a few humble suggestions

H.L. Hunt was a genius in many ways – or perhaps the better word is idiot savant. One of his firm beliefs was that the wealthier you are, the more votes you should get. Hunt’s prophetic vision, which was poo pooed in the sixties, has proven itself to be the bedrock of current American politics. As D.C. insiders look at the Abramoff scandals, they are as one in having this kind of response, from the WP’s Tom Edsall:

“If history is any guide, there may well be some forms of lobbyist reforms passed but there will continue to be as much or more money flowing in the system. There are some benefits if new laws increase transparency, but attempts to restrict the influencing of legislators has in the past simply created roadblocks that soon can be driven around.”

This view of the everduring power of corruption, which is also known as the lie there and enjoy it doctrine, should be used to reform how we do our national business. LI thinks that the biggest reform, one that is urgently called for, is to stop letting States elect representatives. Rather, corporations should. We know, for instance, that the current House Republican contest between John A. Boehner, who is listed as representing a district in Ohio, and Roy Blunt, who is listed as representing a district in Missouri. This is much like LI claiming to be a citizen of Dekalb Country, Georgia, which we last lived in decades ago. Obviously these two men took the earliest opportunity to flee the hinterlands, as so many go-getters do. Once launched, they hooked up with like minded people who could see, at a glance, that these men were the kind of guys Post-Reagan America is built on – wired for servility, unscrupulous, greedy, and willing to implement a win win plan to piss on their grandma’s graves if it meant they could eat a free lunch tomorrow.

So, having shaken the dust of Ohio and Missouri from their expensive shoes (dollars to donuts that eventually, when they retire or are defeated, they remain in D.C.), who does Boehner and Blunt really represent?

Blunt is easiest. He represents Philip Morris. It is really an injustice that yokels in Missouri who don’t have a pot to piss in or a McMansion to lounge around in have anything to do with his seat in Congress. Adjusting the law to allow Phillip Morris’ stockholders the right to elect him would align, we think, the interests of the people who count in the country with the governing class. Boehner, who is more of a Renaissance man, represents the Baby Bells, the Tobacco industry, and Sallie Mae, according to the Post. He also gives fabulous parties, apparently. I think that here a law that forced him to choose – does he represent SBC, or Sallie Mae – would be best for all parties.

A House of Representatives that was elected by the stockholders of the corporations they represent would, we think, get the approval of such D.C. observers as Edsall. The liberating disappearance of hypocrisy would also do us good in our war against terrorism – for what is good for the D.C. establishment is automatically good for our war against terrorism. I hope no reader of this blog doubts that.

Finally, after our reforms are enacted, we might think of building some kind of monument to H.L. in D.C. – I’d suggest tearing down the Vietnam memorial to do so, since that memorial is defeatist and doesn’t include the names of those of our men who bravely guarded our own soil, like our President and Vice President, during our time of peril back in the Sixties. If we keep harping on casualties, as we know, we are doomed as a great power.

sin camp for me

LI’s work load has suddenly shot up. This means that we are going to be a little less diligent in filling out our readers days with those happy juxtapositions that make this blog so much like the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

In the meantime – we rather missed all the Beatles folderol last autumn, but we must recommend this link for the deeper meanings of Paperback writer: Into the Abyss, by Thomas Ramirez, author of Troop Tramp, of Girls for Gil Savage, and of course Sin Camp. All sixties paperbacks put out for the heavy breathing crowd as quickly as you can put things out. LI definitely enjoyed the atmosphere:

“Many of my alleged plots came out of my own fevered brain. But after awhile, as expected, I was bound to run out of ideas. Thus I took to borrowing plots from fellow authors. A couple examples: Sin Camp [by Anthony Calvano, NB1545, 1961] was a spin on James Jones’ epic From Here To Eternity. Once I even stole some Buenos Aires carnival stuff from Rona Jaffe.
National Geographic became a major resource as I set my stories in every place under the sun – the diamond fields of Brazil, Arabian oil sheiks, Denmark, Germany, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Etc. Read the article, study the photos – my readers were there! My plots featured bootleggers, the aforementioned white slavers, mobbies of all sorts, the fashion industry, the cosmetics industry, and one even delving into the electronics racket – the first flat TV screen was featured in one of my novels. (Was I ahead of the curve or not?) Another book, based in Appalachia, later appeared on TV as The Waltons. Can you believe? Dirty crooks! “
Ramirez and his wife Fern were willing to take time off from his dayjob to experience the derangement of the senses necessary to create his masterpieces:
“An overnight in Tijuana, Mexico (definitely on-the-scene research) on May 11, 1962 on my way to San Diego to do other library-lookup was used and embellished extensively in Lust Slave [MR457, 1962]. (See pps. 98-107 starting with “The Red Door.”)
That night Fern and I somehow got suckered in by one of the gypsy cabbies – “Taxi to zee border, señor?”– who promised a party. What did we know? We ended up at a crib and were settled in a waiting room until the sleazy male host appeared to ask about our special kinks. Did we want to watch, how about a guy for the wife or a gal for me? Or maybe ménage a trios?
We settled for viewing a grainy, black-and-white porno film – made back when the men wore black socks during screw scenes – while on a couch across from us, another guy was doing pre-fuck drills with his Mexican whore. To this day I can still visualize that long, gloomy hall where we entered, looking down the line where the dozen-or-so prostitutes – many of whom couldn’t have been over thirteen, fourteen – sat in chairs outside each crib, waiting on business. “

Ramirez burnout is, mas o menos, what LI went through two years ago, giving up book reviewing:

“So it went, year after year. Along about Nightstand number 70, I began to agonize over the sameness of it all. I was getting burned out. Was I going to be writing crotch the rest of my life? It got harder and harder for me to bring anything new to my novels. By this time (I once received a note from an editor asking for partial rewrite, and in an aside he asked why I was such a pussy in my sex scenes – couldn’t I bring myself to write fuck, tits, cocks?) I was using all the words and, God, weren’t they so deadly wearisome?”

smoke, mirrors, nonsense

LI doesn’t think that, at this point, reason will prevail about the so called war on terrorism. Still, it is a good idea to repeat: the U.S. is spending about 400 million dollars per terrorist head. Mostly, the terrorists are illiterate, unemployed guys like the ones profiled in the NYT Magazine article by Jonathan Mahler. Mostly the money is dispersed to National Security industry types who spend it hosting conferences in chic hotels about distributing largesse in Wyoming and such. We know exactly where most of the terrorists are – we don’t even need to tap phones for that. They are practically listed in the phone book. We’ve known where they are for the last five years. We have no intention of actually spending any money or real effort to get rid of them. We prefer them to be on tap. Nothing is better for a large security industry than a couple of attacks per decade. Not of course that the Bush administration’s incredible inability to do almost anything real about terrorism since 2002 is simply dishonest. I’d credit them with massive stupidity, too. Never let it be said that LI is unfair.

And, due to unemployed taxi drivers in Yemen, it appears we have to crush the Bill of Rights like a dirty Dixie Cup and trust Dick Cheney.

LI doesn’t think you can fool all the people all of the time. To do that, you need objective journalism. But even with all the Washington Post’s editorial writers and all the King’s men, eventually Americans might wonder why we are fighting people, on the one hand, and preserving a terrorist organization, on the other hand. It might begin to make no sense.

Not, of course, that nonsense has ever been a bar to policy.

from pirate to preacher -- the civilizing mission

"Aged 44. Fell into sea … Witnessed by a lady called Mrs Foley with three young children. Body not found - weather terrible. Did not appear to attempt to swim. No visible efforts. Screams. She tried to reach down. Suddenly he was swept under and disappeared. He was upright in water. Was wearing boots."

That was the end of one of LI’s favorite novelists, J.G. Farrell. It came in 1979, when he was at the height of his powers, having just finished Singapore Grip. LI reviewed Singapore Grip for Newsday a couple of years ago, in a summer Sunday supplement devoted to rediscovering older novels. Alas, a cursory search via Google and Factiva has found no trace of our compressed masterpiece, but we like to think that it did some good – after all, last year NYRB books reissued Singapore Grip, along with Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur. These three books – one set in Singapore in 1940, one set in Ireland in 1920, and one set in India in1856 – made up Farrell’s Colonial trilogy. The standard writer with whom to compare Farrell is Paul Scott, whose novels also deal with the British imperium – at least, the Raj. But Farrell is much funnier than Scott. If, as a Victorian historian once famously said, the British put their empire together in a fit of absent mindedness, Farrell’s novels provide us with the agon of absent mindedness – Oedipus at Collonus wondering where he’d put the dratted binoculars, don’t you know.

