santayana, the fourth

It is Santayana’s luck that he is not tarred, as Heidegger is, with sympathy for fascism, even though Santayana abundantly exhibited same. But the other side of that luck is that Santayana has sunk into relative and undeserved neglect.Undeserved on a number of levels. Simply on the level of sheer delight, Santayana ranks high as a writer. Here, for instance, is his criticism of Bertrand Russell’s politics: Russell's "mind and conscience" are "those of a rebel or reformer. He feels no loyalty to dominant things but enthusiasm for possible ideal contrary things. . . . Nothing can be established in this world merely because it is ideally possible: it must flow from what precedes, it must be derivable from physical forces actually afoot." We take that phrase from the review of Santayana’s letters in the Winter 2005 Sewanee Review, which – should you bump into an issue – you should read. Or, again, here is Santayana on myth and science – elucidating a point which, frankly, LI has some disagreement with, but elucidating it beautifully:

The laws formulated by science—the transitive figments describing the relation between fact and fact—possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf. This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed, each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody's knowledge of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which it may succeed in knowing.

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity, however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense. To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also. There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof. Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could not be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device, gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is established. It is not, it merely applies; and every situation in which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.

Santayana was a curious cat. Perhaps because he is a cat with only one life in the public consciousness (revolving around that damned quotation – those who forget to read any of Santayana’s books seemed doomed to repeat his one famous quotation), he’s been immune from the fingerpointing that has attached to Heidegger’s Nazi loyalties. It is, one supposes, Santayana’s luck. Like Pound, Santayana spent WWII in Italy. Like Pound, Santayana was a fascist sympathizer. Like Pound, Santayana harbored a dislike for Jews that peppered his correspondence. But unlike Pound, he didn’t feel called upon to diffuse his views over the radio waves. Instead, he lived in a convent during the war.Nevertheless, we think that Santayana is a philosopher one should read. American political philosophy is pretty bare: there is Rawls, edifying and inedible; there is Strauss; there is Thoreau. Santayana is the only conservative philosopher who can be compared to Ortega y Gasset or Coleridge or Constant. Being captured by the conservative movement – and having his name put in the sub-title of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative mind – has not done Santayana a lot of good, since his concept of order is radically independent of the Burkean tradition. Partly this is because Santayana absorbed so richly the idealistic currents of the 19th century that he couldn’t imagine that the human vocabulary or mind could do anything but distort the facts of nature – for him, too, nature is behind the veil of Maya. This freed him, in a curious way, to propose a naturalism neutered of its anti-traditional import. Santayana, like Stephen Jay Gould, saw no reason that the acceptance, on the one hand, of a scientific narrative that put humans wholly in nature as animals that had evolved, should lead to the rejection, on the other hand, of that magisterial, as Gould puts it, that encodes the mythical. LI will talk about this in a later post.

Meanwhile, it is the fourth of July. For this fourth, the Observer has a very special report on the American financed resurrection of Saddam Hussein’s prison system, a state of things for which we are sending men and women to kill for. And to die for. Shall we mark the fifth year of the Bush elevation with mournful silence -- or just curse him out loud, up and down, sideways and backwards, inside out and through every back entrance? Every insult chased with a good goddamn. We recommend the later. Set off a firecracker and curse the Republican darkness.

the last post on this subject, I hope

LI finds the whole festuche of the upcoming Supreme Court hearings to be so much depressing filler. We expect the D.C. Dems to charge out of their trenches once again into withering fire, having, like the English officer corps on the Sommes in 1915, understood nothing and remembered everything.

It is quite simple. Progressive politics on the national level are dead. D.C. is now the heart of big government conservatism. The party can’t adapt to this because it has concentrated its throw weight and vanity in D.C., producing the pompous puffer culture that is the snide voice which replies to Bush’s weekly radio speeches.

So – one needs a strong states rights justice or two. That should be the biggest criteria for liberals – and please, no Roe! if Roe goes down on the national level, it will just be catching up with reality, since in large stretches of Snopes country, abortion went back to the coathanger era in the nineties.

