notes about atlanta: 1

Revisiting Atlanta, for LI, has an oddly metaphysical impact on the old system: I automatically start feeling like a haunt, except of course that I am not revisiting the scene of any crime greater than adolescence. The stuff I used to know when long ago I lived here is so long past in Atlanta time that the only remaining landmarks in the place that the returning native can be sure of are the strip clubs, monuments to Atlanta’s deepest cultural instincts: the Tops n Tails, the Cheetah Lounge, the Pink Pony. It is an oddity among cities in that it is a great Black metropolis surrounded by perhaps the most conservative white suburbs in the country (although I should say that great black suburbs now span Dekalb county and are reaching into Gwinnett – a county that years ago voted down the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit system out of the oldest segregationist fears ever advanced by a Southern politician. Which is a lesson for me: progress always has the same ragged line as defeat, advances chaotically and partially and with many intervals of retreat and stagnation). It is no surprise that both TLC and Newt Gingrich emerged from the great debris field of this highway system in search of buildings to knock down, or that high tech companies are busily engineering software in counties that are tireless in trying to sneak prayer and creationism into the schools.

stupification or prevarication?

LI is an easily bored fella. So, looking for angles to freshen up the perpetual debate about whether Bush lied and people died or whether Bush was merely stupefied and people died, it has occurred to us that the roots of the debate might not lie solely in the low character of Executive Branch personages, who act, admittedly, like the substandard issue of some horrible merger between Animal House and the Cosa Nostra. Perhaps the root of the crisis that has crept upon this fine little war lies in the very notion of preemptive war.

That doctrine had its fifteen minutes post 9/11, but it isn’t much discussed any more. Yet it still seems to be the undead heart of the Bush doctrine, pulsing the dark blood through creatures of the night, such as Cheney. Like most such foreign policy doctrines, the one thing that is not discussed when it is discussed is how it is embedded in American domestic politics. That’s because D.C. has the ignorant idea that it conducts wars on its own. War, however, is a matter of domestic politics. Wars are dependent on the spirit of legitimacy – the political aspect of morale. When the legitimacy of a war falls apart, the war itself will fall apart. Given American military power, the military machine can keep running long after the legitimacy of its mission has been called into question. That of course has happened.

The chance for a war losing its legitimacy is significantly raised by the doctrine of preemption. Why? Because it gives the President two partly contradictory roles. On the one hand, the President traditionally has the role of an honest broker in relation to foreign policy. Foreign policy, unlike domestic policy, has a much smaller constituency. How many people really know about France, or Canada, or Sri Lanka? And how many people care? The President is theoretically the best informed person in the U.S. with regard to the military and political status of foreign countries vis-à-vis U.S. interests. Or, to put this less risibly, he represents the ideal point of maximum information. Of course, this is a modern role that has become more significant as America has become more imperial.

On the other hand, with preemptive war, the President is really playing the role of advocate. Because the ability to make war is not an instantaneous power vested with the President, because making war is a highly distributed function of the state, war is usually taken to be an extreme measure that requires the impetus attack. The instant of attack collapses the potential contradiction between presidential roles. It makes it much easier for the honest broker to be an advocate. But in a case in which the U.S. is the aggressor, the stimulus is of a different nature. It being a convention that a nation’s aggressive actions have to be disguised in a certain way – even Nazi Germany staged an attack from Poland before Hitler attacked Poland -- it is hard for the President to come right out say, look, I want the U.S. to act like an international mugger, and to simply take down nation x because we have the power and we want nation x’s wealth. While Cheney often talks like the hoodlums in an action movie, taking sadistic pleasure in the power to maim itself, he is a rare character. Cheney’s are usually found in maximum security cells. This one just happens to be the Vice President.

This sets up the kind of situation that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Bush attempted to act like both the honest broker, who did not want to go to war, and the advocate, who did. In retrospect, it should have been easy to predict that such a war would relatively quickly fall apart, as the gap between the two positions operated like some traumatic incident that the body politic could not get over. Actually, not just in retrospect – LI likes to think that we predicted this in the run up to the war. But our prediction was wholly based on the character of the warmongers. In this, we were intellectually timid.