Although I read Troubles and the Singapore Grip, I had never read The Siege of K., the most famous novel in the series, since I couldn’t seem to find it at a bookstore or in a library – save the University library, where I would have to read it. I don’t mind going to the U.T. library, flopping down on the sixth floor, and reading some French or German guy, but not Farrell. He definitely requires a comfortable pillow and an intimate enough space in which one’s laughter doesn’t draw stares. Anyway, last week I found it – so I’ve been reading it and, of course, laughing – and admiring. Figuring out.

I’m aware that my description of Farrell’s work might make one think of him as some professional nostalgist, like the writer of all those Navy historicals. He is nothing like that. The battle of Krishnapur, of course, never took place because Krishnapur never took place – it is a made up city. Farrell, however, has a wonderful sense of how history doesn’t happen so much as wander around. And he sees, correctly, that the Indian Mutiny or the Sepay Revolt or the first war of Indian independence – the latter being the most accurate title – was a transformative Victorian moment. The attitude of the British rulers of India, in the first half of the 19th century, was very different from the attitude of the British rulers in the latter half of the 18th century. The unexpected outcome of the Impeachment of Hastings and Burke’s effort to make known the mass massacre and robbery being committed in India was that the robbers moved from the tolerance – the Enlightenment relativism – of Hastings and William Jones to the moralism of Macaulay. Macaulay’s preserved the Whig ideal of progress by merging it with a new view of the ‘Asiatik’ in which reverence was replaced by contempt – the whole of Indian civilization, in this view, was nonsense. The British role was to replace that nonsense with the most advanced products of real civilization: the calculus of utility, the steam engine, and of course Christianity. In this, Macaulay was following in the footsteps of a Scot, Charles Grant. Grant wrote a famous paper, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain."that was actually printed by the House of Commons in 1792 -- a date that is, not coincidentally, also a time of great anxiety about the French Revolution. Grant’s view was the opposite of the old toleration:

“It has suited the views of some philosophers to represent that people as amiable and respectable; and a few late travellers have chosen rather to place some softer traits of their characters in an engaging light, than to give a just delineation of the whole. The generality, however, of those who have writ ten concerning Hindostan, appear to have concurred in affirming what foreign residents there have as generally thought, nay, what the natives themselves freely acknowledge of each other, that they are a people exceedingly depraved.”

Although some of the terms in Grant’s rhetoric are now moderated or changed, basically his Inquiry sets up a framework that still throbs just beneath the skin of the enterprise now unraveling in Iraq, with the same assumption that the invaders, who have just spent the last century pillaging and robbing, can now be regarded as moral arbiters, and the fruits of their civilization (gained, of course, by the profits accruing to the aforesaid pillaging and robbing) can be shared, for a price, with an ungrateful but ultimately redeemable native population. The performative audacity of the this act is distributed throughout the imperial mindset – it is, in essence, the imperial effect, which LI has written bored our readers with before. The neo-conservatives, or the Cold War liberals before them, entered a field that was mapped out…

''his wish is not to excite detestation, but to engage compassion, and to make it apparent, that what speculation may have ascribed to physical and unchangeable causes, springs from moral sources capable of correction"

Which, of course, brings me back to the particular excellencies of J.G. Farrell. I will put some excerpts in the next, or at least some future, post.

B58/732 was pulled in by mistake

David Ignatius has a nice profile of Cheney’s Cheney, as he calls him: one David Addington. Addington has the typical cold war criminal’s profile: active in Casey’s CIA as the illegal operations were mounted against the Sandinistas, a big supporter of torture, the kind of enabler who emerges in certain historic situations – the dirty war in Argentina, the conservative support for the jihadis in Afghanistan – always on hand to make sure that the worst are not only full of passionate intensity but have the blowtorches and the electric generators they need to put in a good eight hours:

“A special target of Addington's needling during the first term was John B. Bellinger III, at the time the chief legal adviser to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Addington would attack any sign of caution or wariness from Bellinger about proposed policies, breaking in to say, "That's too liberal," or "You're giving away executive power," remembers a colleague. Bellinger is now Rice's legal adviser at the State Department.

Addington's most bruising fights have been with colleagues at the Justice Department and the Pentagon who challenged his views on interrogation of enemy combatants. He pushed Justice's Office of Legal Counsel to prepare a 2002 memo authorizing harsh interrogation methods. When that memo was later withdrawn, Addington was furious. Last year, he successfully blocked the appointment of one critic, Patrick Philbin, as deputy solicitor general, even though Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted him in that role. Also last year, Addington was so adamant in resisting the efforts of a Pentagon official named Matthew Waxman to limit interrogation that Waxman eventually quit and is now moving to the State Department.”

