First, a shout out to reader M.E., who sent a grad student our way for editing work. Remember friends (he said in dulcet tones), rwg communications does heavy editing, proofing, research, and other writing tasks. As the deadlines get closer for turning in dissertations, those wanting quick, thorough editing should definitely contact us. Write us at rgathman@netzero.net
Second… well, this is difficult. In 2003 and 2004, there was one belligeranti we loved to kick around above all others: Christopher Hitchens. Gradually, we lost interest, however – Hitchens as a propagandist ate into Hitchens as an essayist until the writing was all hollowed out. Mental corruption is as bad for a certain sort of writer as termites are for a wood framed house.
But we do have to recommend the article in Slate, since it represents the position on Iran (détente) that we have advocated at this little blog since we started. It even shows an admirable awareness that there actually is such a thing as a future. LI’s position is that the American irrelevance in Iraq -- a situation over which it has long had no control, – is ultimately dangerous, insofar as America is a very aggressive superpower. While the disconnect between real American powerlessness and the delusion that America is doing the moving and shaking in the Gulf has so far been papered over by the almost supernatural blindness of D.C., reality has a way of biting you in the ass in these situations. Our opinion is that the immediate withdrawal of American troops must be coupled with broader, radical changes in Middle Eastern policy. The one most necessary is to accept reality. The regional position of Iran as the strongest of the Shiite powers now stretching from Iran to Lebanon is reality. Another reality is that U.S. policy has systematically and perversely aided the Islamic revolutionary parties in Iran.
We were pleasantly surprised that Hitchens ends his article about Iran with this image:
“So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.
The aging mullahs might claim this as a capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how right would they be? The pressure for a new constitution and genuine elections is already building. Within less than a decade, we might be negotiating with a whole new generation of Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget that it has been generally not unhelpful in Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully entitled and which would decrease its oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and verifiable provisions. American technical help would be available for this, since it was we who (in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism") helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first place.”
While this fantasy of Bush doing the rational thing is unlikely (and the rapid rewiring of zombie brains, if this ever really happened, might lead to thousands of fatalities in the U.S.), it points to what should happen in the Gulf. The U.S. has taken a position – that Iran basically isn’t there, and that a fantasy Iran of our making is a-comin’ round the corner – that is a non-position. It is a classic instance of neuroses on the mass scale. And so, to go back to reality – to surrender – the U.S. will have to weave around it another fantasy. But it can very easily be done (as the promoter who nearly fell on the floor says in Highway 61). Nixon’s surrender in going to China is the great model.
And – just to get the taste of an approving link to Hitchens out of the LI mouth – we’d also recommend going to Jefferson Morley’s article about the Iranian media group, Rooz Online. We hope our friend Brooding Persian writes about this soon.
And finally, re the current climate of tension -- LI believes that the way in which to understand the Bush administration is to follow the lack of sacrifice. This is why we don't much believe the idea that the U.S. is invading, or even bombing, any time soon. To think that Americans are going to welcome another war, and a hike in the price of their gas by at least a dollar a gallon, even as the hurricane season this summer plays dice with more American cities -- well, we think the odds are against it. And while the Rebel-in-Chief is delusional, about the need for no sacrifice he is very realistic. If he can find some way to pre-own the war, to mount it without any immediate sacrifice, even if it means borrowing another trillion bucks -- he'd do it then in a heartbeat. But I don't think this war will be pre-owned.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
hegelian approaches to tinkering
The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous man the world has ever known died without having an inkling that he was the most dangerous man the world has ever known. He wasn’t a politician, or a general, or a bandit, and the most publicity he ever received was when he was elected president of the American Chemical Association in 1944. His name was Tom Midgley. He was a tinkerer.
I know about tinkerers. LI’s old man was a tinkerer until he retired to the mountains of North Georgia (and, incidentally, cut off all relations with LI. But that is another story altogether). Who knows, he might have known Willis Carrier, since he worked for Carrier Air Conditioning, and Willis certainly knew Tom Midgley. In which case, yours truly has three degrees of separation from the most dangerous man the world has ever known. Gives me goosebumps.
Although elected president of the American Chemical Association, Midgley was not really a chemist. He was a mechanical engineer. However, his work for Dupont and GM – GM was, for all practical purposes, owned by the Duponts back in the 20s – resulted in two chemical/mechanical inventions.
The project he became famous for was getting the knocking out of the internal combustion engine. First, he pinpointed the source of the knocking. It was in the nature of the way the gas burned. Second, he experimented with additions to gasoline, until he came up with the perfect mix, tetraethyl lead. Called ethyl, you simply added it to gas and presto chango, no knock. Of course, that meant that you were adding lead to a liquid that burned and that left an exhaust. Necessarily, you increased ambient lead in the environment. And not just any environment, but that which surrounded roads. The heavily human environment. The government actually got concerned about this in the twenties, although there was no EPA back then, and in fact little regulation of even industrial safety. Still, headlines had been made when the news got out that a number of Dupont employees had gone clinically insane and died due to lead poisoning while researching tetraethyl lead. The news leaked out even though Dupont nearly buried the news, since Dupont owned the lab the men got sick in, the town the men lived in, the hospitals the men were sent to, and the cemetery where the men were buried. In other words, in something like a libertarian dream, the state’s role was taken over entirely by a private corporation. Unfortunately for Dupont, one of the happy beneficiaries of this arrangement escaped the embrace of Dupont and got to a non-Dupont owned hospital in Pennsylvania.
This meant that ethyl had to be defended. A Yale professor, Yandell Henderson, became the additive’s chief defamer. Now, Henderson was the kind of guy that, through the ages, tinkerers just hate – a smarty pants, a nosy parker, a pink professor, a nanny stater, an alarmist, practically a woman (In a review of Silent Spring published in 1963 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the reviewer concluded his dismissal of the book by writing that “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”). But at the conference that, essentially, rubberstamped the use of ethyl, Henderson made a pretty good shot at summing up the social side of the issue: “The men engaged in industry, chemists and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”
By this time, Midgley had moved on to his next project. He’d been called upon to devise a safe refrigerant. At the time, GM/Dupont owned Frigidaire, the largest refrigerator maker. Unfortunately, there was a dirty little secret about the refrigerators they sold – they used methyl chloride. In 1929, in a Cleveland hospital, the fumes of methyl chloride had diffused through the duct system after an explosion in the x ray room, and it killed 125 people – one of those extensively unremembered industrial accidents. Midgley set to work and eventually discovered a whole family of refrigerants: the chloroflorocarbons.
LI takes these facts from Cagan and Dray’s invaluable history, “Between Earth and Sky”.
…
Now, here is where LI’s private history grazes against the elephantine hide of public history. The great freon scare of the late eighties was played out, in miniature, at the LI family dinner table. Since the public discussion of global warming has followed, as though by the numbers, the public health/environmental discussions of yore – the same resistance to facts and theories, the same industrial coalitions finding “skeptics” of “junk science,” the same inevitable gathering of real events propelling the discussion from stage one, denial, to stage two, re-visioning benefits, to stage three, expenses and convenience – with the same stage managers, the state and big business, plying the lies – I figure a look back is useful not only to recognize the patterns, but to uncover the dialectical figures that emerge from the patterns. Surely the tinkerer is as worthy of philosophical attention as the master and the slave. In a future post, LI will try to draw his philosophical lineaments.