It is hard enough to manage a war in which the U.S. is attacked – the supposedly attack in the Gulf of Tonkin being a good example of a cause of war that simply did not have the magnitude to justify the U.S. response. George Bush I, whatever one thought of the First Gulf War, did have an aggressive action that justified his advocacy of the war: an attack on an ally. I have no nostalgia for that disgusting old man’s presidency, but he did not suffer from being a dishonest broker.

This isn’t to say that a stake has been put through the preemptive war doctrine. That is the ne plus ultra of D.C. thinking, and it will have a long and sour career, surely, chewing up lives. But, happily the Iraq war has been shedding even the shabby reasons for continuing the American participation in it, and with the call at the end of the Arab League meeting for a timetable of withdrawal (a position behind the overwhelming popularity of withdrawing American troops from Iraq among Iraqis, according to the British military – whose poll on the subject is the most reliable, having been done for no propagandistic purpose), perhaps we will actually see the reluctant dislodgment of the American imperialistS from Mesopotamia.

…
Readers, I am going on vacation for two weeks. Posts will be sporadic. But I will occasionally throw in my two cents worth, although not to the absurd lengths of the usual LI post.

Arcana Imperii

In the early 80s, a popular Scottish historian, Angus Calder, published a marvelous book about the foundation of the British Empire : Revolutionary Empire. What made this book different from the usual procession of imperial icons that storyboard the empire as a series of adventures was Calder's total grasp of the ebbs and flows of the imperial world. For Calder, the colonial models have to be seen in terms of their first instantiation in the British isles themselves –in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Raleigh, for instance, not only founded the first, shortlived colony on the Eastern seaboard, but he was also planning on colonizing Ireland. He drew up a frankly genocidal plan for getting rid of the Irish, which, while not unleashed (at least in that form) upon the Irish, certainly was unleashed, later, on the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Algonquin, etc. Calder's point is that imperialism and the history of England, and by extension the Western countries, is not such that one can segregate the forces at work in the colony from those at work in the mother country. Instead, there was a constant exchange of models between the periphery and the center – the periphery being forged in the center, and vice versa. The experience of the "factory" in Jamaica -- the way in which sugar cane was cultivated, harvested and milled by slaves -- was imported to the factory models in England. The clearing of the Highlands, that fight against a tenacious, clan based mountain people, preludes struggles in India. In my rather floundering posts on the modern construction of liberalism and conservatism, I’ve been calling this the imperial effect.

As I said in those posts, the devaluation of the imperial effect as a driver of politics in the modern West is motivated. The motivation stems from the heart of the cold war controversies over both communism and the adoption of Keynesian economics, which had provoked a rearguard battle associated with conservative economists like Hayek, Friedman and Mises. Put this way, we are talking about a standard Heideggerian trope: forgetting as a social act. Heidegger writes about the forgetting of being, by which he means.. well, I’m not going to go into everything he means, which would get me way off track. My interest is really in the model itself.

Thinking about these matters, LI was pleased to stumble over an article in this Winter’s History and Theory by Anthony Pagden (FELLOW CITIZENS AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS:
CONQUEST AND SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPE’S OVERSEAS EMPIRES) that relates asymptotically, so to speak, to our own view.

Pagden wants to make a claim about a shift in the conception of empire that occurred between 1776 and 1830:

“I would like to suggest that the theoretical history of the modern European overseas empires (which excludes the Carolingian, the Holy Roman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian empires as well as such short-lived imperial projects as the Third Reich, the USSR, Mussolini’s Abyssinian empire, or, the “empire” of the United States) can be divided into two distinct phases. There has long been a disputed division between Europe’s “first” empires—mainly those in the Americas, which all came to an end between 1776 and 1830, and the “second” empires, which began in the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century and continued until the middle of the twentieth.4 Against any such neat periodization, it has been pointed out that the British incursions into Asia and Africa had already begun by the early seventeenth century; that although Spain had lost most of her American possessions by 1830, she retained the Philippines and still clings to outposts of the north-African coast; that as soon as the Treaty of Paris of 1763
had stripped France of most of her possessions in America and India, she began searching for new opportunities, first in the Pacific and then in north Africa. It seems obvious that there was indeed a continuous imperial, expansionist ambition shared by all the major European powers during the whole period from the mid-fifteenth century until the late-nineteenth century. My claim that the early empires in America were significantly different from the empires that overlapped and finally succeeded them is based not on organization, social type, objectives, or economic performance. It is based, instead, on the central conception of sovereignty.