Which of course reminds me of two scenes from one of my favorite movies about the Bush administration:


“KURTZMAN is pacing anxiously. SAM walks into the office.
During the brief opening and closing of the door we just
manage to hear the piano player in "Casablanca" singing,
"... a kiss is just a kiss ...". KURTZMAN is too worried
to notice. He is holding a piece of paper gingerly as if
it were contagious. He waves it frantically as SAM enters.

KURTZMAN
(hysterically)
Thank God you're here! We're in
terrible trouble! Look at this! Look
at this!

He thrusts the piece of paper at Sam.

SAM
(taking the paper)
A cheque.

KURTZMAN
The refund for Tuttle!

SAM
(startled)
Tuttle?

KURTZMAN
I mean, Buttle! It's been confusion
from the word go! He's been wrongly
charged for Electromemorytherapy and
someone somewhere is trying to make
us carry the can!

SAM
I've never seen a Ministry cheque
before.

KURTZMAN
We've got to get rid of it! There's
been a balls-up somewhere, and when
the music stops they'll jump on
whoever's holding the cheque!

SAM
Send it to somebody else. Send it to
Buttle. It's his cheque.

KURTZMAN
I've tried that! Population Census
have got him down as dormanted, the
Central Collective Storehouse
computer has got him down as deleted,
and the Information Retrieval have
got him down as inoperative ...
Security has him down as excised.,
Admin have him down as completed

SAM
Hang on.

SAM sits down at the console and punches keys. He does
this very efficiently, muttering to himself and generally
demonstrating an expertise which obviously leaves KURTZMAN
way out of his depth, until -

SAM
He is dead.

KURTZMAN
Dead! Oh no! That's terrible! We'll
never get rid of the damned thing!
What are we going to do?

SAM
Try next of kin.”


But Addington’s role, when the movie is made, should really be played by Michael Palin. Who can forget him as Jack Lint?

JACK
How much do you know?

SAM
Not much.

JACK
Enough though, eh?

SAM
(getting sucked into this
exchange)
Not really, no.

JACK goes over to the sink and turns on the taps full
blast, splashing the water noisily into the basin.

JACK
OK. OK. Let's not fence around ...
This is the situation. Some idiot
somewhere in the building, some
insect, confused two of our clients,
B58/732 and T47/215.

SAM
B58/732, that's A. Buttle isn't it?

JACK
Christ! You do know it all!

SAM
No, no, I don't. I'm just beginning
Honestly. Sorry, carry on.

JACK
Well, your A. Buttle has been
confused with T47/215, an A. Tuttle.
I mean, it's a joke! Somebody should
be shot for that. So B58/732 was
pulled in by mistake.

SAM
You got the wrong man.

JACK
(a little heated)
I did not get the wrong man. I got
the right man. The wrong man was
delivered to me as the right man! I
accepted him, on trust, as the right
man. Was I wrong? Anyway, to add to
the confusion, he died on us. Which,
had he been the right man, he
wouldn't have done.

SAM
You killed him?

JACK
(annoyed)
Sam, there are very rigid parameters
laid down to avoid that event but
Buttle's heart condition did not
appear on Tuttle's file. Don't think
I'm dismissing this business, Sam.
I've lost a week's sleep over it
already.


That last sentence about sums up the moral sense of the crewe of thugs who rule us. At one time we thought that the New Left was essentially bogus, making up caricature monsters of oppression against which to let fly their cries of outrage. And now those caricature monsters exist. Life imitates art once again.

Vince Young, mon amour

I saw the best football game I will ever see tonight. With rabid U.T. football fans, five babes and four year olds strewing toys all over the floor, and beer, which I wasn't planning on drinking this week (this was juice/purify the body week) in my belly and roaming the fretted paths of the consciousness.

