begging, second week

Some Begging

Those who pledged last week – and those who want to pledge to keep this site alive! (to use the overheated sales technique of public radio) can now look at the Café press site. The link is cafépress.com/limitedinc.

Please contribute – we have items for the top of your list of bric a brac and the bottom. Eventually, I will be putting a little book up in the shop – LI according to topics. That is, if there is any demand for such a thing. Café press can apparently print up texts, glue covers to em, and send them out. Just the thing to give a friend, an enemy, or someone who needs that special five inches of support to fit under a wobbly table.

And … in one way or another … who doesn’t need a special five inches?

the messianic timetable

The spirit of the common place book is about one of those facts in the reader’s natural history: suddenly there will loom, out of one’s loose and general reading, some phrase or anecdote that seems mysteriously to signal one – a wink in the suddenly lighted up dark. The darkness descends again, the wink is registered. The reader continues, spending a portion of his life in one book or another. LI received one of those winks from the beyond while reading this in Mark Mazower’s Salonica:

“In 1524, a mysterious Jewish adventurer called David Reuben arrived in Venice and presented himself as prince of one of the lost tribes of Israel. He gained an audience with the Pople and told the Holy Roman Emperor to arm the Jews so that they might regain Palestine. Crossing his path was an even less modest figure – a Portugese New Christian called Diego Pires. After rediscoving his Jewish roots and changing his name to Solomon Molcho, he studied the Kabbalah in Salonica with some of the city’s most eminent Rabbis and gradually made the transition to messianic prophet. He predicted the sack of Rome – which occurred at the hands of the imperial troops in 1527 – and then declared himself to be the Messiah, and went to Rome itself, in accordance with the apocalyptic programme, where he sat for thirty days in rags by the city gates praying for its destruction. Before being burned at stake, Molcho saw the future: the Tiber was flooding over, and Turkish troops were bursting into the seat of the Papacy. The truly striking thing about Molcho is how many people believed in him and preserved and reinterpreted his messianic timetables.”

The wink I received from this story was about my own liberalism, for it is a liberalism derived from drifting away from the Marxist oriented left, and its main characteristic is that it has weaned itself away from the apocalypse. It is not, then, an ideology for every situation – during the late forties, Zoltas, the Hungarian Jewish writer, made bitter fun of the community leaders who simply refused to believe reports about Auschwitz. My instincts would certainly be with those community leaders. I resist believing that my enemies are enemies on that scale. That they can be points to the very limits of liberalism, its vacancy in the face of certain existential crises. But – liberal to the end – I don’t believe in one ideology for all seasons.

This, at least, is LI’s position for the moment. But as I say, I recognize, in the pull of Marxism, the pull of a more passionate worldview, and one from which I still extract a considerable stock of critical insights. So I could see myself as a potential candidate for belief in the divine appointment of Solomon Molcho. I just can’t see myself reinterpreting the messianic timetables after his untimely auto de fe.

All of which is by way of sliding into a subject I know little about: Slavoj Zizek. My friend T. sent me a Zizek essay to help me get a better grasp on this guy, but he warned me that, probably, Zizek is not someone who would make a good subject for an LI post. Probably he is right. However, after reading this interview with Zizek in the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, I am… well, confounded. In the interview, Zizek takes up the religious turn that appeared in Lacan’s writings in the seventies, and has continued in Badiou. In particular, Zizek comments on the special place Badiou accords St. Paul.

That special place, one would think, for a Marxist would be in the invention of conversion. The ritual of conversion, the movement from God to God, was commonplace in Paul’s Hellenic Eastern Meditteranean. But that movement did not signal a change in world view, so to speak. In fact, world views qua world views didn’t exist, as far as I can see, in that world – using Heidegger’s sense of World, which he explicitly ties to Christianity. Rather, there were views of fate. All of which I won’t batter on about. But according to Badiou, apparently, St. Paul was the inventor of something far different. And that different thing is not something I like at all, although Zizek does. When the interviewer asks Zizek about the significance of St. Paul, he gives a long answer. Part of it goes like this:

