Calasso's perpetual war

Continuing the line of thought from our last post….

There’s an essay by Arthur Machen about a spiritualist who surprises himself by successfully conjuring up a dead spirit. Looking at the vision he has been pursuing, the spiritualist feels a hand go through him, which does not press his physical organs so much as it squeezes something unknown – his very soul. This contact proves to be so overwhelming that the spiritualist never again tries to conjure up a spirit.

Well, LI can’t claim to have experienced anything that grotesquely metaphysical when we read Roberto Calasso’s essay, Perpetual War, but we did feel contacted. The essay is about Kraus’ “The Last Days of Mankind.” This is a five hundred page play, an epic theater event never, actually, staged. Kraus wrote it during World War I, and read from it in lecture halls. Elias Canetti, among others, has described the fevered atmosphere that surrounded Kraus in the twenties at those readings.

Calasso’s essay does a number of brilliant things. For instance, Calasso shows how a modern version of stupidity intersects with the modern project of building an all encompassing war culture. Bêtise was the obsession of three modern authors in particular – its anti-evangelists: Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Kraus. Readers of LI will recognize these as the patron saints of this site, although we maintain a more extensive hagiology – we throw in Peguy, the Shaw of the prefaces, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels (in their political journalism). In particular, Engels phrase, “the official legend,” which I find so much more useful than the term “ideology” to talk about the system of modern unintelligence. The official legend is where the marriage of betise and war is officially sealed. While it is official in the sense that the same picked over phrases from it occur over and over in the mouths of officials, pundits, soldiers, clerks, farmers, etc., it is never codified in one place or another. It isn’t a constitution or a law. The official legend not only brings about and justifies wars, but it tells us how to think about them, and how to pretend that our peaces are different from wars. According to the official legend, wars are subordinate to states, and derived from them. You have a state, which is a separate, substantial thing – emblematically, a human body. A leviathan, or a behemoth. And then you have war, which is something that may afflict a state, the way a fever or the measles afflicts the human body. Randolph Bourne’s phrase, which plays with this idea, actually leads us out of the nets of the official legend: war is the health of the state. Health is not derived from the body – it describes the normal state of the body. The normal state of the modern state is war.

Of the three grand inquisitors of modern betise, Kraus was the one who saw most systematically, and attacked with language St. John of Patmos might have whistled at. This is how Calasso puts it: “The epiphany that dazzled Kraus is the same one tht made Flaubert’s last years compulsive and feverish: the prodigious eruption of la betise as the beginning of a new era, an era paved and cemented with it once any kind of alkahest or universal solvent had disappeared. This appalling event, from whose light most people averted their eyes, was obsessively followed and properly recorded primarily by three writers: Flaubert, Kraus, and Leon Bloy. To them we gratefully turn as pioneers of a new science, the only one where we can follow the treacherous waverings of that uninterrupted experiment-without-experimenter that is world history.”

Calasso doesn’t strictly date the West’s official legend – it is not something of which you can say, now it is here, or now it is there. But it has symbols you can date. Calasso choses the symbol of the “blood tax” – the draft – suggested in the French revolution and fully operational in the Napoleonic wars. The draft indicates what the new state will be composed of: ‘human materials,’ as Napoleon’s strategists called them. The AEC, in the plutonium experiments it performed on patients in hospitals in Rochester and Chicago, labelled them “human products.” And, in a memo of great philosophic acuity, speaking of the downwinders, the inhabitants of towns in Utah and Nevada that were sprinkled continually with radioactive fallout from the above ground bomb tests, the AEC called them a “low use population.” The low use population, that atomized mass of human product, are known, on official occasions when the lights in the sky are the results of fireworks rather than beta particle emissions, as We the people – and such sweet people too! If you read interviews with the downwinders, interspersed with the usual stories – the tongue cancer, the boy born with extruded organs and no legs, the cancer that goes from house to house in places like St. George, Utah, and systematically eliminates the young – leukemia – and the old (like, forty to fifty years old) with variously sited cancers, and produces immune deficiency and diabetes 1 and muscular disorders and sterility and the oddly born lambs and foals, you will find inhabitants who might be nursing their last tumors saying things like, we had to do the tests because the Russians did the tests. Sinking on the good ship cancer, the human product gave heartfelt thanks to the captain. Or, to speed the film up to today’s exiting news, 37% gave President Bush good or excellent marks on his presidency.

