the fun of the war

Continuing from my last post...

There is actually something else to say about Geras. Not so much to make a political point, but to make a psychological one.

Geras’ attitude, as you will remember, is that now, looking back, he can’t see that the war in Iraq he supported was supportable. On the other hand, looking back, he can’t see opposing the war, which he identifies with supporting the Ba’athist regime.

For a person active in politics, this is a rather appalling stand. After all, with or without his support, his state is engaging in a war that he thinks is wrong – or went wrong. So what kind of reason is it to not oppose that war because you identify opposition solely with supporting the Ba’athist regime?

However, stripping this idea of its political references for a second - this attitude is actually at the base of great English comedy. It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of competition. To judge that a thing is bad is a philosophical task, but in the novel of real life, we more often judge that a person is bad. We more often think, that is, about how we don’t want to be or function like X, and create a negative figure out of that moment of negative choice. Those are the figures, in essence, that we compete with. And often, the badness of the figure becomes stronger than the reasons we hold an act or a function to be bad. Out of this comes snobbery and wounded dignity. The latter emerges from the moment in which we are squeezed between the figure that represents ‘how we don’t want to be’ and something that upsets our judgment about how we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a liberal academic, or a poser, or a fan of country music, or a supporter of George Bush, etc., etc. translates into a satisfying comparison with liberal academics, posers, fans of country music, supporters of George Bush, etc. At least I am not X: This is the moral stance of the contemporary hero.

Sketching out this aspect of moral life, it points to a problem in the way sociologists mapping out our positive identifications as primary. That’s an idealistic stance. Dis-identification is just as important.

It might seem like the logical endpoint of “how we don’t want to be” is enmity. But the origin of the enemy is in combat, and there is always something mortal about enemies. You wish your enemies dead. Your enemies wish you dead. Whereas dis-identification is more about edging away from people, and the horror that it wishes to avoid most is: being surrounded by. Being surrounded by Republicans. Being surrounded by anti-war types. Being surrounded by lefties, righties, pinkos, rednecks, yahoos, jerkoffs, feminazis, dittoheads. Whatever. To be surrounded by cuts off the ability to edge away. Terrifyingly, to an outsider, one can be identified with the crowd of ‘how we don’t want to be.’

This is where English comic writers come in – where in French literature, the thousand meannesses of everyday life are treated as though they have a certain grandeur – think of Lisbeth’s revenge in Cousine Bette – since the French have a genius for enmity, in English writers, those meannesses are filtered through the comedy of wounded dignity or snobbery, since the English genius is for edging away. Dickens, of course, is the first writer who comes to mind. I have lately been reading one of E.F. Benson’s Mapp novels, about the town of Tilling, and here meanness, hypocrisy, invidious comparison and snobbery are very foundations of village life and the source of the thousand and one differences between a general mask of amiability and a sudden and brutal dislike lurking just below the surface, and most apt to emerge during a game of bridge. Tilling is a town of retirees, mostly, on limited incomes, but with high social standing. And of course it is picturesque, a tourist spot, and the perfect place to make the most of a limited income. Benson’s invention works by itself, in a way – everything follows the ridiculousness of Tilling. And Miss Mapp’s world is truly funny.

This is a typical Mapp moment:

