coups

LI recommends going to Tiny Revolution this morning – the brief comment on the Padilla case goes right to the heart of the madness.

And there is a discussion in the April Harpers about the culture of the military we also recommend, for more extensive reading. The discussion includes Edward Luttwak, Andrew J. Bacevich, Charles J. Dunlap Jr, and Richard H. Kohn, with moderation by Bill Wasik, and it begins with the dismissal of a military coup scenario and ends with a consideration of the rightleaning political culture in the military. Since I have been going to a lot of military blogs, lately, trying to decode them, in a way, so I can use their language and attitudes to create the perfect anti-recruitment message, I’ve been struck by something the panel talks about:

“WASIK: I want to address the question of partisanship in the military. Insofar as there is a "culture war" in America, everyone seems to agree that the armed forces fight on the Republican side. And this is borne out in polls: self-described Republicans outnumber Democrats in the military by more than four to one, and only 7 percent of soldiers describe themselves as "liberal."
KOHN: It has become part of the informal culture of the military to be Republican. You see this at the military academies. They pick it up in the culture, in the training establishments.
DUNLAP: The military is an inherently conservative organization, and this is true of all militaries around the world. Also the demographics have changed: people in the South who were Democratic twenty years ago have become Republican today.
BACEVICH: Yes, all militaries are conservative. But since 1980 our military has become conservative in a more explicitly ideological sense. And that allegiance has been returned in spades by the conservative side in the culture war, which sees soldiers as virtuous representatives of how the country ought to be.
KOHN: And meanwhile there is a streak of anti-militarism on the left.
BACEVICH: It's not that people on the left disdain the military but rather that they are just agnostic about it. They don't identify with soldiers or soldiering.
LUTTWAK: And their children have less of a propensity to serve in the military. Parents who describe themselves as liberal are less likely to make positive noises to their children about the armed forces.
DUNLAP: Which brings up a crucial point. Let's accept as a fact that the U.S. military has become more overtly ideological since 1980. What has happened since 1980? Roughly, that was the beginning of the all-volunteer force. What we are seeing right now is the result of twenty-five years of an all-volunteer force, in which people have self-selected into the organization.
BACEVICH: But the military is also recruited. And it doesn't seem to me that the military has much interest in whether or not the force is representative of American society.”


This rightward shift has been very speeded up by the Iraq war. In effect, the war has caused a near collapse of black enlistment. In fact, urban enlistment in general has sunk, and has been made up by enlistment from the country. This is a bad thing, over the long term. And, as we know, the officer corps in the Air Force has gotten awfully tainted with the worst, most bug eyed evangelical views. This doesn’t get the frightened attention it should:


KOHN: And partisanship in the military overall, i.e., the percentage of the military that identifies with a party as opposed to being "independent" or nonaffiliated, is much greater overall. Not only are military officers more partisan than the general population; they're more partisan than, say, business leaders and other elite groups. I've tracked the numbers of retired four-star generals and admirals endorsing a candidate in presidential campaigns, and it's vastly up in the last two elections.
BACEVICH: Remember at the Democratic National Convention, where General Claudia Kennedy introduced General John Shalikashvili to address the delegates? Why were they up there? There was only one reason: to try to match the parade of retired senior officers that the Republicans have long been trotting out on political occasions.
KOHN: But is that to get military votes? Or just to connect with the American people on national security and patriotism?
BACEVICH: It's both. In 2000, the Republican National Committee put ads in the Army Times and other service magazines attacking the Clinton/Gore record. To me that was, quite frankly, contemptible.
WASIK: It seems as if the two are related: if it's reported that you have the support of the military-as was the case before the 2004 election, when newspapers noted that Kerry had less than 20 percent support within the military-then you get a halo effect among the rest of the voters. Does the partisanship of our military present a danger to the nation?
KOHN: One of the great pillars in our history that has prevented military intervention in politics has been the military's nonpartisan attitude. That's why General George Marshall's generation of officers essentially declined to vote at all, as did generations before them. In fact, for the first time in over a century we now have an officer corps that does identify overwhelmingly with one political party. And that is corrosive.:
Which leads into the most interesting discussion about an issue that hardly ever sticks its head out of the hole. After spending a trillion or so dollars every four years on the military in the States, would the military allow itself to be cut back? To be demobilized? At the end of the Cold war, basically – nothing happened. If this country can’t demobilize at the end of a war, then the structure of aggression has become simply part of what the U.S. is. If we could cut military spending (bracketing veteran’s entitlements) to about one hundred billion a year, which I think is something any even halfway liberal politician ought to shoot for – what happens when the military doesn’t allow it?
KOHN: Consider this glaring example of political manipulation by the military: After every other American war before the Cold War, the country demobilized its wartime military establishment. Even during the Cold War, when we kept a large standing military, we expanded and contracted it for shooting wars. But in 1990 and 1991, the military-through General Colin Powell, who was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time-intervened and effectively prevented a demobilization.
BACEVICH: More accurately, I'd say that he prevented any discussion of a demobilization.
KOHN: That's right.
DUNLAP: We did have a reduction in the size of the military. There were cuts of around 9 percent, in both dollars and manpower.
KOHN: But it was nothing compared to the end of great American wars prior to that.
BACEVICH: Powell is explicit on this in his memoirs. "I was determined to have the Joint Chiefs drive the military strategy train," he wrote. He was not going to have "military reorganization schemes shoved down our throat."
KOHN: This was not a coup, but it was very clearly a circumvention of civilian political authority.”

