My faithful commentator Mr. NYP rightfully called me upon my too too sarcastic description of Jacob Weisberg. The hanging judge style of making someone out to be an absolute felon is a vice I am all too liable to - it is also a vice that is common in the b-b-blogosphere. But on the whole, I would say that Slate’s political side combines the arrogance of the TNR set with the arrogance of the Washington Post pundits set to create a whole new element in the periodic table of attitudes, a superheated, superconcentrated arrogance - a rare form of Ultrasnarkium. This, in spite of the fact of the terrible, terrible record of Slate’s political side, available to any reader – the penchant for predictions that go wrong, support for policies that blow up in Uncle Sam’s face, etc. On the other hand, let me say something good about Slate: they have a pretty excellent cultural side. And they know how to use the web – having a store of articles, when something comes up which is relevant, they recycle those articles.
Getting me to the point of this post – when I look at what Slate does, it depresses me all the more to see a site like In these Times. This week, Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize. Now, I happen to know that In these Times could recycle an excellent little review of Pamuk’s My Name is Red – because I wrote it. And I am pretty sure that is what they have in the way of Pamukiana. But, unlike Slate, they still have not come into the 21st century – it is still a ‘look it up in the paper archives’ mindset. How dumb. I would not be so irritated if (ho ho ho) I hadn’t somehow misplaced my computer copy of that review, with selected bits of which I would love to regale my readers. But no, somehow, from 7/2001 to 12/2001, there is no file anywhere of that review. Damn.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Thursday, October 12, 2006
a non-contrarian, going with the crowd on moral relativsm, kind of post
LI had a nice little poem/screed about these here states that we penned yesterday, but looking at it this morning, we thought: so much typing!
So perhaps for later. For the moment, we’d like to consider the notion of interest in American foreign policy. Oh, don’t worry – this won’t be a long and dull post – I’m saving that for when I feel like doin’ more typing.
Specifically, we would like to know: what advantage does the U.S. accrue in remaining hostile to Iran?
The assumption that Iran should be our enemy is laid on so thickly by the D.C. pundit class that it has helped blur the question that should guide any country in chosing, or having forced upon it, its adversaries. Let me use a Slate writer for an example – Slate being the dead level of conventional wisdom. I don’t think you can write for Slate unless you can come up with twelve contrarian reasons to defend the status quo just as it is – which, lo and behold, is the same status quo that has so richly benefited those who write for Slate! It is a minor miracle that reporters and opinion makers, using only the most objective criteria, continually discover that they are not only at the top of the heap, but deserve to be there. It is like self-beatification. Anyway, today one of the truly dumb writers at Slate, Jacob Weisberg, pens a stirring condemnation of the Bush foreign policy that was all the rage, at Slate, in the post-coital glow of invading Iraq. Weisberg starts off in classic Slate fashion – when Slate wants to come down hard on a platitude, it begins by first dismissing the clueless majority of striving pinheads that are clinging to some obvious error:
“In his first State of the Union Address in January 2002, George W. Bush deployed the expression "axis of evil" to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Critics jumped on the president for his belligerent rhetoric. But the problem with Bush's formulation wasn't his use of the term "evil," a perfectly apt description of the regimes of Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong-il.”
There you go, for those of you who don’t think Saddam, the anonymous but shadowy mullahs, and Dear Leader were evil! The majority, in this case, is the 90 to 99 percent of Americans who have dismissed God as a fiction and are wallowing in moral relativism. Of course, included in that are the ever powerful Chomsky crowd, and maybe Howard Dean. However, Weisberg is one tough cookie. A cop, even. Sure, he sees there’s evil afoot – plenty of it, baby! But he’s hard as nails. He’s been on this beat for all too long. The things he’s seen! Why yesterday, the waiter brought him a cold coffee. So he uses his super powers to see that there is a problem with the formulation in spite of its clear descriptive power. The article runs into the ground from there, covering the usual blah blah in 1000 words or less. Isn’t that sweet?
Now, we do wonder if the evil Iranian mullahs are as evil as, say, the ruling elite in Egypt. Or the one in Saudi Arabia. Are they as evil as Israel’s recent war with Lebanon? How about Putin – are they as evil as Putin? I am not going to insult your intelligence by asking about the U.S., which recently legalized torture – obviously we aren’t evil! Like angels, we are perched her on our mountains of virtue surveying the world for evil.
Weisberg is an echo chamber of D.C. assumptions, and that’s the worth in this otherwise worthless article. By making the mullahs (they are always in a crowd, those mullahs) evil, the discussion of what advantage we accrue by being Iran’s enemy is obviated. No advantage necessary when it is St. Michael against Belzebuub.
Otherwise, though, we see a history of disadvantages:
- hostility to Iran prevented the U.S. from discouraging the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan
- hostility to Iran prevented the U.S. from operating in an efficient way in the 90s to topple Saddam Hussein, without armed U.S. intervention
- hostility to Iran prevents the U.S. from forming any kind of exit strategy from Iraq at the moment.
So where, pray tell, are the advantages in this? or: cui bono?
So perhaps for later. For the moment, we’d like to consider the notion of interest in American foreign policy. Oh, don’t worry – this won’t be a long and dull post – I’m saving that for when I feel like doin’ more typing.
Specifically, we would like to know: what advantage does the U.S. accrue in remaining hostile to Iran?
