hawks shedding feathers

In the early 1840s, a Baptist named William Miller began doing some serious work on the Book of Revelation. Using his mathematical genius, Miller came up with a formula showing precisely that the world would end in March of 1843. Due to an overlooked erasure, that date proved incorrect. The world was really going to end in 1844.

Miller collected thousands of followers. Unfortunately, God didn’t stage the drama he’d outlined in the book of Revelations in 1844, either. Hiram Edson, who later figured out that Jesus was coming in stages to the earth after making a tour of the universe, wrote about gathering with others on 23 October, 1844:

“Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled 12 at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before…”

Civilization rolls onward. Hiram Edson, more savy than Scott Fitzgerald, realized that America is the home of second acts, especially if the first act involved apocalyptic failure, and went on to found the very successful Seventh day Adventists. The war party is going through a similar blasting of expectations. Since the expectations were founded, generally, on mutually contradictory premises, vague allegories, and an almost complete lack of knowledge about… well, Iraq, the sackcloth and ashes phase should, one would think, involve absorbing a certain skepticism, and of course a reconsideration of the entire war culture – at this time, under the guise of the Global war on Terrorism – that has mangled so many bodies without any necessity at all.

There has been a blog hubbub about the post by Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, in which she explains why she was slightly wrong about ardently supporting America’s pre-emptive invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It turns out that McArdle was mislead by her faulty sense of empathy. In the end – as one would expect from a woman who names herself after an Ayn Rand character – the sum of novelistic factors that constituted America’s favorite Punch, Saddam Hussein, was beyond her. On the other hand, she remembers no dove who got anything right in the leadup to the war, except, by some odd quirk of fate, they were right that the war in toto.

Many of the doves seem to be reconstructing their memory of why they objected to the war, crediting themselves with having predicted that the invasion would fail in this way. Many hawks are also reconstructing their memories to make themselves less hawkish. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.

The lesson that I can unequivocally take out of this is: do not be so confident in your ability to read other people and situations. Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future.

That is so sweet of her! The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead have contributed to her education, and I bet she is going to be nicer to elderly neighbors, too!

McCardle leans libertarian. The occupation in Iraq has taught her to distrust government. Or so she writes. LI quietly tore out all of our hair, reading that, and flushed it down the toilet. Say what? If it wasn’t an analytic truth in January, 2003 that the invasion involved every feature of governmental overreaching that had been harped upon for two hundred years by liberal thinkers – as Limited Inc pointed out by going exhaustively through the catalogue of classical liberalism, from Burke to Constant – and McCardle couldn't figure that out herself, well, I'd guess there is a large hole in her libertarian ideas. The hole can be labeled - automatic respect for authority figures. I wish libertarians would just call themselves richophiles – a love of the wealthy the desire that all of society be shaped to please them is pretty much the alpha and omega of the McArdle strain of libertarianism.

Another hawk who shed his feathers a couple of months ago, Norman Geras, is an interesting case. He has made a career as a political intellectual – yet, his politics seem as easily distracted by the most juvenile mock arguments as the audience of American Idol, and that worries me about the way people become political intellectuals in the U.K. Geras recently raved about a Martin Amis quip – Amis denounced those who “waddled” out in the streets of London holding we are all hezbollah signs in the demonstrations against Israel’s bombing of Lebanon last year. Now, “waddled” is an interesting verb. I don’t believe that it is the verb that really occurred to Amis, seeing the tv footage of the demonstrators. They were mostly young and sprightly. Waddling wasn’t in it – waddling is confined more to the over the hill cigarchompers Amis might meet at his friend Chris Hitchens’ parties. The difference between insult and satire is the difference between using the verb “waddling” – which lights up the children and the Geras typses - and using a verb that really does break through the human crust, that puts the fishing hook through that bare forked creature and reels him in.

Anyway, Geras coyly links to a defense of the surge published in Foreign policy by a man named Donald Stoker. And what do you know – Stoker comes up with a defense that is another pony ex machina argument, of the same type that the hawks have made, over and over again, during the past three meat mounding years.

To read the Stoker article, it is best to skip the main part – a mélange of cases in which insurgents lost, insurgents won, etc., etc. – and get to Stoker’s case:

“Combating an insurgency typically requires 8 to 11 years. But the administration has done such a poor job of managing U.S. public opinion, to say nothing of the war itself, that it has exhausted many of its reservoirs of support. One tragedy of the Iraq war may be that the administration’s new strategy came too late to avert a rare, decisive insurgent victory.”

