, he finds such intensely meaningful and accidental parallels between his book, Flow my tears the policeman said, and the Book of Acts that he is forced to draw conclusions that are stretchers: “So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real" story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The CORE message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts tc. myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace.”
I rather want to be Isaiah myself. Unfortunately, the flaming star from Crawford who I want to see fall into ruin and disgrace seems to blithely escape my prophetic mental ray gun.
On the other hand, Dick earned the right to his stretchers, if you ask me. But this is getting off the track. What impressed me most about the essay was how it captures the sci fi moment that encloses both the work and the reception of the work. Or, to be less mysterious about it – Dick gives us a sense of how the science fiction of something like Star Wars lies not in the series itself, but the viewing and buzz around the movies. That great machinery of commerce and p.r., dovetailing with these passionately awaited and debated story/games, makes it hard to know what is going on here for someone like LI – who, when all is said and done, is just your typical boojwah symbol pusher, thinking to put himself in a one on one with the great works – or the video, or the novel, or the poem. Thinking that the orgy is all about himself.
One more passage from the Dick essay, just for the hell of it. I love this: “If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:
I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: I am the brand name. Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as: When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.”
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
poetry and rent seeking
Poetry is a mysterious thing. It can go underground for a century – as it did in eighteenth century France. In the U.S., poetry has always been capricious. What happened in the twentieth century was in some ways miraculous – yet, after the major poets of the forties generation started dying out, they weren’t replaced. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill – there’s no American poet, at the moment, of a remotely similar stature. There’s a factory mindset that worries about this – it is as if there were some production quota for sausages, lawn mowers and poets.
In the absence of great poets, the American community has great poetry cabals. There’s a very nice article about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas Bartlett. Alas, the article is entitled Rhyme and Unreason, instead of (dream on!) Poetry and Rent-seeking. And double alas, Thomas Bartlett, the author, didn’t seek out any economists for comment. But he nevertheless untangles a wonderfully tangled tale.
The tale in short goes like this. Foetry, a website dedicated to getting to the root of corruption in poetry contests, appeared on the web last year. It was run anonymously. Eventually, that anonymity was penetrated – it turns out the site is run by a librarian named Alan Cordle, who is married to a poet. Cordle felt a burning sense of injustice about the world in which his wife was trying to make it as a poet, and so decided to attack the backscratching and numerous collusions that make poetry contests as fair as a Florida election.
Rent-seeking is a term invented by Anne Krueger to denote behaviors that are advantage-oriented but unproductive. It is an oblique acknowledgement by neo-classical economists that the model of enterprises fairly competing with each other to achieve advantage doesn’t really take into account the enterprises knowledge of the system – that, in other words, the path to profit needn’t be a matter or services, prices, or innovation, but can consist in gaming the system. In fact, the impossibility of creating a system that would block incentives to game the system is the reason that neo-classical economics is the economics of a vacuum in search of a reality. And the term “unproductive” is, shall we say, debateable – for economists, outputs from the government, such as environmental protection, can be seen as “unproductive”, while the output from a small movie company making snuff films can be seen as “productive.”
As you can see, the roots of the notion are embedded in the usual conservative world view that establishes absolute differences between the state and private enterprise, or bureaucracy and management, and so on. The usual unjustifiable intellectual cockledoodledoo. But there is a nugget of sound common sense here, as long as one is not carried away by the normative overtones. Andrew Hindmoor published a nice knockdown of rent seeking in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 1999. He provides a useful summary of the rent seeking concept:
“(i) Rent seeking is extremely common. Within the political arena where attention remains largely focused, examples of rent seeking are manifold.(n4) Interest-groups invest resources in an effort to extract favourable legislation from government. Utilities invest resources in an effort to capture their regulator and so ensure the erection of barriers to entry which will stifle competition. Bureaucrats invest resources in an effort to persuade government that budgets should be increased and political parties invest resources in an effort to capture the monopoly rent of government itself. Whilst efforts to quantify the volume of rent seeking remain in their infancy, one recent study concludes that as much as one-quarter of American gross national product is devoted to rent seeking and rent protection.
“(ii) Rent seeking is pernicious. Rent seeking may be individually rational but it is socially costly because it occurs at the expense of productive investment. Consider the following `clear cut' example offered by Tullock.(n6) In an effort to increase its profits, a struggling American steel company invests resources in an effort to secure a ban on the imports of a rival Korean firm's goods `on the purported grounds that [they are] environmentally dangerous'. Not only will the price of steel rise but money invested in this way cannot then be spent in other more productive ways. Resources invested in an effort to secure an import ban cannot be invested in new machinery which will reduce costs and improve quality.
“(iii) Rent seeking should be eliminated. For Rowley and Tullock, it is an item of political faith that `for those concerned with advancing the nation's wealth, the elimination of rent seeking ... is on a par (almost) with support of the flag, motherhood and apple pie'. It may not be possible to eliminate rent seeking but it is possible to reduce it. Reform is often envisaged as occurring at the constitutional level. Proposals are varied and include the imposition of tighter party discipline, rules limiting the size of government and a requirement that legislation be non-discriminatory.”
Interestingly, the political economy of poetry in the U.S. is very like the political economy of a particularly corrupt third world country. For instance, take the poetry contest. As Bartlett puts it:
“Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.”
So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with contests making a poet’s reputation. The problem comes from the fact that the reputation does not then get out in the world, so to speak. Poetry doesn’t sell. Here’s where the kicker comes in:
“But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.”
The pre-requisites for corruption in a small undeveloped economy are similar. An economy that doesn’t produce enough saleable product – or that has systematic impediments to the production of saleable goods – which, nevertheless, has an inflow of aid for some reason from developed countries. An oversized administrative structure that sucks out the money and energy that could be spend on removing impediments to native growth. A competition for power-brokering positions, rather than for productive positions – as the latter are not as profitable as the former.