The assumption that Iran should be our enemy is laid on so thickly by the D.C. pundit class that it has helped blur the question that should guide any country in chosing, or having forced upon it, its adversaries. Let me use a Slate writer for an example – Slate being the dead level of conventional wisdom. I don’t think you can write for Slate unless you can come up with twelve contrarian reasons to defend the status quo just as it is – which, lo and behold, is the same status quo that has so richly benefited those who write for Slate! It is a minor miracle that reporters and opinion makers, using only the most objective criteria, continually discover that they are not only at the top of the heap, but deserve to be there. It is like self-beatification. Anyway, today one of the truly dumb writers at Slate, Jacob Weisberg, pens a stirring condemnation of the Bush foreign policy that was all the rage, at Slate, in the post-coital glow of invading Iraq. Weisberg starts off in classic Slate fashion – when Slate wants to come down hard on a platitude, it begins by first dismissing the clueless majority of striving pinheads that are clinging to some obvious error:
“In his first State of the Union Address in January 2002, George W. Bush deployed the expression "axis of evil" to describe the governments of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Critics jumped on the president for his belligerent rhetoric. But the problem with Bush's formulation wasn't his use of the term "evil," a perfectly apt description of the regimes of Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong-il.”
There you go, for those of you who don’t think Saddam, the anonymous but shadowy mullahs, and Dear Leader were evil! The majority, in this case, is the 90 to 99 percent of Americans who have dismissed God as a fiction and are wallowing in moral relativism. Of course, included in that are the ever powerful Chomsky crowd, and maybe Howard Dean. However, Weisberg is one tough cookie. A cop, even. Sure, he sees there’s evil afoot – plenty of it, baby! But he’s hard as nails. He’s been on this beat for all too long. The things he’s seen! Why yesterday, the waiter brought him a cold coffee. So he uses his super powers to see that there is a problem with the formulation in spite of its clear descriptive power. The article runs into the ground from there, covering the usual blah blah in 1000 words or less. Isn’t that sweet?
Now, we do wonder if the evil Iranian mullahs are as evil as, say, the ruling elite in Egypt. Or the one in Saudi Arabia. Are they as evil as Israel’s recent war with Lebanon? How about Putin – are they as evil as Putin? I am not going to insult your intelligence by asking about the U.S., which recently legalized torture – obviously we aren’t evil! Like angels, we are perched her on our mountains of virtue surveying the world for evil.
Weisberg is an echo chamber of D.C. assumptions, and that’s the worth in this otherwise worthless article. By making the mullahs (they are always in a crowd, those mullahs) evil, the discussion of what advantage we accrue by being Iran’s enemy is obviated. No advantage necessary when it is St. Michael against Belzebuub.
Otherwise, though, we see a history of disadvantages:
- hostility to Iran prevented the U.S. from discouraging the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan
- hostility to Iran prevented the U.S. from operating in an efficient way in the 90s to topple Saddam Hussein, without armed U.S. intervention
- hostility to Iran prevents the U.S. from forming any kind of exit strategy from Iraq at the moment.
So where, pray tell, are the advantages in this? or: cui bono?
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
north korea and mars
Fred Kaplan’s response to North Korea’s announcement of it’s a bomb test is pretty standard:
“It doesn't take more than a handful of nukes to become a "made man" in this club. If Saddam Hussein had possessed some nukes in 1990, before he invaded Kuwait, it is doubtful that the U.S.-led coalition (and that really was a coalition) would have mobilized armed forces to push his troops back. If Mao Zedong had not possessed an atomic arsenal in 1969, during intense border clashes with the Soviet Union, it is likely that Leonid Brezhnev would have mounted an invasion. More to the point, without the nukes, Mao wouldn't have had the nerve to trigger the border clashes to begin with.”
LI totally agrees with this. Which is the reason I suggest we sue the Pentagon for, oh, 5 to 10 trillion dollars. As Kaplan shows, practical invulnerability is cheap. Spend, say 50 billion dollars over a decade, build 20 to 100 H bombs, and that is it. Instead, the U.S. built something like over 40,000. It built perhaps around 20,000 to 40,000 ICBMs. In other words, after the threshold of practical invulnerability was reached, in 1952, the U.S. just kept going. My estimates for Pentagon overspending are probably off by as much as ten trillion dollars, but what the hell. LI is feeling generous this morning. Ten trillion, what is that? Lagniappe. In any case, what we want to know is: Why? when the evidence is right before our eyes on things like China, why did the Pentagon, why did the American people, keep spending and spending and building and building weapons?
There are two answers to that question. One, on the practical narrative level, is that once Mars has its hooks into a nation, the nation is fucked. There was way too much money to be made making redundant weapons, and way too much power to be accrued in approving and overseeing the redundant weapons programs, and so a powerful alignment between economic, military and political oligarchs was forged while the world’s total (virtual) destruction became a multiplier – and the thing that brought, for instance, the primitive South back into the U.S. economy. A powerful constituency emerged that ultimately depended on the defense dollar. This is the very origin of big government conservatism.
The metaphysical answer to this question is the advance of the notion that a nation could actually be the end of history. Could, that is, be so important that its fall should be prevented at the price of extinguishing all future human life. War, in the insane LI view, is the real political system here on planet Mars, and the state is a function of war. But just as the veil of Maya prevents us, as individuals, from seeing that our individuality is an illusion, so, too, a similar veil – the veil of Mars – prevents the state from seeing its subordination to war. From the veil of Maya, one gets methodological individualism and the market society. From the veil of Mars, one gets the absolute state.
…
Which is not what I meant to write about today.
I’ll save that for my next post.