All of which is on LI's mind. One of the side effects of anti-recruiting which I do not want to see is the strengthening of the rightwing peckerhead cohort in the military -- but I don't see any alternative -- surely the only way to withdraw American troops from Iraq is the strangle the army strategy, but this is why I want to design an anti-recruitment mechanism that doesn't discourage enrollment in the military after the Iraq war.

things for our national short term memory to forget

My comrades, the libertarians (to do a little Hitchensspeak) have rather loony ideas about the market -- but LI stands shoulder to shoulder with them about civil liberties. So it was heartening to read Reason’s Jeff Taylor take the axe to the massive lying about 9/11 – no, not the massive lying that 9/11 was really contrived by U.F.O. Zionists, but the massive lying that 9/11 couldn’t have been prevented, and that everything – every fucking thing – done since, the insane Patriot act, the Homeland Security department (an Escher nightmare inside a Piranesi torture chamber), of course the war on Iraq, has all been useless, unnecessary, a power play by the sleaziest and greediest, made possible by the dopiest and most gullible – the zombie legions still lifting the binoculars to spot all that good news from Iraq -- while the people and structures that bungled 9/11 have been allowed to grow fat and flourish in their little posts.

The national secret police and intelligence agencies are, as one would expect from bureaucracies encased in self-defined secrecy, among the incompetent wonders of the world. Even when the CIA succeeds, as they did in Iraq in 54, they fuck up. But mostly they skip the short term success phase and go right to the fuckup.

But the FBI, always jealous of the CIA, can proudly assert that, in the race for worst, most ill governed and misbegotten American bureaucracy ever, they are far ahead of all contenders, a unique agency in the annals of bumbling, supported by a long history of reaching out to racists, McCarthyites and the hardcore right in order to garner, year after year, the oh so precious and squanderable billions . This is an agency that expressly herded through a law, in the 30s, to make auto theft that crosses a state line a federal crime. Why? Because it happens that autos are well marked things, easy to track down. So whenever the FBI wants to inflate its quota of solved crimes, it just goes after a stolen auto. It did this for decades under Hoover.

Now, the FBI isn’t incompetent about all things. Spying on vegetarian restaurants in which some animal rights speaker is wolfing down the broccoli is something they are expert at. As long as the animal rights speaker doesn’t give em the slip – staying in the bathroom too long, for instance.

…

So, to pass from general disasters to particular ones: what we knew about 9/11 before Moussaoui’s trial was that the warning that a terrorist act was coming did not even provoke an incurious George into asking his Department of Transportation secretary about airport safety. There was, after all, brush to be cut in Crawford. We also know – via Douglas Farah’s reporting – that the knowledge that 9/11 was coming up had circulated among al Qaeda’s contacts in Liberia and Sierra Leone – since the A.Q. and Hizbollah have long had desultory dealings in blood diamonds. In other words, chatter was loud and widespread about the coming attack. What, according to Taylor, was revealed by Moussaoui’s trial, like an x ray showing a tumor, was just how the FBI manages crime prevention. Crime prevention is a bummer – either you respond too hard to some false alarm, or you respond too indifferently to some real crisis. The best thing for a bureaucrat to do, then, is bury any evidence. And so, like a child’s whispering game, the guys in D.C. heard something very different from the things heard by field agents.