Cordle stumbled upon a great trove of insider dealing when he went after the University of Georgia poetry contest, getting a list of judges for recent poetry contests. The University had not published that information before. It turns out Jorie Graham, who is the poet laureate of rentseeking, happened to be a judge the year the top prize was awarded to a Peter Sacks.
As Bartlett puts it:
On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
“Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.”
The story gets much funnier, as Bartlett gets a series of excuses from all participants that are, truly, the stuff of poetry. Or litigation, or both – this being an American story, the end of it is that all sides are mounting up their lawyers. Graham claims that she had reservations about her role in the UGA contest.
But… “Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."
However, the reach of rentseeking as a tool of analysis only goes so far. There is no reason to think Sacks’ poetry isn’t great – LI hasn’t read it. In fact, the universal perniciousness of rent seeking only appears to University of Chicago deluded eyes. Still, there is something enjoyable – something Dunciad like – about this farce.
In the absence of great poets, the American community has great poetry cabals. There’s a very nice article about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas Bartlett. Alas, the article is entitled Rhyme and Unreason, instead of (dream on!) Poetry and Rent-seeking. And double alas, Thomas Bartlett, the author, didn’t seek out any economists for comment. But he nevertheless untangles a wonderfully tangled tale.
The tale in short goes like this. Foetry, a website dedicated to getting to the root of corruption in poetry contests, appeared on the web last year. It was run anonymously. Eventually, that anonymity was penetrated – it turns out the site is run by a librarian named Alan Cordle, who is married to a poet. Cordle felt a burning sense of injustice about the world in which his wife was trying to make it as a poet, and so decided to attack the backscratching and numerous collusions that make poetry contests as fair as a Florida election.
Rent-seeking is a term invented by Anne Krueger to denote behaviors that are advantage-oriented but unproductive. It is an oblique acknowledgement by neo-classical economists that the model of enterprises fairly competing with each other to achieve advantage doesn’t really take into account the enterprises knowledge of the system – that, in other words, the path to profit needn’t be a matter or services, prices, or innovation, but can consist in gaming the system. In fact, the impossibility of creating a system that would block incentives to game the system is the reason that neo-classical economics is the economics of a vacuum in search of a reality. And the term “unproductive” is, shall we say, debateable – for economists, outputs from the government, such as environmental protection, can be seen as “unproductive”, while the output from a small movie company making snuff films can be seen as “productive.”
As you can see, the roots of the notion are embedded in the usual conservative world view that establishes absolute differences between the state and private enterprise, or bureaucracy and management, and so on. The usual unjustifiable intellectual cockledoodledoo. But there is a nugget of sound common sense here, as long as one is not carried away by the normative overtones. Andrew Hindmoor published a nice knockdown of rent seeking in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 1999. He provides a useful summary of the rent seeking concept:
“(i) Rent seeking is extremely common. Within the political arena where attention remains largely focused, examples of rent seeking are manifold.(n4) Interest-groups invest resources in an effort to extract favourable legislation from government. Utilities invest resources in an effort to capture their regulator and so ensure the erection of barriers to entry which will stifle competition. Bureaucrats invest resources in an effort to persuade government that budgets should be increased and political parties invest resources in an effort to capture the monopoly rent of government itself. Whilst efforts to quantify the volume of rent seeking remain in their infancy, one recent study concludes that as much as one-quarter of American gross national product is devoted to rent seeking and rent protection.
“(ii) Rent seeking is pernicious. Rent seeking may be individually rational but it is socially costly because it occurs at the expense of productive investment. Consider the following `clear cut' example offered by Tullock.(n6) In an effort to increase its profits, a struggling American steel company invests resources in an effort to secure a ban on the imports of a rival Korean firm's goods `on the purported grounds that [they are] environmentally dangerous'. Not only will the price of steel rise but money invested in this way cannot then be spent in other more productive ways. Resources invested in an effort to secure an import ban cannot be invested in new machinery which will reduce costs and improve quality.
“(iii) Rent seeking should be eliminated. For Rowley and Tullock, it is an item of political faith that `for those concerned with advancing the nation's wealth, the elimination of rent seeking ... is on a par (almost) with support of the flag, motherhood and apple pie'. It may not be possible to eliminate rent seeking but it is possible to reduce it. Reform is often envisaged as occurring at the constitutional level. Proposals are varied and include the imposition of tighter party discipline, rules limiting the size of government and a requirement that legislation be non-discriminatory.”
Interestingly, the political economy of poetry in the U.S. is very like the political economy of a particularly corrupt third world country. For instance, take the poetry contest. As Bartlett puts it:
“Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.”
So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with contests making a poet’s reputation. The problem comes from the fact that the reputation does not then get out in the world, so to speak. Poetry doesn’t sell. Here’s where the kicker comes in:
“But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.”
The pre-requisites for corruption in a small undeveloped economy are similar. An economy that doesn’t produce enough saleable product – or that has systematic impediments to the production of saleable goods – which, nevertheless, has an inflow of aid for some reason from developed countries. An oversized administrative structure that sucks out the money and energy that could be spend on removing impediments to native growth. A competition for power-brokering positions, rather than for productive positions – as the latter are not as profitable as the former.
Cordle stumbled upon a great trove of insider dealing when he went after the University of Georgia poetry contest, getting a list of judges for recent poetry contests. The University had not published that information before. It turns out Jorie Graham, who is the poet laureate of rentseeking, happened to be a judge the year the top prize was awarded to a Peter Sacks.
As Bartlett puts it:
On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
“Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.”
The story gets much funnier, as Bartlett gets a series of excuses from all participants that are, truly, the stuff of poetry. Or litigation, or both – this being an American story, the end of it is that all sides are mounting up their lawyers. Graham claims that she had reservations about her role in the UGA contest.
But… “Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."
However, the reach of rentseeking as a tool of analysis only goes so far. There is no reason to think Sacks’ poetry isn’t great – LI hasn’t read it. In fact, the universal perniciousness of rent seeking only appears to University of Chicago deluded eyes. Still, there is something enjoyable – something Dunciad like – about this farce.