8 to 11 years, eh? To what end? I want to try to put a fairer cast on suggestions that are clearly lunatic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, billion of dollars spent per month, in order to perhaps put down an insurgency and create (ta ta ta da!) a theocratic Shi’a government indistinguishable, in its ideology, from … Hezbollah. Indeed, Amis might have wanted to watch Chris Hitchens neo-con friends waddle at the next party he goes to, since they are doing infinitely more for Hezbollah than the young bucks of London.

ka

Austin is moping under that hideous counterfeit of winter that goes by the name of a winter storm warning – or is it watch? What this means is that there is ice on the branches of the tree outside my window, which obviously took the tree by surprise – and that the streets have icy patches, and the sidewalks do too – and that we can all stay inside and listen to news about traffic accidents on the highways, and those of us who have stocked up on either hot chocolate or cider or marijuana can enjoy the forced hibernation like in a Christmas card. Those of us who, like LI, suffer from vicious ricocheting coughs, the butt end of a chest cold that doesn’t seem to know how to leave the party my body threw for it (get your coats, guys! my, the time!), have to settle for shivering and cabin fever and Kagome purple roots and fruits juice.

This is no condition to ponder the Vedas.

However, as we said in our post before last, or some fucking post, how am I supposed to keep up, we were going to write about Calasso’s Ka. The idea I’ve been kicking around is that the form of giantism in the Indian sacred books is of a different type entirely than that associated simply with wonder. It is a giantism that is both discontinuous and in unlimited, systematic expansion, like certain of the dreams described by De Quincey in the Pains of Opium section of the Memoirs of an Opium Eater. An amazing section that contains, among other things, a description of the close connection between psychosis and racism (it is in this section that De Quincey claims that the very idea of having to live among the Chinese gives him an almost bodily disgust).

But being a sickly critter, I think I’m going to content myself with comparing the creation story in Ka with the creation story in the Samapatha Brahmana, as translated by Mueller.

Here is the story of the first man – Prajapati - via the latter:

Verily, in the beginning this universe was water, nothing but a sea of water. The waters desired, “How can we be reproduced?’ They toiled and performed fervid devotions, when they were becoming heated, a golden egg was produced. The year, indeed, was not then in existence: this golden egg floated about for as long as the space of a year.

In a year’s time a man, this Pragapati, was produced thereform: and hence a woman, a cow or a mare brings forth within the space of a year; for Pragapati was born in a year. He broke open this golden egg. There was then, indeed, no restingplace: only this golden egg, bearing him, floated about for as long as the space of a year.

At the end of a year he tried to speak. He said bhuh: this (word) became this earth. buhuvah: this became this air - svah: this became yonder sky.”

There are many complications here – Pragapati, who turns into Brahma, is also described as the composite of seven men that the gods put together, and the egg here might be Pragapati’s own egg with the waters, that he inseminated – complications that hint at the maddening impossibility, for the mere amateur, to make sense of the Indian myths. The way events are enchained in the Indian sacred books gives one a certain double vision because there are all of these logical hallucinations, these moments of self-contradiction from which the stories branch off. But I could not help but think as Pragapati speaks in that blubber of Handke’s Kasper Hauser – and, indeed, the figure of the stutterer in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Just as the stutterer breaks through the floor of speech, gets into the basement, Pragapati’s stuttering sounds become words that become things because the words have no speech within which to be words. To be a word means to be a word in a language. To be a syllable in a word means to be a syllable in a word in a language.

In the Upanishads, it says:

LET a man meditate on the syllable Om, called the udgîtha; for the udgîtha (a portion of the Sâma-veda) is sung, beginning with Om.
The full account, however, of Om is this:--
2. The essence of all beings is the earth, the essence of the earth is water, the essence of water the plants, the essence of plants man, the essence of man speech, the essence of speech the Rig-veda, the essence of the Rig-veda the Sâma-veda 1, the essence of the Sâma-veda the udgîtha (which is Om).
3. That udgîtha (Om) is the best of all essences, the highest, deserving the highest place 2, the eighth.
4. What then is the Rik? What is the Sâman? What is the udgîtha? 'This is the question.
5. The Rik indeed is speech, Sâman is breath, the udgîtha is the syllable Om. Now speech and breath, or Rik and Sâman, form one couple.
6. And that couple is joined together in the syllable Om. When two people come together, they fulfil each other's desire.
7. Thus he who knowing this, meditates on the syllable (Om), the udgîtha, becomes indeed a fulfiller of desires.
8. That syllable is a syllable of permission, for whenever we permit anything, we say Om, yes. Now permission is gratification. He who knowing this meditates on the syllable (Om), the udgîtha, becomes indeed a gratifier of desires.
9. By that syllable does the threefold knowledge (the sacrifice, more particularly the Soma-sacrifice, as founded on the three Vedas) proceed. When the Adhvaryu priest gives an order, he says Om. When the Hotri priest recites, he says Om. When the Udgâtri priest sings, he says Om,
--all for the glory of that syllable. The threefold knowledge (the sacrifice) proceeds by the greatness of that syllable (the vital breaths), and by its essence (the oblations) 1.
10. Now therefore it would seem to follow, that both he who knows this (the true meaning of the syllable Om), and he who does not, perform the same sacrifice. But this is not so, for knowledge and ignorance are different. The sacrifice which a man performs with knowledge, faith, and the Upanishad is more powerful. This is the full account of the syllable Om.”

To my addled mind, a strange path opens up here: it is a path I've been treading for a while. It is Red Riding Hood's path of needles, if you will, or the path of the wiccan Marx - the path that you move forward on will, it turns out, be different from the same path you return on. To go forward is the path of creation, and it seems pretty much what we are used to – in the beginning is the word, and the word becomes earth, and earth is the place for the speaker of the word – etc. But going backward, the word is no word at all, having no language within which to be a word, and the syllable, then, becomes no syllable at all, since it aims at no sense. This is the essence of the gigantism that so frightens De Quincey in the Opium Eater.

As the Upanishad passage says, the syllable is the place of desire and gratification – which gets us back to Prajipati. In Ka, after Prajipati has created the earth and produced the first gods, this happens:

Prajapati sensed that he had a companion, a second being, dvitya, within him. It was a woman, Vac, Word. He let her out. He looked at her. Vac “rose like a continuous stream of water.” She was a column of liquid, without beginning or end. Prajipati united with her. He split her into three parts. Three sounds came out of his throat in his amorous thrust: a, ka, ho. A was the earth, ka the space between, ho the sky. With these three syllables the discontinuous stormed into existence.

peter beinart speaks

Dear sir,

Peter Beinart, nude model, here.

Since I have been making some very high energy adult entertainment on location (let me hint to my fans that, for the first time, I play CHIEF STUD – that’s right, the poolboy roles that graced such films as Operation Free Lickin’ and My Master, My Decider, are now a thing of the past – and let me also say that I have learned from my mistakes in those roles – for instance, the premature problem I had in Operation Free Lickin’ is, I admit, an embarrassment, and I apologize to my faithful viewers) – but anyway, to veer this sentence back to the straight and narrow, due to this schedule I was not aware of the many unfair hits yours truly was taking from various objectively terrorist sympathizing media persons. Apparently my factotum, who I left in D.C., signed a contract for me (aka him) to appear in Time Magazine. On the face of it, writing a column for Time seems just the opposite of what, as you know, I vowed to do last year, viz., leaving punditry for nude modeling. But, as with any vow, there is a time clause – after all, my booboo about Iraq doesn’t excuse me from battling Islamofascism wherever it rears its ugly head. I was, I admit, surprised by the Time announcement. However, after a long conference call with my fac (which was interrupted by my director’s need to have me stiffen my resolve for a scene I was playing with my co-star, Cruella, a charming Southern girl), I decided to see how this Time magazine gig works out.

As this was playing out, I glanced through the LA Times, looking for my friend Jon’s fabulous reflections. And boy, was I rewarded! He is truly sticking it to the doves today! Going through the pitiful records of one of the appeasers who have so damaged the dear, dear Democratic party, Jonathan Schell, he produces one of the great paragraphs of our time, a time crying out for the lucidity of a Harry Truman as the long long long long war continues to threaten all freedom loving people:

“Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren't enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn't have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.”

Sometimes, the doves – who I give every credit to for their intentions – obscure the important issue. The most important issue of our time was simply this: Hussein would not surrender his imaginary weapons! An America that is threatened by imaginary weapons is an America that can never be as strong, as erect, as lubricated as the America I see in my dreams. In the future, we cannot allow the stockpiling of imaginary weapons – this is something we can all agree on, whether we are Joe Lieberman in the center or Hilary Clinton on the far appeasement left.