One field agent, Harry Samit, who interviewed Moussaoui, was persistent:

“When defense lawyer Edward MacMahon cross-examined Rolince [Samit’s superior, a D.C. based FBI honcho] possibly the first and only time a government security official has been so challenged on 9/11, the disconnect between the official story and reality was plain. Rolince knew nothing of the August 18, 2001 memo Samit had sent to his office warning of terror links. In that memo, Samit warned that Moussaoui wanted to hijack a plane and had the weapons to do it. Samit also warned that Moussaoui "believes it is acceptable to kill civilians" and that he approved of martyrdom. Rolince testified he never read the memo.
On August 17 Samit sent an e-mail to his direct superiors at FBI headquarters recounting Moussaoui's training on 747 simulators. "His excuse is weak, he just wants to learn how to do it... That's pretty ominous and obviously suggests some sort of hijacking plan," Samit wrote.
Rebuffed by his superiors and ignored by Rolince, Samit still sought out more info worldwide and from sources as diverse as the FBI's London, Paris, and Oklahoma City offices, FBI headquarters files, the CIA's counterterrorism center, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, probably the National Security Agency, and the FBI's Iran and OBL offices.”

Ah, and then there is this nugget:
“Defense attorney MacMahon then displayed an August 30, 2001 communication addressed to Samit and FBI headquarters agent Mike Maltbie from a Bureau agent in Paris. It passed along that French intelligence thought Moussaoui was "very dangerous" and had soaked up radical views at London's infamous Finnsbury Park mosque. The French also said Moussaoui was "completely devoted" to bin Laden-style jihadism and, significantly, had traveled to Afghanistan.

Yet on August 31 Maltbie stopped Samit from sending a letter to FAA headquarters in Washington advising them of "a potential threat to security of commercial aircraft" based on the Moussaoui case. Maltbie said he would handle that, but it is not clear if he ever did.”

Yes, we wouldn’t want to wake up, would we. But America the somnambulist has responded by stripping out as many civil rights as we could, allowing an autistic president to proceed with an unnecessary, vanity project war, and putting in place a candy store for earmarking Repub pols called Homeland security. Bozo über alles, dudes.

The man made a mess of things. He got all balled up with Christ. He made a white marriage. He had one son die of tuberculosis, the other shoot himself. He only rode his own space once—Moby-Dick. He had to be wild or he was nothing in particular. He had to go fast, like an American, or he was all torpor. Half horse half alligator. – Charles Olson

The writer no more creates writing than the electrician creates electricity. Invisible currents move at their own speed, out there, among unknown elements – and the writer merely captures a bit of that invisible world in the poor conductors available to him, and measures it and deludes others – though not himself – that he made the conductor, the current, the speeds and fluctuations.

New, yes, to our science, but not to that invisible world itself. Nothing is new or old, there.

So … I received a salutary shock, much like that given to Franklin by the key tied on the wet kite string, from a paragraph I wrote today about ghost stories. Making a plebian précis of Machen’s glorious image of Grimaldi the clown pursuing the spectre of his brother through the London streets, always a minute or two behind him at every house, I wrote:

“That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.”

Well,I looked at that graf with a little amazement, because – although not precisely worded, I should have been a little less gnomic about the kingdom of heaven, or being on time, and pandemonium, or being late -- I should have pointed to the root of meritocracy in the schedule, the saint's luck of always being on time -- I should have pointed out how its negation, being late, is not precisely its negation but a sort of parody, a shadow of being on time that infects its victim even when he is on time, so that his on-timeness is always slightly addled, unlucky –anyway, all of this somehow met in that paragraph, and it seemed to be the missing piece I was looking for, or at least one of them, in my project of understanding success and failure in America. In fact, the psychoanalysis of the meritocracy should definitely accord a large place to the uncanny. Anyone who has read Freud’s essay On the Uncanny will see a parallel in Grimaldi’s hopeless bummel.