Monday, May 16, 2005
the sycophants ball
The Washington Post, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send a staff reporter to interview Phillip Johnson, the gray eminence behind the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. This is interesting. Are they going to start letting the style section do reports on business, now? How about having a sports reporter do the Pentagon beat.
The article, of course, betrays Michael Powell’s powerful eighth grade education in biology, and his charming belief, which probably won him prizes in high school, that a newspaper story doesn’t take sides -- it deals with both sides of the question. He even wrote a very good essay on that in his English class, and Ms. Figworth marked it VERY IMPRESSIVE!
One doesn’t blame poor Mr. Powell – he truly seems prepared, if the question is, say, whether Star Wars one is better than Star Wars three – but the brothelkeeper who sent him on his task. As usual, the Washington Post’s response to the conservative establishment that runs D.C., now, is to fetch the bone. The bone, in this case, is the debasing of American education with nonsense.
We especially loved this sentence:
“Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture.”
Because Powell obviously think that science is a debate, with people taking notes out of their files – yes, it is the debate club! He covered the debate club, once! He knows how to do this!
Oh, the Bush age. How I long for it to end.
The article, of course, betrays Michael Powell’s powerful eighth grade education in biology, and his charming belief, which probably won him prizes in high school, that a newspaper story doesn’t take sides -- it deals with both sides of the question. He even wrote a very good essay on that in his English class, and Ms. Figworth marked it VERY IMPRESSIVE!
One doesn’t blame poor Mr. Powell – he truly seems prepared, if the question is, say, whether Star Wars one is better than Star Wars three – but the brothelkeeper who sent him on his task. As usual, the Washington Post’s response to the conservative establishment that runs D.C., now, is to fetch the bone. The bone, in this case, is the debasing of American education with nonsense.
We especially loved this sentence:
“Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture.”
Because Powell obviously think that science is a debate, with people taking notes out of their files – yes, it is the debate club! He covered the debate club, once! He knows how to do this!
Oh, the Bush age. How I long for it to end.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
intellectual scabs
This is the kind of post my friend T. will frown at. Having already violated my vow, this week, to make this blog a Hitchens free zone, I am now going to post about one of the “friends of Hitchens,” Marc Cooper.
However, instead of concentrating fire on Cooper’s brand of Bush era leftism – four parts surrender, one part reminder of what a groovy radical past Cooper possesses, why he was even against Pinochet! – let’s expand the parameters to a broader question: why did the New Left generation fail to socially reproduce? This is the kind way to put it. Another way to put it is: why did the generation of 1968 produce such ace putzes of the Cooper/Hitchens variety?
First, we should briefly review Cooper’s m.o. In the past year, Cooper has bravely unmasked Naomi Klein as a useful tool of Islamofascist terrorists; has sternly criticized the paranoid rantings of the left re Bush; took up the cudgels against world renowned celebrity Ward Churchill and his plan to reduce your mother, dear reader, to sexual slavery; and in various other ways has rightly become the leftist most likely to be linked to by an Instapundit.
His absurd post about Iraq is par for Cooper’s course. Having checked out the tv news and seen that 400 people have been murdered by the insurgents in the past month, Cooper’s humanitarianism is offended. And of course in this mood he can see right through the moral idiocy of calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. He goes right to work, barking at various leftists who advocate just that.
Now, in fact, there is a strict correlation between these deaths and their occurence in those areas where our heroic Uncle Sam has scattered his forces. There is also the little matter of the history of the occupation. Cooper's position seems to be that the occupation was a total disaster, so we should keep on with the occupation. This is worthy of the man. This is how he covers the path that took us to those four hundred murders.
The new tack, as we all must have noticed, is to pretend that now, it is all about supporting democracy. In fact, American newspapers have taken to describing the Bush doctrine, shorthand, as supporting democracy. Which is like describing Bush's social security proposals, in shorthand, as "saving social security.' So we are 'supporting democracy" by transforming our occupying force in Iraq into a weapon used by Talabani's Kurds and SCIRI against their opponents. Let's lift the veil of amnesia a bit. What’s forgotten?
- That, up until the week of the elections, the major coalition of Shiite parties did support a a timetable of withdrawal.
- That even the American propaganda poll, done by the IRI, showed majority support for the timetable.
- That the dropping of that provision was the result of heavy American pressure.
- That the three month lag in governance was the result of the American designed occupation law.
- That the law was designed to maximize the occupier’s power in the country.
- That the law under which the constitution is to be decided in Iraq is an American enforced law, of no real validity.
Cooper’s humanitarianism, while extended to the four hundred killed in one month, is apparently unmoved by the more than one hundred killed in one week by the Pentagon in Western Iraq. This, however, is typical Cooper -- a fine selectivity of indignation. As the Lancet group showed, and as was further shown by the UN study of living conditions in Iraq this week, and what the offensive in Western Iraq showed as well – the majority of deaths in Iraq come by way of American firepower and the semi-criminal attempt, by the COA, to run Iraq as a profit preserve for America's biggest War contractors. A suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of out of work Shi’ites is called a terrorist act by the Coopers of the world. An American plane blowing up a restaurant with a bunch of Sunnis dining in it is called a tactical strike. The insurgents, so far as I know, have not reduced any major city to the totalitarian rule of segregating males and letting them walk in their own neighborhood on sufferance – as the Americans are doing in the ruins of Falluja. Nor have the insurgents dropped bombs from planes on Iraqi cities, nor machine gunned streets from helicopters. This is what Cooper supports.
Now, the truth is, if we hadn’t gone via Harry to the Cooper site, Cooper would not be on our mind. If we want Hitchens, we can get him elsewhere – and Cooper’s much weaker beer. We don’t often look at his weblog. But the larger question is, why did the antiwar movement in this country so politically suck? And why did it never revamp into an anti-occupation movement?
