heroes on parade

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who teaches at Berkeley. I was complaining, for some reason, about the ineffectuality of lefty political movements. My pet peeve – for instance, the way the anti-war movement gets continually diverted to supporting factional and hopelessly unlikely projects, thus foreclosing on allies to the right that could seal the closure of this occupation. And he told me that sometimes he gets tired of his radical students playing the ultra game, with their seeming program of getting guns and going to the hills to fight capitalism. And, although he didn’t add this, their probable real future in business, entertainment, law and medicine.

I said that this is just the kind of romantic lefty shit I hated. Especially the projection of a heroic ideal embodied by some revolutionary leader, Castro or Che or, as is the case right now, Chavez. Chavez, who has quite correctly begun diverting revenue from petroleum exports to human capital projects (just like Kuwait has done since 1964), while at the same time quietly continuing to pay the premium for those massive Venezuelan debts accrued over the past thirty years in such a manner that, in the business world, there would definitely be huge and winnable suits over the manner of their composition and delivery. No bolivarian revolution is required – just re-tooling international corporate law. The problem is the symbiosis between lender and emerging market debtor, with their neo-liberalism guaranteed by cyclical and cynical socialism for the wealthy, robbing the public till to sustain a con man’s dream of unneeded infrastructural projects. But both the left and the right, in the Latin American context, still loves those infrastructural projects, as though this was still the golden era of damming.

In fact, my opinion about the bad gas emanating from the neurotic projection of white boogey kids is itself an old cliché from the cold war – see any essay by Naipaul, circa 1970-1980.

However, we don’t live in a time warp. The projections that endanger us don’t come from the infantile left, but from the infantile CEO set. Oddly enough, nobody, to my knowledge, has tracked down the characteristic tropes of the neo-liberal hero, that comic counterpart to the Berkeley vision of the Motorcycle Diaries. And yet they are all around us: the Merkels, the Chalabis, the Sarkozys, succeeding the Fujimoras and the Pinochets and Salinases of yesteryear.

This struck me as I read the NYT’s report about Merkel on Thursday. The NYT has been very disappointed in Germany since the election. Here is how the election was supposed to go: the Germans, realizing that the political economy of America was superior in every way, was supposed to flock to Merkel’s standard. An orange, or a red white and blue revolution, if you will. Soon union membership would decline, and high tech service jobs would flourish. German CEOs would soon be raking in the chips. And the whole thing would be baptized: the entrepreneurial society. Or how about: the ownership society.

But this is the way the election went: the entrepreneurial society lost. The Germans flocked to the slow the ‘reform’ or ‘stop the reform’ parties, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left. Between them these accrued 51 percent of the vote. And this wasn’t an Ohio or a Ninevah province vote, either.

This leaves Mark Landler, the NYT reporter, with a heavy hearted task. What if you gave a party for morning in Deutschland and nobody comes? Here’s how you report it:

“Germany’s two major political parties on Friday sealed an agreement to govern the country together under Angela Merkel, who would become the country's first female chancellor.

But after six weeks of grueling negotiations, which exposed fissures on both sides and necessitated deep compromises, the new government faced a murky future, shorn of the reformist zeal that many here believed is necessary to fix Germany's stagnant economy and stem its soaring unemployment.”

That “many” which obtrudes itself in the second graf is the many-headed minority to which the whole story is keyed. It is the many who think of Tom Friedman as God’s own son. It is the many who compose the editorial board of the Times. It is the many who see past the fog of unsustainable worker’s rights and pensions and health care a little something else, a little lexus and the olive tree, chugging away. Everything, in this vision, can become America, and America can become everything! We have it in our hands to distribute a universal solvent, melting away bad old socialism, and creating a new economy in which the GDP grows by leaps and bounds, and most of the wealth of it is captured by the upper ten percent, or the exciting success class. And that class, like the engine of a train, will pull behind it the investments of the working class. Nirvana and Dow 36,000 are just around the corner.