Advice that is futile, of course. The Dem consultants and media hangers-on and all the pathetic political hive continue to hum along as if they are about to retake D.C. any day now. In 1932, the shift to the national level was tactically brilliant. And up until the seventies, it was still a historic necessity. Breaking apartheid in the South, and, to a certain extent, in the North was a great moral victory. But the center didn’t feed the periphery. Snopes states were generally able to retain their anti-labor laws and their legally enshrined feudal customs, partly because it was to the advantage of those Northeastern investors who started putting serious money in the Sunbelt in the sixties. The Sunbelt, in turn, has interiorized the dependent mindset to the degree that the monstrous hybrid of big government and Bama-thought was inevitable: Bush is simply the freerider king, which is why it is popular in households in Mobile and Albany,Georgia and other of the bright lights of civilization to think that he talks directly to Jesus. Faith, after all, is just freeloading gone cosmic.

Adapting to this situation requires waking up. The medical marijuana case was the latest in a long line of examples. Those forms created by the progressives to enforce civility on a restless and depraved rural population have been seized by that civilization, and they are in payback mode. What does that mean? This is the part of the Widescreen space drama where the invaders are seizing the ship’s working mechanisms, and the captain has to press the autodestruct button, while the crew looks on anxiously. The carefully crafted national system has to be taken down. Otherwise, it is easy to predict the passage of a law outlawing abortion nationally in coordination with the redneck court, and a series of other eviscerating judgments -- for instance, the spread of anti-labor legislation on a national level. Etc., etc. The 2000 court decision that gave Bush the presidency (making the recent election of the president of Iran a model of democracy, by comparison – just think, the person with the most votes won!) indicates how far that court will go to enable the crushing power of reaction.

Geneology of suicide bombing

Usually, the history of suicide bombing draws a straight line between kamikazes and Palestinians with bombs strapped to their belt. What this skips is the defense postures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the pre-intercontinental period. Watching Fail Safe last week, it struck me that the whole posture depended on delivering bombs from aircraft manned by soldiers who accepted the fact that bomb delivery would be equivalent to suicide. In other words, suicide bombers.

These were the avant garde. After the development of long range missiles, they were replaced by suicide populations. One assumes that the posture died – but it is amazing what can be carried forward, all unconsciously – history is, after all, in Marx’s image, and Kafka’s, and Bataille’s, the great burrowing mole, operating under our feet. The commitment to suicide was tied by a thousand economic incentives to the commitment to prosperity. Live longer through suicide – the motto of the twentieth century.

Why LI is no radical:

LI has been pondering a question: when Jack White screams “Take… take … take” in the song of the same name on the latest White Stripes album, why is it that I would trade that moment for the collected works of Jorie Graham and Jonathan S. Foer and a half a dozen other writers? Why is it that that scream seems to me to come from the tumultuous collective parasitic heart – the heart that beats in me – in this epoch of the American decay, in this culture that has ensured that your average Babbit can get through, year after year, using up as much energy as the largest beast ever to stalk the landmasses and leaving behind, as his little value added to the betterment of all nature’s kingdoms, excrement and crushed to-go cups?

Oh, and hypocrite lecteur, I’m that beast too, the leech in my heart keeps screaming take… take… take, as if this was the natural order, and I was actually owed. Owed. Nobody believes that it will someday end, that the account will be finished. No, we are the end of evolution, we are going to live nano-afterlives. Right. I don’t really need some putative survivors to tell me that the life more abundant has turned into the cruelest joke that ever stifled generosity in its crib. LI knows it. Every peasant Jesus’ dream is realized, now, in any destination store you want to aim your SUV at; so why is it all so much value added excrement? Why is it that something better didn’t happen?

It didn’t, though. Take… take… take…

another fine mess...

In the preface to Heartbreak House, Shaw wrote:

“Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison.”

Ah, but if Shaw had lived through a second rate war by a first rate power led by fourth rate con men – then he would have been able to brag. Not the earth opening up to eat the European generations, perhaps (the earth has only opened up to eat the Iraqi generations, after all ): but not all cataclysms come on the same scale. Ford Maddox Ford’s phrase, in the Good Soldier (a mouse dying of cancer is the whole story of the fall of the Roman Empire) is, perhaps, more apposite. It is the small lump that sometimes announces the upcoming death.