Our own feeling is that this has to do with the ties with the old left – the old communist left from the thirties – having long died out. The anti-war movement in the sixties benefited from the tacit knowledge held by veterans of the thirties. But the knowledge they passed along was, unfortunately, mostly passed to a college educated elite whose basic interests are much closer to the basic interests of Bush’s suburban supporters than they are to the working and lower middle class. In LI’s own terminology – we have been working this out – the difference between the Vietnam era and the Bush era is that the momentum of the movement shifted. There is, definitely, a Movement on the right – in fact, there are converging but separate movements, who have targeted the Republican party as their vehicle.
On the left, the movement is in severe crisis. The Democratic Party continually seeks to exert control over any movement, and has successfully inducted into its orbit the leaders of the Vietnam era. Kerry was, in many ways, typical – a mamby pamby liberal, vain, an instinctive comformist, a showboater, a laughable acolyte at the alter of JFK, elevated by way of the usual path – in the Democratic version of the Beatitudes, it is said that the mediocre will inherit the earth – whose role as most electable was a judgment of the Party professionals – Cooper’s kind of people.
The journalistic camp followers of the Cooper type play the role of movement breakers – intellectual scabs. The scab ideology comes out, among them, as “criticism” – they are all honest to god Orwells, speaking truth to power. In reality, they are speaking half truths in order to render powerless. And they do a good job of it, week after week. This interruption in the progressive line in America – a line that goes back to the abolitionists, and through the Wobblies and to early civil rights activists like Du Bois and Ida B. Wells up through the fifties – has impacted the ability to organize the clear discontent with Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. That is all around. When we go and have our little lunch here – lately, we’ve been going to the new, anti-union Whole Foods and getting sushi and a cup of coffee, since it is cheap – we usually sit out in the patio area. This is a store that definitely caters to the well to do, as well as the aspiring post punker. And we always overhear the same things -- complaints about what is happening in this country. If we go to the Tex Mex place up the street, which is a frat and sorority hangout, we still hear things like that. Unfortunately, these complaints are always couched in party terms – which is a measure of the success of the intellectual scabs. The little enders and the big enders, as Swift put it in Gulliver’s Travels, take up all the political space – rendering it conveniently tedious. In an electoral democracy, the status quo must make politics boring. Otherwise, it can be used as a weapon to exploit the exploiters.
However, instead of concentrating fire on Cooper’s brand of Bush era leftism – four parts surrender, one part reminder of what a groovy radical past Cooper possesses, why he was even against Pinochet! – let’s expand the parameters to a broader question: why did the New Left generation fail to socially reproduce? This is the kind way to put it. Another way to put it is: why did the generation of 1968 produce such ace putzes of the Cooper/Hitchens variety?
First, we should briefly review Cooper’s m.o. In the past year, Cooper has bravely unmasked Naomi Klein as a useful tool of Islamofascist terrorists; has sternly criticized the paranoid rantings of the left re Bush; took up the cudgels against world renowned celebrity Ward Churchill and his plan to reduce your mother, dear reader, to sexual slavery; and in various other ways has rightly become the leftist most likely to be linked to by an Instapundit.
His absurd post about Iraq is par for Cooper’s course. Having checked out the tv news and seen that 400 people have been murdered by the insurgents in the past month, Cooper’s humanitarianism is offended. And of course in this mood he can see right through the moral idiocy of calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. He goes right to work, barking at various leftists who advocate just that.
Now, in fact, there is a strict correlation between these deaths and their occurence in those areas where our heroic Uncle Sam has scattered his forces. There is also the little matter of the history of the occupation. Cooper's position seems to be that the occupation was a total disaster, so we should keep on with the occupation. This is worthy of the man. This is how he covers the path that took us to those four hundred murders.
The new tack, as we all must have noticed, is to pretend that now, it is all about supporting democracy. In fact, American newspapers have taken to describing the Bush doctrine, shorthand, as supporting democracy. Which is like describing Bush's social security proposals, in shorthand, as "saving social security.' So we are 'supporting democracy" by transforming our occupying force in Iraq into a weapon used by Talabani's Kurds and SCIRI against their opponents. Let's lift the veil of amnesia a bit. What’s forgotten?
- That, up until the week of the elections, the major coalition of Shiite parties did support a a timetable of withdrawal.
- That even the American propaganda poll, done by the IRI, showed majority support for the timetable.
- That the dropping of that provision was the result of heavy American pressure.
- That the three month lag in governance was the result of the American designed occupation law.
- That the law was designed to maximize the occupier’s power in the country.
- That the law under which the constitution is to be decided in Iraq is an American enforced law, of no real validity.
Cooper’s humanitarianism, while extended to the four hundred killed in one month, is apparently unmoved by the more than one hundred killed in one week by the Pentagon in Western Iraq. This, however, is typical Cooper -- a fine selectivity of indignation. As the Lancet group showed, and as was further shown by the UN study of living conditions in Iraq this week, and what the offensive in Western Iraq showed as well – the majority of deaths in Iraq come by way of American firepower and the semi-criminal attempt, by the COA, to run Iraq as a profit preserve for America's biggest War contractors. A suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of out of work Shi’ites is called a terrorist act by the Coopers of the world. An American plane blowing up a restaurant with a bunch of Sunnis dining in it is called a tactical strike. The insurgents, so far as I know, have not reduced any major city to the totalitarian rule of segregating males and letting them walk in their own neighborhood on sufferance – as the Americans are doing in the ruins of Falluja. Nor have the insurgents dropped bombs from planes on Iraqi cities, nor machine gunned streets from helicopters. This is what Cooper supports.
Now, the truth is, if we hadn’t gone via Harry to the Cooper site, Cooper would not be on our mind. If we want Hitchens, we can get him elsewhere – and Cooper’s much weaker beer. We don’t often look at his weblog. But the larger question is, why did the antiwar movement in this country so politically suck? And why did it never revamp into an anti-occupation movement?
