Dominique Kalifa

Okay, we’ve seen Barthes, we’ve seen Mallarme, is it time yet to go to the concession stand and buy the kids peanuts, and what does this have to do with our Bush era beeswax anyway, honey?

Let’s turn, shall we, he said medically, to this essay by Dominique Kalifa, a French historian very interested in the symbiotic relationship between crime and the press. Kalifa pushes back to the 1830s the “mediatic era”, seeing three things come together then: a cheap, mass circulation press; second, a press in which more can be printed (the initiative comes here from the editor Gervais Charpentier, who lead his« révolution » in 1838. Thanks to the technical possibilities opened by the mechanical presses, he created a new format, the so called « in-18 jésus » (18,3 x 11,5 cm), which permitted the offer of much more text for a price reduced by half: 3,50 francs au lieu de 7. The totality of bookstores were constrained to align themselves, engaging from than on, little by little, in the path which lead to the cheap book). And finally, another technical innovation, the illustration, where engravings, vignettes and lithographs became more and more numerous, doing their working on the writing of the text itself.”

Kalifa then jumps to the 1860s, the decade of decay (and as I’ve pointed out before, Louis Napoleon’s era holds eerie resemblances to our own – down to the coup that began it all. Henri Rochefort said, about Napoleon II, that there was a curious enthusiasm for him in prisons, among thieves. I do wonder if thieves or conmen look at Bush as a brother). Napoleon II began lifting censorship rules on the press. Thus, more radical press popped up and like that. The working class got to speak out and like that. But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

“But the initiatives of the 1860s were not limited only to the universe of reading. Modernisation touched the world of spectacles (spectacle I translated, in that Mallarme piece, as side show), which entered into the industrial regime under the Second Empire. This is the case of the café-concert, which is structured in a hierarchised network of programs and venues, and it is also that of theater, of which the production diversified, attaining in 1867 an exceptional level of grosses. In the remodeled, hausmannized city, a new social spectacle outlines itself, the strolls of loiterers, the rushes on the boulevards or the refluxes of the crowd coming out of the department stores in which is specified that public taste for reality that the cinema is going to soon capture. But the most significant expample is without doubt that of the 1867 l'Exposition universelle, which welcomed to Paris 11 million visitors, the double of that of 1855. It is besides there, in that curious enterprise which conjoins social pedagogy and industrial exhibition, mixes commercial, political and aesthetic functions, where W. Benjamin wanted to see the christening of the spectactle industry.”

Which brings us up to the case of Tropmann, the famous murder whose crimes and execution were considered symbolic of the sinister atmosphere of Second Empire decay and corruption. And which we consider to be among the most significant of private murders for merging the political and the sensational in a way that was felt, even then, to be new.

side show act, interrupted

We all work to one effect, some willingly, and with a rational
apprehension of what we do: others without any such knowledge.
As I think Heraclitus in a place speaketh of them that sleep,
that even they do work in their kind, and do confer to the general
operations of the world. One man therefore doth co-operate after
one sort, and another after another sort; but even he that doth murmur,
and to his power doth resist and hinder; even he as much as any
doth co-operate. – Marcus Aurelius

LI was going to directly plow into our Barthes quote – in the post before the last post – to suss out this “immanence” and the strangely intimate world of the news as it is sliced, diced, produced, and repeated on the tv news broadcast that forms the basis for your average American householder’s feel for the world outside of the perimeter. And also the world at the urban center, the fear of the black planet world. Our idea is that the ‘idiocy’ at play in the defense of the Iraq war as something that could best be described in terms of American crime – and not any old American crime, but the crime associated with black metropoles – is a kiss away from the forms and figures of the newscast, from the mentality shaped by those news casts.