However, Jon misses something essential, here: where are OUR imaginary weapons? Without imaginary weapons, the world will think, basically, that Uncle Sam is the Bend Over Kid (fans will recall my scene on the hood of that vintage Mustang in the film of the same name – and no, to answer the query from S.T. in Seattle, augmentation, as dear Condi would put it, was not involved).

We now have a chance to catch up in the imaginary weapons department, and this will be a test – a test of the resolve of the Democratic Party. For if we cannot build the imaginary weapons of tomorrow, that party, sadly, will show itself mired in its McGovernist yesterdays.

I remain, strong in resolve
Peter Beinart
Nude Model

through the ringer with some NYT reviewers

LI is suffering from some damned confederation of leaks and clogs in his pipes – sick to you, damned sick, and I don’t, as our blessed VP put it so teeth grittingly yesterday, have to put my little fucking pinkie in the air and see what a lot of the low use population has to say about that. Sick is sick, you fuckers (the endearing phrase Cheney uses to talk about the cowardly, Islamofascist favoring populace) . Thus, I couldn’t exactly go forward with my plan to explore Ka in relation to De Quincey, the natural next step from my last post.

So instead, a review of a review.

LI is a great fan of the early Martin Amis – the period from Money to London Fields – and is, consequently, very much thumbs down on this ill formed, ill thought out toss off of a new novel, the House of Meetings, a sort of test tube baby that resulted from the unprotected meeting of Anthony Beevor’s Berlin and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag on Amis’ bookshelf. Martin Amis has decided that he, unlike other British comic novelists of the past, is peculiarly gifted with insights into vast swathes of human history – he’s Tommie Mann, if you will, sledding down the Magic Mountain. Unfortunately, the U.K. just doesn’t create the exciting world historical stuff anymore for a novelist of his caliber, so he has to go abroad. (There is a funny dismissal of Robert Graves, of all people, in the House of Meetings - but no, no, no, I must include this in a ps - it is a funny one-off comment that says everything about the safari tour morality of not only Martin Amis, but of the whole liberal warhawery as constituted at present). The premise of House of Meetings is that this Russian expat, magically rich – it is a symptom of how bad this novel is that the striving for money, one of Amis’ great themes, is tossed aside for the scriptwriter’s given of affluence – is moved to write patronizing screeds to his step daughter, an American who apparently went to college in a Tom Wolfe novel (she is a wavering fantasy of PC gestures and, for some reason, blameable money – that she has never had to lie in her own shit in a prison camp has definitely put her lower on the gravitas scale both for her stepfather and for Amis) whilst returning, via a tour boat, to the Gulag camp in which he and his brother were held in the late 40s and early 50s. Oh, and the narrator went marching through Germany raping, vide the Beevor. This sadly loose premise, especially compared to the fine little traps Amis used to make to squeeze his characters, allows for a lot of pontification, as well as for a very weird metaphor for the ass of the woman that both the narrator and his brother are in love/lust with.

Well, this is just the kind of studly, liberal hawk stuff (against the Gulag, check; against the softhearted PC-ers, check) that some reviewers – notably, Michiko Kakutani -are going to find absolutely thrilling. But the cover review of the novel in the Sunday NYT by Liesl Schillinger has to be one of the worst reviews I’ve read there in years. Already, the paper has published the following correction:

“The cover review in the Book Review today, about Martin Amis’s novel “House of Meetings,” misstates the relationship between the unnamed narrator and Venus, the young woman he addresses throughout. She is his stepdaughter, not his daughter.”

Now, since one of the few episodes set in that part of the narrator’s life in which he becomes rich in America is explicitly about Venus choosing to stay with the narrator, it is a measure of Schillinger’s shall we say hit and run way of reading the novel that this passes her by. Not that she doesn’t pretty much broadcast that she is a woman who skips a lot in novels, as for instance in this astonishing paragraph:

“Writers seeking to capture the nature of Russia in one take have often favored grand oppositional schemes: “Crime and Punishment”; “War and Peace”; or, in the case of Woody Allen, “Love and Death.” It goes without saying that there’s more punishment than crime in Dostoyevsky’s novel; and a guilty secret of Russian bookworms is that many of them skim or skip the war parts of Tolstoy’s classic, focusing on the romantic sections devoted to peace. But “House of Meetings” is primarily, obsessively, occupied with the gulag and lacks a counterweight, at the expense of the usual teeter-tottering Amis brio. A woman named Zoya masquerades as a love interest. Luscious, lurching, swivel-hipped and Jewish, she is the wife of the narrator’s brother, Lev.”

