A LITTLE BAR POLITICS

So we find out that the groovy place to find girls on the island is the Whale Bar from the man who tells us, in a voice that runs through its syllables at the same rate that a blender on medium shreds a banana, how to get to the public dock to launch our kayaks. This was after we'd followed his advice about going down the river with the low tide and found out that the man was one of those souls who confuses right with left: a critical defect in a man who routinely gives directions. On the other hand, it is a defect I share as well. In any case, after the dolphins and the weird bird and the oar manipulation that is surely going to reverberate tomorrow -- although I need that upper body exercise -- and we are driving away after putting the boat back uptop the car and listening to the radio and we hear what the SOB president has to say about Iraq. This is after I am thinking of who to compare that combination of ignorance and incapacity to -- Admiral Horthy? Claudius? James II? So we elbow into the Whale bar and find a very diminished crew, and not a very female one there, but what the hell. The bartender turns out to be a live wire, matching us drink for drink even though it turns out that in South Carolina by some bizarre state law drinks can only be served from those tiny two ounce bottles of liquor that you get on airplanes. Anyway, this gray haired guy with that expression of a man of fifty who still loves the Beasty Boys starts to do a bit of a rap about Iraq, and I am pleasently surprised that - here in the heart of Bush zombiedom -- it seems to be over even for the believers. The rap begins with Murtha, god bless that bloodthirsty pol, and ends with a display of an ashtray in the shape of the state of Texas and the bartender putting his cigarette out in it and saying, and so fuck him. Meaning, of course, our idiot president, a man who has mistaken his own impotence for a Churchillian stance.

setting sail, or something

LI is leaving for an unnamed South Carolina island tomorrow. Probably we will be without a keyboard to hammer on. Instead, we are going to concentrate on the time honored tradition of manfully downing tequila shots while still managing to stay supine in a hammock – not so easy once you are past the first two, let me assure you. There are more dangerous sports, but surely this is a very televisable one. At least as televisable as poker, I would imagine. Still, the cables still haven’t got back to my agent on this.

In the meantime, we recommend highly the story about treasure hunting in last week’s New Yorker. Cynthia Zarin’s story of the emeralds that were dredged from mysterious depths by unknown hands – although covered by a story that specifies both depths and hands – is all about the most romantic of subjects, unearned wealth. To edenically find, rather than to toil and labor outside the garden – even if it is the Octopus’ garden, and the treasure one is digging up was long ago taken from the bloodied populations dying in various mines in Latin America in order to produce wonderful baubles. Here’s Zarin’s backgrounder:
“The Galeones de Tierra Firme fleet had set sail for Colombia, to pick up jewels from the Muzo and Chivor emerald mines, in the dense jungle region north of Bogotá. By 1567, the Spanish had wrested control of the mines from the Muzo Indians, who had kept their location secret for centuries. They forced captive Indians to work the mines until, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, harsh labor conditions and disease had decimated the population. "Muzo and Chivor produced the finest emeralds in the world," Rebecca Selva told me when I visited Fred Leighton. "The mines are fabled. These beautiful things come out of a very dark period of Latin-American history."

In September, 1714, the Galeones fleet sailed to Havana, and waited there for the New Spain Flota, which had left for Mexico in 1712 with orders for textiles and porcelain from the Far East (sent overland through Veracruz), as well as for gold, silver, and jewels. The boats also carried newly minted currency, cocoa, vanilla, paper, brazilwood, and animal hides. The official manifests, sent ahead to Spain, did not account for all of the goods on board: twenty per cent--the "Royal Fifth"-would be claimed as taxes, and many merchants bribed officials to underestimate their cargo. According to the ships' manifests, General Don Juan Estéban de Ubilla, the captain of the New Spain Flota, carried treasure for the Queen on the lead ship, La Capitana.

On July 24, 1715, the combined fleet, eleven boats in all, plus the Grifon, a French ship, which was sailing with the heavily armed fleet for protection from pirates, set off into the Straits of Florida. It was hurricane season. The three-masted galleons were up to a hundred and sixty feet long and forty-five feet wide, and held several hundred passengers and crew. A storm hit on July 30th. By early the next morning, all eleven boats in the fleet had been lost, propelled shoreward onto the jagged worm-rock reefs that edge the coast of southeast Florida. More than a thousand men drowned. According to the manifests, fourteen million pesos (the modern equivalent of about two hundred million dollars) in treasure was lost. Only the Grifon escaped.”
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atlanta notes 3

The aquarium proved to contain fish. Many, many fish, in scenic locales, and with background music to make your average ticket holder feel vaguely heroic, as though he was not visiting the Atlanta aquarium but shouldering through Jurassic Park.

I am not one to diss fish. I like them, I like them large, I like quantities of them swimming above my head or held in by auditorium wall sized glass. I liked them so much that at the end of my tour, I craved fish and chips. But LI’s major interest was not in the fish, but in the fish and people combo – people looking at fish.

The weather when we go to the aquarium was, for this Austinite (where the golfers are used to wearing their checked shorts under December skies, and the ac is always an option) astonishingly cold. But it was probably only in the forties. There was a milling crowd before the giant, well, ark shaped structure – what did you expect? – and we were all eager to see the wonders. Myself, I had not been instructed in the scandalous and sad lives of the beluga whales (“given to the aquarium by the owners of a Mexican Amusement Park because they knew the aquarium would take better care of them,” according to one helpful sign – but the news is these were abused belugas with the sores of Job when they arrived), or the supposed tantrums of the founder of Home Depot, whose money created the place, when news of his precious purchases, the surprises he apparently wanted to unveil before the awestruck town, was leaked to the paper. I had not seen the reporter with the Penguins, or with the sea lions, or with the sea dragon, or petting the skate. I was sorely lacking in background.

