From parody to policy -- Li pats itself on the back.

There are those who think that reading, as well as writing, Limited Inc is a less valuable use of time than, say, cutting holes in the pockets of your pants so you can play pocket pool.

But LI says, au contraire!

Proof exists right around the corner of your NYT -- go to the science section today. The global warming story. The geo-engineering story:

"Worried about a potential planetary crisis, these leaders are calling on governments and scientific groups to study exotic ways to reduce global warming, seeing them as possible fallback positions if the planet eventually needs a dose of emergency cooling.

...

Dr. Cicerone [President of the National Academy of Sciences] recently joined a bitter dispute over whether a Nobel laureate's geoengineering ideas should be aired, and he helped get them accepted for publication. The laureate, Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, is a star of atmospheric science who won his Nobel in 1995 for showing how industrial gases damage the earth's ozone shield. His paper newly examines the risks and benefits of trying to cool the planet by injecting sulfur into the stratosphere.

The paper "should not be taken as a license to go out and pollute," Dr. Cicerone said in an interview, emphasizing that most scientists thought curbing greenhouse gases should be the top priority. But he added, "In my opinion, he's written a brilliant paper."

Geoengineering is no magic bullet, Dr. Cicerone said. But done correctly, he added, it will act like an insurance policy if the world one day faces a crisis of overheating, with repercussions like melting icecaps, droughts, famines, rising sea levels and coastal flooding."

For faithful readers, this should ring a bell. It doesn't? Mein Gott, Vhat am I doing dis fuer? I've instructed Igor to go back in the files. This is LI for February 19 2006. Hey, I wonder if I should hit this Cicerone cat up for consulting duties?

"money makin' ideas for the AEI to consider

Being broke at the moment, LI has been in search of a surefire source of revenue. And then it occurred to us: what kind of pro-active, pro-business response to global warming would warm the hearts of rightwing moneybags and bring in the checks?

Surely the thing to do is controlled volcanic management! We keep our cars, SUVs and coal generated plants going along at full carbon tilt, toss in a few atom bombs into the crater of some isolated volcano every year or so, and get the wonderfully cooling effect of pumping “sufficient amounts of ash into the air.” This package has everything: major manipulation of nature, atom bomb use, and a pro-carbon agenda. We are writing to the Scaife foundation for a grant right away! Happy days are here again!

From the Washington Post Q and A with Eugene Linden, author of Winds of Change:

Q: “As I've followed the global warming/climate change discussion, three historically based questions have always interested me. First, the drop in temperatures from the 1940s to the 1970s seems to contradict the correlation between human generated greenhouse gases and warming. Has this been adequately explained? Second, there was a significant warming period during the middle ages during which an agricultural colony was established in Greenland, but there was little or no human generated greenhouse gases at the time. Does this indicate that other factors besides human activity are the predominant causes of warming? Finally, proxies for temperature measures (i.e. ice cores, tree rings) have indicated that current temperatures are below long-term millennial temperature averages, and these long term trends track very closely to trends in solar activity. Does this indicate that current levels of solar activity are a more likely cause of current warming than greenhouse gases? Thank you for your consideration of my questions.

Eugene Linden: Since human greenhouse gas emissions only truly ramped up in the last century or so, it should be obvious that past warmings were the result of natural cycles (although one scholar argues that humans have had an impact through deforestation and agricultural going back thousands of years). Moreover, periodic coolings don't contradict the connection between GHG emissions and warming. For instance, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the early 90s put sufficient amounts of ash into the air to cool the planet the following year. Climate is one of the most complex systems on the planet, responding at any given time to countless pushes and pulls, but, on relatively short time frames, CO2 has tracked temperature as far back as we can reliably measure. It's one big variable that we can affect, and since we've upped it by 50%, temperatures have responded much the way climate scientists have expected. There will never be 100% certainty that the recent warming represents a response to human inputs, but the consensus is strikingly strong that it does. Moreover, it's the one thing we can do something about.