Human product or human materials, the names have an effect. Just as God’s real name is supposedly part of the essence and power of divinity, the low use population’s real name is part of the essence and power of its anti-divinity – its essence, which is shit. But do not underestimate shit! It can be drafted, taxed, and driven to the polling booth to enthusiastically vote for its own demise. As Calasso points out, the most menacing phrase in the Last Days of Mankind is “Clusters form.”

“These two little words discretely accompany us in the stage directions from the very first page, the second line to bew exact. They swell like poisonous clouds for hundreds of pages and strike us at the end… when they are spoken by the Faultfinder [Noergler, Kraus’s stand-in] to designate the throng of bystanders who want to have their pictures taken alongside the corpse of the hanged Battisti, while the jovial hangman looks on. Groups are not expressions of democratic spontaneity. Their origin is much older. Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that place always evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear.”

It is evidence of Kraus’ prophetic sensibility that he could have foreseen those pictures that flooded Nazi Germany during the first, good part of the war – soldiers sending home pics of rabbis used as ponies, little Jewish kids strung up in a wood, the hustle of warmly coated German soldiers under them, protecting the Reich, all of the news from the front. And, indeed, news from the front in Iraq follows this pattern – but no in real time video, with a sound track from Elvis, mercenaries having fun shooting through the windows of Iraqi cars and such, with the official law between the provisional government of Iraq and the Liberating Powers such that no force in Iraq could touch the Pentagon’s contractors.

In the official legend, circa 2006, virtue and vice depend on an exact matching of the ideal corpse-set to the dictatorship and Islamofascism, and, on the other side, to liberation – with the difference being that the corpses produced by liberatory activity, when alive, ardently desired their own splattering, evisceration, or simple bullet through the head termination. The liberation’s corpses are much like the cartoon animals you see on billboards for restaurants in Texas – smiling chickens and pigs, chuckling broadly about their stun gun and chain saw futures. They are not only aware of their own sweet and delicious meat – they want to be eaten.

To get Jenseits der Bloedsinn is no easy thing. The method adopted by the inquisitors is that of extensive quotation. As Calasso points out, perhaps half of The Last Days of Mankind consists simply of quotes. To put the written or spoken in quotation marks was Kraus’ way of damning it. In the passage that analyzes this, Calasso, to my mind, reaches a point of true sublimity. I’ll end this gloomy post with this amazing passage:

“But at the same time, since his name is hidden behind the figure of a comic character (the Faultfinder), his words are a voice that no longer belongs to him and that guarantees the life of this nonstop spectacle. Their function is like that of the blade used by Chuang-tzu’s perfect butcher, who for nineteen years used the same knife to quarter thousands of oxen. The blade never lost its edge because “I let it go through only where it can” – in the imperceptible empty interstices. And Prince Wen-hui answers the butcher: Thank you, you have taught me how to prolong one’s life, by using it only for what does not consume it.”

American stupidity -- let me count the ways

GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, appear to be lining up closely with the president on foreign policy. It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted. – Charles Babbington, Washington Post, Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy

“The American energy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman, who met with Iraq’s oil and electricity ministers in Baghdad, had a rosy view of progress here since his last visit in 2003.

“The situation seems far more stable than when I was here two or three years ago,” he said in an interview in the fortified Green Zone. “The security seems better, people are more relaxed. There is an optimism, at least among the people I talked to.””
...
“United Nations officials said Tuesday that the number of violent deaths had climbed steadily since at least last summer. During the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.”
- Quotations from the same article, “About 20 Sunnis Are Kidnapped in Baghdad”-

How does one face the enormity of an intelligence that has the scope of a housefly’s stuffed into a colossus the size of a continent? Hows does one grasp something that is as awesome, as hideous, as farcical as American stupidity –the right and real stuff, the strategy behind the atom bomb and the Hummer, the third, impossible division of the American brain - neither left nor right, but an as yet undiscovered dimension, somewhere between Miracle Whip and the world’s biggest human turd?