For one thing that all empires, no matter how distinct they may be in size or type—and there is a bewildering variety—share is that they involve the exercise of a sovereign authority that has usually been acquired, at least in the first instance, by force. Since the occupation of lands to which the occupier could make no prior claim on grounds of autochthony, spurious or no, necessarily involved some kind of violation, empires were inescapably lands of conquest. Moreover, in view of the fact that most European peoples did generally hold that that domination is—or at least should be—a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, conquest presented a considerable challenge to most notions of sovereign authority.”

Pagden’s thesis is consistent with the anomaly of empire that bedeviled the early Victorians. If I am broadly right about the imperial effect, Pagden’s framework would have to accommodate a series of changes within the central European states themselves – changes wrought, in England, by the successive revolutions of the seventeenth century, and in France, by changes that began, as Tocqueville noted, under the Ancien regime and accelerated dramatically under the Revolution. These changes in the system of “acquired property” did have the effect of calling into question sovereignty, using the elements that Pagden highlights – geographic region and population. It is my guess that the imperial effect on the breakup of the brief classical liberal hegemony was such that it created a new division of political modes that, in a sense, drew their lesson from the government of the periphery to the government of the center. On the conservative side, the lesson was one of combining a government of moral coercion with one that incited the transformation of property into acquirable property – a process that still goes on, in, for instance, the privatization of public goods (like ideas, texts, mechanical processes, etc. – all of the IP stuff). On the liberal side, the lesson was of the success of central planning.

The anxiety underneath these lessons remained has long co-existed with imperial power. In fact, in Pagden’s first period, he traces a legal pattern that preludes the manner in which the legitimacy of empire was reformulated in his second period:

“By the early seventeenth century most European governments had resolved the problem by the simple expedient of denying its existence. The French hardly ever employed the term “conquest” in Canada. The Dutch, although happy to speak of conquest when the conquerors in question were the Spanish or the Portuguese, avoided the term when describing their own activities in Asia and America; the English, despite the fact that all their colonies in America were legally held to be “lands of conquest” and had been so ever since Henry VII’s letters patent to John Cabot of 1496, tended to agree with John Locke’s condemnation of conquest as “far from setting up any government, as demolishing an House is from building a new one in the place.”10 “The Sea,” declared the Scottish political theorist and soldier of fortune Andrew Fletcher in 1698, “is the only Empire which can naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our Interest.”11 Even the Spanish, whose American empire was so obviously based on conquest, and who boasted a rich imaginative literature to prove it, banned all official use of the word in 1680.”

Reminiscent of the recent career of the term “occupation,” no?

Anyway, readers are urged to flock to Theory and History and check out Pagden’s provocative, and even brilliant, essay. The passages on Henry Maine are themselves worth the trifling price of a little effort. Maine wrestled with the legal status of principalities in India that had the power to tax and judge, but were denied any power to make foreign policy. And he concluded that liberal ideas of dominion had to cede to a new idea of dominion, or sovereignty. Maine’s discussion could be about Iraq at the present moment. Pagden places Maine’s discussion in conjunction with Burke’s tortured notion of the legitimacy of the British project in India and concludes:

This [position of subservient sovereign states] had been precisely Burke’s complaint, since in the context in which sovereignty was divided between conqueror and conquered the outcome could only be what Maine himself recognized as “the virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people.”

The virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people. Hmm, sounds like the D.C. plan for Iraq.

Bob Woodward, the high government official said

LI has had a wonderful time watching the fall of the tinhorn journalist, Bob Woodward. If the D.C. clique of insiders carried cards, Woodward’s would certainly be platinum. As the much linked to opinion piece by Tim Rutten in the LA Times noted:

“There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.

Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops.”