PS PS – Speaking of industrial accidents nobody has heard of, the Prudhoe Bay leak (via brickburner) has gotten zip attention. Largest spill since 1989. And figures for how much was spilled are still coming in. See here. And here, for a description of the state of the art monitoring of leaks – this one was heard gurgling by an oil field worker. There you go – the money those oil companies spend to be green and greener! It just makes the whole board of the AEI terribly sad.
I know about tinkerers. LI’s old man was a tinkerer until he retired to the mountains of North Georgia (and, incidentally, cut off all relations with LI. But that is another story altogether). Who knows, he might have known Willis Carrier, since he worked for Carrier Air Conditioning, and Willis certainly knew Tom Midgley. In which case, yours truly has three degrees of separation from the most dangerous man the world has ever known. Gives me goosebumps.
Although elected president of the American Chemical Association, Midgley was not really a chemist. He was a mechanical engineer. However, his work for Dupont and GM – GM was, for all practical purposes, owned by the Duponts back in the 20s – resulted in two chemical/mechanical inventions.
The project he became famous for was getting the knocking out of the internal combustion engine. First, he pinpointed the source of the knocking. It was in the nature of the way the gas burned. Second, he experimented with additions to gasoline, until he came up with the perfect mix, tetraethyl lead. Called ethyl, you simply added it to gas and presto chango, no knock. Of course, that meant that you were adding lead to a liquid that burned and that left an exhaust. Necessarily, you increased ambient lead in the environment. And not just any environment, but that which surrounded roads. The heavily human environment. The government actually got concerned about this in the twenties, although there was no EPA back then, and in fact little regulation of even industrial safety. Still, headlines had been made when the news got out that a number of Dupont employees had gone clinically insane and died due to lead poisoning while researching tetraethyl lead. The news leaked out even though Dupont nearly buried the news, since Dupont owned the lab the men got sick in, the town the men lived in, the hospitals the men were sent to, and the cemetery where the men were buried. In other words, in something like a libertarian dream, the state’s role was taken over entirely by a private corporation. Unfortunately for Dupont, one of the happy beneficiaries of this arrangement escaped the embrace of Dupont and got to a non-Dupont owned hospital in Pennsylvania.
This meant that ethyl had to be defended. A Yale professor, Yandell Henderson, became the additive’s chief defamer. Now, Henderson was the kind of guy that, through the ages, tinkerers just hate – a smarty pants, a nosy parker, a pink professor, a nanny stater, an alarmist, practically a woman (In a review of Silent Spring published in 1963 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the reviewer concluded his dismissal of the book by writing that “Silent Spring, which I read word for word with some trauma, kept reminding me of trying to win an argument with a woman. It can not be done.”). But at the conference that, essentially, rubberstamped the use of ethyl, Henderson made a pretty good shot at summing up the social side of the issue: “The men engaged in industry, chemists and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance.”
By this time, Midgley had moved on to his next project. He’d been called upon to devise a safe refrigerant. At the time, GM/Dupont owned Frigidaire, the largest refrigerator maker. Unfortunately, there was a dirty little secret about the refrigerators they sold – they used methyl chloride. In 1929, in a Cleveland hospital, the fumes of methyl chloride had diffused through the duct system after an explosion in the x ray room, and it killed 125 people – one of those extensively unremembered industrial accidents. Midgley set to work and eventually discovered a whole family of refrigerants: the chloroflorocarbons.
LI takes these facts from Cagan and Dray’s invaluable history, “Between Earth and Sky”.
…
Now, here is where LI’s private history grazes against the elephantine hide of public history. The great freon scare of the late eighties was played out, in miniature, at the LI family dinner table. Since the public discussion of global warming has followed, as though by the numbers, the public health/environmental discussions of yore – the same resistance to facts and theories, the same industrial coalitions finding “skeptics” of “junk science,” the same inevitable gathering of real events propelling the discussion from stage one, denial, to stage two, re-visioning benefits, to stage three, expenses and convenience – with the same stage managers, the state and big business, plying the lies – I figure a look back is useful not only to recognize the patterns, but to uncover the dialectical figures that emerge from the patterns. Surely the tinkerer is as worthy of philosophical attention as the master and the slave. In a future post, LI will try to draw his philosophical lineaments.
PS PS – Speaking of industrial accidents nobody has heard of, the Prudhoe Bay leak (via brickburner) has gotten zip attention. Largest spill since 1989. And figures for how much was spilled are still coming in. See here. And here, for a description of the state of the art monitoring of leaks – this one was heard gurgling by an oil field worker. There you go – the money those oil companies spend to be green and greener! It just makes the whole board of the AEI terribly sad.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
the Rosemary’s Baby of American conservatism.
Every day, LI says bad things about the Bush administration. Today, we are going to say something good about the administration. Good, that is, from the point of view of philosophical clarification. For it has struck us more and more strongly that the Bush administration is the Rosemary’s Baby of American conservatism. This is what it was all always about, all the ritual, all the preparation.
For sixty years, American politics, on the ideological level, has been a rigged fight between frauds. The right wing fraud went under the mask of wanting “smaller government.” The left wing fraud went under the mask of supporting “working families.” In actuality, there was no side that wasn’t for big government. The argument was really about the bonds between big government and its partners. For the most part, the right’s preferred partners were in the petro-chemical industry. Both sides fought for the defense industry, and the left wing laid dibs on the unions and information technologies. There is a small, vocal sector in the public who actually wants small government (although usually, when given a taste of it, they quickly vote back in the pork), but they are so negligible that their only real purpose is to make one side of the big government-big business combination respectable. Similarly, there is a small, vocal sector standing up for working people, but their purpose was to operate as plausible defenders of the various free trade pacts that liquidated American manufacturing.
LI has been reminded, reading about the attacks launched on Rachel Carson and the environmental movement, that the first property one "owns" is one’s body. Because it is inconvenient to the petro-chemical sector, this property has not only been routinely trespassed upon, but the sense that you have some right not to be a lodging place for untested chemicals that leach out from agribusinesses, chemical factories, and a thousand and one household products has had to be dulled in the average citizen. Not to speak of the average citizen’s exchangeable property – his land, for instance. The first suits filed against DDT were filed against government sponsored flights dumping oil and DDT mixtures on private land in the name of fighting various insects. And the most ardent supporters of this kind of state activity were conservatives – in fact, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Benson, assured Eisenhower that Carson was a communist – and he was in a way right. Communism became opposing the state coalition with big business.
However, the ideological masks have, at last, left American politics a wilderness of blunderers. Interestingly, this comes at a time when two threats to the U.S. are converging. One is the increased dependence on foreign sources for oil, and one is the looming threat from global warming and the acidification of the oceans. The convergence of those threats have been met with the orgy of irrelevance that makes up most of the newspaper headlines, and all of this administration’s policy.
In the next couple of days, we are going to concentrate on Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker series, The Climate of Man, which is going into her book, to be released this month, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
To give some sense of the material in the book, here’s a passage about the rapidly thawing permafrost zone:
“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.
One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.”
For sixty years, American politics, on the ideological level, has been a rigged fight between frauds. The right wing fraud went under the mask of wanting “smaller government.” The left wing fraud went under the mask of supporting “working families.” In actuality, there was no side that wasn’t for big government. The argument was really about the bonds between big government and its partners. For the most part, the right’s preferred partners were in the petro-chemical industry. Both sides fought for the defense industry, and the left wing laid dibs on the unions and information technologies. There is a small, vocal sector in the public who actually wants small government (although usually, when given a taste of it, they quickly vote back in the pork), but they are so negligible that their only real purpose is to make one side of the big government-big business combination respectable. Similarly, there is a small, vocal sector standing up for working people, but their purpose was to operate as plausible defenders of the various free trade pacts that liquidated American manufacturing.