Here’s what Robert Calasso said about Karl Kraus:

"Kraus’ fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but the voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafes and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.”

LI has his own threefold solitude. The enemy is met not in the coffeehouse but on a cheap dialup internet connection, blinking ads; the demon is poverty and a sarcasm that has long gone to the dark side and become pathological, a real heart condition, - a speeding up of the heartbeat, a spread of heat across the chest, the signs and symptoms of demonic possession; as for the work – well, where is the work? An impossibly cheap blog, cluttered with typos, clogged with yesterday’s annulled news, various and sundry highly forgettable reviews, failed projects that have left behind snowdrifts of paper and (wait for it, Prufrock) a graphic novel, of all things.

I’ve chosen to personalize the affront given to intelligence by American stupidity, which is rather like trying to personalize entering the Empire State Building, or entering your local shopping mall. It is doomed to failure – for if it succeeded even once, it would transform that stupidity into something else. The housefly thinks, cogito, ergo Musca domestica sum. But no, the default settings for stupidity are such that the bland language, or language substitute, used by our Energy secretary, and the formulas of WAPO’s ace reporter, Charles Babbington, are all the same thing – they have no external referent, but go on in a dark vacuum forever. They would hardly be real at all – but here we must concede that experiment has shown them to be real. The experiment of, for instance, the three thousand dead in Iraq. And it is LI who is unreal, LI with the ardent wish that tonight and every night, the throngs of those dead crowd about President Bush’s bed and freeze the blood of that pissant lowlife, who has found the dead level of his own incompetence in a clueless and ever more syncophantic court society. Freeze it tonight, and tomorrow night, and tomorrow night. Freeze it eternally.

no goodies from this war

In the Man without Qualities, Ulrich – the man himself – staying at his father’s house after his father’s death, sits down and solves a mathematical problem that he has been working on for years. He has taken up other work, and takes up the problem as a way of passing the time. He thinks about what this means. If he publishes this, perhaps his career as a mathematician will take off, perhaps he will find a place in academia. And suddenly he thinks: I’m too old for that. For the first time, he has decided that some bold move in his life is barred by age. He is thirty five, I believe.

Myself, I think that about acid. While I enjoyed it in my twenties on rare occasions, and took it once past that equinoctal age, thirty, I’m too old for that now. Pot, alcohol, cocaine I can still take. But acid is now off the menu. So, probably, is heroin – a drug I’ve never tried, and always wanted to try.

The big biography of Timothy Leary by Robert Greenfield was released this spring. I was happy to see Louis Menand review it for the New Yorker. I’ve seen a few hippyish sites on the web comment on the bio, mainly to condemn Leary. In the end, he had so relentless sold out every member of every niche that had once formed his audience that he is regarded, pretty much, with universal disgust. Myself, I can’t get over him being a snitch. On the other hand, the legendary early years fascinate me, partly for what they say about the intersection of the Cold War culture and academia, partly because who does not dream of nibbling on mushrooms in Cuernavaca in 1962? What total fun. Exploitative, check. Probably the kind of thing that not everybody should do, check. But I envy certain moods of intoxication, certain highs: Malcolm Lowry in the same town in the thirties, for instance.

Part of the war culture was the flowering of psychology. With the country being blanketed with fallout from insane bomb tests, and scientists covering up what was wrong with that, or – alternatively – proclaiming, as Edward Teller amazingly did, that the mutations that might result from radiation would be steps on man’s evolution ever onward, it is no wonder so many people felt crazy, and ended up going to psychologists in the 50s:

“There was no more opportune moment to become a psychologist. Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people that genetics does today. "It's all in your head" has the same appeal as "It's all in the genes": an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can't be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946, became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients diagnosed as mentally ill.”

