the new Mount Rushmore

Fred Barnes is glowing with pleasure today. He knew that the Rebel in Chief had super powers. He knew that that face, those abs, the incredibly long member, that loveable grin, could only have come from the Planet Zygon. And today, the President shyly let the cat – or as they say on Zygon, the endless stream of copulating cockroaches – out of the bag, in this interview with the Washington Post:

“Bush, who has always said that the United States is headed for victory in Iraq, conceded yesterday what Gates, Powell and most Americans in polls have already concluded. "An interesting construct that General Pace uses is, 'We're not winning, we're not losing,' " Bush said, referring to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs chairman, who was spotted near the Oval Office before the interview. "There's been some very positive developments. . . . [But] obviously the real problem we face is the sectarian violence that needs to be dealt with."

Asked yesterday about his "absolutely, we're winning" comment at an Oct. 25 news conference, the president recast it as a prediction rather than an assessment. "Yes, that was an indication of my belief we're going to win," he said.”

There it is. The stabbers in the back who, inexplicably, aren’t being tortured to death so that we can preserve our democracy, have accused our Greatest President of lying. But those who wore the special glasses (mail the Weekly Standard for your own pair, kids!) already knew that English verbal structure is much too primitive for a Zygonite. Our President travels through the past, present and future with the greatest of ease, and thus sometimes makes statements that seem like they are set in the present when they are actually set at some other time. For instance, the statement that Iraq has WMD meant that in 1989, Iraq had WMD. But had, has, and all temporal modes of having are Earthling delusions – all time is now time, or as the Zygon proverb goes: it is always time to take a shit! According to Zygonites, we must temporally orient ourselves by unloading our bowels on unworthy specimens of unfreedom. Zygonites also recommend, for maximum skin care, a lotion that is compounded of the blood of six hundred thousand human beings who have met violent ends. Since skin care is the number one priority on Zygon, you can of course see with what joy the properly constituted Zygonite would regard the war in Iraq.

In truth, all time, to the Zygonite, dissolves into what they call the great Narcissistic time. The great Narcissistic time flows out of the brain of the greatest and wisest of the Zygonites – the Rebels in Chief – and creates reality itself. It would seem that all Earthlings, being relatively primitive beings, would not even be able to comprehend the complexity of the Zygonite mind. But some Earthlings do! Magically transcending their own brainstem, Fred Barnes and a few selected journalists (all of whom, by a happy chance, have been hired to analyse the news endlessly on our freedom loving tv channels!) could see that the Rebel-in-Chief was no ordinary man, but a fierce extraterrestrial on a mission. His mission will only be accomplished when he has made a just distribution of the goods of the earth (which, by right, belong to members of the Carlyle Group), changed the atmosphere of the earth for the better (eliminating inefficient life forms), and Christianized forever the backwards Middle East.

Isn’t it time for the press, having had its week or two of celebrating the stab-in-the-backers of the Baker-Hamilton group, to get back to marveling at our Zygonite leader? I always like to think of the high point of the last six years, in which our long, long long war gone wild! has gone from climax to climax, was that heartwarming moment when our President brought a smile to the lips of the hardened Press with his hilarious skits – you remember! Back in 2004, as described by the Post:

“President Bush opened his 10-minute remarks to the gathering with a reference to what he referred to as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "favorite show" on television. Those anticipating an "Apprentice" punch line -- the Donald, after all, was only a few yards away -- guessed wrong.

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," Bush said, generating a roomful of laughter. "My Cabinet could take some pointers from watching that show. In fact, I'm going to have the Fab Five do a makeover on [Attorney General John] Ashcroft."

“From there, Bush went on to poke at his own malapropisms before unveiling a slide show titled "White House Election Year Album" that had the crowd chuckling. Yes, there were a few jabs at the Democrats, including a couple of shots taken at Democratic challenger John Kerry. Bush described a picture of himself doing what looked like the shuffle in the Oval Office in front of Condoleezza Rice as "here I'm trying to explain John Kerry's foreign policy to Condi." He also faked a phone conversation between Kerry and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. "Hey, John," he said. "Kim Jong Il here. Just wanted to let you know, you're my guy."

Mostly, though, he put up dorky-looking pictures of himself. A recurring joke involved photos of the president in awkward positions -- bent over as if he's looking under a table, leaning to look out a window -- accompanied by remarks such as "Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere!" and "Nope, no weapons over there!" and "Maybe under here?"

That was as funny now as it was then, since, of course, now and then are one now, one big Zygonite now without end. And from this perspective, our Greatest President is President forever!

I should mention that our former president, a pseudo-Zygonite if there ever was one, once hinted at his own power over time by saying, “that depends on what your definition of is is.” How we were shocked at the way he lied about getting a blowjob! He wasn’t a true Zygonite at all. Saying that in front of the whole nation too. However, a true Zygonite president transcends the question of ‘lying’ – nobody is going to question him about ‘lying’ when he said we were winning in Iraq. That would be too laughable. It is not an issue that is as important as a blowjob. As Barnes has pointed out, our Zygonite president has a member that is so extremely and awesomely huge that one thinks not of blowjobs, but of a special, maybe new like Mount Rushmore thing which would be exclusively dedicated to his dick. I am totally behind this project.

why I love the Washington Post

Moments in the dreamlife of the governing class

This exchange in the Washington Post deserves an award of some kind – it so exactly represents the way in which, in D.C. circles, conventional wisdom deals with those truths that upset it:

“Waterville, Maine: Good Morning Dan,

President Bush's proposal to increase troops in Iraq by 20-30,000 has received a lot of attention this weekend and has sparked considerable debate and controversy. On the one hand, incoming Majority Leader Reid stated he would support a short-term increase. On the other hand, I thought it was very interesting that former Secretary Powell and Hillary Clinton spoke out against the idea. Powell even suggested that the army was "nearly broken" and could not sustain another build-up. How is the White House responding to all this? Are we seeing evidence of a growing rift between Democratic leaders? How many other Republicans will speak out now that Powell has come out publicly?

Dan Balz: These are all good questions and the focus of a considerable amount of reporting these days here and elsewhere. You've got two conflicting forces at work. The November elections clearly sent a message that the American people want a change in Iraq and that what they most want is a plan that begins to draw down U.S. forces. Because there are worries that an abrupt pullout would leave Iraq and the Middle East in even more chaos, there is a desire to find a way to reduce the warfare in Baghdad. Can the addition of more U.S. troops, for a short period of time, accomplish that? People who are far more expert than I in military matters are debating that right now.”

So, an election in which people seemed to vote for withdrawing from Iraq really requires “the addition of more U.S. troops, for a short period of time.” Just as an election in which people didn’t voted against withdrawing from Iraq would seem to require “the addition of more U.S. troops, for a short period of time.” A surge, if you will. The tiptoeing language of "for a short period" is so beautiful - I mean, you get a serious turd from the White House and you have to dress it up like a Christmas turkey, so you say things like that. And of course Balz is inexpert in military affairs. Goodness gracious, we have to leave those military affairs to the generals, who have been doing such a truly outstanding job so far.

It is a joke. I laughed at this exchange so heartily I could almost taste fresh Iraqi blood in my mouth. While I have emphasized, and will continue to emphasize, that the only interest served by the occupation of Iraq is that of Bush’s vanity, one must always remember the context: vanity is the stock in trade of these people. They are attracted to vanity, parasites of it, investors in it. Little pieces of the imperial vanity are broken off and carried by the little drones like pieces of the cross. Really, it is hard to imagine a viler elite. They get in their little Hummers after a good days work, they get home and play with their meritocratic 2.1 kids, and they have not a single thought in their heads that wasn’t put there by some boss figure from the time they are 18 to the time they die. Complete servility, complete nullity. Withdrawal from Iraq – which will happen only when the army is so squeezed that the U.S. will have to withdraw in self defense – is only the first condition for a more peaceful, just world. A deeper condition is disempowering these terrible buffoons.

the age of the airloom

LI was pleased to receive some compliments on our Pinochet post from our friend in Mexico City, M., the more so as we seem, lately, to have either stunned or bored our readers to the extent that we sadly, visibly lack comments. On other blogs, there are lively debates about censoring or not censoring comment sections, but we don’t have that sort of problem here. Christ, you write an anti-Christmas piece that ties together father Christmas and Hitler and nobody even peeps.

We’ve been thinking, perhaps we haven’t been mad enough. Or is it that we are too mad? And this thought naturally led us to consider the autobiographies of mad political cosmologists before us. The most famous, of course, is Paul Schreber, the son of Germany’s greatest anti-onanist, Moritz Schreber. Paul Schreber’s spacewalk into a new heaven and new earth, which occured in the nuthouse where he was committed, was published in book form and, famously, analyzed by Freud, and then by Canetti, and then by all the epigones.

But Schreber is not modernity’s only mad cosmologist. There is, for instance, Friedrich Krauss, the clerk who fell into confusion in Antwerp in 1816 as he was folded, spindled, mutilated, mocked, and had his thoughts replaced by senseless or obscene images. He realized he was being poisoned by animal magnetism, directed against him by a black magnitiseur, and wrote a warning to the fathers of families and such, Nothschrei eines Magnetisch-Vergifteten (Scream of a man poisoned by magnetism).

Then there is James Tilly Matthews . Matthews, as his biographer, Mike Jay, explains in the summation of his book at nthposition, was a Welsh tea merchant of Republican sympathies who acted as an agent for Pitt with the moderates in Paris in the Revolution. Unfortunately for Matthews, the Jacobin triumph caught him still in Paris, and he was imprisoned for three years. When he was released, he got back to London and started making harsh accusations of treason, like some Edgar Allan Poe figure. And this got him quickly committed by the political establishment to Bedlam, where he met up with the apothecary, John Haslam.

Matthews apparently shared his ideas and papers with Haslam. When it appeared that Matthews family was going to succeed in getting him released, Haslam, to prove that Matthews was truly insane, published his Illustrations of Madness, which is a mixture of Blakean and Schreberian. Haslam begins his account like this:

“Mr. M Insists that in some apartment near London Wall, there is a gang of villains profoundly skilled in Pneumatic Chemistry, who assail him by means of an Air Loom. A description of this formidable instrument will be given hereafter; but he is persuaded that an account of it is to be found in Chambers’s Dictionary, edited by Dr. Rees in 1783, under the article Loom…

It is unnecessary to tell the reader that he will fruitlessly search that work for such information.”

I must quote from Mike Jay’s wonderful summary:

"Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an 'Air Loom', of which Matthews was able to draw immaculate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. It incorporated keys, levers, barrels, batteries, sails, brass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by directing and modulating magnetically charged air currents, rather as the stops of an organ modulate its tones. It ran on a mixture of foul substances, including 'spermatic-animal-seminal rays', 'effluvia of dogs' and 'putrid human breath', and its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews' brain. There were many of these mind-control settings, all classified by vivid names: 'fluid locking', 'stone making', 'thigh talking', 'lobster-cracking', 'bomb-bursting', and the dreaded 'brain-saying', whereby thoughts were forced into his brain against his will. To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head. No wonder some people thought he was mad.

"The Air Loom was being run by a gang of undercover Jacobin revolutionaries, bent on forcing Britain into a disastrous war with Revolutionary France. These characters, too, Matthews could describe with haunting precision. They were led by a puppet-master named 'Bill the King'; all details were recorded by his second-in-command, 'Jack the Schoolmaster'. The French liaison was accomplished by a woman called Charlotte, who seemed to Matthews to be as much a prisoner as himself, and was often chained up near-naked. 'Sir Archy' was a woman who dressed as a man and spoke in obscenities; the machine itself was operated by the sinister, pockmarked and nameless 'Glove Woman'. If Matthews were to see any of these characters in the street, they would grasp batons of magnetic metal which would cause them to disappear."

This is magnificent – although it is a bit heartless to say so, since these ravings are so obviously rooted in vast amounts of pain. There is surely some vast underground counterpoint in operation here to Blake – the same mythological sense of the forces at work in the French revolution, some of the same images – notably the near naked, chained up woman. Is there a common Swedenborgian root? Or - as I madly suspect - is there some contact below the surface, some underground, poetic continent whose inhabitants look at the treadmill of production, the uprooting of all things by white magic, with eyes in which are reflected the burning wheels of Revelations?

For the most striking thing, to me, is that Matthew’s Air Loom seems so familiar – isn’t this some horrendous pre-cognition of television? Haven’t we seen, in the last six years, “delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head” on a national scale?

Blair, that eggbeater

There are people to whom a sense for quality is denied in the same way others are blind or deaf and dumb. Only the first type is incomparably more numerous - which is why nobody sees their condition as pathological - Kurt Heller

Far, far from the Commons of Great Britain be all manner of real vice; but ten thousand times further from them, as far as from pole to pole, be the whole tribe of false, spurious, affected, counterfeit, hypocritical virtues! These are the things which are ten times more at war with real virtue, these are the things which are ten times more at war with real duty, than any vice known by its name and distinguished by its proper character. My Lords, far from us, I will add, be that false and affected candor that is eternally in treaty with crime,—that half virtue, which, like the ambiguous animal that flies about in the twilight of a compromise between day and night, is to a just man's eye an odious and disgusting thing! There is no middle point in which the Commons of Great Britain can meet tyranny and oppression. No, we never shall (nor can we conceive that we ever should) pass from this bar, without indignation, without rage and despair, if the House of Commons should, upon such a defence as has here been made against such a charge as they have produced, be foiled, baffled, and defeated. – Edmund Burke, Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings

A political crime is a most peculiar species in the animal kingdom of crimes, for its eggs are perpetually hatching its own negation. Investigation, here, tends towards the cover up, and cover ups tend to be defended as a necessary bulwark for society, which is defended as a necessary bulwark against crime. Eggs give way to eggs, and all of them are rotten.

The BAE case, which has blipped on the radar of the papers for an instant, and is already making its sucking way down the memory hole, is a case in point.

If there were ever a creature that, to the just man’s eye in Burke’s speech, had an odious and disgusting look, that creature is Tony Blair. He is at once today’s man, the kind of vacuity destined to be a second circuit celebrity, and a throwback – a throwback to the worst side of Gladstone combined with one of those Dickens villain, a Pecksniff or a Uriah Heep, in which the essential Victorian indecency that ran the empire and built oligarchy emerged undisguised. Or, no – never undisguised. It was the peculiarity of the Victorian hypocrite, as opposed to the hypocrite of the ancien regime, that the hypocrisy went all the way down. Even his worst vices were haunted by virtues. Even Jack the Ripper had interiorized the progressive urbanist view of prostitution as a riddable vice of the working classes. In Blair, there is no ripping off of the mask even in the most solitary moment. He is thoroughly spoiled, like a pound of hamburger left for a week on a counter in room temperature. He is wormy with his own virtue.

If we are ever to understand the mock world war in which we are invested, the BAE case is a wonderful place to start. But where to start? For the present BAE case is only the successor of past BAE cases. It seems that, since the eighties, the British establishment, Tory or Labour, spends a lot of time and energy trying to pry money out of the Saudis in return for a vast armament of the weapons of mass destruction. Oh, but don’t worry. As we know, the Saudi regime has merely financed Osama bin Laden, spread a militant form of Islamic belief intolerant of other Islamic beliefs throughout the world, and is at the moment bankrolling the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Thus, they are perfectly sound.

LI rather admires the symbolic demands of the Saudis. Whenever they are in the mood to buy another 20 billion dollars worth of bugridden, obsolete weaponry from the U.K., an elaborate ritual ensues. First, the Brits take time off from the lectures about democracy and freedom with which they bore the rest of the world (following, as usual, the boss of bosses, Uncle Sam) to do a little third world repressing. In 96, as contracts were making the Brits salivate, they simply deported a Saudi dissident, a man named Mas'ari, to the Caribbean without really even finding an excuse for it. Blair has done the same, but he has covered these acts of sycophancy with the language, so dear to him, of security.

(As a side note: the language of security is all over the sale of the weapons of mass destruction – the newspapers commonly report on these as sales from ‘defense’ industries, which is a lovely devolution from the more robust Edwardian description of them as war industries. However, war is now unheard of in this world. It is never declared. It is always defense against defense.)

The first of the big BAE sales followed in the wake of the “Death of the Princess” fiasco, in which the Saudis held the British responsible for that embarrassing docu-drama and the Thatcherite cabinet ministers – led by Douglas Hurd – ritually abased themselves. In the U.S., I should say, things didn’t go much better. Mobile Oil and the State Department tried to keep the film from being shown on Public TV, and half of the locally owned Public stations refused to show it. In any case, the Thatcherites had made their peace with the Saudis to the extent that they were able to sell them 20 billion dollars worth of the weapons of mass destruction in 1984. And wasn’t Maggie’s son, Mark, fortunate! As an indispensable middle man, he seems to have made out pretty well on the deal. Alas, how well has never quite been exposed, as the investigation into that, by the House of Commons, was buried in the early nineties, with Labour pledging to dig it up as soon as they got into power. Well, Labour got into power with Maggie’s biggest fan, Tony Blair, as the grinning face of the catastrophe, and somehow Labour never did get back to the case.

Blair, of course, presided over another BAE deal, and there is one pending. As always, these deals exhibit how farcical is the conservative idea that the state and private enterprise are somehow ontologically separated. The whole point of being in the upper class is to have the ability to use the government as a sort of private club, and the governing cadre of any moment is more than happy to oblige. Thus, Blair’s numerous trips in which, after making with the sickening sermons that are solemnly reported in the Murdoch papers, he gets down to crawling on the ground for Saudi money. Or does he do his famous Bo Jangles routine? I’m not sure which it is.

So, here we are again, going through the ritual. An investigation. A Saudi threat - apparently Blair had fifteen days to shut down the investigation. And, being the kind of man he is, he has put the keebosh on it while droning on as though he were performing some act in accordance with the famous “universal laws of the enlightenment” that the Euston belligeranti so like to hear about. BAE stock is up. The money is flowing to the gangsters who support him – and all the little people can keep their jobs, hurray hurray! busy producing lethality for the Saudis. However – and this is Blair’s Dickensian side – he can’t resist moralizing over his own outrageous acts of immorality. You can’t beat the man for pure bushwa:

"Leave aside the effects on thousands of British jobs and billions worth of pounds for British industry," he said.

"Leave that to one side - our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel/Palestine.

"That strategic interest comes first, particularly in circumstances where if prosecutions have gone forward, all that would have happened is that we would have had months, potentially years, of ill feeling between us and a key partner and ally, and probably for no purpose."

Mr Blair said he was in no doubt the right decision had been taken in terms of the UK's interest and took "full responsibility" for the advice he gave. "I have no doubt at all that had we allowed things to go forward, we would have done immense damage to the true interests of this country, leaving aside the fact that we would have lost thousands of highly-skilled jobs and very, very important business for British industry," he added.

For more on the business side of the BAE deal, see Monbiot here.

On Mark “Thickie” Thatcher’s mosquito-like ride atop the first BAE-Saudi arms deal under Maggie Pinochet, his mom, see David Osler’s blog here. Thickie not only has in common with our current Rebel in Chief that he was the underachieving son of a country's leader, but the two knew each other when Thickie came to Texas and plunged into the world of unethical business practices with Texas companies.

And here’s some fun facts from Global Security Org. Read it for the fine, full blast of hypocrisy in the morning – like the smell, in a small airless room, of the results of a four day drunk!

"Saudi Arabia does not have weapons of mass destruction. [Editor's note: Global security defines WMD in the foreshortened terms used by the U.S. In Limited Inc terms, he who has a peashooter can be presumed to have access, sooner or later, to a pea. And he who has a delivery system for a nuclear weapon and pays for nuclear weapons to be developed in another state can be presumed to have simply outsourced WMD.] It did, however, buy long-range CSS-2 ballistic missiles from China in 1988. More recently, Saudi officials have discussed the procurement of new Pakistani intermediate-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Some concern remains that Saudi Arabia, like its neighbors, may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, apparently by purchase rather than indigenous development. While there is no direct evidence that Saudi Arabia has chosen a nuclear option, the Saudis have in place a foundation for building a nuclear deterrent.
Saudi Arabia first opened a nuclear research center in the desert military complex at Al-Suleiyel, near Al-Kharj, in 1975. Saudi Arabia reportedly offered to pay for reconstruction of the Osirak-reactor, destructed by Israel on 06 June 1981. By at least 1985 Iraqi and Saudi military and nuclear experts were co-operating closely. Saudi nuclear scientists were sent to Baghdad for months of training.
In late June 1994 Muhammad Khilewi, the second-in-command of the Saudi mission to the United Nations, abandoned his UN post to join the opposition. After defecting, Mr. Khilewi, who was denied federal protection, went into hiding, fearing for his life. He has tried to distribute more than 10,000 documents he obtained from the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

Khilewi produced documents for the London Sunday Times that supported his charge that the Saudi government had paid up to five billion dollars from the Saudi treasury for Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear weapon. Between 1985 and 1990, up to the time Saddam invaded Kuwait, the payments were made on condition that some of the bombs, should the project succeed, be transferred to the Saudi arsenal. Khilewi cache included transcripts of a secret desert meeting between Saudi and Iraqi military teams a year before the invasion of Kuwait. The transcrips depicts the Saudis funding the nuclear program and handing over specialised equipment that Iraq could not have obtained elsewhere.

What Khilewi did not know was that the Fahd-Saddam nuclear project was also a closely held secret in Washington. According to a former high-ranking American diplomat, the CIA was fully apprised. The funding stopped only at the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991.

gott mit uns

In the First International Dada Fair in 1920, one of the exhibits, a collaboration between John Heartfield and Rudulf Schlichter, was entitled Prussische Erzengel. It was a dummy, dressed in a military uniform, surmounted by a pig’s head. A note on the dummy read: “in order to understand this work of art, go on a daily twelve hour exercise on the Tempelhof Field with full backpack and equipped for maneuvers.”

Alas, the simple and direct attack on the military that characterized the Vietnam war protests and help shrink the American military in the seventies has not materialized, so far, in the Iraq war. The American archangel has yet to be attacked for its brainlessness, its threat to our liberties, and its criminal waste of resources. The good side is that recruitment – which, by relentlessly manipulating numbers, the Bush administration has tried to portray as being excellent – is, in reality, in trouble. While re-enlistment is high (for the same reason that, in the 1890s, the coal companies could find coal miners – temporary bonuses and steady wages in low wage and impoverished areas), in truth, the army is breaking. Slowly but surely:

“Warning that the active-duty Army "will break" under the strain of today's war-zone rotations, the nation's top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, issued his most dire assessment yet of the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the nation's main ground force. At one point, he banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today's Pentagon policies is "not right."

In particularly blunt testimony, Schoomaker said the Army began the Iraq war "flat-footed" with a $56 billion equipment shortage and 500,000 fewer soldiers than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Echoing the warnings from the post-Vietnam War era, when Gen. Edward C. Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, decried the "hollow Army," Schoomaker said it is critical to make changes now to shore up the force for what he called a long and dangerous war.

"The Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror . . . without its components -- active, Guard and reserve -- surging together," Schoomaker said in testimony before the congressionally created Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.”

Since the global war on terror is a farce and a fraud, one can only consider this great news. The army spokesman is saying this after a year in which the U.S. spent approximately a trillion dollars on the Pentagon (mostly, of course, these were vast engineering welfare payments, hundreds of billions spent on useless equipment, technology, and ‘consulting’ that soaks into areas like D.C. and gives them hot hot hot real estate markets and fascist-leaning editorial pages in their local paper, blood in their mouth-ers looking longingly to the Pinochet model of governance). The mock-Cold war that is the phylogenic expression of the mock President’s vanity is starting to bite the American ass. And, gasp, the will of the American public is starting to falter and fumble! Will wonders never cease. The rubes are no longer amused.

So, remember, in the next year, lets all surge together, discourage recruitment, make every effort to break the pseudo-war on terror, encourage defeatism, pacifism, and the dada attitude. Long, long ago, John Kerry was right (although, being a completely cowardly putz, he quickly hid from his own conclusions): terrorism is a police, not a military matter. Making it a military matter has been a complete fiasco, from Bush-Rumsfeld-Cheney idea of letting Osama bin Laden go (the terrorist on tap strategy) to the armies of ignorance unleashed by our peck of peckerwoods on poor Iraq. There is no war on terrorism. There can’t be any war on terrorism. And, of course, the human violence expressed in the stock of nuclear missiles the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and (in bomb form) Israel, India and Pakistan possess is still the greatest terroristic threat to the world.

the borderline between white and black magic

‘In a sense, it is the market that free-rides on extra-market values that make our market society a bearable place, by tempering the relentless opportunism that the market model commends. Norms of civility are a public good. Without them, the world would degenerate into a society of relentless mutual suspicion.” – Robert Kuttner

LI’s last post breezily went on about the social imposition of money as the supremely cathected object. To understand that, I thought it would be nice to turn to a product that is on the twilight borderline between white and black magic – blood. You know, the substance the wine turns into during mass. That fascinating liquid with the color that serves no evolutionary purpose – pure accident, that red.

As a matter of fact, blood and its sale was the object of one of the most cited books in defense of the welfare state by Richard Titmuss, who correctly saw that white magic depends on inverting a fundamental human fact – that the gift relationship logically and historically precedes the money relationship. But Titmuss is not nostalgic for the highly hierarchized society overthrown by the white magic. This is why the donation of blood is such an exemplary act for him:

“Unlike gift-exchange in traditional societies, there is in the free gift of blood to unnamed strangers no contract of custom, no legal bond, no functional determinism, no situations of discriminatory power, domination, constraint or compulsion, no sensed of shame or guilt, no gratitude imperative and no need for the penitence of a Chrysostom.”

Blood, like air, love, a fuck, a wank, everyday speech, etc., is one of those seemingly unmonetized things, the things outside the white magic mesh. The task of making money a super-cathectic object entails the double task of either monetizing these things or devaluing them. Those functions are, of course, related. So, for instance, that air is free means that there is no cost to polluting air, no individual hurt. There is no stealing, here. In the white magic world, stealing is a fundamental negative principle, defining what is valuable. Prometheus stealing fire, or Jahweh commanding his people not to steal, are just as founding, in their way, as any incest tabu.

To which subject I will return in another post.

strength through joylessness

“When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that [by] this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices.” – Freud, the Id and the Ego.


LI did not plan to write anything about Pinochet. But the astonishingly fascist Washington Post editorial, which bears all the hallmarks of a Fred Hiatt special (you can use the same rule of thumb on it as you use to spot rabies in a dog – check for foam around the muzzle) has made LI think again.

The celebration of Pinochet and his apologist, Jean Kirkpatrick, starts out with the patented cigars and whiskey tone that they used to like down at Signatures, the neo-con’s favorite Georgetown restaurant:

“AUGUSTO PINOCHET, who died Sunday at the age of 91, has been vilified for three decades in and outside of Chile, the South American country he ruled for 17 years. For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked. Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.”

Creating conditions for the coup, that Allende. Hiatt does feel he has to tiptoe around the bodies a bit, but he comes back for the strong finish:

“Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.

By way of contrast, Fidel Castro -- Mr. Pinochet's nemesis and a hero to many in Latin America and beyond -- will leave behind an economically ruined and freedomless country with his approaching death. Mr. Castro also killed and exiled thousands. But even when it became obvious that his communist economic system had impoverished his country, he refused to abandon that system: He spent the last years of his rule reversing a partial liberalization. To the end he also imprisoned or persecuted anyone who suggested Cubans could benefit from freedom of speech or the right to vote.

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.”

Praising Pinochet’s economic policy is sheer fantasy, but this editorial does point us backwards and forwards – backwards to the primal beginnings of the neo-liberal world order, emerging as the Bretton Woods structure fell apart, and forwards to our recent, noble attempt to grant the ungrateful Iraqis the same wonderful shock treatments that Pinochet was good enough to visit upon his own people.

All of which makes me think of another event that happened in 1973: the publication of Joachim Fest’s biography of Hitler. In that biography, Fest wrote, at one point, that if Hitler had died in 1938, he would have been regarded as one of Germany’s greatest statesmen.

By coincidence, in 1973, that statement could jump out of the book and be incarnated in a real venue: Chile. In 1933, Hitler had set up seventy some concentration camps, had processed 45,000 people through them, and had effectually terrorized the opposition, unions, the socialists, the communists, and the cultural Bolsheviks, so that by 1938 many of the concentration camps could be closed down. Some of the guards in the more notorious concentration camp were even tried for their excesses – torture and murder. The racial laws in place were moving towards Kristalnacht, but hadn’t got there yet. Hitler had reinflated the economy, was pouring money into the military, was very soundly against the Bolsheviks. He was, of course, laying the foundation for the kind of guns and consumerism economy that West Germany adopted, with some major Social Democratic modifications later on.

I’m less concerned with all of the parallels here (although it would be interesting to see the response if Hiatt wrote an editorial praising the first part of Hitler’s rule, granting that there were certain human rights excesses of it, although one can’t really sympathize with the “saintly” Social Democrats, and surely they deserved blame for the social chaos that necessitated the Nazi seizure of power) than with one of them, which looms larger for me: the persecution of the “cultural Bolsheviks”. Why do these regimes spend so much time imprisoning singers, gays, poets, cabaret female impersonators, beggers, and the lot? Why do they rail against degenerate art, drugs, and the collapse of morality? I think there is an explanation beyond the personal peculiarities of Hitler or Pinochet. The reason, I think, is that authoritarian rightwing regimes aim, ultimately, at instituting a regime of seriousness. Seriousness is a political category. It has to be defended from the attempts of the Cultural Bolsheviks to undermine it because, in so doing, the C.B.s undermine something more important – the psychological underpinnings of the political economy as a whole. For seriousness is, in the end, about the id and its unstable objects of affection. It is about disciplining a nation to adopt one and only one overriding cathectic object.

Now, this psychological structure is somewhat disguised by the use of the slogans of the 19th century about hard work and thrift. That is not what is really happening. A Germany that was drifting towards slave labor was not a Germany that really wanted its population to be particularly industrious. Granted, the break up of the unions is about the greater exploitation of labor to the profit of capital. But in the dawning era of neo-liberalism, the psychological path that is being blazed is to impose a new cathectic object – money – upon the population as a whole. To paraphrase Freud’s famous phrase about the id and the ego, the psychological structure of the authoritarian states created by D.C. involve setting up the leader as an Id proxy, in order to replace him, as the chief sanctioned cathectic object, with money itself. There is, as Freud might put it, a mystery here: why does the fuhrer precede the dollar? I have some ideas about that, but... I will devote another of my lectures in the series, Confessions of an ectoplasm, to that fascinating subject.

But to return to matters at hand: this mass introjection of money is the whole point of the fascist regime. In Hitler’s case, the leader who bore this role was blind to it, but the pattern was set: first a leader who creates a disaster, then the leap into a money centered value system – first the Third Reich, then the West German miracle. Similarly, first Pinochet, then the Washington Consensus. First the Brazilian generals, then the Washington consensus. First the Argentinian generals, then the Washington consensus. First Suharto, phase I - the 800000 dead Indonesian communists - then the Washington consensus.

This is why, actually, LI believes that the U.S. is relatively immune to fascism – the leadership principle, here, would be archaic, a perversion. There is no need for it. Money as the great national cathectic object already rules. Thus, the short lived surge of Bush as the Rebel in Chief was doomed to parody from the beginning.