The NYT view, of course, papers over the reality of the meaning of “reformist zeal.” Reform unleashes reform in a chain reaction. There's the tax “reform” and labor market “reform.” There's the pension reform and the reform on corporate holdings. There are reform going all the way out to the horizon. What this view really means is this: a politics that would essentially junk the social welfare state. The way in which Europeans ask the question: to what extent can we preserve a system that guarantees health and retirement and worker’s rights? is of course ignored with the pretense that that system is far too expensive – on the principle of the richer we are, the poorer we are. No, in the new, competitive world, the only viable option is a politics of growth that skews wealth wildly to the wealthiest and creates mindboggling personal and public debt, as well as mindboggling inequality. Growth, here, becomes the enemy of social welfare, not its ally. Keynesian economics is turned on its head.

This return to the politics of an old capitalist elite, circa 1890, with the new twist that the state becomes a player for the corporations, requires a myth. The myth is that the business cycle is dead. With growth becoming a linear and predictable thing, everybody becomes an owner, and nobody needs those antiquated benefits.

So who wants this? Heroes do. Heroism is coupled with myth, requires it. Just as every myth generates heroes, every hero defines him or herself in terms of myth. Especially when the myth obscures a sharp and cruel desire, and when that desire can only succeed by means of sacrifice, heroes come to the fore to make that sacrifice seem virtuous.

Our current crop of neo-liberal heroes are all little Reagans and Thatchers. Their bios are oddly similar. They start out as outsiders. They talk tough, and directly to their enemies – who are portrayed as the insider elites. That tough talk appeals to the street.

Merkel has proven to be a big disappointment on the hero level. She came from East Germany, and that was good. Her outsider credentials were burnished. She was a woman, hence the Thatcher image. And she brought in a flat taxer to talk tough. Instead of campaigning like a neo-liberal hero, however, she campaigned like a wall flower. This was not at all good. She did not plug into the secret desire on the street to junk the system of social welfare and plunge into the ownership society. Hence, the melancholy of Landler’s story:

“She would emerge from that vote with half her cabinet - including the foreign, finance, and labor ministries - in the hands of her former political opponents, the Social Democrats.

Even more important, Mrs. Merkel has had to set aside many of her proposals for overhauling Germany's economy, including a simpler tax regimen; reform of health care and pensions; and a more flexible labor market. The Social Democrats objected to Mrs. Merkel's proposals to curb unions and to make it easier to dismiss workers.

Plans to restructure the medical and pension systems were also either watered down or deferred. And the Social Democrats succeeded in nudging up the tax rate for people with high salaries.”

Like Kurz dying in his dark canoe, one can only imagine this NYT-er gasping out the immortal words: the horror! the horror!

For a look at neo-liberal mythography in action, LI’s readers should get ahold of the Atlantic magazine in September and read Charles Trueheart’s Waiting For Sarko. We’re going to put on our Barthes glasses and analyze that tomorrow.

oompa loompa liberalism

Funding note: this week LI’s funding drive netted one hundred dollars. This is excellent. When we started this drive, our goal was one thousand dollars. Now our goal is a more reasonable six hundred dollars. We are only two hundred dollars away from the goal. Is that cool or what? Please think about contributing to LI, check out the shirts and stuff via the handy Dopamine Cowboy button, and take the bread out of the mouths of orphans and widows and instead send it to LI. What did those orphans and widows ever do for you, anyway?????

…

Easeful sleep is not easy for LI. Somehow, our consciousness has transformed, over the years, from the good and faithful servant of the body to a tenacious monster out of some James Whale flick, a combination Igor and Old man of the Sea, clutching at our neck and turning the volume up in our brain with breathy chuckles as the night grinds on. For some people, three o’clock in the morning is an abstraction. For us, it is a stage in the journey to despair. Yesterday, as you might have noticed, our post was not, shall we say, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. That’s because we were falling asleep as we wrote it. Just as we were falling asleep doing almost everything we did yesterday: pissing, eating breakfast, riding the bike.

Today I am a product of, if not a great deal of sleep, at least a concentrated dose of it. For which, I will sacrifice a goat to Morpheus in good time.

