One of the more discouraging things about Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is how much its famous opening lines, about tragedy and farce, have absorbed interest in the entire work. (Hegel observed somewhere that all great world historical facts and persons occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce). Those lines weren’t meant as toss offs, any more than the individual witticisms in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest are written to be relished solely outside of their place in the play. Rather, the tragedy/farce duality initiates a series of complex and beautiful inversions which operate, on the literary level, to make this account of the long ago doings of half forgotten Frenchmen still a fast paced read, and on the political level, to give us perhaps the first analysis of the kind of reactionary politics that, it turns out, is the ever-recurring counterpart, in modernity, to modernization itself. The convergence of a literary trope and a political truth is quite astonishing – it is like being able to use a poem as a household cleaner. In other words, the literary and the political ought to come from completely separate conceptual domains. That they don’t is one of the surprises of the text. It is a surprise that destabilizes our ideas of genre, journalism, history, politics and philosophy. In this sense, Marx’s work is close to Swift’s Drapier Letters, Burke’s Reflections, and Paine’s The Rights of Man.
Terell Carver, in a brief intro to the work in Strategies (2003), gives us its publication history:
“Put through the mill of the Selected or Collected Marx and Engels, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is just another text, falling at 1852 in the lineup. Compared to its usual neighbors, The Class Struggles in France and The Cologne Communist Trial, it is more famous and more widely read. In Marx’s own time, matters were rather different: The Class Struggles appeared in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung-Revue with a reasonable circulation in Germany and amongst the e´migre ´s, and The Cologne Communist Trial became a notorious pamphlet smuggled over borders and past censors. The Eighteenth Brumaire was supposed to appear in installments in a functioning periodical (Die Revolution), published in the USA, but the plans for a periodical fell through. The text eventually appeared as a whole in May 1852 in something more like a pamphlet than a periodical (there were no other works in it), though styling itself an “occasional” publication. Excerpts appeared in English in the Chartist People’s Paper from September through December. While the Eighteenth Brumaire was distributed in the US (20¢ wholesale, 25¢ retail), Marx and his associates had little luck getting it re-imported (in any language) back into Europe, and it is safe to assume that its existence was known to but a select few. It was also not the only pamphlet circulating that satirized the deadly funny Louis Bonaparte, nor the only one that recalled the original 18th Brumaire of Year VIII of the revolution. In Prussia Marx’s brother-in-law the Interior Minister Friedrich von Westphalen was informed by his police that an embarrassing relation had published a work entitled Revolution, but there is no evidence that many others of any political persuasion were taking such a keen interest. In short, its contemporary impact was disproportionate to its later fame, even as one of Marx’s second-rank texts.”
Carver has an anachronistic suggestion as to the pamphlet’s genre:
“I have suggested that the Eighteenth Brumaire was the closest Marx could get to the movies, and that the genre is that of the docu-drama, in which factual reportage merges with political performance.10 While Marx did not have access to the drama as such (stage, screen, television), he did his best through his vivid
characterizations and colorful language. If metaphors could murder, he would have gone to prison or the scaffold, and there is no doubt that he was a master of character assassination. The colorful language of the Eighteenth Brumaire should have made it performative as a pamphlet, if anything could, that is,
rallying democratic forces in several countries against the principle and practice of authoritarianism and gangsterism, as practiced by Louis Bonaparte in his politics of constitutional subversion. Moreover, what Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire reflects his view of politics as a performance in an astonishingly subtle and complex way.”
LI has been re-reading the Eighteenth B. with a lot of pleasure, in our off moments – since we are thinking a lot, at the moment, of the political pamphleteering. Marx put his finger on the way the reactionary moment is structured in this pamphlet – with the structure of that moment being in contradiction with the very premise of the modern version of history. That version, codified in the eighteenth century, made history the story of progress. Ranke, in the 19th century, famously objected that all moments are ‘equally distant’ from God – but he didn’t actually believe this, as his treatment of Asian history shows (Asian history, for Ranke, was ‘stagnant’). Progress operates as the Anankê of history – its necessity. That progress happens through people, behind their backs, so to speak, is the condition for the tragic opposition between the hero and the story in which he figures -- at least for the modern hero. While I don’t want to press this too hard, obviously one of the differences between tragedy and farce is the difference between a story in which necessity conditions the general trajectory of discoveries (both by agents in the narrative and by observers outside of it) and a story in which necessity continually dissolves into contingency – into lovers hiding in closets, policemen chasing funny crooks, banana peels getting under the heels of harlequins.
The masterly design into which Marx presses the highly resistible but curiously unresisted rise of the very louche Louis Napoleon is to make all accidents happen under the sign of inversion. Now, it is true that Marx does a little cheating to get his inversions. The French revolution, as he presents it, progresses by moving from a bourgeois revolution to a popular one – from the fall of the Bastille to Robespierre. He makes a little cut there, although we know that isn’t the end of the story. The reactionary sequence of 1848 to 1851 is the inverse of this: it moves from a popular revolution through a bourgeois reaction to a dictatorial conclusion.
“Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows who have mislaid their bodies.”
LI will return to this notion in another post.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
the American crisis
Dear President Bush,
In 1776, at a time when American forces were being pushed back by the British, Tom Paine took up his pen and wrote a series of letters to various British officials, and even to the people of England. These letters were published as a pamphlet entitled, The American Crisis. While Paine likely did not believe that his letters would actually persuade their addressees to cease and desist from the various depredations that he deplored, his letters gave them a moral chance.
In fact, the commander of the British forces in America, Lord Howe, might well have read the letters Paine addressed to him. After all, Paine was a wildly popular author, and Howe might have felt it was his duty to read a writer whose words would have an immediate effect on the morale of the population he had come to subdue.
Times have, of course, changed. In 2002, you often hinted that you did not even read newspapers. The image of you, barely able to pull yourself away from ESPN 1 to watch some paen to your genius on Fox News, was calculated to anger your enemies. The enemies at that point had, admittedly, dwindled. Here it is important to note – it is always important to note - that you were not really elected as president. You lost the popular vote. You were nevertheless elevated to your office in one of the most singular acts of corruption in U.S. history – since the Supreme Court, however low it has fallen at times, had never before played the role ward boss. If the U.S. were another country – say, Iran, or the Ukraine – the machinations that brought a man of your feeble abilities and family connections to power would have caused the U.S. state department to issue some tut-tuttery about the whole thing. However, solely because the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, you became popular. The rallying round effect erased the shameful memory of your criminal ascent. In addition, the knowledge that your disinterest in newspapers extended to disinterest in memos advising you of imminent Al Qaeda attack was not, in 2002, in the sphere of public knowledge.
What is one to make of the boast of ignorance by a man who is evidently willing to commit any infamy to become president? There is something bullying about the ignorance, something that hints at the kind of hoodlum who actually takes pride in some outrageous act of brutality. But, on balance, I don’t think that you are a hoodlum. Rather, yours is a character in which grudges have long been stored up and ossified. The contradiction between your failure to ever achieve anything by yourself, your reliance on a network of cronies, and the code of the self made man that is your public ideology, is too gross for you to completely ignore. Instead, a man of your type immediately decides that his failures are due to a cabal. In your set, that cabal is usually represented as some vague but powerful one composed of East Coast liberal elites. Without thinking much about it, you have obviously accept this idea. So to shock them by playing the Texas ignoramus proved irresistibly tempting to a man who, evidently, spent his happiest days as the class clown at the private school he went to long ago.
The short era in which playing the Clown Prince reaped applause is now over, however, and you are back to admitting to the habit of reading newspapers. This is progress of a sort – vaunting your ignorance as an electoral ploy is not a thing that even your most fanatic followers can stomach any longer. Even though they can stomach quite a bit.
With the myth of your functional illiteracy exploded, my conceit, that I am writing a letter to a man who might actually read it – however dim the chance – acquires a little more verisimilitude. My idea, then, is to occasionally pen letters to you about Iran, Iraq, your foreign policy, your environmental policy, your economic policy, etc. – and show you the error of your ways. Since your errors are so multitudinous and so fundamental, this task will require a little work. Like Paine, however, I believe that at the very center of the person is a flickering but permanent moment of liberty. By demonstrating, irrefutably, that you have set this nation on the path to ignoble defeat in Iraq; that you are acting the madman with regard to reality in the Middle East, in China, in Europe, and in Latin America; that you have multiplied and augmented the environmental crises that are now upon us; that you have oppressed the poor and the working class; that the money that you have poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the attempt to shift the balance of opportunities in this country, so that the descendents of the poor will always be poor, the descendents of the middle class will be burdened with such intolerable debts that they sink into poverty, and the descendents of the wealthy, like you yourself, will be free to tread across the bodies of their innumerable victims without any fear of retaliation, is blood money and fairy money – money that will be revenged, and money that will vanish; all of these things will, if you receive them into your heart, perhaps change you at the last minute into a tolerable human being and a president who, from being a laughing stock, becomes a leader upon whom we can look back with gratitude. There are those who say that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, especially if the sow has been hardened in her vices, stewed in her crib, for the whole of her life. But this is too hard on sows, I think, and it might even be too hard on you.
This is what Paine wrote to Howe:
“TO argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of
reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in
contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring
to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of
feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man
will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival
and a bear your master.”
And, a paragraph later:
“…it would be a pity to pass you from the world in state, and consign you to magnificent oblivion among the tombs, without telling the future beholder why. Judas is as much known as John, yet history ascribes their fame to very different actions.”
Paine is harsh, but then, he was also confident that fate had not bound him up entirely with the fate of Lord Howe. Unfortunately, your actions do have an effect on my fate. For that reason, I lean towards the generous notion that your ignorance is not so ingrained as to make all my scrubbing vain, but that it can be rubbed away with enough friction.