But then we said to ourselves: what’s with the fuckin’ directness, LI? Don’t you always say, by indirection I will find direction out? Or something like that, you mumbly old prick? LI likes to diversify meetings of the editorial board with a little insult, to break up the monotony of there being only one editor. I’m cracking myself up here, folks. I’ll be in Omaha on the 5th, and then a two week engagement at the Bismark, North Dakota Holiday Inn with the Dakota Polka Nation. …

Instead, I’m going to cut from Barthes to Mallarme. There’s a cut for ya. Mallarme was fascinated by the fait divers, which was blooming in the late and degenerate last decade of the farce Napoleon. The ‘interrupted side show’, as I am going to translate the following piece of prose, figures in his final collection, Divagations, subsumed under the title of Grands faits divers. Translating Mallarme is a classic mug’s game. It can’t be done, it destroys the destruction wrought on the French language in the French – for like any good modernist prose, Mallarme’s works by wrecking. How, for instance, to reproduce Mallarme’ habitual inversion of the order of anaphora, so that the “this” referred to comes after its anaphoric marking. Like I am supposed to know what this would sound like in English! I’m a babbler here meself. But I found this piece to have, a, on odd match with the line from Marcus Aurelius, and b., something to do with the notion of the brief, intense episode that catches fire with its own elements and burns itself out.

An interrupted side show act.
How far is civilization from procuring the joys attributable to that estate! One has to be astonished, for example, that there does not exist an association between dreamers sojourning in every great city to support a newspaper which would take note of events in the proper light of the dream. Reality is an artifice, made for sticking the middle intellect between the mirages of a fact; but it reposes for that very reason on some universal entente: let’s see if it is not, in the ideal, a necessary aspect, evident, simple, which serves the type. I wish, for myself alone, to write as it struck my poet’s gaze, an anecdote in the state it was in before reporters divulged it to the crowds prepared to assign to each thing its common character.
The little theater of PRODIGALITES adds to the exhibition of a living cousin of Atta Troll or of Martin its classic fairy pantomime the Beast and the Genie; I have, in order to recognize the invitation of a double ticket some ending up yesterday at my place, posed my hat in the vacant auditorium in the seat next to me, an absence of friends testifying to the general taste for avoiding this naïve spectacle. What happens before my eyes? Nothing, save that: from amidst the evasive palenesses of muslin finding shelter on twenty pedestals in architecture imitative of Baghdad there jumps out a smile and open arms to the sad weight of a bear: while the hero, a clown, evoker of these sylphids and their guardian, in his high silver nudity, rallied the animal with our superiority. What a break, to enjoy like the crowd the myth, all banality added, and without anyone sitting nearby to whom to pour out these reflections; to see the ordinary and splendid eve of the act discovered on the ramp by my research saturated with fantasies or symbols. A stranger to the many reminiscences of evenings like this, the brand newest of accidents! suscitated my attention: one of the numerous salves of applause distributed according to the enthusiasm for the illustration before us of the authentic privilege of man, having just, broken by what? ceased all at once, with a fixed fracas of glory at its peak, unable to expand itself. All ears, when what was needed was all eyes. At the puppet’s gesture, a bent palm in the air opening five fingers, I understood that he had brilliantly captured all sympathies by the air of trapping on the wing something, the figure (and that is all) of the facility which one is taken by an idea; and that moved by the light breeze caused by the gesture, the bear rhythmically and gently rose up, questioned that exploit, one claw posed on the ribbons of the human shoulder. No one breathed, so much did this situation pose some grave consequences for the honor of the race: what was going to happen? The other paw fell, supple, against an arm extended along the silver suit; and one sees, a couple united in some secret understanding, how an inferior man, beefy, good natured, standing on two hairy, slightly apart legs, squeezes to learn here the practices of genius, and his black muzzled cranium only gets halfway there, the butt of his brilliant and supernatural brother: but who, himself! lifting up, the mad mouth of a vagueness, a terrible head moving by a visible string a golden paper fly in the horror of true denials. An act of a clarity transcending the vast sawdust strewn stage, with this gift, proper to art, of lasting for a long time: in order to make it complete in its entirety I let tacitly stream out of the rejection from the Polar regions a forbidden discourse, without letting myself be put off by the probably fatal attitude taken by the mime, repository of our pride. “Be good enough (this was the sense) to not lack the charity to explain to me the virtue of this atmosphere of splendor, of dust and voices, where you have taught me to move. My request, my pressing request, is simply that you don’t seem, in an anguish that is not only faked, to be able to respond to it; o subtle older brother, throw yourself on the regions of wisdom, to me, still dressed for an informal stay in the caves where I replunge, in the night of humble epochs, my latent force, in order for me to free you. Let us authenticate, by this narrow hug, before the multitude sitting here to this end, the pact of our reconciliation.” The absence of any breath united to space, in what an absolute spot I lived through one of those dramas of astral history electing, in order to produce itself, this modest theater! the crowd was effaced, all, in the emblem of its spiritual situation magnifying the scene: modern dispenser of ecstasy, only, with the impartiality of an elementary thing, the gas, up in the ceiling of the auditorium, continuing a luminous expectant sound.
The charm was broken: this is when a piece of meat, nude, brutal, traversed my vision directed from the wings, in advance by some moments on the recompense, the mysteriousness of the ordinary after these scenes. A substitute rag bleeding by the bear who, instincts that were anterior to a higher curiosity with which the stage lights had endowed him now rediscovered, fell on his four paws and, as though the silence has carried one away, went to sniff it in the stuffed animal march of his kind, in order to sink his teeth into it, this prey. A sigh, almost exempt of deception, soothed incomprehensibly the assembly: of which the lorgnettes, by rows, searched, glinting with their refined lenses, the game of that splendid imbecile evaporated in his fear; but they see an abject meal preferred perhaps by the animal to the same thing that he had needed to do at first to our image, in order to taste it. The curtain, hesitating up to now in the worry of increasing the danger or the emotion, suddenly let fall its daily round of prices and common places. I got up like everybody else, in order to breath outside, astonished not to have felt, again, the same genre of impression as my fellows, but serene: for my way of seeing, after all, had been superior, and even true.”