…

The mighty, mighty Nurses of California – a group that has reconciled me to Nurse Ratchet – enjoyed the fruits of victory yesterday as Schwarzenegger dropped his “I kick their butt” objection to the law mandating a ratio of one nurse to every five patients at hospitals. Schwarzenegger had objected because his bottom was pinched by the medical industry, but lo and behold! now that the ratio is taking effect, turns out the medical industry has become all lamblike and amenable:

“Jim Lott, executive vice president at the Hospital Assn. of Southern California, said the governor's action in ending his appeal of the staffing rules "will have no impact on what hospitals do because they are already attempting to staff at the more stringent levels."

Last March, Lott had warned that the rules might lead to the closure of hospitals "on the cusp of closing because of financial burdens."

Kaiser Permanente and University of California hospitals have stated they have adopted the new ratios. Lockhart said Catholic Healthcare West, the state's largest nonprofit chain, recently agreed to comply.”

It would be nice if the Mighty Mighty nurses next knocked down the anti-capitalistic guild provisions that restrict the labor market in medical care – that’s right, I’m talking about the State-Doctor nexus that both limits the powers of medical care-givers who aren’t doctors and that culls the number of doctors who are put into the system each year – all, of course, in the name of quality. Medical technology has long made it the case that qualified nurses could take over much of the powers invested in your average GP – and at a much cheaper cost. Home visits by doctors are actually common in France – imagine that. In the U.S., home visits by doctors went out with the fifties sit com. But home visits are an economical way of cutting down health care costs, since they are a mighty mighty preventive weapon. A whole class of medical technician could easily fill that role if it were subvented by the state.

Such a proposal would, of course, lead to an uproar among doctors. They have a very keen sense of the role artificial scarcity plays in maintaining high medical costs. And they are very big contributors to political campaigns. Hence, the buffoonery of knocking down “frivolous lawsuits”, on the one hand, and of doing nothing to make medical care provision more efficient, on the other. If medical malpractice suits were more difficult to mount because medical care was being vastly expanded at a cheaper rate, that would make some sense. But medical malpractice suits are being attacked at the same time medical care is being tied every more closely to inefficiencies in the guild tradition of monopoly – which is a variant of the P.T. Barnum version of Capitalism preferred by the political establishment.

The Mighty Mighty nurses goals for next year? Oh, I love these people!

“The fight with Schwarzenegger has politicized the 65,000-member nurses union, which previously had not been one of Sacramento's major players. The nurses said they plan to continue to pressure the state's leaders by lobbying next year for a single-payer healthcare system that would abolish private insurers and for comprehensive campaign finance reform.”

Scorcese made the brilliant decision, in Goodfellas, to impose the action of the movie against the signs of the sixties and seventies, using the music, the décor, the sex, the clothes, the drugs, everything, and simply eliminating the politics. Not one mention of the Vietnam war, for instance. This gives the viewer two feelings. One is the feeling that this Mafia enclave is truly living in its own world, even as it receives its inputs from the outside. And the second is that the American imperium is truly vast, because the Mafia is living like average Americans.

So: I go out to breakfast, typical Austin joint, migas for me, tables around buzzing, here’s two guys talking about their kids and the marvels of speech their kids are inventing out of the stitching of neurons and the world, here’s a table around which construction chiefs have gathered as the GC lays out the plans for building a number of restaurants in Texas, from bonding agent to the architectural drawing to the specs, and over here two women are having an animated discussion about the passage of Amendment 2 this Tuesday, and how one of them voted against it, and the people who are against it are going to wake up. Etc. Another day in America.

One gets the feeling that nobody there is particularly eager to bath in Iraqi blood.