“I think the reason that Badiou does not deploy this, as I tried to develop in the long chapter on Badiou and St. Paul in The Ticklish Subject , the key question for me is negativity in the sense of death. For him, in Badiou's reading of St. Paul, the death of Christ, as he puts it, has no inherent meaning whatsoever—it's just to prepare the site for the event. All that matters is resurrection life. This is connected with a very complex philosophical-theological topic . . . you may have noticed if you read Badiou, Badiou has some kind of natural, gut-feeling resistance toward the topic of death and finitude. For him, death and finitude, animality and so on, being-towards-death, death-drive—he uses the term sometimes in a purely non-conceptual way, "death drive, decadence" as if we were reading some kind of naïve Marxist liberal optimist from the early 20th century. This is all somehow for me interconnected. Although I am also taking St. Paul as a model, a formal structure which can then be applied to revolutionary emancipatory collectivities, and so on, nonetheless I try to ground it in a specific Christian content, which again for me focuses precisely on Christ's death, [his] death and resurrection. I am trying even to identify the two. The idea that resurrection follows death, the idea that these are two narrative events, this is at the narrative level of what Hegel would have called vorstellungen , representations. Actually, the two of them are even united. That is to say that Christ's death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.
What interests me is how precisely to distinguish Christ's death from this old boring topic—and all the old materialist critics of Christianity like to point this out: what's the big news, don't you have this sacrificial death of God in all pagan religions? Ah ah! You don't. The structure is totally different if you read it closely: already at the most superficial level, after Christ's death what you get is Holy Spirit, which is something totally different than in previous societies. All this about Isis, and so on, this rather boring circular myth, where basically god dies . . . you know, it's like, people are disordered, things go bad, but then there is the phoenix, everything is good again—no wonder this version is so popular, like even in The Lion King, where you have a kind of Hamlet-version where king dies, son redeems, there is a new king and so on . . . Christianity precisely is not this.”

I am for the popular version here, the Lion King versus the death of Jesus, if those are the terms. But I can’t help wonder: if those are the terms, isn’t something wrong with the choices in this game? Which is why, at the very threshold, I have trouble with the religious turn. Give me material ecstasies and agonies, and less imperial tortures on hilltops. More specifically -- I simply don't see why one would chose St. Paul over Solomon Molcho. I don't, I guess, see the specialness of Christianity at a point in history where, in Europe, the Christian myths are dying, and in America, the Christian myths are being replaced by the American Jesus, a relatively new godhead. There is something that vaguely repulses me, here, in this dabbling in a language that embraces the old Cold war idea of Communism as a religion. To embrace the God that failed as the God that fails, and whose revolutionary project is to fail every time, is a sort of messianic nightmare to me.

All of which probably means: I don't understand what Zizek wants.

chronicle of a war crime foretold

In Dexter Filkin’s depressing NYT Magazine piece about the murder of Zaydoon Fadhil – which thinks it is a depressing NYT Magazine piece about the downfall of Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman – there are several “admissions” about the way the war is being conducted in Iraq that are especially strange coming from a paper that routinely reports on the death of Iraqis just as the Pentagon labels them. If the Pentagon blows away 100 people on the Syrian border, then 100 insurgents are killed, and that is that. No hint of such things as this:

“On a mission in January 2004, a group of Sassaman's soldiers came to the house of an Iraqi man suspected of hijacking trucks. He wasn't there, but his wife and two other women answered the door. "You have 15 minutes to get your furniture out," First Sgt. Ghaleb Mikel said. The women wailed and shouted but ultimately complied, dragging their bed and couch and television set out the front door. Mikel's men then fired four antitank missiles into their house, blowing it to pieces and setting it afire. The women were left holding their belongings.
"It's called the 'leave no refuge' policy," Mikel later explained to Johan Spanner, a photographer working for The New York Times.

That same winter in Samarra, Sassaman's men moved through a hospital and pulled a suspected insurgent from his bed. When a doctor told the Americans to leave, a soldier spat in his face. Another time, an officer told Spanner, one of Sassaman's soldiers threw a wounded man into a cell and threatened to withhold treatment unless he told them everything he knew. "We've told him he's not getting medical attention unless he starts to talk," Capt. Karl Pfuetze told Spanner. The man's fate was unknown. (Pfuetze now denies the withholding of treatment. Sassaman insists he never condoned beatings or denial of medical treatment.)”

Filkins article actually surfaces some rare truths about guerilla warfare that have been pretty much sieved out of Times stories about Iraq. These truths have been obvious for some time – in fact, were obvious in 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq.
From Filkins:

“But as a consequence of its overwhelming power and prowess, the American Army is not likely to face an enemy similar to itself. It is more likely to face guerrillas. Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back. This is more or less the case in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, yet the leadership of the American Army is still wary of preparing the bulk of its troops to fight a guerrilla war. Most American soldiers are trained to use maximum force to destroy an easily identifiable enemy. Waging a counterinsurgency campaign, by contrast, often requires a soldier to do what might appear to be counterproductive: use the minimum amount of force, not the maximum, so as to reduce the risk of killing civilians or destroying property. Co-opt an enemy rather than kill him. If necessary, expose soldiers to higher risk. In the American Army, that sort of training is mostly relegated to forces like the Green Berets, who account for a small percentage of the Army's manpower.