Our own feeling is that this has to do with the ties with the old left – the old communist left from the thirties – having long died out. The anti-war movement in the sixties benefited from the tacit knowledge held by veterans of the thirties. But the knowledge they passed along was, unfortunately, mostly passed to a college educated elite whose basic interests are much closer to the basic interests of Bush’s suburban supporters than they are to the working and lower middle class. In LI’s own terminology – we have been working this out – the difference between the Vietnam era and the Bush era is that the momentum of the movement shifted. There is, definitely, a Movement on the right – in fact, there are converging but separate movements, who have targeted the Republican party as their vehicle.
On the left, the movement is in severe crisis. The Democratic Party continually seeks to exert control over any movement, and has successfully inducted into its orbit the leaders of the Vietnam era. Kerry was, in many ways, typical – a mamby pamby liberal, vain, an instinctive comformist, a showboater, a laughable acolyte at the alter of JFK, elevated by way of the usual path – in the Democratic version of the Beatitudes, it is said that the mediocre will inherit the earth – whose role as most electable was a judgment of the Party professionals – Cooper’s kind of people.
The journalistic camp followers of the Cooper type play the role of movement breakers – intellectual scabs. The scab ideology comes out, among them, as “criticism” – they are all honest to god Orwells, speaking truth to power. In reality, they are speaking half truths in order to render powerless. And they do a good job of it, week after week. This interruption in the progressive line in America – a line that goes back to the abolitionists, and through the Wobblies and to early civil rights activists like Du Bois and Ida B. Wells up through the fifties – has impacted the ability to organize the clear discontent with Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. That is all around. When we go and have our little lunch here – lately, we’ve been going to the new, anti-union Whole Foods and getting sushi and a cup of coffee, since it is cheap – we usually sit out in the patio area. This is a store that definitely caters to the well to do, as well as the aspiring post punker. And we always overhear the same things -- complaints about what is happening in this country. If we go to the Tex Mex place up the street, which is a frat and sorority hangout, we still hear things like that. Unfortunately, these complaints are always couched in party terms – which is a measure of the success of the intellectual scabs. The little enders and the big enders, as Swift put it in Gulliver’s Travels, take up all the political space – rendering it conveniently tedious. In an electoral democracy, the status quo must make politics boring. Otherwise, it can be used as a weapon to exploit the exploiters.
Friday, May 13, 2005
a pleasure-self post
“The Hadza of northern Tanzania publicly marked a boy’s first nocturnal emission by decorating him with beads in exactly the same way as they decorated a girl with beads at the time of her first menstruation.” Charles Stewart, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.
"The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer, or a man who is no less wicked. The way in which the crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble women, as I have already pointed out in the first book." – Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams
Whenever LI hears the phrase “mental masturbation” (and for our sins in writing this blog, we hear the phrase quite a bit), we always wonder what the opposite is. What would be full frontal missionary mental fucking, and how would one achieve it with an organ as marooned as is our poor human brain – which, without the pineal eye that Bataille dreamed would burst someday out of the top of the skull, blinking monstrously in whatever shade of darkness its nerve impulses are couched in, is, in actuality, reduced to living in that darkness familiar from infancy that is enlivened only by the flickers of light coming in from the relatively distant eyes.
Since there is an answer to all questions (although not necessarily a right answer), we turned to the experts. Our readers are probably already familiar with the Zurbriggen and Yost study, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, published in the Journal of Sexual Research last year. Z and Y brought together one hundred plus persons of both sexes, filtered out the bis and the gays, and had these people write down sexual fantasies. Subsequently, they coded the sexual fantasies. Their conclusions are conveniently summed up in the following reader-friendly manner:
“Men's sexual fantasies were more sexually explicit than women's, t(160) = 4.11, p < .001, and women's sexual fantasies were more emotional and romantic than men's, t(160) =-2.69, p =.008. In addition, men's fantasies involved more interactions with multiple partners than did women's, t(160) = 1.97, p = .05. There were also gender differences in fantasized dominance and submission. Men's fantasies included more portrayals of the self as dominant and in power than did women's, t(160) = 2.45, p = .02. Women's fantasies did not include significantly more portrayals of submission than did men's, t(160) = -1.62, p = .11. However, in a repeated measures ANOVA, the interaction between gender and type of power fantasy (dominance vs. submissive) was reliable: F(1,160) = 7.75, p = .006.
Although men were equally likely to fantasize about dominance and submission, women were more likely to fantasize about submission. Other interesting gender differences involved sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire more frequently than did women's fantasies, t(160) = 3.09, p = .002. Although men's fantasies were equally likely to include desire-self and desire-other, paired t(84) = -.58, p = .57, women's fantasies were marginally more likely to include desire-self than desireother, paired t(76) = 1.69, p =. 10. Men also described their partners as experiencing sexual pleasure more frequently than did women, t(160) = 3.24, p = .001.
Although men's fantasies were marginally more likely to include sexual pleasure-other than sexual pleasure-self, t(84) = -1.74, p = .09, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include sexual pleasure-self than sexual pleasure-other, paired t(76) = 2.04, p = .04. In a repeated measures ANOVA, this interaction between gender and sexual pleasure (self vs. other) was reliable, F(1,160) = 7.14, p = .008”
To which one wants to say, Zut alors. But bien sur, this is the way of a man with a woman and a woman and a woman, at least when I shut my how do you say, peepers?
But to tell you the truth, LI felt old and ghost ridden reading Z and Y’s paper. Call us a throwback to that old reprobate, D.H. Lawrence, but we feel something is wrong with handing sex over to multiple digits, pinching and prodding it for gender singularities. So we turned, for a more narrative view, to Charles Stewart’s paper, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute a few years ago, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present. Stewart combines approaches from Freud and Foucault – still not Lawrence’s cup of tea, but much closer to LI’s way of thinking. Although our pleasure-other quotient might well be –1.74, we feel a little more akin to the Umeda, among whom “a hunter intentionally [sleeps] on a net-bag scented with magic pighunting perfume (oktesap) in hopes of receiving the erotic dream that presaged a successful hunting expedition. Such erotic dreams held out the promise of real sexual consummation, which often followed after a kill was made.”