So: Condeleeza Rice feels she must meet with Chalabi, the embezzler who is also the target of an FBI investigation who is also the great Iraqi patriot feted by the same AEI that proclaimed, in its journal last May, that the war was over and we won – news of course that keeps on being new to corpse after Iraqi and American corpse. The Rice flies to Iraq in a surprise visit to Mosul to tell us that our strategy against the insurgents is working. It is working like gangbusters. And the NYT files its report saying, first graf:

“MOSUL, Iraq, Friday, Nov. 11 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise stop on Friday in this violent, Sunni-dominated city in northern Iraq , declaring that it had recently become a success story for the strategy of using Iraqi forces to quell the insurgency.”

This turns out to be a lie, as the story goes on to report that she did not make a stop in the city at all:

“But the visit also reflected the delicate situation in Mosul as Ms. Rice - making her second trip to Iraq as secretary of state and her first trip to a Sunni-dominated area outside Baghdad - flew from Bahrain directly to a heavily fortified military base north of the Tigris River, surrounding an old palace of Saddam Hussein's on the city's northern outskirts. The area is now known as Camp Courage.

A month ago, four State Department security officers were killed in Mosul by a roadside bomb, and the city, Iraq's third largest, was not deemed safe enough for her to visit.”

The Bush strategy and the NYT strategy on the whole truth vs. lie thing are, as so often, in tandem. As a measure of the trendline for Mosul and our great adventure there, the story gives us a canned history – the invasion, the relative peacefulness of the first year of the occupation, the explosion as the U.S. committed atrocities on a Chechnyan scale in Falluja, the impossibility since for any American unaccompanied by armed guard to hustle down the Mosul streets. Your usual win win situation.

So: The same Washington Post story that gingerly prodded the return of Iraq’s odd choice of a convicted criminal for minister of oil mentioned the meeting between another of America’s Iraqi sweethearts, Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld, conferring over the ever denied and now undeniable desire of the U.S. to put a big fat military presence in Iraq forever:
“In an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, the economist said a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave a "very dangerous" vacuum. In talks with Rumsfeld, Mahdi said he had made clear he is "not averse" to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.”

Bob Dreyfus at Tom Paine, whose reporting about Iraq should be taken with a big dose of salt, mentions something interesting about this week’s spate of Chalabi redux: a lot of money seems to be going into Chalabi’s campaign for the December 15th election. To find out the sources of Chalabi money always requires a spelunking expedition down a rathole: did he get his pockets stuffed by the Americans or the Iranian or is this money he stole from the Oil Ministry, from the CIA, from the bank in Jordan, or from kidnapping and burglary in Iraq itself?

No doubt a big reason Chalabi is in D.C. and Rice is/isn’t in Mosul is that the Arab League is inviting all sides to a conference in Egypt. The U.S. has a great fear of all sides reaching some agreement behind our back, one that might well be “averse” to a permanent base for U.S. troops in Iraq.

So: The spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, Fareed Sabri, gives an interview in the Asian Times. The IIP, as the Asian Times reporter explains, is essentially an offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood. Since the Moslem Brotherhood and the Ba’athists have been blood enemies for decades, the IIP is in the strange position in this insurgency of cooperating with its enemy, insofar as Ba’athists are involved in the resistance to the occupation, or cooperating with its Shi’ite enemies, DAWA and SCIRI. The IIP solution to the first horn of the dilemma is to indignantly deny it is happening. That is, that Ba’ath members are at all involved in the resistance. As for the future:

“MA [the Asian Times reporter]: Is the insurgency creating a new form of political identity, namely an Iraqi nationalist-Islamic identity?

FS: Yes, and this predates the occupation. It goes back to the early 1990s when the former Iraqi government launched Hamla Imaniyah, or Faith Campaign. But the resistance is adding flesh to that legacy and in the process is not only creating a new political identity, but a new Iraq as well. I can tell you that many people in the resistance are looking beyond the occupation and are anxious to implement true Islam in Iraq.

MA: Do you think this new ideology can be a suitable replacement for Ba'athism, insofar as ensuring Iraqi unity is concerned?

FS: It is difficult to say at the moment. But as far as the Iraqi Islamic Party is concerned, we call people to Islam through dialogue. And at this point in time we strive to promote democracy and an atmosphere of toleration inside the country. It is too early to be talking about an Islamic state. We need to gradually prepare the people for this.”