“It doesn't take more than a handful of nukes to become a "made man" in this club. If Saddam Hussein had possessed some nukes in 1990, before he invaded Kuwait, it is doubtful that the U.S.-led coalition (and that really was a coalition) would have mobilized armed forces to push his troops back. If Mao Zedong had not possessed an atomic arsenal in 1969, during intense border clashes with the Soviet Union, it is likely that Leonid Brezhnev would have mounted an invasion. More to the point, without the nukes, Mao wouldn't have had the nerve to trigger the border clashes to begin with.”
LI totally agrees with this. Which is the reason I suggest we sue the Pentagon for, oh, 5 to 10 trillion dollars. As Kaplan shows, practical invulnerability is cheap. Spend, say 50 billion dollars over a decade, build 20 to 100 H bombs, and that is it. Instead, the U.S. built something like over 40,000. It built perhaps around 20,000 to 40,000 ICBMs. In other words, after the threshold of practical invulnerability was reached, in 1952, the U.S. just kept going. My estimates for Pentagon overspending are probably off by as much as ten trillion dollars, but what the hell. LI is feeling generous this morning. Ten trillion, what is that? Lagniappe. In any case, what we want to know is: Why? when the evidence is right before our eyes on things like China, why did the Pentagon, why did the American people, keep spending and spending and building and building weapons?
There are two answers to that question. One, on the practical narrative level, is that once Mars has its hooks into a nation, the nation is fucked. There was way too much money to be made making redundant weapons, and way too much power to be accrued in approving and overseeing the redundant weapons programs, and so a powerful alignment between economic, military and political oligarchs was forged while the world’s total (virtual) destruction became a multiplier – and the thing that brought, for instance, the primitive South back into the U.S. economy. A powerful constituency emerged that ultimately depended on the defense dollar. This is the very origin of big government conservatism.
The metaphysical answer to this question is the advance of the notion that a nation could actually be the end of history. Could, that is, be so important that its fall should be prevented at the price of extinguishing all future human life. War, in the insane LI view, is the real political system here on planet Mars, and the state is a function of war. But just as the veil of Maya prevents us, as individuals, from seeing that our individuality is an illusion, so, too, a similar veil – the veil of Mars – prevents the state from seeing its subordination to war. From the veil of Maya, one gets methodological individualism and the market society. From the veil of Mars, one gets the absolute state.
…
Which is not what I meant to write about today.
I’ll save that for my next post.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
new american liberalism - don't be fooled.
Mr. Scruggs been up to his old tricks again. I notice, through MaxSpeaks, that he has created this amazing parody
Of course, I saw through this right away. A new liberalism group heralded by the New York Sun? With Marty Peretz and Michael Ledeen playing the aging but virile sons of old rancher Harry Truman? That’s the Harry that potters around and mutters about the a-bombs. “Warnt nuthin to me, Marty, a-droppin them firecrackers. Why, I had me a good old nap that day! Fucked Bess. I’m spry for my hundert thousand years of age. Like my pappy Lucifer!”
However, Mr. Scruggs has put a lot of work into this obvious sham. For instance, notice the care he has taken in compiling a faux editorial board composed of the kind of academic deadwood that is routinely hustled out to defend the latest atrocities perpetrated by the American Wehrmacht. I have to say, picking Russell Berman and Jeffrey Herf betrays the fine hand of the practiced satirist. Russell Berman, you’ll remember, is the man who has built an academic Marxist magazine, Telos, into a cult from which he preaches war against Iran when he isn’t publishing French racists. Telos was, of course, the journal that published the first translations of Nazi political “theologian” Schmitt . As for Jeffrey Herf, he is a TNR Book section reliable – a sort of handmedown Sidney Hooks type, if Sidney Hooks had suffered a lobotomy at a young age.
It is Scruggs best piece of work since he launched the bogus Washington Times owned, supposedly, by the Moonies. Luckily, LI is not so naïve that we’d fall for things like that. Oh, there are times that we fear that the parody is getting out of hand – for instance, when Scruggs created a cutout editor of the WTimes, one Francis B. Coombs Jr , he whimsically gave him a glaring white power past, and to add spice, he made up a wife for Coombs who is on the board of several white power groups. The point, of course, is to test the D.C. waters, and see who would continue to suck up to such obvious moral lepers, and whether they would be excused in general. Such is Scruggs cynical mindset. Imagine his surprise when all of D.C. universally shunned a paper owned by a cult and run by a Klansman knockoff. Not a single politician or public figure cooperates or writes for it, or even pays any attention to it whatsoever. Conservatives, who long ago refused to have anything to do with segregationists in Moonie clothing, have denounced the Wash Times – or would have. But Conservatives are practical jokers. Seeing that the paper was a parody, they’ve gone along and actually write for it and pretend like Coombs isn’t even there!
