there we go again...

Over at the Valve, there is a disturbing post about blogging. The writer claims that there is some convention that says that posts over 500 words are a waste of time, and that those who read blogs continually get impatient with reading longer matter.

Now, LI’s posts regularly come in a bit over the 500 word limit – sometimes by 500 words – and we are always referring to longer reading matter.

So the question here is: are we fucking up?

I notice that the Valve post says nothing about re-reading posts. That might be our out from having gotten the whole culture completely wrong. I hope so – we at LI are starting to feel like the elves that built the broken toys that ended up on broken toy island. We are talking mass despondency. One of our writers tossed the two hundred page post responding point by point to Petroski’s history of the paper clip (with many amusing details culled from the various memoirs of King Louis XV’s court)in the garbage can today. But …Many of our most popular posts are popular long after they have faded into the archives. That’s one thing. Especially the one's mentioning Aisha Qaddafi, for some reason. Let’s see. Oh, and we have always considered these posts to be like a cronica on hyperdrive, rather than seeking the mere comment-on-a-link comment. That’s another thing. Also, also many of our posts exist to amuse my friend, D., in the Portland area, and the crew of grave diggers that he works with at a public cemetery there. Grave diggers want the real thing, they don’t want 200 word balderdash – or dashed off balder, as it may be. D. tells me that the common complaint is that LI didn't dig deep enough, or square off the corners.

Also, we don’t get out enough. And also, also we have this graphomania problem…

poor richard's almanac, revised

The newest talking point by the pro-war side is to compare the irrationality of getting into the war with the irrationality of withdrawing from it. There was a post on Crooked Timber making this point, and I’ve read it in the Washington Post. My favorite, however, is Noah Feldman’s NYT Magazine piece

Now, the logic of this argument is pretty much the logic of Bush culture in general. For instance, 9/11 happened, as we all know, after Bush was warned about an upcoming attack, after he failed to take it seriously enough even to communicate his info to the Secretary of Transportation or ask the FBI for any further information. In fact, he went on a month long vacation. Now, in Bush cultural terms, this makes Bush the ideal leader in the fight against terrorism. Failure is the new success. Indeed, Bush went on to make a botch of capturing or killing Bin Laden, and then went on to make an epochal botch of Iraq.

To do this, of course, you need failures to help you. In Bush’s case, there is Rumsfeld, commonly felt to have grossly mismanaged the number of troops required to hold Iraq and thus kept around while he grossly mismanaged the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, from which failure he rebounded by the massive failure to pacify the budding insurgency in the Sunni sections of Iraq – in fact, he is poised for even greater failures in the next year, which is why he is indispensable. There is Wolfowitz, whose failure to come within a magnitude of the cost of the Iraq war is just the kind of thing to elevate him to the head of the World Bank. Etc.

Given this kind of background, a man educated into being competent to mouth the complacent idiocies that pass for foreign policy in D.C. like Feldman has leaped into the gap of defending our course to complete victory. Because he and his like massively failed to understand Iraq in the pre-invasion time and were fooled, or self-deceived, time and time again, they have a portfolio we can surely trust:

“A little less than a year ago, in the aftermath of the first Iraqi elections, the most irresponsible thing being said in Washington was that everything was going to be fine. Now, with the next set of elections scheduled for Dec. 15, the new irresponsibility is the increasingly respectable assertion that the war has already been lost. Irrational optimism has been replaced by unjustified pessimism. This is not some triumph of experience over idealism. One a priori ideological standpoint is simply giving way to another.”

I wonder, sometimes, whether it is right to name this the Bush culture, Bush being a minor politician and all. But statements like this reassure me. Bush may be a minor politician, but he is a major symbol of the Zeitgeist. Feldman’s utter lack of embarrassment reflects a certain narrative impudence that Bush specializes in. Who can forget the guy, after borrowing to an unprecedented extent in order to give tax breaks to the rich, claiming that the money he borrowed from FICA could bankrupt Social Security – since who knew if the U.S. was going to pay it back?

Poor Richard's almanac needs a new proverb to represent the new American wisdom. I propose this one: Keep hammering a crooked nail and it will straighten out all by itself.