LI has been reminded, reading about the attacks launched on Rachel Carson and the environmental movement, that the first property one "owns" is one’s body. Because it is inconvenient to the petro-chemical sector, this property has not only been routinely trespassed upon, but the sense that you have some right not to be a lodging place for untested chemicals that leach out from agribusinesses, chemical factories, and a thousand and one household products has had to be dulled in the average citizen. Not to speak of the average citizen’s exchangeable property – his land, for instance. The first suits filed against DDT were filed against government sponsored flights dumping oil and DDT mixtures on private land in the name of fighting various insects. And the most ardent supporters of this kind of state activity were conservatives – in fact, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Benson, assured Eisenhower that Carson was a communist – and he was in a way right. Communism became opposing the state coalition with big business.
However, the ideological masks have, at last, left American politics a wilderness of blunderers. Interestingly, this comes at a time when two threats to the U.S. are converging. One is the increased dependence on foreign sources for oil, and one is the looming threat from global warming and the acidification of the oceans. The convergence of those threats have been met with the orgy of irrelevance that makes up most of the newspaper headlines, and all of this administration’s policy.
In the next couple of days, we are going to concentrate on Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker series, The Climate of Man, which is going into her book, to be released this month, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
To give some sense of the material in the book, here’s a passage about the rapidly thawing permafrost zone:
“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.
One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.”
Monday, March 06, 2006
the archaeology of zombie talk
LI is fascinated by zombie talk. It is an idiolect of the hypnotized, a rare and precious thing.
Now, there are many patterns in zombie talk to choose from. We've written about the bogus analogies. We've written about the false claims. But --if we were to choose just one word to prospect out of the madness and moil of the last three years, the word would be “desperate.” This word pops up every time the weld between Iraq’s reality and the American description of it is jarred.
Here's a little travelogue for ya:
Back in June, 2003, when the first roadside bombs were killing American soldiers, Bremer said:
"Those who refuse to embrace the new Iraq are clearly panicking, they are turning their sights on Iraqis themselves," L. Paul Bremer said. "Today they have killed innocent Iraqis with the same disdain toward their own people they showed for 35 years."
Then, in August, as bombs hit Najaf, Rumsfeld, who back then was happy, as chief clown, to hog the spotlight on Iraq, said:
“As success during this period of transition continues to mount, the opponents of success and of a free Iraq may continue their desperate acts. But the outcome is not in doubt: Those who committed this act and who support violence in Iraq will fail.”
By October, 2003, Bush had, somehow, dropped the mission accomplished rhetoric. But mission was about to be accomplished soon, as in this description of those deadenders who by this time had mounted a quite extensive bombing campaign:
“Their desperate attacks on innocent civilians will not intimidate us or the brave Iraqis and Afghans who are joining in their own defense and who are moving toward self-government. Coalition forces, aided by Afghan and Iraqi police and military, are striking the enemy with force and precision. Our coalition is growing in members and growing in strength. Our purpose is clear and certain. Iraq and Afghanistan will be stable, independent nations, and their people will live in freedom.”
By then, desperation had become a normal White House response to any attack. This is from the Christian Science Monitor, 29 October, 2003, reporting on car bombings in Fallujah and the killing of the deputy mayor of Baghdad:
“This week's string of deadly attacks in some areas of Iraq has rocked Washington policymakers back on their heels and led to calls for a reassessment of the US military effort.
On Tuesday unknown assailants struck again in Baghdad, assassinating a deputy mayor in a hit-and-run shooting. A car bomb exploded in the tense city of Fallujah, killing at least four.
White House officials said the attacks showed that anti-US elements were desperate to stop steady progress towards Iraqi normalization. But they also admitted that the ferocity of resistance to the US occupation has taken them by surprise.”
In the Weekly Standard, on 25 November 2003, a summary of after mission accomplished Iraq stated: “Over the summer, as we were continuously assured by the administration that the bad guys were desperate and on the run, we could not turn on our television sets without hearing that "the noose is tightening." (Whether around Saddam's neck, or ours--nobody seemed to specify).”
By 12 February, 2004 Tom Friedman, a columnist who absolutely loves desperate as the word to describe the “terrorists” in Iraq, wrote:
The situation in Iraq is fast approaching the tipping point. The terrorists know that if they can wreak enough havoc, kill enough Iraqis waiting in line to join their own police force, they can prevent the U.N. from coming up with a plan for elections and a stable transfer of U.S. authority to an Iraqi government. Once authority is in Iraqi hands, the Baathists and Islamists have a real problem: They can't even pretend to be fighting the U.S. anymore. It will be clear to all Arabs and Muslims that they are fighting against the freedom and independence of Iraq and for their own lunatic ideologies. Which is why they are desperate to prevent us from reaching that tipping point. Their strategy is to sow chaos, defeat President Bush and hope that his Democratic successor will pull out.”
That desperation. Those terrorists, always working on a deadline, as the calm but implacable American machine swept them out of Iraq, and put in their place the Iraqi entrepreneur!
Friedman’s column came after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which signaled the complete and final victory of the Americans in Iraq. The military was on board with the desperate meme, too. This is from January 22, 2004, a dispatch by Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commanding general, 4th Infantry Division –
“Capturing Saddam was a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy. But a more important result of his capture is the increase in accurate information brought forward by Iraqis allowing us to conduct numerous precise raids to kill or capture financiers, IED-makers, and mid-level leaders of the former regime. These groups are still a threat, but a fractured, sporadic threat with the leadership destabilized, finances interdicted and no hope of the Ba'athists' return to power.
The number of enemy attacks against our forces has been declining since a peak in November during Ramadan. And now their desperate attacks are targeting civilians; terrorist car bombs have killed innocent civilians and Iraqi police; ambushes attacked civilian supply convoys and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers, demonstrating the enemy's disdain for peace and prosperity in Iraq and for Iraqis. The enemy is focused solely on indiscriminate murder and promoting their own cause.”
You can tell – like a yoyo in a vacuum at the end of its string, Iraq was now calming down. Imagine, the enemy is focused on its own cause. No more ups and downs! As the AEI discovered a year later, we’d already won the war. Among the odd couplings in this war, none is odder than the embrace of the Baudrillardian view of reality by the hardcore right.
So time and our triumph marched on. Of course, people who are desperate are desperate for something. Fox news figured it out: the terrorists were desperate to derail democracy. The sabotage against the big democracy train has become very popular, and if a spokesman says desperate today, likely that derailing will occur in the next paragraph or so. In December, 2004, when the non-war, which we had won, seemed to be going on – like a play with no audience, really, except perhaps for the Iraqis, who persistently keep trying to edge into the American narrative, Scott McLellan put it best:
This [election] is an important first step in their future. And certainly, the security situation is an issue that we continue to address. There are challenges that remain, but the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists are being defeated and they will be defeated in the end. They're growing more desperate because we're getting closer and closer to a free and democratic Iraq.”
Desperation piled on desperation – obviously, those terrorists were not only using weapons obviously smuggled in from Iran, but prozac, probably from the same terrorist source. Bomb those prozac factories and the terrorists will have to face up to reality.
Desperation did take a curtain call for a while in 2005, while people in the know told us all about the amazing progress being made in Iraq. As for derailing democracy – keeping a majority who had voted in a free election from choosing their leader – why, that was now the job of our U.S. ambassador to Iraq. However, it wasn’t exactly “derailing” – call it more like jerking on a leash.
