goodbye molly ivins

Well, this year is starting out with a lot of deaths.
Molly Ivins just died.

I wasn’t going to put up any comment. I looked around and found plenty of comments on plenty of blogs already. But then a friend emailed me and reminded me of Ivins stand against the first Gulf War, retrospective support for which has become a sort of Rush ritual – the warmongers love the idea that anybody who is ‘serious’ in D.C. has to ritually praise the wonderful First Gulf War.

Molly Ivins was always part of the “war sucks” club. God bless her. The first time I saw her was, as my friend reminded me, in a chapel at U.T. in 1991. Apparently my friend and I even got on television at that event – but this had gone down the memory hole for yours truly. Ivins gave not only a rousing speech, but the right kind of speech against the upcoming Kuwait War. It was the kind of speech that you hardly hear anymore – it got to the point – fuck that war – it was inclusive – whether you are a Rotarian or a Young Socialist, this war is not for you - and it called on people to do something to show disgust when the war broke out. At least a thousand did, as I remember. We marched on the Capital and lay down in the rotunda. Unimaginable now, as we would be swept up as so many terrorists. Well, the nation that was back then has died, as we know, and out of it has hatched this monstrous product of fats and aggression that I can no longer recognize.

She was right about that war. Often, I didn’t like the Texas act, and often, I thought she was carried away by one of the subsidiary madnesses of this time, thinking that any political party – in Ivins’ case, the Dems - is going to embody anything but its own greed to survive. But her instinct, which was to push outside of the party structure, and not build your political life around voting, any more than you would build your economic life around buying a lottery ticket – was eminently sound. I always liked Molly Ivins. Last time I saw her was, what three years ago? It was at a party for Robert Bryce at Schultz’s, which has been the Texas Observer bar since forever – see Bill Brammer’s The Gay Place for details.

Oh fuck. Ivins fought well, carried a flame for existential liberty as the culture in this country got darker and sicker, and she died well. There is nothing more to say.

Michael Pollan, again

Being the sort of guy who plunges, headfirst, into the latest fashion, LI pondered two options, this week. We could start an exploratory committee to see about running for president (with the secret aim, of course, of being picked as VP by the candidate whose inevitability, at the moment, is crushing, Senator Dodd); or we could start reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

We crossed off the first option, because we are not going to give up shooting heroin just to pass that nasty drug test they give you to become the Libertarians for War candidate. Fuck that. And it is so sad, since the libertarians for war wanted to combine a muscular liberal approach to foreign policy with small government at home that would concentrate on destroying the scourge of drugs and cutting taxes for the most productive. So we opted for the second. Happily, Independent People is not just recommended by Jonathan Franzen and flaunted around by Columbia U. creative writing students, but is absolutely worth reading…

Which is connected, believe it or not, to our last post, about the excellent essay by Michael Pollan on the replacement of food by nutrition, the laboratory spawn of the agribusiness-chemical business, and its numerous malign side effects.

In Independent People, a homesteader, Bjartur, who has finally acquired land and had built a turf house and looks forward to becoming a debt free sheepowner, marries a woman named Rosa from the village of Utirauthsmyri and takes her to the little piece of independence he’s carved out of the world, much to her dawning horror. The first night is ill omened – Rosa finds out that Bjartur is a doubter, and refuses to even placate the local demon, whereas Bjartur finds out that Rosa has slept with other men (which, in all probability, is false – but she has had her crushes on other men). But Rosa’s ordeal of joylessness seems to increase day by day as, day by day, Bjartur seems content for them to subsist on dried catfish, oatmeal, and coffee. Plenty of sugar, though.

Then one day this dialogue ensues:
“Bjatur,” she said after a short silence, “I’d love some meat.”
“Meat?” he asked, astonished. “Meat in the height of summer?”
“My mouth waters every time I look at a sheep.”
“Waters?” he repeated. “Why, it must be water-brash.”
“That salt catfish of yours isn’t fit to offer to a dog.”

Rosa proceeds to truly astonish Bjatur by saying that she wants milk too. She dreams of milk. And tops it off here:

“Can we possibly buy a cow, Bjatur?”
“A cow?” he repeated in gaping astonishment. “A cow?”