So it is not a wonder that a story like this – a story that indicates what mad, bad people ride mankind, at the moment, with their D.C. cocktail party plans for world domination coordinate with such halfwit organizational skills as to render them unfit for planning a child’s birthday party – is passed over in silence. This is from two days ago, in the Washington Post. Of course, it was buried on page A19:

“The Bush administration disclosed yesterday that it had vastly underestimated the number of service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan seeking medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and warned that the health care programs will be short at least $2.6 billion next year unless Congress approves additional funds.
Veterans Affairs budget documents projected that 23,553 veterans would return this year from Iraq and Afghanistan and seek medical treatment. However, Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson told a Senate committee that the number has been revised upward to 103,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. He said the original estimates were based on outdated assumptions from 2002.”

Oh, and of course, the Administration knew all of this as they watched Senator Murray’s attempt, a month ago, to add money to the V.A. go down in Republican approved flames. They simply didn’t want to disclose the underestimate during a period when it would get publicity.

Why they bother puzzles me. As if the media has not, by now, become organically incapable of exercising any critical power whatsoever. The terrible beauty of the Iraq war is in how it makes us see the immense rot at the heart of America’s ‘meritocracy’ – this is an elite that well deserves its inevitable downfall, even if it is paid for by other people’s deaths. These people have passed all the tests in the American system. The tests are, as we suspected, absolutely worthless.

Let’s see, what did the oracles at the WP last say about Iraq?

“Fortunately, most Americans appear to have a hardheaded appreciation of the problems and stakes in Iraq. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that most do not believe the administration's claims of progress, but a majority still is willing to support an extended stay by U.S. forces.”

Ah, that ‘fortunately’ – shored up by the systematic misinforming of the American public by papers like, well, the Washington Post. Reading the WP editorial board on Iraq is like reading a review of a cookbook by a convicted poisoner – it is an essay in moral obliquity enlivened by grotesque juxtapositions.

old fashioned family values

LI is a pro-drugs site. It is a pro-sex site. It is a pro-hedonism site. We stand upon the principle that you should be able to put whatever chemicals get you high in your bloodstream once you reach the age of maturity; and that you should be able to sell said chemicals, under the kind of regulations common to such commodities, without fear of arrest. No ifs, ands or buts.

The history of drug bans goes back to the temperance and progressive movements in the 1900s in the U.S. – the country that drove the whole international prohibition movement. Certainly the Brits and the French, with their lucrative opium businesses, were not enthusiasts for the regime of coercive sobriety that enthused the Yankees. Recently, we’ve been reading a very entertaining history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (remembered, if at all, for whipping up the reefer madness hysteria). The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine, is a gold mine of the old weird America – the legendary weave of national security thugs, narcs, drug dealers, Mafioso, and politicians which conspiracy groupies love to ponder, the world within a world of the Lee Harvey Oswald character in Libra, the fascoid underbelly of the American Dream, if your version of the American Dream is the Black Dahlia.

Valentine makes us realize that the government and business derived two advantages from the banning of narcotics. One was realized early on: black money could be used to support surreptitious foreign policy. As early as the twenties, the U.S. government was cooperating with the Nationalist Chinese government to import opium into the U.S., washing the money back to our anti-communist friends among the Nationalist fascists. If Mao Zedong had failed to unseat the Nationalists, we would look back on Chiang Kai Shek as one of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century, behind Hitler and Stalin. Unfortunately for China, his millions are cast into the shadow by Mao’s more millions. Typically, the tension between the American policy of supporting the Nationalists and supporting prohibition created a structurally disastrous system of corruption that ultimately helped destroy the Nationalists, but not before it had spread the network of abetting narcotics and banning them all over Southeast Asia. Poison tutti frutti. The U.S. has pretty much gone with the same model ever since: the Mafia in Sicily in WWII, the Laotian warlord/opium dealers, the Contra coke-runners, Afghani poppy farmers – it is all a golden braid.
LI naively thought that the other advantage was mere coincidence – the proliferation of true dope by way of “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies. Apparently this wasn’t just an unexpected synergy – the FBN cultivated its contacts with big pharma. Every dope head tells some story about how driving out marijuana and letting in tranquillizers is a sort of master plan. This is not a myth – or not only a myth – but a dim memory, much as the memories that collected around barrows over the cliffs near the Bosphorus sorted themselves out in a tale of gods and heroes. In an age in which big pharma routinely reaches down to the elementary school level (in schools that put up signs with the wonderfully brazen lie, Drug Free Zone, under which the dispense colorful attention and mood alterers like M and Ms to the six year old to twelve year old set), I suppose it is naïve to suppose this has all been a big coincidence. Still, it is a bit shocking to realize that Anslinger, the head of the FBN, was instrumental in revising the League of Nation’s accords on pharmaceuticals to open up the international market. There is nothing like knowing that yesterday’s narc was moonlighting for yesterday’s makers of prototype barbs and diet pills to make the paranoia and night sweat of someone like Burroughs seem like the most naturalistic and reasonable response to the historic circumstances.

