art and provocation

LI has strong and stubborn ideas concerning certain subjects of which, in reality, we are abysmally ignorant. One of those subjects is tv. LI has always thought that the influence of tv is vastly exaggerated. But even so, this article by Jane Kramer about “24” was a bit of a shock. Apparently, “24” is a Fox show centering on a fictitious Homeland security unit, and the gimmick is that it occurs in real time:

“The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.
Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.”

Well, no, the insecurity is that liberal societies are historically founded on sheer racism. Of course, while Kramer’s article does raise the hysteria level for a liberal like me, the description of what the show does is reassuringly ridiculous:

“The show’s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. (The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which took on the force of federal law when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994, specifies that “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”) In one episode, a fictional President commands a member of his Secret Service to torture a suspected traitor: his national-security adviser. The victim is jolted with defibrillator paddles while his feet are submerged in a tub filled with water. As the voltage is turned up, the President, who is depicted as a scrupulous leader, watches the suspect suffer on a video feed. The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works. A few minutes before the suspect gives in, the President utters the show’s credo, “Everyone breaks eventually.” (Virtually the sole exception to this rule is Jack Bauer. The current season begins with Bauer being released from a Chinese prison, after two years of ceaseless torture; his back is scarred and his hands are burnt, but a Communist official who transfers Bauer to U.S. custody says that he “never broke his silence.”)”

The show, of course, gets the onlooker wrong – it should make our torture voyeur the Vice President. The whole family of the odious shithead who presently fills that office are, apparently, big fans of the show. Does this fuckin surprise anybody?

The collaboration between the reactionary state and the resentful artist has a long and fatal history. It is the history of provocation. Oddly, I don’t think there is a history of this concept – although there should be. Although the elements of it go way back to the Egyptians, no doubt, I’d nominate Les Philosophes, a play by a man named Palissot that debuted in 1760, as the first modern provocation.

LI has been trying to trace the career of the Philosopher buffoon from Bruno to Rameau’s nephew to some figures in Dostoevsky. Reading Rameau’s nephew again, I came up, again, against that curious figure, the now forgotten Charles Palissot de Montenoy. The philosopher buffoon is not, after all, simply a hero, but a literary figure which, like all literary figures, finds unpredictable niches in the epigenetic media landscape. Shit, did I just write that? Well, leave it, and let somebody else figure out what that means.

Satire, of course, has always had a deep anti-intellectual bias. Burke must have given some thought to Swift’s Island of Laputa when he wrote his Reflexions on the French Revolution, given the way he displays a Swiftian contempt for the “theorists” who would try to re-engineer society. But Palissot’s genius was of the type that we can recognize in the up and coming muscular liberal or neo-con in D.C. First, attach yourself to a powerful patron with a complete lack of pride, bootlicking enthusiastically (see Fred Barnes vis a vis the Bush administration). Then, employ the arts of the class clown to make a name for yourself. Kick the weak, recycling old and tired clichés, launch various coy slanders, and – when all else fails – attack someone’s lack of patriotism.

Palissot must have seemed like a divine instrument to the forces of reaction back in the day. He was precocious, defending a thesis on theology at the age of 13. He was envious. He had an extraordinary regard for bigwigs – in his memoirs, he is obviously enraptured by the praise given to his comedy, Les Philosophes, by Frederick the Great – a king no less!

Palissot was obviously a man who needed a patron, and he found one in the Duc de Choiseul, France’s foreign minister. He first made a name for himself, after several mediocre pieces, with a play entitled the Circle, commissioned especially (oh heaven) for a party given to honor Stanislas, King of Poland in Nancy. This was the first time Palissot attempted to imitate Moliere. Having the usual heavyhanded taste of the reactionary humorist, Palissot thought the occasion was just right for making fun of Voltaire’s mistress, Mme du Chatelet, who had recently died. Mme du Chatelet was one of France’s premier mathematicians too – a learned woman! Just the thing to bark at. Alas, the play was considered to be in extremely bad taste – even royalty didn’t like it. Palissot went to the extent of writing a defense of the play to the king – and to the police chief of Nancy. The defense consisted of the fact that the elite, in Moliere’s time, were not offended by Moliere's plays. This is, of course, the alpha and omega of right wing humor – do not offend the powerful. That is, unless you have a patron you can rely on.