"It's a chronic problem that runs deep in the DNA of the Army," says John Waghelstein, a retired colonel in the Special Forces who helped to conduct the American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador. "The Army has never taken counterinsurgency seriously. The Army's doctrine hasn't changed since the 1840's." At the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., attended by all American officers hoping to rise above the rank of major, students must pass a rigorous program consisting of roughly 700 hours of instruction. Of that, not a single required course focuses on how to fight guerrilla wars.”

From LI, on Feb 13, 2003 – before the invasion:

“This American pattern is often ignored by American policy makers. The latest example is the kind of ambitious policy in the Middle East being promoted by the circle around Paul Wolfowitz. According to this circle, America is, in reality, an empire. So using that imperial power, we can remake social and political situations that we don't like in our image. The language of empire now fills our foreign policy journals, as well as conservative weeklies. The opposition to the Bush administration's aggressive plans in the Middle East has concentrated mainly on the cost of war in the narrow sense -- the cost, that is, of invading and defeating Iraq. However, the real question is about the cost of the war in the larger sense -- the cost of exposing an occupying force to the constant attrition of a guerilla war, and to the unexpected violence of factional conflict. This is where the imperial model has failed in the recent past, from Saigon to Somalia. Empires require some legitimation that goes beyond the mere aggrandizement of power. Americans have never accepted any legitimation, over the long run, except national defense. Neither glory nor ideology have garnered American support for a war.

To explain the paradox of American power -- that combination of a high level of military spending with a low level of acceptable risk -- I believe this, it is useful to use McClellan and Grant to represent the two poles of the American dialectic. Both McClellan and Grant started from the same premise: the prerequisite to fighting a war was amassing a force disproportionately greater than the enemy's. However, while the strategic premise was the same, the tactics were much different. McClellan Civil War career has become infamous for the chances he refused to take. He was tender for the lives of his men. It was a this caution that doomed his Virginia campaign of 1862. As one private wrote, "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." (Gallagher)

Grant's tactics were very different. He used the advantage of a more numerous army to raise the level of casualties he would accept. This made it possible to continue inflicting casualties on the enemy in a more prolonged way than was ever seen before, in the campaign. The general stress broke the army of Northern Virginia. It is easy to forget that Grant's ultimate success was preceded by general shock at the the bloodletting he was prepared to countenance -- a shock that so shook the Union side that Lincoln, in the middle of the election campaign of 1864, thought he was going to lose. Grant's position was made plain in a telegram Sherman, with whom he was in perfect agreement, sent to Halleck, one of the incompetent Union commanders, after Vicksburg:

``War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be `pure and simple' as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it....

This is the kind of language spoken by legendary American commanders, like Sherman, Grant, Patton and Macarthur. The words are stirring. We shouldn't be deluded, however, into thinking that the feelings are typical. McClellan's caution has never been submerged by Grant's boldness in the mix of American foreign policy and military strategy. In fact, it is the McClellan pole that drives the fundamental US military strategy of the moment: replacing the manpower of battle with military technology. The goal is to achieve Grant's objective with McClellan's tenderness for American life. This works in the case of those military engagements that can be decided solely by weaponry. However, occupation is, by definition, not one of those strategies. In fact, by raising the optimistic vision of a bloodless (at least for our side) war, it prepares the guerillas advantage -- blows struck against the occupying forces will be illogically magnified because they are judged against the background of a military technical utopia.

The best argument against the imperial design of the Wolfowitzes is to appeal to the reality of this American pattern, in which the cost of an enterprise is judged rigidly against the benefit it brings. The benefit brought by regime change in Iraq is obvious -- but the benefit wrought by invading and occupying Iraq is not. The landscape, as it appears to D.C. foreign policy honchos, is one of overwhelming American power. But the landscape since 9/11 has changed. Guerillas may not possess nuclear missiles, but they can forge the weapons of mass destruction out of boxcutters and American airliners. in treating Iraq as though it were merely a problem amenable to a Grant-like solution, we are putting ourselves into a situation in which all alternatives are impalatable. Assuming that 9/11, and the suicide bombers in Israel, are omens of things to come, the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq will be subject to the constant low attrition of guerilla warfare, with its morale breaking concomitants: a desire to strike blows against a dispersed enemy driving general dispersed acts of mayhem against the native population, which in turn creates mutual distrust between American forces and the native population, which in turn creates a gap between the ostensible reasons for the American presence (that they somehow 'represent' the aspirations of the native people) and the reality of it. Bush is edging into a situation in which the choices will be an unacceptable withdrawal from Iraq, and an unacceptable occupation of Iraq.