But the winds of freedom sweeping Iraq still hadn’t quite swept away the one or two terrorists left in the country yet. In a bold meeting of clichés, we have it on the word of
U.S Brigadier General Alston, (AP, 13 January 2006):
“He said the recent attacks, blamed mostly on extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, were part of an "attempt to discredit and derail the progress of the Iraqi people."
Alston has discovered the definition war – he should definitely rush back to the Pentagon to announce the results of his startling research. The enemy, he could tell them, actually opposes us. Imagine that! They must be desperate.
All of which gets us to the best use of desperate yet – General Pace’s interview on Tim Russert’s show, yesterday.
LI simply can’t get over the abyss revealed in Pace’s remarks – the abyss, that is, of sheer mindlessness in the Pentagon. In Rumsfeld’s search for the perfect lackey, he should have included some other job qualifications – for instance, not being a total redneck:
“MR. RUSSERT: What’s going on in Iraq?
GEN. PACE: Well, what happened in Iraq was you have the extremists who see that the Iraqi people are going to the polls and voting for their own freely elected government. The terrorists are becoming more desperate—so desperate that they destroy one of their own most sacred shrines in an attempt to cause civil war and strife.”
So, the shrine in Samara was the terrorist’s own shrine. Hmm, could it be that the military sees every Iraqi as a terrorist? Perhaps that explains their ‘desperate” air strike policy, unquestioned by the U.S. press, and a sign of desperation by deadending Americans if I ever saw one.
Now, there are many patterns in zombie talk to choose from. We've written about the bogus analogies. We've written about the false claims. But --if we were to choose just one word to prospect out of the madness and moil of the last three years, the word would be “desperate.” This word pops up every time the weld between Iraq’s reality and the American description of it is jarred.
Here's a little travelogue for ya:
Back in June, 2003, when the first roadside bombs were killing American soldiers, Bremer said:
"Those who refuse to embrace the new Iraq are clearly panicking, they are turning their sights on Iraqis themselves," L. Paul Bremer said. "Today they have killed innocent Iraqis with the same disdain toward their own people they showed for 35 years."
Then, in August, as bombs hit Najaf, Rumsfeld, who back then was happy, as chief clown, to hog the spotlight on Iraq, said:
“As success during this period of transition continues to mount, the opponents of success and of a free Iraq may continue their desperate acts. But the outcome is not in doubt: Those who committed this act and who support violence in Iraq will fail.”
By October, 2003, Bush had, somehow, dropped the mission accomplished rhetoric. But mission was about to be accomplished soon, as in this description of those deadenders who by this time had mounted a quite extensive bombing campaign:
“Their desperate attacks on innocent civilians will not intimidate us or the brave Iraqis and Afghans who are joining in their own defense and who are moving toward self-government. Coalition forces, aided by Afghan and Iraqi police and military, are striking the enemy with force and precision. Our coalition is growing in members and growing in strength. Our purpose is clear and certain. Iraq and Afghanistan will be stable, independent nations, and their people will live in freedom.”
By then, desperation had become a normal White House response to any attack. This is from the Christian Science Monitor, 29 October, 2003, reporting on car bombings in Fallujah and the killing of the deputy mayor of Baghdad:
“This week's string of deadly attacks in some areas of Iraq has rocked Washington policymakers back on their heels and led to calls for a reassessment of the US military effort.
On Tuesday unknown assailants struck again in Baghdad, assassinating a deputy mayor in a hit-and-run shooting. A car bomb exploded in the tense city of Fallujah, killing at least four.
White House officials said the attacks showed that anti-US elements were desperate to stop steady progress towards Iraqi normalization. But they also admitted that the ferocity of resistance to the US occupation has taken them by surprise.”
In the Weekly Standard, on 25 November 2003, a summary of after mission accomplished Iraq stated: “Over the summer, as we were continuously assured by the administration that the bad guys were desperate and on the run, we could not turn on our television sets without hearing that "the noose is tightening." (Whether around Saddam's neck, or ours--nobody seemed to specify).”
By 12 February, 2004 Tom Friedman, a columnist who absolutely loves desperate as the word to describe the “terrorists” in Iraq, wrote:
The situation in Iraq is fast approaching the tipping point. The terrorists know that if they can wreak enough havoc, kill enough Iraqis waiting in line to join their own police force, they can prevent the U.N. from coming up with a plan for elections and a stable transfer of U.S. authority to an Iraqi government. Once authority is in Iraqi hands, the Baathists and Islamists have a real problem: They can't even pretend to be fighting the U.S. anymore. It will be clear to all Arabs and Muslims that they are fighting against the freedom and independence of Iraq and for their own lunatic ideologies. Which is why they are desperate to prevent us from reaching that tipping point. Their strategy is to sow chaos, defeat President Bush and hope that his Democratic successor will pull out.”
That desperation. Those terrorists, always working on a deadline, as the calm but implacable American machine swept them out of Iraq, and put in their place the Iraqi entrepreneur!
Friedman’s column came after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which signaled the complete and final victory of the Americans in Iraq. The military was on board with the desperate meme, too. This is from January 22, 2004, a dispatch by Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commanding general, 4th Infantry Division –
“Capturing Saddam was a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy. But a more important result of his capture is the increase in accurate information brought forward by Iraqis allowing us to conduct numerous precise raids to kill or capture financiers, IED-makers, and mid-level leaders of the former regime. These groups are still a threat, but a fractured, sporadic threat with the leadership destabilized, finances interdicted and no hope of the Ba'athists' return to power.
The number of enemy attacks against our forces has been declining since a peak in November during Ramadan. And now their desperate attacks are targeting civilians; terrorist car bombs have killed innocent civilians and Iraqi police; ambushes attacked civilian supply convoys and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers, demonstrating the enemy's disdain for peace and prosperity in Iraq and for Iraqis. The enemy is focused solely on indiscriminate murder and promoting their own cause.”
You can tell – like a yoyo in a vacuum at the end of its string, Iraq was now calming down. Imagine, the enemy is focused on its own cause. No more ups and downs! As the AEI discovered a year later, we’d already won the war. Among the odd couplings in this war, none is odder than the embrace of the Baudrillardian view of reality by the hardcore right.
So time and our triumph marched on. Of course, people who are desperate are desperate for something. Fox news figured it out: the terrorists were desperate to derail democracy. The sabotage against the big democracy train has become very popular, and if a spokesman says desperate today, likely that derailing will occur in the next paragraph or so. In December, 2004, when the non-war, which we had won, seemed to be going on – like a play with no audience, really, except perhaps for the Iraqis, who persistently keep trying to edge into the American narrative, Scott McLellan put it best:
This [election] is an important first step in their future. And certainly, the security situation is an issue that we continue to address. There are challenges that remain, but the terrorists and the Saddam loyalists are being defeated and they will be defeated in the end. They're growing more desperate because we're getting closer and closer to a free and democratic Iraq.”
Desperation piled on desperation – obviously, those terrorists were not only using weapons obviously smuggled in from Iran, but prozac, probably from the same terrorist source. Bomb those prozac factories and the terrorists will have to face up to reality.
Desperation did take a curtain call for a while in 2005, while people in the know told us all about the amazing progress being made in Iraq. As for derailing democracy – keeping a majority who had voted in a free election from choosing their leader – why, that was now the job of our U.S. ambassador to Iraq. However, it wasn’t exactly “derailing” – call it more like jerking on a leash.
But the winds of freedom sweeping Iraq still hadn’t quite swept away the one or two terrorists left in the country yet. In a bold meeting of clichés, we have it on the word of
U.S Brigadier General Alston, (AP, 13 January 2006):
“He said the recent attacks, blamed mostly on extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, were part of an "attempt to discredit and derail the progress of the Iraqi people."
