coriolan - polemos vs. polis

Cavell is a pretty fine reader of Shakespeare, and he tosses out some great bon mots in his discussion of the plays. For instance, this, which begins the essay on The Winter’s Tale in the lectures, In quest of the ordinary. Cavell is giving a philosophical defense of romanticism, and he moves from considering a poem by Wordsworth to the play:

Apart form any more general indebtedness of the romantics to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale is particularly apt in relation to the romatic themses I have emphasized of reawakening or revival, beginning with the figure of the six year old boy of Wordsworth’s Intimatins Ode and the ode’s idea of the adult’s world as “remains”, as of corpses. In my precedeing lecture I associate this figure, especially in view of his difficulties over remembering, with Freud’s report of a phobia in a five year old boy, partly simply to commemorate Freud’s acknowledgement that he was preceded in his perceptions by the poets, more specifically because of Freud’s consequent perception, in this case, of adult human life struggling toward happiness from within its own ‘debris’.

That last sentence tells me so much about psychoanalysis that … it puts the fear of God in me. As in, where to start?

So I quite respect Cavell’s decision not to give a political reading of Coriolanus, but a psychoanalytic one. In his view, there is a core of baffled narcissism at the heart of Coriolanus. To make that view work, he takes Coriolanus’ relationship to his mother as central to the play, and the images of “feeding upon oneself” and other metaphors of cannibalism as the metaphoric of a narcissistic meltdown, essentially determining Coriolanus’ failure. Yet I think that there is a false distinction at work, here, separating the two domains, as though the self and the family could be walled off from the dynamics of the polis and, to my mind most particularly, polemos.

So, I’m going to leave that as something to return to – and no doubt I will forget it.

I want to look at Coriolanus in terms of war, politics and exile. It is striking to me how much more ‘likeable’ Coriolanus is in the scene in which he actually bids farewell to Rome – his speeches remind me very much of another battle hardened man taking grief in stride: the Earl of Kent. When Kent, over Gloucester’s objections, is put in the stocks, this is what he says:

“Glou. I am sorry for thee, friend. 'Tis the Duke's pleasure,
Whose disposition, all the world well knows,
Will not be rubb'd nor stopp'd. I'll entreat for thee.
Kent. Pray do not, sir. I have watch'd and travell'd hard.
Some time I shall sleep out, the rest I'll whistle.
A good man's fortune may grow out at heels.
Give you good morrow!
Glou. The Duke 's to blame in this; 'twill be ill taken.
Exit.”

This is very like Coriolanus at the gates of Rome.

“My (sometime) Generall,
I haue seene the Sterne, and thou hast oft beheld
Heart-hardning spectacles. Tell these sad women,
Tis fond to waile ineuitable strokes,
As 'tis to laugh at 'em.”

What hangs over him at this point – what hangs over the play itself – is a double act of banishment. Coriolanus has been banished from Rome – but he himself has “banished’ Rome, in an act that, to my mind, raises up all kinds of questions the relationship between war and the city:

“Corio. You common cry of Curs, whose breath I hate,
As reeke a'th' rotten Fennes: whose Loues I prize,
As the dead Carkasses of vnburied men,
That do corrupt my Ayre: I banish you,
And heere remaine with your vncertaintie.
Let euery feeble Rumor shake your hearts:
Your Enemies, with nodding of their Plumes
Fan you into dispaire: Haue the power still
To banish your Defenders, till at length
Your ignorance (which findes not till it feeles,
Making but reseruation of your selues,
Still your owne Foes) deliuer you
As most abated Captiues, to some Nation
That wonne you without blowes, despising
For you the City. Thus I turne my backe;
There is a world elsewhere.”

Well, I’ll take this up tomorrow if I can. These are hasty days, as I finish up my affairs before taking my big trip. There is a world elsewhere.

coriolanus

First, some LI stuff. LI is comin’ to NYC – due to the generosity of our far flung correspondent, Mr. T. – next week. And we are thinking of having a happy hour reception for our own self next Monday – which is Dec. 4th, I think - at either Sophie's (5th Street between Aves A and B) or 7B (corner of 7th St and Ave B). But we would like to know if any Gotham LI readers are interested in this, or if you all think that sounds infinitely tedious, the downing of the dominoes in that gray hour when the ball has lost its coherence, and the guests have drifted off to private parties, bearbaiting or bed. Anyway, write me at rgathman@netzero.net to tell me if you think this is a good idea. If I get some responses (and please, tell me which bar you think it should be), I’ll pick one of them and a time and inform you in an upcoming post. Oh, and of course, there will be an animated discussion of the Zizekian sublime and last year’s American idol finale…

Ho ho ho. I’m joking. I’M JOKING!