To write about Leary, for someone like Menand, is an easy opportunity to grind out great paragraphs – and luckily, he gives into the temptation:

“Leary spent the first part of his career doing normative psychology, the work of assessment, measurement, and control; he spent the second as one of the leading proselytizers of alternative psychology, the pop psychology of consciousness expansion and nonconformity. But one enterprise was the flip side of the other, and Greenfield's conclusion, somewhat sorrowfully reached, is that Leary was never serious about either. The only things Leary was serious about were pleasure and renown. He underwent no fundamental transformation when he left the academic world for the counterculture. He liked women, he liked being the center of attention, and he liked to get high. He simply changed the means of intoxication. Like many people in those days, he started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff .“

The old war culture. Peter Beinart is doing his best to make the new war culture into the equivalent of the Cold War. This is laughable on many dimensions, not least of which is the lack of drugs:

“LSD was also administered to alcoholics, drug addicts, and patients with emotional blockages. The most famous of these patients was Cary Grant, who took LSD under the supervision of a psychiatrist. "All my life, I've been searching for peace of mind," Grant said. "Nothing really seemed to give me what I wanted until this treatment." Allen Ginsberg was introduced to LSD at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, in 1959, where his responses were measured by a team of doctors as part of a federally funded research program. Ginsberg eventually became one of the chief publicists for LSD, along with Ken Kesey, who first used it at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, in 1960, where, in another federally funded program, he was paid seventy-five dollars a day to ingest hallucinogens.”

That is more money than I make, for sure. All the good jobs are gone and taken!

Menand doesn't deeply understand drugs -- that is evident in his dismissive last paragraphs, which display a vulgar economic determinism that tells us little about why cocaine should have succeeded acid. But the essay does place Leary -- who is the kind of character Menand understands - very well.

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"Life goes on"

This is a dark week. LI is trying to find what inspiration we can. So imagine our joy when we came across a story in the WSJ today about a class that we sometimes too carelessly insult – I’m talking about the upper management of Fortune 500 corporations.

The story, “Executive Pay: The 9/11 Factor, by Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont” is about the sheer patriotism of that group – its belief in America, even when times are down. Take 9/11. Stocks plummeted in the wake of 9/11. But… well, here’s the inspiring story:

“ON SEPT. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world.

"Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that day. They handed out millions of bargain-priced stock options to their top executives.
The terrorist attack shut the U.S. stock market for days. When it reopened Sept. 17, stocks skidded more than 14% over five days, in the worst full week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since Germany invaded France in May 1940. But for recipients of options, the lower their company's stock price when options are awarded the better, since the options grant a right to buy shares at that price for years to come. The grants set recipients up for millions of dollars in profit if the shares recovered.

"A Wall Street Journal analysis shows how some companies rushed, amid the post-9/11 stock-market decline, to give executives especially valuable options. A review of Standard & Poor's ExecuComp data for 1,800 leading companies indicates that from Sept. 17, 2001, through the end of the month, 511 top executives at 186 of these companies got stock-option grants. The number who received grants was 2.6 times as many as in the same stretch of September in 2000, and more than twice as many as in the like period in any other year between 1999 and 2003.

"Ninety-one companies that didn't regularly grant stock options in September did so in the first two weeks of trading after the terror attack. Their grants were concentrated around Sept. 21, when the market reached its post-attack low. They were worth about $325 million when granted, based on a standard method of valuing stock options. “

Faith in America – and faith in gouging Americans. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or Halliburton and Cheney. Even as they were weeping for compatriots lost, these company boards knew that a smash and grab opportunity like this doesn’t come around twice in a lifetime. There is a saying about the amoral opportunist that he would dance on his grandmother’s grave – but what a waste of grandmother that is! Especially when you can rent her dead body out to necrophiles and make a little of the ready.