PS – the counter-recruitment folks out there shouldn’t be too worried by this Washington Post story that the Army met its recruitment goals in June. It met them by cutting down the goals to meet them. From an earlier WP story:

"The Army will make a "monumental effort" to bring in the average 10,000 recruits a month required this summer, said Maj. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle, head of the Army's recruiting command. An additional 500 active-duty recruiters will be added in the next two months -- on top of an increase of 1,000 earlier this year."

If the 10,000 mark is used, the Army fell short by about 4,000.

Starving the beast is a long journey, but step by step will stop the flow of WMD to Bush and his criminal gang.

be like Bush!

Although LI thinks William Saletan is mostly a (what is the polite word here?)… an idiot, he has written the only sensible article about Bush’s speech. Basically, Saletan gets it:

“We're "helping Iraqis rebuild their nation's infrastructure and economy," Bush said tonight. "Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard, and rebuilding while at war is even harder. ... We're improving roads and schools and health clinics. We're working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we'll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens."

Deliver a better life for its citizens. Is it any mystery why polls have turned against the occupation? The people being polled are Americans. The people deriving a "better life" are Iraqis. Bush spent half the speech obscuring this gap. He equated Iraqi terrorists with the 9/11 hijackers and kept insisting that we're fighting for "our" freedom and security. But that spin lost its force long ago, when Saddam's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, forcing Bush to reframe the war as a democracy-spreading project. It's a noble war, but it's noble because it's altruistic. And people get tired of altruism.”

Now, LI thinks that it is an imperialist war, not an altruistic one, an ignoble piece of political grandstanding in ocean’s of other people’s blood enacted by a pampered, preening crowd of D.C. eggheads and carnivores – but the main point stands. The U.S. has absolutely no reason to be delivering a better life for Iraq’s citizens. Any old time conservative who has read Hayek could tell you that the U.S. is unlikely ever to deliver a better life for Iraq’s citizens – that Iraq can do that much better. In fact, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq recovered from a much more devastating war with Iran quicker than it is recovering today. This isn’t because the Ba’athist command and control regime was more efficient, but because it was more embedded – it could capture Iraq’s tacit knowledge, which is the way systems work.

When LI is in a generous mood and not viewing the leadership of the Democratic party with the disgust we usually reserve for those bizarre species of parasites that life cycle through pigeons and mosquitoes, we realize that the Dem paralysis stems, partly, from a kneejerk reaction to Bush’s old fashioned liberalism in Iraq – it gets the old New Deal juices flowing. LI is a fan of the New Deal too. We are strong believers, around here, in the Keynesian economic model. We think the libertarian dream of a stateless economy has been shredded by history – in the same way that the socialist dream of a command and control economy has been shredded by history. But New Deals can only be carried out by the natives – be they American, German or Japanese.

The Downing Street memo should have made it plain to all by now. In 2001, the Bush administration decided to spend any amount on an adventure in Iraq. That amount will probably be around half a trillion dollars, if not more. Why the Dems don’t simply run on this fact is an astonishment and a proof of their terminal condition, an institutional tabes dorsalis. Why any taxpayer in Missouri should devote a goodly chunk of their salary to the installation of an electric generating plant in a place that could easily borrow the funds to do so itself (having one of the great oil reserves on earth) is beyond comprehension. At the same time, of course, we are being told that we can’t afford social security, and that the government that borrowed from the Social Security fund, i.e. the U.S. government under George Bush, just might not pay it back.

As we wrote yesterday, we are going to try to remember to advertise the counter-enlistment program in every post. Here’s the link to Counter Recruitment.net. Remember, just advise people who are thinking about enlisting to listen to what the President had to say about Vietnam: “The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions…” George Bush was right about that. Use your President as a role model and DO NOT enlist for this war.

After all, Bush's successful career shows that if you put raw and rancid self interest over sentimental patriotism in your life, you too, can become president of the greatest country in the world, and help to systematically destroy it.