And thinking of this, I also thought of a line from Olson’s Maximus poem. A line about failure. I’d stored that line up, put it in some notebook, but I couldn’t find it. I looked for it and stumbled across Olson’s essay on Melville.

I decided to put up the first part of it, Call Me Ishmael – also the name of the whole book. The essay has the spaced intensity of poetry. Olson is an essayist along the same lines as Emerson, or Nietzsche –the pendulum is always swinging between the vatic and the vapid. It is a prose that makes large bets. This excites adolescents, and gives those who have outlived all avatars, moderate souls dessicating their way towards retirement, something to jeer at

What I like best about Olson was how intensely he felt about failure and success in America – how he knew some bone truths about this gristle hearted country. Of course, poets in the fifties and sixties, like novelists, could be successes. Not in the way they are successes now, with the soft shoe act on NPR, the terrible kindergarten readings, all so educated in not dramatizing a line it is funny, the last horrible debris of modernism combined with the complete eclipse, in America, of oratory – an art that only survives, heavily disguised, in hip hop. Successes nevertheless, in the fifties -- Robert Lowell got his face on the cover of a Time magazine. Meanwhile, Olson taught, delivered the mail, and watched the Organization Man, the tranquilized behemoth, bestride the suburbs.

Anyway, Olson’s essay on Melville gets the elements right away:

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration."

He also gets a basic fact about the culture, one so disguised that you can only see it historically, at a distance, it so goes against the grain of what you are supposed to feel in this place:

“Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.

To Melville it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people. Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource.”

And Olson gets the polarity right. It also gets the mythic names right. The polarity is Melville and Poe:

“He had the tradition in him, deep, in his brain, his words, the salt beat of his blood. He had the sea of himself in a vigorous, stricken way, as Poe the street. It enabled him to draw up from Shakespeare. It made Noah, and Moses, contemporary to him. History was ritual and repetition when Melville's imagination was at its own proper beat.”

The names are strewn through the text (John Henry, for instance, is there) like so much phosphorescence. Here’s an instance of it:

“This Ahab had gone wild. The object of his attention was something unconscionably big and white. He had become a specialist: he had all space concentrated into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick. And he assailed it as Columbus an ocean, LaSalle a continent, the Donner Party their winter Pass.”

That the polarity and the names are all of the peculiar dialectic of success and failure – the way failure searches through the street for its lost other, is killed on the Texas coast and cannibalized in the Sierra Nevada and comes out of that innocent (I’ve always loved that one of the survivors of the Donner Party opened a restaurant in Sacremento – the most American of stories!) – is where you have to begin to look at the whole odd structure of petrified luck and its worship in these here States.

"Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope. Melville is the truer man. He lived intensely his people's wrong, their guilt. But he remembered the first dream. The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root."

the unlucky world part two

(See previous post)

Or so I would think. But Jo Bath and John Newton’s Sensible Proof of Spirits essay makes the story much less straightforward. Bath and Newton show how the ghost became a disputed site in seventeenth century England, taken up by intellectuals like Glanvill and More as part of a larger defense of Christian belief. But it is a mistake to infer that Glanvill and More were defending tradition – for B & N make clear, an old, unsystematic belief in ghosts was changed by their use in the intellectual “game” of defending a Christian order against a perceived threat.

“By the early seventeenth century there were signs that the confessional divide upon this issue was becoming increasingly blurred as scholars and clerics, “reluctant to discard visible spirits altogether,” admitted the possibility of ghostly visitation (Thomas 1971, 705). John Aubrey records that as early as the 1590s, “when [William Twisse] was a School-boy atWinchester, [he] saw the Phantoˆme of a School fellow of his deceased . . . who said to him, I am damn’d. This was the occasion of Dr. Twisse’s Conversion, who had been before that time . . . a very wicked Boy” (Aubrey 1696, 73). Thus he became a puritan divine following the sighting of a ghost, a somewhat unique event on two counts: firstly, as the spirit was the agent of conversion; and, secondly, because it was an encounter with a damned soul. The surety of demonic theories, which had been stated with such force by protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century, began to be questioned in the reign of Charles I. Oxford dons discussed “whether spirits really and substantially appeare, i.e. the ghosts of the deceased”—and these speculations were to provide a foretaste of the intellectual debates that were to follow (Crosfield 1935, 17).