Alston has discovered the definition war – he should definitely rush back to the Pentagon to announce the results of his startling research. The enemy, he could tell them, actually opposes us. Imagine that! They must be desperate.
All of which gets us to the best use of desperate yet – General Pace’s interview on Tim Russert’s show, yesterday.
LI simply can’t get over the abyss revealed in Pace’s remarks – the abyss, that is, of sheer mindlessness in the Pentagon. In Rumsfeld’s search for the perfect lackey, he should have included some other job qualifications – for instance, not being a total redneck:
“MR. RUSSERT: What’s going on in Iraq?
GEN. PACE: Well, what happened in Iraq was you have the extremists who see that the Iraqi people are going to the polls and voting for their own freely elected government. The terrorists are becoming more desperate—so desperate that they destroy one of their own most sacred shrines in an attempt to cause civil war and strife.”
So, the shrine in Samara was the terrorist’s own shrine. Hmm, could it be that the military sees every Iraqi as a terrorist? Perhaps that explains their ‘desperate” air strike policy, unquestioned by the U.S. press, and a sign of desperation by deadending Americans if I ever saw one.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
LI's taste in murder
Denis Donoghue, has penned a nice review of Denise Gigante’s book, “Taste: A Literary History,” in February’s Harpers. Donoghue considers the concrete sense, first – a sense that lies the tongue which is, as he felicitously puts it, “like a kingdom divided into principalities according to sensory talent” – for our bitter and sweet, our sour and salty are found in different areas of the tongue, the chemistry of the alien bodies we put in the mouth turned into its synaptic commentary by means of differently grouped sensors.
Gigante begins, too, with a primal scene of appetite and taste, this one taken from Paradise Lost:
“Gigante's point of departure is Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book 5, God sends the archangel Raphael to warn Adam that Satan is on the loose and determined to harm God's new creation, the human race. Adam doesn't seem especially perturbed; he is more interested in learning from Raphael what it's like to be an angel. He invites him to sit and share the sumptuous meal that Eve has prepared. Raphael accepts the invitation. This leads him to talk about food and to describe the angelic state. There is no reference to excretion; instead of evacuation, the angelic form of life has expression and eloquence. Raphael distinguishes angels from men and women, but he nonetheless says that a "time may come when men/With Angels may participate" and find
Later on, Raphael tells Adam that angels "live throughout/Vital in every part, not as frail man/In Entrails, Heart or Head, Liver or Reins." This suggests that angels are not dependent on mouths, tongues, and kidneys, even though they can assume human senses and choose whatever size, shape, and color they like.
Gigante notes that these passages in Paradise Lost were in the minds of the eighteenth-century philosophers of Taste and were constantly alluded to. After the divisiveness of the British Civil War, the end of the Stuart monarchy, the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Settlement (1701), it was widely felt in Britain that soothing images of national unity were needed. The first of these was the True-Born Englishman, who might be Whig or Tory but was ultimately an Englishman. Another image, companionable to the first, was the Man of Taste, an exemplar of moderation, politeness, and refinement.”
LI has long ago fallen from aus der Engel Ordnungen, and is no longer really a man of taste or a true born American – which might explain why we got such a cruel kick from this article in the Washington Post. Like any other People or Vanity Fair reader, we do love a good murder. Besides which, we used to play tennis almost every day in the old, dead teen years, and so witnessed the phenomenon of the brow beating tennis parent, the one with the little kids who were being taught to play a fun game with the ruthlessness with which you teach a puppy to pee on the paper. In the person of Christophe Fauviau this apparently found its logical conclusion:
“Christophe Fauviau, a self-described obsessive tennis dad, was a fixture at amateur matches throughout France in which his son and daughter competed. He often appeared at the start of sets with bottled water or cups of Coca-Cola for his children, as well as their rivals.
Sometimes those rivals became ill during the match. They complained they were seeing double; some passed out or collapsed. One fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the way home from a match he had forfeited to Fauviau's son because of sickness.”
Christophe, it appears, is a true narcissist for our time. A duly medicated French yuppie – tranqs follow income as surely as magnets attract iron – it was Fauviau’s habit to give his darling Valentine and Maxime that foot up by doping the waterbottles of their opponents with Temesta. Here’s what the trick felt like, to one of Maxime’s opponents:
“During the match, he suddenly began feeling dizzy. "I was seeing two balls coming at me," he recalled. He said Maxime's father asked him if his head was okay. After the game, Tauziede said, he collapsed in the shower. His parents took him to a hospital where he remained for two days. Doctors were unable to diagnose his illness, he said.”
All of which led to this:
“Fauviau's undoing began in 2003. On July 3 that year, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher, Alexandre Lagardere, played Maxime Fauviau in what was considered a friendly local match. The prize was a ham. Lagardere fell ill while they were playing and dropped out. He drove to a friend's house and went to sleep on a couch, abandoning plans for a night out.
Two hours later he awoke and tried to drive home. He crashed his car when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and died of his injuries. An autopsy found traces of Temesta in his system. Fauviau became a suspect when witnesses reported seeing him fiddling with Lagardere's water bottle just before the match.”
Once caught, however, our hero knew exactly what to do: blame his actions on his virtues. The virtue currently most worshipped in the world – ask our Rebel in Chief –is a high opinion of oneself. Given enough of this high opinion, you even have some to spend on other people. Yes, love love love – that is, of oneself, through other people:
“Fauviau, a slightly built man with a receding hairline and a pinched-looking face, testified in court, "When my children were playing, I was suffering. It was as if I were playing myself. I felt I was my child. I felt something crying inside me."
He said he arrived at his plan "little by little -- it was not sudden."”
Fauviau, after serving some tiresome sentence, should surely take his message to CEO retreats and think tanks, for there is an aching message there, a universal message… I think we can all sympathize with his agonies.
Which brings me back around to the man of taste. Surely it was this straw figure that De Quincey was mocking in the best essay ever written about homicide, Murder considered as one of the fine arts. It consists of a rather wild and wooly address given to a typical tasteful club: “The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.” Actually, Fauviau’s crime might be sneered at by De Quincey, since it lacks some of the characteristics of the great murders:
“People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed--a knife--a purse--and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”
I for one would stick up for the poetry and sentiment, but it must be admitted that the grouping and design are rather poor.
De Quincey’s lecturer is given to great digressions that are so satiric that they almost don’t seem satiric, like a stain that fades into a fabric of the same color. So, of course, first he has to establish the moral boundaries, here:
Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency. Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and _that_, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated _æsthetically_, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.”
After more of this, our lecturer gets down to brass tacks, and as with any connoisseur, glances over the progress made by homicide over the ages, from the crude artistry of Cain to the more ingenious murders and assassinations of Christian times. Assassinations of statesmen and kings are rather boring, but there is a more delicate prey, and here De Quincey’s lecturer fixes, so to speak, his monocle:
But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really _does_ surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”
Truly, I can’t plead that my murderer, Fauviau, is a philosopher – but certainly I can claim that he is a murderer for the age of therapy, and a damn good one too.
Anyway, I could quote De Quincey's essay for ever -- it is one of my favorite pieces. If you haven't read it, dear reader, do.
PS -- A shout out to my readers in the Chicago area. If you aren't sick of my longwindedness yet, you can catch me in today's Sunday Chicago Sun Times book section opining about Kevin Brockmeier's new novel.
