demo letdown

Oh, bitterness. I get to the bridge where the demonstration is scheduled at around 6. It is a relatively frosty evening for Austin. I’d supplied myself with two candles and a box of matches. Somehow, I had the delusion that – though it was a day off – though the evening was nippy – though the demonstration itself was the result of a floating announcement – that somehow others would be as shocked by the symbolism of three thousand soldiers dead as I was. As spurred on. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Rather, crammed up on the ramp leading to the pedestrian bridge over lake Austin was a handful of people – at most, 150. And coming up to them, I received, once again, that familiar progressive demonstration feeling. Small demonstrations for good causes generate an air much like an after church service get together. Except not after, say, a Southern Baptist Church service. Baptist get togethers are full of meaty, red faced men in florescent blue suits bouncing around with the juice of life and the holy ghost running in their veins, and their wives, all sweetness and life and chuckles and the flesh around the chin catching the kids and absentmindedly stroking their hair, and the sons with the high school football player shoulders, and holy connecting, business connecting, sexual connecting being all wound up with each other in the great suburban ball of yarn. Demonstrations, on the other hand, resemble the get together after a Quaker service. Nobody is meaty, the goodness of life is a set of good causes, and nobody wears a florescent blue suit. Let’s put it this way: if the call had gone out in Austin, Texas, for everyone who despises barbecue to meet on a cold bridge in January, much the same group would have assembled. Good people all, God bless them. But not the army to stop the war.

Oh well. The news people interviewed a few people. I hoped the cameras didn’t take any long shots – the contrast between the claim, made by all the interviewees, that the people are rising up against this war and the paucity of people gathered to rise up against the war would be too killing. There were crosses to hold, and it turned out I didn’t need my own candle, and eventually the crowd gathered around a guitar player and sang this little light of mine and This land is your land – believe me, this was an after services get together. We were all pretty old, and lovely as it is that the guitarist was there – and he is always there, he always puts in his time – I felt that the sing along format jarred with the occasion. If he had sung, say, I want to fuck you like an animal, no doubt this would have disturbed the semi-sanctuary air of the demo, but it would have been more about what this war is all about.

This little light of mine seemed singularly inappropriate.

The demo spoke of political paralysis. It foretold another 3,000 dead. And no doubt there will be – 3,000 more, that is, in American uniforms. I held a candle, said this land was made for you and me, thought like hell, blew it out and walked back down to the path around the lake and looked back. You couldn’t really see candlelight up there on the bridge.

I know these people are the core. They are my side. But I wish we could get us some fucking Baptists.

While Chalabi lounges in London, the 3,000th American soldier is killed

First things first: to find the location of a vigil near you for the 3000th American soldier killed in Iraq, go to the American Friends site.

Now, to get out the knives.

Anne Applebaum’s typically braindead obit for Hussein – a little like Hitler, a little like Stalin, throw on olive oil and bake in the pundit oven for three minutes, blah blah blah – was enlivened by the inevitable nod to Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear. The mention of Makiya started another train of thought, however, in LI’s mind. While Hussein was the bloody dictator Applebaum describes, one thing he didn’t do – he didn’t flee Iraq. He had the means to. He could have surely gone, as his family did, to Jordan. He could have found a way to get to Libya. But he stayed in Iraq, and was captured, and was hung.

Kanan Makiya, on the other hand, helped to generate the American invasion. He was one of those who suggested the disastrous extreme de-Baathification program, the dissolution of the army, etc. He was at all the conferences. He was a regular hero of moral integrity for the neo-cons. But, inexplicably, after helping liberate Iraq, he didn’t move there. In fact, apparently he lives in the States, and he pulls down lucrative fees from his association with Benador Associates, a whack job agency dedicated to promoting blood in their mouths Middle East hawks – need someone to recommend bombing Iran for your next chamber of commerce meeting? Call Benador.

Similarly, Ahmed Chalabi is now residing in London.

And, of course, we recently witnessed the escape from prison of an Iraqi official charged with peculation, who simply used mercenaries to break him out of the Green Zone. He will no doubt be flying back to Chicago.