Our own experiments with pighunting perfume are for another time. Stewart’s point is that erotic dreams can act as portents – and indeed, isn’t desire a portent laden structure among the best of us? With Foucault, Stewart sees sexuality in the modern epoch as a matter of subjectivication – that is, it is taken as the truth about the subject. In a society as dedicated to sensation as ours is – where we are supposed to judge the merit of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution on the sensations it evokes of like or dislike among Gallop’s focus groups – sex, being an ultimate of sensation, is going to be a criterion for authenticity.
But of course, there is always killing. This is where the erotic dream and the nightmare intersect. Stewart’s notion is that a change in the hermeneutic value of erotic dreams was wrought by Early Christian culture. For “Artemidorus, the dream of sex with one’s mother, for example, was not problematic, but rather a good dream for politicians. This was because the mother represented one’s native country, and to make love is to govern the obedient and willing body of one’s partner. The dreamer would thus control the affairs of the city (Artemidorus, Interpretation of dreams, 1.79). Hippias, a Greek traitor serving as the Persians’ guide in the landing at Marathon, dreamt of sleeping with his mother and interpreted this to mean that he would return to Athens and recover power (Herodotus, History, 6.107).” However, there was no room in the Christian culture for portents deriving from sleeping with your mother.
Although… surely there are spicy enough stories in Genesis to toss up the problematic, here. Not that the Greeks didn’t put the stamp of their own ethical ideas on sexual dreams. “Some ancient doctors understood ‘gonorrhoea’ to be an involuntary emission of semen, and their term for this ailment, meaning literally ‘the flow of seed’, remains with us to this day. Nocturnal emissions were considered a variant of gonorrhoea, and in his survey of acute and chronic diseases CaeliusAurelianus contrasted the two. Gonorrhoea could occur any time, without imagery, while nocturnal emissions occurred only during sleep and as a consequence of imagining sexual intercourse through ‘unreal images’ (inanibus visis concubitum fingat) (On chronic diseases, 5.71.82). Unlike gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions did not necessarily constitute an illness. They simply resulted from desire, which could arise either through regular sexual practice or throughprolonged continence.”
Well, enough – we have a few other things to say about Stewart’s article, but we will reserve our shots until another time.
"The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer, or a man who is no less wicked. The way in which the crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble women, as I have already pointed out in the first book." – Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams
Whenever LI hears the phrase “mental masturbation” (and for our sins in writing this blog, we hear the phrase quite a bit), we always wonder what the opposite is. What would be full frontal missionary mental fucking, and how would one achieve it with an organ as marooned as is our poor human brain – which, without the pineal eye that Bataille dreamed would burst someday out of the top of the skull, blinking monstrously in whatever shade of darkness its nerve impulses are couched in, is, in actuality, reduced to living in that darkness familiar from infancy that is enlivened only by the flickers of light coming in from the relatively distant eyes.
Since there is an answer to all questions (although not necessarily a right answer), we turned to the experts. Our readers are probably already familiar with the Zurbriggen and Yost study, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, published in the Journal of Sexual Research last year. Z and Y brought together one hundred plus persons of both sexes, filtered out the bis and the gays, and had these people write down sexual fantasies. Subsequently, they coded the sexual fantasies. Their conclusions are conveniently summed up in the following reader-friendly manner:
“Men's sexual fantasies were more sexually explicit than women's, t(160) = 4.11, p < .001, and women's sexual fantasies were more emotional and romantic than men's, t(160) =-2.69, p =.008. In addition, men's fantasies involved more interactions with multiple partners than did women's, t(160) = 1.97, p = .05. There were also gender differences in fantasized dominance and submission. Men's fantasies included more portrayals of the self as dominant and in power than did women's, t(160) = 2.45, p = .02. Women's fantasies did not include significantly more portrayals of submission than did men's, t(160) = -1.62, p = .11. However, in a repeated measures ANOVA, the interaction between gender and type of power fantasy (dominance vs. submissive) was reliable: F(1,160) = 7.75, p = .006.
Although men were equally likely to fantasize about dominance and submission, women were more likely to fantasize about submission. Other interesting gender differences involved sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire more frequently than did women's fantasies, t(160) = 3.09, p = .002. Although men's fantasies were equally likely to include desire-self and desire-other, paired t(84) = -.58, p = .57, women's fantasies were marginally more likely to include desire-self than desireother, paired t(76) = 1.69, p =. 10. Men also described their partners as experiencing sexual pleasure more frequently than did women, t(160) = 3.24, p = .001.
Although men's fantasies were marginally more likely to include sexual pleasure-other than sexual pleasure-self, t(84) = -1.74, p = .09, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include sexual pleasure-self than sexual pleasure-other, paired t(76) = 2.04, p = .04. In a repeated measures ANOVA, this interaction between gender and sexual pleasure (self vs. other) was reliable, F(1,160) = 7.14, p = .008”
To which one wants to say, Zut alors. But bien sur, this is the way of a man with a woman and a woman and a woman, at least when I shut my how do you say, peepers?
But to tell you the truth, LI felt old and ghost ridden reading Z and Y’s paper. Call us a throwback to that old reprobate, D.H. Lawrence, but we feel something is wrong with handing sex over to multiple digits, pinching and prodding it for gender singularities. So we turned, for a more narrative view, to Charles Stewart’s paper, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute a few years ago, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present. Stewart combines approaches from Freud and Foucault – still not Lawrence’s cup of tea, but much closer to LI’s way of thinking. Although our pleasure-other quotient might well be –1.74, we feel a little more akin to the Umeda, among whom “a hunter intentionally [sleeps] on a net-bag scented with magic pighunting perfume (oktesap) in hopes of receiving the erotic dream that presaged a successful hunting expedition. Such erotic dreams held out the promise of real sexual consummation, which often followed after a kill was made.”