We suspect this time Scruggs has gone too far. New Liberalism, centered around the Euston Manifesto, with Peter Beinart all signed up? – we detect a heavy handedness, I’m afraid. Nobody is going to believe it. I mean, does someone like Beinart still have a career? Of course not. Common sense tells us that the people who advocated the invasion of Iraq, a great, avoidable stupidity, managed with maximum corruption to the miserable end of making Iraq even worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, are universally shunned in our capital, which is, when all is said and done, manned by hardworking patriots who, using the best information available, make choices that are best for this country, no matter what the cost to their own careers and reputations. That’s why poor Beinart was run out of town on a rail. Last I heard, he’s washing dishes in a diner in Wheeling West Virginia. However, being an intellectual sort, he has reviewed the many mistakes he’s made, and his complicity in the crime of the War, and has decided that he just isn’t really smart enough to figure out foreign policy. So he has turned his sights to trying to be the best damn dishwasher in Wheeling, West Virginia. It is truly a Hollywood story. He wants, supposedly, to work his way up to cook, and then, saving up his money, maybe one day start a diner of his own! Beinart, to be fair, is doing his best to make amends. In an interview with a Wheeling paper, he said that he realized, after a while, his total incompetence at understanding public policy. “If an auto mechanic doesn’t understand engines,” said Beinart, “he shouldn’t repair them.” Shifting around for something to do that would occupy his talents, he has discovered that he is pretty good at whipping up grits. Thus, his newfound ambition. He’s hoping to hire his friend Chris Hitchens, who has quit his various media positions, given the money he earned from them to charity, and has been trying to master 3 minute grits himself in Beinart’s trailer kitchen. ‘Chris is totally ashamed,’ Beinart says. “Do you know, he actually supported installing a known criminal and peculator as head of poor Iraq? Every day he bemoans his blindness and vanity.” Meanwhile, of course, in our capital, the militantly anti-war Democrats, proud to have opposed the war from the very beginning, adamant about never rolling over for a tyrannical hick of a president, see with eagle vision that sacrificing American military men to the imbecilic vanity of iniquitous old warmongers in D.C. is highly immoral, akin to colluding in murder, and not something they will put up with. What a Party! We are truly blessed. Our political system has never been healthier or more vibrant. So, sorry, this parody – excellent as it is in several respects! – is not going to fool anyone.
Of course, I saw through this right away. A new liberalism group heralded by the New York Sun? With Marty Peretz and Michael Ledeen playing the aging but virile sons of old rancher Harry Truman? That’s the Harry that potters around and mutters about the a-bombs. “Warnt nuthin to me, Marty, a-droppin them firecrackers. Why, I had me a good old nap that day! Fucked Bess. I’m spry for my hundert thousand years of age. Like my pappy Lucifer!”
However, Mr. Scruggs has put a lot of work into this obvious sham. For instance, notice the care he has taken in compiling a faux editorial board composed of the kind of academic deadwood that is routinely hustled out to defend the latest atrocities perpetrated by the American Wehrmacht. I have to say, picking Russell Berman and Jeffrey Herf betrays the fine hand of the practiced satirist. Russell Berman, you’ll remember, is the man who has built an academic Marxist magazine, Telos, into a cult from which he preaches war against Iran when he isn’t publishing French racists. Telos was, of course, the journal that published the first translations of Nazi political “theologian” Schmitt . As for Jeffrey Herf, he is a TNR Book section reliable – a sort of handmedown Sidney Hooks type, if Sidney Hooks had suffered a lobotomy at a young age.
It is Scruggs best piece of work since he launched the bogus Washington Times owned, supposedly, by the Moonies. Luckily, LI is not so naïve that we’d fall for things like that. Oh, there are times that we fear that the parody is getting out of hand – for instance, when Scruggs created a cutout editor of the WTimes, one Francis B. Coombs Jr , he whimsically gave him a glaring white power past, and to add spice, he made up a wife for Coombs who is on the board of several white power groups. The point, of course, is to test the D.C. waters, and see who would continue to suck up to such obvious moral lepers, and whether they would be excused in general. Such is Scruggs cynical mindset. Imagine his surprise when all of D.C. universally shunned a paper owned by a cult and run by a Klansman knockoff. Not a single politician or public figure cooperates or writes for it, or even pays any attention to it whatsoever. Conservatives, who long ago refused to have anything to do with segregationists in Moonie clothing, have denounced the Wash Times – or would have. But Conservatives are practical jokers. Seeing that the paper was a parody, they’ve gone along and actually write for it and pretend like Coombs isn’t even there!
We suspect this time Scruggs has gone too far. New Liberalism, centered around the Euston Manifesto, with Peter Beinart all signed up? – we detect a heavy handedness, I’m afraid. Nobody is going to believe it. I mean, does someone like Beinart still have a career? Of course not. Common sense tells us that the people who advocated the invasion of Iraq, a great, avoidable stupidity, managed with maximum corruption to the miserable end of making Iraq even worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, are universally shunned in our capital, which is, when all is said and done, manned by hardworking patriots who, using the best information available, make choices that are best for this country, no matter what the cost to their own careers and reputations. That’s why poor Beinart was run out of town on a rail. Last I heard, he’s washing dishes in a diner in Wheeling West Virginia. However, being an intellectual sort, he has reviewed the many mistakes he’s made, and his complicity in the crime of the War, and has decided that he just isn’t really smart enough to figure out foreign policy. So he has turned his sights to trying to be the best damn dishwasher in Wheeling, West Virginia. It is truly a Hollywood story. He wants, supposedly, to work his way up to cook, and then, saving up his money, maybe one day start a diner of his own! Beinart, to be fair, is doing his best to make amends. In an interview with a Wheeling paper, he said that he realized, after a while, his total incompetence at understanding public policy. “If an auto mechanic doesn’t understand engines,” said Beinart, “he shouldn’t repair them.” Shifting around for something to do that would occupy his talents, he has discovered that he is pretty good at whipping up grits. Thus, his newfound ambition. He’s hoping to hire his friend Chris Hitchens, who has quit his various media positions, given the money he earned from them to charity, and has been trying to master 3 minute grits himself in Beinart’s trailer kitchen. ‘Chris is totally ashamed,’ Beinart says. “Do you know, he actually supported installing a known criminal and peculator as head of poor Iraq? Every day he bemoans his blindness and vanity.” Meanwhile, of course, in our capital, the militantly anti-war Democrats, proud to have opposed the war from the very beginning, adamant about never rolling over for a tyrannical hick of a president, see with eagle vision that sacrificing American military men to the imbecilic vanity of iniquitous old warmongers in D.C. is highly immoral, akin to colluding in murder, and not something they will put up with. What a Party! We are truly blessed. Our political system has never been healthier or more vibrant. So, sorry, this parody – excellent as it is in several respects! – is not going to fool anyone.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Note on the dirty war
LI’s readers and other spectators of this long movie should note the coordination of two events happening in America’s dirty war in Iraq. The last couple of weeks have seen the reintroduction of a push to ‘federalize’ Iraq – which is a long way to say, SCIRI wants to break off Southern Iraq and use its Badr brigade militia to create a state as autonomous as the Kurdish state, under SCIRI rule. Really, that means under the rule of Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim. This, it might seem at first glance, is counter to the Bush junta’s interests. After all, Hakim is notoriously close to Iran.