Yours truly,
Limited Inc.
PS -- My next letter may touch on this Washington Post article about Iran, and more specifically, your almost infallible ability to get things wrong, screw things up, and generally leave a ring of scum about the most mundane matters of government. Did you and your cronies actually believe you were going to make the Iranian government fall with a flick of your magic military hand? We must work on that vanity. While you are evidently a slothful man, and not the brightest bulb in the bunch, I don't really think these are the keys to your gross incompetence. No, it is your vanity that is your and, alas, our undoing.
In 1776, at a time when American forces were being pushed back by the British, Tom Paine took up his pen and wrote a series of letters to various British officials, and even to the people of England. These letters were published as a pamphlet entitled, The American Crisis. While Paine likely did not believe that his letters would actually persuade their addressees to cease and desist from the various depredations that he deplored, his letters gave them a moral chance.
In fact, the commander of the British forces in America, Lord Howe, might well have read the letters Paine addressed to him. After all, Paine was a wildly popular author, and Howe might have felt it was his duty to read a writer whose words would have an immediate effect on the morale of the population he had come to subdue.
Times have, of course, changed. In 2002, you often hinted that you did not even read newspapers. The image of you, barely able to pull yourself away from ESPN 1 to watch some paen to your genius on Fox News, was calculated to anger your enemies. The enemies at that point had, admittedly, dwindled. Here it is important to note – it is always important to note - that you were not really elected as president. You lost the popular vote. You were nevertheless elevated to your office in one of the most singular acts of corruption in U.S. history – since the Supreme Court, however low it has fallen at times, had never before played the role ward boss. If the U.S. were another country – say, Iran, or the Ukraine – the machinations that brought a man of your feeble abilities and family connections to power would have caused the U.S. state department to issue some tut-tuttery about the whole thing. However, solely because the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, you became popular. The rallying round effect erased the shameful memory of your criminal ascent. In addition, the knowledge that your disinterest in newspapers extended to disinterest in memos advising you of imminent Al Qaeda attack was not, in 2002, in the sphere of public knowledge.
What is one to make of the boast of ignorance by a man who is evidently willing to commit any infamy to become president? There is something bullying about the ignorance, something that hints at the kind of hoodlum who actually takes pride in some outrageous act of brutality. But, on balance, I don’t think that you are a hoodlum. Rather, yours is a character in which grudges have long been stored up and ossified. The contradiction between your failure to ever achieve anything by yourself, your reliance on a network of cronies, and the code of the self made man that is your public ideology, is too gross for you to completely ignore. Instead, a man of your type immediately decides that his failures are due to a cabal. In your set, that cabal is usually represented as some vague but powerful one composed of East Coast liberal elites. Without thinking much about it, you have obviously accept this idea. So to shock them by playing the Texas ignoramus proved irresistibly tempting to a man who, evidently, spent his happiest days as the class clown at the private school he went to long ago.
The short era in which playing the Clown Prince reaped applause is now over, however, and you are back to admitting to the habit of reading newspapers. This is progress of a sort – vaunting your ignorance as an electoral ploy is not a thing that even your most fanatic followers can stomach any longer. Even though they can stomach quite a bit.
With the myth of your functional illiteracy exploded, my conceit, that I am writing a letter to a man who might actually read it – however dim the chance – acquires a little more verisimilitude. My idea, then, is to occasionally pen letters to you about Iran, Iraq, your foreign policy, your environmental policy, your economic policy, etc. – and show you the error of your ways. Since your errors are so multitudinous and so fundamental, this task will require a little work. Like Paine, however, I believe that at the very center of the person is a flickering but permanent moment of liberty. By demonstrating, irrefutably, that you have set this nation on the path to ignoble defeat in Iraq; that you are acting the madman with regard to reality in the Middle East, in China, in Europe, and in Latin America; that you have multiplied and augmented the environmental crises that are now upon us; that you have oppressed the poor and the working class; that the money that you have poured into the pockets of the wealthy in the attempt to shift the balance of opportunities in this country, so that the descendents of the poor will always be poor, the descendents of the middle class will be burdened with such intolerable debts that they sink into poverty, and the descendents of the wealthy, like you yourself, will be free to tread across the bodies of their innumerable victims without any fear of retaliation, is blood money and fairy money – money that will be revenged, and money that will vanish; all of these things will, if you receive them into your heart, perhaps change you at the last minute into a tolerable human being and a president who, from being a laughing stock, becomes a leader upon whom we can look back with gratitude. There are those who say that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, especially if the sow has been hardened in her vices, stewed in her crib, for the whole of her life. But this is too hard on sows, I think, and it might even be too hard on you.
This is what Paine wrote to Howe:
“TO argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of
reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in
contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring
to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of
feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man
will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival
and a bear your master.”