Rutten’s own paper, on the day they published his article, published several routine articles that are sprinkled with anonymous sources. For instance, Ron Brownstein’s thumbsucker, “Democrats' War Opposition Not a United Front,” includes such winking-leading-the-blind passages as:
Although Democrats may be split on Murtha's specific proposal, his call for a clear break from Bush's policy is likely to strengthen those who want the party to offer concrete alternatives, many observers believe.

Many Republicans also see last week as a turning point. Bush allies believe that Murtha's declaration — following Senate Democrats' call for estimated timetables — will identify Democrats with a policy of "cut and run."

"I don't think the country has any doubt there are two positions: One is to stay and fight and the other is to leave," said one Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking.”

The proliferation of such fictitious cutouts has contributed mightily to the odd war over the truth about Iraq. If one cut out all unnamed sources from the runup to the War in Iraq, we would have had a much more informed debate about the War. It would have been about Iraq, for one thing, rather than about D.C. pocket pool, who said what to whom. Woodward’s style of journalism has lead to disaster after disaster, since it is used mostly for two things: to distort foreign policy choices, about which there is much exploitable ignorance in the American hinterlands (as in any nation -- no nation consists of people who are highly informed about geographic entities that impinge very little on them); and to destroy D.C. reputations. There’s no defense of citing a “Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking” to lay down such a howlingly obvious talking point. Enclosing the source in the heavy armature of description lends the source's words a spurious significance: we are supposed to take this as coming from the horse’s mouth, when it obviously comes from the orifice on the opposite end. If Brownstein’s promise of non-disclosure generates nothing more than political fortune cookie talk, why does he make it? Why does he quote it? What does it do to the credibility of a newspaper that prints these kinds of items day after day?

the geneology of horseback hall

I’ve said a bit about the imperial effect in my last post.

In this series of posts about Stephen, Mill, and the Pilate controversy, my point is both historiographic and current. I think that there has been, since the beginning of the Cold war, a systematic distortion of the real political history of the conservative/liberal split. To my mind, the canonical text in which this distortion is inscribed is The Road to Serfdom. In that book, Hayek attacks socialism as the source of the planned economy, identifies the moment that the planned economy took power as state policy with communism, and identifies the classic liberal era as the golden era of individual liberty. All of these claims are false. Hayek’s notion of the planned economy makes an eccentric exception for law – as though the body that lays down the law code is doing neutral work. It is this exception that allows him to plausibly lay out a case for his historical perspective. Without that exception, the history of central planning looks much different. In fact, laissez faire was not a matter of self organizing, but was highly dependent on the capture of state organizations and the rewriting of law to organize a whole different system of property rights. This central organization of the political economy was a key to bringing about the agricultural revolution in Europe. It was also a key to the famine in Ireland, and the repeated famines in India during the nineteenth century. It is no exaggeration to call these terror famines – around the natural core of a food shortage was woven a political scheme that exacerbated the famine and used it for political ends. One has only to trace the history of central planning in England to see that, far from originating with Marx, it originated with India. A goodly percentage of the Fabian group was connected, either by ties of family or career, to the Indian Civil Service. This was no coincidence – the rewriting of the Indian civil code and the enforcement of an entirely other regime of property upon Indian villages was widely viewed, by the British, as one of the great triumphs of the British Imperium.

That triumph justified an anomaly, as Macaulay called it, in British classical liberalism. The anomaly was the Empire itself. Of course, this is a difficult subject to encompass in a series of posts in a blog. For one thing, to background the Stephen-Mill controversy, one has to know something about the early Victorian synthesis of, as Mill put it, Coleridge and Bentham – that is, how the critique of the French revolution started by Burke and codified by Coleridge was assimilated into the liberalism of Bentham and the intellectual heirs of Adam Smith, who viewed the Revolution, in retrospect, as a progress marred by a few regrettable instances of radicalism. This is the context in which Burke, who in the 1790s still labored under the shadow of being a turncoat and a sell out, became a posthumous member of the British classical tradition. In this process, Burke’s disturbing legacy of showing the history of British encroachment into India as the advance of numerous small frauds was purged, and his crusade against Hastings fell into the category of mistakes that it would be a pity to dwell on. It is hard to legitimize power on the basis of an admitted series of robberies, which is how Burke framed the conquest of India. This isn’t to say that he wanted to give India back. A point we will get back to, perhaps. In any case, nobody was more acutely aware of these contradictions than John Stuart Mill, whose father, after all, wrote the standard history of India, and worked for the East Indian Company most of his life – as did Mill himself.