But in the dirty war, nothing is what it seems. From the start of the war, the idea of breaking off Southern Iraq and creating a neo-liberal slave state has been floated around as a project. The NYT’s group of reporter/propagandists were particularly dreamy about that prospect in 2003 and 2004, writing thumbsucker pieces about a Chalabi-headed Iraq ‘Singapore.’ To have a notorious thief in charge of territory right above Kuwait, this was an irresistible wet dream to the Bungalow Bill set. James Glanz, one of the worst reporters of the war so far, wrote a story on 2/27/05 with the grotesque title, “Iraq's Serene South Asks, Who Needs Baghdad?” Glanz, in wet dream mode, wrote:
“Several different versions of a southern Iraqi republic have been proposed. One would include only the three or four southernmost provinces -- Basra, Muthanna, Dhi Gar and Maysan; and another would stretch as far north as the holy city of Karbala, 50 miles from Baghdad.
The one that sparks the most interest here, though, is a Singapore-style Republic of Basra alone. Comparable in area to neighboring Kuwait, such a republic could be equally rich. With foreign investment, Ramzi asserted, its economy could overtake that of the tiny but sparkling Gulf emirate of Qatar within three years.”
With the saliva coming out of the corner of his mouth, Glanz conjured up a gentle, business friendly, Brown and Root friendly entity. One of the great things about Glanz as a reporter is that he is so invariably wrong that the article was a sign in itself – surely the war was coming South when a reporter as blind as Glanz couldn’t see it. And so it went, as into the trash went the gentle Singapore south, and out came the new, Taliban version South, envisioned by SCIRI.
Yet, SCIRI’s scheme has annexed the American military, who are presently campaigning to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces. Sadr is, of course, the enemy of SCIRI. He is also an advocate of Iraqi nationalism. And his party is as popular as or more popular than the proxy party of SCIRI’s.
Why would the Americans have become part of the scheme to break up Iraq and hand a considerable amount of territory to a Islamacist group? Well, the key is still the dreamy dream of Singapore. The South would, to this view, be a smaller, and much more easily dominated entity. And whatever SCIRI’s ties to Iran, they are a group very much interested in the money to be grafted off of privatizing oil resources – under one cover or another. The Dirty intentions of the Bush junta and the dirty intentions of the Badr brigades shake hands over their mutual interest in money money money. And the price is cheap – a few hundred American soldiers, white trash lives the president, and this country, could give a shit about. Being a bold Rebel in Chief, the president is willing to risk American flesh here if the price is right. It will cost him a pang – he’s not an unfeeling brute. Out there, toking up among the Crawford Ranch brush, he might think of the losses suffered by his guys and remind himself how tough he is, to take them. For their wounds are, metaphorically, his wounds. It is the third awakening, and we should count our blessings in getting a sub-messiah like our Bush, but as an even bigger man once said, you gotta take up your cross. And Bush’s cross is made of American and Iraqi bodies.
This is why it is important that Hakim has been meeting with Iraq’s vice president, Abd-al-Mahdi.
But in the dirty war, nothing is what it seems. From the start of the war, the idea of breaking off Southern Iraq and creating a neo-liberal slave state has been floated around as a project. The NYT’s group of reporter/propagandists were particularly dreamy about that prospect in 2003 and 2004, writing thumbsucker pieces about a Chalabi-headed Iraq ‘Singapore.’ To have a notorious thief in charge of territory right above Kuwait, this was an irresistible wet dream to the Bungalow Bill set. James Glanz, one of the worst reporters of the war so far, wrote a story on 2/27/05 with the grotesque title, “Iraq's Serene South Asks, Who Needs Baghdad?” Glanz, in wet dream mode, wrote:
“Several different versions of a southern Iraqi republic have been proposed. One would include only the three or four southernmost provinces -- Basra, Muthanna, Dhi Gar and Maysan; and another would stretch as far north as the holy city of Karbala, 50 miles from Baghdad.
The one that sparks the most interest here, though, is a Singapore-style Republic of Basra alone. Comparable in area to neighboring Kuwait, such a republic could be equally rich. With foreign investment, Ramzi asserted, its economy could overtake that of the tiny but sparkling Gulf emirate of Qatar within three years.”
With the saliva coming out of the corner of his mouth, Glanz conjured up a gentle, business friendly, Brown and Root friendly entity. One of the great things about Glanz as a reporter is that he is so invariably wrong that the article was a sign in itself – surely the war was coming South when a reporter as blind as Glanz couldn’t see it. And so it went, as into the trash went the gentle Singapore south, and out came the new, Taliban version South, envisioned by SCIRI.
Yet, SCIRI’s scheme has annexed the American military, who are presently campaigning to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces. Sadr is, of course, the enemy of SCIRI. He is also an advocate of Iraqi nationalism. And his party is as popular as or more popular than the proxy party of SCIRI’s.