This situation should look familiar. It is Vietnam.”

Filkins:
But there is another reason American commanders shy from using violence on civilians: the effects it has on their own men. Pittard, the American commander in Baquba, says that he was careful not to give his men too much leeway in using nonlethal force. It wasn't just that he regarded harsh tactics as self-defeating. He feared his men could get out of control. "We were not into reprisals," Pittard says. "It's a fine line. If you are not careful, your discipline will break down."

In most of the 20th century's guerrilla wars, the armies of the countries battling the insurgents have suffered serious breakdowns in discipline. This was true of the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria and the Soviets in Afghanistan. Martin van Creveld, a historian at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that soldiers in the dominant army often became demoralized by the frustrations of trying to defeat guerrillas. Nearly every major counterinsurgency in the 20th century failed. "The soldiers fighting the insurgents became demoralized because they were the strong fighting the weak," van Creveld says. "Everything they did seemed to be wrong. If they let the weaker army kill them, they were idiots. If they attacked the smaller army, they were seen as killers. The effect, in nearly every case, is demoralization and breakdowns of discipline."

We will end this long, long post with the suggestion that you LI’s post on The Making of the Enemy.

Humean reflections

There were a couple posts at the Long Sunday blog this week making the case for Hume being a precursor of postmodernism. The term “postmodernism” brings out LI’s virtuoso middle aged sighing – as a veteran of the 80s, I can’t countenance a thing that was surely fossilized by 1990, and whose reappearance has all the appeal of a remake of the Friday the 13th series.

However, in making critical comments about this view of Hume, I re-read Hume’s famous essay, That Politics May be Reduced to a Science and found the essay pretty surprising. Surprising, that is, if you have a view of the Enlightenment in which that phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness,” plays a central role. I think that anyone looking at the political nature of the Atlantic revolutions – in North America, France and Haiti – has to take that phrase seriously. Which is why we were rather shocked that Hume introduces this disjunction between what you might call the aggregate level of virtue among a people and the level of virtue of the state:

“The ages of greatest public spirit are not always most eminent for private virtue. Good laws may beget order and moderation in the government, where the manners and customs have instilled little humanity or justice into the tempers of men. The most illustrious period of the ROMAN history, considered in a political view, is that between the beginning of the first and end of the last PUNIC war; the due balance between the nobility and the people being then fixed by the contests of the tribunes, and not being yet lost by the extent of conquests. Yet at this very time, the horrid practice of poisoning was so common, that, during part of a season, a Prætor punished capitally for this crime above three thousand*25 persons in a part of ITALY; and found informations of this nature still multiplying upon him. There is a similar, or rather a worse instance,*26 in the more early times of the commonwealth. So depraved in private life were that people, whom in their histories we so much admire. I doubt not but they were really more virtuous during the time of the two Triumvirates; when they were tearing their common country to pieces, and spreading slaughter and desolation over the face of the earth, merely for the choice of tyrants.”

I found this a surprising dissent from the usual Enlightenment idea that the government is a mirror of the people -- in fact, Hume's remark edges towards the Sadean. An Enlightenment ideal of representative government is one that most people today – including LI – would take for granted -- and similarly, that the benefit of such a government is that it establishes a virtual space for happiness in which all good things flourish, the lion lies down with the lamb, etc. -- an Edward Hicksian picture of the world as it should be. After all, the revolution to establish a state that would preserve an order making the pursuit of happiness possible for every citizen presumes that the most appealing of those pursuits will not consist of slipping arsenic to your neighbors or husband.