Then came Les Philosophes. “No play between Tartuffe and Figaro excited such passionate joy and such malicious pleasure,” according to the theatre historian Charles Lenient. There is an story Palissot told one of Napoleon’s officers – Palissot lived through the revolution and through Napoleon’s reign – that the only reward he got for his play was a smile, a mere smile, from Madame de Pompidour. Such are the rewards of the bootlickers.

The machinations behind getting the play put on by such a major troupe as a Comedie Francaise signaled that the play was not an ordinary play – it was a state sponsored provocation. The use of the arts to send political messages, persecute dissidents, punish factions – it is here in a nutshell, and it will be used again, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, and in the U.S., where the tv network, Fox, that puts on “24”, now has put provocation into the media cycle, where it will quickly devalue.

Palissot outlived all the philosophes; in the age of Napoleon, he began to view himself as an illustrious enlightenment sage himself, and a protector of all things 18th century. The sports of the Napoleonic era didn’t quite know what to make of the crazy old coot. LI finds this latter part of Palissot’s life a sort of parody on the recent craze, among the warmongering set, for the Enlightenment. At least some more educated warmongers, like Gertrude Himmelfarb, has actually read, with mounting horror, what those philosophes wrote, which is why she wrote a book disputing the French pre-eminence in the Enlightenment (her argument isn’t so much revisionist as petulant). From romantic third world-ism to attacks on family, church and the war, Enlightenment writing is just the sort of stuff so richly denounced by the New Criterion, National Review, and Weekly Standard, issue after issue.

The Iran scarecrow

LI's readers should check out Jonathan Schwarz's putdown of the insane Michael Gordon article in the NYT yesterday. Schwarz applies himself, as Gordon's editor should have, to the sources that Gordon is quoting, since Gordon is making a little two thousand year regression to a time when citing an oracle was the height of the scientific method. Since then, we got us some of that civilization - except sometimes, as in warmongering articles from the NYT.

And - to give us spirit for the long long long long war - do read Nicholas Hoffman's bracing column in the NY Observer. Like many journalists of good will, Hoffman has seen the sheer, well, you can only call it bravery of the American public as we face this truly terrifying threat of terrorist just walzing in, carting their four hundred pound suitcases full of nuclear material that any tom, dick or harry with a copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, a screwdriver and an old Playboy can turn into a ticking bomb that you'd really have to torture a terrorist suspect within an inch of his life to find. But we have answered President Backbone's call to glory with a stoicism that will go down in the history books:

George W. Bush says he won’t raise taxes to pay for his war. “I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy,” he explained. “And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to
college and put more money on the table.”

By those standards, Mr. Bush’s war has been a success for some New Yorkers. E. Stanley O’Neal, Merrill Lynch’s chief executive, did his best, in conformity with the President’s wishes, to put more money on the table by having been paid $48 million last year, up from $37 million the year before, a sum so small it
might have caused the President distress.

Another man who will be able to report to the President that he has been able to make enough of a living to put more money on the table and pay any college tuition which might be owing is Lloyd C. Blankfein of the Goldman Sachs Group, who brought home $53 million last year. All together, Wall Street’s five
biggest outfits were able to relieve President Bush’s mind by telling him that their top people were paid $60 billion in 2006. Doubtless the President, as soon as he was apprised of the news, flashed the joyful tidings to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. No piece of news could be better calculated to stimulate
our soldiers and Marines to fight harder and make greater sacrifices for the cause for which they and Messrs. O’Neal and Blankfein, each in their own way, struggle in common.

In accordance with Mr. Bush’s wish that most of us move on from the war and give it as little thought as possible, even as a few of us fight it, a man named Stephen A. Schwarzman will celebrate his 60th birthday on Feb. 13. Mr. Schwarzman is a billionaire who, in deference to the President’s urgings, has
been spending the years since the two airplanes were driven into the World Trade Center making money hand over fist. If you are going to sacrifice for your country, there are few more deeply satisfying ways of doing it.