that dog don't hunt... the right way, sir

Sometimes the liberal bloggers remind us of so many untrained coon hounds out on the hunt, baying for anything – skunk, squirrel or sparrow – except coon. So it seems at least with the Berube post over at Crooked Timber and the resulting comments rush, in which LI elbowed into the queue, hollerin’ for a stake.

Now to my mind there’s one and only one coon in the hunt: the war culture. Since the whole thing started on the level of a feud between Cockburn and Berube on the credentials of Berube’s anti-war stance (about which Cockburn is wrong, apparently) this was probably a rush that was gonna go wrong from the beginning. And in fact Cockburn’s fucking point, at the beginning of his article, doesn’t get a look: “Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American West. “Historic marker, 1 mile”, the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. “On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry “

So the point is the American normalization of the war culture, and its effects. But in the liberal anti-war coon hunt, the whole notion that it is somewhat crooked and downright fucked that the U.S. spends the sums it does on war, engages in so many wars, encircles the globe with its troops, and keeps trying to jimmy the rules so that its missiles dominate this planet with the threat of cruel annihilation goes and sits on a log and has a beer while we all bark all over the woods. In place of an honest discussion of the war culture there is always a discussion of the perfect war, the one we all like to imagine where nobody can say it isn’t right and good and just the thing to do. It’s the Beach Boy’s immortal hit, wouldn’t it be nice if we were married, except not about marriage, but about war. This alluring possibility remains, of course, a little abstract, and none of the participants or promoters have the slightest inclination to actually get into one of these dreamy wars or even look at the gross pictures of people fucked up by it – the scoriated torsos, extruded eyes, the wriggly spill of bowels in lovely pixel.

I’ve been reading Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore this week. The preface was written in 1962. By this time, Wilson was in his mandarin autumn. He’d been there in 1932, voting communist. He’d been there in the fifties, swatting down Agatha Christie in the New Yorker book section. At this point he could take a long squint at the course of American history, and he saw: wow, a lot of war. And the abiding delusion that all these wars were forced upon a peaceseeking Columbia – even, as some senator said before we invaded Mexico in 1845, it was the non-aggressiveness of the Mexicans that had forced our hand. Wilson disposes of the question of right and wrong with an image that he boosts, perhaps unconsciously, from the beginning of Dreiser’s the Financier. “In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up a smaller organism through a large orifice at the end of its body; confronted with another sea slug of only a slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too.” Wilson sees the repression of the Southern states, the war against Mexico, the first World War, etc. – all the way up to the recent hostility to Castro – as part of the same blind pattern of expansion. With that idea, he sees Lincoln as a figure like Bismark and Lenin. He ends the intro with a survey of the harm done by the cold war to our fundamental liberties. It is a nice thorough job.