This couple live, I would guess from internal references, late in the nineteenth century. So often the story of conjugal misery centers on money, or sex – and ignores food. Food, however, can be a powerful carrier of joylessness. The most irritating thing about second rate magical realism is the way food becomes empowerment – feminist empowerment, no less. That is a decorator magazine’s lie. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, (I think – or was this in Shame?) contained a much more powerful truth in the person of an aunt in a household who curses the household with her food – every dish holds a curse. Although the conversations between Rosa and Bjatur are funny, we all know that domestic life for women in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth, or the seventeenth – in China, in France, in England, in Iceland, in Kansas, etc., etc. – was often symbolized by an expertise in making food that the women personally despised. There’s an interesting story to be written about the relationship between male taste and female cooking, and it isn’t just the happy story of peasant bacchanals, that’s for damn sure. One has the impression from, say, Willa Cather novels that the joy of growing old for a woman among the sod huts of Kansas is being able to make, once in a while, food that she actually wants to eat – although one suspects that the joy of the taste has so long been extinguished by its omission from the signals sent each day from the tongue that the taste, in truth, disappoints.

I can sympathize with both Rosa and Bjatur. An ex lover of mine once accused me of being anorexic, and though, as a matter of fact, she was wrong, her exaggeration did hit on certain salient LI features. It is true that, more often than I care to admit, the whole notion of food disgusts me in the very pit of my stomach, and that visiting the standard grocery store often fills me with great, chainclanking boredom. A grocery store is my idea of karma – where else do we commune with the spirits of the dead as visually and viscerally as in a grocery store? I would be a much happier guy if I could eat like a sage – say three times a week, broth and French bread. But I am dragged by the habits of my mouth to hamburgers and fried chicken – and so, automatically defined as a denizen of my time.

Ezra Klein, in his post on Pollan, quotes a passage in the NYT Mag essay that ends like this:

“Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery.”

Then Klein makes this transitions to a passage in the Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The short version of this is that we've taken an animal accustomed to feeding on forage and forced it to digest grain. Corn, after all, is cheaper, more plentiful, more engineerable, less land-intensive, and more subsidized than grass. But cows haven't evolved to eat corn. And so we drug 'em.”

Here we have stumbled upon what looks like a disconnected giant – a whole system, if we want to look at it. But Klein’s conclusion is that we, as consumers, should buy more grass fed beef. That’s admirable, but there is a certain… inadequacy to it. The misfit liberal in me wants to go back to the whole corn/land-intensity issue and ask a few questions about the basic system – a system that, I should say, extends through capitalism and communism. A system of production. Not a malign system – one shouldn’t be nostalgic for Rosa’s dilemma, the way things were in the pre-industrial agricultural days, for her joylessness could be multiplied by millions of instances - but one that, having provided the Rosas and the Bjaltur’s with all the Big Macs they can stand, is slowly but surely drowning in its social costs.

Oh, dear. I’ll never cover this in one post. Shit. Well, Pollan’s article, which I haven’t even touched on, deserves another post.

Misfit liberalism

If LI is anything, we are that crash dummy that is continually being tossed around Lefty sites, the liberal. The sissified liberal, unable to put our shoulder to the wheel and overthrow the capitalist system in one giant revolutionary push. This is true. Our negative reason for this balky liberalism is that we don’t think the revolution would do anything but continue the treadmill of production in place. We don’t think it would take apart the war culture, but simply embody it again, another of the endless avatars. On the positive side, we think the liberal notion of encouraging a profit system, while at the same time putting two loaded pistols to its head at all time – militant labor, and a state that can exert some countervailing pressure to lessen the grosser features of the profit system in spite of its natural inclination to support capital – is the best of all methods to produce affluence. It is the Misfit method – named after the character in the Flannery O’Connor story – and if we were going to slap a little label on our politics, it would certainly be misfit liberalism.

Because it is a system of checks and balances, however, liberalism can’t really operate by the blind application of abstract principles. It can and should encourage that degree of equality, for instance, which forestalls and –hopefully – extinguishes the billionaire, while at the same time not aiming for an absolute equality that would abolish the profit motive.