“Miss Mapp set off with her basket to do her shopping. She carried in it the weekly books, which she would leave, with payment but not without argument, at the tradesmen's shops. There was an item for suet which she intended to resist to the last breath in her body, though her butcher would probably surrender long before that. There was an item for eggs at the dairy which she might have to pay, though it was a monstrous overcharge. She had made up her mind about the laundry, she intended to pay that bill with an icy countenance and say "Good morning for ever," or words to that effect, unless the proprietor instantly produced the--the article of clothing which had been lost in the wash (like King John's treasures), or refunded an ample sum for the replacing of it. All these quarrelsome errands were meat and drink to Miss Mapp: Tuesday morning, the day on which she paid and disputed her weekly bills, was as enjoyable as Sunday mornings when, sitting close under the pulpit, she noted the glaring inconsistencies and grammatical errors in the discourse. After the bills were paid and business was done, there was pleasure to follow, for there was a fitting-on at the dressmaker's, the fitting-on of a tea-gown, to be worn at winter-evening bridge-parties, which, unless Miss Mapp was sadly mistaken, would astound and agonize by its magnificence all who set eyes on it. She had found the description of it, as worn by Mrs. Titus W. Trout, in an American fashion paper; it was of what was described as kingfisher blue, and had lumps and wedges of lace round the edge of the skirt, and orange chiffon round the neck. As she set off with her basket full of tradesmen's books, she pictured to herself with watering mouth the fury, the jealousy, the madness of envy which it would raise in all properly-constituted breasts.”

Mapp, suitably folded, spindled and mutilated, is Geras.

The idea that, to put it bluntly, pouting is an honorable and moral political position, vis a vis a war, is very much a Tilling idea. It is consistent with the odd frivolity that hangs about some of the war’s biggest boosters. While celebrating loudly the struggle of good and evil, the battle of civilizations, and the liberation of Iraq, the details of said liberation have always been left entirely and a little blurrily to the discretion of the liberation caterers, while one noted “the glaring inconsistencies and grammatical errors” of the war’s opponents, Ba’athist supporters every one, which was of course the real fun of the thing.


PS – oh, I have to shoehorn this in here somehow. A fun fact to know and tell! This is from Murtha’s op ed piece in the WashPo, 10/13:
“Some of my Democratic colleagues questioned whether Iraq posed an immediate threat to our national security; some were not convinced that Iraq was accelerating the development of nuclear weapons and had an active chemical and biological weapons program; and almost all believed that Iraq was not involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They turned out to be right on all three counts. Nevertheless, since our forces deployed to Iraq, Democratic support for the troops has never wavered.
In the past nine months alone, $962 billion has been appropriated for the Defense Department, $190 billion for the war effort. A vast majority of Democrats voted for the funding. Democrats also identified shortfalls in body armor, armored vehicles and electronic jammers to defeat roadside bombs. Democrats uncovered problems with the military readiness of our ground forces in the United States and fought for measures to restore it. That's hardly defeatist.”

Nine months=1 trillion dollars = total insanity. As in, we live in a country that spends a trillion dollars on war in 9 months. 9 months. A trillion dollars. On war. 9 months. War. A trillion dollars. Hmm, how can I gild this giant, comet sized, planet sized, astronomical, megalo-mutant piece of shit! Which, you should note, you Americans reading this, you eat every day! If you compared this amount of shit to all the shits excreted by all the Joint Chiefs of Staffs since George Washington’s day, the budget piece of shit is still 10 to the power of 10 feces higher than their shits. That is enough shit to reach to the nearest planet outside our solar system that whirls around the star, XXXBEINART1.

norman geras puts his fingers in his ears and goes na na na na na

Back in the heady days after the purple revolution, when every belligeranti worth his salt had dyed his own forefinger purple in solidarity, there was an article in the Sunday Times of London (2/6/05) entitled “Stormin' Marxist is toast of the neocons”.

It began like this:

“AN OBSCURE Marxist professor who has spent his entire academic life in Manchester has become the darling of the Washington right wing for his outspoken support of the war in Iraq.

Despite his leanings Norman Geras, who writes a blog diary on the internet, has praised President George WBush and says the invasion of Iraq was necessary to oust the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein.

His daily jottings have brought him the nickname of "Stormin' Norm" from the title of his diary, Normblog. The Wall Street Journal has reprinted one of his articles in its online edition and American pundits often cite his words.
…
Most mornings Geras, 61, the author of such obscure books as Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, sits in the upstairs study of his Edwardian semi in Manchester to type his latest entry.