Continued belief that the dead could return is notable in the fact that it was considered worth attempting to make a pact with a friend—that whoever died first should report back from the afterlife. This is notable not only for its view of ghosts as souls of the dead and not demons in human form, but also for the underlying notion that such experiential data might verify post-mortem existence. Aubrey http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8misc10.txt records the appearance of Lord Bacconi to Lord Middleton while he was in the Tower after his capture at Worcester during the Civil War. Such pacts continued after the Restoration, and Joseph Glanvill, among others, recounts how Captain William Dyke was disappointed when his friend, Major George Sydenham, failed to make an arranged rendezvous in Dyke’s garden three nights after his death. Sydenham appeared to Dyke soon afterwards, however, and apologised that he was unable to keep his earlier appointment, thus vindicating the former’s arguments for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God, which they had vigorously debated while both were living. Not all pacts were fulfilled, however: the failure of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s friend, Montague, to manifest after death was “a great snare to him during his life” (Burnet 1787, 27).”

Of course, the Earl of Rochester, who wrote the finest poems on fucking in the English language, was a notorious skeptic. But why would skepticism about ghosts lead to skepticism about God? Partly this was due to Glanvill’s chain argument:

“The denial of the existence of spirits was seen as the thin end of a wedge that led ultimately to atheism, an idea that found forceful expression in More’s dictum “No Spirits, No God” (More 1653, 64). This argument was taken up even by moderate Anglicans—Benjamin Camfield wrote that denying the existence of spirits had dangerous consequences: “’tis to be observed, among our modern Atheists and Sadducees especially, that their antipathy and aversion, as to the notion and being of Spirits universally, hath carried them on (and naturally doth so) to the dethroning of God, the Supreme Spirit and the Father of Spirits”(Camfield 1678, 172).

Glanvil similarly spoke of a “chain of connexion,” where disbelief in ghosts and witches—as the lowest and most tangible section of the supernatural chain— ultimately resulted in disbelief in the resurrection and the immortality of the soul. (Glanvill 1681, part IV, 4).”

LI is the more fascinated by this – probably more than the poor reader of this site – as we have just finished reviewing James Morrow’s excellent novel, The Last Witchfinder, for the News and Observer – we hope that PZ has published the review by now – which is one of those alternative history novels a la Neal Stephenson about the legal end of witchcraft. Morrow doesn’t view the burning of witches as an anachronistic and rather charming habit, but as a crime involving flesh, fire and faggots. It has a very sweet and limited energy, unlike, we should say, Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy, which was wedding cake on top of wedding cake.

Well, we poor players have long overstayed our welcome. I’m going to split this up into two posts, Ad Majorum Brevitas Gloriam.

the unlucky world

According to an essay by Arthur Machen (the English ghost story writer who fascinates Javier Marias, the great Spanish novelist), Grimaldi, the most famous clown of Regency England, was performing one night in 1803 in a play called “A Bold Stroke for a Wife” when he was told that there were two men waiting to see him at the stage door that led from the back of the theatre into the street. Grimaldi went to see what they wanted, and confronted two apparent strangers. One was in a white waistcoat, and had evidently been living in the tropics, such was the complexion of his skin. He greeted Grimaldi familiarly. Grimaldi was at a loss as to who this person was until the man unbuttoned his shirt and showed the clown a scar. The man was Grimaldi’s brother John. This was pretty amazing – John had supposedly gone down on a Naval ship years before.

Grimaldi, of course, was overjoyed, and invited the men in. John’s companion demurred – and John, after giving him instructions on when they would meet again in the morning, mounted the stairs with Grimaldi and came into the Green room while his companion disappeared into the London night. Grimaldi still had to complete his part in the play, so he left his brother with another man, a Mr. Wroughten, while he went to do his stage business. John showed Mr. Wroughten that his duffel bag was full of coins, and bragged about his various successes. Grimaldi was in and out of the green room according to his entrances and exits. His idea was that John should come with him, after the play, to see their mother. John asked for her address, which Grimaldi gave, but then he said that they should go together, and that he merely had to change out of his costume in the dressing room.