Right.

Interestingly, the IIP is looking beyond the occupation. But they are not seeing, as Chalabi is, American oil companies as far as the eye can see, and the infinite chances for graft therein. They are seeing an economic community, like the Europeans, between Turkey and Iraq and Iran.

So: the manic investigation of how we got into Iraq seems to have taken the air out of the question, what is our goal in Iraq? The short answer is that we still hope to treat Iraq as we once treated, say, Guatamala, finding figureheads that would cover massive American pilfering. This is what stay the course is about. Or as Powell's aide de camp, Wilkerson, put it:

“The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption,” the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.

While bemoaning the administration’s incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region’s oil supplies.

“We had a discussion in (the State Department’s Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly,” Wilkerson said. “That’s how serious we thought about it.”

Now that is a planning session whose minutes should be leaked.

Off to prison she must go

LI opposes the death penalty. But LI also believes that Saddam Hussein should have been shot on the day he was captured.
We reconcile these two positions dialectically – which is a fancy word for weaseling around seemingly irreconcilable positions.
Clive Foss has produced a nice overview of the dispatching of tyrants in November’s History Today.

Foss does a very English job of maintaining an armed innocence about the whole issue of violence and the state. That is the crux issue for us, and the reason we believe that a gap opens up in the very notion of law itself when a tyrant is overthrown.

Foss’s article ends with the current decorous human rights point of view:

“In modern times, a consensus has emerged that tyrants should not get way with their crimes against humanity but must face a fair trial, not so much for revenge as for catharsis, to bring closure to the survivors of their actions, and as a warning to future would-be tyrants. Yet fairness can itself bring problems. If Saddam's tribunal decides to exercise due legal process, the case could drag on for years and could prove embarrassing for the powers who supported him in the past. Delayed justice brings real dangers: Tyrants can start to look better in retrospect, especially if the succeeding regime fails to offer security or prosperity; the population might get exasperated waiting for closure; and the ex-tyrant could serve as a rallying point for opposition. On the other hand, swift or arbitrary justice could undermine the rule of law that a country like Iraq is so determined to achieve. Much will be heard about these precedents and the complications they evoke.”

The rule of law that Iraq is so determined to achieve is a little neocon poppycock. The rule of law is, on the contrary, what the government has been running over roughshod, tearing up the rules, for instance, on making its constitution in order to produce a document to fit the American schedule. Etc.

But ignoring that, Foss’ introduction of the notion of deterrence is a way of normalizing the trial of the tyrant. Like any other trial, it points to its predecessors, and it points to that whole strain of mimicry which exerts a concentrating force on the social whole. In this way, Foss papers over the uniqueness of the founding situation. If Foss is correct, revolution has no status whatsoever in politics.

This is why Foss is evidently embarrassed by the trial of King Charles I:

“The first trial of modern times, in England, illustrates problems that still challenge equitable solution. King Charles I, not everyone's idea of a tyrant, had fought and lost a civil war, and wound up the prisoner of enemies who were determined to punish him. By then, the government was in the hands of a small minority of a House of Commons purged of any who might be sympathetic to the king. What remained of the Lords refused to cooperate, so the trial was conducted by a 'High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Smart', claiming to represent the will of the people of England. From the beginning, the verdict was never in doubt: the trial was a cover to justify executing the 'tyrant'. The indictment stated that Charles had conspired to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people, had levied war against parliament and was guilty of all treasons, murders, burnings and damages committed in the wars. He was accused of being a tyrant, a public and implacable enemy of the commonwealth of England.
The King, who was allowed no counsel, faced his accusers alone. To their chagrin, he ran circles around them. Instead of replying to the charges, he attacked the authority of the court. He claimed that the tribunal was illegitimate, unrepresentative of the people or parliament, and that it had no right to try him. To accept the legality of the court, he claimed, would in itself be a violation of the laws. Charles turned the table on his accusers by maintaining that he was himself defending the liberties of the English people by resisting arbitrary power. Although the judges had no ready answers, the king was found guilty and executed, all in the course of ten days in January 1649.”

