“… in an hundred instances, the Interest of our Empire is scarcely to be reconciled to the Interest of our Constitution.” Burke on India
In ‘The Context of Burke’s Reflections’, David Bromwich emphasizes how important to Burke’s notion of legitimate order was the metaphor and fact of theater. You could put it in Kantian terms: what is it in society that makes it possible to have dramatic interests? That question, although seemingly merely aesthetic and marginal, sinks a shaft that hits the center, insofar as that center is human nature itself. That nature is not repressed by society, but enlarges its primitive instruments in society, bending the sentiment of awe to the ritualized appearances of legitimate power, which are in turn linked to hierarchies spread throughout the social scale; and thus giving to the carrying on of the business of society its deep and fundamental dependence on inequality. This is the natural piety upon which the social has its only legitimate foundation. In Burke’s mind, there was no substitute for this piety, but there were parties within society who desired to supplant natural piety with another sentiment all together. The Jacobins, in his mind, represented one head of this many headed beast. The beast’s great instrument was money, which can operate as a sort of diminutive absolute of all appearances by dissolving them into their exchangeable value. This is the subtle common bond between capitalist and communist, both of whom operate from the basic assumption that money is the truth of appearances, and ritual merely the appearance of the appearances. Burke’s notion was that legitimate order was a system of counterpoises to the enemy of human nature. That enemy is the egalitarian spirit. And those counterpoises are explained, at different points in the history of civilization, by the different aspect that spirit takes. In the late eighteenth century, in Burke’s opinion, that spirit had divided itself into moneyed power in England, and mob power in Paris. Both were working to substitute an equalizing function for the grace that stood as the central social function that kept society from whirling apart.
Bromwich’s essay makes these points, and many others, by concentrating on a few texts around the time of the Reflections. We won’t go into the Bromwich’s densities, but they are very worth reading if you are interested in Burke. He makes the point, which I have not seen made elsewhere, that at the time of the unthroning of Louis XVI, Burke was involved in the complicated schemes to either preserve the power of Mad King George III or substitute the Regent for him. These schemes provoked rhetoric from Burke about George III quite as violent as the rhetoric from Robespierre about Louis XVI.
However, as we know, kings aren’t the emotional center of the Reflections – queens are. Bromwich quotes a very nice exchange Burke had with his co-worker on the impeachment of Hastings, the rather nasty but very sharp Philip Francis. Francis noted the famous passage on Marie Antoinette and wrote:
“If she be a perfect female character you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse it is ridiculous, in any but a Lover, to place her personal charms in opposition to her crimes .... I despise and abhor, as much as you can do, all personal insult and outrage even to guilt itself, if I see it, where it ought to be, dejected and helpless; but it is in vain to expect that I or any reasonable man shall regret the sufferings of a Messalina, as I should those of a Mrs. Crewe or a Mrs. Burke, I mean of all that is beautiful or virtuous amongst women. Is it nothing but outside? Have they no moral minds?”
This, according to Bromwich, is the letter that ended their friendship. But Bromwich points out how interesting Burke’s reply is, since Burke chooses to defend himself not by reference to the character of the queen, but by reference to our dramatic taste for queens, and by implication, our social instinct for hierarchy:
“I really am perfectly astonish'd how you could dream with my paper in your hand--that I found no other Cause than the Beauty of the Queen of France (now I suppose pretty much faded) for disapproving the Conduct which has been held towards her, and for expressing my own particular feelings. I am not to order the Natural Sympathies of my own Breast, and of every honest breast to wait until the Tales and all the anecdotes of the Coffeehouses of Paris and of the dissenting meeting houses of London are scoured of all the slander of those who calumniate persons, that afterwards they may murder them with impunity. I know nothing of your Story of Messalina .... What, are not high Rank, great Splendour of descent, great personal Elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of Men? The minds of those who do not feel thus are not even Dramatically right. "What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?" Why because she was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, the Wife of Priam, and suffered in the close of Life a thousand Calamities .... You find it perfectly ridiculous, and unfit for me in particular, to take these things as my ingredients of Commiseration. Pray why so? Is it absurd in me, to think that the Chivalrous Spirit which dictated a veneration for Women of condition and of Beauty, without any consideration whatsoever of enjoying them, was the great Source of those manners which have been the Pride and ornament of Europe for so many ages? And am I not to lament that I have lived to see those manners extinguished in so shocking a manner by mean speculations of Finance and the false Science of a sordid and degenerate Philosophy? I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, Splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate Homage of a Nation before her, compared with the abominable Scene of 1789 which I was describing did draw Tears from me and wetted my Paper. These Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I looked at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact, or that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, "downright Foppery". My friend, I tell you it is truth.and that it is true, and will be true, when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men--with their Natural feelings exist.”