To quote Machen: “And then the strangeness of it all came with a sudden onset on Grimaldi. "The agitation of his feelings, the suddenness of his brother's return, the good fortune which had attended him in his
absence, the gentility of his appearance, and his possession of so
much money; all together confused him so that he could scarcely use
his hands." He seems to have fallen into the state which the Scots
call a "dwam," a manner of waking vision, in which actualities are
taken for dreams and the man wonders when he will awake and recognise
that he has been amongst the shadows of the night.” It was in this state that Grimaldi returned to the Green room, only to find that his brother had left.

This is my favorite part of the story. Grimaldi found an actor named Powell in the Green room, and asked if he’d seen John.

"I saw him," he replied, "but a moment ago; he is waiting for you on
the stage. I won't detain you, for he complains that you have been
longer away now than you said you would be."

So Grimaldi hurried to the stage area. John wasn’t there. Another actor was there named Bannister. Bannister asked who Grimaldi was looking for, and after Grimaldi told him he was looking for John, Bannister said:

"Well, and I saw and spoke to him not a minute ago," said Bannister.
"When he left me, he went in that direction (pointing towards the
passage that led towards the stage-door). I should think he had left
the theatre."

So the clown went out of the theater, but he didn’t spot John. The doorkeeper said he’d gone out just a minute before. Grimaldi, out in the street, decided that John had, perhaps, decided to visit an old friend of his who lived close to the theater, Bowley. So he rushed to the Bowley house and knocked, even though it was rather late. Bowley came to the door:

“Mr. Bowley himself opened the door, and was evidently greatly
surprised.

"I have, indeed, seen your brother," said he. "Good God! I was never
so amazed in all my life."

"Is he here now?" was the anxious inquiry.

"No; but he has not been gone a minute; he cannot have gone many
yards."

"Which way?"

"That way--towards Duke Street."”

The clown rushed onwards, then, thinking that his brother was going to see another friend there, a Mr. Bailey. He rattled the door of the house, which was dark, rousing the girl, who spoke to Grimaldi from the window:

“"I tell you again, he is not at home."

"What are you talking about? Who is not at home?"

"Why, Mr. Bailey. I told you so before. What do you keep on knocking
for at this time of night?"

In great bewilderment, Grimaldi begged the girl to come downstairs, as
he wanted to speak to her, telling her his name. She came down after a
short interval.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir," said the maid. "But there was a
gentleman here knocking and ringing very violently not a minute before
you came. I told him Mr. Bailey was not at home; and when I heard you
at the door I thought It was him, and that he would not go away."

Then Grimaldi asked the girl if she had seen the gentleman's face. She
had not; she had looked out of the upper-window, and all that she
noticed was that the gentleman had a white waistcoat, whence she
inferred that he might have come to take her master out to a party.

Back went the amazed and frightened actor to the theatre. There
nothing had been seen of the lost brother; and then Grimaldi began a
sort of mad midnight tour of the houses of old friends round the Lane,
knocking and ringing people out of their beds and enquiring after his
brother. Some of the people thought Grimaldi was mad; and said so. His
manner was wild, and nobody had heard of John Grimaldi for fourteen
years. They had long given him up as dead.”

And so Grimaldi finally lost the trail of his brother. He went home. He told his mother. She fainted. The next day, and the next, no sign of John. And no sign ever again. Grimaldi pulled some strings to see if John hadn’t been impressed into the Navy that night. He talked to the London police. But never a hide nor hair of the man was discovered. It was as if he’d never been.

This is what Machen says:

“It is an extraordinary tale. It may be true in every particular. But
there are strange circumstances in the history. For example: why
should John knock up his old friend, Mr. Bowley, only to dart away
from his door in a minute's time? Note that minute in advance all
through the chase. It persisted up to Mr. Bailey's house. The
servant-girl there said, "there was a gentleman here knocking and
ringing very violently not a minute before you came." I do not quite
know why; but this fixed period of a minute inspires me with distrust.”