Okay, enough background. Here is an edited version of my first post.

James Fitzjames Stephen was a Victorian bravo, described in his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, as a man “massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness.” I imagine him as a sort of Mr. Rochester.

Stephen was a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge group, in the 1840s, well before it became the conglomeration of aestheticism and the higher buggery under Keynes and Strachey. This was where he met some of his lifelong friends, like Henry Maine, the legal historian. Stephen’s father was a famous civil servant, whose office was satirized as the Circumlocution office by Dickens in Little Dorrit. Needless to say, Stephen detested Dickens. Probably some strain of that detestation came down the family line – Stephen’s niece was Virginia Woolf.

This is from Leslie Stephen’s biographical entry about his brother in the National Biography, which Leslie Stephen wrote. It gives us some idea of the kind of person James Fitzjames Stephen was in his Cambridge years, and afterwards:

“He speaks of the optimistic views which were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth would slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot say how I personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time, he was aware of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the feelings of the great majority of my age and class, and which have ever since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I feel them now [1887] as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and thinks and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists; feelings of the most bitter contempt and indignation against those who feared them, truckled to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they could and as long as they could: feelings of zeal against all popular aspirations and in favour of all established institutions whatever their various defects and harshnesses (which, however, I wished to alter slowly and moderately): in a word, the feelings of a scandalised policeman toward a mob breaking windows in the cause of humanity. I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which gave me real pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he had been a man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a real sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He cannot, he admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's cowardice; and he never passed the Tuileries in later life without feeling the sentiment about Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid' expressed by Thackeray's drummer, 'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward, that had not the heart to defend it!'

'I have often wondered,' adds Fitzjames, 'at my own vehement feelings on these subjects, and I am not altogether prepared to say that they are not more or less foolish. I have never seen war. I have never heard a shot fired in anger, and I have never had my courage put to any proof worth speaking of. Have I any right to talk of streets running with blood? Is it not more likely that, at a pinch, I might myself run in quite a different direction? It is one of the questions which will probably remain unanswered for ever, whether I am a coward or not. But that has nothing really to do with the question. If I am a coward, I am contemptible: but Louis Philippe was a coward and contemptible whether I am a coward or not; and my feelings on the whole of this subject are, at all events, perfectly sincere, and are the very deepest and most genuine feelings I have.'”

Stephen was known as a not very subtle, but very ardent, debater. He went into law himself, and eventually devoted himself to grafting principles of English common law into the workings of the British Raj in India, completing Macaulay’s work. In actual fact, he did not spend a deal of time in India. But, on his return to England, he became a powerful figure in Indian politics, nonetheless. He became a power behind the throne in things Indian, a person to whose views a Governor of India had to hearken, a person to whom members of parliament went when they desired instruction on some point of colonial policy. Meanwhile, he was on his way to becoming a judge famous for his rather draconian style. Towards the end of his life, he became an embarrassment to the bench, since he was obviously suffering from the onset of senility.

It is said that on the boat back from India, Stephen, reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, devised his rebuttal, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

The book rather sank. Lately, however, it has become the subject of a little Tory cult.

Among the little band of Fitzjames Stephen's acolytes, none is fiercer than Roger Kimball of the New Criterion. Kimball, who has done his warrior bit in the Kulturkampf of the early nineties, rousting out tenured radicals and exposing them for the dubious souls that they are, has featured Stephen as a sort of Archangel Michael, putting the sword in the breast of that loathsome liberal toady of Satan, John Stuart Mill. Kimball’s loathing of Mill has breathed even in the pages of the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, where all conservative hobby-horses eventually find a home. But there's a problem. Mill is widely revered in Libertarian circles. Kimball represents one crucial side of the untidy conservative front. He is plainly unhappy with his libertarian allies.