Right, skipping those war scenes is just what Russian bookworms are all about – just as readers of Hamlet often skip the tawdry bits about revenge and shit to concentrate on whether Ophelia and the Prince are going to make it, or whether they’ll have to break up, which would be such a bummer for Ophelia.

I have, maliciously, quoted the nadir paragraph of Schillinger’s review, but the rest is equally incoherent. She seems to have decided, having skipped the gross parts in House of Meetings, to free associate about Russian literature in lieu of, like, actually reviewing House of Meetings. If she couldn’t take Prince Andrei loosing consciousness on the battlefield of Austerlitz, it is unlikely she is going to read about lice with any happiness. I have never read a review that made me suspect more that the author reached page 30, went to the middle of the book, and then took a look at the last ten pages. And this is a short book.

I will give Schillinger this – she never commits blurb language. Kakatuni’s first graf about the novel ends like this: “a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.”

This is a bullet train of a sentence – one that crashed as it hit the heart of darkness that was the Soviet Gulag, and out of which passengers leaped as it was going off the track, explosions racking the lead train, balls of fire casting shadows over Nyt readers trying desperately to avoid the harrowing clichés ahead as they tumbled into the outer darkness.

ps - about the Robert Graves comment. Here it is. Remember, our narrator has served in the Soviet army and spent a decade in a slave labor camp:

... I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the first World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Meditteranean. I spent time above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.

The balance between the pendantic precision accorded to Graves name - here's a wanking toff, look at that von Ranke, will ya - and the imprecision of what Graves did - he actually went to Majorca in the twenties after spending a very stormy time in Britain that ended with his attempted suicide, so it wasn't exactly that he took a cruise boat tour - and of course he fled Majorca in the end because of a little thing called the Spanish Civil War - is indicative of Amis' odd notion that, deep from within the bright heart of his affluence, he is more of a he-man, really, than this Graves chap, and all of those earlier generations that had no appreciation for the really heroic gestures - except perhaps George Orwell, one should never forget him: we are all Orwells today! A little trench warfare and that sissy Graves has to go to Majorca!

For connoisseurs of the ridiculous, Amis' career since he discovered the Gulag, what was it, in 1998, offers a case study that just keeps on giving. Compared to Graves life of luxury in the trenches, one can only see Amis' agonizing encounter with the Gulag in book after book as a sort of martyrdom, much like Joan of Arc's, except with better lunches in between.

The House of Meetings, by the way, is packed with these invidious comparisons between the decadent West, full of Gulagofascist supporters, and the horrors, absolute horrors, gone through by the narrator. Usually one would say - well, the narrator is not to be identified with Martin Amis, the author - but these off the cuff remarks are so consistent with the remarks Martin Amis, the author, likes to make in newspaper articles and so inconsistent with what we imagine the narrator saying (for instance, about, of all people, Robert Graves) - that we have good reason to conflate the two.

chasse aux geants

The first chapter of the Chuang-Tzu consists of a comparison between the giant and the small, beginning with the famed fish, K’un:

“IN THE NORTHERN DARKNESS there is a fish and his name is K'un.1 The K'un is so huge I don't know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P'eng. The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move,2 this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven. (Burton Watson translation)

Against the wonder of the P’eng is set the laughter of the dove and the cicada:

The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, "When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don't make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!

The chapter then proceeds through other giant/small contrasts in the style peculiar to it – each passage being at once unlinked from the proceeding one and yet bearing the distinct resemblance that one hand of cards bears to another. So giant and small face off against each other in wisdom, in status, in miraculous powers. The final contrast is between Hui Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Hui Tzu, given giant gourd seeds, plants and grows them, but the gourds are too big, so he smashes them Chuang Tzu laughs at this, saying that Hui Tzu, seems to be in thrall to the outward show of the gourds only: “Now you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why didn't you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!"