U.T. -- Champions. A lovely, lovely game. And Vince Young owns this town.

ps

Last night, I finagled a spot watching the Rose Bowl game with two friends who were going to a third friends house. The house was down in Kyle, in a new, rather raw subdivision, one of those cruel exposures of wood and glass and brick to the pitiless Texas sky, the trees and other vegetation having been thoroughly routed by bulldozer and just creeping back into precarious existence via the aboriculture of some of the more green-thumby householders. There were approximately four infants scattered around the living room, three of them appropriately dressed in burnt orange, before the large screen tv that could do amazing things (my own tv can’t really get tv channels – rather I switch from one cloud of staticy unknowing to another, with figures vaguely looming out and disappearing - so I use it solely to watch dvds, and am rather out of the loop re tv technology – which is why I audibly wondered at the marvels available via remote – for instance, stopping a show and going backwards – like any yokel from the sticks with shit on his boots, and my friends explained to their friends that I was a bit retarded, but generally harmless). There were three male U.T. fans and two female U.T. fans. There were a variety of plastic blocks and toys fanned out across the rug. There was at any time four bottles of beer or two glasses of wine being drunk. There was much denunciation of the obvious media bias towards USC (led by yours truly, always keeping a nasty eye out for bias). And my friend’s friend was a fan of my type: bobbing up and down, yelling at the tv, and in general subject to mild epileptoid fits of appreciation or vituperation that rated well up on the calorie scale. My friend’s friend claimed that if U.T. won, he would celebrate with me by smashing all the car windows in the neighborhood (since I pointed out that the appropriate way to celebrate winning a championship is, traditionally, a riot). But we didn’t break any car windows or even burn any tires. We did race outside screaming at the top of our lungs. If we had been in Austin, ours would have simply been part of the chorus of voices – but Kyle is quieter, and I think we were the only people in the neighborhood making a ruckus. Then, going home, we got caught in the spontaneous parade down Guadalupe of college kids in pickup trucks (the most bizarre use of a pickup truck is that of transporting an eighteen year old from his apartment a half a mile from the campus to a university in which he invests a mile of driving time to looking for a parking space, as if it took an extra ton of metal to accomplish this noble deed), and watched a cop decide to let the four way stop on Guadalupe and 14th work its own knots and peculiarities out.

any primary products for you today, ma'am?

If LI were Evo Morales – a thought out of H.G. Wells, no? – we would definitely be taking notes about the recent Russia-Ukraine tiff. Putin "hates" Mr Yushchenko and is happy to try to undermine him,” according to the Financial Times in an article that overviews the recent, slow return of resource companies to state control.

State control does not mean total state control, however. It means that the state has a majority share in Gazprom and Rosneft, oil and gas groups. This, we think, is a logical fit for Russia. Both groups have private investors, but given the Russian national economy’s strengths and weaknesses, it never made sense to make Russia into neo-liberal heaven – consideration of the right mix of private to public enterprises should have made the state very cautious about giving away its crown jewels. In fact, no country in its right mind gives away its high value resource extraction industries – witness the recent dustup in this country when China made an offer for Conoco.

“In the past two years, [Putin] has set about creating those groups. Using occasionally questionable methods, he has restored to state control energy assets that were privatised cheaply a decade ago. Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, in late 2004 bought the main production arm of Yukos, the oil company built up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky - now serving a nine-year sentence in a Siberian prison for fraud and widely seen as the victim of a politically motivated campaign.
Last autumn, the Russian state increased its stake in Gazprom, the gas giant that controls about 20 per cent of the world's natural gas reserves, from 38 per cent to 51 per cent, moving from de facto to de jure control. Gazprom then bought Sibneft, the oil group controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea Football Club owner, for Dollars 13.1bn in Russia's biggest merger.

Finally, Mr Putin has just signed into law measures to lift long-standing restrictions on foreigners owning Gazprom's remaining 49 per cent free float. Some analysts believe the influx of international investors could double Gazprom's market capitalisation to as much as Dollars 300bn (Pounds 172bn, Euros 250bn), putting it among the world's top companies. Rosneft, meanwhile, is being prepared for an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange this year that Russian officials have suggested could value it as high as Dollars 72bn.”

Those who, in the nineties, were critical of ‘shock therapy’ will now get a chance to see if the model that worked so successfully after WWII – a private economy with a large state stake– will work for Russia. The danger to governance is obviously underlined by Putin’s use of natural gas as if it were his own private dagger. When there are no impediments to direct executive control of these enterprises, they are always going to be subject to this kind of gross corruption. State control shouldn’t mean straight executive control.

Read Chris Floyd’s analysis for comments on the hypocrisy of certain of those who are condemning Putin at the moment. And do remember, too, that the increase Putin is trying to extract from the Ukraine is, percentage wise, in the same ballpark as the increase in gas prices demanded by the IMF in Iraq, which has so far not created mass indignation among policymakers in the West.

This is probably the structural lesson for Morales. The other lesson should be situational. Bolivia does not have to market its natural gas to the U.S. The EU has every incentive to diversify its suppliers. This is a good time to have massive natural gas reserves.