The execution of the king was the root out of which the liberal order in England formed, with all its contradictions, cruelties, and advantages. It is rather like the nursery rhyme, London Bridge is falling down.

London Bridge has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down,
London Bridge has fallen down, my fair lady!
Build it up with lime and stone ...
Stone and lime would wash away ...
Build it up with iron bars ...
Iron bars would bend and break ...
Get a watch to watch all night ...
Suppose the watch should fall asleep? ...
Get a dog to bark all night ...
Suppose the dog should get a bone? ...
Get a cock to crow all night ...
Suppose the cock should fly away? ...
What has this poor prisoner done? ...
Off to prison she must go.
My fair lady!

As many an excavation of old bridges have shown (and as Frazier made a point of in The Golden Bough) a victim – a poor prisoner – was often entombed in the bridge’s foundation to appease the river god. That’s as good an image as any for the state. In the revolutionary moment, there is, properly, no state, a fact that has been pointed out by every tyrant ever tried, from good Charles I to bad Nicolas Ceausescu. Was it Deleuze who speaks of the making of the state as a lightning like act? The state begins with a dazzling suddenness. And its post-revolutionary structural stability depends upon having sacrificed the right victims to the people: those tyrannical bodies entombed in the foundation. This is why a trial should be swift, if trial there is to be. Foss’ mention of trials that linger on and on – he uses the example of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian dictator who eventually escaped his trial.
What does it mean when the lightning like moment doesn’t happen? Foss’ model, which would make the trial of the tyrant like any other, would make this situation like any other in which a murder is unsolved. But if the state’s legitimacy is bound up in the death of the tyrant, then it is not simply a question of precedent – it is a question of the state’s own history. In essence, the moment of the non-trial is the moment in which the state embraces its earlier form. At that moment, the regime of abuse begins to contaminate the state’s own claimed renewal. There’s nothing inevitable about this. Chile may well continue to exist as a democracy without putting Pinochet to death. But there is something extremely hazardous about this. The collapse of Argentina in 2000 is linked not only to the incautious embrace of the bogus dictates of neo-liberalism, but the thousand uncut ties to the military regime that preceded Menem.

Now, LI does try to avoid the bloodless bloody rhetoric that comes up wherever politics is talked about – the glee in jailing people, cutting off their heads, raping them, which fills the comments of blogs on both the left and the right. Politics is and always will be partly entertainment – and glee is one of the emotions that part of it is supposed to arouse. But glee is a dangerous, lynch-y thing, and I am as afraid of it as any person with common sense. So I am not quite comfortable about the ideas I’ve traced above. Yet I do not think that the revolutionary moment is merely a figment of the overheated student libido. It has a real historical existence. That the American Revolution did not require George III’s head was a matter of contingency – the spatial separation of America and England – rather than any principle. In principle, the founding fathers would no doubt have had to execute him, if George III had incautiously ensconced himself on these shores.

giddy nurses for us

The moronic inferno won in my state yesterday. The sick breath of bigotry had been condensed into an amendment to the constitution that defined marriage as “between a consenting cock and a consenting pussy.” The amendment also noted, “cocks with other cocks or assholes and pussies among each other are just too God damned scary.” The yahoos, of course, went for it like a prize ticket to a mudwrestling match. Next year we are going to vote on whether dinner is defined as “that meal with a hunk of scorched cow flesh in it and only with the aforesaid flesh.”

This would be merely funny if the anti-gay amendment didn’t include vaguely threatening language that seemed to threaten the finances of gay couples, and their ability to raise kids.

All of my votes – the vote against the prison bond issue, the vote against the road bond issue, etc. – lost. Wait a minute… I think the park bond issue passed. Oh, and supposedly “liberal” Austin went for the fear of cock with cock and pussy with pussy by 60 percent to 40 percent. So much for keep Austin weird. There’s no perversion quite like the perversion of normality – the Einsaetzgruppe of perversions. It was on the rampage last night.