How can you not love the Bush culture? It is drunk driving every day, with the whole nation – loads and loads of fun and casualties for the whole international family!

lies, the press, lies, the press

LI is struck by the lack of U.S. reporting on this story that comes, via Today in Iraq, from an AP report in The Hindu:

“Baghdad, Dec. 9 (AP): A group of Shiite and Sunni parties has signed a declaration condemning terrorism, urging a timetable for the end of the US military presence, and vowing never to normalise relations with Israel.
The parties to the "code of honour" included followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Sunni Iraqi Consensus Front.
The code also declared that resistance is a legitimate right and condemned "terrorism, violence, murder and kidnappings." The code is non-binding but it indicates what parties might choose to work together after the new parliament is elected next week.
Officials said al-Sadr was the driving figure behind the yesterday's pact.”
So, let’s get this straight. The prime minister of Iraq, for whom the U.S. is fighting, signs a declaration declaring that it is open season on U.S. fighters, as long as the shots and bombs don’t injure Iraqis. Of course, since this counters the D.C. clique’s perception of what the prime minister of Iraq should say, it will get no publicity. Further, the alliance between Chalabi and al-Sadr will get no publicity. Meanwhile, the U.S. papers will talk up Allawi and chuckle a bit about where he is getting his money from – yeah, that is a huge puzzle.
I read this in Homage to Catalonia the other day:
“The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”

I was reading William Everdell’s superb book, the First Moderns, the other day, and came across an unfamiliar name: Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. Everdell’s book explores the emergence of the “vortices” of modernism by tracking the various conjunctions of theory and practice not only in the obvious places, the big metropoles, but on the periphery. And, indeed, even in the metropoles modernism was a negotiation between outliers and the establishment. One of the monuments of modernism, Everdell claims, was invented by Weyler y Nicolau: the concentration camp. Or campos de reconcentraciòn, as he named them.

It is an interesting story. According to Everdell, Weyler y Nicolau, fighting against the Cuban insurgents in 1897, decided to experiment with an American invention, barbed wire. Why not string barbed wire around areas that were insurgent strongholds? Since insurgents weren’t formally organized, it seemed like a good way to contain them, a sort of cordon sanitaire. No sooner thought of then done. Soon camps sprang up, thousands of potential insurgents were surrounded by good, healthy barbed wire, and the dying started. The U.S. decided to protest the inhumanity, sending a note to Spain on June 24, 1897. The Spanish reply was interesting: the Spanish government noted that the cruelty of the camps was not different from the cruelty exercized by Sherman on his march to the Sea in 1864. Everdell digs up a clever conjunction of names, here:

“But Secretary Sherman [John Sherman, the man who had penned the American protest to Spain] probably knew better than any Spanish journalist how "cruel" Weyler's policies were, for he was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, the general who had become famous by marching from Atlanta to the sea and becoming the first to treat civilians as combatants in a modern war. The Spanish knew it, too. With a fine sense of irony, Madrid replied to Secretary Sherman's protest against what Spain was doing in Cuba by calling attention to what the Secretary's brother had done in Georgia and Carolina thirty years before.

We don't know who in the Spanish foreign ministry put that reminiscence in the note, but the odds favor Weyler himself. At the time of the March to the Sea, the future Captain-General of Cuba had been twenty-five, serving as the Spanish military attaché in Washington, and writing home about how impressed he had been by General Sherman's remarkable new interpretation of the laws of war.”

We like Benjamin’s image of human history as a multiplying pile of ruins observed by an appalled but impotent angel, but in many cases history seems more like a frightened monkey making its way over the trapeze equipment hanging from the ceiling of some big top, a matter of hairy leaps and enormous swings.

Weyler’s invention soon caught the eye of the British, who tried it out in South Africa; soon that caught the eye of the Americans, who were fighting a pesky war against the Filipinos.

“As near as we can tell, the first American concentration camps were built for the Filipinos in that month of November 1900, which means that the British were just ahead of the Americans in adapting Weyler's invention. By December 20, when General Order Number 100 on the treatment of civilian "war rebels" was issued by General MacArthur (this was Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas was to follow in his and Weyler's footsteps as proconsul of the Philippines), the ''reconcentration camps" were there to receive them.”

And so one aspect of modernism was launched. An aspect that has been with us persistently ever since, although Americans don’t like to notice their own use of reconcentration camp – how much more comforting to read, for instance, about nasty Lenin and his proto-gulag than to contemplate the fact that William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were responsible for more deaths in a lager than Lenin ever was. Bringing us, of course, to present day Falluja and the new American notion of the high tech reconcentration camp, all about getting your pass, plucking out genetic information, and in general treating the non-American human being like a hog prepared for slaughter.