Okay, second. On to… Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is the most unloveable of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and he casts an eagle’s cold shadow over the play. In the 30s, the play came in for a lot of attention from the likes of people like Wyndham Lewis, since there seemed to be such obvious hookups between Coriolanus and fascism – in an era when fascism still designated a tight bundle of material characteristics, instead of now, when fascism designates a loose set of unpleasant psychological attitudes. Among the material characteristics for English writers (not only Lewis, but, for example, Shaw) was the idea that politics ultimately boiled down to leadership.

However, Coriolanus acted, even then, as a counter-case to the cult of leadership – even if it did not lead one to a possible politics of non-leadership. Now, LI is obviously obsessed at the moment with the state, war, and the treadmill of production, and just as the jealous man sees the world in green and the man on the blue guitar sees the world in blue, LI sees the system of commodified violence, the epoch beginning with the mass death initiated in 1492, reaching its extreme limit in the death of the ocean and the theft of the atmosphere, those approaching norms of planetary mortality, in every raindrop that falls – so we are certainly going to import our obsessions into a play that seems to invite them.

We’ve been reading the play in conjunction with North’s translation of Plutarch’s life, and with Stanley Cavell’s essay, who does the wolf love? While Coriolanus might seem – fuck it, is – a bit of an illogical jump from our previous thread about Lenin and the percipient/agent dialectic, what can we say? LI has as little talent for staying on topic as a Mexican jumping bean. But one of the great things about obsession is that you don’t have to worry to much about staying on topic – you will inevitably find your way back to the topics of your particular cancer. You will inevitably bump against the shore you are seeking, which will, unexpectedly, appear in Shakespeare, or a news story, or a burst of static on the radio. This is a good thing, until it becomes a very bad thing.

So LI is going to do a post or two about Coriolanus. Here, let’s remind my readers of the plot and context of the thing. The events in the play are set at the beginning of the Roman Republic. The plebians have rebelled against the debt they have been forced into in order to feed themselves, and which they are desperately repaying by selling themselves and their families into bondage. The oligarchs, of course, then as now, are on the lender’s side. The rebellion finds expression in a threat to migrate from Rome, and the plebes even settle on a hill near Rome. They are persuaded to come back by an embassy from the oligarchs headed by Menenius, depicted by Shakespeare as one of those grand old pols: a drinker, close to the oligarch families but able to understand, if not approve, of the plebe culture. Think of a machine Democrat – or even one of the Longs. Earl Long, for instance. Menenius tells the plebes the ‘parable of the belly’ – which is basically the same in North’s Plutarch and in Shakespeare – and – as much by his willingness to talk to them at their own level as by the parable itself – wins them back to Rome. At this opportune time, the Volsces threaten the Roman state. Caius Martius (aka Coriolanus), who has been the most intransigent opponent of the plebes, and especially indignant at the creation of plebian offices, like the tribunes of the people, joins the Roman army and performs such heroic feats against the Volsces that he almost personally drives them back. According Coriolanus is heavily favored to become consul. However, in order to take that office, he must gain the voice of the people through the ritual forms – and in the process, Coriolanus shows himself so scornful of the people and the forms that he incites the popular will against him and is exiled from Rome. In exile, he joins the Volsces to get revenge on his native city – only to be greeted, at the gates, by his mother, who begs him to spare Rome. Coriolanus bows to his mother’s will, betrays the Volsces, and suffers for that betrayal.