Finally, even if the current warming was entirely natural, it would still represent something that we should take very seriously. Natural climate change did in past civilizations, and we've seen the destructive potential of extreme weather just recently on the Gulf Coast.”

ps

Ah, fuck the think tank peanuts. LI is now thinking of the plot for the latest Michael Crichton novel – you know, our Rebel in Chief’s favorite expert on so called climate change. In this plot, St. Exxon (the first corporation ever to be beatified by the Vatican), trying, as usual, to save humanity, comes up with the volcano management idea. Evil environmentalists – the Osama bin Laden league for Deep Ecology – try, of course, to stop them. In the exciting last scene, Jesus Christ, played by Mel Gibson, machine guns the Laden-ites just as they are about to mess up St. Exxon’s scheme. Beautiful fadeout as Jesus turns to the CEO of Exxon – played by St. Peter – and says, in a choked up voice, “I just want my country… to love me… like I love it,” copping the finale to Rambo II – but also a wink and a nod to the idea, gaining increasing currency in the Red States, that Sly’s movie now has official gospel status.

A subplot involving St. Exxon falling deeply in M & A love with Chevron (who is pursued by a lustful, deceptive Chinee company, backed by some evil liability chasin’ lawyers) is, of course, de rigeur, since we need some nude accounting scenes – or at least nude flowsheet scenes. Hey, and to be all comme il faut and shit, how about a stand-in for you know who, toting a pellet gun loaded for bear, who tattoes cartoon images of the prophet on the buttocks of the aforementioned liability lawyers? We gotta think outside the box here, boys. Outside of the Hollywood mindset. Family values and like that. I’m going to pitch this plot to Seth."

Well, looking at our proposal, now, with an eagle eye, I can see a major flaw in it. It does have explosions. It would please the ever apoplectic male population, all pumped up on their Limbaugh brand Viagra and shit. But... it really needs to pump federal money into the South. This is, after all, pretty much the reason the U.S. exists any more -- find some reason to send another couple billion to a Peckerhead War Industry firm. I concede that, feeding the Dixie monkey wise, my simple proposal might not go over. But wait! What if we chose to explode volcanos in countries that aren't free? Couldn't we liberate them first? Which is invasion, which is moola-moola for those greasy kentucky fried fingers. And a lot of brown bodies, all torn to bits, ocassionally flashed on the tv screen. Wow. A lyncherooni of an idea.

I'm seeing if Tom Delay is available for board membership of this thing.

LI helps out the poor Dems...

LI is reviewing a bio of LBJ. So, doing some research, we rented the film Hearts and Minds, a documentary about Vietnam that made a big splash in the in the seventies. Well. We heard a few things in that documentary that made us think about the Democrats.

The Democrats apparently have a problem with their message. Now, that’s a shame. That’s a doggone shame. It makes LI weep, sometimes. So, out of our infinite compassion for our Democratic brothers and sisters, we copied down those things so that the Dems could use them.

One was said by a past Democratic presidential candidate about the Vietnam war – Eugene McCarthy – and we think it is still such a sturdy, succinct, and generally correct phrase that we’d recommend it for Iraq: “It is unwise, immoral and not in the national interest of this country, and that therefore it must be brought to an end.” Except, of course, that it has to be brought to an end now. Withdrawal in the next, oh, three months.

And here’s a remark from Senator Fullbright. He was speaking to a question about Johnson’s speech on the Gulf of Tonkin that began the official U.S. military intervention in Vietnam:

“We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie but a lie’s a lite, it’s a misrepresentation of fact and it is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”

Short and sweet and from a Senator, no less.

And then there was a comment from a former Oklahoma bomber pilot – the most impressive American in the documentary, including the Kennedys, Johnson, Daniel Ellsburg, Nixon and Bob Hope. The guy’s name was Randy Floyd.

Q: Do you think we’ve learned anything from this.
A: “I think we are trying not to… I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and policy makers have exhibited.”

