There is nothing some scientists hate more than to have their activities scrutinized by a certain kind of sociologist. Somebody, for instance, like Bruno Latour, who they suspect is saying, in obscure language, that science is a dream, a highly wrought bubble composed of countless work-arounds and displayed before the credulous, who haven’t the training to see through the trick, as a seamless miracle. That is not, really, what Latour is saying, although he does, at critical points, suspend the question of the truth of what a particular scientist or a collection of scientists is maintaining in order to aim at what the scientists are doing. For the scientists, their motivations come from the nature of things; for Latour, their motivations come from the nature of scientists.
To do this kind of work, one must be extremely clever. But often, one isn’t. Which brings me to the Spring 2004 issue of Science as Culture magazine. Jon Turney has written just the kind of article that would seem to back up the scientists’ suspicions: “THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as Information Waiting to be Rewritten.” Turney turns his gaze on the genre of the popular science book. A little hurray for that – we are great devourers of popular science books ourselves. The poetics of the genre has been much neglected. Turney, however, isn’t interested in being extensive. Rather, he uses only one popular science book, Adrian Woolfson’s Life Without Genes. He does, it is true, make an allusion to one of Carl Sagan’s. But that is it. This is typical of Turney’s m.o. – generalization with too few examples. The article is an amalgam: Turney borrows Burke’s notion of the sublime to categorize the aesthetic appeal of popular science book, thus applying literary theory to science (of a type). The idea is good, but the follow through is lousy. His explanation of Burke is canned – he throws in some remarks about how people in the Middle Ages feared mountains and people in the eighteenth century started to revere them, which is such a stale insight, has been repeated so often as a cultural fact marking the borderline between the medieval and the early modern, that we are beginning to think it must be untrue. We look forward to some brave soul resurrecting a whole lost culture of medieval mountain climbers.
Turney likes Burke saying:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Surely Turney is right that some feeling that mingles terror and beauty is the expected response that shapes certain passages in certain popular science books. But he really should have gone to Kant for further information. Kant’s idea that sublimity is about the overcoming of some natural disproportion through the intellect is much closer to the modern sublime. The modern sublime is engineering and special effects. To understand the aesthetic impulse, as it relates to popular science books, you have to see its relation to curiosity – which, as problem-solving, has become the basis of our idea of intelligence. I say “our” – not LI’s idea of intelligence, I should add.
Fortified with his idea of sublimity, Turney then takes a crack at biology. Here things get much worse.
By any measure, biology is an incomplete science. Any sampling of the literature on biodiversity, for example, quickly shows that we have little idea how many different kinds of organisms currently exist on Earth, let alone how many may have existed in the past. Electronic databases contain records of a few complete genomes, but there are many more to analyse. And there are many aspects of intracellular or neuronal interaction which are poorly understood, to say the least.
Yet from one point of view, it is possible to imagine a biology which takes complete inventory of all these things. If you begin with the conviction that, in principle, all that is known can be represented as information, then what is not yet known is simply extra information. Conceptually it is equivalent to more of the same. One can then move imaginatively from, say, a DNA database containing the decoded genomes of a few species whose hereditary information has been processed through mass sequencing to a complete database of all species, or even all existing individual organisms. Expand to
include all the organisms that ever have existed and you are still nearer completion. All that remains is to include all the organisms which ever could exist.”
This is biology as Linneaus imagined it – infinite taxonomy. Turney’s unlikely idea that biology is data base making takes him to his even more unlikely idea that biology has now embraced, across the discipline, information as a sort of father son and holy ghost:
There is more to the state of any living organism than its genes, Woolfson acknowledges, but all the other features of its development, organization and experience can nevertheless be considered as simply additional information. In fact at this level of abstraction, the universe of all possible organisms is simply an awfully large subset of the set of all possible states of anything at all. The awesome extent of the Information Sea stems from the fact that ‘all possible bits of information are housed within an information
space … which accommodates every element of an infinitely detailed description of the state of the world at any moment in the past, present or future’ (p. 77).
Indeed, it contains all possible histories—for, again, The Information Sea is [thus] the space of all possible mathematical spaces, a hypothetical information space which contains the complete collection of all the infinite libraries of description that document every possible state of the universe to the highest degree of resolution.
Turney is very impressed by this. LI is less so. What makes information valuable isn’t captured, here, at all – for all possible histories includes false ones. The information that I leaped off the roof and flew for several miles is only separated from the information that I didn’t by the fact that one is a true statement and the other isn’t – not something information can specify. Although, to be sure, in specifying, I am providing information. As for the particular dynamism that provides us with our information about organisms – descent with modification – well, that sort of sinks to the bottom, here, doesn’t it? Turney’s paper has just that aggressive tendency to exaggeration that should make the science-as-culture people cringe. This isn’t, after all, the English department. So that I doubt very much Turney’s point:
As I have stressed, this may seem an unexpected space to explore in a book about the potential and limits of biology. But it is a logical product of the development of biological thinking in the last halfcentury, and of the ascendancy of computational and cybernetic metaphors. As Lily Kay and others have documented in detail, the
development of the idea of the genetic code indicated that biology was becoming an information science.”
In fact, biology is a vast array of different sub-disciplines. Molecular biology certainly uses the information archetypes – which, in turn, are parasitic on 19th century thermodynamics. But the key to biology is that it explains histories – organic development – and the information archetype is always oriented to this explanation. As Turney should have known from reading, well, popular science books, genes are not blueprints. If you skip survival in your tour of biology, you skip, well, biology itself.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Monday, July 04, 2005
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 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.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
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.
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…
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…
Friday, July 01, 2005
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.
“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.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
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.
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.
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