Why would the Americans have become part of the scheme to break up Iraq and hand a considerable amount of territory to a Islamacist group? Well, the key is still the dreamy dream of Singapore. The South would, to this view, be a smaller, and much more easily dominated entity. And whatever SCIRI’s ties to Iran, they are a group very much interested in the money to be grafted off of privatizing oil resources – under one cover or another. The Dirty intentions of the Bush junta and the dirty intentions of the Badr brigades shake hands over their mutual interest in money money money. And the price is cheap – a few hundred American soldiers, white trash lives the president, and this country, could give a shit about. Being a bold Rebel in Chief, the president is willing to risk American flesh here if the price is right. It will cost him a pang – he’s not an unfeeling brute. Out there, toking up among the Crawford Ranch brush, he might think of the losses suffered by his guys and remind himself how tough he is, to take them. For their wounds are, metaphorically, his wounds. It is the third awakening, and we should count our blessings in getting a sub-messiah like our Bush, but as an even bigger man once said, you gotta take up your cross. And Bush’s cross is made of American and Iraqi bodies.
This is why it is important that Hakim has been meeting with Iraq’s vice president, Abd-al-Mahdi.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
killing a writer is easy
Anna Politkovskaya, RIP
Our criminal time has materialized itself in a vast hitman’s hand that slaps us and slaps us and slaps us. And we – we are still asleep. We’ll die asleep.
This news simply makes me sick.
From Mandelstam’s Tristia
The asphodel’s transparent
grey spring is a long way off.
Sand is rustling, really
the waves are breaking white.
But here, like Persephone, my soul
enters the sphere of no-weight
and there are no beautiful tanned
arms in the kingdom of the dead.
Why trust a boat
with a funeral urn’s weight,
and why make holidays of black roses
over amethyst water? My soul pulls there,
past Meganom’s misty cape,
where the black sail will come
from, after the funeral!
Quick black clouds run by unlit,
and under this windy moon
flocks of black roses go flying.
And, behind the cypress-stern
the bird of death and mourning-tears
drags itself,
a huge flag of memory.
And the fan of buried years
opens, rustling, toward the amulet,
where once, with a dark shuddering
it buried itself in the sand:
my soul pulls there
past Meganom’s misty cape
where the black sail will sail
from, after the funeral!
Friday, October 06, 2006
Es war einmal ein Fischer und seine Fru…
Well, LI has been on a tear this week.
1. First, we proposed that there is a dialectic in history, which can be seen in the divergence of form and substance over time – over, that is, human time. And that form goes ‘wild’ – that the form in which substance is presented can spread in unpredictable ways, capturing other seemingly unrelated issues and themes.
(When the fisherman went home to his wife in the pigsty, he told her how he had caught a great fish, and how it had told him it was an enchanted prince, and how, on hearing it speak, he had let it go again. ’Did not you ask it for anything?’ said the wife, ’we live very wretchedly here, in this nasty dirty pigsty; do go back and tell the fish we want a snug little cottage.’
The fisherman did not much like the business: however, he went to the seashore; and when he came back there the water looked all yellow and green. And he stood at the water’s edge, and said:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
Then the fish came swimming to him, and said, ’Well, what is her will? What does your wife want?’ ’Ah!’ said the fisherman, ’she says that when I had caught you, I ought to have asked you for something before I let you go; she does not like living any longer in the pigsty, and wants a snug little cottage.’ ’Go home, then,’ said the fish; ’she is in the cottage already!’ So the man went home, and saw his wife standing at the door of a nice trim little cottage. ’Come in, come in!’ said she; ’is not this much better than the filthy pigsty we had?’ )
2. Second, in the “choose a philosophy of history” game show, we chose, absurdly, Michelet over Marx – the satanic notion of playing things in reverse, which Michelet, romantically, imagines to be the essence of the witch, is for us the essence of freeing ourselves from the white magic of our times. Reversal, of course, is a big term in Hegel and Marx as well. Umschlag, the reversal of the negation caused by the negation of the negation into the positive, is one of those complex little twists Hegel throws into game. It became Marx’s favorite gesture – he was always inverting things. Like Michelet’s witch, Marx uses reversal to exorcize the white magic of the sacred – in his case, capitalism.
(The next morning when Dame Ilsabill awoke it was broad daylight, and she jogged the fisherman with her elbow, and said, ’Get up, husband, and bestir yourself, for we must be king of all the land.’ ’Wife, wife,’ said the man, ’why should we wish to be the king? I will not be king.’ ’Then I will,’ said she. ’But, wife,’ said the fisherman, ’how can you be king–the fish cannot make you a king?’ ’Husband,’ said she, ’say no more about it, but go and try! I will be king.’ So the man went away quite sorrowful to think that his wife should want to be king. This time the sea looked a dark grey colour, and was overspread with curling waves and the ridges of foam as he cried out:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’Well, what would she have now?’ said the fish. ’Alas!’ said the poor man, ’my wife wants to be king.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish; ’she is king already.’)