Misfit liberalism, like all liberalisms, does suffer from a penchant to systems blindness. It is why Marx is still indispensable to the liberal – Marx did see systematically and whole. Unfortunately, in the Reagan era (which we still live in), liberalism went whoring after strange gods – an insane faith in the marketplace, for example, an inability to understand the crucial role of organized labor, and an inability to defend, on political grounds, common sense things, like – a really trivial point - encouraging the state to expropriate a lion’s share of the enormous surplus of wealth seized by the top one percent of the population. Alas, these common sense notions – known even to the well known, muscular liberal, girl scout cookie seller cannibal Harry Truman – are now heresies even among media liberals, a group who operate, generally, to pimp for the biases of the governing class. They are the too fit liberals.

But – to get to the nubby little point of this post – one of the root perversions of Reaganism is the infusion of methodological individualism into every good soul. The bias here is subtle. I thought about this reading a very good post written by Ezra Klein today about the brilliant NYT Magazine piece by Michael Pollan – and knowing my readers, they have already scarfed down the Pollan essay and gone, God fucking damn, I wish I had written that!

Klein draws on Pollan’s book to make several astute remarks. But we detect, here, a bit of that old systems blindness. About which we will comment in our next post.

the disconnected giant

In the chapter on the "metaphysics of the beautiful and aesthetics" in the second volume of the Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer discusses history. In 1851, when the essays came out, Schopenhauer's stance against the philosophical importance of history made him seem, pleasingly, like some archaic remnant of the eighteenth century. He was willing to suffer this reputation, and even enlarge on it. History at this time is, of course, associated with Hegel, and even if Hegel did not recognize, in Schopenhauer, his unmasker and foe, Schopenhauer definitely took Hegel as the touchstone of what Leon Daudet later labelled "the stupid 19th century" - the stupidity being, at its very beastly heart, the idea that there was a dynamic axis to history.

In the essay on history, Schopenhauer casts himself as a moralist, an intemporal observer, a user of classical exempla. And he comes up with this image:

He who, like myself, cannot help seeing in all history the same thing over and over again, just as every turn of a kaleidoscope continually reveals the same things, but in different combinations, will not be able to share all this passionate interest; nor, however, will he censure it.


According to the toy historian Paul Hidebrandt, the kaleidoscope, which was invented by the Scottish scientist David Brewster in 1817, aroused “such enthusiasm among all social circles that the victory of the kaleidoscope over the Chinese puzzle or tangram game was even celebrated in Paris with an engraving: the goddess Kaleidoskopia, with her emblems, a tube and a pattern sheet, stands on a Chinese person crawling on the earth, before whom lies his board game on the ground.” However, supposedly the Chinese became enamored of the ‘tube of ten thousand flowers” themselves, and began to manufacture them en masse.

Borges notes Schopenhauer’s kaleidoscope comparison in "the Wall and the Books" in Other Inquisitions, and writes of it: “For if the world is the dream of Someone, if there is Someone who is dreaming us now and who dreams the history of the universe (that is the doctrine of the idealists), then the annihilation of religions and the arts, the general burning of libraries, does not matter much more than does the destruction of the trappings of a dream. The Mind that dreamed them once will dream them again; as long as the Mind continues to dream, nothing will be lost…”

A quick search through a couple of Schopenhauer biographies has not brought me any information on when the great man collided with the kaleidoscope. But it would be easy to believe that he saw one early on, perhaps in 1817, because it was at that time that Schopenhauer was most closely involved with Goethe's optical work. Goethe was a friend of Schopenhauer’s always fearsome mother, Johanna, and Johanna wanted her son to get into Goethe’s good graces. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer deviated from the anti-Newtonian program on color laid down by Goethe – he rationalized it into a system having to do with the sensitivity of the retina. Goethe was particularly infuriated that Schopenhauer betrayed him on the issue of “white” – which, as Newton said, contained all colors, and which, according to Goethe, did no such thing.