One of the things about Vietnam that the film doesn’t show, but that I am beginning to see, reading around, is that Vietnam was not lost after the Tet offensive. Vietnam was lost in late 1963-1964. That was when Diem was assassinated, and the next government tried, and failed, due to American obstruction, to create a neutralist state. That this would eventually lead to the re-unification of Vietnam was obvious. That Vietnam would be Communist dominated was obvious. That American could do nothing about that was also obvious. The French floated the neutralist balloon. The Americans shot it down. 750,000 casualties later, Vietnam was a communist state. And twenty some years after Hearts and Minds was made – with certain sections devoted to the big fat Vietnamese capitalist pigs that the filmmakers saw as American puppets – the united communist nation was speaking exactly that big fat capitalist tongue. In fact, the businessman they interviewed made chamber of commerce statements about South Vietnam (which, in the commentary, the filmmaker points out with some disdain) that are now state doctrine – the pablum official line. The war was not only pointless strategically, it was even pointless ideologically. Just as the Americans were bound to lose the war, American ideology was bound to win it.

The Americans “lost” in Iraq in 2004 – whatever they were trying to do. The post Iraq syndrome is already in – Richard Perle, who is so odious that he is a bit unbelievable, like a comic book villain, is still smart enough to know that the reactionary line is, Bush is losing Iran. Because Bush is. Because nobody is going to keep paying for America’s stinkin’ wars. Bush is both a parody of LBJ and a parody of detentish Richard Nixon. Who knew that one frat boy had it in him?

that diorama style

Taine’s introduction to his history of English literature became famous as soon as the first volume was published, in 1864. Its fame has dwindled, as fame does, into an exercise in memorization for grad students in comparative literature: Q: what was Taine’s thesis? A: History is about race, milieu and the moment. Which you can know without ever reading Taine – it is the kind of knowledge you get in an overview written by someone who may, perhaps, have acquired his or her knowledge of Taine from another overview.

This is not to bitch – Taine’s intro begins with set pieces in a Believe it or Not diorama style that has aged as badly as the American Natural History museum’s Culture Halls, with their celebration of how the Peoples of the World live in their natural setting. The diorama style is not just Taine’s, of course – he is writing in the wake of fifty years of ethnographic shows and exhibits, including the great Crystal Palace one in 1851 (in which the U.S. was represented by our amazing gunsmiths – the Colt rifles and revolvers, and the way they were made of standard parts in factories in which, it was rumored, machines made machines, so shook the British that they sent a special mission to the U.S. to observe and report on U.S. manufacturers). But Taine intellectualized this hybrid of scholarship and entertainment. So, he urges the historian to act much like the visitor to one of these shows – to view the country and culture, instead of merely drawing philosophical conclusions from the logic of texts its might produce:

“In order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imaging the father of a family who, having seen a son on the knees of his son, retires, according to the law, into a solitary state, with a vase and an axe, under a banana tree on the edge of a stream, ceasing to speak, multiplying his fasts, standing nude between four fires, and under the fifth fire, the terrible sun that devours and incessantly renews all living things; who, by stages, during entire weeks, keeps his imagination fixed on the foot of Brahma, then on his knee, and then on his thigh, and then on his belly button, and so on, until, under the pressure of that intense meditation, hallucinations appear, presenting all the forms of being, transformed confusedly one into the other, oscillating inside that head carried away by its vertigo, up to the point that the man, perfectly still, breathing once again, his eyes still fixed, sees the univers vanish smoke above the universal and empty Being, in which he aspires, himself, to plunge.”

This kind of speech cries out for a showman’s cane – and in fact was quickly absorbed into popular literature and then into films.

While Taine’s prose is a little, well, funny, his point is interesting – he wants the historian to begin his own meditation by way of starting with the novel, or the drama. To make a history is to visualize the settings and persons in the history. Thus, Taine counts, among those who have put history on the right track in the 19th century (the track of science), Walter Scott.