Now, one interesting note about the above described plot. In Plutarch, the revolt of the plebes is described like this: “… it fortuned that there grew sedition in the city, because the Senate did favour the rich against the people, who did complain of the sore oppression of usurers, of whom they borrowed money. For those that had little, yet were spoiled of that little they had by their creditors, for lack of ability to pay the usury: who offered their goods to be sold to them that would give most. And such as had nothing left, their bodies were laid hold on, and they were made their bondmen, notwithstanding all the wounds and cuts they shewed, which they had received in many battles, fighting for defence of their country and commonwealth: of the which, the last war they made was against the Sabines, wherein they fought upon the promise the rich men had med them that from thenceforth they would intreat them more gently…” In a brilliant bit of the negation of the negation, Shakespeare inverts this (o black magic moment, that hath such monsters in it!) and makes it Coriolanus who has to show his wounds to the people in order to get their voice – a ritual he is unwilling, in the end, to go through with. So the people never really see his wounds – he is a wound tease – although the people (in the audience) have witnessed the getting of them. It is part of the unloveliness of Coriolanus that his attack on the people extents to an attack on the audience, of which it is a safe bet that 99 percent will not possess the bloodlines such as a Coriolanus would respect. Talk about putting a shark filled moat around identifying with the hero...

let a thousand pundits pout - Max Boot

The pack of pundits, LI has noted, has generally been pouting about the war they so ardently helped blow into life three years ago. When the American populace goes off the reservation, as they did in 1998 when they refused to knock the president off for his office quickie, the pundits do this. Centrists of mammon, shills of the war culture, the pundits generally consider that they have backdoor privileges on the American psyche, which shuns extremes and loves reforms and finds its true voice in the arthritic angers of the various wattled turkeys that end up on news talk shows, endlessly retreading cliches. This is what the American people love. Strong on defense. Oh how they love defense. And reform, too. Oh how they love reforms. Plus they love spreading democracy. Gots to spread that democracy. The last time the American populace failed their pundit spokesman, in 1998, the turkeys spead their wings. They got angry. It was the death of outrage and the slouching towards Gomorrah.

Is it time for that again? The neo-cons, after covering reams of paper with bullshit paens to the City on the Hill, are radically revising their view of American history downward, or so at least seems to be the distinct undercurrent. It broke cover in Max Boot’s column in the LA Times this Sunday, which is full of pop gun anger usually to be directed against, say, the French:
“MANY AMERICANS have been wondering why so many Iraqis are willing to fight for militias and terrorist groups but not for the American-backed government. Look at it from their perspective. Would you stake your life on a regime whose existence depends on Washington's continuing support? Given our long, shameful record of leaving allies in the lurch, that has never seemed to be a smart bet.”

“Long, shameful record”??? Whatever happened to the benign empire? How quickly we’ve fallen from the cynosure of history to the dunce. But, besides the usual grumblings of a discredited faction, the interesting thing about Boot’s column is how thoroughly it ventilates what one could call the state of the art in American thinking. That is, non-thinking.

Here’s the theme. Since the war against the Barbary pirates, the U.S. has promiscuously picked up and discarded allies. Shocking, eh?

“We have been betraying friends since our first overseas conflict, against the Barbary pirates who captured ships off the African coast and enslaved their crews. To defeat the pasha of Tripoli, the U.S. made common cause with his brother, Hamet Karamanli. In 1804, American envoy William Eaton led a motley force of mercenaries and Marines across North Africa to install Karamanli on the throne. The offensive was called off prematurely when President Jefferson's envoy reached a deal with the pasha to free his American captives in return for $60,000. Karamanli was evacuated to the U.S., but his family members were left as hostages. Eaton raged: "Our too credulous ally is sacrificed to a policy, at the recollection of which, honor recoils, and humanity bleeds." “

Now, let’s grant for a second the premise here. Actually, it is eminently grant-able – since the U.S. is simply operating as all nations have operated since the beginning of the nation state. What is interesting, here, is that this history should certainly have applied three years ago as well as now. In other words, when Boot was advocating swarming into Iraq back in 2003, he should have know that “we have been betraying friends since our first overseas conflict…” So, this should have effected his thinking re said attack. You go to war with the history that you have, not the history you pull out of your ass – as per Donald Rumsfeld. Meaning…

Meaning that any conflict labors under a time constraint. The constraint runs something like this: American wars have certain broadly agreed upon goals – and then some of them have less broadly agreed on goals. The agreed upon goal in the war against the Barbary pirates was to free the American captives – not to overturn piracy. The war in Iraq was about overthrowing Saddam Hussein – not about making good Chamber of Commerce Republicans out of the sheiks of Ramadi.

