eureka! LI figures out what has been bugging us about the term 'subversive'

It struck me today that I was on the wrong track.

I’ve been searching for some use of subversive in art or literary criticism in the 19th century. And I have found texts that are about things that I associate with subversion – for instance, many, many texts about overturning conventions and rules in painting, poetry, fiction. And I have been doing what seems natural - grouping them together, looking for the subversive theme, style, attitude. Yet the actual use of the word subversive is lacking. That isn't a big deal, but it was available. It was certainly as there for Baudelaire or for Delacroix as for me. Yet ... the first use of it in the modern sense that I’ve found, so far, is from a Lionel Trilling essay in the 30s.

And then it struck me: I was not seeing the blank where the blank was. To see a blank is not always the easiest thing. Especially when you are vampire hunting in the vaults of history. Artists, writers and critics wrote in the beginning of the 20th century wrote about revolutionary art. Or they wrote, under the influence of Zola, of experimental art. The blanks were filled in, but not the blank that I thought I was just so naturally filling in. Today, you can find a thousand titles referring to the ‘subversive tradition in Spanish renaissance poetry”, or the ‘subversive Shakespeare,’ but oddly, none of those titles actually quote uses of subversive by the poets or playwrights they are analyzing. Rather, our modern day academic uses the word ‘subversive’, unconsciously, as an instrument, without worrying too much about when it was invented. But LI has been worrying about when it was invented, when it became such a critical commonplace. Thinking about it as competing with experiment and revolution is actually very clarifying. Experiment, linked to modernism by every bond, seems not to enjoy the prestige it once enjoyed. And revolutionary? Nobody is writing about, say, the revolutionary tradition in Spanish Renaissance poetry. Why? because revolution has a bolder profile that would call for some self-consciousness. Delacroix painted the revolution of 1830. When Russian futurists wrote manifestos back in the 1920s, they didn’t call for a subversive literature – they called, explicitly, for a revolutionary one. But who among all of these writers called for a subversive art?

Which makes LI suspect that the normalization of subversion as a critical category is not linked to the rise of feminism, or gay studies, or post-colonialism – but is linked, much more interestingly, to the post 1968 loss of faith in revolution. This has a jarring effect on my sense of the politics of ‘subversive’.

Huh.

what is that noise of creeping and crawling in the family vault

It is difficult for us in such a short space of time to get together all the reflections which a work of this nature naturally gives birth to; we can only lament here publicly on the kind of frenzy which seems to agitate these turbulent spirits that the love of liberty and independence carries into excesses, and which makes them envision happiness in the subversion of all rules, of all principles, and in the destruction even of those laws that up to now have been the security of the proprieties not only of the family, but of the person and even of the sovereign

--- The warrant [arrêt] for the pamphlet, the Inconveniencies of feudal rights by Pierre Francois Boncerf, which was burned in Paris in 1776. Boncerf was a lawyer, the clerk of the great physiocrat, Turgot, and his pamphlet was directed against serfdom on economic grounds – a small moment in the Great Transformation of the European economy.

LI feels like we have distinctly advanced on this whole subversive festuche and debauch we’ve got going. It is definitely a step forward to look at it in terms of insiders and outsiders, as per our last post on the subject, even though subversion doesn’t originally – that is, when the word starts appearing in the sixteenth century - locate the inverting force it denotes. What we are looking for is the souterrain of history in which a word finds its connotative field. Criticism is a sport like vampire hunting, one has to be willing to get down in the vaults, open up boxes that have been closed for centuries, breathe a miasmatic air.

So we see how subversion is used in a judicial sense by the police in the year Adam Smith wrote the Declaration of Independence. Or something like that. Like the wind that ‘subverted’ John Evelyn’s trees in the late seventeen hundreds, Boncerf’s pamphlet aims at knocking down a system of proprieties. However, if we look at who Boncerf is, we get the picture of the semi-insider, a lawyer, Turgot’s secretary, a made young man. Boncerf, it turns out, is one of the physiocrats who, far from trying to subvert the public order, is a reformer intent on saving it. In his view, serfdom is an economic offense, just as liberty is about property – not the proprieties that bind it in. The insider/outsider is of a type that requires the most delicate handling. A type that the guardians of public order have to be especially vigilant about. Subversion often acts anonymously, it often acts secretly – or at least these are the connotations to which it is destined as it goes down the surveillance track. As it appears in legal documents and reports, as it functions in the courtroom and the newspapers. And as subversion, by being secret, can infiltrate the inside, the public order itself, as it steals the codes, the plans, the blueprints, the information, as it deforms the tramsmission of orders, spreads rumors, gossips, blackmails, then it has to be adapted to staying inside by the various devices used by the covert - becoming invisible, planting bugs, spying through keyholes, etc. The association with secrecy is formed in the police file, but it soon has a natural existence outside of the police file. So the question is: if the spirit of subversion makes the hop into the arts, will it use its history? Will it lay low, will it disguise itself?

Let’s now jump ahead to another subversive scene. This is from the report filed by Billaud-Varennes in 1794 to the Convention, on “the necessity of promoting the love of civic virtue by public celebrations…” Public celebrations – not least, executions – have certainly been promoted by the Jacobins. But 1794 is a reaction to the terror. So Billaud-Varennes looks back:

“We must confess that the delirium that took possession of some actors was shared by the authorities as well.