Now, LI has just the tiniest peckerwood rage that the devisors of a war in which 3,000 American soldiers have been killed so far – this hardy band of Iraqi patriots – aren’t patriotic to go back to Iraq. So here’s a proposal: why not prod this band back to the country they so love and cherish? If Iraqis in the U.S. could vote in the last Iraqi election, surely they can be punished under the system of Iraqi law. If the Iraqi exiles that allied with the scummiest members of the permanent War Party in D.C. can play a role in sending kids from Nebraska to Iraq to operate as decoys in Anbar province, perhaps those same Iraqi exiles could test the waters in the new, ultra-liberated Baghdad?

Iraq – if Saddam Hussein could stay there after the fall of Baghdad, perhaps Kanan Makiya should try it. Or shut the fuck up.

PS – while it is simply cruel and unusual punishment to inflict comments about Christopher Hitchens on my poor readers, I had to smile about his latest war tourist piece in Slate:

“I flew to Baghdad from the northern city of Erbil, by the ordinary means of buying a local Iraqi Airlines ticket, boarding a plane that made a stop in Sulaymaniyah, and landing at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport. The whole exercise was almost weirdly normal. The plane was full of ordinary citizens carrying plastic hold-alls, with cheerful, unveiled hostesses handing out snacks and drinks. The terminal was quiet, and the airport road (which used to be known as "Route Irish" and was the scene of incessant mayhem) is these days considered fairly safe and has been stabilized by the Iraqi army. I stopped to be photographed with a unit of this force, a group of cheerful and professional young men.”

The photo op at the end of this Scoop-like passage is the gorgeous bit that just topples the creaky bogus tone into that something extra - it is that sweet moment of ridiculousness that transcends the mere booming egotism of the Hitchens persona, and becomes true self-parody. Isn’t this just like Bertie Wooster after the testosterone patch? Hitchens punishment for having taken on the role of a warmongering zombie is that he now writes like one, 24/7. The punishment fits the crime.

tomorrow - protest the 3,000th american soldier murdered by this administration

STANDING CALL when 3,000th US Troops Have Died

The Austin Center for Peace and Justice is calling for a vigil on the day following the death of the 3,000 U.S. soldier in Iraq,* on the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge at 6:30pm. Bring candles and paper plates or cups to catch wax (bring extra to share!).

LI is not a demo groupie, but this time, we are going to get some candles and be there. ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

asini mysteria

Nuccio Ordino, in Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, riffs as follows about asses:

“Indeed, Silenus, Marsyas and Midas

– three asinine spirits whose adventures are associated with water-purification rites – join the ass in the cycle of Dionysian myths. The ass of Hindu myth, apart from being a great seducer, is the guardian of the waters and of riches. The ass’s relation to fecundity is legitimated also by fables and myths that associate it with feminine deities; it is sacred to Vesta, mother and nurse; to the Phrygian goddess Cybele; and to the powerful Isis. In this regard, apart from asses having sexual relations with women, there is no shortage of references to cosmetic and pharmacological uses for certain of the ass’s organs as aids to many of the functions involved in childbirth and breastfeeding.

The reverse of the coin also reveals man examples in which the ass appears linked to death and the demonic. In his tale of Psyche’s descent into Hades, Apuleius only mentions the presence of an ass and its driver. Aelianus recounts tht the ass is the only animal able to resist the dissolving action of the waters of the Styx. Indeed, tradition has it that the devil is powerless against those who take an ass with them to Hell.”


In a comment on my Tom Paine posts below, faithful reader Amie has pointed to the relative philosophical neglect of birth, as opposed to the industry around death. Now, it is our opinion that LI is – however deficient in actual, concrete offspring – a big birth man. We are all for birth. And, being all for birth, we have been thinking that for this new year – the year that will spring, full grown, out of the travail of the wristwatch tonight – we wanted to dedicate the year, our year, to the ass: that fecundator, and the defier of the devil. In fact, 2006 has been building, sweet and sour post after post, to a grander vision of, well, something or other. And this is the year we propose to contemplate it – the divine earthly comedy. The anima mundi. The soul of the world. Yes, in this decade of war and planetary wear – it seems like a good time to go back to a notion that excited Giordano Bruno, and that – shrunk to Sedona, Arizona measures and become a New Age plaything – still manages, under the guise of Gaia, to crawl into the mumbles of the spiritual consumer set.