A stronger metaphor using another children’s toy is employed by Lorenz Oken. I image Schopenhauer knew of it. Oken is writing in 1805, before the kaleidoscope. This is from his Physiophilosophy:

“All things are created in time; for time is the totality of Singulars. Time is no stationary quantity, which is always changing itself into something new during its progressive flux. It is not a continous stream, but a repetition of one and the same act, namely, the primary act, like as it were to a rolling ball, which constantly returns upon itself. There is no endless, still less an eternal thing; for things are only positions of time. Time itself is, however, only repetition…”

Two children’s toys, two similar points about time - except that Oken’s is a more radical stance. Schopenhauer was stuck, due to his system, with defending some version of Kant’s notion of the aprioris of experience. Myself, what I find interesting here is the connection between seriality and eternal repetition. The notion of a repetition that creates a difference connects Schopenhauer and Oken to a passage in De Quincey that you would not normally put in this association. It comes in the section of the Opium Eater entitled The Pains of Opium. The text wavers between a description of the hallucinatory pains of opium and a lingering repetition of them, arousing the suspicion that pain and pleasure melt into each other in ways that are going to elude classification.

“Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s, Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further and you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.”

When I started this thread, last week, I was trying to distinguish two types of giants. One type, as I said, was chased from Europe by a mode of thought not that different from the very different giantkilling promoted by the Daoists in China. This was the homogenous giant. There is a different type of giant, though – Don Quixote engages a premonition of him in the battle against the windmill, the romantics filled the city of the dreadful night with him, and he exists – if I, a total amateur, can rely on the construction of Indian myths in Roberto Calasso’s Ka - in depths in the Indian sacred books. This is the disconnected giant – he exists in the amniotic depths, precedes contradiction itself, and has that power of endless growth and self-reproduction that leads us, like our tutelary nightmare, through the money economy – for in my opinion, this is what the money economy is all about, its cosmological significance. for in my opinion, this is what the money economy is all about, its cosmological significance. And that, I'll grant you my lovelies, is not be the most obvious of connections. I should draw it out next - the relation of these passages to the nests within nests in Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money. Ooh, and then how this is like the ball, the kaleidoscope, the hallucinatory image of Piranesi multiplying, and the first man, Prajapati, who was made by the gods from seven men, impregnated the waters and was born out of the golden egg produced by the waters, and then created the Gods – for of course, in the first moment, the law of contradiction cannot apply, else the law would precede itself.

O, the amniotic tangle of it all, the amniotic tangle, and me at the bottom of the world doing a crossword puzzle.

A decent future

Brother see we are one in the same
And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains fell out through your teeth
Push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see
Don't you take this away - Neutral Milk Hotel

“I met Haifa and her husband, Hassan, both teachers, in a driveway in western Baghdad. They had just found the body of their 12-year-old son, who had been kidnapped and brutally killed, and were frantic with grief. They finally decided to leave Iraq, but its violence tormented them to the end. They paid a man to drive them to Jordan, but he was working with Sunni militants in western Iraq, and pointed out Hassan, a Shiite, to a Sunni gang that stopped the car. Over the next several hours, Haifa waved a tiny Koran at men in masks, pleading for her husband’s release, her two remaining children in tow.

Hassan, meanwhile, knelt in a small room, his hands behind his back. His captors shot a man next to him in the neck. Haifa, a Sunni, eventually prevailed on them to let him go. The family returned to Baghdad, then borrowed money to fly to Jordan.” –
It Has Unraveled So Quickly - NYT, January 28, 2007

“The auctioning off of Iraq began in the summer of 2003 in a packed conference room at the Grand Hyatt in Amman, Jordan. More than 300 executives had gathered from around the world to vie for a piece of one natural resource Saddam Hussein never managed to exploit—the nation's cellular phone frequencies. With less than 4 percent of Iraqis connected to a phone, the open spectrum could earn billions of dollars for the eager executives working the room. Conference organizers tried to keep everyone focused on the prize. "Iraq needs a mobile communications system and it needs it now," stressed Jim Davies, a British expert with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) who was leading the effort. "We want quick results." – Mother Jones, September/October 2004, Crossing the Line

“In the bombings in Baghdad on Thursday, a roadside bomb that exploded about 7:30 a.m. near the mosque in the Cairo neighborhood killed three people and wounded 16 others, the Interior Ministry official said. About 9:30 a.m., a suicide car bomber detonated a bomb near police vehicles whose tanks were being filled at a gas station in the Karrada district, killing 10 people -- some of them police officers -- and wounding 17, the official said.