‘This is the first step in history: we have made it in Europe thanks to the renaissance of the imagination produced, at the end of the last century, with Lessing, Walter Scott; a little later in France, with Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, M. Michelet and so many others.”

All of which is by way of pointing back to Marx’s use of a literary method in the 18th Brumaire. LI has had a bit of a discussion about these matters with Le Colonel Chabert. Marx, who wrote the 18th Brumaire in the very year of the Crystal Palace Exhibit, sounds so modern, compared to Taine. Or modernist – for Taine’s diorama style is, as I am coming to see more and more, the style of the comic book, which is not so marginal any more – and which probably never was. There are bizarre enjambments between Marx’s text and Taine’s, and my next post on this matter is going to explore one of them – Marx’s remark about the pretence of the actors in the events he is looking at to actually be enacting a classical, analogous drama.

This political charade is, for Taine, stage two of the historic method:

If you wish to observe this operation [the historian’s attempt to plumb the psychology of historical personages] look at the promoter and model of all great contemporary culture, Goethe, who, before writing his Iphigenie, used his days to design the most perfect statues, and who, at last, his eyes filled by the noble forms and landscapes of antiquity, and his mind penetrated by the harmonious beauty of the classical era’s lives, came to reproduce so exactly inside himself the habits and tendencies of the Greek imagination that he gives us almost a twin sister to Sophocles’ Antigone, and the goddesses of Phidias.”

The tendency to for political actors to play this game of masquerade is something we see, at present, in the proliferation of analogies for the Iraq war. What is this about?

the best of times

Let’s review the week’s news, shall we?

On the one hand, we learn that the president was amply warned about Al Qaeda’s planned attack. He did nothing. As a result, 3,000 people died.

On the other hand, a band of poor young black men in Miami were cozened by a secret policemen into planning an attack on the Sears building in Chicago. They only lacked equipment, weapons, a plan, any connection to al Qaeda, and, most likely, the foggiest idea of where Chicago is, not to speak of the Sears building. Testimony from neighbors has shown conclusively that they wore things on their heads like turbans.

Two stories. Which story does the media go with?

There is a psychological problem in preserving the level of contempt the governing class, the press, and the culture that is perfectly content with the two, deserves. As my commentor, Mr. Nyp, has pointed out, as this and other information scrolls before our eyes for years and years, there is a contempt burn out. There only so many levels of disgust one can go through. There is such a thing as spectator paralysis. It is like the situation of the boy in Clockwork Orange – eyes forced open with little wire brackets, secured in a seat so that we can’t move, the movie unrolls before us. And such are the truths of Pavlovian conditioning that after a time, they can remove the wire clamps and the seat restraints, and they can do whatever the hell they want to do. Foist another Clinton or Bush upon us. Raise another ignorant crop of privileged white men and women to wink and blink at us on tv, babbling on, swollen mindless egos knowing nothing and filling the gaping intellectual hole by repeating endless versions of childhood taunts, heads filled with straw. The kind of people who consider themselves the crown of the meritocracy – and who are. Meritocracy, American version, circa 2006. We even see stories that clearly indicate that the next terrorist action in the U.S. will likely be the result of a botched sting operation -- and nobody questions it. LI is laughing so hard that blood is bubbling out of his mouth.

The angels weep. Better I were distract/So should my thought be sever’d from my griefs/And woes by wrong imagination lose/The knowledge of themselves – as Gloucester says in Lear, prophetically envisioning the cable news networks of the future.

And then there is this from the Washington Post:

“Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?
By Richard Morin
Friday, June 23, 2006

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.”
Morin, who in the past has shown himself entirely clueless about sieving social science studies, reports this story with an earnestness that could earn him a place on the show itself. I have to give him credit for producing the best grafs of the week, however:

“To test for a "Daily Effect," Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from "The CBS Evening News" to another group. Then they measured the students' attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.”

where did you go, Rambo? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

The War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs are, of course, not wars at all. They are declared illegally, pursued intermittently to both scourge a potentially rebellious population and to score public relations points, and tend inevitably to the government’s oldest trick: inducing citizens to commit crimes, then clapping them in irons.

So, the Bush administration, in its infinite wisdom, has said, let a thousand little Reichstag fires burn – and it has come up with sad things like the arrest of those boys in Miami, yesterday. Clearly, this was a case of talking shit. Even the Washington Post, ever willing to the administration’s cat’s paw, can’t turn this ridiculous administration concoction into the kind of threat to leave us householder’s trembling in our beds.

In reality, these young men were enacting one of the perennial phenomena of urban streetlife, from Jerusalem in 1 A.D. to James Baldwin’s Harlem in the 40s – the incubation of a religious cult:

“Residents living near the warehouse said the men taken into custody described themselves as Muslims and had tried to recruit young people to join their group. Tashawn Rose, 29, said they tried to recruit her younger brother and nephew for a karate class.

She said she talked to one of the men about a month ago. "They seemed brainwashed," she said. "They said they had given their lives to Allah."
Residents said FBI agents spent several hours in the neighborhood showing photos of the suspects and seeking information. They said the men had lived in the area for about a year.

Benjamin Williams, 17, said the group sometimes had young children with them. At times, he added, the men "would cover their faces. Sometimes they would wear things on their heads, like turbans.”

Things on their heads like turbans… Wow. The problem with the current Bush culture is that it is a scary clown culture. It is both funny and terrifying at the same time – as though the S.S. had been issued rubber red noses to wear before they went out and did their raiding. Although these cornpone authoritarians have made up this terrorist shit before – in Detroit, in Ohio, etc., etc. - this time out the fraudulent nature of the enterprise is hard to disguise even in the first flush of the scoop. The oldest gesture encoded in the genes of the secret police is to protect us from crimes that it first makes up. But when the secret police are so contemptuous of the public that they deliver shoddy goods like this for our consumption, you know something has gone awry, culturally. Is it that the U.S. population will put up with anything? Is it that, unlike the heroic culture that resisted the invading Soviets in many a Reagan era film, in reality, we are composed of surrenderers, dickerers, halfwits and dupes? Will no Rambo arise among us, muscular and oiled, to save us from the Bushist beast?

“The person they believed to be an al-Qaida representative gave Batiste a digital video camera, which Batiste said he would use to record pictures of the North Miami Beach FBI building, the indictment said. At a March 26 meeting, it went on, Batiste and Burson Augustin provided the "al-Qaida representative" with photographs of the FBI building, as well as video footage of other Miami government buildings, and discussed the plot to bomb the FBI building.

But on May 24, the indictment said, Batiste told the "al-Qaida representative" that he was experiencing delays "because of various problems within his organization." Batiste said he wanted to continue his mission and his relationship with al-Qaida nonetheless, the document said.”

Discussed his plot to bomb the FBI building? What kind of comic book language is that?

Oh well. This is proof, once again, that Conrad’s The Secret Agent should be made part of the high school curriculum, in order to inoculate Americans from a disease that has been carefully nurtured in them by fifty some years of tv: their love for a man in a uniform.

PS – there is another wapo article readers should check out. I still heard it said, all of the time, that the U.S. has a moral obligation to stay in Iraq. I hear this said even by anti-war people. While that sounds fine, in reality, as long as the U.S. is in Iraq, there will be no serious negotiation between the government and the various insurgents. Of course there should be amnesty for insurgents who have fought Americans – otherwise, we are talking about a decade long war to the death. But that can’t happen as long as Americans are holding the strings and making the puppets dance. Except that old fusty metaphor isn't exactly right -- the Americans can pull strings, but they don't really know what the puppets are doing. They didn't in South Vietnam, and they don't here.

Americans – this is the point – are prolonging the war in Iraq. Not limiting it.

american crisis 2: cheney's moral blackmail

Dear President Bush,

Yesterday you said, "I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I'm not going to forget them.”

Good for you. I’m not going to forget September 11th, either.

In my last letter I discussed your aversion to reading. Well, my topic seems to have coincided by happy chance with Ron Suskind’s new book. The book reveals, among other things, your less than stellar habits in the matter of information retrieval. According to Suskind, you have created a political tactic out of your feigned illiteracy: plausibly claiming ignorance, for instance, about the brummagem nature of your assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry. After all, you just didn't read that piece of paper when it came across your desk. You trusted what Dick told you.

However, let's remember the lessons of 9/11. Suskind's book, according to reports of it in the press – see the section in the ps to this letter that I am citing from Brad Delong’s site – throws even more light on what happened between 8/6/01 and 9/11. The more light that is cast, the more disturbing your actions appear. Much more disturbing than they appeared even in Michael Moore's movie, or in any number of conspiratorial accounts of 9/11. In all of those accounts, you are assumed to be more than competent. Your mission accomplished persona is simply morally reversed -- from superhero to supervillain.

But the truth is otherwise, isn't it? In fact, you have no idea what to do in an emergency. I have often why nobody has ever pressed you about what you did in that month. We knew, before Suskind, that you had been told about Al Qaeda intentions to attack the U.S. We still don't know if, for instance, you pressed the FBI director, alerted the Secretary of Transportation, etc. Now we do know a bit more, and that glimpse looks bad. Just as happened before Katerina, you took it to be your role to play observer -- and a disinterested, dumb observer at that. According to Suskind, your almost incomprehensible indolence during that summer was interrupted not by reports you had asked for, but by the CIA thrusting an assessment upon you, disturbing the great work of brush clearing on your ranch. You were clearly more interested in the brush clearing. At that time, apparently, you considered the presidency a part time job – much like being the Governor of Texas, or being a teenage liquor mixer at your Dad’s country club.

Suskind’s discovery has given us another piece of the mystery that has long troubled LI – namely, Cheney’s role in your administration. It has become a given among the press that Cheney’s power is due to your inexperience. This, I think, is incorrect. There is nothing in your character that would indicate that you are capable of the kind of cool self-assessment this story implies – to wit, deciding that you are inexperienced, and handing power to Cheney. Nothing in your actions pre-9/11 make this plausible. Cheney, in those halcyon days, was given the task of mind melding with his fellow extraterrestrial energy company CEOs. He was not the man behind the throne.

Instead, I have an alternative narrative. Please tell me if this is correct. In the weeks following 9/11, you had a big secret – your neglect of all warnings that this was about to happen. At the time that you were most conscious of this secret, your VP began to press his own agenda, and his own desire to take over foreign policymaking from you. Or at least operate as the chief shaper of that policy. I have always suspected that the timing of those two things is not a coincidence. In effect, the person who knew about your negligence, who made it his duty to know, was your Vice President. And this Vice President is extraordinarily unscrupulous. If we turned to the pseudo-science of criminal profiling, I think we could show, pretty easily, that he is a socio-path.

LI thinks that this period was a time of moral blackmail. My hypothesis depends on two things: your guilt and your secret. There are those who think that you, like Cheney, are a socio-path – I don’t think so, however, I think you are prey to two polar moods – one of supreme vanity, and the other of guilt. The latter, of course, being the product of your mother’s upbringing. As a good Freudian, I consider that your Jesus Christ obsession is not just for political show, but a way of mediating between these two contradictory traits. As a reward for your abasement, you are made a son of God yourself. This is almost perfect as a solution to your little psychic woes. But surely on 9/11, a day you spent flying around, as though looking for another country to be president of, all the past failures must have come bubbling up – that pre-spree feeling. The failure to be a fighter pilot, like Daddy. The failure to be an oil company founder, like Daddy. The need for Daddy to get you on Harkin, and your eagerness to profit to the point where Daddy’s friends had to squelch an embarrassing investigation. You were vulnerable as you had never been, since past fuck ups were, after all, country club affairs. So you stole from Harkin and dropped out of the National Guard. Really, these weren’t big deals. But this time, it was a big deal.

The presidential bios of dead presidents often fill us in on things that we didn’t know at the time – notably, who the president was fucking. In your case, we will find out something different – who was fucking the president.

It was during this period that an inexplicable grant of authority was given to your Vice President. I am not saying that the Vice President went into your office and laid all his cards out on the table – although he might have. This is a crude man. I am saying that the emotional pre-requisites for emotional and political blackmail were there; that out of your consciousness of failure, you ceded power you would not otherwise have ceded to Cheney; and that your inability to free yourself from him stems from these crucial weeks.

Any other president would, at the very least, have been angry that his vice president went to see his mistress on a Texas ranch and ended up shooting a friend (a friend of your family) in the face and leaving your people to clean up the P.R. mess. But you weren’t. This blackmail has now become not just a single thread in your administration – it is the whole spider web.

Of course, my story shouldn’t be taken to suggest that you aren’t on board for such crimes as the invasion of Iraq – it is just that, on your own, I don’t think you would have had the courage or the interest to drive that enterprise. When, on your own, you do attempt to drive an enterprise – cast your mind back to ‘reforming’ social security – the enterprise peters out. You are not what I’d call a transformational leader, to use management speak. You are rather a rare case of transformational/patsy leadership.

And, of course, your guilt about 9/11 is not enough. If we only had known then, what we know now, surely you would not only have been impeached – you might have been imprisoned. You must be grateful, on some level, to Cheney for his role in creating such an unparalleled atmosphere of bullying that the facts of your non-role, pre 9/11, have never become a real issue. Who has ever asked about it? The same press that went into ecstasy about a sperm stained dress, years ago, has an incredible disinterest in what, exactly, you did, post August 6. I assume that is because the press feels threatened itself, for reasons I am not going to go into, here. However, the success of Cheney’s socio-pathic demeanor, the spread of his combination of guilt free lying and absurd truculence, has spread like a meme through the right wing media-sphere. Joe McCarthy has been normalized in the last six years.

This doesn’t answer all of the questions about 9/11, by any means. The collapse of the Democratic party – the abdication of the oppositional role – is not explained by Cheney-ian moral blackmail. I think there are structural explanations for that. There is a notion, on the part of grassroots Democrats, that the party is supposed to win elections. But the party doesn’t really exist to do any such thing for the party’s leading spirits in D.C. – rather, it exists as a form of entrée into the power structure. If winning elections threatens that power structure, it threatens those leading spirits. Consequently, they will take the knife to any oppositional strategy that leads to threats on their own entrenched positions. It is extremely odd that a party that held the White House for eight years would simply surrender as it did, but it is surely less odd if that party, for a long time, had become a vehicle for self-aggrandizement of a selected group in the Court society of D.C.

Yours sincerely,
Limited Inc.

PS – From Suskind’s book:

Ron Suskind: The "what ifs" can kill you.... [I]n terms of the tragedy of 9/11, a particular regret lingers for those who might have made a difference. The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to [Bush]--"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"--has been widely noted in the past few years. But also in August CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President--to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode.... They didn't know place or time... but something was coming. The President needed to know.
Verbal briefings of George W. Bush are acts of almost inestimable import... more so than... for other recent presidents. He's not much of a reader... never has been... not a President who sees much value in hearing from a wide array of voices.... But he's a very good listener and an extremely visual listener. He sizes people up swiftly and aptly... and trusts his eyes. It is a gift, this nonverbal acuity.... What does George W. Bush do? He makes it personal.... The expert... has done the hard work... [Bush] tries to gauge how "certain" they are of what they say....
The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markers can be crucial... they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it.
And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.
He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.

"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."

the 18th brumaire

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.