Here’s a quote from Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper about the soul of the world. This is more prescient than Bruno ever knew. The “Nolan”, here, is Bruno – Nundinio is John Underhill, an Oxford professor – and the dinner party is set at the house of Fulke Grenville, where it might really have happened. Finally, Pru is Prudenzio, a pedant, and Theo is Theophil, a philosopher :

“Everything is caused by the sufficient interior principle by which it is naturally stirred, and not by an external principle, as we observe occurring to those things which are moved contrary to or outside their own nature. Thus the earth and the other stars move according to the peculiar local differences of their intrinsic principle, which is their own sould. “Do you think,” asked Nundinio, “that this soul is sensitive?” “Not only sensitive,” answered the Nolan, “but also intellective, and not only intellective as our souls, but even more so.” At this point Nundinio kept quiet and did not laugh.

Pru: It seems to me that the earth, being animated, must be displeased when we dig caves and grottoes in its back, just as we feel pain and displeasure when our teeth are extracted or our flesh is pierced.

Teo: Nundinio did not have enough Prudence to think this argument worthy of being advanced, although it had occurred to him. In fact, he was not so ignorant a philosopher that he couldn’t understand that, even if the earth has sensibility, it is not a sensibility similar to ours; if it has limbs, they are not similar to ours; if it has flesh, blood, bones nad veins, they are not like ours; it it has a heart, it is not similar to ours; and so on for all the other parts which are equivalent to the parts of all others which we call animals and usually consider to the be the only animals.”

Who knew that digging enough of those caves into the earth could hurt the gigantic son of a bitch? Only the jackasses.

I’ll burn incense to the flayed spirits of Silenus, Marsyas and Midas tonight. Happy New Years!

the meaningless death of Saddam Hussein

“Man, seized suddenly with a divine fury, alien both to hatred and to anger, advances on the field of battle without knowing what he wants nor even what he is doing. What is this terrible enigma? Nothing is more contrary to his nature, and nothing repulses him less: he performs with enthusiasm that which horrifies him. Have you ever remarked that, in the heat of battle, man never disobeys? He might well massacre Nerva or Henri IV, but the most abominable tyrant, the most insolent butcher of human flesh, will never hear, there: we no longer wish to serve you. A revolt on the field of battle, an accord for mutually embracing each other and denying the will of a tyrant, this is a phenomenon that does not present itself to my memory. Nothing resists, nothing can resist the force that pulls man into combat; innocent murderer, passive instrument of a fearful hand, he plunges with bowed head into the abyss he has dug all by himself; he receives death without even thinking that it is he who has made death.
--
Thus we see ceaselessly accomplished, from the gnat to the human, the great law of the violent destruction of living beings. The entire earth, continually imbibed with blood, is nothing but an immense altar where all that lives must be immolated without end, without measure, without let-up, right up to the consummation of all things, right up to the extinction of evil, right up to the death of death.”. – Joseph De Maistre, les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg

And so the sideshow is hung, instead of being strung up a la Mussolini when he was captured. Undoubtedly, immediate execution would have been both more appropriate and would have saved us the propaganda joke that has taken place since 2004. The New York Times, demonstrating de Maistre’s opinion of the fundamentally murderous nature of man, publishes a lot of the usual drivel, emitted from an unearned but assumed elevated moral plateau. John Burns’ piece uses the word evil a lot – except about state sanctioned murder, which, as De Maistre says, is irresistible, a force that pulls us all, head bowed, into the abyss we have dug ourselves. The Iraq war is this moment’s abyss. The kangaroo court that sentenced Saddam was careful not to tread on American toes. Thus, the Iraqis will never get a nice courtroom account of how, exactly, that war with Iran was financed. The Warmonger crowd in the States is forever harping on who supplied the weapons – the U.S. supplying very few of them, although of course only the U.S. would use its Navy to protect Iraqi shipping – as though nations were gifting the Meatman with weapons systems. As we know from the recent dustup about BAE, in which Tony Blair kowtowed from the very bottom of his Christian convictions to the anti-semitic tyranny of Saudi Arabia in order to sell them 30 billion dollars worth of WMD, all the trails of blood, here, are prefigured by trails of $$$. One trail, even now, goes trickling out from the Iraq government every month as it still, incredibly, pays Kuwait for the loans Kuwait made, with definite consultation with the U.S., in the 80s to keep Iraq battling Iran. All, of course, justified by the U.S. sense of entitlement. That sense which is leading the U.S. to the farther reaches of disaster in the Middle East – 2007 being the Year of the Moron, in which our Surgers will lament our lack of will in op ed pieces in the Washington Post, while kids they could give a fuck about get their nuts blown off in Iraq, and Iraqis that Americans would just as soon eat, whole – this being a cannibal nation – get blown in thousand to bits in the streets of cities we have ‘reconstructed’. Ah yes, let us remember that Kuwait had the good sense to retain, as its lobbyists for bleeding Iraq, Madeleine Albright and James Baker – who had their little spoons out for an extra serving of blood pudding.