Last week he gave thanks to Bush, quoting an Iraqi who wants to build a statue to the American president as "the symbol of freedom".

He also lambasted "all those conflicted folk who would like to remain true to their values and be pleased about the Iraqi election, but don't want George Bush to be able to take any credit for it". He picked Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent newspaper, for special mention.”

Ah, credit. The other side of credit is, I believe, blame. Times have gotten tough for the pro-war side, due to the terrorist coddling media reporting only the bad news from Iraq. The statue of Bush has, sadly, been put on hold. And what a symbol it would have been! Something for all Iraqis to see. Their liberator, their hero, the man who has cared enough for them that he even extended the blessing of the flat tax to them – making a thousand flowers bloom. Poems about the Rebel in Chief, on the model of Pushkin’s the Bronze Horseman, could be written. He’s like Lawrence of Arabia, but more butch.

Geras is quoted in the Stormin’ Norm article saying:

"Everybody and his brother has had a go at me. But I started the blog because I was fed up with the prevailing left and liberal consensus that the war in Iraq was wrong.

"If those people who marched against the war had been successful they would have prolonged a brutal regime responsible for 300,000 deaths. They could have chosen not to support the war, but they chose to oppose it.”

The rather mystifying suggestion that we in the West live in such authoritarian regimes that our choice is to either support the war or exist in interior exile, pretty much allowing the powers that be to exercise their will without restraint or opposition, has now become Geras’ own position. This weekend he withdrew his support for the war – and presumably is no longer going to contribute to that statue of George Bush:

“Still, there have been too many deaths; there has been too much other suffering. It has lately become clear to me - and this predates publication of the second Lancet report - that, whatever should now happen in Iraq, the war that I've supported has failed according to one benchmark of which I'm in a position to be completely certain.

That is, had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed and the numbers now daily dying, with the country (more than three years down the line) on the very threshold of civil war if not already across that threshold, I would not have felt able to support the war and I would not have supported it. Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside.”

The interior exile position is a little strange. What I guess this means is that, three years ago, he would have stuck his fingers in his ears and sung na na na na na instead of supporting or opposing the invasion. And he would have kept his fingers in his ears for the duration.

Who knows? LI thinks that might well have been the right course for Geras, but for those who opposed the invasion and opposed Saddam the Meatman, it just won’t do. In actuality, American interest and a certain justice would have been better served by dropping, after 9/11, the double cordon sanitaire around Iraq and Iran. American interest, served by waging a war in Afghanistan that did not have a forty year goal, but a two year one (breaking with the liberal "nationbuilding" idea, that imperialism of good intentions - this time, we aren't here to plunder but to help you become just like Californians!) plus a thaw on relations with Iran, would have provided a framework in which America could actually lower its profile in the Middle East to accord with its real influence in the Middle East. American hegemony was bound to take a hit after the end of the Cold War. The question about Saddam wasn’t if he was going to fall, but when, as the belligeranti in their cups sometimes like to point out – Hitchens being a great one for the idea that, save the invasion, the failed state would have spiraled into something horrible. Like, uh, I don’t know, a state in which it is an everyday occurrence for militia from the Ministry of the Interior to use drills in torturing and killing ordinary Iraqis. Something like that.

The belligeranti served one purpose only in 2002 – to throw up a smokescreen. We aren’t going to revisit the numerous posts we made at the time, pointing out that their arguments were for a war that wasn’t ever going to be waged. Geras’ na na na na na option is clueless, but at least it is a start. However, those who oppose the war and oppose the occupation should certainly not be mislead into following that option. The current D.C. fantasy of splitting Iraq into tasty bits so that we can bed down with our buddy Shiites in the South and those great Kurds in the north is not only not going to work, but will, very obviously, lead to the worst case scenario of continuing, high levels of conflict in Iraq driven by American interest. Although splitting up Iraq has been the favored rightwing Israeli fantasy since the war began, the SCIRI state it has now become U.S. policy to kill Iraqis for will work out even worse for our proud little buddy in the Middle East – a Shiite, hezbollah lovin’ state in South Iraq is not going to be the Chalabi-land of Richard Perle’s erotic dreams. Israel truly is on the verge – if it continues to follow every Perle-ish dream for regional domination, it is signing its own death warrant.