The jeering of the queen, as much as her execution, pointed, for Burke, to the truth about the revolution – that it produced monsters. Bromwich’s best paragraph underlines this point:
“I look into myself and discover a feeling I hold to be just, or natural, and dramatically right. With what principle within which "passes show" am I then connected? The answer Burke gives is not quite an answer (it does not pretend to be), but the name of a mystery which he calls human nature. The curious suggestion of the passage on the Queen is that dramatic appearances, by recalling a belief in what is probable as well as proper, may confirm my sense of incorporation in human nature. Does Burke imply that what drama achieves eloquence also may achieve? Anyway, he offers a test of feeling. His originality consists in saying that it is a test in which I search for evidence of human nature in myself. Yet there remains a puzzle why, in 1790, his readers should stand in particular need of such a test. I surmise from other moments in the Reflections--for example, the early sentence in which the revolution is said to affect "the affairs not of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe" -- that Burke supposed the Jacobin ideology was capable of exerting a unique power. It could deprive men and women of the capacity to feel, or the capacity to know as human actors their own feeling for human sufferers. It is this discovery that impels Burke to speak of those who have thus been cheated of themselves as "monsters." The usage in his own eyes is simple and literal.”
Out of this moment in Burke grew the contradiction that animated his final years: the advocacy of a war against France for ideological reasons. This war was justified, in Burke’s eyes, by its apocalyptic terms: it was a war against monsters, against those who attack human nature itself. What is ignored, however, is that war is not a mere instrument. It produces a double change – a change in the object against which it is directed, and a change in its very directors. LI will take up this point in another post.
Monday, July 18, 2005
When the forefathers were gluing together this nation, they were careful not to make it easy to conduct a war. It was by this time a wellknown political maxim that the executive branch used war to encroach on the rights of the people. The Federalist papers were much concerned with war. Jay, in Paper 3, made it an argument for a national government that the best men from every state would be attracted to the national government, and that thus the best men able to judge the reasons for and the conduct of, if necessary, war. Hamilton, in no. 6, includes a list of wars that reflect the indulgence of tyrannical rulers:
“The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentment of a prostitute, [1] at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the SAMNIANS. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the MEGARENSIANS, [2] another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice of a supposed theft of the statuary Phidias, [3] or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity, [4] or from a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the name of the PELOPONNESIAN war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions, and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth.”
Hamilton, in Paper 26, mocks those who claimed that the U.S. national government would decay into a warmaking body. As he puts it, pointing to clauses 11 and 12 of the 8th section ( which gave Congress the power to declare war and “to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years”):
"The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence. As the spirit of party, in different degrees, must be expected to infect all political bodies, there will be, no doubt, persons in the national legislature willing enough to arraign the measures and criminate the views of the majority. The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it. Independent of parties in the national legislature itself, as often as the period of discussion arrived, the State legislatures, who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national rulers, and will be ready enough, if any thing improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the VOICE, but, if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.”
Clearly, the U.S. was not conceived, originally, to be a great oppressor nation. There were limits put to the military ambitions of the national leaders, few of whom could hope to have Pericles qualities, but all of whom were heir to Pericles’ temptations. Clearly, there was more involved in the two year review of military outlay than the dickering over the site where the next unnecessary fighter plane is going to be built. The shape of American foreign policy, insofar as it is aggressive, was meant to be addressed seriously by the legislature.
Unfortunately, Jay’s prediction was wrong. The national government now routinely attracts rascals, criminals and cretins (ie, the present administration), bogus think tankers, political consultants and the White House press corps – all much worse than the occasional Athenian whore. If my webfriend Paul is right (see his comments to my Thursday post), we have now invented the insta-war – never declare the end of the last war, so we can thaw it out and have it again, any time it is politically convenient. A recent Harvard Law review article on the anti-terrorism act, passed in 2001, mentions in passing that no war declaration was needed for the Korean war or the Kosovo war. Given the brutalized state of political intelligence in D.C., where the two parties consist either two shades of opinion, one pallidly for, one rabidly for continuing the immoral, unconstitutional and unjust war in Iraq, it is too much to expect that the constitution has any sway in the matter. It will take prolonged anti-war protest, using civil disobedience in all likelihood, to pull the D.C. krewe away from violating the precepts upon which this place was compounded together. As Hamilton puts it, “to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the VOICE, but, if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.” But I don’t want the FBI knocking down LI’s door for subversive activities. We, of course, mean “ARM” to be symbolic, as in, we are going to call Bush and Rove dirty names and such.
The tradition of perpetual war that has woven itself into the conservative liberal consensus was the devil’s bargain sealed after WWII, when the anti-communist crusaders identified the U.S. with a particular ideological slant. On the face of it, something peculiar is going on here: why would the representatives of order transform themselves into the advocates of war? The contradiction between order and war beats away, deep in the heart of conservative thought. The compromise that has embedded war into the social order – to the tune of about 400 billion a year in this country – is subject to the massive censorship that comes down upon any real look at war in the last hundred years.
What do I mean by censorship? I mean by looking at war not as an accident or a necessity, but as an institution.
To use an example that springs to mind: how often have I read that Lenin was a mass murderer because of the labor camp system that was started under his regime? And how few times, if any, have I read that Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill were much greater mass murderers, for the sustaining of trench warfare for four years in the heart of Europe – to say nothing of the fighting in the Middle East? In actual fact, Lenin, by withdrawing Russia from the War, was a net saver of lives. Russian casualties were horrendous on the Eastern Front. Seeing this, the Communists calmly pulled the plug on the project. It was the refusal to countenance more mass murder that made the Bolsheviks the enemy of the Western power – not the incipient Gulag.
However, war’s a freebie. At least, in the current conventional wisdom.
In LI’s opinion, the genealogy of this reliance on war, and denial of its real effects, goes back to Burke’s warmongering in the years of the French Revolution. Burke produced a model. In my next post, I plan to look at that.
“The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentment of a prostitute, [1] at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the SAMNIANS. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the MEGARENSIANS, [2] another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice of a supposed theft of the statuary Phidias, [3] or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity, [4] or from a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the name of the PELOPONNESIAN war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions, and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth.”
Hamilton, in Paper 26, mocks those who claimed that the U.S. national government would decay into a warmaking body. As he puts it, pointing to clauses 11 and 12 of the 8th section ( which gave Congress the power to declare war and “to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years”):
"The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence. As the spirit of party, in different degrees, must be expected to infect all political bodies, there will be, no doubt, persons in the national legislature willing enough to arraign the measures and criminate the views of the majority. The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it. Independent of parties in the national legislature itself, as often as the period of discussion arrived, the State legislatures, who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national rulers, and will be ready enough, if any thing improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the VOICE, but, if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.”
Clearly, the U.S. was not conceived, originally, to be a great oppressor nation. There were limits put to the military ambitions of the national leaders, few of whom could hope to have Pericles qualities, but all of whom were heir to Pericles’ temptations. Clearly, there was more involved in the two year review of military outlay than the dickering over the site where the next unnecessary fighter plane is going to be built. The shape of American foreign policy, insofar as it is aggressive, was meant to be addressed seriously by the legislature.
Unfortunately, Jay’s prediction was wrong. The national government now routinely attracts rascals, criminals and cretins (ie, the present administration), bogus think tankers, political consultants and the White House press corps – all much worse than the occasional Athenian whore. If my webfriend Paul is right (see his comments to my Thursday post), we have now invented the insta-war – never declare the end of the last war, so we can thaw it out and have it again, any time it is politically convenient. A recent Harvard Law review article on the anti-terrorism act, passed in 2001, mentions in passing that no war declaration was needed for the Korean war or the Kosovo war. Given the brutalized state of political intelligence in D.C., where the two parties consist either two shades of opinion, one pallidly for, one rabidly for continuing the immoral, unconstitutional and unjust war in Iraq, it is too much to expect that the constitution has any sway in the matter. It will take prolonged anti-war protest, using civil disobedience in all likelihood, to pull the D.C. krewe away from violating the precepts upon which this place was compounded together. As Hamilton puts it, “to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the VOICE, but, if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.” But I don’t want the FBI knocking down LI’s door for subversive activities. We, of course, mean “ARM” to be symbolic, as in, we are going to call Bush and Rove dirty names and such.
The tradition of perpetual war that has woven itself into the conservative liberal consensus was the devil’s bargain sealed after WWII, when the anti-communist crusaders identified the U.S. with a particular ideological slant. On the face of it, something peculiar is going on here: why would the representatives of order transform themselves into the advocates of war? The contradiction between order and war beats away, deep in the heart of conservative thought. The compromise that has embedded war into the social order – to the tune of about 400 billion a year in this country – is subject to the massive censorship that comes down upon any real look at war in the last hundred years.
What do I mean by censorship? I mean by looking at war not as an accident or a necessity, but as an institution.
To use an example that springs to mind: how often have I read that Lenin was a mass murderer because of the labor camp system that was started under his regime? And how few times, if any, have I read that Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill were much greater mass murderers, for the sustaining of trench warfare for four years in the heart of Europe – to say nothing of the fighting in the Middle East? In actual fact, Lenin, by withdrawing Russia from the War, was a net saver of lives. Russian casualties were horrendous on the Eastern Front. Seeing this, the Communists calmly pulled the plug on the project. It was the refusal to countenance more mass murder that made the Bolsheviks the enemy of the Western power – not the incipient Gulag.
However, war’s a freebie. At least, in the current conventional wisdom.
In LI’s opinion, the genealogy of this reliance on war, and denial of its real effects, goes back to Burke’s warmongering in the years of the French Revolution. Burke produced a model. In my next post, I plan to look at that.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
five hundred years of madness
There was a series of experiments on humans conducted in the twenties that would have warmed Dostoevsky’s heart. Warmed? Well, perhaps the temperature of that word is incorrect. Put it like this: these results would have cheered up the Underground Man.
The problem was a military one. How does a company of soldiers orient itself in the fog? The problem extended to orientation itself. My current fascination with McManus’ book on handedness turned me on to the experiments of one Asa A. Schaeffer of the University of Kansas. Schaeffer took advantage of Kansas’ outstanding trait – flatness, no trees. He put people in the driving seat in cars, blindfolded them, and had them drive straight. He blindfolded other subjects and had them swim, or walk. The results were reported “in a paper entitled Spiral Movement in Man,(Journal of Morphology and Physiology, Vol. 45,No I, March, 1928). He finds that whether walking, swimming, rowing a boat, or driving an automobile, the tendency of a blindfolded person is always to follow a spiral path.” Nature does not abhor a vacuum more than man abhors a straight path.
In a sense, this is the full horror of modernity – the massive imposition of straight paths on spiral seeking creatures. Skyscrapers, the prohibition of LSD, deadlines, formatting – it is all the subtlest of tortures that makes our lives intolerable. Man makes jam -- traffic jam -- out of the straight lines that the masters lay down for him. We long for the spiral. Dostoevsky knew this long ago, and so did Kafka.
According to McManus’ site:
“In the studies (Schaeffer, 1928; see Ludwig (1932 pp.327-330.), 57% of people turned to the right and 43% to the left, the size of the circles being surprisingly small, a diameter of about 18 metres when walking or swimming, and about 50 metres when driving. Ludwig speculates that one side is somewhat stronger than the other, and that the difference is accentuated as the person becomes tired, when walking or swimming (but not driving), accounting for the ever tightening spiral. Schaeffer (1931) also carried out studies of protozoa and found that in the majority of cases they spiralled to the right. Bracha et al., 1987. Slight turning tendencies can also be recognised in subjects wearing a backpack attached to a set of detectors, and suggest that slight noises to one side, or carrying a heavy object on one side can cause veering (Millar, 1999). A similar tendency of right handers to turn to the right can be seen in the stepping test used by Previc and Saucedo (Previc & Saucedo, 1992).”
So – take In the Penal Colony. Query: when the sentence is inscribed on the chest of the prisoner, is the handwriting to the left or the right? Perhaps the intolerable compromise of printing, with no handedness to the words at all, destroyed the whole mechanism of a rack in which, in his last throes, the human being tosses bodily to the right. The same disconnect between print and the spiral tending human probably makes this epoch of printed matter -- a short period, actually, starting in the 15th century -- ephemeral. The assault on the unconscious of us spiral tending writers and readers lo these many centuries is being repaired by the blessed illiteracy of eight hours of tv per day. I don't know if that is enough.
The problem was a military one. How does a company of soldiers orient itself in the fog? The problem extended to orientation itself. My current fascination with McManus’ book on handedness turned me on to the experiments of one Asa A. Schaeffer of the University of Kansas. Schaeffer took advantage of Kansas’ outstanding trait – flatness, no trees. He put people in the driving seat in cars, blindfolded them, and had them drive straight. He blindfolded other subjects and had them swim, or walk. The results were reported “in a paper entitled Spiral Movement in Man,(Journal of Morphology and Physiology, Vol. 45,No I, March, 1928). He finds that whether walking, swimming, rowing a boat, or driving an automobile, the tendency of a blindfolded person is always to follow a spiral path.” Nature does not abhor a vacuum more than man abhors a straight path.
In a sense, this is the full horror of modernity – the massive imposition of straight paths on spiral seeking creatures. Skyscrapers, the prohibition of LSD, deadlines, formatting – it is all the subtlest of tortures that makes our lives intolerable. Man makes jam -- traffic jam -- out of the straight lines that the masters lay down for him. We long for the spiral. Dostoevsky knew this long ago, and so did Kafka.
According to McManus’ site:
“In the studies (Schaeffer, 1928; see Ludwig (1932 pp.327-330.), 57% of people turned to the right and 43% to the left, the size of the circles being surprisingly small, a diameter of about 18 metres when walking or swimming, and about 50 metres when driving. Ludwig speculates that one side is somewhat stronger than the other, and that the difference is accentuated as the person becomes tired, when walking or swimming (but not driving), accounting for the ever tightening spiral. Schaeffer (1931) also carried out studies of protozoa and found that in the majority of cases they spiralled to the right. Bracha et al., 1987. Slight turning tendencies can also be recognised in subjects wearing a backpack attached to a set of detectors, and suggest that slight noises to one side, or carrying a heavy object on one side can cause veering (Millar, 1999). A similar tendency of right handers to turn to the right can be seen in the stepping test used by Previc and Saucedo (Previc & Saucedo, 1992).”
So – take In the Penal Colony. Query: when the sentence is inscribed on the chest of the prisoner, is the handwriting to the left or the right? Perhaps the intolerable compromise of printing, with no handedness to the words at all, destroyed the whole mechanism of a rack in which, in his last throes, the human being tosses bodily to the right. The same disconnect between print and the spiral tending human probably makes this epoch of printed matter -- a short period, actually, starting in the 15th century -- ephemeral. The assault on the unconscious of us spiral tending writers and readers lo these many centuries is being repaired by the blessed illiteracy of eight hours of tv per day. I don't know if that is enough.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Some good things about our President
LI has often had harsh things to say about President Bush. But fairness requires that we also praise the President when he is right. Lately, we’ve been thinking that Bush must have received intelligence that Osama bin Laden is particularly vulnerable to humor. The man has several congenital diseases, and the frail system might shake itself mortally out of shape if subject to enough fits of laughter.
That explains much of the policy we are pursuing in Iraq, and throws a flickering light on the unexpected keenness of our Texan president, known for his pratfalls on bikes already. From class clown to strategy leader – such things can only happen in America. For instance, this story, from the Kurdish press, shows how cleverly Bush is pushing the “fatal joke” plan:
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa stating that the future Iraqi state will be called “The Islamic Federal Republic of Iraq.” On 10th of July, al-Sistani had issued another fatwa in which he stated, “The Iraqi constitution must not contradict with Islam.” Al-Sistani, who in the past has stated that he would not get involved in Iraqi politics, daily issues decisive fatwas on the way the Iraqi socio-political system is to be shaped, which has so far meant that al-Sistani has practically overridden the work of the committee that is responsible for producing the new Iraqi constitution. It has also been noted by observers that the Shiia bloc uses al-Sistani as, what has been termed, a “pressure-pump”. Whenever the Shiia bloc wants to impose an issue over the Iraqi Assembly and the Kurdish bloc, they request al-Sistani to issue a fatwa. As it is known, “Fatwas” are non-negotiable.”
And so 1700+ American soldiers have died, 15,000 have been wounded, 200 billion dollars has been doled out, 28-100,000 Iraqis have died so that we can proudly plant the Islamic Federal Republic in Mesopotamia. Good job, neo-cons. I suppose the root of our success, here, begins with the brilliant beginnings of our campaign, when we made secular democracy synonymous with a noted Middle Eastern fraud, Ahmed Chalabi. That ploy "failing" (as we knew it would), we then sealed the deal by supporting known car bombing terrorist Allawi as the next representative of all things secular. Of course, Allawi greenlighted our attempt to purge the Sunnis from participation in Iraq's political structure by razing Fallujah. Success followed success, although you would never know this from the press, who seem totally out of the loop as far as our higher strategy is concerned. Since then, all elements have converged as planned to make Iraq a showcase of Islamic fundamentalism – and to overthrow the risible physiology of the A.Q. leadership. Future historians will probably speculate about when Bush got the idea. Surely he watched Monty Python in his younger days, when he was serving in a unit in defense of the Gulf Coast. I'd guess he saw the skit about the killing joke, and it stuck in his mind. The minds of great scientists are mysteries, and Bush's mind is no different. Those who criticize his intelligence are simply fetishizing the verbal. That isn't how Bush stores up his mental material.
So, there you have it. Those who accuse this President of a disconnect from reality should connect the dots and smell the coffee. America is proud and strong today, and as we dot the map of the Middle East with more Islamic republics, we will be ever stronger and ever prouder.
That explains much of the policy we are pursuing in Iraq, and throws a flickering light on the unexpected keenness of our Texan president, known for his pratfalls on bikes already. From class clown to strategy leader – such things can only happen in America. For instance, this story, from the Kurdish press, shows how cleverly Bush is pushing the “fatal joke” plan:
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa stating that the future Iraqi state will be called “The Islamic Federal Republic of Iraq.” On 10th of July, al-Sistani had issued another fatwa in which he stated, “The Iraqi constitution must not contradict with Islam.” Al-Sistani, who in the past has stated that he would not get involved in Iraqi politics, daily issues decisive fatwas on the way the Iraqi socio-political system is to be shaped, which has so far meant that al-Sistani has practically overridden the work of the committee that is responsible for producing the new Iraqi constitution. It has also been noted by observers that the Shiia bloc uses al-Sistani as, what has been termed, a “pressure-pump”. Whenever the Shiia bloc wants to impose an issue over the Iraqi Assembly and the Kurdish bloc, they request al-Sistani to issue a fatwa. As it is known, “Fatwas” are non-negotiable.”
And so 1700+ American soldiers have died, 15,000 have been wounded, 200 billion dollars has been doled out, 28-100,000 Iraqis have died so that we can proudly plant the Islamic Federal Republic in Mesopotamia. Good job, neo-cons. I suppose the root of our success, here, begins with the brilliant beginnings of our campaign, when we made secular democracy synonymous with a noted Middle Eastern fraud, Ahmed Chalabi. That ploy "failing" (as we knew it would), we then sealed the deal by supporting known car bombing terrorist Allawi as the next representative of all things secular. Of course, Allawi greenlighted our attempt to purge the Sunnis from participation in Iraq's political structure by razing Fallujah. Success followed success, although you would never know this from the press, who seem totally out of the loop as far as our higher strategy is concerned. Since then, all elements have converged as planned to make Iraq a showcase of Islamic fundamentalism – and to overthrow the risible physiology of the A.Q. leadership. Future historians will probably speculate about when Bush got the idea. Surely he watched Monty Python in his younger days, when he was serving in a unit in defense of the Gulf Coast. I'd guess he saw the skit about the killing joke, and it stuck in his mind. The minds of great scientists are mysteries, and Bush's mind is no different. Those who criticize his intelligence are simply fetishizing the verbal. That isn't how Bush stores up his mental material.
So, there you have it. Those who accuse this President of a disconnect from reality should connect the dots and smell the coffee. America is proud and strong today, and as we dot the map of the Middle East with more Islamic republics, we will be ever stronger and ever prouder.
My friend D. sent me a little CD the other day. It had the Rage against the Machine song on it, Killing in the Name of. D. is an old Metallica fan, from before they had an on-call psychoanalyst. Myself, I love noise, but I am not a metal person. I particularly hate the voices that a lot of metal music features, in which some singer has to assume the precise sound that would be made by the Cowardly Lion on meth – a fake monster voice, full of empty volume and scatchiness.
All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.
A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.
The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.
Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.
That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.
Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.
All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.
A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.
The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.
Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.
That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.
Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
L'affaire du collier
"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]"
Some Time journalists have expressed concern that the company's decision could have a chilling effect on their relations with sources and could hinder their newsgathering efforts.
"We're very much worried about what kind of signal this sends," Ms. Tumulty said. In Washington, she added, "confidentiality is the lubricant of journalism."
In re the summer’s mini-Rove scandal: LI has been searching for historical parallels to write about Matt Cooper’s revealing email, as published by Newsweek. It throws a nice light on the mores of the press corps. This is how the sausage is packaged (incidentally, last night we saw Alain Tanner’s excellent film, La Salamandre (1971). So we have seen how sausage is really packaged). We all knew that most stories in the media peddle a pro-government, pro-corporationist agenda; but the question is, what do the puppets, ie the journalists, think they are doing? How does a corps that exudes such arriviste arrogance negotiate its own perpetual surrender? It takes a major event – for instance, being led into a war desired by a lobby in D.C. – to show us that the techniques that sell tickets to and toy spinoffs of The War of the Worlds are now routinely used to sell every war and policy lurch. It is a world of press releases, with the voice of the third person narrator in your average news story turning out to belong to somebody from the dread State or the dread Corporation or other of the infinite band of dimwits working the American hypno-zone. They have simple desires. They want to steal your money, kill your brothers and sisters, and erect a large tombstone over your every opportunity for joy. The journalist has the complicated but rewarding task to make this seem inevitable – as inevitable as seeing the latest movie or watching the latest tv show. Press criticism has become a lazy blogger past-time. The point of it, though, is to pluck out those moments of ersatz necessity and lay them bare in all their essential ridiculousness. Though it is true that murder and the destinies of nations are at stake, it is also true that fate, here, is operating in the comic mode.
Incidentally, a story about Rove in the NYT this morning ends in this appropriately lubricated manner: “A former official who has worked for Mr. Bush said: "This president is Mr. Alamo. He sees the hordes coming over the hill and he heads for the barricades. And not to raise a white flag."
Wow. Former official risks all to deliver world class flattery to former boss. Punishment: a three hundred per job on K Street. No wonder the NYT scribe guaranteed him anonymity. Just think – if there were more Cooper like surrenders of anonymous sources, we wouldn’t have such choice bits to thicken the stew of sycophancy and propaganda. Our very freedoms would be threatened.
PS -- Press auto-fellation watch:
This, from David Carr's review of In Cold Blood in today's NYT:
"Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives."
PPS -- LI sometimes worries that our p.o.v. is so from Mars that we are separated, forever, from our fellow mooing herds of Americans. We too, wait in the slaughterhouse stockyard. But somehow, we don't have our little bovine head on straight. In any case, the views given above are reflected in this article in the NYObs by Christopher Lehman.
Some Time journalists have expressed concern that the company's decision could have a chilling effect on their relations with sources and could hinder their newsgathering efforts.
"We're very much worried about what kind of signal this sends," Ms. Tumulty said. In Washington, she added, "confidentiality is the lubricant of journalism."
In re the summer’s mini-Rove scandal: LI has been searching for historical parallels to write about Matt Cooper’s revealing email, as published by Newsweek. It throws a nice light on the mores of the press corps. This is how the sausage is packaged (incidentally, last night we saw Alain Tanner’s excellent film, La Salamandre (1971). So we have seen how sausage is really packaged). We all knew that most stories in the media peddle a pro-government, pro-corporationist agenda; but the question is, what do the puppets, ie the journalists, think they are doing? How does a corps that exudes such arriviste arrogance negotiate its own perpetual surrender? It takes a major event – for instance, being led into a war desired by a lobby in D.C. – to show us that the techniques that sell tickets to and toy spinoffs of The War of the Worlds are now routinely used to sell every war and policy lurch. It is a world of press releases, with the voice of the third person narrator in your average news story turning out to belong to somebody from the dread State or the dread Corporation or other of the infinite band of dimwits working the American hypno-zone. They have simple desires. They want to steal your money, kill your brothers and sisters, and erect a large tombstone over your every opportunity for joy. The journalist has the complicated but rewarding task to make this seem inevitable – as inevitable as seeing the latest movie or watching the latest tv show. Press criticism has become a lazy blogger past-time. The point of it, though, is to pluck out those moments of ersatz necessity and lay them bare in all their essential ridiculousness. Though it is true that murder and the destinies of nations are at stake, it is also true that fate, here, is operating in the comic mode.
Incidentally, a story about Rove in the NYT this morning ends in this appropriately lubricated manner: “A former official who has worked for Mr. Bush said: "This president is Mr. Alamo. He sees the hordes coming over the hill and he heads for the barricades. And not to raise a white flag."
Wow. Former official risks all to deliver world class flattery to former boss. Punishment: a three hundred per job on K Street. No wonder the NYT scribe guaranteed him anonymity. Just think – if there were more Cooper like surrenders of anonymous sources, we wouldn’t have such choice bits to thicken the stew of sycophancy and propaganda. Our very freedoms would be threatened.
PS -- Press auto-fellation watch:
This, from David Carr's review of In Cold Blood in today's NYT:
"Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives."
PPS -- LI sometimes worries that our p.o.v. is so from Mars that we are separated, forever, from our fellow mooing herds of Americans. We too, wait in the slaughterhouse stockyard. But somehow, we don't have our little bovine head on straight. In any case, the views given above are reflected in this article in the NYObs by Christopher Lehman.
Monday, July 11, 2005
chiral up!
Lately, LI has been enjoying Chris McManus’ book Left Hand, Right Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures. We love an omnium gatherum, of which this is a superior instance. Also, handedness is naturally of interest to the philosophically minded. It comes as no surprise (although, actually, it did come as a surprise) that one of the great pioneers in the study of the problem of handedness was Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that the dispute over absolute or relative space – the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz – could be resolved by considering right and left. Kant was, as always, right (a word etymologically connected, as all handedness researchers assure us, to the superstitious reverence accorded to the right hand, just as superstition accords ill luck to the left – the left is “cack-handed”), although as always, he was also wrong.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
In 1768, Kant wrote a little essay entitled Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raum (usually translated as On the basis of differences between regions in space) about absolute and relative space. You will remember that Leibniz’ argument against absolute space capitalized on the anxiety caused by the loss of discernability – L.’s idea being that one region of absolute space would be absolutely identical to another. This would mess up the cosmic bookkeeping of God himself. Kant’s first theory about space (he changed his mind later, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason) sought to find the answer in the dispute between Newton and Leibniz in considering incongruent counterparts: the left hand and the right hand are the most “at hand” examples. The metaphysical dimension of the problem would be on the way to logical solution if we could find some fundamentally right handed spatial object – something asymmetrical to which all parties could refer.
Now, as McManus notes, the problem of transforming a one dimensional shape on a plane facing one way into its incongruent counterpart facing the other way has been solved by the trick of assuming another dimension, in which the first object can be flipped. What is the medium of that third dimension?
Remember, the argument is ultimately about discernability. Here’s how McManus puts it:
“If space could be described adequately in terms solely of the relationships between objects, as Leibniz…argued, then objects that are different could be distinguished by different interrelationships of their components. [in other words, the differences would be expressed by internal configuration -- LI]. … That, though, is not the case with my own right and left hand. All of the angles and lengths are the same in my two hands, yet still the hands are indisputably different. I cannot put my right glove on my left hand or my right shoe on my left foot [although I can try, as I discovered a few days ago, trying to put a right sandal on the left foot of the squirming two year old son of a friend of mine. The child, being an inveterate Kantian, baulked-LI]… For Kant, the conclusion is inescapable: there must be something against which right and left can be compared – and that could only be space itself: “Our considerations … make it clear that differences, and true differences at that, can be found in the constitution of bodies: these differences relate exclusively to absolute and original space.’ Even empty space must have some absolute structure against which it can be said that our right hand is not the same as our left.”
Kant’s paper has created a sub-industry. Pooley’s paper, here, defends the Leibniz-ian view, modified by contemporary physics, against Kant.
“I will side with most—although admittedly not all—philosophers in defending an account of incongruent counterparts according to which they are intrinsically identical.3 Moreover, I will defend a relational account of handedness according to which the difference between incongruent counterparts is grounded in their relations to each other and to other material objects. Kant thought that there were reasons to reject such an account. Initially he concluded that the difference between left and right hands did indeed come down to a difference in their relational attributes, but that these involved relations to “universal space as a unity” (Kant,
1992 [1768]: 365). Not long after reaching this conclusion, he also rejected this substantivalist account of handedness. Instead he now believed that the difference between incongruent counterparts was fundamentally incomprehensible: that it could only be grasped in perception, through a “pure intuition,” and not by any “characteristic marks intelligible to the mind through speech” (Kant, 1992 [1770]: 396).”
We will return to handedness in another post But we should include, here, the most wonderful bit of Kant’s essay. Like Condorcet and Locke, Kant liked the Enlightenment notion of an imaginary problem (which has become, as philosophers have grown into thinking of themselves as scientists without portfolio, into “thought experiments’). This is Kant’s
“ . . imagine that the first created thing was a human hand. That human
hand would have to be either a right hand or a left hand. The action of the creative cause in producing the one would have of necessity to be different from the action of the creative cause producing the counterpart.”
Has Borges somewhere taken up this absurdly beautiful idea? LI, at least, finds it ravishing, and would like to worship that unknown God that created, as his first magic trick in the as yet uncreated universe, a human hand.
Of course, this might actually have been God's first trick in all earnest -- given the handedness of the electrons.
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