3. Third, we returned to the question of the anxiety betrayed by recent shabby overthrow of our rights, first as human beings (the right not to be tortured) and then, as Americans (for those who are Americans), the rights protecting us from the grossest encroachments of tyrannical executive power. A child, picking its nose and flicking its boogers, would spend more thought on what it was doing than the pack of Gadarene swine in congress spent in thinking of the consequences of destroying our constitution. In the blogosphere, there was a lot of concentration about how many Dems voted with the swine. Actually, that makes no sense to us. Of course, a certain percentage of the Dems is anti-constitutional. Yes, fuck them righteously, but please – this is a pattern from forever. Usually, civil rights stuff is passed by a coalition of the majority of the Dems and a hefty minority of the GOP. As it was in 1964, so it shall and ever will be – or so the Conventional Wisdom held. The terrible thing is not that the Democratic party holds people who wipe their asses with the constitution, the terrible thing is that the hefty minority of the GOP has evaporated. LI has dreamed of a moderate GOP coming back, somehow. But even witches know that when you poke a man with a knife and he don’t respond and he don’t seem to be a-breathin’, he’s prob’ly ghastly dead. From the San Francisco convention of 1964, nominating Goldwater, to 2006, with the crowing of the Rebel-in-Chief, there’s been a death march inside the GOP. (So the fisherman went. But when he came to the shore the wind was raging and the sea was tossed up and down in boiling waves, and the ships were in trouble, and rolled fearfully upon the tops of the billows. In the middle of the heavens there was a little piece of blue sky, but towards the south all was red, as if a dreadful storm was rising. At this sight the fisherman was dreadfully frightened, and he trembled so that his knees knocked together: but still he went down near to the shore, and said:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’What does she want now?’ said the fish. ’Ah!’ said the fisherman, ’my wife wants to be pope.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish; ’she is pope already.’)
However, we aren’t writing this thing to dwell on party politics. We are writing this thing to poke among the carrion in the battlefield, to reign curses down on the powers that be, and to cast spells.
To give LI’s gentle reader a larger picture of anxiety and desire, we quoted Silja Graupe’s analysis of the neo-classical paralogism – to achieve an economic theory centering on equilibrium, it was necessary to postulate a population moved by infinite greed. A peculiarity of theory that reflects a peculiarity of social fact. As the market becomes the site of social interaction, reversing its subordination to the social [the non-serviam of white magic], the theoretical becomes the form of the practical. Greed is no longer a moral description, or even a psychological one – it is simply a social function. It is simply how the white magic survives. Day after day of it, year after year of it, it creates changes on such a vast scale that one can’t even see them. (Then they went to bed: but Dame Ilsabill could not sleep all night for thinking what she should be next. At last, as she was dropping asleep, morning broke, and the sun rose. ’Ha!’ thought she, as she woke up and looked at it through the window, ’after all I cannot prevent the sun rising.’ At this thought she was very angry, and wakened her husband, and said, ’Husband, go to the fish and tell him I must be lord of the sun and moon.’ The fisherman was half asleep, but the thought frightened him so much that he started and fell out of bed. ’Alas, wife!’ said he, ’cannot you be easy with being pope?’ ’No,’ said she, ’I am very uneasy as long as the sun and moon rise without my leave. Go to the fish at once!’
Then the man went shivering with fear; and as he was going down to the shore a dreadful storm arose, so that the trees and the very rocks shook. And all the heavens became black with stormy clouds, and the lightnings played, and the thunders rolled; and you might have seen in the sea great black waves, swelling up like mountains with crowns of white foam upon their heads. And the fisherman crept towards the sea, and cried out, as well as he could:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’What does she want now?’ said the fish. ’Ah!’ said he, ’she wants to be lord of the sun and moon.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish, ’to your pigsty again.’
And there they live to this very day.)
Which brings us to the story of the fisherman and his ‘Fru’, which is not a tragic story at all. From a “Potte” – a pot, a pigsty – through the stages of secular and sacred power, back to the pigsty. When I was a younger man, all I would see was the servility in this story. An older man in a patchwork state, I can now read portents in it I didn’t see before. Yes, for America, that 'benign power', that new empire, that oh so wondrous enemy of all terrorism (after, of course, having won its greatest war -- WWII -- by the application of terrorism on a scale never seeen before) now wants to tell the moon and the stars how to run in their courses. But as both a younger man and an older man, I have instinctively realized that the market society makes all things comic, and the present shenanigans of our coup crewe is no exception to the rule.
1. First, we proposed that there is a dialectic in history, which can be seen in the divergence of form and substance over time – over, that is, human time. And that form goes ‘wild’ – that the form in which substance is presented can spread in unpredictable ways, capturing other seemingly unrelated issues and themes.
(When the fisherman went home to his wife in the pigsty, he told her how he had caught a great fish, and how it had told him it was an enchanted prince, and how, on hearing it speak, he had let it go again. ’Did not you ask it for anything?’ said the wife, ’we live very wretchedly here, in this nasty dirty pigsty; do go back and tell the fish we want a snug little cottage.’
The fisherman did not much like the business: however, he went to the seashore; and when he came back there the water looked all yellow and green. And he stood at the water’s edge, and said:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
Then the fish came swimming to him, and said, ’Well, what is her will? What does your wife want?’ ’Ah!’ said the fisherman, ’she says that when I had caught you, I ought to have asked you for something before I let you go; she does not like living any longer in the pigsty, and wants a snug little cottage.’ ’Go home, then,’ said the fish; ’she is in the cottage already!’ So the man went home, and saw his wife standing at the door of a nice trim little cottage. ’Come in, come in!’ said she; ’is not this much better than the filthy pigsty we had?’ )
2. Second, in the “choose a philosophy of history” game show, we chose, absurdly, Michelet over Marx – the satanic notion of playing things in reverse, which Michelet, romantically, imagines to be the essence of the witch, is for us the essence of freeing ourselves from the white magic of our times. Reversal, of course, is a big term in Hegel and Marx as well. Umschlag, the reversal of the negation caused by the negation of the negation into the positive, is one of those complex little twists Hegel throws into game. It became Marx’s favorite gesture – he was always inverting things. Like Michelet’s witch, Marx uses reversal to exorcize the white magic of the sacred – in his case, capitalism.