So: what is the Daoist attitude towards the giant – are we looking at things from the perspective of the P’eng or the cicada? Surely Chuang Tzu’s tone of mockery is supposed to release us from the first impression of the giant – the impression of sheer wonder. That moment emerges in the early modern era in Europe as a sly maneuver to allow the writer to attack wonder itself , the glue that officially kept the sacred system together. Rabelais’ mock giants, the windmills that Don Quixote attacks, thinking that they are giants – this is about, in one sense, chasing the giants from the culture. Giordano Bruno uses the same mock heroic means in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. In the Ash Wednesday colloquy, Nolan (Bruno himself) is extolled in terms that could plug into the Chuang Tzu:

“Now here is he who has pierced the air, penetrated the sky, toured the realm of stars, traversed the boundaries of the world, dissipated the fictitious walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and whatever else might have been attached to these by the devices of vain mathematicians and by the blind vision of popular philosophers. Thus aided by the fullness of sense and reason, lie opened with the key of most industrious inquiry those enclosures of truth that can be opened to us at all, by presenting naked the shrouded and veiled nature; he gave eyes to moles, illumined the blind who cannot fix their eyes and admire their own images in so many mirrors which surround them from every side. He untied the tongue of the mute who do not know [how to] and did not dare to express their intricate sentiments. He restored strength to the lame who were unable to make that progress in spirit which the ignoble and dissolvable compound [body] cannot make. He provided them with no less a presence [vantage point] than if they were the very inhabitants of the sun, of the moon, and of other nomadic [wandering] stars [planets]. He showed how similar or dissimilar, greater or worse [smaller] are those bodies [stars, planets) which we see afar, compared with that [earth] which is right here and to which we are united. And he opened their eyes to see this deity, this mother of ours, which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, [33. This animistic world view precedes a slightly veiled affirmation of pantheism.] let alone the trash of all bodily substances.”

The moment of mockery, of the exorcism of the giants, gets its juice, its scoffing power, from the practical, from the peasant’s p.o.v. – it is, after all, through Sancho Panza that we know the giants are windmills in Don Quixote. (Although the voice of the trope starts singing in my head as I write this: aren't peasants notoriously credulous? Aren't these images out of tune? - ah, the malicious trope that tricks my every claim with a counter-claim!) However, it would be a retarded enlightenment indeed that remained frozen in the moment of mockery. The movement, as in the quote from Bruno above, is to another and more abstract view. In the Chuang Tzu, the scale by which the K’un is gigantic and the dove is small is itself neither gigantic nor small. The scale has no size. In Bruno, the attack on the giants is done in the name of a notion of infinity with which Bruno’s name is still associated. When Newton applies the laws of motion on earth to the heavenly bodies, his idea is related to this same notion of a scale of no size – of a force. Newton famously wrote that he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants – showing that he had learned something that would make him free from the reproach Chuang Tzu gives to Hui Tzu: "You certainly are dense when it comes to using big things!” In fact, there is a certain slyness to Newton’s phrase – he does not, as is usual with the phrase (tracked through every maze by Robert Merton in his book) call himself a dwarf – his own stature is, as it were, for the observer to determine.

LI is down with these two moments in the chasse aux geants – we can understand – or, more accurately, we feel no resistance to - the Dao, here. But there is a whole other dimension of the gigantic that we don’t understand at all. Lately, we’ve been thinking about this because we’ve been reading Roberto Callosso’s Ka. In Ka, Callasso retells the stories of the Indian sacred books – the Rg Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, etc. Being incredibly ignorant of these basic texts, we have been trying to catch up – you know, the old struggle for minimum cultural literacy. Reading Ka has been an uncomfortably dreamlike experience – the dream divided between nightmare and wet dream, the powers that rule over the inveterate masturbator’s nocturnal life. We will have more to say about this in our next post.

The Economist supports President Backbone for another Keegan

The Economist is made of stern stuff. Not for them the cotton candy allurement of extraction from that Middle Eastern principality which we were all hopeful, two years ago, would follow General Pinochet’s path to privatization and prosperity. Instead, they are throwing their muscularity behind President Backbone:

America and its allies have failed in Iraq. George Bush is right to hold out against an even bigger failure

GEORGE BUSH has always been a gambler but this is his most audacious bet yet. Most Americans now believe that America has lost the war in Iraq. Only last month the Baker-Hamilton group, a bipartisan group of wise men (and one wise woman) told Congress that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating”. It recommended a managed withdrawal, dangling the prospect of the bulk of America's combat troops pulling out in early 2008. This week Mr Bush rejected that advice. He intends to defy world opinion, American opinion, congressional opinion, much military opinion and even the advice of many members of his own Republican Party by reinforcing rather than reducing America's effort in Iraq. Some will call this reckless. Some will say the president is in denial. We don't admire Mr Bush, but on this we think he is right.”