Say, however, you want to piggyback your war on the war that the Americans are fighting – which is the essence and body of the neo-con deal. That means you have to fight the war right – in other words, no drift, no aimless strategizing, no fiasco. Given this goal, the neo-cons should have been the most radical critics of the pursuit of the occupation from April, 2003, onward. In fact, they became a chorus line of approval for every dumb and dumber move made by the administration in Iraq. A chorus line of zombies.

And now they are suddenly aware that the time is running out???

Which gets us back to the state of the art of American thinking, circa this year of our lord, 2006. The characteristic that strikes the unbiased observer is an astonishing inability to put puzzle pieces together to form a coherent image. Rather, like monkeys at a jigsaw puzzle, our pundits continually put together a botch and call it a picture. Small people, misused forums, lightless imaginations, failures on the ever upward track – that is what American thinking, at the moment, consists of.

please send me a note

Oddness. LI got up this morning, went to this site, and confronted a picture in the middle of the post we put up yesterday that we did not put there. Worse, it destroyed the post. The security of my blog has never been an issue with me, or even a thought in my head. However, the person who inserted that photo should send me an email and tell me how and why you did it, please.

i can only slake my desire for infinite revenge with an infinitely deep lake of blood

“Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I'm not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property”

Public Image
- John Lydon

In 2004, LI compared what was happening in Iraq to a chess game. This was a radically simplifying image, meant only to highlight the fact that, a., “American strategy” was not the salient factor, by that time, in Iraq’s affairs in spite of the myopic depictions of the American newspapers; and b., there would be no deus ex machina, no special suspension of the laws of causality, for the Americans. Whenever the governing class confronts one of those crises that results from a combination of erroneous assumptions and its own deepseated corruption, it immediately begins to evoke a suspension of the laws of causality, along the lines of “… but if Iraq improves in the next three months,” etc.Behind the cloud that is supposed to hide cause and effect, the elites scramble to put in place the usual deals and violence. But of course, in 2003 the elites, to even manage the affair of plunging the U.S. into an unprovoked, aggressive war, had already bet that the violence would be so easy – that a major war could be waged with the resources of limited war, with the surplus cost going, of course, to a network of seedy mercenaries of all kind, an immense machine dedicated to hiring politicos and producing goods and services that were as expensive as they were unnecessary. Of course, you can’t wage a major war as though it were a limited war – which LI pointed out in 2002-2003 in increasingly hysterical tones, like a mockingbird with an adenoid problem. But even LI, at that time, couldn’t imagine how fucked up the U.S. effort was going to be.

Well, as John Lydon said, “You never listen to a word that I said…” Me, plus how many million worldwide, out in the streets protesting, and given the kind of rush one usually reserves for a prophylactic salesman’s phone call at dinnertime. Fuck off wasn’t in it – this was a truly historic silence, an indication of the absolute decay of democracy world wide – a silence compared to which the Czar’s soldier’s trampling down and shooting the crowd petitioning the Winter Palace in 1905 was actually more democratic, more responsive. Poof, the crowds went. Poof, the protest went. Poof, the protest went about the occupation. Oh, we all went poof, we were all so so so fucked. But we ate, we shat, we fucked, and we watched other crowds get it in the neck, in the groin, get the dental drill, the black hood, the drone bombardment, the white phosphorus.

Anyway, the chess metaphor served to point out some facts, but the problem with chess is, of course, that the ritual sequencing of moves, the waiting while one’s opponent makes his move, organizes the game tidily away from reality, where the moves are made by millions, all at once, on countless number of boards, according to an inferno of rules. So, while LI has pressed for one thing since the invasion – unilateral, immediate American withdrawal - and we still believe in pressing for that, we aren’t insane. Nobody hears, and nobody certainly is going to give this result in the American system. We will be in Iraq, in all probability, until 2008 and beyond. The way to get out of Iraq, from the American side, is to press in every way, from discouraging recruitment to demoralizing the war effort to pressing congress. Unfortunately, when the Peace movement went poof, it disheartened those who would organize the stabbing in the back of the American military effort – and the anti-war effort has since been mainly directed by those who abjure the whole stabbing in the back thing in order to remain, uh, politically viable. Yeah, right. Well, we are ardently pro-stab, and hope that the demoralization of the American will – that vaunted tool of the para psychos in DC – will lead to massive, permanent cuts in American military expenditure and a radically revampted foreign policy that no longer relies on military threat, period.