I note, in other elections, that Bloomberg won spectacularly in NYC. If the man would come out against the Iraq war, he’d be my perfect G.O.P. candidate for the presidency. I’d definitely vote for him over Hillary, in spite of the anti-smoking penchant. Unfortunately, as we’ve said and said, liberal Republicans have fallen into a state between hibernation and death, the zombie Bushites form that solid block of unreconstructed fantasists determining the party’s course into ever wilder realms of unreal rhetoric, and liberal Dems piss all over themselves celebrating the election of moderate to conservative Dems. So it goes….

I meant to write an obituary of John Fowles today. But I will put that in another, friendlier post.

PS – my gloominess about Texas was lightened, a little bit, by the story of the defeat of Schwartzenegger’s proposals in California. We loved this little Oompa-Loompa bit:

“On a Beverly Hills stage Tuesday night next to his wife, Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger pledged "to find common ground" with his Democratic adversaries in Sacramento.

"The people of California are sick and tired of all the fighting, and they are sick and tired of all the negative TV ads," he told supporters at the Beverly Hilton. He did not concede, saying instead that "in a couple of days the victories or the losses will be behind us."

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic's in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger's defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, "We're the mighty, mighty nurses."

That does it. Fuck the party system, it is the mighty mighty nurses for LI! And one question: is Schwartzenegger insane? How long do you have to be in Hollywood before you realize that giddy nurses rhumba-ing is a winner? You want to be with the nurses, not against them. Elementary rule.

the nobility of parchment goes down

“… il est plus important qu'on ne pense en politique d'extirper cette diversité d'idiomes grossiers qui prolongent l'enfance de la raison et la vieillesse des préjugés.” (... in politics, it is more important than you might imagine to extirpate that diversity of vulgar idioms which prolongs the infancy of reason and the senility of prejudices." – Abbe Gregoire.

When LI was a young lad hitching around France, we once hitched to Brittany. We were hitching with a young lass, which made the hitching a lot more fun. And both of us were associated with CODOFIL, an France-Louisiane friendship society. Well, the town that we hitched to was quiet enough that our appearance there, plus Codofil, got us an invite to dinner with the mayor and a picture in the local newspaper. While some of the local muckety mucks were shaking each others hands and exchanging jokes, the photographer sidled over to us and began to explain that he was a member of an independence group. The group had turned its face against the intolerable oppression of Brittany and its Celtic culture.

Well, there is little chance of Brittany becoming independent in the near future, but I was reminded of that incident in the last couple of days, reading references to 1968 in the stories about the riots in France. A better date, if you ask me, is 1792, the year of the Vendée.

By this I don’t mean to imply that the massive autos de fe, so to speak, is on the same level as the thousands slaughtered in the war between the royalists and the revolutionaries in Brittany. Rather, what is being shaken right now is the historical result of that war: an official France that enforces itself, by a long performative act, on the territory of France. When Abbe Gregoire presented his inquiry into the languages of France to the Commission on Public Safety in 1794, he called it: "On the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalize the french language.”

A friend from Paris wrote me that I should understand a little verlan to understand the rioters. I had not even heard the term verlan – so far out of the loop am I – but quickly caught on that this is the hip hop street slang, and that this slang is a marker – it is a marker of what needs to be annihilated. But our feeling is that the old and successful system, Gregoire’s France, is on an unsustainable course of confrontation with French reality. That reality is about an enclaved population that is desperate for representation – for power. As well it should be. My friend told me about listening to Jospin on the radio last night. He has written a memoir, and is out on the book trail. He was asked about the rioting and told a story about some immigrant rugby player who made it into the political elite. It was a pointless story, from the point of view of the street. But from the point of view of Gregoire’s France, it made total sense – it was exactly the kind of myth Barthes wrote about.