Our own experiments with pighunting perfume are for another time. Stewart’s point is that erotic dreams can act as portents – and indeed, isn’t desire a portent laden structure among the best of us? With Foucault, Stewart sees sexuality in the modern epoch as a matter of subjectivication – that is, it is taken as the truth about the subject. In a society as dedicated to sensation as ours is – where we are supposed to judge the merit of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution on the sensations it evokes of like or dislike among Gallop’s focus groups – sex, being an ultimate of sensation, is going to be a criterion for authenticity.
But of course, there is always killing. This is where the erotic dream and the nightmare intersect. Stewart’s notion is that a change in the hermeneutic value of erotic dreams was wrought by Early Christian culture. For “Artemidorus, the dream of sex with one’s mother, for example, was not problematic, but rather a good dream for politicians. This was because the mother represented one’s native country, and to make love is to govern the obedient and willing body of one’s partner. The dreamer would thus control the affairs of the city (Artemidorus, Interpretation of dreams, 1.79). Hippias, a Greek traitor serving as the Persians’ guide in the landing at Marathon, dreamt of sleeping with his mother and interpreted this to mean that he would return to Athens and recover power (Herodotus, History, 6.107).” However, there was no room in the Christian culture for portents deriving from sleeping with your mother.
Although… surely there are spicy enough stories in Genesis to toss up the problematic, here. Not that the Greeks didn’t put the stamp of their own ethical ideas on sexual dreams. “Some ancient doctors understood ‘gonorrhoea’ to be an involuntary emission of semen, and their term for this ailment, meaning literally ‘the flow of seed’, remains with us to this day. Nocturnal emissions were considered a variant of gonorrhoea, and in his survey of acute and chronic diseases CaeliusAurelianus contrasted the two. Gonorrhoea could occur any time, without imagery, while nocturnal emissions occurred only during sleep and as a consequence of imagining sexual intercourse through ‘unreal images’ (inanibus visis concubitum fingat) (On chronic diseases, 5.71.82). Unlike gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions did not necessarily constitute an illness. They simply resulted from desire, which could arise either through regular sexual practice or throughprolonged continence.”
Well, enough – we have a few other things to say about Stewart’s article, but we will reserve our shots until another time.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
GET OUT NOW
From Today’s Washington Post:
“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.
Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”
From yesterday’s New York Times:
“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”
I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?
“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.
Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”
From yesterday’s New York Times:
“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”
I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Inspissated cockledoodledoo
LI used to ‘do’ Christopher Hitchens more. After a while, though, it got boring. The man’s defense of the indefensible, his substitution of belligerence for logic, his wavering between complete lies and half truths, became a circus sideshow that indicted those who hooted at it as much as those who cheered it – after all, why were us squawkers still watching? My friend, T., kept pointing this out forcefully. After all, why waste one’s time on Hitchen’s inspissated cockledoodledoo when there were more pressing matters to worry about? Existence itself, my next meal, sex and the lack of it around these parts, etc., etc.
But the sideshow still runs, and is still, occasionally, funny in that “watching-Friday-the-thirteenth” way – watching, that is, the killer resurrect in the midst of ever more bogus S/FX. So we read, with vast amusement, the copping of old Cold War themes in his essay on Abu Ghraib (and how the horrible left is using it as a propaganda tool against the good old Americans) in Slate. We particularly liked this one:
“Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.”
Remember how the Russians used to ‘whisper’ about the Lubyanka? Of course, oppressed people were always whispering to reporters back in the day. That the whispers of the Iraqis wouldn’t, really, be understood by Hitchens, who doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t matter. Apparently his translators mimicked the whipering. And the hands being cut off – not like today’s prisons in Iraq. Sure, in Samarra, where the Iraqis are whispering again, to a real reporter, Peter Maass, there might be a little electric prodding to the genitals. There might be the tying to the ceiling – the famous airplane – pulling the arms out of the socket. But of course, it is only used on the ‘sudden flood of ex-cons” – Saddam Hussein’s natural constituency. Funny how debasing the enemy into the purely criminal is part of the organization of torture in Iraq. It is also funny that nowhere in Hitchens essay is there any mention of the, uh, heart attacks suffered by various prisoners of the Americans. Maybe the whispering about that was just too low for him to hear.
Anyway, now we get to the new, improved prison complex – prisons as humane as the ones we have in Ameriiiicaaa:
“Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.
“Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors.”
Wow. Their superiors uncovered this, eh? Makes one wonder what Stalin would have found out if he’d just ordered a thorough investigation of what the police were up to. The father of all the Russias might have found, to his disgust, that those labor camps weren’t really rehabilitating his dear children. And the Pentagon bigwigs might have found out that instead of the ice cream and veggies that they had strictly ordered the guards to give the low-lives, the guards were, on their own, staging these orgies. One is just pleased as punch that the superiors uncovered the lot of em. As for the hangings – that is certainly right, and progress we should all be proud of. The body in the bag that Grainer was famously making the thumbs up sign over was beaten to death. Or died of a heart attack -- Ba'athist scum are notoriously prone to heart attacks.
Quite wonderful, actually, how civilization marches on.
Hitchens, who has taken to thinking that his father’s position in the Navy makes him an expert on the army, must be pleased that there are no more messy hangings going on, since it is so against the regulations. He might, however, want to watch some of that American funded Iraqi tv. The popular show in which terrorists confess – and sometimes, after confession, their bodies are found by roadsides. The lot of them were Saddam’s natural constituency, and we don’t want to waste a lot of sob sister sympathy on these impediments to democracy as the Hitchenses see it in the Middle East.
ps: ps – We at LI often feel bad about the number of people coming to this site looking for “sex” “girles” “breasts” and the like. We’ve offered pretty slim pickings. But today we can recommend a link to those surfers: take a look at the hot analingus action over at the NYT, when not one but two reporters stick their tongues and noses as far up the rectum of our Secretary of War as is permitted by the Supreme Court. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s article begins in the time honored fashion of the breathless Teen Mag piece about some Britney-ette:
"Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."