However, there is what you want and there is reality. The one thing a small blog can do is work to promote the decomposition of the American will, and particularly the illusion, which is still prevalent, that the Americans are over there to prevent a bloodbath – which illusion was, in the Vietnam war, beginning to crack under the strain of too much reality by 1967. Still, it is a perennial American misconception. It is like thinking a man purchases an elephant gun to protect elephants.

However, as it is likely the America Will is not going to respond to LI’s flea circus, we have another goal we want to promote, even though it is in contradiction to the goal of withdrawal. This is simply to call for unconditional negotiations between all parties in Iraq – the Americans, Al Qaeda, the Badr Brigade, etc. – simply in order to establish a basic level of self-policing and a significant diminishment of attacks. On the table should be the ridding of the criminal gangs that have attached themselves to all factions (including the Americans – we have heard too much about the private military services to not think they’ve engaged in murder and robbery). Does such a suggestion have a snowball’s chance in Cheney’s undisclosed underground location?

I don't know.

win win in iraq - can't you just taste the slaughter?

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit
                thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye
                defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination


LI doesn’t have the equipment to respond to the news from Baghdad. The evil done yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, going all the way back to the invasion, the massive links in that chain forged by criminals in Washington – and the mediate links through all of the criminals, literally, on the streets of Baghdad – and the inevitable tit for tat braiding of all Iraqi blood for blood – the incredibly stupid sudden grab for Sadr in 2004, balanced and exceeded by the razing of Fallujah in 2004, while the zombie American war crowd howled, like the dead in the Odyssey, blind bats attracted to blood sacrifices, the sportifs getting hardons from the purple revolution - exhausts the pittance of my empathy and imagination, which is contained in only so much nerve and neuron, insufficient collective tissue to curse and moan, to beg God above to rain down fire and brimstone on this dangerous, disgusting country of ADD aggression. No God, though, and no matches. Not really much to that, in the end, surely? Fuckin’ pitiful. Truly a cunt prophet, LI, not even one of Nobodaddy’s emissaries, but doing my utmost to imitate, in prose, the projectile vomiting of my indignation.

So, track some blood in the house. The slaughter in Sadr City, yesterday, which the American forces, striving to achieve the bogus objective of pleasing the diseased vanity of our Rebel in Chief, were helpless to contain or prevent, is the dark cloud in the Iraq picture – but hark, a little brightness for the war gamer crowd – a pitched battle! This should make the sucklings of the War industry, all those gamer belligerents, hard:

“American soldiers fought such units in a pitched battle last week in Turki, a village 25 miles south of this Iraqi Army base in volatile Diyala Province, bordering Iran. At least 72 insurgents and two American officers were killed in more than 40 hours of fighting. American commanders said they called in 12 hours of airstrikes while soldiers shot their way through a reed-strewn network of canals in extremely close combat.”

Yes, this is the family friendly movie of combat, and what Americans do best – or at least, since they spend 500 billion per year on this kind of scenario, the only thing the American military really knows how to do.

There was a story last year (December 18, 2005) in the Boston Globe Vietnam and Victory, by Matt Steinglass about the brand new brand new thinking of the Rumsfeldian military, sniffing, in the Iraq situation, the smell of victory – and as we all know, the Bushies are all about accomplishing missions, leading to victories, leading to wearing butch clothing and an all around distribution of medals and defense contracts.

Here’s a bit of it:

“SUPPORTERS OF the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have often argued that it has little in common with the Vietnam War. But judging by President Bush's new "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," unveiled Nov. 30 and promoted in a series of recent speeches, the administration itself may have started to see some parallels. The document envisions a three-pronged security strategy for fighting the Iraqi insurgency: "Clear, Hold, and Build." It is no accident that this phrase evokes the "clear and hold" counterinsurgency strategy pursued by the American military in the final years of the Vietnam War. For months, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius and The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan have reported, influential military strategists inside and outside the Pentagon have been pushing to resurrect "clear and hold" in Iraq, claiming that the US effort to suppress the Viet Cong was actually a success.
The argument that "clear and hold" vanquished the Viet Cong is made most forcefully in "A Better War," the 1999 book by Vietnam veteran and former Army strategy analyst Lewis Sorley. The book focuses on General Creighton Abrams, who replaced General William Westmoreland as supreme commander in Vietnam in 1968 and moved from Westmoreland's discredited strategy of seeking out and killing enemy soldiers ("search and destroy") to one of controlling and defending patches of territory and population ("clear and hold"). In Sorley's telling, this new approach, combined with the severe losses the Viet Cong suffered during the 1968 Tet Offensive, virtually wiped out the insurgency. By late 1970, Sorley writes, "the war was won." Sorley's book has reportedly been widely read this year by US military strategists, including the commander of US forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid. Its influence can also be seen in a key article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs by military analyst Andrew Krepinevich Jr., himself a Vietnam War historian, which called for adopting a "clear and hold" approach. But the idea that the strategy that beat the Viet Cong could work in Iraq elides a fundamental question: Did "clear and hold" actually beat the Viet Cong? For most historians of the war, not to mention for those who fought on the winning side, the answer is no. And the lessons for Iraq are far from clear. . . . "The Sorley analysis is wrong," writes David Elliott, author of the exhaustive and widely lauded "The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-75." "For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would think [clear and hold] was a success in Vietnam," writes William Turley, author of "The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975." "Lewis Sorley is completely wrong," concurred retired General Le Ngoc Hien in a recent interview. As deputy chief of staff for operations in the North Vietnamese Army, Hien was responsible for compiling the overall military strategies for both the army and the Viet Cong. The argument is not about whether the Viet Cong suffered severe losses between 1968 and 1972; everyone acknowledges that it did. Hien agrees with Sorley that "major mistakes" were made in planning the Tet Offensive, including expecting pro-Communist uprisings by the urban populations in cities the Viet Cong seized (they never happened), and trying to hold on to the cities against overwhelming US and South Vietnamese counterattacks. More importantly, in 1969 and '70, the Viet Cong lost control over huge swathes of countryside and population. The Viet Cong, Hien acknowledges, found it impossible to locally recruit new guerrillas to replace those decimated in '68; tens of thousands of regular soldiers had to be sent down from the North to fill out Viet Cong units.
The debate, then, is over the reasons for the Viet Cong's reversals-and their significance. Sorley claims the tide was turned by Abrams's use of smaller American units working in close concert with South Vietnamese Army and Civil Guard troops at the village level, and by the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development (CORDS) program, which targeted economic aid to government- controlled villages in a campaign to win the locals' "hearts and minds." Elliott disagrees. He thinks Viet Cong setbacks resulted from a much simpler and more brutal tactic: The US and the South Vietnamese Army emptied Communist-controlled areas of people. "Only the 'clear' part [of 'clear and hold'] was a success," according to Elliott. In terms of controlling the population, the key was "indiscriminate bombing and artillery shelling which led to rural depopulation." Elliott's book is largely based on 400 interviews with Viet Cong defectors, some of which Elliott himself collected as a Rand Corporation researcher in South Vietnam during the war. Interviewees speak of villages hit by 300 or more mortar shells a day, of tiny hamlets with dozens of civilians killed by artillery and bombs. In one six-month operation in 1969, the US 9th Division came up with a body count of over 10,000 "enemy" dead, but only 751 weapons, suggesting huge civilian casualties.
"People hated the Americans," Elliott quotes one defector saying-a far cry from "winning hearts and minds." In sum, where Sorley paints a picture of in-depth village-level deployments between cooperating American and Vietnamese units, combined with economic aid, building villagers' loyalty and sense of security, Elliott and Hien paint a picture of indiscriminate firepower driving villagers off of their land, creating an atomized and demoralized, but controllable, population. This, presumably, is not the new strategy the US envisions winning hearts and minds in Iraq. . . .
A second critique of Sorley's thesis goes to the significance of the Viet Cong's reversals. According to Hien, the aim of the Tet Offensive was only partly to seize the South's cities; it was also intended to break the will of the American political leadership to continue the war. In this, it succeeded. Hien calls Tet "a victory with heavy casualties." It may have been a sacrifice from which the Viet Cong never entirely recovered, but it was a sacrifice which helped drive the US from the field, ultimately enabling the North to win the war. "The American historians want to isolate a short period of history and claim a victory," Hien remarks. "But at the end of the war, which side achieved its strategic and political aims?" Hien is right that some American analysts are eager to "claim a victory" in Vietnam. Sorley doesn't just argue that "clear and hold" beat the Viet Cong. He goes on to argue that the Vietnamization program in general was a success, and that by the time the last US troops left in 1973, the South Vietnamese Army was capable of defending the country.”