Ah, this is a true story of the people Bush calls his base. And base, oh so base, they are, the most debased mob of knaves and thieves ever to have afflicted this country. A white collar riot, in which the rioters aren’t going to be taking cheesy tv sets and shit – that is so below par when you can rack up the extra million here and there and you are guaranteed tax advantages by a president who came in via coup. Sweet! Robber barons did many things, but one thing they did supremely: build. In contrast, this is the crowd that has utterly reduced the American manufacturing base and stands in the way of creating a green economy, in spite of the overwhelming long range necessity of it. The are a parasitical crew of pirates, more than willing to sink this country for a dime and a percentage point. And they are winning, every day. Can't you feel it, reader, in your shoulders and neck?

“The 91 companies included such corporate icons as Home Depot Inc., Black & Decker Corp. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. It included two companies directly touched by the tragedy. Merrill Lynch & Co., across the street from the Twin Towers, lost three employees. On Sept. 24, Merrill granted its president options to buy more than 750,000 shares, at a price 15% below the pre-attack level. At Teradyne Inc. in Boston, an employee delayed a business trip until Sept. 11 to attend a son's soccer game and died on American Flight 11. Teradyne that month gave its CEO more than 600,000 options at a price enabling him to buy stock at 24% below its pre-attack level.

At Stryker Corp., a Michigan maker of orthopedic products, onetime stock-option-committee member John Lillard said he didn't regret the decision to award options nine days after the attack. "If you believe the company is going to do well, and here is an external event that is affecting the market and you've made a decision to reward executives, you go ahead with it," Mr. Lillard said. "Life goes on."”

the agendas: Israel vs. Hezbollah or how the mouse trap caught the cat

Yesterday’s Kagan op ed, it appears, is only the first in a flood of wargasm rhetoric in the WAPO – with today’s op ed page hosting Krauthammer and a fellow at a conservative think tank in Jerusalem, Michael Oren, as well as David Ignatius (a man for whom LI has some residual personal respect – we interviewed him, years ago, and formed a favorable judgment about him in spite of his pro-war beliefs).

LI doesn’t fully understand the motives behind Israel’s decision to go full tilt, lately, into Gaza and now into Lebanon, in response to Hamas and Hezbollah. We suspect that Michael Oren’s op ed reflects the thinking of Israel’s government:

“By eliminating the terrorist leaderships in Gaza and southern Lebanon and deterring Syria and Iran from prodding their proxies to war, Israel can restore a reasonable level of security to its citizens. Such measures will also be implicitly welcomed by Israel's Jordanian and Egyptian neighbors, who are similarly threatened by these same terrorist groups. Only by establishing a new and more stable status quo along Israel's borders can Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proceed with his plan of redrawing those borders permanently, either unilaterally or in cooperation with a nonviolent Palestinian partner.”

This is magic thinking, however. Israel has never “eliminated” terrorist leadership anywhere (and let’s not be distracted by the word ‘terrorist’ into a long detour about who is really the terrorist – LI doesn’t really care). In fact, the restoration of a “reasonable level of security” for Israel’s citizens is a curious goal, given that the insecurity they suffer from stems from Israel’s attempt to impose – unilaterally – a plan for redrawing boundaries.

By discarding graduated response, Israel is putting the U.S. in a very awkward position. After all, Hezbollah and the Dawa party running Iraq are joined by a long history of common bonds. Ignatius and Oren and Robert Fiske and other Middle Eastern reporters have developed a shorthand for talking about the Middle East in which there are the main players and the proxies. Hezbollah, for instance, is a client of Iran, or operates as Syria’s proxy. But this is very misleading. Because one party in a situation is weaker economically and politically doesn’t mean that the flow of power is unilateral from the stronger to the weaker. Israel is weaker than the U.S. by far, and has built itself up with massive amounts of U.S. aid. But it is not just a U.S. proxy. Discard the so often invoked idea of the head and the tail – the image of the beast is just that – an image.