Nobody thinks, at this point, that another execution or killing in Iraq is going to stop the mass killings. Well, perhaps President Bush, a man who has been wrong about almost everything for the last six years. Or is it everything? LI can’t remember when he was right about anything, but surely he doesn’t have enough talent to have that much anti-talent. His mediocrity does not disguise any hidden genius – he is what he is, a half educated scion of a rich house, elevated by the scruff of his neck from one post to another, each more inappropriate, who was destined to restore a Texas ranch, smoke pot, and cut cypress while boring his wife with his homemade Christian philosophy, but has been inflicted on this nation for our sins. There is a sense of futility, in the States, that haloes any of the "good news" from Iraq. Good. The demoralization of the U.S. war effort proceeds apace. This blog, at least, is trying to stab that effort in the back, and promote the Vietnam-Iraq syndrome to such an extent that the U.S. start seriously demilitarizing.

We will surely hear Saddam’s name a lot in the next couple weeks. And it will all be utterly meaningless jabber.

We must bring down the system of perpetual war.

part 2: paine and political ethics

As we pointed out in our last post, there is a certain psychopathic subtext in Paine’s The Rights of Man – or, rather, there is a psychopathic subtext that Paine digs out of Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. The psychopathology takes the shape of a mind machine – a machine for controlling the minds and actions of others. It isn’t a fully articulated mind machine, but – we think – it prefigures the much more elaborate Air Loom visualized by James Tilley Matthews, psychology’s first fully fledged paranoid schizophrenic.

However, there is much more to Paine’s reproof of Burke than this. LI believes that one can find, in Paine’s argument, the lineaments of a political ethics that is pertinent to the question of how to change the treadmill of production, which is leading us to the seediest kind of apocalypse – an apocalypse of cocooned silkworms. An apocalypse in Pampers. For the threat to the planet doesn’t come as the result of a lifestyle which, upon ceasing or radical modification, would seriously harm the human race – it comes, instead, as a result of the affluence effect. It comes about as a result of the social logic of invulnerability, which entails building ever more McMansions ever further from workplaces requiring ever more heavy machines to transport ever more heavy human beings. It comes from an almost absent minded scouring of the ocean, devastating fish populations. It comes from a stubborn refusal to modify engines that were designed, basically, one hundred years ago for a world awash in potential carbon based fuels. It comes from having nursed a war culture to the point where life without the war culture is unimaginable.

So, here is what Paine wrote that has recently excited me:

“There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

When Paine wrote that he was thinking, according to all the evidence, that the living generation should cast off the religious, economic and political trammels put upon it by the generations of the dead. However, there is another dimension to Paine’s thought – and here, it helps to have read too much Heidegger. LI has read too much Heidegger, so we are just the man for the job. Heidegger, of course, in Being and Time writes extensively about the orientation towards Death in everydayness – and the orientation towards death that does not evade Death. The latter is the leading edge that turns us towards authenticity. Now, LI used to take the Mekon song (never want to work/always want to play/pleasure, pleasure every day) as a better guide to ethics than Heidegger’s turn to authenticity, since we felt that a certain evident fascism, a certain unanalyzed seriousness, is encoded in this turn. However, reading Heidegger in the context of Paine’s point makes for an interesting variation here. This is Heidegger:

“The explication of everyday being-toward-death stayed with the idle talk of the they [Man]; one also dies sometime, but for the time being not yet. Up to now we solely interpreted the “one dies” as such. In the “also some, but for the time being not yet,” everydayness acknowledges something like a certainty of death. Nobody doubts that one dies. But this “not doubting” need not already imply that kind of being-certain that corresponds to the way death – in the sense of the eminent possibility characterized above – enters into Da-sein. Everydayness gets stuck in this ambiguous acknowledgment of the “certainty” of death – in order to weaken the certainty by covering dying over still more and alleviating its own thrownness into death.” [Stambaugh translation]