To mark his six lucrative decades on earth, Mr. Schwarzman is renting the Park Avenue society armory, where he and some 1,500 guests will do what rich people do on such occasions. The featured entertainer performing for the occasion will, it is said, be paid $1 million for his night’s work. If the other expenditures are commensurate, Mr. Schwarzman will have laid out $15 million before his head hits the pillow that night, content that, as his President wishes, his “life’s moving on”—and right nicely, one cannot forbear to add.

a letter from an LI reader

Peter Beinart
Nude Model

Dear LI

As you probably know, the most exciting story of the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign is the extraordinary synergy between science and muscular liberalism that has actually cloned a candidate from one of Joseph Lieberman’s cells crossed with one of Harry Truman’s. The candidate, Harry Truberman, will, I think, be challenging voters with his exciting new policies any day now, as soon as our assistants teach him English.

But with the upside comes the downside. Yes, the Truberman campaign did hire me to create an exciting blog for a truly spectacular candidate (also, they are programming some math and geography into his, at present, prone and unconscious bio-structure). This was great news, until the minions of reaction got ahold of it, as in this ABC story, ‘Truberman stumbles on the Net’. The money shot graf, as it were, is this one:

“The drama began when it became known that the Truberman campaign had hired Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic and now the employee of a group calling itself Scruggs+LimitedInc+Gulf and Western. Reaction from the right side of the blogosphere was swift and critical, as Beinart’s work in such films as Bend Over Muscular Liberals and My Missile, Your Place were reviewed for lack of, shall we say, child friendly viewing (although this commentator did like the exciting Command and Control scene in the latter film). Beinart, they claimed, made caustic, profanity-laced remarks in these films, besides showing his privates. Beinart supporters, on the other hand, claim that the remarks were only made by the co-stars, with Beinart’s own dialogue amounting to “feel that, baby” and “oh yeah, oh God, oh yeah”. Beinart’s spokeswoman claims that the later is a quote from one of the Psalms, although as of the date of this report, she has still refused to specify which Psalm.”


Once again, a muscular liberal like myself is being martyred by McCarthyism. So let us get this story straight, shall we?

My nude modeling career is out there for all to see. I have nothing to hide on that front. My discussions about this with the Truberman campaign people was nothing if not candid. Most of them, I was pleased to discover, are big fans of my film oeuvre. These attacks, however, do present a test of will for us (and, by the way, our bio-form candidate has passed several tests with flying colors this morning, including identifying all of the primary colors by name), since we can bow to the demagoguery of the dishonorable right – in which I do not include such names as Rich Lowrey or, say, Charles Krauthammer, brilliant writers who have come out and said that the Bend Over films were like a fifth division, aimed at the treacherous heart of Islamofascism - or we can fight for what we believe in. These red herrings do us no good in a time when we need to be radically increasing our defense budget to meet the challenges of World War IV, and defending a reformed Social Security system that integrates Wall Street and Main Street – the best of American productivity meeting the best of America’s financial wizardry. Tearing down middle class entitlements is part of the third way that is revolutionizing the government, and making us ever more relevant in an ever more competitive world.

So, ignore the stories you are reading about the Truberman campaign disavowing this one lone, and – even if I say it myself – heroic nude model, standing up against those in the Democratic party who, inadvertently, help the cause of terrorism. Standing up for aching minutes in other areas too, standing, throbbing, heated, passionate, oh yeah, oh God, oh yeah – such are the talents I am proud of.

Yours,
Peter Beinart
Nude Model

philosopher buffoon 2

- Do you know how to twist?

Well it goes like this…

The buffoon and the ass keep turning up together, as though the deck of achetypes that lies, face down, under my electric prestidigitator’s fingers were a crooked pack.

According to Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradion, Apuleius, the author of the Golden Ass (that book of transmutations through which the transcendentally ludicrous is finally given shape and form by Psyche’s quest for Cupid) was, by the fourth century A.D., credited with the translation of the corpus of Hermes Trismegistus. These were the books that were supposedly written before Moses was a pup, and they were wildly popular in the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici hired Ficino to translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum in 1462, as the manuscript containing it had turned up by way of a traveling monk, Leonardo da Pistoia - instructing him to interrupt the Plato translation project, as the Corpus Hermeticum was urgent. Cosimo wanted to read the thing before he died. Such was its prestige, such is the greed for ‘secret’ knowledge. By the time of Bruno, a century later, the C.H. had lost something of its allure, vis a vis the regular scholarly world, but had continued to be central to the system of Renaissance magic, which operated in the hidey holes, intersecting, as secret knowledge always seems to, with intelligence agencies and diplomacy.