Talking about which -- the Americans are up to their old tricks again. Another election looming. Another series of military actions, based in Anbar province, motivated by little more than the desire to prevent Sunnis from going to the polls. Last year, the game was to reconcile the Shi'ites to the American tote in Iraq, Allawi, by showing that Allawi was willing to slaughter Sunnis without compunction. This time the game has changed. The Americans have given up the idea of a minority ruling the Shi'ites, and are being used as tools by the present government. Having no choice, the Americans are embracing an obviously dubious bunch, hoping that allies like Chalabi will emerge to rescue the plan to steal the oil and make Iraq an American military platform. But we think the last named are yesterday's options -- they aren't going to happen.

For comic relief, the AEI publishes a ripe load of garbage by Ur-neocon, Fred Kagan, that is a joy to read. This is how these people talk to each other. It is a little weird reading this article in a publication that proclaimed, just six months ago, that the war was over and America had won -- apparently this is the afterimage of Mission Accomplished, the part of the trip where we slaughter -- or 'clean and hold' merrily merrily merrily. It is thinkers like Kagan that have made D.C. what it is today -- a rat's nest of second-raters.

action movie principalities

LI urges our readers to pick up the 11/28 issue of the New Yorker and read Tom Reiss’ quite instructive essay on the literature of invasion, “IMAGINING THE WORST.”

What we found most interesting about the essay was the knitting together of literature and surveillance. At the same time that Yeats’ was worried about choosing life or art, much lesser writers in England were worried about the lack of a security state, and they set about destroying the liberal English nonchalance that was decried, in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, by the Russian attaché who frightens Verloc.

Reiss’ essay begins with the first modern invasion fantasy, “The Battle of Dorking”, by a military man writing for Blackwood’s Magazine – that most tory and clubbable of Victorian magazines. The military man, Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney, had recently returned from India (ah, the imperial effect – see my little read and apparently tedious posts about which) in May, 1871, when the story was published. Just about the time that James Fitzjames Stephen was returning from India, too. A year after the battle of Dorking, Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – his plea for a combination of laissez faire economics and a coercive, militarist state – was serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette. Indeed, conservatism in the modern sense was hatching in the 1870s.

Reiss claims that Chesney was worried that the Prussian victory over France foreshadowed the end of British supremacy if the state did not wake up, smell the coffee, organize its people and spy on them in the huts and mansions to the fullest extent.

“The story's author, Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney, a British officer who had recently returned from India, was not motivated by literary ambition. Like many British observers, he was alarmed by Prussia's successful invasion of France in 1870-the French Army, Europe's largest, had been taken prisoner en masse in less than two months--and he worried that his country could suffer a similar fate. Blackwood's was read by many government officials, and Chesney, who had previously contributed articles on military matters, suggested to the editor, John Blackwood, that "a useful way of bringing home to the country the necessity for thorough reorganization [of the army] might be a tale." "The Battle of Dorking" was intended not to entertain but to shock, yet reaction to it showed that to the reading public the two sensations were intertwined. Chesney had accidentally invented the thriller.
Blackwood's reprinted its May issue six times. Then it published Chesney's story as an expensive pamphlet, which sold even faster: a hundred and ten thousand copies by July, continuing at a rate of approximately twenty thousand copies a week through the rest of the summer. Soon "The Battle of Dorking" was available throughout the British Empire, and in most European languages.”

Chesney’s literary inheritors have gone on to imagine attacks and fantastic salvation from the muscular, the wise, the espionage agent, the submarine captain, and the paranoid jack in the corridors of the Pentagon ever since. We found it rather fascinating that the two British secret services, MI5 and MI6, were prepared for by much literary softening up by the ineffable William Le Queux, a sort of Michael Ledeen of the Edwardian era. Le Queux was used by Lord Northcliffe, the press baron, to both pump up papers and to move the British polity away from its regard for privacy and its distaste for standing armies. In much the way James Bond functioned, for JFK, as a wet dream figure joining absolute power to the swinger (that ultimate rentier of sex), so, too, Le Queux used his sinister power to create, in literary patriots and unbelievably evil traitors, a desire for surveillance that had to find its institutional form, a symbol in search of matter. Le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser in 1909 led to an outcry, as Le Queux claimed, under the coy disguise of fiction, that there was a vast fifth column working to undermine Britain for Germany’s benefit.

“That March, the Secretary of State for War, R. B. Haldane, convened a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence to investigate the problem of foreign spies on English soil. What was known about the sixty-six thousand German agents scattered in the Home Counties? Was it true that they maintained a secret arms dump near Charing Cross Station? What about the strangers who had been seen sketching the neighborhood of Epping for the past two years? These rumors had originated with Le Queux. The subcommittee's chief witness was James Edmonds, a British Army colonel and friend of Le Queux, who oversaw a small "counter-espionage" effort in the War Office devoted to collecting news about spies and invasion plots, most of which came from novels and newspaper reports-and, of course, from his lunches with Le Queux. The novelist supplied Edmonds with the "information" he needed to argue before the subcommittee about the need for a domestic intelligence service. (Many of the alleged encounters with spies described in the subcommittee's notes are attributed to "a well-known author.") Three months later, the subcommittee authorized the creation of the British Secret Service.