In LI’s uninformed opinion, Hezbollah, in the late nineties, was an instrument used by reactionary forces in Iran to work against the moderates in Teheran. And the relationship between Israel and Iran, which seems to be the latent cause of Israel’s new found aggressiveness, has been determined by elements quite different from opposition to Islamic ‘radicalism.’ Trita Parsi, in an article in the June, 2005 Iranian Studies journal, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective”, showed that Israel supported Khomenei in the most radical phase of the Iranian revolution, operating to supply Iran with arms in its war with Iraq and only shifting to an anti-Iranian posture after the first Gulf war. If Israel were simply responding to Hezbollah’s threats, this is a curious pattern of engagement and disengagement. Parsi, however, contents that Israel is playing for dominance in the region. It is not responding to threats so much as responding from an ideology that simply sees Israel as permanently threatened as long as it does not dominate in the Middle East. In a footnote to that article, there’s a very interesting comment from a high ranking Israeli military man:

“Interview with Israeli ministry of defense official, Tel Aviv, October 18, 2004. “There is definitely a tendency in Israel [to think the worst]. . .. Today, the prevailing culture or I would say the mindset of the intelligence industry is to attribute to the enemy almost infinite power and completely underestimate what our strength means to them.”

Parsi sums up the change in Israeli policy by looking at what Rabin and Peres were saying and doing in the 80s and then in the 90s:

“The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran
policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran.

"This was at the center of the “Iran-Contra” affair, in which Israel pressured the
U.S. to improve relations with Iran and sell advanced American arms to the Khomeini
regime.42 The affair was initiated by Amiram Nir, a close aid to Shimon Peres, who floated the idea of selling arms to Iran in Washington in the mid- 1980s. The idea was rejected by the State Department and the Pentagon, but it found support in National Security Council operatives Oliver North and Michael Ledeen.43 (Ledeen, a personal acquaintance of Peres, was convinced by
the Israelis to pursue a U.S. opening to Iran.44 Today, he is one of the most vocal opponents of U.S.-Iran talks and advocates a policy of regime-change in Tehran on the grounds that Iran opposes Israel’s right to exist.) Israel’s key argument was that Iran would once again become an explicit ally of the two if moderate elements in Tehran were strengthened.

This stands in stark contrast to Israel’s policy after 1992, driven again by Peres and Rabin, in which Tel Aviv rejected the very concept of “Iranian moderates” and opposed any rapprochement between the Unites States and Iran.46 Indeed, one of the questions that arose from the Iran-Contra affair was Israel’s seemingly paradoxical role in strengthening a regime that opposed Israel’s existence and Iran’s collaboration with a state that it officially sought to destroy.”

Parellel with Israel’s underground alliance with Iran, Hezbollah seems to have been in contact with Al Qaeda in the 90s, in spite of the fact that Al Qaeda acted as an occasional Einsatzgruppe against Shiites in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the same period, organizing and participating in anti-Shi’a pograms that prefigure those going on in Iraq today. LI puts the “seems” in, since all information about Hezbollah and al Qaeda has to be finely sifted, as the amount of sheer propaganda written about Al qaeda in the last five years makes it hard to get any hard facts. Still, I trust Douglas Farah’s reporting on this issue, in spite of Farah’s biases. Unfortunately, the agenda-blind never explain seeming contradictions. How could Hezbollah cooperate with al qaeda, for instance, at the same time that al qaeda was the guest of a government that massacred Shiites in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998, in the Shamali region around 1999, around Taloquan in 2000, and in Bamiyan in 2001 – regions of Afghanistan that were of great concern to Iran, supposedly Hezbollah’s patron, all during this time? Farah, as far as I know, never discusses these facts -- which is where his Maronite sympathies betray him. On the other hand, how could the U.S. be sponsoring an Iraqi government headed by the party with the close ties to Hezbollah, too?

The LA Times has the one dissenting analysis of Hezbollah’s actions in the past week – the rest of the press is towing the Bush line, as per usual.

kagan/sade

LI was pleased to see that the Washington Post is doing something about an issue that effects us all – the erotic dreamlife of neo-cons. Rather than let daydreams of violence, torture, and death end up as the private incentives towards some covert ejaculation, the WAPO has manfully published Robert Kagan’s wet dream on its op ed page.