The liberal in me protests, though, against the sea slug. Surely we can put that god damn sea slug on a vegetarian diet, dip that orifice into... g-green technology! or some damn thing if we really try. Although the realist thinks that, most likely, the slug is in a phase of fatal overstretch that will set much harsher limits to its very ability to continue this insane thirst for lesser sea slugs.

iraq and the world of the fait-divers

LI often wonders about a particular form of the defense of the Iraq war that we come across in comments threads, and that seems pretty common the margins of conservative political talk. The defense goes like this: Iraq is mostly peaceful, and the violence there is no greater than violence in a major U.S. metropolis. The metropolis chosen is, of course, always predominantly black. Here’s an example from last week’s news:

During an interview Monday with WILS-AM in Lansing, Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, said the returning troops he has talked with "indicate to me that 80 to 85 percent, in a conservative fashion, of (Iraq) is reasonably under control, at least as well as Detroit or Chicago or any of our other big cities. That's an encouraging sign."
Program host Jack Ebling remarked, "I've never heard Iraq compared to Detroit before."

Walberg responded: "Well, in fact, in many places it's as safe and cared for as Detroit or Harvey, Illinois, or some other places that have trouble with armed violence that takes place on occasion."

Detroit and Chicago had higher rates of murder, assault, robbery, burglary and car theft than the nation as a whole in 2005, according to FBI statistics. Harvey is an economically depressed suburb of Chicago with about 30,000 residents — about 80 percent of whom are black, the same proportion as in Detroit.”
…
Walberg was born in Chicago, grew up on the city's south side and is an ordained minister. He is in his first term in the U.S. House, serving a district that includes Branch, Eaton, Hillsdale, Jackson and Lenawee counties, and parts of Calhoun and Washtenaw counties.

The district in south central Michigan is 90.1 percent white and 5.7 percent black, with other races and mixed-race persons comprising the remainder, according to 2000 U.S. Census data.

Walberg spokesman Matt Lahr said in a statement that the congressman "frequently shares sentiments expressed to him by the soldiers and veterans he meets at Walter Reed Hospital or the (Veterans Affairs) hospital in Battle Creek.
"These soldiers have expressed optimism to the congressman about the safety and security of the majority of Iraq. There are still major challenges in Iraq, especially in the Anbar province and Sadr City," said Lahr, who declined to respond to the comments from the Detroit mayor's office.”

LI gets impatient with this sort of thing, since it is so obviously bogus. To take a simple example ... No. Countering an argument like this, as I was about to do, is pointless. It is the non-argumentive character of the argument that is the whole point. The thread is so obviously pointless that one begins to wonder about the long term mental effects of fallout, and whether they weren’t a lot more severe than we were ever told.

But here’s a thought. Maybe the answer is given by an old essay of Roland Barthes. Instead of the isotopes in the milk solution, that is.

Perhaps this comparison, which seems to willfully isolate the speaker from the reality of war in any sense, is the result of conditioning. After all, the Walbergs out there grew up turning on the news at ten and watching a fifteen minutes of murder stories, mostly, with the rest of the time devoted to sports and weather. In other words, they grew up in the world of the faits-divers.

Which gets us to Roland Barthes’ essay on the fait-divers. In order to explain the structure of the fait-divers, Barthes makes an initial move that I am not entirely happy with – but that does work towards the point he is making. He compares the story of a murder to the story of a political assassination. I am not entirely happy with that comparison, because I think it inscribes a certain class hierarchy, in terms of what is and what is not serious, into a supposedly neutral distinction between narrative types. On the other hand, it does seem to work – and it does explain the isolating effect given by the comparison of Iraq to Detroit. The effect is two-fold: it both points at the isolation of the speaker and it tries to enforce a certain isolation, a certain political passivity, on the hearer.