So LI wondered if there was any instance in which one could say that public virtue increased while private disorder decreased. And what immediately came to mind was the sixties. Surely, in many ways, the most virtuous epoch in American history since the eighteen sixties – the first serious effort to eliminate apartheid – it was also, to use Hume’s measure, a time when homicide made dramatic leaps, taking over from Monopoly as the favored past-time of the sons and daughters of the peaceful booboisie, become all hitchhiking serial killers or victims. And the nineties were the reverse: at a time when the Federal government was stripping the poor of the pitiful amount the republic grudgingly devoted to them, while allowing the rich to enjoy the splendor of the deregulatory anarchy that would eventuate in Enron, the homicide rate dropped considerable. In fact, I do remember, when Clinton was signing off on putting the pistol to the pauper’s head and pulling the trigger, thinking how absurd it was that this was happening in a decade that was rolling in dough. It was as if the whole Enlightenment assumption that the people were vested with certain inherent virtues that would express themselves in a democracy was being mocked.

On the other hand, we don’t think Hume’s index for defining both private vice and public “spirit” is sufficient. Besides being based on the dubious proposition that murders were less when the Triumvirates were tearing the Republic apart, we also think that it is misleading to label the successes of the state – its survival, its ability to enforce order – as virtues. Hume is overclever here, and thus dims his otherwise very ponderable point: that the assumption that the government and the people are reflections of one another rests on very ad hoc grounds. That the best form of government might be installed to administer a society in the midst of dissolution is, theoretically, a possibility, and one that I think is connected to the dark side of populism: the longing for the open expression of the latent violence that maintains the social order. The long, long reaction to the official dismantling of racism is a case in point – here the longing for the chthonic age of the old slave auction block, and the fear that any loosening of the chains would lead to some unimaginable riot, has become a reliable predictor in Southern elections: coded and not so coded racism wins almost every time. This is the longing not only for tyranny, but for a tyranny erected on the lynch mob. I’m being obscure; what I mean is, the popular feeling that the people – if it includes all of the people, even them, the unspeakable autrui - don’t deserve a form of government that mirrors their situations, but one that punishes their differences.

turning in clusters

It is nice to begin the weekend on a note of Ionesco like absurdity, which is why I am grateful to Judy Miller’s attorney for adding a new twist to the 1th amendment in the form of the codicil that Ms. Miller was fighting for her freedom not to report her story at all. Not content with acquiring a special security clearance from the Pentagon, Miller also seemed to think she was entitled to a special get out of jail card simply for being employed by the Times. Luckily, Miller’s mind didn’t drift to knocking over convenience food stores, which is also apparently covered by the 1st amendment. That’s some amazing amendment.

However, there is some life at the Times suddenly. One of LI’s commentators remarked last week that the much maligned Maureen Dowd was obviously restive about the Times inexplicable bondage to one reporter. Today, Dowd’s column was a little shot across the bow:

“The Times's story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said yesterday in an e-mail note to the staff, Judy seemed to have ''misled'' the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.
She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a ''former Hill staffer'' because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like ''Valerie Flame.'' Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she ''did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby.''’

And, unlike Dowd’s usual endings, which take the sting out of her stinging, this one is pretty straightforward:

“Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover ''the same thing I've always covered -- threats to our country.'' If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.”

That Maureen Dowd gets it and that the editorial management at the Times publicly doesn’t – that Dowd actually has pierced the veil enough to understand that the Times is ruining its credibility with its audience on a principled stand that doesn’t make sense – might just mean that revolt is in the air.

Notes on fundraising

This week so far LI's received six pledges. Yesterday, I was going to put up a link to the Cafe Press shop, to direct pledgers, but Harry told me my original idea of taking the pledges, going to the shop, ordering the shirts and shipping them to the pledgees would be wasteful. Anyway, the link will soon be up.

Remember as you toss your coins into that blind beggar's cup today, hurrying out of your office building into your limo, to toss LI various currencies, too. Or, if you are the blind beggar in this situation, cull us out some of the ready tonight, as you are going through your day's take.

not that deep

“J. T. Battenberg III, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Delphi Corporation, USA, said corporate governance has changed. Boards tended to be less attentive in the past, but they are now paying very close attention to financial reports and probing deeply into the organization. "I have to force myself to really guard my time accordingly,"he remarked. CEOs need to maintain focus on the entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit necessary for growth.

Battenberg also said the board must have an intimate relationship with the CEO. He finds "few boards do a good job establishing a relationship with the CEO or even among themselves." He is working on ways to improve relationships among members of the boards on which he serves, but finds peer evaluations "difficult for old friends." -- from the World Economic Forum, "Do Ceos earn their keep?"
....................