Notice how that intimation of intimacy, that dropped “you” in the “ask…” functions. On the one hand, you, too, lucky citizen, could have the earthshaking opportunity to interview the great man! Oh, doesn’t it do something to you that makes you run to the bathroom to change your shorts! But on the other hand – sucker, you don’t have a chance in hell getting within touching distance of Donnie. That’s reserved for NYT reporters, who are specialists in the tongue massage.
Not that they aren’t critical. Why, they went out and found a congressman who put it that some criticize Rumsfeld for not kowtowing in Congress!
As for clichés, we got your clichés right here. For instance, Paul Wolfowitz is a “lightning rod” of controversy. Interesting choice of words, given that this week, the price of going into Iraq has risen to 300 billion dollars, just a tad more than the 10 billion Wolfie projected two years ago. I guess lightning rod means, in Timespeak, dysfunctional liar. But given the adorable Rumsfeld bottom to which our reporters are attached, I suppose these are minor things.
One boner deflator warning, however: the article is about how Rummy is going to finish out his term. Meaning, for those of you outside the NYT orgy – those fans, those “you”’s outside the magic circle – another, what, two thousand, three thousand soldiers dying, adorably, for Rumsfeld’s crackpot ideas. Isn’t that sweet! As for the colored others, well, let’s not even count them.
Another triumph for the free press everywhere!
But the sideshow still runs, and is still, occasionally, funny in that “watching-Friday-the-thirteenth” way – watching, that is, the killer resurrect in the midst of ever more bogus S/FX. So we read, with vast amusement, the copping of old Cold War themes in his essay on Abu Ghraib (and how the horrible left is using it as a propaganda tool against the good old Americans) in Slate. We particularly liked this one:
“Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.”
Remember how the Russians used to ‘whisper’ about the Lubyanka? Of course, oppressed people were always whispering to reporters back in the day. That the whispers of the Iraqis wouldn’t, really, be understood by Hitchens, who doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t matter. Apparently his translators mimicked the whipering. And the hands being cut off – not like today’s prisons in Iraq. Sure, in Samarra, where the Iraqis are whispering again, to a real reporter, Peter Maass, there might be a little electric prodding to the genitals. There might be the tying to the ceiling – the famous airplane – pulling the arms out of the socket. But of course, it is only used on the ‘sudden flood of ex-cons” – Saddam Hussein’s natural constituency. Funny how debasing the enemy into the purely criminal is part of the organization of torture in Iraq. It is also funny that nowhere in Hitchens essay is there any mention of the, uh, heart attacks suffered by various prisoners of the Americans. Maybe the whispering about that was just too low for him to hear.
Anyway, now we get to the new, improved prison complex – prisons as humane as the ones we have in Ameriiiicaaa:
“Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.
“Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors.”
Wow. Their superiors uncovered this, eh? Makes one wonder what Stalin would have found out if he’d just ordered a thorough investigation of what the police were up to. The father of all the Russias might have found, to his disgust, that those labor camps weren’t really rehabilitating his dear children. And the Pentagon bigwigs might have found out that instead of the ice cream and veggies that they had strictly ordered the guards to give the low-lives, the guards were, on their own, staging these orgies. One is just pleased as punch that the superiors uncovered the lot of em. As for the hangings – that is certainly right, and progress we should all be proud of. The body in the bag that Grainer was famously making the thumbs up sign over was beaten to death. Or died of a heart attack -- Ba'athist scum are notoriously prone to heart attacks.
Quite wonderful, actually, how civilization marches on.
Hitchens, who has taken to thinking that his father’s position in the Navy makes him an expert on the army, must be pleased that there are no more messy hangings going on, since it is so against the regulations. He might, however, want to watch some of that American funded Iraqi tv. The popular show in which terrorists confess – and sometimes, after confession, their bodies are found by roadsides. The lot of them were Saddam’s natural constituency, and we don’t want to waste a lot of sob sister sympathy on these impediments to democracy as the Hitchenses see it in the Middle East.
ps: ps – We at LI often feel bad about the number of people coming to this site looking for “sex” “girles” “breasts” and the like. We’ve offered pretty slim pickings. But today we can recommend a link to those surfers: take a look at the hot analingus action over at the NYT, when not one but two reporters stick their tongues and noses as far up the rectum of our Secretary of War as is permitted by the Supreme Court. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s article begins in the time honored fashion of the breathless Teen Mag piece about some Britney-ette:
"Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."
Notice how that intimation of intimacy, that dropped “you” in the “ask…” functions. On the one hand, you, too, lucky citizen, could have the earthshaking opportunity to interview the great man! Oh, doesn’t it do something to you that makes you run to the bathroom to change your shorts! But on the other hand – sucker, you don’t have a chance in hell getting within touching distance of Donnie. That’s reserved for NYT reporters, who are specialists in the tongue massage.
Not that they aren’t critical. Why, they went out and found a congressman who put it that some criticize Rumsfeld for not kowtowing in Congress!
As for clichés, we got your clichés right here. For instance, Paul Wolfowitz is a “lightning rod” of controversy. Interesting choice of words, given that this week, the price of going into Iraq has risen to 300 billion dollars, just a tad more than the 10 billion Wolfie projected two years ago. I guess lightning rod means, in Timespeak, dysfunctional liar. But given the adorable Rumsfeld bottom to which our reporters are attached, I suppose these are minor things.
One boner deflator warning, however: the article is about how Rummy is going to finish out his term. Meaning, for those of you outside the NYT orgy – those fans, those “you”’s outside the magic circle – another, what, two thousand, three thousand soldiers dying, adorably, for Rumsfeld’s crackpot ideas. Isn’t that sweet! As for the colored others, well, let’s not even count them.
Another triumph for the free press everywhere!
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