At 10:45 a.m., two more people were killed and 23 wounded when a second suicide car bomber exploded a bomb in the Bab al Sharji district, a mile north of the gas station, near the Interior Ministry's headquarters. At 3:30 p.m., a third suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle in the Kadisiya neighborhood near a police convoy, wounding seven police commandos, the Interior Ministry official said. At 7:15 p.m., a roadside bomb killed a woman and wounded 13 others in the Amil district. “– NYT, 8 Sept., 2006

“Even as the bombs fell over Baghdad, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose district includes many Qualcomm employees, had tried to wrap his favored company in the flag. He denounced the cellular system used by Iraq's neighbors as "an outdated French standard," and proposed a law that would effectively mandate Qualcomm on Iraq. "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," Issa wrote in a March 26, 2003, letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. – Crossing the Line

“At the conference in Amman, CPA officials promised an apolitical selection process that would accept any workable technology. …. On October 6, Iraq's new minister of communications, Haider al-Abadi, announced the winners—two Kuwaiti firms and one Egyptian company. Not one of them used the Qualcomm standard.

If any officials in Baghdad or Washington thought such a decision would be the end of Qualcomm's quest, the next six months would prove them wrong. Like dozens of American corporations looking to influence U.S. policy—shaping everything from the banking and insurance markets to foreign-investment rules—Qualcomm, Lucent, Samsung, and their partners would only expand their efforts and broaden their reach into the CPA. With the guidance of a deputy undersecretary of Defense, John Shaw, this effort became one of the most brazen lobbying campaigns of the postwar reconstruction, one that has brought Shaw under investigation for potentially breaking federal ethics rules.” – Crossing the Line

“The morgue stank of bodies. Visitors burned paper and wood in the parking lot to mask the smell. The reception area was full with 40 Iraqis, mostly women, standing and sitting on the ground, waiting to look at bodies and photographs of bodies.

Around 11 a.m., three pickup trucks arrived with a total of at least eight bodies. Morgue workers and police officers put them in body bags and took them inside.

Officials in Baghdad receive 10 to 20 bodies a day, mostly victims of killings by Sunni and Shiite militias, American officials said.” – NYT, 5 July, 2006

“Deputy Undersecretary Shaw, an old Republican hand who had served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses, quickly became the point man for the initiative to bring CDMA to Iraq. Shaw and other officials in the Pentagon and Congress reasoned that establishing CDMA in the Middle East would be possible if they could find a way for Qualcomm and its partners to offer cellular service in Iraq under the rubric of the police and fire communications system that the CPA planned to purchase for the Iraqis. "The CDMA system could then morph into a commercial service with our having total control over it," Shaw wrote in a November email to a Coalition adviser in Baghdad.

To dodge contracting rules that prevent officials such as himself from cherry-picking favored companies, Shaw proposed using Nana Pacific, which is exempt from many contracting laws because it is an Alaska Native American-owned business. – Crossing the Line

“The new Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, said Wednesday that more than 50 bodies had been discovered in the Tigris River and suggested that they were victims of a mass kidnapping south of Baghdad that other Iraqi officials had insisted was a hoax just three days before. – NYT, April 20, 2005

“... Deputy Undersecretary Shaw appeared to have reasons for pushing the plan that went beyond the interests of the Iraqi people … In fact, his intervention on behalf of the Qualcomm consortium, with whose lobbyists and investors he had close ties, has led the Defense Department's inspector general to begin an investigation into his activities.

One of those lobbyists, Don De Marino, was a close friend and former deputy of Shaw from the Commerce Department during the early 1990s. Early this year, Shaw helped appoint De Marino to an official Defense Department assessment mission to Baghdad on behalf of Rumsfeld. Although De Marino had recently been a registered lobbyist of the Qualcomm consortium, he was given access to the CPA telecommunications office. "He spent hours in our office just being our buddy. Yucking it up," said a former adviser to the ministry, who added that no one there knew that De Marino, who works with the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, was also a member of the board of directors of the Qualcomm consortium, and had helped the group to investigate the backgrounds of the winning cellular companies in Iraq.” – Crossing the Line

“In one of the most brazen kidnappings in recent memory in Iraq, about 60 masked gunmen wearing government-style camouflage uniforms stormed a meeting here of the country's top sports administrators on Saturday, abducting more than 30 people, including the president of the National Olympic Committee of Iraq, the authorities said. – July 16, 2006 NYT