Is this cool or what? The Bush administration not only gets the U.S. into a losing war, but then goes through past losing wars in order to stock up on more losing strategies. And, as we can see – as we will see, although nobody is really going to see the hundreds of dead per day in America, since at heart the country has no heart – the Bushies have managed to lose Iraq in more than one way – they are burning a hole in America’s position in the Middle East for the next decade.

C’est le renversement de toutes choses

“Who was safe? No one. From the moment that the devil was taken to be the revenger of God, from the moment that one wrote, under his dictation, the names of those who could pass into the flames, each had, day and night, the terrible nightmare of the stake.” - Michelet

That the devil would be inside God as his hitman is, in a sense, part of the white magic mythology – that mythology that reconciled the pains of man to the benignity of the deity, with the assumption that God allowed evil as a part of the scheme for the greater good. For other stories (for instance, that God enjoyed evil as well as good, or even that the devil’s evils disguised his own dark good intents) – they sank to the nasty Gnostic bottom, where only the poets muck about.

The Devil inside God is God’s devil – and, LI would claim, there at the very origin of human organization. It is an Uncle Tom Devil, and I know it intimately.

These quotes are picked out of the the Gauffridi chapter in Michelet’s La Sorciere – to which, readers will notice, I all too often refer. Louis Gauffridi was a priest burned in Aix in 1613, after having been accused by two Ursuline nuns of having subdued an entire convent to the will of the devil. Michelet gives one account of this rather famous case of possession and persecution. It preceded the Loudun case, and served in some ways as a template.

Gaufridi, confronting the nuns, was nonplussed. The nuns in this case, Louise and Madeleine, were an interesting pair – Louise, possessed by a devil named Verrine, dared all things, having a demonic freedom granted to her to mock, to accuse, and in general to run over Madeleine (who, Michelet points out, had made the mistake of claiming too high a regard from the demons – an impudence that Louis’ behavior soon cowed out of her, as Louise seem to inexorably cow all who got in her way). Gauffridi was formally accused by Madeleine of presiding over sabbats with the usual sex and blasphemies, and despite his his standing, was inexorably pulled, by the competition between religious orders, and the impressiveness of Louise and Madeleine's devils, into a meat mangle from which there was no exit. And so he was imprisoned, questioned, denied all charges, and burnt, after which a pseudo-confession was circulated by the exorcists to blacken his posthumous reputation.

An old, barbarous story. What interests LI is the way in which Michelet grasps its essence – the way in which power, panic and rumor are the elemental spirits of this trial. LI can’t help but think of the twisted logic of our own GWOT era, in which all terrors are permitted to the terror-hunters. Louise and Madeleine agreed that the satanic convulsions and phrases they would banter – blaspheming the mess, parading through the streets proclaiming Belzebuub – were actually emanating from Gaufridi – Gaufridi was the master ventriloquist here, especially before he had been thrown into jail and made his confession. Louise, asked why she, possessed by a devil, would so betray Gaufridi, to whom she would seem to owe some discretion at least, replied, ‘why shouldn’t there be treason among demons?” Louise was, in general, a veritable participant-observer in the demon world, and was continually being quizzed by the inquisitors as to demonic moeurs. Michelet doesn’t include all of her responses, some of which are quite interesting. For instance, it turns out that Belzebuub cried out against printing. “Cursed be the first who began to write! cursed be the printer! cursed be the doctors who approve the works!”

Interesting, too, as evidence of how justice does not accrue to the victims, is how the pseudo-confession of Gaufridi gradually supplanted his actual pleas of not guilty as his name comes down, through the years, among the historians and artists who gradually want there to be this satanic priest who supposedly seduced through his very breath – which the devil made of such sweetness that no woman could resist. And so the Uncle Tom Devil had his way with Gauffridi in death and in the afterlife. As with so many millions of victims, one is left to ask in vain: “Where are all those beauties that those ashes owed?”

And on that grim note: Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers!