Jericho

And it shall be, whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him. -- Joshua, chapter 2
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The shotgun I lived in on Willow near the Carrollton Cemetery, which always seemed to have kids flying kites from it when I lived there, is probably flooded. The house on Prytania might actually be flooded up to the roof, hard as that is for me to even conceptualize. The house on Audubon is on higher ground. The Tulane Library, where I worked on a project in which a group processed the purchase of a couple million dollars worth of books, is no doubt flooded down in the basement. The Tulane site is down. Apparently, the students and faculty have been evacuated, many of the students to Jackson Mississippi.

I’ve seen one dead city on the Gulf: Galveston, Texas. Galveston gave up the ghost after a terrific storm in about 1911. The place still boasts 50 000 people, but its opportunities shriveled after that storm. Houston became Texas’ big port. Galveston became a fief of the Moody’s, the insurance clan. Walk down the streets of Galveston and marvel at the architecture, the like of which has no parallel in Texas. But it is like a royal robe on a shivering leper.

I’m in shock, awe, anger, disbelief. In the Cleveland airport, I drank beer and watched CNN with the subtitles rolling across it. I nearly sobbed, but didn’t – I’ve learned enough about the world to know that sobbing over disasters that are too big for you simply leaves you raw and confused. A new legend was born, I’ve noticed: Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Bush strummed a guitar while New Orleans sank. Bush is a lesson in the servile reflex: I instinctively expect him to operate like a leader. He instinctively operates like a class clown dumped on the island in the Lord of the Flies. He’s good for me, insofar as he has destroyed the remnant of my respect for leadership itself. America is not special; the stupid Caesars are definitely upon us.

I fell in love a dozen times in New Orleans; I learned politics there, and I learned to distrust the cops. I learned how to listen to opera, and how to snort coke. My first experience with acid was with my friend A. and her maniac Chilean boyfriend, who inhabited a shadowy room in a demi-whorehouse in the quarter. I can still feel the lack of vitamin C as I stumbled down Magazine street in the morning after, passing by a poster advertising a Kung Fu movie in Spanish. The poster sometimes still pops up in my dreams.

If I were living in NOLA – and six years ago, when I moved back South, that was my plan – I’d be in the Civic Center or the Superdome. Evacuation at a moment’s notice is not in my economic cards – I have no car, I have no cell phone, and I have no desire to leave my possessions (a computer, a tv, a stereo) to the winds, or to a passing looter. Although I very much understand taking bacon and beer (which, by the way, is a good thing to drink when the water becomes polluted – that is, after all, why beer was invented). I very much don’t understand evacuating New Orleans without any regard for the stuff left in the stores, especially the weapons. I don’t understand not impounding that stuff the first day. This is New Orleans, after all, where every native has a funny story about some naïf tourist venturing out to some area which is not to be visited without an armed escort. We toyed with these stories, when I was there, because there was a certain resentment of tourists, who were in search of easy vices but hadn’t earned the right to them – didn’t even understand that vices come in bundles, and some of them you might not like at one in the morning. New Orleans isn’t just like a banana republic, it is one. There is no real police force in New Orleans. There is a praetorian guard that protects the garden district, and Jefferson Parish middle class folk, and enforces the rule of the jungle on the Ninth ward. Over the decades, both sides of this equation were educated to believe in a very direct view of the regulation of social relations. When I hear calls to shoot to kill the looters, that is the Garden District expressing what it has always thought. I once saw a policeman beat the shit out of man in the French Quarter. I wasn’t stupid enough to interfere.

I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone, I know it’s gone…

I first saw New Orleans a long time ago. I was taken there by my Uncle Harry. And I resolved to go there after high school, which I endured in suburban Atlanta. I went to Tulane the year the Meters played for the incoming freshman party. Back in the day, it was really a party – the university sprang for the kegs. That has probably fallen victim to our current Puritanism. My first year there, I worked on the Figaro, which was run by James Glassman. Glassman went on to become a crackpot conservative (author of Dow 1 million two hundred and ten), but back then he was cool. One of my duties at the Figaro was to keep him from dealing with the assorted weirdos from the sex industry that would come in and bug us – pin striped escort service guys, weeping fat ticketsellers at various adult theaters, etc., etc. They advertised with us, they were hit by the cops, they came to us. My immediate boss was more interested in being a dance instructor. The writers (this was back when Bunny Matthews worked for the paper) lounged around in the back in their pyjamas. I’ve seen the bohos, or the last of em…

It’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone…

For a long time I’ve felt extinct myself. And it didn’t take a genius to know that New Orleans time was limited. I wrote a piece in 2000 about this, which I’ll publish in my next post. This post is just a puddle of piss and tears. And I don’t give a shit.

the respectable left

The new myth floating about is that the liberal hawks are in a self-questioning mood: how could they have been so wrong? The answer is that they trusted the Bush administration to do the right thing but the Bush administration let them down.

This is, of course, horseshit covered in catsup. Hitchens, Friedman, Berman, Packer, Ignatieff, Marc Cooper (post occ.) and the rest of them are well practiced in the art of emitting herbivorous platitudes about human rights to defend the infamies of American foreign policy. Their share of the war consisted of committing a double act of bad faith: demoralizing the liberal/secular side in Iraq by branding it with the name of various scoundrels (Chalabi, Allawi), while putting up a noxious smokescreen of righteousness on the home front to disguise the quite normal imperialist mechanisms by which Iraq was to be reduced to its proper place in the world system. The movement was from a tyranny run by a mass murderer to a colony run by corporate American shills. Hitchens is merely the most articulate and exemplary of the band of lefty poseurs: in the lead up to the war, his chief argument was that the antiwar side sickened and disgusted him, as though his very innards had been carved out of the Critique of Practical Reason. He now defends the war, as he does in the latest New York Observer, on grounds of honor -- a sort of mafia ethic:

Hitchens clarified what world he’s currently living in. “It’s a matter of solidarity with the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, and trying to turn American policy in their favor,” said Mr. Hitchens. “I’m on their side, win or lose …. I could never publish an article saying, ‘Come to think of it, we never should have done this,’ because I could never look them in the face …. So, no, I don’t have any second thoughts.”


The rest of them are going to remain with us as the unimpeachable voice of the reasonable left, of course. As with a position in the Bush cabinet, the advantage of being a public intellectual is that failure is no bar to success. That these people, none of whom could be trusted to organize a children's birthday party, could intrude into a nation about which they knew neither the language nor the culture and transform it from the top down is a subject for farce and tears. None of these people seem to have the least sense of how projects are done, how agency works in an organization, how producing a set of incompatible goals leads to failure, or even how to map the incompatibilities.

All of this matters not a jot. The Dissent eggheads have always had great success commoditizing their sensitivities in the op ed market. They will continue to do so. But I say, as a mild and moderate liberal:

Fuck em.

oh that liberal political strategy

LI is still on vacation. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of our far flung correspondents, C., to write a post about her first pregnancy – a report from the frontlines. This might still happen, if we turn on the Svengali.

Small topic today: if our readers want to know why the Democratic party is brain dead, go to the Wesley Clark op ed in the Washington Post today. The tone and feel of it – the inanity surmounted by arrogance – the blindness – it is all there, like an indigestible stew served to a dying invalid in a poorhouse. We particularly liked this graf, both for its meaninglessness and as a true gauge of how D.C. thinks about their war, three years after:

“On the political side, the timeline for the agreements on the Constitution is less important than the substance of the document. It is up to American leadership to help engineer, implement and sustain a compromise that will avoid the "red lines" of the respective factions and leave in place a state that both we and Iraq's neighbors can support. So no Kurdish vote on independence, a restricted role for Islam and limited autonomy in the south. And no private militias.”

This is a man pissing in the wind and complaining about rain.

The LI theory is not, pace Harry, to disestablish the Dems – it is that the liberal of today must explore multiple tracks. This means supporting independent movements to strangle the U.S. military’s capacity for continuing in Iraq as well as re-engaging with the… G.O.P. The liberal influence on the G.O.P. is non-existent. That is because liberals, after Vietnam, gave up on the G.O.P. and allowed themselves to be bought by the Dems. Well, that was a silly strategy, and we’ve been paying for it for years. Liberals should start picking Republicans to support, and they should start doing it now. Let’s revive the Bull moose faction of the Repug party.

Let’s… well, we aren’t going to get carried away. Doubtless the power of LI to affect the liberal mindset is less than that of a goose fart in a whirlwind. But the blogger manner is to pretend that one is some crowned Humpty Dumpty reigning over the scene, and who am I to violate the blogger stylebook?

Bush/Ubu

In an essay on Peron’s dictatorship, Borges claimed that recent argentinian history happened on two levels: one, a sordid theatrical farce, and the other, a literature for washerwomen – the paperback romance.
The Bush culture, more straightforwardly, takes its cues from Ubu Roi. Thus the latest sequence from Iraq. In one way, it is heartening. As readers of this blog know, the Iraq that emerged from the election was a theocracy in formation, with the Sunnis operating as the appalled but powerless spectators and the Kurds maneuvering to save their autonomy even at the risk of planting the seeds of a monster to the South. The Kurdish leadership, remember, found it convenient, at one point in the now forgotten civil war between warlords that occurred in 1996, to call in Saddam Hussein. This is the same leadership routinely praised, nowadays, for its commitment to democracy.
The defenders of the war, and even its opponents, have the disturbing habit of ignoring Iraqi reality when it doesn’t fit American rhetoric. For the belligerents, the Iraqi government we are defending is committed to democracy and human rights. Only the jihadists want to create an Islamic state. Of course, this turn away from reality has been occasionally pierced by the media, which, in fits of absent mindedness, sometimes reports on the inconvenient reality settling down in, say, Southern Iraq. This is a part of the country where the insurgents are replaced by the Sadr and Sciri paramilitaries, the lion lies down with the lamb, and coed college gatherings can result in attack, assault and murder at the hands of the guardians of the New Iraq. The neo-cons, who would have delighted Jarry, think that they have lit the fire of freedom in the middle east; they have, of course, acted unconsciously to spread the doctrine of Khomeini.
That being said, there is a certain schizophrenia on the pro-war side that has its counterpart on the anti-war side. On the one hand, the insurgency is in the last throes, or it is confined to merely three provinces, or it is simply something like the unruliness of the Nazis in occupied Germany. On the other hands, the insurgency is so powerful that American withdrawal would lead to Iraq falling into the hands of Zarquawi. Alan Philps, writing a surprisingly pessimistic column in the pro-war Telegraph, plays this tune:
“ feeling is growing in the West that it is time to remove troops from Iraq. Foreign troops, it is argued, are the problem, not the solution. The generals, anxiously watching the opinion polls, want nothing more than an excuse to start reducing troop numbers. So why not now? It is undeniable that the casualties are appalling and that every week Iraq produces more and more insurgents trained and bloodied in battle. The anti-war camp argues rightly that these jihadists did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. But they exist now. If they win, they will spread out to fight Arab regimes and no doubt try to bloody America as well.
So many mistakes have been made that success - the installation of a functioning secular democracy - is out of the question. But we owe it to the Iraqis not to hand them over to the new crop of warlords. What we started we must try to finish. “
The new crop of warlords, contra Philps, is precisely who we are fighting for. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that the Iraqi government would have less of a chance to suppress the insurgency than any other Middle Eastern government at this point.
The question that fascinates us Jarry-philes is how the neo-cons will turn on this dime. The defense of the rightful place of Islam in deciding petty things, like whether women receive an education or not, is going to be interesting. I’d suggest these useful lines of dialogue as a guide. Mere Ubu is trying to persuade Pere Ubu to kill the king of Poland and take his place:
Pere Ubu:
Eh vraiment! et puis après? N'ai-je pas un cul comme les autres?

MERE UBU
A ta place, ce cul, je voudrais l'installer sur un trône. Tu pourrais augmenter indéfiniment tes richesses, manger fort souvent de l'andouille et rouler carrosse par les rues.

PERE UBU
Si j'étais roi, je me ferais construire une grande capeline comme celle que j'avais en Aragon et que ces gredins d'Espagnols m'ont impudemment volée.

MERE UBU
Tu pourrais aussi te procurer un parapluie et un grand caban qui te tomberait sur les talons.

PERE UBU
Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre, merdre de bougre, si jamais je le rencontre au coin d'un bois, il passera un mauvais quart d'heure.

liberation in chelsea

I am in a museum dedicated to Himalayan art in Chelsea. The site was formerly occupied by a Barneys. There are two musicians, arrayed in white, seated at the foot of the staircase, playing trancelike music representative of a certain Pakistani genre. The staircase is a holiday for architects -- a crooked, cubist thing that ascends up six flights. I like the staircase. My friends and I decide to listen to the guide, who appears at 2:30. The guide is a loud, gray haired Brooklyn-ite with the Yogi Bear figure towards which middle aged American avoirdupois seems inevitably to tend. In a barker's voice he points out salient aspects of Buddhist iconography, and gives a compressed version of Gautama Buddha's message to the world: the letting go of craving, fear, anger and attachment.

Later, my friend K. tells me that she is plagued by craving. She wishes she could purify herself, annihilate it.

Now, I am not a stranger to the purifying impulse. I, too, would like to toss into some ultimate refiner's fire all the dross encumbering my life: the pennyante terrors of my economic life, the irresistable impulse to manufacture opinion that crowds out more valuable contemplative matter in my mindspace, the gnawing, daily sexual lust. But as I told K, I am not so certain that the purifying impulse is the equivalent of life more abundant -- it could well be the hollowing out of life itself. There is a moment in letting go in which liberation crosses over into surrender. In better moods, I believe that the moral point of the secular life is not to get rid of craving, but to get to its very center -- to sink into it until one has unlocked its puzzles. I am disinclined to think that the achievement of some state of gilded hibernation should be called enlightenment. My friend A., at Milinda's Questions, claims that I am a prisoner of my chains. To which my response is: where does that metaphor come from? It seems to me that, if these are chains, human life itself is a chain -- and the symbol of the chain, thus ramified into a world of chains, chains endlessly, loses its edge. I doubt that the Buddha touched earth as a chain touches another chain. In fact, I want to liberate myself from this particular metaphor as my part in freeing myself from the chains...

By the way, the exhibit of the handprints and footprints of the various incarnations of Buddha is extraordinary.

the lamentable state of dangling

According to Dr. Johnson, "whatever busies the mind without corrupting it, has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious." We like the hesitating "will not often" that modifies the sentiment -- however, LI has plunged into as much idleness as saving up for two months can purchase. Instead of attending to Ms. Sheehan, or the bad faith scare, on the left, that Bush is preparing to invade Iran (with, one must ask, what army?); instead of paying attention to the Iranian repression of the Kurds (as our friend Brooding Persian is doing) -- we've been attending Tanglewood concerts and going to lakes and summer movies.

About which -- LI often wonders what they will make, one hundred years from now, of the descent of taste in the latter part of the 20th century. For a long time we simply refused to participate in it -- for instance, by never going to one of the Lucas Space operas. But in the past five years, we have dropped that stance. This means that we have accumulated a certain cache of experience in the twisty logic of action movies; we have sorted the good, the bad, and the ugly; and we have found certain sequences growing stale...

Not, of course, the car chase, the wet dream of a society of traffic jam sitters. There are certain kinds of artistry the quality of which depends on the re-enactment, within some rigid design, of the same thing. In a sense, there is only one car chase, just as there is only one wedding, and one death of the hero. All variants are simulacra of this single and singular event.

We are talking about something else -- the no-thing. This thing can happen as much as it wants, but it never emerges beyond the zero. Such a thing is the "hanging from the cable" scene.

The current Batman movie -- a decent enough flick -- might have signaled the end of this sequence. You know what we mean -- the hero dangles from a wire, a cable, a chain, a rope, that depends from a moving train, a helicopter, even an airplane. Was this sequence invented in the James Bond movies? We dont' know. The suspence, here, is that the fight is waged on two axes. On the horizontal axis, the hero is threatened with annihilation by buildings, railroad bridges, tunnels, and any projecting solidity along that plane; on the vertical axis, the hero is in a sort of tug of war, compounded of bullets, flares, tugs, etc., with the Mr. Big in the vehicle. The current Batman steals, pretty much, the sequence in last year's Spiderman of having its hero ascend a chord attached to a moving train. It struck us that this was the weakest cord sequence we have ever seen. Perhaps audiences will be perpetually moved by the dangers along the two axes, but for us, the danger on both the vertical and horizontal axes has been long exhausted. Dangling is simply too silly -- nor does it have its roots (as the car chase sequence does) in the everyday libido.

Iraq -- the prisoner's dilemma

Crooked Timber pays entirely too much attention ot the ravings of Christopher Hitchens, if only to slag the man. However, a recent post on one of Hitchen's ineffably ignorant Slate columns regarding Iraq (a frequent subject of Hitchen's Slate columns, and proof that you can have a 100 percent failure rate in journalism and still find lucrative work, making it one of those soft industries, like filmmaking and politics, to whose compensation packages we can only aspire), provoking the usual comments pro and anti-war, once again made me think about the way the verb "support" has exerted an odd and malign hegemonic control over the discourse.

In reality, the Iraq war is a sort of prisoner's dilemma in which the rational response is to order one's preferences with reference to the chance of their being realized. "Support" of the war, and opposition to it, contains a disabling germ of confusion, since the vision of the victory that would end the war one way or another has never been clarified since the war started, and the meaning of that victory is impossible to predict. The more prudent course for the war opponent is to elaborate preferences according to the phase of the war.

For instance -- before the war, supporters of the war did their best to obscure the question of preferences. To revert to the prisoner dilemma model, it is as if they were all shouting for the prisoner in cell one to be silent, thus transforming a matter of probabilities and advantages into one of morality. Myself, I ranked my preferences between the coalition not invading at all -- most preferred -- and the American's invading unilaterally -- most disliked -- to range my realistic preferences around either delaying with the inspectors or forcing America to encumber itself with a real international coalition that could block its every move post invasion. On the question of deposing Saddam Hussein, I was all for that, in the absense of every other consideration. However, there were other considerations -- the failure of the Americans to stymie al qaeda, for instance. As to an overthrow that would minimize violence, maximize justice, and depose of Saddam, I didn't realistically see a way in the options on offer -- and certainly, of course, the larcenous Americans were a scary prospect.

Having the preference for a coalition helped me to see that the Bush strategy was to pretend to accede to coalition building while mounting such a campaign of threats and vituperation that any coalition partner would be powerless to stop what the Bushies had in mind. This happened. Nobody raised a finger to stop the Americans from attempting to elevate a convicted criminal to the leadership of Iraq, from dissolving the army, from guarding the oil ministry while the rest of the country was looted, from taking over the government of the country, from putting unpopular native patsies in governing bodies which Gunga Din himself would have had too much self esteem to have served on. Then there was the double plucking of Iraq. On the one hand, the taxpayers were plucked massively, as U.S. money poured into a consortium of the worst American corportations, War department leaches, GOP subsidiaries and the like. This was, of course, in the name of aiding Iraq. On the other hand, the Iraqis were plucked as their national treasury went into obscure gambits that ultimately benefited the same congery of corporate scoundrels.

At about the one year mark, then, my preferences were for world wide resistance to the Americans -- from the Iraqis, from the French, from the Iranians, etc. Again, however, just as wanting Saddam removed from power didn't entail "supporting" unilateral American action, supporting resistance to the Americans didn't mean "supporting" the insurgency.

All well and good, but do my "preferences" have an effect? Many people would say it is all bullshit. I think that is the real unrealism. Sitting in the Behemoth doesn't mean one is paralyzed. The promotion of the sense that American action in Iraq is wrong, unjust, and incompetently carried out was a minority view in May of 2003, but it has spread to achieve near majority status in the polls recently. How? Partly through harsh and unremitting attacks on the war by the left -- in blogs, in newspapers, whereever. There is a lot of curious anti-war worrying over the perception that the left is stabbing America in the back. To which I'd say: of course I'm stabbing America in the back! America, in this instance, is a giant dunderhead, and pricking the nerves is the only way to get his attention. Harshness and extremism have a tactical use. It frees people up by extending the range of their preferences. If people prefer to think America was well intentioned but misguided in this war, that is fine with me -- the misguiding that leads to withdrawal is the goal.

In terms of my preferences for Iraq --well, I do have them. In 2004, I was hopeful that perhaps some secularist middle would emerge -- neither pro-American nor theocratic terrorist. I didn't expect the liberal ideal, but I thought that it was possible that a coalition between Sistani Shi'ites and recovered Ba'athists might just be possible. It wasn't. If in fact a coalition had invaded Iraq, one strong enough to counter the Bush people, I think there would have been a chance for such a thing. But secularism is indelibly stained by the face put on it by the Americans -- the crook and the terrorist being the best patsies America could come up with. In the end, America shot itself in the foot -- without a strong secularist middle party, it was inevitable Iraq would drift into the Iranian orbit. The drift, which I think is inevitable, now has to be disguised in the American press. The press is very obediant to the idea that our withdrawal will be followed by a bloodbath, which ignores that our occupation is a bloodbath. It also ignores the fact that insurgencies in the Middle East are eventually put down with no help from the Yankees -- witness the Kurdish civil war in the nineties. No, below all of that is the suspicion that America's withdrawal will be the final stage in Iran's domination of the northern part of the Gulf. Personally, instead of fearing an American invasion of Iran, what we should be looking for are signals of American dickering with the final deal. That could well happen -- there is no allergy to private enterprise in Shi'ite theocracy. I imagine that the American death count -- and the Iraqi death count -- should be seen as a holding action while the Americans figure out how to deal with the unexpected result of their insane enterprise. Captain Ahab went down with the white whale, but we can always deal with the Whale and get the oil we need -- for a price.

We thought the U.S. should have been practicing detente with Iran since the mid nineties. Alas, it took thirty some thousand Iraqi dead and who knows how many Americans before it is all through to put us on this sensible course.