The Army was given responsibility for domestic intelligence, which became MI5; the Navy was put in charge of a new foreign espionage service, which became MI6. (This is why James Bond is sometimes referred to as Commander Bond and occasionally wears a naval uniform.) However, the new Secret Service devoted its resources not to pursuing spies but, rather, to establishing a vast, J. Edgar Hoover-like card-file register of "suspicious reports"--essentially the institutionalization of Le Queux's publicity stunts. Over the next several years, Scotland Yard's Special Branch investigated more than eight thousand suspicious aliens, but in September, 1914, the agency issued a report declaring that it had found no evidence of bomb plots or "of any kind of military organization" in Britain. By 1917, MI5 held dossiers on more than thirty-eight thousand individuals, and at the end of the war it employed a staff of three hundred and twenty-five clerks, simply to maintain the card-filing system.”

It is funny how the thriller and it cousin, the Action movie, have legitimized the militarization and coercion dreamt of by Stephen and other of the bureaucrats who managed India. With an action movie figure as the governor of California and a man whose only military experience is playing a soldier in the Mission Accomplished Infomercial pretending to be our commander in chief, art has joined with life all too well. Politics has turned into an action movie which each of us dreams in a different way – which is partly why it is so disgusting. Of course, this isn’t quite the art Yeats meant. In Ego Dominus Tuum, there is a nice (elitist) passage about art and life, and I’ll close with it:

“For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular, and full of influence;
And should they paint or write still is it action,
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?”

notes of a non-native son

The codex of everyday life is lost. The epiphanies of Babylonian woodchoppers, Sea Island cotton pickers, line order cooks and leasing agents have been scattered irretrievably in the ethereal babble that hugs the glob, a smog of unknowing. Long ago I vowed this wouldn’t happen to me. I’d take a toehold in life and battle death. It is the only reason I give a shit about politics, philosophy, art, or any of the grander vistas. So far I haven’t kept my promise. Defeat after defeat, you know. But I’m still here, and I still might.

…

My old man made his money in temperature modification. He started out as a farmer, switched to carpentry, and then discovered his real road to wealth as an HVAC man. At one point he deviated, trying to make an endrun around his fate by becoming the ice mogul of metro Atlanta, which is why I spent my youth, like Dickens, in a factory. Charlie put labels on boot polish, I believe. I bagged ice: ten and fifty pound bags and the treacherous twelve pound blocks – treacherous because you had to take the metal canisters that contained the blocks out of the coolant with cold hands and try to get them to slip out of there. It was easy to get cut. However, in the wake of the oil crises of the seventies, my old man’s dreams folded – the price of gas for the van skyrocketed, as did the price of the plastic bags for the ice, as did the coolant, which used some petro derivative. The coolant was your ultimate enviro unfriendly, and could be met with in nature only on the surface of Jupiter. So the old man brooded, and then went back to HVAC.

My brothers followed in that path, or at least in the path of mechanical aptitude, carpentry, and the ability to fix heating and air conditioning. They are now jack-of-all-trades in Atlanta, where the real estate boom has made such knowledge as good as gold. Which brings me to yesterday.

All through my post college life I have dabbled with extreme poverty. At the lowest points, my bros have intervened, often hiring me as a tote. I didn’t inherit the old man’s aptitudes. I nail a crooked nail, need a diagram to jump start a car, and my idea of temperature modification is sleeping naked under the sheets. However, what with the cost of the vacation and my lack of editing work, I’m ready for any job at the moment. So yesterday I was out there with my bros, replacing one and one and a half ton a/c units at a property in the North part of Dekalb county.

A “property”… That word. Geologists, by examining pebbles and soils in a given area, can reconstruct its long history. The same thing can be done, in human terms, by listening to the terms and phrases and nicknames that occur and reoccur among a given set of persons. The group is bound together by ties not only as public as family and region, but also by ties so hidden that the group’s members are unaware of them. Exiles can die for lack of these hidden ties, and the misbegotten from too much of them, from being suffocated by the words you hear casually exchanged at a dinner table. Property is a word that comes up frequently in the conversations of my brothers, and it has a particularly ring. To me, it means parking lots at ten in the morning, pittus porum or juniper, porches, the grill area and the car wash area, the leasing office. My brothers started out as apartment maintenance men and they have in their heads the long histories of the various Gables, Arbors, Traces, and Smoke Rises that have appeared in the metro Atlanta area since the early eighties. How many times have I myself paced a property, checked the levels in the pool room, laid down pea gravel drains, cleaned trash from the common areas and leaves from the gutters? Yesterday’s task was a simple one: I had merely to cut the a/c units out of their boxes, put the serial numbers in the packets that came with each box, dolly them into position, and dolly out the junkers.