It begins with a “Let’s imagine,” and ends with “It’s just a theory,”- clueing us into the daydreaming nature of the column. In between there is a rich and colorful mix of those puzzling features that make up the neo-con underlife – the homo-erotic fascination with George Bush, of all people, as Superman; the ardent desire to burn brown skin, which one sees in old postcards of lynchings, and of which Kagan is the heavy breathing inheritor; and judgments about the Clinton administration that are so absurd as to be more than mildly deranged – they are definitely symptoms of the erotic role played by Clinton in the neo-con mind.

Erotic daydreaming is heavily ritualized. One returns again and again to a formula. Sade actually made the ritualization itself pornographic, in the 120 days of Sodom:

“Singulièrement mécontents de la maladresse de toutes ces petites filles dans l'art de la masturbation, impatientés de ce qu'on avait éprouvé sur cela la veille, Durcet proposa d'établir une heure dans la matinée où on leur donnerait des leçons sur cet objet, et que tour à tour un d'eux se lèverait une heure plus matin, ce moment d'exercice étant établi depuis neuf jusqu'à dix, se lèverait, dis-je, à neuf heures pour aller se prêter à cet exercice. On décida que celui qui remplirait cette fonction s'assiérait tranquillement au milieu du sérail, dans un fauteuil, et que chaque petite fille, conduite et guidée par la Duclos, la meilleure branleuse que le château renfermât, viendrait s'essayer sur lui, que la Duclos dirigerait leur main, leur mouvement, qu'elle leur apprendrait le plus ou le moins de vitesse qu'il fallait donner à leurs secousses en raison de l'état du patient, qu'elle prescrirait leurs attitudes, leurs postures pendant l'opération, et qu'on établirait des punitions réglées pour celle qui, au bout de la première quinzaine, ne réussirait point parfaitement dans cet art sans avoir plus besoin de leçons.”

Kagan, discontented by the supposed maladresse of a President who has refused to use even a petite tactical nuclear weapon on Iran, comforts himself first by recalling the dark days – yes, the Clinton days:

“Let's imagine, and this is purely hypothetical, that President Bush has already decided that he will not leave office in January 2009 without a satisfactory resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem. Let's imagine that he has already determined that if he cannot obtain Iran's agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program voluntarily and verifiably, then he will order some form of military action to destroy as much of that program as possible before he leaves. Let's imagine that he has resolved not to end his two terms in office the way Bill Clinton ended his, by leaving every major international crisis -- from Iraq to Iran to North Korea to al-Qaeda -- for his successor.”

The erotic lives of others are easy to laugh at. Of course, the idea that Bush, who has started an unwinnable war and has said, publicly, that he is leaving that war for his successor, won’t be like Clinton – who left Bush with a number of officials who explained Al Qaeda to him, even as Bush was eager to do some cedar choppin’ on his ranch – is obviously an erotic pretext. The famous remark about not being part of the reality based community was all about the mixture of sexual disposition and policy at the D.C. court. To succeed dans cet art, combining the right amount of friction and mental picturing, requires that one return again and again to some primal, vulnerable scene. This is the tableau of the baby and the mean mother.

Having set himself up in this way, Kagan can then imagine the seduction. The powerful, powerful rebel in chief, in this episode, is operating in a curiously non-muscular way. Is superman really a drag queen? Or is this, oh bliss, is this really superman in a new role – a man/woman, a seducer? Surely it is the latter! This is the cross dressing tableau.

“Bush would be sincere, and convincingly so. For his ideal outcome really would be a diplomatic solution in which Iran voluntarily and verifiably abandoned its program. He would know that such an outcome, in addition to benefiting the world, could completely reshape his image and ensure his legacy as a successful leader. He would also know that the military solution is fraught with danger and, indeed, could end badly. He would genuinely like to avoid it if at all possible. It really would be a last resort, to be used only when diplomacy failed. Therefore, Bush would send his diplomats out and want them to succeed. He would not be bothered by press reports that he had abandoned "cowboy diplomacy" and given in to the "realists" at the State Department.”