In an essay in November, 1998, that served as the centerpiece for a later, book-length attack on liberalism, Kimball poured out the vials of his wrath on Mill. And, as is the way of New Criterion loathings and the mood of the time, he attacks him as a sexual being as well as a thinker. Kimball, like Ken Starr, is a great one for keeping up with the bedroom habits of his enemies. In Mill’s case, the great sin was one of omission, rather than commission. Kimball writes, of Mill's relationship to his wife Harriet, “it is noteworthy that this "lofty minded" relationship was apparently never consummated.” There are, it appears, no sexual depravities to which the liberal mind won’t sink - including chastity.

In this essay, Kimball referred to Stephen’s book, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The book has already been rescued by Richard Posner, and has found its way into the reading list of the Federalist Society. Here’s Kimball’s assessment of it:

”By far the most concentrated and damaging single attack on Mill's liberalism is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, first published serially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872-1873, and then in book form in March 1873 in the last year of Mill's life. It was written by the lawyer, judge, and journalist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894): Leslie Stephen's older brother and hence--such is the irony of history--Virginia Woolf's uncle. Mill himself never responded to Stephen's book beyond observing, as Leslie Stephen reports in his excellent biography of his brother, that he thought the book "more likely to repel than attract." But several of Mill's disciples responded--the most famous of whom was the liberal politician and journalist John Morley (1838-1923). Stephen brought out a second edition of his book the following year, 1874, in which he reproduces and replies to many criticisms raised by Morley and others. Stephen described Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as "mainly controversial and negative." Pugnacious and devastating would be equally appropriate adjectives. As one commentator put it, Stephen made "mincemeat" of Mill.”

One notes that there is nothing worthy, sexually, of noting about Stephen. Thank God.

The confused elements of American conservativism, circa 1998 - the longing for an established religion, the opposition to dissent, and the confused sense that the marketplace is no model for ideas - already form the base of Stephen’s politics. In fact, this is no surprise - Mill might have been an eminent Victorian, but Victorian society, in its imperial flush, was much better represented by Stephen than by Mill. Stephen articulates a type that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Shaw, in Heartbreak House (his best play - the only play of Shaw’s that LI re-reads, as we re-read Shakespeare’s plays), was talking of the Mill/Stephen split when he describes the difference between Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. Heartbreak’s liberalism, of course, was falling down around Shaw’s ears as he wrote. World War I was an unmistakable counter-blast to the genteel Victorian and Edwardian virtues, and seemed, at the time, to put an end to the matter. Shaw’s description of Heartbreak culture in the preface seems, to LI’s mind, alarmingly like contemporary academia, with the substitution of other references for Wells, of course -- try Foucault, or whoever:

”With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.”

Horseback Hall has, of course, few voices, because its texts are woven of such common-places of the governing classes as have, usually, no need for the exposure of literature, being content with the half-grunted affirmations of one's fellow club-men over a nice glass of port. However, Shaw creates a sort of ambassador from Horseback Hall in the play, Lady Utterword, whose husband, Hastings, has been a colonial governor over various tracts of the empire. At one point in the play, the house discovers a burglar, and there is a debate about sending for the police. If they do, of course, their names will be in the paper, which is the kind of publicity to which both Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall are constitutionally averse. Lady Utterword alludes briefly to her husband’s ways of dealing with crime:

”Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
England there is no real protection for any respectable person.”

Hastings Utterword, who never appears, in propria persona, on the stage, is embodied once and for all in that outburst. His type was invented by such as James Fitzjames Stephen.

pilate intro

Years ago, I played around with writing a series of essays – a small book, in fact, about the evolution of modern liberalism and conservatism from classical liberalism. My angle was this: the traditional model of the formation of political ideologies in the 19th and 20th century emphasizes the role of the conflict between labor and capital, with imperialism being derived from that central conflict. My idea was that this didn’t really capture the imperial effect. I thought that these essays could employ Pilate as a legend around which these issues gathered. In the enlightenment, Pilate had become a practical skeptic, a cousin of the enlightened ruler, dealing with religious enthusiasm by asking ‘what is the truth?” But in the 19th century, in Britain, there was a shift in the meaning of this legend. Just as the British empire became the new Rome, Pilate became a quietly heroic colonial officer, much like the officers in India, controlling the native inclination to superstition and riot. There was an exemplary controversy over the meaning of Pilate between John Stuart Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen: Stephen provided a certain template for the Right’s modern, uneasy compound of coercive moralism and libertarian economics against an earlier version of liberalism represented by Mill, for whom empire represented an incoherence in the system – a political entity that liberalism both relied on and could not justify.