“In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Shaw dismissed claims that such mixing of friendship and business was improper. "Hey, we won the war," said Shaw, who, like De Marino and Qualcomm officials, declined to comment for this story. "Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can, that can then become the dominant standard in the region?" – Crossing the Line

How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War – headline, NYT, May 22, 2006

“In March, this dispute reached a critical turning point when Sudnick and other advisers in Baghdad discovered that Nana Pacific had added language to a contract for a pilot first-responder program that would allow such competition, opening the door for the consortium to establish a CDMA network. Sudnick and his colleagues promptly challenged Nana officials about the new provision. Within hours, they received a blistering phone call from Shaw, who shouted at Sudnick's deputy, Bonnie Carroll, that there would be "hell to pay" if they did not sign off on the additional language, according to Carroll.

Within days, Sudnick received an email from Shaw: "If you can't lead or follow get the hell out of the way." The first-responder system, Shaw wrote, was "the last opportunity to install a viable cellular network that is responsive to our needs and requirements." – Crossing the Line

“For more than a year, he has been collecting stories of atrocities committed by uniformed Iraqis. In a recent interview, he produced a book of case studies with color photographs showing gruesome evidence of torture and killings by men in uniform: a sheik with a power drill driven into his temple; 14 laborers abducted from a checkpoint in Baghdad and killed; dozens of men beaten, burned with acid and shot.”- 3 August, 2006 NYT

Interview: T. Christian Miller talks about his new book "Blood Money," about greed, waste and fraud undermining reconstruction of Iraq – Fresh Air, 12 September, 2006

“GROSS: So the way that Shaw from the Defense Department gets this backdoor deal for his friend through partnering with an Alaska Native corporation, it's all legal? It is all legal. So what's the problem?

Mr. MILLER: Well, yeah, it's all legal. It sounds comical, but it is all definitely legal. The problem was that--well, there was a couple of problems. One, it wasn't what anybody in Iraq wanted. Nobody needed another cellular phone contract.

Number two, the particular type of system that they wanted to install is a system widely unused in the US, but it's not used anywhere else in the world, so if you put the system in Iraq, nobody else would be able to use it, and it would basically force the Iraqis in the Middle East to go on the US standard of cell phone communications, which would basically reward very much companies like QualComm, but wouldn't do very much for telecommunications in the Middle East. So that was the second thing.

And the third thing was it was simply unseemly. It was a conflict of interest at the very least, and both the FBI and the inspector general for the Pentagon both looked into this matter, although ultimately the FBI filed no charges in the case.

GROSS: Now, you say that this scandal set back the telecommunications industry in Iraq. How?

Mr. MILLER: What happened with--well, the cellular phone system itself continued apace, and it has grown, and it's actually one of the very few success stories of the reconstruction of Iraq, is that the cell phone system has grown and expanded. So Iraqis today have cell phone communications. They're not great, but they have them.
On the other side, the particular contract that was involved in this deal between the Alaska Native corporation and the US company involved police communications. It was a contract to allow communications between police systems, essentially. That whole effort collapses when Dan Sudnick leaves. And it's only now, almost three years later, that there is a 911 system which is up, but there was a recent inspector general report which got almost no attention which, essentially, says that Iraqis today, three and a half years later, still can't call their local police station. They still can't report an insurgent attack or an insurgent--even tip off the Iraqi army or military, because they still don't have an effective system of communicating both with their emergency centers, their first responder centers and--nor do those centers have an effective way of communicating with each other.
So three and a half years later, it's an amazing thing, where we've put this focus on trying to tamp down the insurgency and yet we still can't create a system that allows an Iraqi to call 911.”

As Iraq Deteriorates, Iraqis Get More Blame; U.S. Officials, Lawmakers Change Tone Washington Post 29 November 2006

“Thomas Donnelly, a hawkish defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he considers blame a legitimate issue. "Ultimately, just like success rests with the Iraqis, so does failure," he said. "We've made a lot of mistakes, but we've paid a huge price to give the Iraqis a chance at a decent future."

hide your devil

Thomas Bernhard’s biographer, Gitta Honegger, has noted that Bernhard was deeply influenced by his reading of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. She writes: “Valéry never recovered from his amazement about the spectacle of his own intellect,” mocks E.M. Cioran. If one replaced “amazement” with “laugher,” the statement could apply to Bernhard.” According to Honegger, the idea of Monsieur Teste – of an intelligence so high that it could only take as its highest object – itself – and in so doing erase itself, really impressed Bernhard.