Now – back to building that statue of the Liberator. Let’s paint it a blood red, shall we?

the crow

In Naude’s book, The history of magick, he writes:

“There is a story that among many birds that came not neer the Temple of Minerva, the Goddesse of Sciences and Reason, the Crows durst not take their flight about it., much less light upon it. If it be lawfull to give it any other sense than the literall, I think the most probable were this: that that bird, so considerable in the superstitious Augury of the Ancients… being the true Hieroglyphick of those who search after things to come, it is to teach us, that all those who are over-inquisitive in such things, together with the Authours and Observers of I know not what chimericall and fabulous prophecies… should be eternally excluded the Temple of Minerva, that is, the conversation of learned and prudent men.”

Learned and prudent men! Yesteryear’s op ed men, the pundits of the ages, the Delphic codgers, the many weary generations of David Broders, down through the epochs! The ones who condemned Socrates to death, but would have preferred exile for the troublemaking old snake. (and an independent party in Athens composed of moderates from both sides). Indeed, between the crow and the owl there is an enmity set. LI has been comparing ourselves to a crow, lately – actually feel crow like, inclined to raucous cawing, dire views, and the smell of carrion, wake up all beaky and shit, shedding black feathers – and now we see the hieroglyphical reasons. You think we weave our metaphors out of tv ads or the images in Thomas Friedmen’s books or something? Fuck that! Naude also says that crow wisdom is barren witch wisdom, “the fantasicall predictions of certain Figure-flingers, and the Cunning-women…”

I like that. I feel as puffed up as a crow looking in a mirror…

hands off ed rosenthal

I recognize that all of the truly addictive/dangerous drugs that are in common use--like alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, barbiturates, amphetamines, and opiates-- can and do cause large amounts of personal and family suffering and social harm.However, experience teaches us that criminalizing the adult use of such drugs generally does nothing but make the situation worse. For example, we already tried prohibition with alcohol, and that "Noble Experiment" caused our grandparents and great-grandparents many of the same sorts of problems that our current "drug war" is causing for us.

Most experts agree that our society needs to move toward a treatment/medical/education model to deal with addictive/dangerous drug use-- and to move away from the criminal justice model. I know that many people in law enforcement are very discouraged and troubled because society is asking them to fight a war that is not really winnable in the criminal justice system, and that is causing a huge drain on our social resources. - Justice Larry V. Starcher of the West Virginia Supreme Court, State v. Poling (2000) 531 S.E.2d 678


It is a small step, decriminalizing medical marijuana. LI stands for the chemical autonomy of the human being, which means that the government cannot prevent you from buying, selling or using marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, heroine, methamphetamines, crack or any other substance, the jackbooted thugs.

The war on drugs seems like a small thing, but actually it was a huge opening, created by the American government, to stealthily destroy your rights. It has done a crackerjack job. In California, poor Ed Rosenthal is again being prosecuted by Federal terrorists, otherwise known as the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The drug war won’t end until the DEA is destroyed. Also, LI would like to see the restitution of the property of drug dealers from the government, which must, by this time, amount to billions of dollars.

Of course, my readers may cry: this is obvious. Of course we will only vote for that Presidential candidate who promises to reimburse drug dealers, let them out of jail along with all inmates convicted of drug possession, and in general set up regulations for drug sales that imitate those for legal drugs now, i.e. cigarettes and alcohol.

I’m waiting for that voice of liberty to make its appearance.