Gigante begins, too, with a primal scene of appetite and taste, this one taken from Paradise Lost:
“Gigante's point of departure is Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book 5, God sends the archangel Raphael to warn Adam that Satan is on the loose and determined to harm God's new creation, the human race. Adam doesn't seem especially perturbed; he is more interested in learning from Raphael what it's like to be an angel. He invites him to sit and share the sumptuous meal that Eve has prepared. Raphael accepts the invitation. This leads him to talk about food and to describe the angelic state. There is no reference to excretion; instead of evacuation, the angelic form of life has expression and eloquence. Raphael distinguishes angels from men and women, but he nonetheless says that a "time may come when men/With Angels may participate" and find
Later on, Raphael tells Adam that angels "live throughout/Vital in every part, not as frail man/In Entrails, Heart or Head, Liver or Reins." This suggests that angels are not dependent on mouths, tongues, and kidneys, even though they can assume human senses and choose whatever size, shape, and color they like.
Gigante notes that these passages in Paradise Lost were in the minds of the eighteenth-century philosophers of Taste and were constantly alluded to. After the divisiveness of the British Civil War, the end of the Stuart monarchy, the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Settlement (1701), it was widely felt in Britain that soothing images of national unity were needed. The first of these was the True-Born Englishman, who might be Whig or Tory but was ultimately an Englishman. Another image, companionable to the first, was the Man of Taste, an exemplar of moderation, politeness, and refinement.”
LI has long ago fallen from aus der Engel Ordnungen, and is no longer really a man of taste or a true born American – which might explain why we got such a cruel kick from this article in the Washington Post. Like any other People or Vanity Fair reader, we do love a good murder. Besides which, we used to play tennis almost every day in the old, dead teen years, and so witnessed the phenomenon of the brow beating tennis parent, the one with the little kids who were being taught to play a fun game with the ruthlessness with which you teach a puppy to pee on the paper. In the person of Christophe Fauviau this apparently found its logical conclusion:
“Christophe Fauviau, a self-described obsessive tennis dad, was a fixture at amateur matches throughout France in which his son and daughter competed. He often appeared at the start of sets with bottled water or cups of Coca-Cola for his children, as well as their rivals.
Sometimes those rivals became ill during the match. They complained they were seeing double; some passed out or collapsed. One fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the way home from a match he had forfeited to Fauviau's son because of sickness.”
Christophe, it appears, is a true narcissist for our time. A duly medicated French yuppie – tranqs follow income as surely as magnets attract iron – it was Fauviau’s habit to give his darling Valentine and Maxime that foot up by doping the waterbottles of their opponents with Temesta. Here’s what the trick felt like, to one of Maxime’s opponents:
“During the match, he suddenly began feeling dizzy. "I was seeing two balls coming at me," he recalled. He said Maxime's father asked him if his head was okay. After the game, Tauziede said, he collapsed in the shower. His parents took him to a hospital where he remained for two days. Doctors were unable to diagnose his illness, he said.”
All of which led to this:
“Fauviau's undoing began in 2003. On July 3 that year, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher, Alexandre Lagardere, played Maxime Fauviau in what was considered a friendly local match. The prize was a ham. Lagardere fell ill while they were playing and dropped out. He drove to a friend's house and went to sleep on a couch, abandoning plans for a night out.
Two hours later he awoke and tried to drive home. He crashed his car when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and died of his injuries. An autopsy found traces of Temesta in his system. Fauviau became a suspect when witnesses reported seeing him fiddling with Lagardere's water bottle just before the match.”
Once caught, however, our hero knew exactly what to do: blame his actions on his virtues. The virtue currently most worshipped in the world – ask our Rebel in Chief –is a high opinion of oneself. Given enough of this high opinion, you even have some to spend on other people. Yes, love love love – that is, of oneself, through other people:
“Fauviau, a slightly built man with a receding hairline and a pinched-looking face, testified in court, "When my children were playing, I was suffering. It was as if I were playing myself. I felt I was my child. I felt something crying inside me."
He said he arrived at his plan "little by little -- it was not sudden."”
Fauviau, after serving some tiresome sentence, should surely take his message to CEO retreats and think tanks, for there is an aching message there, a universal message… I think we can all sympathize with his agonies.
Which brings me back around to the man of taste. Surely it was this straw figure that De Quincey was mocking in the best essay ever written about homicide, Murder considered as one of the fine arts. It consists of a rather wild and wooly address given to a typical tasteful club: “The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.” Actually, Fauviau’s crime might be sneered at by De Quincey, since it lacks some of the characteristics of the great murders:
“People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed--a knife--a purse--and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”
I for one would stick up for the poetry and sentiment, but it must be admitted that the grouping and design are rather poor.
De Quincey’s lecturer is given to great digressions that are so satiric that they almost don’t seem satiric, like a stain that fades into a fabric of the same color. So, of course, first he has to establish the moral boundaries, here:
Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency. Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and _that_, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated _æsthetically_, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.”
After more of this, our lecturer gets down to brass tacks, and as with any connoisseur, glances over the progress made by homicide over the ages, from the crude artistry of Cain to the more ingenious murders and assassinations of Christian times. Assassinations of statesmen and kings are rather boring, but there is a more delicate prey, and here De Quincey’s lecturer fixes, so to speak, his monocle:
But there is another class of assassinations, which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century, that really _does_ surprise me; I mean the assassination of philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly by way of showing my own learning.”
Truly, I can’t plead that my murderer, Fauviau, is a philosopher – but certainly I can claim that he is a murderer for the age of therapy, and a damn good one too.
Anyway, I could quote De Quincey's essay for ever -- it is one of my favorite pieces. If you haven't read it, dear reader, do.
PS -- A shout out to my readers in the Chicago area. If you aren't sick of my longwindedness yet, you can catch me in today's Sunday Chicago Sun Times book section opining about Kevin Brockmeier's new novel.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
rachel, rachel
Rachel, Rachel
The Anti-Rachel Carson crowd is a surprising vituperative bunch. If you take an unpleasant stroll around the net, you can find plenty of apoplectic pesticide-ophiles, telling you things like “…today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them.” (which I got from Reason’s screed against Silent Spring). Seeing that number is like smelling the trace of the exterminator. Obviously, that many new cases would mean that soon, everybody would be infected with malaria. Actually, that figure talks about something different. As Reed Karaim explained in this summer’s American Scholar:
“But what about the 300 to 500 million people who "get" malaria annually? When most people hear that, I believe they think "new cases." (After all, you can't get it if you got it, right?) If that were true, then we would be in the middle of terrifying global epidemic. There are only 6.4 billion people on the planet, so we're all going to be sick within the next 13 years or so.
But that's not what the number means at all. Eline Korenromp, the World Health Organization analyst in Geneva behind the study cited when the figure is used, told me that the statistic is an estimate of "incidence of clinical disease episodes" of malaria in a year. In other words, it's the number of times people exhibited symptoms of malaria--not new cases, or even existing cases. The malaria parasite can be eliminated from the body with the fight treatment, but in certain parts of the world it persists in many people for years, and they face recurring symptoms. Others have the disease but show no symptoms. The World Health Organization, Korenromp says, has no estimate of how many new people catch malaria each year.”