But let’s not jump the gun here. Here’s Barthes:

The difference appears as soon as we compare our two murders. In the first (the assassination) the event (the murder) necessarily refers to an extensive situation outside itself, previous to and around it: “politics”; such news cannot be understood immediately, it can be defined only in relation to a knowledge external to the event, which is political knowledge, however confused; in short, a murder esacpes the fait-divers whenever it is exogenous, proceeding from an already known world; we might then say that it has no sufficient structure of its own, for it is never anything but the manifest term of an implicit structure which pre-exists it: there is no political news without duration, for politics is a transtemrpoaral category; this is true, moreover, of all news proceeding from a named horizon, from an anterior time: it can never constitute faits-divers; in terms of literature, such items are fragments of novels, insofar as every novel is itself an extensive knowledge of which nay event occurring within it is nothing but a simple variable.

Thus an assassination is always, by definition, partial information; the fait-divers, on the contrary, is total news, or more precisely, immanent; it contains all its knowledge in itself; no need to know anything about the world in order to consume a fait-divers; it refers formally to nothing but itself; of course its content is not alien to the world: disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears: an ideology and psychoanaysis of the fait-divers are possible, but they would concern a world of which knowledge is never anything but intellectual, analytical, elaborated at second-hand by the person who speaks of the fait-divers, not by the person who consumes it; on the level of reading, everything is given within the fait-divers; its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome; without duration and without context, it constitutes an immediate, total being which refers, fformally at least, to nothing implicit; in this it is related to the short story and the tale, and no longer to the novel. It is its immanence which defines the fait-divers.1

… whatever its content’s density, astonishment, horror, or poverty, the fait-divers begins only where the news divides and thereby involves the certainty of a relation; the brevity of the utterance or the importance of the information, elsewhere a guarantee of unity, can never efface the articulated character of the fait-divers: five million dead in Peru? The hoorr is total, the sentence is simple; yet the notable, here, is already the relation between the dead and a number. Granted, a structure is always articulated; but here the articulation is internal to the immediate narrative, whereas in political news, for example, it is transferred outside the discourse to an implicit context.

1. Certain faits-divers are developed over several days; this does not violate their constitutive immanence, for they still imply an extremely short memory.

I’ll have more to say on this in my next post

a medical question

Democrat Proposes Making Withdrawal Date Secret
Only Congress, White House and Iraqi Government Would Know Plan - Headline, Washington Post

I'm pretty sure repeated bouts of convulsive, sardonic laughter have been implicated in lung cancer. So, if the good citizens of Mississippi can take AJ Reynolds for ten billion or so, do you think LI can sue WAPO for, say, 100,000 plus a gift card at the good for a lifetime supply of xanax?

edna st. vincent millay and hart crane

The Werepoet has been glorifying Edna St. Vincent Millay lately .

I’m a latecomer to Millay. In the summer of 2001, I contacted Inside New York to write a review of the Millay bio, Savage Beauty, that came out that season. Then I went to Mexico. I brought the book with me and read it as I did what I did in Mexico, and after a while, Inside NY got pissed with me. Where was the review? So I did it fast, and I wrote way over the word limit, and the editor, justly, said you have screwed the pooch, son.

So I dint make the easy on that, did I? But the bio turned me onto the work. And I fell for Edna. This was unexpected. See, I’d been suckled, or not exactly suckled, more like inducted into poetry in high school through reading the modernist masters. Admittedly, I did not understand Wallace Stevens – but I lapped up Eliot and Pound. When I played tennis with my best friend K. – glorious autumns at the Dekalb County Junior College tennis courts – I used to amuse him by spouting off bits of Gerontion. Patched and peeled in London. I am an old man in an old house. Waiting for rain. I’m not going to look and see if that is right, but it was right back then. Used to amuse the cross country team – I was a sporty little fuck – with the first ten lines of the Wasteland. Etc. My mom had more sentimental tastes in poetry. O captain my captain our fearful trip is done. Sort of thing. Funny thing, I’m her age now, and I, too, get tearful about o captain my captain.