To draw a practical consequence from these riots, from the point of view of the Greens, communists, and socialists is going to be difficult. My correspondent tells me that Sarkozy’s removal is not only an obsession of Humanité’s, but is demanded by the rioters themselves. Our point is: if Sarkozy disappeared tomorrow, the social motives for rioting would still exist. And the inevitable riot aftermath – the reaction – is not going to be blocked by a politics that can’t reach beyond persons.

To end on a dialectical note: while Abbe Gregoire’s thesis about language might be taken as a sort of ultranationalism, one has to remember that historical categories are contingent and precarious. Actually, Abbe Gregoire was one of the Assembly’s fiercest defenders of the Haitian revolution, a political position beyond the political limits of mere abolitionism. An unpopular position to take. So, in fairness to Abbe Gregoire, two further quotes:

“De toutes parts on y parle de droits, de devoirs, de constitutions, de représentation nationale; partout resplendissent les emblèmes de la liberté, l’esclave les voit; partout se font entendre les chants de la liberté, l’esclave les entend. Croyez-vous que ces étincelles électriques n’atteignent pas son coeur?”( Everywhere one speaks of rights, of duties, of constitutins, of national representation; everywhere the songs of liberty are making themselves heard, the slaves hear them. Do you really believe that these electic sparks will not penetrate their hearts?)

“La noblesse de la peau subira le même sort que celle des parchemins.” (The nobility of skin will submit to the same fate as that of parchment)

notes

Notes

LI apologizes for the length of yesterday’s post. I don’t know what came over me. The fascination of the topic, the two Thai sticks, what... Anyway, I’m not going to go on at such tyrannical lengths again – without breaking it up into two posts.

Also, an email from a reader reminds us that we should have linked to the Colombia Journal site a post or two ago. LI especially recommends Eric Fichtl’s August article, which goes probing into Colombia’s recent history from the odd vector formed by media and grafitti.

LI is hoping that the peak donation period hasn’t passed. The first week of our drive we collected 200 dollars. The second week we collected 100 dollars, I believe. This is the third week. We’d really like to collect seven hundred more dollars, but more realistically, two hundred more is our goal. Please donate to us.

And finally: we are not really puzzled by the news from France. This emeute has been building for some time. In the U.S., there is a sort of laughable view of France – as there is of much of the rest of the world – in which the country exists only in strobic moments in which it interacts with or can be compared to the U.S. It is rather like the old disco days, when the multitudinous flicker of the house's special blacklights would reveal a world of dancers seemingly caught in some film strip of elaborate but obscure martyrdoms, disconnected naked poses bared to eyes that would seek in vain for the old instinctive continuities. All very dramatic, especially if you added coke or poppers to your dance card, but when the beautiful people went home or to the bathrooms or to fuck in the car, they still had to trundle the old daily carcass, that unglittering young thing as material as any mop, enduring all the ersatz hiatuses, with them to do it. So, too – to escape this ungainly metaphor – the French problem with its band of outsiders in the banlieus is not especially understood from the U.S. perspective. Much of the coverage in France has been disappointing, centering around Sarkozy’s Lepennian slip – calling the poor scum, saying he was going to ‘vacuum clean” the suburban slums, etc. Sarkozy is in an uncomfortable position, since his toughness was supposed to make the car burning insurrection impossible. But L’humanite, for instance, concentrating on Sarkozy as a cause of the insurrection is simply political bs.

From the U.S. pov, if we must have one, Sarkozy not only has moved to embody a sort of Nixon/George Wallace position in France, but he also – like Nixon – favors affirmative action. Affirmative action will go against so many French inclinations that it will be interesting to see where, if anywhere, such proposals go.

However, instead of analyzing the riots, we thought it would be more helpful just to translate a news account. Which we will do in an upcoming post – the one we thought we’d translate, we can’t find. It should be noted that the state of emergency declared by Villepen today originated with Le Pen’s party. We aren’t necessarily going to see a drift to the ultra right, but we certainly will see it if the Greens and Communists stick to the chorus that these riots are about Sarkozy. This is the time to really get into who is getting educated, who is getting the jobs, who is getting the health care, who is getting the infrastructure, who is getting the policing in France.