In my opinion, the Enlightenment and the late nineteenth century uses of Pilate overlapped. So it rather delighted me that Tony Blair, famously, wrote an encomium of Pilate as a representative of the modern politician. Since the Iraq war has politicized the question, what is the truth, rather than the usual question, what are we to do, it struck me that following Pilate’s image was a way of tracing the ruse of reason in history.

Anyway, all of this is an intro to republishing those Pilate posts this weekend. I want to see what they look like, for one thing. Also, I don’t know if LI’s readers read them, or remember them – and hell, I don’t know if LI’s readers will care one way or the other, but I hope you'all do.

your mission, if you take it, is to destroy the department of War

Two stories in the last two days shed little pinpricks of light on the wholly, deeply, astonishingly disastrous reign of Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld has earned for himself a rare niche, as far as cabinet officers go. Usually, the worst ones are venal. The worst ones pocket money for selling federal mineral rights, or authorize bribes to quiet blown illegal operatives working for the White House. Rumsfeld is a different variety of cat. His mission has been to destroy the Department of War, and to do it while ensuring America’s defeat in Iraq against the insurgency. He came in with plans that would perfect the technostructure for our battle with Soviet forces on the plains of Poland, and has stuck to that task with all the vigor of the monomaniac in Dracula who collects flies. Apparently in the five long, long years he has been there, nobody told him that we aren’t endangered by Soviet forces any more. In an administration composed of Confederate re-enactors, I suppose it isn’t that odd that we have a Cold War reenactor as Secretary of War. It is sad, though.

The NYT today reported on a North Carolina felon who rehabilitated himself, at least financially, thanks to the Pentagon/Cheney plan for making spending in Iraq an excuse to directly route money to the network of pustular American war profiteers. If Haliburton gets its billions, why should we deny Robert Stein his paltry $82 million?

Unlike others who get out of prison and go through a period of uncertain employment, Stein got out of prison and made a beeline to where work was an unnecessary complement to Christmas. That is, he started working for the CPA in Iraq. Since the CPA was a pirate organization set up basically to steal Iraq’s resources and impose a thousand year neo-liberal Reich on the place (which lasted all of eighteen months), naturally they looked on pirates favorably.

As the NYT puts it:

“Along with a web of other conspirators who have not yet been named, Mr. Stein and his wife received "bribes, kickbacks and gratuities amounting to at least $200,000 per month" to steer lucrative construction contracts to companies run by another American, Philip H. Bloom, an affidavit outlining the criminal complaint says. Mr. Stein's wife, who was not named, has not been charged with wrongdoing in the case; Mr. Bloom was charged with a range of crimes on Wednesday.

In the staccato language of the affidavit, filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, Mr. Stein, 50, was charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, interstate transportation of stolen property and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
But the list of charges does little justice to the astonishing brazenness of the accusations described in the complaint, including a wire transfer of a $140,000 bribe, arranged by Mr. Bloom, to buy real estate for Mr. Stein in North Carolina. The affidavit also says that $65,762.63 was spent to buy cars for Mr. Stein and his wife (he bought a Chevrolet; she a Toyota), $44,471 for home improvements and $48,073 for jewelry, out of $258,000 sent directly to the Bragg Mutual Federal Credit Union into accounts controlled by the Steins.

Mr. Stein's wife even used $7,151.58 of the money for a "towing service," the complaint says. Much of this money was intended for Iraqi construction projects like building a new police academy in the ancient city of Babylon and rehabilitating the library in Karbala, the southern city that is among the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims.”

Stein obviously was inspired by Wolfowitz’s soaring rhetoric before the war, when the NYT reported on his testimony to the senate on February 28,2003:

Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.

Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.”