And, a paragraph later:
“…it would be a pity to pass you from the world in state, and consign you to magnificent oblivion among the tombs, without telling the future beholder why. Judas is as much known as John, yet history ascribes their fame to very different actions.”
Paine is harsh, but then, he was also confident that fate had not bound him up entirely with the fate of Lord Howe. Unfortunately, your actions do have an effect on my fate. For that reason, I lean towards the generous notion that your ignorance is not so ingrained as to make all my scrubbing vain, but that it can be rubbed away with enough friction.
Yours truly,
Limited Inc.
PS -- My next letter may touch on this Washington Post article about Iran, and more specifically, your almost infallible ability to get things wrong, screw things up, and generally leave a ring of scum about the most mundane matters of government. Did you and your cronies actually believe you were going to make the Iranian government fall with a flick of your magic military hand? We must work on that vanity. While you are evidently a slothful man, and not the brightest bulb in the bunch, I don't really think these are the keys to your gross incompetence. No, it is your vanity that is your and, alas, our undoing.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Wayne Morse day
LI is busy, busy -- hey, yesterday we put the finishing touches on the first draft of our translation of Silja Graupe's "Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens. Die Methodologie der Wirtschafts-wissenschaften im Licht japanischer Philosophie." More on the publication of that book as it developes.
Anyway, here are some choice morsels from Wayne Morse, the Oregon Senator who was one of the two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Morse foresaw the age of the executive vanity war. Such as the war in Iraq that Americans are suffering from (a bit here, a bit there -- an invisible sector with its amputated limbs and its freaked out minds) and that the Iraqis are really suffering from -- you know, from the policy of war crimes with which the U.S. military has chosen to pursue this 'low intensity warfare,' from Fallujah to Haditha.
“Likewise, there are many Congressional politicians who would evade their responsibilities as to American foreign policy in Asia by use of the specious argument that “foreign policy is a matter for the Executive branch of the government. that branch has information no Congressman has access to.” Of course, such an alibi for evading Congressional responsibility in the field of foreign policy may be based on lack of understanding, or a convenient forgetting of our system of checks and balances, that exists and should be exercised in the relationships between and Among our co-ordinate and co-equal branches of government.
Granted, there are many in Congress that would prefer to pass the buck to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon building in respect to our unilateral American military action in Asia. nevertheless, I am satisfied that once the American people come ot understand the facts involved in the ill fated military operations in Asia, they will hold to an accounting those members of Congress who abdicated their responsibilities in the field of foreign policy.
It is an elementary principle of constitutional law that the Executive branch of government cannot spend taxpayer’s money in the field of foreign policy, or for any other purpose except when the appropriation is passed into law.
…
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to declare war is vested in the Congress. No President has the legal authority under the Constitution to send American boys to their death on a battlefield in the absense of a declaration of war. – Wayne Morse, July 17, 1964
What America needs to hear is the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, in community after community, across the length and breadth of this land, in protest against the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal war in South Vietnam. Those protest must be within the law. Those protests must not violate the law. But the administration must also act in keeping with the rights of the protesters under the first amendment.
…
I wish to make clear once more my views as to why this administration is not declaring war. There are two main reasons… The administration knows that to ask Congress for a declaration of war would start a historic debate at the grassroots of America. The administration would soon come to recognize that the American people want peace, not war.
Second a declaration of war would completely change the international law relationships immediately with every non-combatant country in the world.
- Sen. Morse, October 19, 1965
The United States is on the way toward leading mankind to a third world war. …
The resolution of August, 1964 cites southeast Asia as an area where the United States regards the maintenance of international peace and security as vital to our interests. I submit that the continued intrusion of large-scale American military forces, bases and navies in this area will destroy what little international peace and security is left to the people of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and eventually Burma and Cambodia, for the war that is lapping at their shores will engulf them, too, if it is allowed to proceed on its present course. – April, 1966
Anyway, here are some choice morsels from Wayne Morse, the Oregon Senator who was one of the two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Morse foresaw the age of the executive vanity war. Such as the war in Iraq that Americans are suffering from (a bit here, a bit there -- an invisible sector with its amputated limbs and its freaked out minds) and that the Iraqis are really suffering from -- you know, from the policy of war crimes with which the U.S. military has chosen to pursue this 'low intensity warfare,' from Fallujah to Haditha.
“Likewise, there are many Congressional politicians who would evade their responsibilities as to American foreign policy in Asia by use of the specious argument that “foreign policy is a matter for the Executive branch of the government. that branch has information no Congressman has access to.” Of course, such an alibi for evading Congressional responsibility in the field of foreign policy may be based on lack of understanding, or a convenient forgetting of our system of checks and balances, that exists and should be exercised in the relationships between and Among our co-ordinate and co-equal branches of government.
Granted, there are many in Congress that would prefer to pass the buck to the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon building in respect to our unilateral American military action in Asia. nevertheless, I am satisfied that once the American people come ot understand the facts involved in the ill fated military operations in Asia, they will hold to an accounting those members of Congress who abdicated their responsibilities in the field of foreign policy.