This isn’t to say that DDT was not, once, a lifesaver, or that its use in small spraying – inside huts, or on mosquito netting – should be totally discontinued. Nobody, actually, says that. Carson was as sophisticated as any pesticide man about the reasons for using DDT, and the successes and failures of that use. Granted, she was not fair to the mosquito men in her work. There is a wonderful article by Malcolm Gladwell about the great anti-malaria campaign of the late fifties, here. He makes the point that it may have been the best funded anti-disease campaign the U.S. ever sponsored, at least outside of the U.S. He makes the further point that it was a great success:
“Beginning in the late fifties, DDT was shipped out by the ton. Training institutes were opened. In India alone, a hundred and fifty thousand people were hired. By 1960, sixty-six nations had signed up. "What we all had was a handheld pressure sprayer of three-gallon capacity," Jesse Hobbs, who helped run the eradication effort in Jamaica in the early sixties, recalls. "Generally, we used a formulation that was water wettable, meaning you had powder you mixed with water. Then you pressurized the tank. The squad chief would usually have notified the household some days before. The instructions were to take the pictures off the wall, pull everything away from the wall. Take the food and eating utensils out of the house. The spray man would spray with an up-and-down movement--at a certain speed, according to a pattern. You started at a certain point and sprayed the walls and ceiling, then went outside to spray the eaves of the roof. A spray man could cover ten to twelve houses a day. You were using about two hundred milligrams per square foot of DDT, which isn't very much, and it was formulated in a way that you could see where you sprayed. When it dried, it left a deposit, like chalk. It had a bit of a chlorine smell. It's not perfume. It's kind of like swimming-pool water. People were told to wait half an hour for the spray to dry, then they could go back." The results were dramatic. In Taiwan, much of the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of northern Africa, the northern region of Australia, and a large swath of the South Pacific, malaria was eliminated. Sri Lanka saw its cases drop to about a dozen every year. In India, where malaria infected an estimated seventy-five million and killed eight hundred thousand every year, fatalities had dropped to zero by the early sixties. Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions--even tens of millions--of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since.”
What it was not, of course, was a sustainable success. As Carson pointed out, patiently, DDT resistant mosquitoes will emerge and begin to dominate, by way of natural selection, given mass spraying. Which is of course what happened. The funding eventually ran out, the mass spraying itself ran into problems with the animals it was killing, and DDT resistant mosquitoes emerged. On the right, there is a sort of synergy between anti-darwinism and anti-Carsonism – the idea being that natural selection doesn’t exist. It does. So does extinction. It’s a jungle out there.
Gladwell is eminently fair to Carson:
“It was in this same period that Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," taking aim at the environmental consequences of DDT. "The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection," she wrote, alluding to the efforts of men like Soper, "but it has heard little of the other side of the story--the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts." There had already been "warnings," she wrote, of the problems created by pesticides:
On Nissan Island in the South Pacific, for example, spraying had been carried on intensively during the Second World War, but was stopped when hostilities came to an end. Soon swarms of a malaria-carrying mosquito reinvaded the island. All of its predators had been killed off and there had not been time for new populations to become established. The way was therefore clear for a tremendous population explosion. Marshall Laird, who had described this incident, compares chemical control to a treadmill; once we have set foot on it we are unable to stop for fear of the consequences.”
It is for spotting that treadmill that Carson will be forever relevant, and forever of interest to any political intellectual. Which is why other intellectuals can be grudgingly praised by the owners, pervayers, and maintainers of the treadmill – but Carson will always drive them nuts.
One more post about Rachel is welling up in me. And then I’ll turn to the New Yorker’s new environmental reporter, Elizabeth Kolbert.
The Anti-Rachel Carson crowd is a surprising vituperative bunch. If you take an unpleasant stroll around the net, you can find plenty of apoplectic pesticide-ophiles, telling you things like “…today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them.” (which I got from Reason’s screed against Silent Spring). Seeing that number is like smelling the trace of the exterminator. Obviously, that many new cases would mean that soon, everybody would be infected with malaria. Actually, that figure talks about something different. As Reed Karaim explained in this summer’s American Scholar:
“But what about the 300 to 500 million people who "get" malaria annually? When most people hear that, I believe they think "new cases." (After all, you can't get it if you got it, right?) If that were true, then we would be in the middle of terrifying global epidemic. There are only 6.4 billion people on the planet, so we're all going to be sick within the next 13 years or so.
But that's not what the number means at all. Eline Korenromp, the World Health Organization analyst in Geneva behind the study cited when the figure is used, told me that the statistic is an estimate of "incidence of clinical disease episodes" of malaria in a year. In other words, it's the number of times people exhibited symptoms of malaria--not new cases, or even existing cases. The malaria parasite can be eliminated from the body with the fight treatment, but in certain parts of the world it persists in many people for years, and they face recurring symptoms. Others have the disease but show no symptoms. The World Health Organization, Korenromp says, has no estimate of how many new people catch malaria each year.”
This isn’t to say that DDT was not, once, a lifesaver, or that its use in small spraying – inside huts, or on mosquito netting – should be totally discontinued. Nobody, actually, says that. Carson was as sophisticated as any pesticide man about the reasons for using DDT, and the successes and failures of that use. Granted, she was not fair to the mosquito men in her work. There is a wonderful article by Malcolm Gladwell about the great anti-malaria campaign of the late fifties, here. He makes the point that it may have been the best funded anti-disease campaign the U.S. ever sponsored, at least outside of the U.S. He makes the further point that it was a great success:
“Beginning in the late fifties, DDT was shipped out by the ton. Training institutes were opened. In India alone, a hundred and fifty thousand people were hired. By 1960, sixty-six nations had signed up. "What we all had was a handheld pressure sprayer of three-gallon capacity," Jesse Hobbs, who helped run the eradication effort in Jamaica in the early sixties, recalls. "Generally, we used a formulation that was water wettable, meaning you had powder you mixed with water. Then you pressurized the tank. The squad chief would usually have notified the household some days before. The instructions were to take the pictures off the wall, pull everything away from the wall. Take the food and eating utensils out of the house. The spray man would spray with an up-and-down movement--at a certain speed, according to a pattern. You started at a certain point and sprayed the walls and ceiling, then went outside to spray the eaves of the roof. A spray man could cover ten to twelve houses a day. You were using about two hundred milligrams per square foot of DDT, which isn't very much, and it was formulated in a way that you could see where you sprayed. When it dried, it left a deposit, like chalk. It had a bit of a chlorine smell. It's not perfume. It's kind of like swimming-pool water. People were told to wait half an hour for the spray to dry, then they could go back." The results were dramatic. In Taiwan, much of the Caribbean, the Balkans, parts of northern Africa, the northern region of Australia, and a large swath of the South Pacific, malaria was eliminated. Sri Lanka saw its cases drop to about a dozen every year. In India, where malaria infected an estimated seventy-five million and killed eight hundred thousand every year, fatalities had dropped to zero by the early sixties. Between 1945 and 1965, DDT saved millions--even tens of millions--of lives around the world, perhaps more than any other man-made drug or chemical before or since.”
What it was not, of course, was a sustainable success. As Carson pointed out, patiently, DDT resistant mosquitoes will emerge and begin to dominate, by way of natural selection, given mass spraying. Which is of course what happened. The funding eventually ran out, the mass spraying itself ran into problems with the animals it was killing, and DDT resistant mosquitoes emerged. On the right, there is a sort of synergy between anti-darwinism and anti-Carsonism – the idea being that natural selection doesn’t exist. It does. So does extinction. It’s a jungle out there.
Gladwell is eminently fair to Carson:
“It was in this same period that Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," taking aim at the environmental consequences of DDT. "The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection," she wrote, alluding to the efforts of men like Soper, "but it has heard little of the other side of the story--the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts." There had already been "warnings," she wrote, of the problems created by pesticides:
On Nissan Island in the South Pacific, for example, spraying had been carried on intensively during the Second World War, but was stopped when hostilities came to an end. Soon swarms of a malaria-carrying mosquito reinvaded the island. All of its predators had been killed off and there had not been time for new populations to become established. The way was therefore clear for a tremendous population explosion. Marshall Laird, who had described this incident, compares chemical control to a treadmill; once we have set foot on it we are unable to stop for fear of the consequences.”