For the resident, an apartment complex is a hive of different living quarters. For the maintenance man, it is so many puzzles and problems. Is there a trip rise problem with the concrete slabs that comprise the walk in the back? Are the a/c units hidden for maximum invisibility behind the shrubs in front, or down some flight of stairs? Is there a dog in apartment X? And can you take a leak out behind the maintenance man’s shop?

The work went surprisingly fast. This is, for my bros, absolute crème. In my family, the movie hero we all respond to is the rebel a/c man in Brazil: get in, work fast, get out. On the other hand, if you aren’t used to toting units, the end of the day comes with a muscle crash. Yours truly felt that crash today, winging back to Austin.

birthday greetings

It is LI’s birthday today. I am going out to some Gwinnett county restaurant to celebrate. The telegrams, of course, have been pouring in: “Little Father of the Revolutionary Movement! We pledge to die for you!” is typical. Others (Comrade Commandante!” and “Our Lady of the Sacred Heart that waters all Living Beings” also seem to be popular salutations) have been highly complimentary. What can we say? We’ve already written several poems to ourselves, comparing ourselves to the Sun, the demiurge, the snake with no name, and Br’er Rabbit.

Presents, too, abound. Last week, the White House gave us a special present by revealing that Bush’s current Iraq speeches are being penned by a man named Feaver. And then there was this NYT story that Weicker just might challenge Lieberman. Oh bliss indeed, to see Joe Lieberman forcibly retire to some million plus a year job pushing accounting “reform” for some major lobbying group of business thugs! Weicker, however, is an old man and predicts that he would lose his bout – but says something important:

Mr. Weicker, who discussed his willingness to run against Mr. Lieberman in response to questions from reporters after he spoke to the Hartford Rotary Club on Monday, emphasized in an interview later that he was not making plans to run. If he did run, however, he said he would run as an independent and oppose Mr. Lieberman solely on the war.
"Out!" he said, summarizing his position on what the United States strategy should be in Iraq. "We'd get out of Iraq. I'm not going to tell you it should be on Feb. 16 or something, but six months to a year, we're out. Otherwise you get all these mealy statements."
Mr. Weicker, noting that he had lost to Mr. Lieberman once, said his prospects in a rematch were "probably pretty poor."
"I'm not somebody who wants to put his track record on the line for some quixotic pursuit," he said, "but how do you bring the issue of the war to the country otherwise?"

And then, to put icing on my cake, the Business section of the Times had a beautifully brief report on Mr. Scrushy. Scrushy is the the excrutiating crook from Health South who finagled his way into an innocent verdict (a case that, heavens, didn’t cause the white riot that ensued after the OJ Simpson case, even though Scrushy essentially used the same racial tactics, palling up, suddenly, to black churches and the like to influence a black dominated jury – but somehow white millionaires getting off from charges of murder, fraud, or whathaveyou never really sends white America into a froth – hell, Tom Delay is using a lawyer who essentially freed a white millionaire who cut his next door neighbor into little pieces, and who really gives a shit?). And these words make us melt into a sort of masochistic glee, a (dangerous) bittersweet butter, so indicative are they of the moral blindness of those figures generated by the business culture:

“But Scrushy, who has talked about returning to HealthSouth and regularly criticizes the current management, also conceded he will not return to the Birmingham-based medical services company, which he often refers to as one of his children.

''I recognize that I will not be part of the board or the management team of HealthSouth,'' he said. ''Still, I built the company and remain a major shareholder of the company and regardless of what anyone says, I want the best for HealthSouth.''

Scrushy said he also wants the company to pay his legal bills, a claim the company said amounts to some $25 million.

HealthSouth spokesman Andy Brimmer called Scrushy's resignation from the board ''long overdue.''

Ah, to expect the company you defrauded to pay for your legal expenses – it is too delicious! It is Bush culture in overdrive! Give this man a job in the Pentagon. And on my b-day, too.

Betting is on, by the way, on whether Scrushy gets his 25 million or not, with the odds being, I would imagine, in favor of a more limited, negotiated 10 million dollar deal.