It is an elementary principle of constitutional law that the Executive branch of government cannot spend taxpayer’s money in the field of foreign policy, or for any other purpose except when the appropriation is passed into law.
…
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to declare war is vested in the Congress. No President has the legal authority under the Constitution to send American boys to their death on a battlefield in the absense of a declaration of war. – Wayne Morse, July 17, 1964
What America needs to hear is the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, in community after community, across the length and breadth of this land, in protest against the administration’s unconstitutional and illegal war in South Vietnam. Those protest must be within the law. Those protests must not violate the law. But the administration must also act in keeping with the rights of the protesters under the first amendment.
…
I wish to make clear once more my views as to why this administration is not declaring war. There are two main reasons… The administration knows that to ask Congress for a declaration of war would start a historic debate at the grassroots of America. The administration would soon come to recognize that the American people want peace, not war.
Second a declaration of war would completely change the international law relationships immediately with every non-combatant country in the world.
- Sen. Morse, October 19, 1965
The United States is on the way toward leading mankind to a third world war. …
The resolution of August, 1964 cites southeast Asia as an area where the United States regards the maintenance of international peace and security as vital to our interests. I submit that the continued intrusion of large-scale American military forces, bases and navies in this area will destroy what little international peace and security is left to the people of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and eventually Burma and Cambodia, for the war that is lapping at their shores will engulf them, too, if it is allowed to proceed on its present course. – April, 1966
note on Charlotte Street
I received an email today from the former Charlotte Street blog. The new address of the blog is http://www.mark-kaplan.blogspot.com. The old Charlotte Street blog is now inhabited by a spam alien.
Friday, June 16, 2006
the power of bazooka
There are the business stories that horrify; the business stories that make you despair; and then, every once in a while, business stories that make you think that there are few ticks left in the old capitalist heart.
Of the last is this story in the New Yorker about Topps, the bubble gum company that sells Bazooka bubble gum: “Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries for a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. The older man was Arthur Shorin, the chairman of Topps, which in 1947 created the iconic bubble gum Bazooka. "I am a bubble-gum maven," Cherrie said recently. "You can't help but be in awe of Mr. Shorin. There's only a few of him left."
They were wandering through the Seaport, eating hot dogs, when Shorin turned to Cherrie and said, "You know how good this thing could be." Cherrie knew that he was talking about Bazooka. Once Topps's prize product, the brand had lost its cachet. Cherrie responded, "Mr. Shorin, not only do I know it but I have been coveting this brand my whole career. Nobody understands the power of Bazooka better than I do."”
The power of Bazooka. Cold War culture was, also, children’s culture. It was only after WWII that it became the norm to finish high school. And all the technology build up was coming on line in the 50s, after being frozen out in the 30s and being shoved aside for military tech in the forties. TVs, the household appliance house, the drugs. The infinitely fine threads between world wide political struggle and millions of kiddies, with the intermediaries, the world historical myths, being superheros. The atom bomb was kiddified into atom balls, those little hot red balls of sugar; and the dogfaced GI’s weapon of choice, at least in the movies, the bazooka – that bizarre name – was kiddified into a bubble gum comic figure. But the kiddies knew they came from a scary world, no matter what they put in their mouths. Randall Jarrell's poem was the lullaby in their bloodstream, and many grew up to find, in Vietnam, that the lullaby was God's truth:
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
LI doesn’t totally understand the power of Bazooka, but we understand Cherrie. Obviously, the man has something all too rare in the business field: respect. Lack of respect is inscribed in the bones and knitting of the current age of the CEO. The top management is trained to have no respect from day one at business school. They aspire to the morals of a rabid dog, and the time horizon of a car accident victim. The economy they are building reflects those salient qualities.
“So Joe, who began life fifty-three years ago as a crewcut boy with an eye patch, sprouted a few inches. His blond hair grew out and became fashionably tousled. He kept the eye patch but started wearing his cap backward. To keep him company, Topps artists developed five new sidekicks, including an excitable German named Wolfgang Spreckels. "We want Joe to be beyond this Americancentric guy," Cherrie said. "We have aspirations for him to find his way across the world. What better way to accomplish that than with an exchange student?"
Another of Joe's new pals is Casey McGavin, a tomboy. She likes bleacher seats and watching "SportsCenter." DJ Change, who wears headphones around his neck, is a slouchy music snob. ("You've gotta have somebody who's into the tunes," Cherrie said.) Cindy Lewis is an environmentalist. She likes to hike and volunteer, and she hangs out at the farmers' market. Cherrie said, "A lot of little kids are like this.
"Approximately thirteen per cent of the American population is African-American," he went on. "We'd be foolish to ignore it. But we didn't want to have some stereotypical urban black kid." So Topps created Kevin Griffin, a science geek who travels with an iguana on his shoulder. The only old friend Joe was allowed to keep was Mort, with his spiked hair and trademark turtleneck pulled up over his mouth. "Mort is Kramer for kids," Cherrie said.”
LI finds few news stories, nowadays, that don’t point to the heat death of the civilization and a blankness as of death creeping over the culture. That’s because LI is a bit of a depressed putz. But this story cheered us up: a infinitesimal progress in the kid kulture. Bazooka Joe for a better tomorrow.
Of the last is this story in the New Yorker about Topps, the bubble gum company that sells Bazooka bubble gum: “Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries for a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. The older man was Arthur Shorin, the chairman of Topps, which in 1947 created the iconic bubble gum Bazooka. "I am a bubble-gum maven," Cherrie said recently. "You can't help but be in awe of Mr. Shorin. There's only a few of him left."
They were wandering through the Seaport, eating hot dogs, when Shorin turned to Cherrie and said, "You know how good this thing could be." Cherrie knew that he was talking about Bazooka. Once Topps's prize product, the brand had lost its cachet. Cherrie responded, "Mr. Shorin, not only do I know it but I have been coveting this brand my whole career. Nobody understands the power of Bazooka better than I do."”
The power of Bazooka. Cold War culture was, also, children’s culture. It was only after WWII that it became the norm to finish high school. And all the technology build up was coming on line in the 50s, after being frozen out in the 30s and being shoved aside for military tech in the forties. TVs, the household appliance house, the drugs. The infinitely fine threads between world wide political struggle and millions of kiddies, with the intermediaries, the world historical myths, being superheros. The atom bomb was kiddified into atom balls, those little hot red balls of sugar; and the dogfaced GI’s weapon of choice, at least in the movies, the bazooka – that bizarre name – was kiddified into a bubble gum comic figure. But the kiddies knew they came from a scary world, no matter what they put in their mouths. Randall Jarrell's poem was the lullaby in their bloodstream, and many grew up to find, in Vietnam, that the lullaby was God's truth:
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
LI doesn’t totally understand the power of Bazooka, but we understand Cherrie. Obviously, the man has something all too rare in the business field: respect. Lack of respect is inscribed in the bones and knitting of the current age of the CEO. The top management is trained to have no respect from day one at business school. They aspire to the morals of a rabid dog, and the time horizon of a car accident victim. The economy they are building reflects those salient qualities.
“So Joe, who began life fifty-three years ago as a crewcut boy with an eye patch, sprouted a few inches. His blond hair grew out and became fashionably tousled. He kept the eye patch but started wearing his cap backward. To keep him company, Topps artists developed five new sidekicks, including an excitable German named Wolfgang Spreckels. "We want Joe to be beyond this Americancentric guy," Cherrie said. "We have aspirations for him to find his way across the world. What better way to accomplish that than with an exchange student?"
Another of Joe's new pals is Casey McGavin, a tomboy. She likes bleacher seats and watching "SportsCenter." DJ Change, who wears headphones around his neck, is a slouchy music snob. ("You've gotta have somebody who's into the tunes," Cherrie said.) Cindy Lewis is an environmentalist. She likes to hike and volunteer, and she hangs out at the farmers' market. Cherrie said, "A lot of little kids are like this.
"Approximately thirteen per cent of the American population is African-American," he went on. "We'd be foolish to ignore it. But we didn't want to have some stereotypical urban black kid." So Topps created Kevin Griffin, a science geek who travels with an iguana on his shoulder. The only old friend Joe was allowed to keep was Mort, with his spiked hair and trademark turtleneck pulled up over his mouth. "Mort is Kramer for kids," Cherrie said.”
LI finds few news stories, nowadays, that don’t point to the heat death of the civilization and a blankness as of death creeping over the culture. That’s because LI is a bit of a depressed putz. But this story cheered us up: a infinitesimal progress in the kid kulture. Bazooka Joe for a better tomorrow.
ARGENTINA REBELS
There’s a nice review of “Argentina rebels” in Le Monde today.
Info on the book: ARGENTINE REBELLE : UN LABORATOIRE DE CONTRE-POUVOIRS de Cécile
Raimbeau et Daniel Hérard. Alternatives, 144 pages, 20 €.
Raimbeau and Herard were in Argentina when the economy suddenly collapsed in 2000, and they watched as people simply took over factories, stores, and private property of the rich and the worthless and re-started the economy. A heartening story – and who knows? Since hyper-Peronism is in the saddle in these here states, we might have to be picking up the pieces in much the same way – rummaging in the fallen columns of the investment bank impact trail.
“If you loved the film, you will adore the book. The documentary, “memoirs of a sacking” by Fernando Solanas has planted the décor of the Argentine crises: the pillage of wealth in the wake of the wave of privatizations launched by peronist president Carlos Menem in the 90s, the impotence of his successor, Radical party president Fernando de la Rua to close the gates, then the economic collapse, followed by the moratorium on foreign debt in December, 2001.”
The merit of the book by Cecile Raimbeau and photographer Daniel Hérard is to recollect that period’s effervescence, and to describe the forms of social innovation put in place against the bankruptcies and closing of enterprises, the dizzing augmentation of unemployment and the fall into poverty of a population used to enjoying a level of life superior to the Latin American average.
Argentine rebelle presents the typology of forms of experimental struggle, from the demonstrations of pot bangers to the putting back into functioning closed enterprises or public services thanks to cooperation and other forms of autogestion, going though barter on a national level.
Facing a crisis of traditional political representation, neighborhood assemblies became the place of deliberation and mutual aid. The extension of barter and the blocking of bank accounts entrained the apparition of parallel currencies. The taking over of elementary needs, like transportaton or the distribution of water, the more or less fraudulent failure of a ceramics factory or a hotel, brought about forms of popular organization and transformed the participants.”
Info on the book: ARGENTINE REBELLE : UN LABORATOIRE DE CONTRE-POUVOIRS de Cécile
Raimbeau et Daniel Hérard. Alternatives, 144 pages, 20 €.
Raimbeau and Herard were in Argentina when the economy suddenly collapsed in 2000, and they watched as people simply took over factories, stores, and private property of the rich and the worthless and re-started the economy. A heartening story – and who knows? Since hyper-Peronism is in the saddle in these here states, we might have to be picking up the pieces in much the same way – rummaging in the fallen columns of the investment bank impact trail.
“If you loved the film, you will adore the book. The documentary, “memoirs of a sacking” by Fernando Solanas has planted the décor of the Argentine crises: the pillage of wealth in the wake of the wave of privatizations launched by peronist president Carlos Menem in the 90s, the impotence of his successor, Radical party president Fernando de la Rua to close the gates, then the economic collapse, followed by the moratorium on foreign debt in December, 2001.”
The merit of the book by Cecile Raimbeau and photographer Daniel Hérard is to recollect that period’s effervescence, and to describe the forms of social innovation put in place against the bankruptcies and closing of enterprises, the dizzing augmentation of unemployment and the fall into poverty of a population used to enjoying a level of life superior to the Latin American average.
Argentine rebelle presents the typology of forms of experimental struggle, from the demonstrations of pot bangers to the putting back into functioning closed enterprises or public services thanks to cooperation and other forms of autogestion, going though barter on a national level.
Facing a crisis of traditional political representation, neighborhood assemblies became the place of deliberation and mutual aid. The extension of barter and the blocking of bank accounts entrained the apparition of parallel currencies. The taking over of elementary needs, like transportaton or the distribution of water, the more or less fraudulent failure of a ceramics factory or a hotel, brought about forms of popular organization and transformed the participants.”
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Beinart again
Jonathan Swartz has been doing a nice job of slice and dice exegesis on Peter Beinart’s claim, made in an interview with Kevin Drum, that
“Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.”
Schwarz’s pithy summary of this farrago is: “Peter Beinart Finally Achieves 100% Gibberish.”
From a logical point of view, Schwartz is right. However, there is more going on here than logic.
Beinart and the court D.C. set are not completely crazy to have decided to make jihadism the object of a ‘long war.’ First, however, one has to say that logically, this is one of the funnier isms ever – consider that it fits into a series including prayerism, meditationism, and reflexionism, or, ratcheting up the fiercesomeness, Iron Johnism (from the 90s male liberation movement). I imagine that at this assembly of apocalyptic movements our readership is already trembling like tapioca in an earthquake. But for those who can keep their teeth from chattering, you will notice that the main threat posed by this series is that each encloses its acolytes in such time consuming practice that it takes away from quality time better devoted to sexual congress. That’s about it, as far as the threat level goes. These aren’t even first person shooter games.
Politically, however, there is some subgenius thing going on. The cold war is obviously so hardwired into the D.C. mindset that the nineties, our glimpse of a world without a long war, caused actual physical agony among the think tanks – daylight seeped through the windows of the New American century, the Heritage Foundation, the Brooks Brothers Institute, the Psychotic Robotrons for a Stronger America Institute and other well funded and well staffed booby hatches, and many vampires, reportedly, died. To this day, it is said, Richard Perle has scars on his body.
But never let it be said that these low lights and paragons of political science were not thinking hard about strategy, geo-politics, the state of exception, tactical warfare, and the sweet taste of nymphette blood on a full moon night.
The problem with the Cold War, in a nutshell, was that the enemy actually had a few very attractive notions up its sleeve. Like the social welfare state. Like social and economic justice. Like equality. Like public investment. And the response in the West, up until the social welfare states were entrenched, was to compete partly by diluting the bloody capitalist order to accommodate the social welfare state. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights movement just didn’t coincide in time – they operated in the same political continuum. At the time, this was openly acknowledged. The investment made, for instance, in science education in the U.S. after 1957 was attributed directly to the Sputnik scare.
Hence, the genius of a long war on a non-existent enemy whose program is almost completely repulsive, insofar as you simply make it up on the spot of various exotic and repulsive items. Double bonus -- you can then justify the most repulsive behavior on the part of the anti-Jihadist forces -- razing Fallujah, say -- by claiming that these jihadists must be fought without moral compunction.
Jihadism isn’t even a Wahabi form of Islam – the closest thing to it that I can imagine is the Taliban in Afghanistan. The idea that the long war is on varieties of the Taliban (while, of course, the U.S.’s great ally in the Middle East remains Saudi Arabia and we spoonfeed billions to the Pakistani government that created the Taliban and, according to the current Afghan government, still sustains it) is, from the vampiric view of the defense industries, simply stunning – it is thinking out of the box, as the vampires like to say, with a chuckle – oh, they know about those long boxes in which the Peter Beinart types like to lie around, during the day. In one brilliant flash, it justifies pouring hundreds of billions into defense industries, allows for a prospective infinity of debates, white papers, meetings, and high level appointments, and undermines any metric of success. It is as if the U.S. declared itself rigidly, passionately, and completely committed to hunting unicorns.
Thus, the perfect war, in which the profit going to the plutocrats would not have to be balanced in any way by any act of economic justice to tame the potentially restive masses. And icing on the cake is the whole new world of executive branch mercenaries, the synthesis of ‘private military forces’ and the volunteer army, with no congressional restraint upon their deployment anywhere, at any time. This is Beinart's Utopia: Bushism forever.
“Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.”
Schwarz’s pithy summary of this farrago is: “Peter Beinart Finally Achieves 100% Gibberish.”
From a logical point of view, Schwartz is right. However, there is more going on here than logic.
Beinart and the court D.C. set are not completely crazy to have decided to make jihadism the object of a ‘long war.’ First, however, one has to say that logically, this is one of the funnier isms ever – consider that it fits into a series including prayerism, meditationism, and reflexionism, or, ratcheting up the fiercesomeness, Iron Johnism (from the 90s male liberation movement). I imagine that at this assembly of apocalyptic movements our readership is already trembling like tapioca in an earthquake. But for those who can keep their teeth from chattering, you will notice that the main threat posed by this series is that each encloses its acolytes in such time consuming practice that it takes away from quality time better devoted to sexual congress. That’s about it, as far as the threat level goes. These aren’t even first person shooter games.
Politically, however, there is some subgenius thing going on. The cold war is obviously so hardwired into the D.C. mindset that the nineties, our glimpse of a world without a long war, caused actual physical agony among the think tanks – daylight seeped through the windows of the New American century, the Heritage Foundation, the Brooks Brothers Institute, the Psychotic Robotrons for a Stronger America Institute and other well funded and well staffed booby hatches, and many vampires, reportedly, died. To this day, it is said, Richard Perle has scars on his body.
But never let it be said that these low lights and paragons of political science were not thinking hard about strategy, geo-politics, the state of exception, tactical warfare, and the sweet taste of nymphette blood on a full moon night.
The problem with the Cold War, in a nutshell, was that the enemy actually had a few very attractive notions up its sleeve. Like the social welfare state. Like social and economic justice. Like equality. Like public investment. And the response in the West, up until the social welfare states were entrenched, was to compete partly by diluting the bloody capitalist order to accommodate the social welfare state. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Civil Rights movement just didn’t coincide in time – they operated in the same political continuum. At the time, this was openly acknowledged. The investment made, for instance, in science education in the U.S. after 1957 was attributed directly to the Sputnik scare.
Hence, the genius of a long war on a non-existent enemy whose program is almost completely repulsive, insofar as you simply make it up on the spot of various exotic and repulsive items. Double bonus -- you can then justify the most repulsive behavior on the part of the anti-Jihadist forces -- razing Fallujah, say -- by claiming that these jihadists must be fought without moral compunction.
Jihadism isn’t even a Wahabi form of Islam – the closest thing to it that I can imagine is the Taliban in Afghanistan. The idea that the long war is on varieties of the Taliban (while, of course, the U.S.’s great ally in the Middle East remains Saudi Arabia and we spoonfeed billions to the Pakistani government that created the Taliban and, according to the current Afghan government, still sustains it) is, from the vampiric view of the defense industries, simply stunning – it is thinking out of the box, as the vampires like to say, with a chuckle – oh, they know about those long boxes in which the Peter Beinart types like to lie around, during the day. In one brilliant flash, it justifies pouring hundreds of billions into defense industries, allows for a prospective infinity of debates, white papers, meetings, and high level appointments, and undermines any metric of success. It is as if the U.S. declared itself rigidly, passionately, and completely committed to hunting unicorns.
Thus, the perfect war, in which the profit going to the plutocrats would not have to be balanced in any way by any act of economic justice to tame the potentially restive masses. And icing on the cake is the whole new world of executive branch mercenaries, the synthesis of ‘private military forces’ and the volunteer army, with no congressional restraint upon their deployment anywhere, at any time. This is Beinart's Utopia: Bushism forever.
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