So this wasn’t the kind of upbringing in which Edna st. Vincent Millay would figure as anything but a figure of fun, an uncool leftover. The sexist bias has slowly sloughed off over the years. Now, mind you, I’m not blaming the modernists. I understand how, buried beneath the vesuvius of marmelade out in the sticks, one kicks out – however, I do expect a little retrospective wisdom. I picked up the Library of America edition of Hart Crane, poetry and letters, today, and turned to the index, wondering what he’d say about Millay. Just one notice, in a letter to a friend back where he came from, Ohio. It was disappointing, but not surprising:

“I can come half way with you about Edna Millay – but I fear not much further. She really has genius in a limited sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc. to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that form a kind of milky way in the poets firmament of the time (likewise all times), indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. … I can only say that I do not care for Mme Browning. And on top of my dislike for this lady, Tennyson, Thompson, Chatterton, Byron Moore Milton and several more, I have the brassiness to call myself a person of rather catholic admirations.”

Remember, you needed dynamite to become modern, or so it seemed, in 1921. Alas, the purge of poets was less excusable when all the cold war broody critics of the 50scontinued in H.C.’s vein., all those men and women with hornrims and a pessimistic view of human nature and going on portentously about the Great Tradition,

There is a certain funny turn here, since Crane, proclaiming his “esoteric’ taste for Donne, misses the fact that Millay’s street ballad style reaches back to John Tyler the Water Poet and the songs of the levelers and the diggers. Take Recuerdo, for instance. Millay effortlessly does something that Crane strives for in The Bridge:

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable--
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

I am only a little baffled by the line about the sun – it seems too easy. But otherwise, how completely elbows out is this poem? And we gave her all our money but the subway fares is so goddam perfect that, I hope, I don’t have to point out its perfection.

Alas, blinded by the need to kick out, Crane couldn’t see this. Plus of course he is the classic Midwestern type who comes to NYC and begins to judge among the quick and the unsophisticated. It is his way of getting an edge.

Why LI Hates the Left (echo echo)

LI has very simple reasons for hating the Left (there should be an echo effect every time that nasty little term is uttered): whenever the Left (echo echo) is part of the title of some essay, the alleged Leftist is surely going to use the occasion to support the war in Iraq, or support stuffing the Washington Consensus down the throat of Latin American, or denounce Chavez, or do variations on the power elite dance that are indistinguishable, in the end, from policies advocated by the Cato Institute (which is, actually, more antiwar than the Left (echo echo)) or the Heritage foundation.

Take a gander at a magazine like Dissent (or, if you have a stronger stomach, Democratiya – which by the way, what fucking dick came up with that title? do those people entirely lack a sense of humor?). The current online issue offers for your entertainment and progressive reading pleasure an article analyzing the Mexican elections (you guessed it – Lopez Obrador is an authoritarian, the future is in markets, there was no election fraud, blah blah blah) by Angel Jaramillo – a New School student specializing in (o Lord, take me now!) Leo Strauss.

There is also the editor’s intro to Dissent, which begins by pointing out, through the wisdom of a poll conducted by CNN, that the elections (ritual expression of gratitude for the Dems win) don’t represent some leftward tending by the electorate. Heaven forbid. The Left (echo echo) stands firmly committed to a third way that triangulates from the really conservative feelings of the vast majority of the population – and if the vast majority starts expressing a yen for lefty-liberal programs, it will certainly mess up the triangulation.