It would be just wrong to lavish that money on Iraqis, when Americans need their towing and jewelry looked after. And this is true even though – miraculously, who’d have thought it? We went past Wolfowitz’s high end estimate in eight months. But in the Bush administration, price is no object when you can stuff the pockets of your buddies with cash and you have the government to do it.

Well, wars are mostly about theft, and the U.S. policy of stealing greatly certainly didn’t begin with the Pentagon pumphouse gang under Rumsfeld. However, our biggest successes usually consist of getting some Central American caudillo to massacre peasants for us. Operating directly, with a black mask tied over our face, always gets us into Vietnam like situations.

Our second story, from the WSJ, is on a more technical matter. Having decided to occupy Iraq, in the first place, with far too few men, the Americans are now supposedly taking proactive measures. Every other day they launch much heralded offenses in Anbar province, or sweep through towns on Iraqi border with Syria, shooting people in great numbers and calling them insurgents – which is Pentagon speak for any Iraqi they have killed. In fact, D.C.’s pro-war clique has been chomping on the bit to attack Syria this year. Meanwhile, according to the WSJ, the Pentagon is withdrawing “foreign-area officers” from Iraq. They can’t afford em, it appears – not and go buying pieces of real estate in North Carolina, too.

What are foreign-area officers? In Iraq, they are officers trained to speak Arabic, and educated in Middle Eastern culture. The WSJ article concentrates on one “David,” who is deployed near the Syrian border:

“As they had done in the past, the Rangers took positions around each village and Bedouin encampment. At one village, an officer named David, accompanied by a small security team, strode into the center looking for someone who would talk. Unlike the clean-shaven, camouflage-clad Rangers, David wore a thick goatee and civilian clothes. The Rangers carried long, black M-4 carbine rifles. David walked with a small 9mm pistol strapped to his leg. The Rangers spoke English. He spoke Arabic tinged with a Yemeni accent.
As he recounts the day, David met a woman with facial tattoos that marked her as her husband's property. As they chatted, the pale-skinned, sandy-haired North Carolina native imitated her dry, throaty way of speaking. "You are Bedu, too," she exclaimed with delight, he recalls.

From her and the other Bedouins, the 37-year-old officer learned that most of the cross-border smuggling was carried out by Shamar tribesmen who peddle cigarettes, sheep and gasoline. Radical Islamists were using the same routes to move people, guns and money. Many of the paths were marked with small piles of bleached rocks that were identical to those David had seen a year earlier while serving in Yemen.”

As you can plainly see, having someone like David around doesn’t fit in with hiring mercenaries from GOP contributing “security” companies, so naturally they are taking him out.

“David is part of a small cadre of cultural experts in the Army known as foreign-area officers. The military would only allow him to be interviewed on the grounds that his last name and rank be withheld. U.S. officials say he'll be spending the rest of his career in the Middle East, often operating alone in potentially hostile territory. Naming him, they say, would make him more vulnerable to attack.

His colleagues in Iraq say his presence has been invaluable. "We ought to have one of these guys assigned to every [regional] commander in Iraq," says Col. John Bayer, chief of staff for Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, the commander of U.S. forces in the northern third of the country. "I'd love to say `assign me 100 of these guys.' "

That's not happening. Instead, the military is pulling David out of Iraq later this month along with seven other officers who make up his unit. Before the end of the year, David will resume his previous post in Yemen.”

And so it goes as we stay the course in Iraq. I wonder ‘stay the course” was what Bush used to say instead of chug-a-lug at the keg parties?

...

Notes:

Belated congrats to William Vollman for winning the national book award. I interviewed him this spring about Europe Central for Publishers Weekly, and found him a very genial sort of guy. He was surprised that I was such an ardent fan of Argall. I have very nice memories of reading Europe Central in a hammock, drinking a tequilla, in a garden in Mexico -- an oddly idyllic context within which to read about twentieth century butcheries.

Other note. I'm going on vacation next Tuesday. I'll be back the eighth of December. Those of you who have contributed to LI during the last couple of weeks - our official total was something like 450 dollars by November 15th, which wasn't bad -- should be sending me mailing addresses for your dopamine cowboy stuff, and telling me exactly what you want.