(The next morning when Dame Ilsabill awoke it was broad daylight, and she jogged the fisherman with her elbow, and said, ’Get up, husband, and bestir yourself, for we must be king of all the land.’ ’Wife, wife,’ said the man, ’why should we wish to be the king? I will not be king.’ ’Then I will,’ said she. ’But, wife,’ said the fisherman, ’how can you be king–the fish cannot make you a king?’ ’Husband,’ said she, ’say no more about it, but go and try! I will be king.’ So the man went away quite sorrowful to think that his wife should want to be king. This time the sea looked a dark grey colour, and was overspread with curling waves and the ridges of foam as he cried out:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’Well, what would she have now?’ said the fish. ’Alas!’ said the poor man, ’my wife wants to be king.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish; ’she is king already.’)
3. Third, we returned to the question of the anxiety betrayed by recent shabby overthrow of our rights, first as human beings (the right not to be tortured) and then, as Americans (for those who are Americans), the rights protecting us from the grossest encroachments of tyrannical executive power. A child, picking its nose and flicking its boogers, would spend more thought on what it was doing than the pack of Gadarene swine in congress spent in thinking of the consequences of destroying our constitution. In the blogosphere, there was a lot of concentration about how many Dems voted with the swine. Actually, that makes no sense to us. Of course, a certain percentage of the Dems is anti-constitutional. Yes, fuck them righteously, but please – this is a pattern from forever. Usually, civil rights stuff is passed by a coalition of the majority of the Dems and a hefty minority of the GOP. As it was in 1964, so it shall and ever will be – or so the Conventional Wisdom held. The terrible thing is not that the Democratic party holds people who wipe their asses with the constitution, the terrible thing is that the hefty minority of the GOP has evaporated. LI has dreamed of a moderate GOP coming back, somehow. But even witches know that when you poke a man with a knife and he don’t respond and he don’t seem to be a-breathin’, he’s prob’ly ghastly dead. From the San Francisco convention of 1964, nominating Goldwater, to 2006, with the crowing of the Rebel-in-Chief, there’s been a death march inside the GOP. (So the fisherman went. But when he came to the shore the wind was raging and the sea was tossed up and down in boiling waves, and the ships were in trouble, and rolled fearfully upon the tops of the billows. In the middle of the heavens there was a little piece of blue sky, but towards the south all was red, as if a dreadful storm was rising. At this sight the fisherman was dreadfully frightened, and he trembled so that his knees knocked together: but still he went down near to the shore, and said:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will,
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’What does she want now?’ said the fish. ’Ah!’ said the fisherman, ’my wife wants to be pope.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish; ’she is pope already.’)
However, we aren’t writing this thing to dwell on party politics. We are writing this thing to poke among the carrion in the battlefield, to reign curses down on the powers that be, and to cast spells.
To give LI’s gentle reader a larger picture of anxiety and desire, we quoted Silja Graupe’s analysis of the neo-classical paralogism – to achieve an economic theory centering on equilibrium, it was necessary to postulate a population moved by infinite greed. A peculiarity of theory that reflects a peculiarity of social fact. As the market becomes the site of social interaction, reversing its subordination to the social [the non-serviam of white magic], the theoretical becomes the form of the practical. Greed is no longer a moral description, or even a psychological one – it is simply a social function. It is simply how the white magic survives. Day after day of it, year after year of it, it creates changes on such a vast scale that one can’t even see them. (Then they went to bed: but Dame Ilsabill could not sleep all night for thinking what she should be next. At last, as she was dropping asleep, morning broke, and the sun rose. ’Ha!’ thought she, as she woke up and looked at it through the window, ’after all I cannot prevent the sun rising.’ At this thought she was very angry, and wakened her husband, and said, ’Husband, go to the fish and tell him I must be lord of the sun and moon.’ The fisherman was half asleep, but the thought frightened him so much that he started and fell out of bed. ’Alas, wife!’ said he, ’cannot you be easy with being pope?’ ’No,’ said she, ’I am very uneasy as long as the sun and moon rise without my leave. Go to the fish at once!’
Then the man went shivering with fear; and as he was going down to the shore a dreadful storm arose, so that the trees and the very rocks shook. And all the heavens became black with stormy clouds, and the lightnings played, and the thunders rolled; and you might have seen in the sea great black waves, swelling up like mountains with crowns of white foam upon their heads. And the fisherman crept towards the sea, and cried out, as well as he could:
’O man of the sea!
Hearken to me!
My wife Ilsabill
Will have her own will
And hath sent me to beg a boon of thee!’
’What does she want now?’ said the fish. ’Ah!’ said he, ’she wants to be lord of the sun and moon.’ ’Go home,’ said the fish, ’to your pigsty again.’
And there they live to this very day.)
Which brings us to the story of the fisherman and his ‘Fru’, which is not a tragic story at all. From a “Potte” – a pot, a pigsty – through the stages of secular and sacred power, back to the pigsty. When I was a younger man, all I would see was the servility in this story. An older man in a patchwork state, I can now read portents in it I didn’t see before. Yes, for America, that 'benign power', that new empire, that oh so wondrous enemy of all terrorism (after, of course, having won its greatest war -- WWII -- by the application of terrorism on a scale never seeen before) now wants to tell the moon and the stars how to run in their courses. But as both a younger man and an older man, I have instinctively realized that the market society makes all things comic, and the present shenanigans of our coup crewe is no exception to the rule.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
On Movies
When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did a...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...