And then the editor (one Mitchell Cohen) proceeds to shovel this poop:

“Some of the toughest questions will concern foreign policy. Consider Iran’s aggressive ambitions. Here is a militant theocracy pursuing nuclear weapons, calling for genocide against a member of the UN, and seeking hegemony in a rattled region. It’s rattled, in part, thanks to disheartening U.S. policy. The United States has a long record of stumbling when it comes to Iran. Think of Washington’s support for the 1953 coup. Remember the utter incompetence of Jimmy Carter’s policies. In this issue we publish a remarkable speech made in Tehran by Joschka Fischer, Germany’s ex–foreign minister. He presents the stakes with candor. In addition, we feature a symposium on Iran and the West. The problems raised in the symposium have frightening implications. People on the left need to be thoughtful and not clichéd in approaching them. See Fred Halliday’s critical article on the romance of some leftists with Islamic extremists—the jihadism of fools. Not that there are wise holy wars.”

Then there is Halliday’s article. I hope he did a twofer with this one - it would fit so well with our comrades over at Telos! I'd go into it, but how much stupidity do I have to suffer for the sake of my readers? Okay, begin with muttering about widespread approval on the Left (hiss hiss – this is the bad left that cheers for the wolf instead of Red Riding Hood, the one that is being rescued by the good left, the Halliday-Cohen-Hitchens left, calling out to all comrades at sea) of the 9/11 attacks. Then the usual humanitarian intervention, Halliday fighting, of course, the fourth world war from an ultra Marxy perspective! It will be a killing field, boys, but fifty years from now, women will be freed from the veil. Mention Iran as a theocracy. That's a good one. That will show em. A dictatorship no less. And so, in the manner of the beloved Soviet Union before him, Halliday and his ilk temporarily form a popular front with the Cheney daughters.

Your average radio talkshow bigneck can do a better job with these threads and pieces than Halliday, but such is the sum of that thing called Dissent. Irving Howe, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you... oo oo oo.

My suggestion is: the LEFT (echo echo) should slit its throat with a big rusty razor. Basta! I know just how Robespierre felt. But have no fear, fearless Leftyites, you will be propped up for decades for your usefulness in creating a counterfeit ideology to flood the market. Case in point: look at, or weep over, the tender Saturday profile of the insufferable Kenan Makiya, the man who who wrote that the the bombs being dropped by American aircraft on Baghdad was "music to his ears" in 2003, as he wrestles with the demons of Iraq in the dangerous precincts of Cambridge, Mass. He is ... doing an analysis! I shiver and shake, thinking of the radical things that might come out of that! But let's see, I'll look in my crystal ball for a moment and find - everything he believed before the invasion was right! he was let down by the people. That's what I'd bet. Hitchens just reviewed his own support for the war and found it was right, too. I was so nervous - I thought he might think he screwed the pooch. So reassuring.

And so it goes, Leftyism serving the war culture in every way.

Surely some budding Sartre should somewhere should write a Naissance d'un guachiste as a matching set with Naissance d'un chef. The first phase would be the ultra phase. Capitalism must be overthrown. The rhetoric in this phase is all ruddy and bloody, the demands, oh, how they pile up! Our lefty is in full imperative mode. He knows that the people united will never be defeated. Phase two, of course, is the upward trajectory. The invites to write articles. Here, our lefty is mr. strategist. Ah, how he casts his sharp eye upon the field of forces! phase three is the NGO or the Academic post. Now comes the era of taking the temperature of the Left. He is continually sticking a thermometer in its, or his, ass, and reporting on the important numbers. By this time, of course, Left is his brand. But it turns out that not overthrowing capitalism right away has had advantages. The credit card, the tenure track, the kids' schooling. So time for phase four, which is democracy - or democratiya, for by this time the Leftist has lost any sense of humor, and finds the least hint of irony to be a bad sign - cynicism afoot and like that. Now he can bring his immense credentials, the threat he once posed to the whole capitalist system, to the crying need for human rights in some place that has to be at least two thousand miles from where he lives - and the rhetoric swells with the accustomed absolutes! But the battle now is against comrades who are allied with fascists - say it ain't so! but sadly, it is. All those comrades with the poster up of Mohammad Atta - oh, they may seem invisible, they may seem non-existent, but comrades, they swarm in the night!

And so on. As a career track move, I highly recommend Leftyism to the budding student out there. It pays richly, both in the moral butter one can swim in in the twenties, and the fat of the land one gets to enjoy later on.

But me? This is why I hate the Left (echo echo).