And what is he right about? Well, the Economist, right out of the box, starts substituting its own description of what President B. proposed for what President B. proposed. This isn’t unusual – rarely has a war been defended so ardently by systematically misdescribing not only its aims, but its tactics, its motives, and – most importantly – the people most effected by it. This is what the Economist thinks the plan is:

Mr Bush is investing much hope in a plan, known as “the surge”, to secure the mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad by injecting “more than 20,000” additional American troops on top of the 130,000 or so already in the country.

Now, the key word here is “mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad.” That description could mean one of two things – it could designate the subset of neighborhoods that are mixed Sunni-Shia, or it could designate the whole of Baghdad. In the latter case, it would be unnecessary – and yet, the only way that the description fits the proposal is if the latter designation is the correct one.
The lack of economy in the language betrays the anxiety of the writer. In actual fact, what is happening is a neighborhood by neighborhood attempt to clean the Sunni out of Baghdad. The cleansing is exactly what the Shia government – the Dawa government – of Maliki has been doing faithfully. To “secure” those neighborhoods, in conjunction with Maliki, is to ethnically cleanse them. In effect, President Backbone is proposing something parallel to adopting, say, Milosovic’s plan for Sarajevo.

However, because the White House favors being unclear about its own motives – looking in its heart all of the time, instead of watching what its brain does – this isn’t the announced American policy. There’s enough elbow room to pretend, in fact, that the effect is just going to be an accidental consequence of the act.

Now, as is the custom for the belligeranti, arguing for a program that has little chance of success and a much greater chance of failure requires, first, pretending to consider the one the one hands and the on the other hands. The Economist gets through this exercise in propaganda briskly:

It is by no means certain that the surge will succeed. The Americans have tried before to impose order on Baghdad, only for violence to flare again as soon as the troops move on (see pages 22-24). Those who say this is too little, too late, may be proved right. Sectarian hatreds have deepened since that referendum of 2005, as the wildly differing reactions of Shias and Sunnis to the hanging of Saddam Hussein demonstrated. Even with Iraqi helpers, American soldiers may not be welcomed in Baghdad's neighbourhoods now that Iraqis have turned for protection to their local militias. According to one survey last September, 61% of Iraqis approve of attacking coalition forces. It may be that by barging into Baghdad's neighbourhoods, and staying there this time, the Americans will merely stoke resistance and take (and inflict) more casualties.
In short, the surge may fail. But the surge is not the most significant part of Mr Bush's speech of January 10th. If this particular plan fails, a new one will be formulated. Far more significant is the strategic message that in spite of the Baker-Hamilton report, and notwithstanding the growing pressure from public opinion and a Democrat-controlled Congress, this president will not in his remaining two years concede defeat and abandon Iraq to its fate. And this, whether it is motivated by obstinacy, denial or a sober calculation of the strategic stakes in Iraq, is a good thing.”

One could make the argument here made about many things. For instance: “It is by no means certain that a perpetual motion machine will succeed.” Or: “It is by no means certain that a man jumping off a cliff could, by flapping his arms, fly safely over to the cliff facing him.” Or: “It is by no means certain that I could throw a rock that would fly all the way up and hit the moon.” The ass covering here is perfunctory. The Economist can’t really discuss the conditions that would give us a sense of whether the escalation would work or not because they have muddied the description of what the escalation is supposed to do from the very beginning. The continual pretence that Iraq is a tabula rasa, that the government in Iraq has left no record and thus is infinitely malleable, that the people of Iraq have not expressed, in polls and, more importantly, in supporting militias and insurgents, their sense that the occupation should be over, is the necessary precondition to continued failure. To discuss these things would be to strip away the pretence that the Iraq war has anything to do with democracy. It would lay bare the cost of the war both for the occupiers (delaying endlessly the reality that the U.S. has lost its Cold War hegemony in the Middle East and is going to have to negotiate in that system from a lower status) and for the occupied (the cost here has a simple name in the courts: it is called first degree murder).

A week ago, LI was surprised to read some eminent sense from Chalabi frontman, Jim Hoagland, in the Washington Post. Instead of continuing the campaign of crushing whoever, Hoagland proposed that the U.S. policy in Iraq should work, firstly, towards a ceasefire.