Hands off Ed Rosenthal. Arrest, instead, William Bennett.

goodbye to my boogie liberalism

LI started out as a standard issue lefty, but somewhere along the way we realized that we were really a postwar, bourgeois liberal. Unfortunately, there is no father of postwar bourgeois liberalism, and this has made it easier, in these dark times of white magic, to forget what it was about in the first place. So today, if someone presents a liberal vs. conservative dialogue, or a liberal vs. libertarian one, they are apt to base it on something like: government vs. the private sphere.

This is so sad. The versus is so bogus. The b. liberal insight was, is, to dispute the compartmentalization of public/private in this way in the first place. In other words, the theoretical distinction between private enterprise, which works within the free market, and government simply is not the two oppose each other, or that we need fundamentally different models to talk about the two. There's a hoary old fable, retold with chuckles by your Republican uncle, about how if somehow, sonny, ever'body had an equal share of things, why, gracious, you know in a week or a year somebody would have more and somebody less. Knees are slapped, beer is drunk, and the great point is made: which is egalitarianism discounts other social factors. Well, the same is true for the conservative and libertarian myth that the government exists in a different compartment than the private sector, or that the market in commodities is oh so much different than the market in power. Democracy is, in fact, all about the interdependence and interpenetration of private and public power. Legislation is a biddable service. This isn't a pejorative description - it is simply the inevitable result of democratic governance and a profit driven market system. To creat a real compartmentalization between the two would require destroying democracy - but even then, that would, in turn, lead inevitably to the well known path of rent seeking. There is a reason that the Marxists thought capitalism leads to fascism -- in fact, without any other factors getting in the way, it does, as the owning class seeks to seal off other bidders in the power market. But fascism then saps capitalism, as power players become market makers in the 'private' sphere.

While this sounds theoretical, it is actually quite practical. Take the conservative fixation on flat taxes. Now, in reality, flat taxes are logically equivalent to freezing wages and prices. Sometimes such freezes work, but the time is limited. Eventually, as we all know, such freezes generate black markets. In the same way, the flat tax creates a perverse market in tax breaks. Simply put, much of the purpose of government is to supplement private power in one way or another, and one of the great ways of doing this is to take costs off business by the seemingly neutral method of giving businesses tax breaks. In reality, this fastens higher costs on some third party -- which is why it is great. After all, businesses compete, and they use the auction system of democracy to compete as well. Thus, they bid for legislators who then ceaselessly find ways to lower the costs of business. The flat tax would simply hide the regressive movement in the tax system -- and it would aggravate it insofar as that regressive movement is a constant, and can only be countered by occassional progressive gestures.

Liberalism's postwar triumph was not to use the government more, but to enroll the government, ocassionally, on the side of labor, on the side of oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, on the side of women, etc. However, the main business of government even during the heyday of liberalism was always to curry to the rich. Conservatives have so succeeded in creating a wholly false image of government -- as some sort of friend of the poor and the working man -- that rightwingers themselves are surprised that every time they get in power, the size of government balloons. There's nothing surprising in this - the predominance of conservatives means a shift in power to the wealthy, who have one loyalty only : to get wealthier. Government spending has always been the path to that. No surprise that after the stock market shock of 2001-2, in which trillions were lost by companies and investors, that the government ruled by and for companies and investors went into the red like nobody had ever seen before.

So much of the talk about what is liberal and what is conservative, nowadays, is complete nonsense. The scale of government (lets shrink the government!) or the public vs. private argument are as bogus as so many wooden nickles. The question is always about who is using the state.

And such is democracy. There aren't, by the way, any neutral positions here.

So: I thought I'd write this out as a mark, a little sign, like the kidnap victim leaves for the trackers. All of this is eminently rational, but we have been saying goodbye to all that. Since LI was visited with the vision of the war culture, since we saw that the state is subordinate to war, to the secret system, to the world structure of it, we can't really make this cohere with our boogie liberalism. In fact, the Martian system is sheer lunacy, and I am convinced that it rules us with an iron hand. Which sort of makes me -- feel like turning to Satanic historiography.

pamuk and me

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.

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?