It is for spotting that treadmill that Carson will be forever relevant, and forever of interest to any political intellectual. Which is why other intellectuals can be grudgingly praised by the owners, pervayers, and maintainers of the treadmill – but Carson will always drive them nuts.
One more post about Rachel is welling up in me. And then I’ll turn to the New Yorker’s new environmental reporter, Elizabeth Kolbert.
Why we love him
"Part of my mission today was to determine whether or not the president is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists to justice, and he is," Bush said at a joint press conference at the presidential place after more than an hour of private talks with Musharraf, an army general who seized power in a bloodless 1999 coup. "He understands the stakes, he understands the responsibility, and he understands the need to make sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy."
Once again, our Rebel in Chief has upended the few, hardcore Islamofascist critics he has at home. “Making sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy” – there will be gnashing of teeth as once again, he nails it. What a strategist! Those sniveling defeatists did not even see this coming.
But the liberal MSM, which as many in the Insta planetary system have been pointing out, have been lying about the greatest man to sit in the Oval Office since Jesus Christ, is not going to tell the story behind the story. So we will. As is well known, the President, like R. Austin Freeman’s famous detective, Doctor Thorndyke, is versed in the latest investigatory techniques, and they could barely hold him back on the plane over to Karachi. He knew his mission and he knew it well. As the plane went into Pakistan air space, Bush put on his parachute, double checked the radio receiver, and then he was off. Goal: find out about this Musharraf character.
A man of ominivorous intellectual appetite, our Rebel in Chief had learned several of the local dialects last week so he could get on the spot information. The mission reminded him of the old days, when he and Sly had gone off on many a black op, penetrating Hanoi, assassinating cadre in Laos, and in general winning the Vietnam war (before, of course, Ted Kennedy, directed by radio phone from Moscow, drowned the war at Chappaquiddick). It felt good getting back to mission strength, and as Bush donned his disguise – popping a betel nut in his mouth, adjusting his white beard and his turban, and putting one sandaled foot after the other – he wondered why he’d ever let this go. Of course, at the end of the mission in Nam, he’d accepted that he’d be more use off of the field – bankrupting small oil companies, being shoehorned by his Dad’s friends into an undeserved windfall with a baseball team, and of course illegally selling stock – all disguising the real trajectory of his life: to become a war president. Even then he knew it would be mano a mano with the dreaded Saddam. No wonder he had a few drink sodden and frankly coked up years there.
But that was long ago, and he couldn’t let regret cloud his mind now as he inquired about the democratizing process among the villagers. Quickly he learned that Musharraf was so popular that nobody in all Pakistan felt like there was any need for an election. This confirmed our man’s intuition: democracy, as he himself had learned in 2000, sometimes meant going beyond the mere fact that you lose an election to the higher fact that you know, in your gut, that you deserve to win. Bush smiled grimly to himself, as he made his way from one Waziristan village to another: Mush, as he liked to call him, would have been on the team in Florida.
But then there was this Osama character. Some memory loss thing, perhaps attributable to that night in Lubbock when he frankly went overboard smokin’ rock, scenes from his past in the Cambodian jungle seeming to lurk in the corners of that cowboy bar, perhaps that was the problem. In excellent Pashto, our Rebel in Chief made his discrete queries about the famous terrorist. He noted the Osama burgers joints that were popping up in every village center. He noticed the Osama informercial playing on many a tv set in the village night. He noticed the Osama look a like contest, the sign on one of the villages quaint Holiday Inns (One Night Only: Osama and his Merry Men), and the ads in the paper: terrorists wanted! It almost made him think of something. But at this point, the betel nut was really giving him a reminiscent buzz, so he decided to cut Mush some slack. After all, our Rebel in Chief himself really hadn’t done all that much about “terrorism” (Karl always used the quote fingers back in the Oval office). This wasn’t No Child Left Behind, where you had to pass some friggin’ test – this was Nam!
It was always Nam, in the end. Our Rebel in Chief radioed in – time to be picked up.
Once again, our Rebel in Chief has upended the few, hardcore Islamofascist critics he has at home. “Making sure our strategy is able to defeat the enemy” – there will be gnashing of teeth as once again, he nails it. What a strategist! Those sniveling defeatists did not even see this coming.
But the liberal MSM, which as many in the Insta planetary system have been pointing out, have been lying about the greatest man to sit in the Oval Office since Jesus Christ, is not going to tell the story behind the story. So we will. As is well known, the President, like R. Austin Freeman’s famous detective, Doctor Thorndyke, is versed in the latest investigatory techniques, and they could barely hold him back on the plane over to Karachi. He knew his mission and he knew it well. As the plane went into Pakistan air space, Bush put on his parachute, double checked the radio receiver, and then he was off. Goal: find out about this Musharraf character.
A man of ominivorous intellectual appetite, our Rebel in Chief had learned several of the local dialects last week so he could get on the spot information. The mission reminded him of the old days, when he and Sly had gone off on many a black op, penetrating Hanoi, assassinating cadre in Laos, and in general winning the Vietnam war (before, of course, Ted Kennedy, directed by radio phone from Moscow, drowned the war at Chappaquiddick). It felt good getting back to mission strength, and as Bush donned his disguise – popping a betel nut in his mouth, adjusting his white beard and his turban, and putting one sandaled foot after the other – he wondered why he’d ever let this go. Of course, at the end of the mission in Nam, he’d accepted that he’d be more use off of the field – bankrupting small oil companies, being shoehorned by his Dad’s friends into an undeserved windfall with a baseball team, and of course illegally selling stock – all disguising the real trajectory of his life: to become a war president. Even then he knew it would be mano a mano with the dreaded Saddam. No wonder he had a few drink sodden and frankly coked up years there.
But that was long ago, and he couldn’t let regret cloud his mind now as he inquired about the democratizing process among the villagers. Quickly he learned that Musharraf was so popular that nobody in all Pakistan felt like there was any need for an election. This confirmed our man’s intuition: democracy, as he himself had learned in 2000, sometimes meant going beyond the mere fact that you lose an election to the higher fact that you know, in your gut, that you deserve to win. Bush smiled grimly to himself, as he made his way from one Waziristan village to another: Mush, as he liked to call him, would have been on the team in Florida.
But then there was this Osama character. Some memory loss thing, perhaps attributable to that night in Lubbock when he frankly went overboard smokin’ rock, scenes from his past in the Cambodian jungle seeming to lurk in the corners of that cowboy bar, perhaps that was the problem. In excellent Pashto, our Rebel in Chief made his discrete queries about the famous terrorist. He noted the Osama burgers joints that were popping up in every village center. He noticed the Osama informercial playing on many a tv set in the village night. He noticed the Osama look a like contest, the sign on one of the villages quaint Holiday Inns (One Night Only: Osama and his Merry Men), and the ads in the paper: terrorists wanted! It almost made him think of something. But at this point, the betel nut was really giving him a reminiscent buzz, so he decided to cut Mush some slack. After all, our Rebel in Chief himself really hadn’t done all that much about “terrorism” (Karl always used the quote fingers back in the Oval office). This wasn’t No Child Left Behind, where you had to pass some friggin’ test – this was Nam!
It was always Nam, in the end. Our Rebel in Chief radioed in – time to be picked up.
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