But it is, of course, the minute that makes the tale. That echoing minute behind, that tardiness as a suddenly autonomous and separate domain of time chunked off of secular time, in which you have a chance to “be on time” – as though one were caught in a world of “too late,” with only one possibility – the unlucky one. If one is looking for the “effect” of the Enlightenment, vide our last post, one of them is surely that the ghost story, the uncanny that so fascinated Freud, fills the place in Western culture that the ghost once filled.

We return to this in our second post.

defending the enlightenment from its defenders

Madeleine Bunting is a columnist for the Guardian who is against the war (yeah!) but is also soft on religion – so that she often goes after people who are against the war, like Richard Dawkins (not so yeah!). LI has been pretty amused, however, by the reaction to her recent thumbsucking piece about the Enlightenment. The piece goes in a rather predictable way for someone who wants to combine a general leftward leaningness with spirituality – Bunting is generally not happy with the Enlightenment. This has caused various pro-war people (here ) and anti-religious people (here ) to the projecting of thunderous batteries of spitballs at her.

Actually, Bunting’s column comes at the enlightenment from a refreshingly unique angle, at least for a newspaper columnist:

“Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam. It was as if the debate had shifted from the Reformation - why hasn't Islam had one? (it dawned on such questioners that a)the Christian Reformation led to several centuries of appalling bloodshed and b)there's a good argument that Wahabi Islam is precisely Islam's reformation) - to another tack: why hasn't Islam had an Enlightenment?)

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias. Montesquieu's 'Persian Letters' is a good example of this.”

However, it is here that one wonders about her own acquaintanceship with Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters.” In fact, a writer much more involved with the creation of the colonialist mindset, Johnny Mill’s father, James Mill, had, in 1810, a much different idea of Montesquieu. He complains that Montesquieu (among other 18th century writers) romanticized Moslem culture, and Asian culture in general. In fact, I’d buy Mill’s version over Madeleine’s – that is, I’d say that far from being anti-Muslim, Montesquieu’s work, along with William Jones’ work on Sanskrit antiquities, was the beginning of an attitude of cultural relativism that Bunting can simply assume today, so much has it rooted in the conventional wisdom.

Here’s what Mill wrote about William Jones – a pretty pure product of the philosophe culture:

“Sir W. finds proofs of a pure theism as easily among the Persians as among the Arabs. "The primeval religion of Iran," he says, "if we rely on the authorities adduced by Mohsani Fani, was that which Newton calls the oldest (and it may be justly called the noblest) of all religions: A firm belief that one supreme God made the world by his power, and continually governed it by his providence; a pious fear, love, and adoration of him; a due reverence for parents and aged persons; a fraternal affection for the whole human race, and a compassionate tenderness even for the brute creation."

I could quote endlessly from Mill’s entertaining Chapter X, Book 2, an attack on the European softheadedness of according the Asians, Persians and Hindoos the least color of civilization.

In fact, that kind of praise for Islam – which, shed of the scandalous worship of a magician, Jesus, seemed, to those who were admittedly not experts in Islam, a religion much closer to their own deism than Christianity – is not uncommon in the Enlightenment. Montesquieu, in the Spirit of the Laws, did take oriental despotism (which Voltaire criticized as a fiction) as a model with which to obliquely criticize the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. But your average Enlightenment figure, from Leibniz up to Diderot, was much more apt to view the Other as distinctly embodying a history and a corpus of tradition that was not automatically subordinate to the West. True, the Oriental other was fictionalized to provide a model against which to criticize or praise features of French or British, or in general Christian civilization. Still, Bunting’s idea of the relation between the Orient and Europe (not that she should be held to some high scholarly standard -- she is merely writing an ephemeral piece) seriously misjudges the Enlightenment’s disposition. Plus, of course, the idea that the Enlightenment sprang up solely in response to the threat of the Ottoman empire is entirely too reductive. After all, the French allied with the Ottomans, and in the nineteenth century the British and the French often found themselves on the Ottoman side – but who would say that this was evidence of pro-Islamic feeling? The whole issue of the Arabic reception of early modern science and the perception, among both the Ottomans and the North African Arabic polities, that the European powers were gaining advantage – is not so simple.

But … this brings us to the subject of ghosts. LI is just using the Bunting piece as a bridge to commenting on “Sensible Proof of Spirits”: Ghost Belief during the Later Seventeenth Century by Jo Bath and John Newton in the April issue of Folklore. Which will be tomorrow’s post.