Bruno, of course, was interested in magic, as were members of Raleigh’s School of Night that he made the acquaintance of in his London sojourn. In the group picture of the founding fathers of the modern era, all lined up like Dutch masters, we usually have Bacon, Galileo and Descartes – Bruno is left out. And the reason that he is left out is that he was just too damned interested in that f-fuckin magic. Yet in reality – that promiscuous bitch, my darling - Bruno can’t be left out. He interests us in this post because, unlike that grave company, Bruno was a buffoon – a necessary joker, the philosopher-buffoon who keeps returning, in some dark orbit according to some dark cycle of its own, to put into disarray the white magic of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. To throw a few boomerangs around, liven the joint up, and raise, if possible, everybody’s level of anxiety and hope, the two intricately counter-weighted against each other.

Dorothy Waley Singer’s life of Bruno has been put up in its entirety by the good folks at positive atheism – and let’s end this post with an anecdote about Bruno’s childhood from Singer:

Bruno gives in his greatest Latin work, the De immenso, [4] a description of an episode in childhood, which made a deep impression on him. His home was in a hamlet just outside Nola, on the lower slopes of Cicada, a foot-hill of the Appenines some twenty miles east of Naples. [5] He tells with affectionate detail of the beauty and fertility of the land around, overlooked from afar by the seemingly stern bare steeps of Vesuvius. One day a suspicion of the deceptiveness of appearances dawned on the boy. Mount Cicada, he tells us, assured him that "brother Vesuvius" was no less beautiful and fertile. So, girding his loins, he climbed the opposite mountain. "Look now," said Brother Vesuvius, "look at Brother Cicada, dark and drear against the sky." The boy assured Vesuvius that such also was his appearance viewed from Cicada. "Thus did his parents [the two mountains] first teach the lad to doubt, and revealed to him how distance changes the face of things." So in after-life he interprets the experience and continues: "In whatever region of the globe I may be, I shall realize that both time and place are similarly distant from me."

Pity the poor fascist

Back in the day, fascists were loud and proud. They formed parties that called themselves fascist. They enthused about Mussolini, and Hitler. They enthused about their own leaders, who they usually called “leader” – in Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Latvian, upper class English or what have you. They had a trade mark, of sorts, on a brand – fascism.

Now, of course, fascism has become an open source kind of thing. Sure, there is a party that calls itself fascist in Italy, but that is the little toe of fascism nowadays. Fascism has become an honorific bestowed by others. You have Islamofascism (or the new variety, Sunni fascism, coined by that facisto-brander extraordinaire, Chris Hitchens), you have Christian fascism, you have Bush as a fascist and Osama as a fascist and my Uncle Dick as a fascist and Donald Duck as one too.

Oddly, as the brand has exploded, it has also become a secret vice, like eating clay is in certain counties in the Southern U.S.A. Nobody wants to be a loud and proud fascist, and usually the response to being called a fascist is to call the person calling one a fascist a fascist. As Machiavelli once put it (talking to Leo Strauss), “I’m rubber and your glue/whatever you say bounces off me/ and sticks to you” – a principle exhaustively analyzed in Schmitt’s Grundlegung des Gummi-Prinzip, an indispensable guide to political philosophy, as all us fascist anti-fascists well know.

Not that I’m a fascist, mind you. Say that again to me and I’ll hit you with my police baton.

This pullulation of fascism is a little unexpected, especially as its principle architects – those many, many fascists of today – can be said, like Christ's executioners, to know not what they do. Osama, looking at what Mussolini wrought in Libya, for instance, might not recognize that as just what he is aiming at – but don’t we know better? And Bush, a man who operates, it has become pretty clear, in the traditional mode of the Southern politician – a species that has been known to seize a capital or two (vide Herman Talmadge) to cap a corrupt victory “gained’ at the polls, turns out to be a fascist too. Well, shit, seems there is a perfect fit between today’s brand fascism and today’s mock heroic ethos – we are in the post Third Way age, the age of the long long long long war on terrorism itself, or World War IV as its fans like to call it. Genocide, it turns out, doesn’t consist of people butchering people in heaps (when that happens, we immediately look for errors in random samples, happily dispute about them, and are able, presto-chango, not to think about stinky dead bodies and such) -- but of the President of Iran holding a holocaust denier conference. Who knew that, in order to save the honor of the holocaust victims, we would have to systematically lower the standards of genocide to a verbal act? Soon bumping your funny bone in the shower will just be a pinprick away from being sent to the oven in Auschwitz. Such are the speeded up delights of insta-history.