Honegger quotes a passage from the Portrait of M. Teste section that describes the the characteristic trajectory of action performed by Bernhard’s early heros:

- Jealous of his best ideas, of those which he believed to be the best – sometimes so particular, so much his own that expressing them in the vulgar, instead of the intimate language gives us on the outside only the most feeble and false idea of them. – And who knows if the most important ones for directing a mind are not as singular to that mind, as strictly personal as a garment or an object adopted to one’s throws – who knows if the true philosophy of someone is… communicable?

- Jealous, then, of his diverse clarities – T. thought: what kind of idea is it to which one does not attach the value of a secret of state or of a secret of art? and thus one must have the shame as for a sin or a pain – hide your god – hide your devil.

LI brings this up because we found, while searching about, a pdf of the entire M. Teste text on the web, here. And we’ve been reading it. It has been a long time since we read this text – I call it a text rather than novella, because it is not like a novella. It is more like Valéry’s essay on Leonardo. It is as much a ‘text’ as a corn flake is purely a breakfast cereal. No fucking around.

At one time, in the twenties and thirties, Monsieur Teste had quite a reputation. But Cioran’s judgment on Valéry reflects the more contemporary view. And it is true, there is a coldness that run’s like the purest fish blood through Valery’s work. There’s a wonderful moment in Sartre’s essay on Nizan where he simply dismisses Gide and Valéry as the very archetypes of intellectual preciosity and futility.

But the thing is, M. Teste is, in spite of everything, rather beautiful.

I’ll have some more excerpts later.

The demonstration that the Washington Post is, of course, not mentioning

There was an actual article on the NYT front page – at least on the web – about war protestors! After we lay there on the floor a bit, we got back up and checked it out. It was about the protest today in D.C. – LI is sending all our spells and good wishes to this thing – and (thank God), the journalists didn’t dwell overmuch on the celebrities that are going to be there.

As we have made clear, we have definite ideas about demonstrations. A huge demonstration must, I suppose, have a few speeches, but let those speeches be … about the War. Entirely. Not about Global Warming, Venezuela, or fish farming.

A friend the other day sent me an email to show me that others than me are thinking about anti-war demonstration tactics. The email was a proposal to combine anti-war protest with online dating. Or dating period, or something. Apparently, using the chi energy that gets all fizzy when you are waving a sign denouncing our atrocious governing class and their War, you bond with some other likely anti-war protestor. At first I was confused, and thought you bonded right there at the protest – which I thought was, indeed, avant garde and heat, a “we chose fucking over being fucked up” gesture, like the sixties except with condoms, but apparently it is more like finding that certain someone to share a coffee with as you both rail about Bill O’Reilly.
I make fun.
I shouldn’t make fun. I’m down with anything that wakes people up.

Anway, we loved this bit in the NYT story:

''We see many things that we feel helpless about,'' said Barbara Struna, 59, of Brewster, Mass. ''But this is like a united force. This is something I can do.''
Struna, a mother of five who runs an art gallery, made a two-day bus trip with her 17-year-old daughter, Anna, to the nation's capital to represent what she said was middle America's opposition to President Bush's war policy.
Her daughter, a high school senior, said she has as many as 20 friends who have been to Iraq. ''My generation is the one that is going to have to pay for this,'' she said.
She held a sign that said, ''Heck of a job, Bushie,'' mocking Bush's words of encouragement to his disaster relief chief, Michael Brown, amid criticism of the government's immediate response to Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005.

When I get my head out of my ass – and it is easy to get your head up your ass when you are writing a blog, or just living, in fact most of the time I go around, embarrassingly enough, with my head up my ass – I remember how much, really, I love the plain old Americans.

The Washington Post, speaking of having your head up your ass so far that you can shed your whole readership while giving op ed space to the retarded children of war mongering think tankers because you are brave and bold and Fred Hiatt, has, of course, nothing on the front of its web page about the demo.

PS - finally, at noon, WAPO puts up a story about the demonstration. With much concentration on the counter-demonstration of pro-war types. Ah, fairness. WAPO is all about fairness.