... ending with a fable

Les anecdotes les plus utiles et les plus précieuses sont les écrits secrets que laissent les grands princes, quand la candeur de leur âme se manifeste dans ces monuments – Voltaire

Well, LI has no access to the secret history of Ibrahim Jafari – we are definitely lacking the crucial anecdotes. But we thought, what the hell, we’d trail the semi-invisible man through Factiva. Surely some major newspaper or magazine profiled the man who was the first Interim Council president and has been the prime minister for a year and a half. But … though you can find profiles of Chalabi and Allawi galore, though you can find all kinds of pics and interviews with Kenan Makiya, you will find Jafari quoted, entering the newstory picture, sometimes referenced (especially by Jim Hoagland, Chalabi’s agent on the Washington Post), a full profile of him, even some account of what he was doing in London for twenty years as the head of the Da’wa branch there is simply impossible to find. However, one thing is clear – Jafari is used to feeding pablum to a patron. For twenty years, the pablum was fed to Iran, but the strategy was not to be a total Iranian pawn. Feeding pablum to the U.S. is much easier. These grafs in the Washington Post essay by Jafari, My Vision for Iraq, are to be washed down with warm koolaid at the next Heritage foundation meeting:

“The other major challenge my government will face is reviving Iraq's economy. Iraq has been drowned by decades of Baathist socialist policies that have made millions reliant on government handouts. We must encourage entrepreneurship and enterprise, while establishing adequate safety nets for the less privileged.
Economic rehabilitation also requires some tough and unpopular changes, such as the reduction in government subsidies for gasoline that my administration began a few months ago. Such steps can be made only by a popular government that has the trust of the people. My administration has the political capital to be able to bring about these necessary changes.”

Political capital – hmm, an old and venerated Arabic term. LI has been trying to figure out how to make this point in a simple manner. Because criticism of the media is so often about the bias in the reporting of this or that story, instead of the accumulative omissions around which a mass of stories are built, to point to a blind spot, a gap, a motivated absence, sets up a different critical dynamic -- one that is vaguely psychoanalytical. That is always the hardest of criticisms to explain.

So, take a look at Edward Wong's interview with Jafari in the NYTtoday. Again, we get a very sketchy sense of who Jafari is or where he comes from. In fact, in a desperate attempt to keep your NYT reader on the page, Wong feels compelled to mention an Iraqi we have heard of:

"In the first two years of the war, Mr. Jaafari emerged as one of the most popular politicians in Iraq, especially compared with other exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite. A doctor by training and well-versed in the Koran, Mr. Jaafari comes from a prominent family in Karbala, the Shiite holy city. But since taking power last spring, Mr. Jaafari has come under widespread criticism for failing to stamp out the insurgency and promoting hard-line pro-Shiite policies."

Yes, we hang onto that former Pentagon (not to mention NYT foreign correspondent) favorite, just so we know where we are. And so the fogmachines of war keep blasting out their product -- cooled hot air.

…
Oh well. I planned to provide such a nice two poster of info about Da’wa, and I’m afraid I was underestimating how little there is in English out there. So instead, here is a fable.

I found this nice Kurdish fable while hunting for information about Jafari. I came upon Incoherent Thoughts, a blog I’d recommend. Sandrine Alexie, the blogger, translated it into French, and I’m going to translate it into English.

“They say that when Belkîs [the queen of Sheba] came to visit the prophet Solomon, she wished for bird feathers in order to make a bed. The prophet Solomon called together all the birds and told them: you have to tear out your feathers to make a bed for the Queen of Sheba! When the bat understood what was going on, it quickly tore out all its feathers and fled. But the birds did not follow this command and said: prophet Solomon, what a sin it is to ask us to strip ourselves of plumage for your wife! Without a feather, how will we pass the winter? These feathers protect our lives from the cold.

The prophet Solomon recognized the justice of these words and let them go. But the bat had plucked itself: since that time, it blushes to come out in the daylight, in the midst of its friends, and only comes out at night.”
Osman Sabrî in Recueil de textes kourmandji, publié par Stig Wikander, 1959.

I can think of several political applications for this tale ... but I prefer to remain artistically silent about them.