Bruno tells the story of two blind beggars at the door of the archbishopric of Naples who started beating each other with sticks, the one claiming to be a Guelph, the other a Ghibelline, although when they were separated neither could say what they meant by those terms.

That is what it was like back in those primitive times. Now, of course, those blind beggars toss aside their sticks to become political pundits, and we all join in the melee, in which every bruise turns out to be a word.

PS - LI is no Schmitt, admittedly, but we do think the sweet clarity and distinctness of political discoursing would be immeasurably elevated if, instead of using the term, fascist, one simply used the more comprehensive and all purpose term, motherfucker.

Mistah Scruggs ties the knot

Congratulations to Mistah Scruggs, who is to the squirrels of this era what Davy Crockett was to the bears of his, on the announcement of his upcoming marriage.

I am a little worried about the impact of this marriage on the Scruggs+Limitedinc+Gulf and Western high end adult entertainment business. I hope the bride to be understands that we are only in the business of creating quality cinema for muscular liberals (with your favorite stars, like Peter Beinart, Nude Model) because, well, because WE CARE.

beating some horses

This blog does try to take our far flung correspondent T.’s advice about leaving dead horses unpummeled – but sometimes, Christopher Hitchens provides such an irresistible target that we can’t, we just can’t. Forgive me, Mr. T!

Anyway, this is just to note that the pluminess, pomposity and egotism with which the man’s mind is furnished is busy producing a form of prose that sounds exactly like the parody of the English celeb journalist in this video by IT’s friend, Jeremy Mcclintock


This comes from his latest article in Slate, entitled, Don’t Blame me, blame the evil Islamofascists against which I struggle like a veritable Hercules:

“The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence.”

“I can still remember the chill…” This is the kind of writing you do when you never quite got over those G.A. Henty adventure stories you read as a boy.

Hitchens, however, is too much of a joke to be a lot of fun bitching about anymore.

On the other hand, John Burns, the Iraqi correspondent for the NYT who was one of the little warriors in 2003, is now all about explaining the woe and American innocence in an interview highlighted on The Corner and pointed to (which is how we came by it) by Matt Yglesias. Yglesias has an inexplicable affection for Burns. We don’t.

This exchange is all about the blind praising the blind for their mutually satisfying depth perception:

“Russert: John, was it possible for our policy makers to truly understand the way Iraqis would have reacted? The judgments made here were that when we went in we would be greeted as quote, "liberators," to quote Dick, Vice President's Cheney's phrase, that they were prepared, in effect, to take governing into their own hands, that they were so upset and had been so downtrodden by Saddam Hussein that they would embrace democracy and rise up, almost immediately.

Burns: Well first of all, I think, again, to be fair, the American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it. It lasted very briefly, it was exhausted quickly by the looting and the astonishment and puzzlement and finally anger of Iraqis that nothing, or very little was done to stop that. I think that to be fair to the United States, when I speak as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis.”

On Matt’s site, I commented at some length of the absurdity of the ‘desire not to have too heavy a footprint”, otherwise known as trying to run a war and cut taxes for the wealthy at the same time. The light footprint effect was seen in New Orleans during and after Katerina too – those idealistic Americans, just empowering the weak like nobody’s business! And – of course – down memory hole is the fact that there has never been an occupation anywhere without looting, and the American response – darling idealists, those Americans – was to guard the Oil Ministry. There are other synonyms for America’s good instincts: blind smugness, criminal greed, incompetence, featherbedding, neo-imperial warmongering – oh, give me a thesaurus and I’ll be here for a week.

But - I suppose I should just say – I still remember the chill that went through me when I read Burns’s malefic words.