The double gesture – the acknowledgment of the certainty of death and the weakening of that certainty – was materialized, in the post-World War II system, in the dialectic of vulnerability – the building of the weapons of mass, planetary death – the amplification of vulnerability to an historically new level - as a way of avoiding vulnerability. That double gesture has now grown old – it has become an ingrown habit, and is in the food we eat and the highways we travel down. It worked, too. Yet the system that was built up, as we know now, makes unsustainable demands on the future. And this is where Paine’s insight comes in – for the living generation, now, is presuming on governing from the grave in a whole new way – the presumption being materialized in the real exploitation and exhaustion of those elements that make this a living planet – air, earth and water.

Hmm. This post is sketchy. The idea I have in mind needs a lot of refinement and clarification. But sketchy as it is, I want to get it down now. I will be returning to this later.

Revolting against the coffin double

In a post last week, LI mentioned Mike Jay’s The Air Loom Gang, the book about the case of James Tilley Matthews, the Blakean lunatick. Matthews went mad, it seems, in the Paris of the Terror, where he was confined to his apartment and suspected of being an English spy. What he was really doing in Paris, and whether he was, indeed, a secret envoy from the British government, is one of those questions that were solved in one of those Sherlock Holmes cases that Watson was always going to publish, but never got around to.

Among Matthews’ lunatick ideas was that of an airloom machine, by which a 'magnetic gang', working in the bowels of London, was able to exert control over the thoughts of the powerful. Fortunately, his doctor, John Haslam, published a full account of it in Illustrations of Madness, so that we know how intricate and – well, beautiful and frightening this first of the mind control machines was. Mind control machines – ‘Beeinflussungsapparates’, as Victor Tausk called them – appear over and over again in the delusions of the paranoid schizophrenic.

Tausk found this out in WWI, when he worked in clinics in Slovakia. In his most famous paper, “On the origin of the influencing machine in Schizophrenia”, in 1919, he discusses the pattern and its meaning. He introduces a very famous case to the literature in this passage:

“In machine dreams, the sleeper awakens, more often than not, with his hand on his genitalia, after having dreamed of manipulating the machine. It may, therefore, be assumed that the influencing apparatus is a representation of the patient’s genitalia projected to the outer world, analogous in origin to dreams….

… The patient is Miss Natalija A., thirty-one years old, formerly a student of philosophy. She has been completely deaf for a number of years, due to an ulcer of the ear, and can make herself understood only by means of writing. She declares that for six and a half years she has been under the influence of a machine made in Berlin, though this machine’s use is prohibited by the police. It has the form of a human body, indeed, the patient’s own form, though not in all details… The trunk (torso) has the shape of a lid, resembling the lid of a coffin, and is lined with silk or velvet.”

LI has been thinking of the coffin double and of Matthews in the unexpected context of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. The Rights of Man begins with a full court assault on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The first issue that Paine takes up is Burke’s insistence that, in England, the right to revolution had been signed away in 1688:

“…That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the people of England have no such rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the nation, either in whole or in part, or anywhere at all, is of the same marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already said; for his arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in whom they did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also. To prove this, he quotes a declaration made by Parliament about a hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these words: "The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people aforesaid" (meaning the people of England then living) "most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for EVER." He quotes a clause of another Act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which he says, "bind us" (meaning the people of their day), "our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time."

Mr. Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by producing those clauses, which he enforces by saying that they exclude the right of the nation for ever. And not yet content with making such declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says, "that if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution" (which he acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but throughout Europe, at an early period), "yet that the English Nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever."”

If we had not been thinking of influencing machines, we would, perhaps, not have seen the shape of one here. But there is one, indeed. In a peculiar way, like Natalia A.’s coffin double, this is a coffin double of England, constructed by the dead to control the living. We want to develop Paine’s thought here a bit, in our next post. To us, this notion of the claims of the living and the need to ward off the dead casts an ethical shadow insofar as, from the aspect of the imagination, the living, now, are potentially the dead of the next generation. Thus, out of Paine’s idea, we can see an ethics that addresses the question of our limits, as the living – notably, our limits on using up the resources of this planet, or damaging it in some way. That this ethical issue should, on the shadow side, be a struggle against paranoid schizophrenia is … well, something we will have to get back to.