“… call a one-month halt to U.S. offensive actions -- a truce, in effect -- and encourage Iraqis to do the same. This would facilitate the holding of a peace conference in Baghdad, in which blood-stained radicals such as Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Hadith al-Dari, the inflammatory voice of Sunni insurgents, would be asked to participate.”

The second point has to do with Iran – doing exactly the opposite of the slimy President Backbone’s policy of weasely aggression:
“Bush's speech should recognize that Iran has legitimate interests in security in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region, and he should pledge that the United States will not use Iraq as a springboard for action against the Iranian regime.
These implicit security guarantees -- if met by a proper response from Iran -- could be the basis for a broad U.S.-Iranian dialogue and an eventual regional conference to endorse and implement the work of the Baghdad conference.”
Actually, to this point should be added that the U.S. should, over the last month, have been making much of the elections in Iran, which repudiated the President and the various hardliners. Instead, the election has been greeted with zip – because it occurred in the great American blindspot, which pretends that Iran is a tyranny run by mad mullahs. Iran is definitely run by too many mullahs, but then again … so is Iraq. And so is Saudi Arabia.
Now, LI is aware of the fact that Hoagland’s proposal wishes away President Backbone. The point of discussing alternatives like this is simply to start filling in the space of opposition to the continued war criminal policy of the White House krewe. Congress is beginning to assert itself. Of course, one of the things that should be done – just to start the discussion – is calling the Iranian Study group before a committee. This should be done solely to amuse us all with Bush’s oedipal rage that those people – his daddy’s friends – are back in D.C. President Backbone, while a terrible president, is at least amusing when he gets into one of his oedipal rages, and what else is the putz for but to make us laugh at him?
But the other thing calling the ISG would do would be to start loosening the lock of the administration on the policy choices before us in Iraq. At the moment, they have the same binary form as the power on the TV clicker – on and off, stay or go. Our notion is that the policy choices are more like the channels on that clicker –potentially different shows. One channel is off the air – the channel formed around every reason and goal that the U.S. was proclaiming in 2003. Even the Economist knows this, underneath the irrationality of its defense of the escalation. The American soldiers and the Iraqis are to be murdered in defense of the power relations that keep such as the editors of the Economist in bar tabs and speech fees.

Bush's speech: the expected and the unexpected

Everybody is a little let down by the Bush speech. Before the speech, White House aides were saying that Bush was going to speak against a background of Sister Machine Gun singing Hole in the Ground:

“Cut down by the look in your eyes
Never satisfied by your goddamn lies
There's nowhere left for me to go
Living in a river of sin
Never thinking about the shit I'm swimming in
Don't think I'm ever coming home

There's a hole in the ground
There's a hole in the sky
And there's no deeper place where all the pigs can die”

In the event, Bush couldn’t find Jenna’s CD. So the speech zeroed out as the dull cadences of Bush on the serious channel convinced many that he'd gotten into Laura's valium. The last couple minutes caught some off guard, though, when the Rebel in Chief put on his Barbara Bush wig and just sat there, silently, while a voiceover played. According to my notes, it went:

“They're probably watching me. Well,
let them. Let them see what kind of
a person I am.
(A pause, as the fly
lights on George's
hand)
I'm not going to swat that fly. I
hope they are watching. They'll see...
they'll see... and they'll know...
and they'll say... 'why, she wouldn't
even harm a fly...'

George continues to gaze ahead into nothing.




According to a poll taken afterwards among Republican voters, Bush is still so popular that he is the model for the candidate they want in 2008. They want the son of a billionaire who is spectacularly unsuccessful at business, pulled out of several jams by his daddy’s friends, given a sweetheart deal on a sports franchise, and leveraged into a meaningless public office the only power of which is to pardon capital offenses or not. If such a person can’t be found, 70% of GOP voters said they’d be willing to consider one of the members of the Billionaire Boys Club, whose parole could be speeded up just in time for the 2008 election.

ps - in a significant development on the brownnoser front, The Corner has come up with a label for our Churchill that will now officially replace Rebel-in-Chief. This is from the sparkling mind of Larry Kudlow, the man who reported, on the basis of the NYSE runup in October, a stunning sweep by the Republican party:

"President Bush—aka President Backbone—may be fighting an uphill battle in Iraq, but he is sure fighting."

Thus, the heirs of Burke dig the old man up and pee in his skull's gaping mouth! Conservatism today - as hot as a Fox Reality Show!