Superman is like that, sometimes. His member, as iron strong as always, is disguised – and not just disguised but mocked! But it is a mistake to take this as a moment of erotic depression. Rather, in the routine, this is as highly charged a moment as any other. Here one is the victim, one is beaten, one experiences the peculiar delight of a masochism that will end in mastery. As Sade knew, seduction is in and of itself a reason for discharge:

"Il y avait eu quelques changements dans la maison de Mme Guérin, [the keeper of a brothel] ... Deux très jolies filles venaient de trouver des dupes qui les entretinrent et qu'elles trompèrent comme nous faisons toutes. Pour remplacer cette perte, notre chère maman avait jeté les yeux sur la fille d'un cabaretier de la rue Saint-Denis, âgée de treize ans et l'une des plus jolies créatures qu'il fût possible de voir. Mais la petite personne, aussi sage que pieuse, résistait à toutes ses séductions, lorsque la Guérin, après s'être servie d'un moyen très adroit pour l'attirer un jour chez elle, la mit aussitôt entre les mains du personnage singulier dont je vais vous décrire la manie. C'était un ecclésiastique de cinquante-cinq à cinquante-six ans, mais frais et vigoureux et auquel on n'en aurait pas donné quarante. Aucun être dans 1e monde n'avait un talent plus singulier que cet homme pour entraîner des jeunes filles dans le vice, et comme c'était son art le plus sublime, il en fait aussi son seul et son unique plaisir. Toute sa volupté consistait à déraciner les préjugés de l'enfance, à faire mépriser la vertu et à parer le vice des plus belles couleurs. Rien n'y était négligé: tableaux séduisants, promesses f1atteuses, exemples délicieux, tout était mis en oeuvre, tout était adroitement ménagé, tout artistement proportionné à l'âge, à l'espèce d'esprit de l'enfant, et jamais il ne manquait son coup. En deux seules heures de conversation, il était sûr de faire une putain de la petite fille la plus sage et la plus raisonnable, et depuis trente ans qu'il exerçait ce métier-là dans Paris, il avait avoué à Mme Guérin, l'une de ses meilleures amies, qu'il avait sur son catalogue plus de dix mille jeunes filles séduites et jetées par lui dans le libertinage.”

The power to seduce is the power to debase. The powerful, in Kagan’s mind, are in fact defined by the debasement that they can effect. Thus the cowboy Bush is being maligned, pushed around by the press, told that his vit is no longer gonflé. He’s a girl, he’s a girlie-man. The persecutors must be punished for this. And what better punishment than to deposit just the most precious little Bush turd on the constitution! Yes, let the president defy law itself – let him use his strong, strong penis to press the buttons and make his supermen squad of bombers discharge on Iran, burning, beautifully burning into a nice crisp those frightening brown skins, and at the same time wipe his ass with the constitution, thus fulfilling the Sadean trajectory that goes from seduction to blasphemy. And in this way we get to the high point of Kagan’s dream. It is, actually, as a high point, rather pedestrian – the usual Clancy fantasy of bombs killing and killing and killing, ripping off the skins of brown men, making sure they suffer. Brown women too, of course. The absence of napalm in the current war is obviously a deep wound to the erotic charge it could have for the neo-cons. Torture has made up for it, in the various prisons, but still, bombing Iran – that would be special, that would make up for everything.

As I said, this is garden variety porn. What is special is that WAPO is where neo-con porno seems to find its natural venue.

“The likely failure of diplomacy would not deter Bush from pursuing it, however. If and when it failed, he would be able to choose the military course, and no fair person could accuse him of not having tried to bring the world along to do what had to be done. At least he would know in his own mind that he had sincerely given diplomacy a chance. And when he ordered the strike on Iran, he would know that, whatever else could be said about him, he would not go down in history as the man who let the mullahs have the bomb.

It's just a theory.”