But I did what I could. I immediately bolted for the restaurant, having had no breakfast and it being five in the afternoon and all, and found the food unpalatable and expensive – which I expected. I even thought about getting a Coke. Coke is an unbearably sweet beverage which I cannot believe I relished as a kid. That adults drink it down – that my brothers finish cans of it without blinking – sorta astonishes me. I didn’t get the Coke. Then I proceeded to the ocean room, and was pleased as punch to watch kids watch fish float above them in the tunnel, and kids pile up at various places of advantage, held in place by their adoring and often aggressive parents. I don’t know what was made of the strangely macabre faces pulled by the sawtooth shark – if I was a four year old, I’d be a little leery. In fact, I always avoided certain animal photographs when I was a kid, close-ups of tarantulas and the like. But I was a whimpy kid. Still, I’d rather like some of the old gut fears kicking in when little humans, and big humans, confront those creatures with mouths and appetites big enough to swallow us down. My, what sharp teeth you have, granny. “The better to eat you with my dear” – perhaps this one sentence is the whole of the prophets and the commandments.

Actually, though, there was no creature like that. The whale shark, the star of this aquarium, is, I believe, a dedicated vegan – and I’m not googling to see if that is correct, for I’m in no mood to correct my impressions.

Getting back to the people-fish nexus: I did wonder, as people watched the large ocean aquarium for long intervals, about what it is that fills space in such a way that people are interested in it. What filled that space was an intense blue, a visible thickness of glass, various motions in the blueness, and odd shapes with eyes and prongs and cruciform tails. It is the life that brings this otherwise highly abstract (and beautiful) tableau into the aesthetic ken of a crowd that probably would be less patient of a painting or a video that eliminated the living parts but combined the same colors and the same motions. What they wanted, it seemed to me, was something to search for. I do too. Searching in crowds – being in a searching crowd – is, for me, a little hard to deal with. I get irritated. This is because I like searching to be a relatively private thing, something I do with a limited number of others. But I can’t really get very far with that irritation. Far better to forget it. I root around here between the urge to be snobbish and the urge to surrender all that pickiness and think of all the popular entertainments, all of the Coney islands, all of the ways of spending Sunday with the kids, and to not care really what I think about it at all.

In the end, though, it is a give us this day, our daily people-n-fish moment, as the Good Lord would have said if he had visited Atlanta’s museum today, no doubt.

Atlanta notes 2

Like certain plants which, removed from their native soil, have a tendency to lose their leaves, LI has an odd tendency to develop sore throats and skin rashes once removed from his apartment. Last spring, while skiing with my brothers, I suffered a faux heart attack that proved to be a pulled muscle in, of all places, my chest, caused by dragging piles of logs around for the cabin fireplace. This trip, I have endured a cold and, after a nice jaunt through a nature preserve in Gainesville, a nasty and inexplicable poison ivy rash. I’d like to think this is all some manifestation of proustian sensitivity, but more likely it is just that I am tempted to overexert myself stupidly around my family.

The Atlanta area in November is oddly bleak. November scours off the leaves, and the grass withers on lawn after lawn, and the sky lowers, tingeing the whole area in melancholic sepias. If all American suburban landscapes strive to be that Currier and Ives picture in the bathroom, this is the Currier and Ives reproduction that was left behind by the former inhabitants of the house, who are currently in prison for manufacturing meth. To keep your spirits up in such a landscape requires fireplaces and the flow of liquid spirits, or it requires massive shopping in massive malls. Coincidentally, there are massive malls all over the place in Gwinnett County. Myself, I went to a Fry’s store, a consumer electronics emporium determined to outdazzle Best Buy, and to fling open to the consumer the whole range of electronic gadgets that will make the consumer’s life a binging A/V paradise. In Fry’s, the clerks are so knowledgeable about the latest computer accessories that they rather disdain discussing the topic with customers, who are yahoos and insistent on buying accessories for ancient computers – computers that are two years old, for instance. The clerks will reluctantly point to various shabby boxes containing archaic things you can plug in your computer, but then they go back to their little conventicles and discuss everything in terms of acronyms and slashes – the SSA slash five, the ADA slash A. The glass bead game is gaining on me, and I grow old. I will keep the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Or something like that.

The latest Atlanta craze is the aquarium. We are going to see the aquarium this afternoon. If it is actually there, my theory will be proven wrong. My theory derives from the surprising difficulty in getting tickets to see the aquarium. It used to be that one lined up at a spectacle and bought tickets. No more. Now one has to be a season ticket holder. To be a season ticket holder, you buy your tickets over the internet. Those people who buy their tickets over the internet are preferred to those who merely show up and buy their tickets at the window. But buying tickets over the internet requires calling the aquarium people and being put on hold for hours at a time. Meanwhile, everybody claims that the aquarium is sold out solid for the next two weeks. This combination of difficulties makes me think that the building supposedly holding the aquarium is empty, that they ran out of money for fishes after putting it up, and that they now surround their mistake with the impenetrable shield of a ticket system designed to ward off anybody who desires a ticket.

Since we did get tickets, or at least receipts for tickets, my theory might not be true. We will see.

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.