George Will has never been shy about his contempt for the working class, or his advocacy for the wealthy. So we read his column in the Washington Post with some amusement, the other day. His eagle eye has been attracted to the robbery of the UAW pension fund by General Motors, and of course he approves:

“GM has been forced to allow product development, pricing and other decisions to be driven by the need to keep sufficient revenue flowing in so it can flow out in fulfillment of GM's function as a welfare state. GM provides $5.2 billion in health care annually -- more than Harley-Davidson's revenue -- to 1.1 million workers, retirees and dependents. Retirees outnumber current U.S. employees 2.5 to 1. The $4 billion that goes annually to retirees does not go into developing products people want to buy.

Concessions by the United Auto Workers will provide GM with annual savings of $1 billion in health care costs. But GM's hourly workers, who pay no health care deductibles and only nominal co-payments, will still enjoy coverage better than most Americans have. Since 2000, the percentage of American businesses offering any health insurance to workers has declined from 69 to 60.”

That the workers have a good health insurance plan is such a shock that Will would probably approve of bringing the old ones into police stations, tasaring them, and throwing them in the slammer. Alas, by some oversight, health care for people who have actually worked all their lives hasn’t yet been ruled illegal. This is one of those occasions when I long for a time machine. Oh, to put Will’s column in it and set the dial for 1980! Remember 1980, all those Democrats-for-Reagan, voting to slit their throats because 400 hostages in Iraq weren’t rescued quick enough for their taste? (Reagan, of course, learned from that fiasco, and when some 260 embassy employees and marines went up in smoke in Beirut, later on, he did not agonize about surrender – he just did it, thus preserving his popularity unscathed. A lesson for us all… but I digress).

The year of the great Social Security Reform has turned into the year America pays its first tab on the high labor cost of CEOs. The papers are full of gloating reporters laughing over Delphi’s bankruptcy and the consequent ruin of the retirement of its work force. My, the gaiety in the business pages. Well, we know that is what the proletariat gets since they have ceased to allow themselves to be sold by the pound on the auctioneer’s block.

Funny, all that talk about pension costs and no talk about the cost of, well, that superb management group that led Delphi before CEO Miller, that much quoted man. We looked up previous CEO J.T. Battenberg III’s compensation package, and found it, as well as Delphi’s v.p., D.L. Runkle, for the 1999-2002 period. It was shockingly low. Why, Mr. Battenberg made a mere 13.4 million in that period. Mr. Runkle made peanuts, really. 6.4 million. Packages like that, why, a man gets ashamed to even show his face at the corner grocery store. Somehow, though, LI doubts seriously that you are going to read any stories about Delphi that mention Mr. Battenberg (such a kind hearted soul – peer evaluations being so difficult among friends, a lot of times it is best to just elevate them silently on the stock options, don’t you know?), although no doubt fully insured business journalists swilling liquor on their lunch hours with war criminals from the vice presidents office will assure us that the Delphi work force was being treated like royalty, and had it coming.

Well, it is turning out that there is a cost to paying top dollar for your top 5 percentile, even in America. If we are going to continue to pay CEOs 190 to 400 times the wage of the average worker, we are just going to have to cut down on the average worker’s benefits. The conventional wisdom is happily starting to gel.

We do wonder, though, how that wisdom is going to play out. The contradictions of the guarantor state are gathering. One dimension of the tension is starting to pound its way into a few conservative heads: Dwarves don’t guarantee giants. Or, to be less fancy pants about it, it is impossible for the private sector to extend its credit on the scale that would match the “ownership society” model without that risk being guaranteed by a third party – the state – of sufficient size to make the guarantor credible. And the size of the state is not a theoretic property – it will have to swallow some enormous failures. This lesson was brought home in the late eighties by the government takeover of S &L assets. It was a lesson that was surely not going to be lost on any man named “Bush”.

However, that contradiction barely breaks the surface. The conflict that is coming is predictable: just as we see with GM, just as we see in the gloating tones of the upper class flunky, Will, you cannot rely on the private sector to maintain welfare services. The reason for that is simple: the governing class in this country will, when the chips are down, rob the working class. In broad daylight. And the media will serve, not as a watchdog, but as an accomplice and jester for the occasion. You can’t afford everything. If we want to entertain ourselves with the lifestyles of the rich and famous at the current rate, we are going to have to start stripping out goods and services such as education and retirement and healthcare. And, even so, the rich and the famous depend on the great consumer class willingness to continue, year after year, with no net savings.

The competition to strip workers of their wealth retrospectively is just beginning. The movement to strip the upper management of its wealth retrospectively has not yet been started. It doesn’t have a party, it doesn’t have a leader, and it certainly doesn’t have a press. But it might just be the case that this robbery is a bit too much for the American people – our Deep Throat nation -- to swallow.