They had ordered the disappearance from all the old plays of the noble titles, to be replaced by the title of citizen; so well that in the place of duc, marquis, count or baron, one substituted the word citizen without even bothering with whether the change violated the rime or measure of the verse. The actors of the theater of the Republic avoided, as much as they could, these gross inconveniences, in making a little less ridiculous changes; but they were obliged to sacrifice all theatrical illusion for fear of losing an eye or an ear from ignorant sans-culottes, and one saw Greeks and Romans, Venetians, Gaulois appear on the stage with the national colors; the women themselves were not exempt from this absurd subjection, and Phedre did not declare her flame for Hippolyte but with a chest ornamented with a large tricolor cocard. But the spirit of subversion did not limit itself to revolutionizing the theatrical costume; one attacked the masterpieces. Even those tragedies that breathed the most ardent love of liberty and the strongest hatred for despotism were obliged to pass by a purifying scrutiny, and only obtained their certificate of civism after one had taken away some hundreds of lines, which were not apropos. How to suffer, for instance, that the death of Cesear was soiled by the counter-revolutionary discourse of that moderate, Anthony?”

The spirit of subversion in this moment was, indeed, the public order. The opposite of the secret is the bacchanal. The policeman's nightmare. It spreads, it infiltrates, the audience and the stage. One wonders about the aesthetic effect of this on the spectators – surely the prehistory of the absurd, of the revolts of the modernists, the dadaists, surrealists, etc, the whole dwindling tradition, has too much ignored performance? Because theater is live, and dies, the influence of performance on writers and artists before the movies is, LI thinks, probably very underestimated. The idea of putting on, say, Cid, with the substitution of “citizen” for any of the monikers of the nobility in the play, really makes it a wholly other play. The noble spirit of the classic plays is, for the contemporary spectator, wholly theatrical and make believe anyway, but this is the moment, in 1793, that made that presupposition possible – that in a sense cuts us off from classical theater forever.

It is time, I think, to jumpcut to Delacroix, Champfleury, Baudelaire, the Exhibition Universelle, and the phrase, “Le beau est toujours bizarre”.

news from the peckerwood apocalypse

As carrion attracts the buzzard, so any story demonstrating the venality, the stupidity, and the general worthlessness of Paul Wolfowitz is a magnet to LI. So we have been in buzzard heaven for the past few days, as John Cassidy’s New Yorker profile of the man has circulated through the media world. Wolfowitz earned his position as head of the World Bank due to the logic of Bozo Bush World, in which the obviously incompetent are raised to positions where they can do the utmost damage by our president, - who, as usual in such cases, displays the acumen of an aging golf pro at a second rate country club.

Cassidy’s article is pretty good, although he could have said something more about the intellectual roots of Wolfowitz’s comic fight against ‘government corruption.” This has been standard boilerplate in conservative development economics since rent seeking was dreamt up in the 70s at the University of Chicago. In neoclass speak, rentseeking has turned into a handy little tool to knock government and seek endless privatization. The economy of favors that is criticized by conservatives never leads to questions about the economy of class – that would certainly be a no no. Rather, the private sector is efficient, don’t you know? So fucking efficient. Thus, the spectacle of the man whose intellectual corruption was a major driver in getting the U.S. involved in a pointless war conducted by an administration that makes Harding’s look clean going to the World Bank with a ‘good governance’ agenda that is your usual Trojan horse for the corporate penetration of national economies in which the real interest is in a very active state role in the economy. Typical mind fucking, American style.

Being the creep that he is, Wolfowitz went into the World Bank and started appointing the usual Bush mafia: for instance, Susan Rich Folsom:

“Folsom is a Washington ethics lawyer with strong ties to the Republican Party. (Her husband, George Folsom, a foreign-policy specialist, worked for the Administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.) Before Wolfowitz’s arrival, the bank had enlisted the help of an executive-search firm, which, out of a large pool of candidates, identified nine finalists. After reviewing these names, Wolfowitz rejected them all and selected Folsom, whom Wolfensohn had hired to help him deal with the Treasury Department and the Republican-controlled Congress, and who had been acting as the department’s interim head. According to one of Wolfowitz’s aides, he regarded Folsom as eminently qualfied for the job, and he was also impressed by her performance at the investigations department. Others at the bank saw things differently. “Paul turned around to the world and said that she was appointed following an international search,” one senior official who has now left the bank said to me. “That was technically true. There was an international search. But she was not part of that search. He shredded the list and then brought in a loyalist from the Republican Party.”

Ah, that Republican double dippin’ habit! Once they reach D.C., they can explore rent seeking in propria persona, as spouses and scion nepotistically scramble up the slope of the public tit, doing their best in the real economy while weaving a rhetorical critic of guv’mint for the suckers. Since the suckers – the deadenders who believe Bush is Jesus Christ’s veritable shit – are often, themselves, engineers and the like who are fattening on Pentagon money, it is a righteous circle of hypocrites, insensibly bringing on the peckerwood apocalypse. Ain’t it cute?

Of course, Wolfowitz brought with him the imperial style that served us so well in CPA Iraq:

“As president of the World Bank, Wolfowitz supervises virtually all of its daily operations. However, the bank’s board of twenty-four executive directors is ultimately responsible for its lending and policy activities. Votes on the board are distributed according to how much money each country has contributed to the bank’s capital. The United States controls about sixteen per cent of the votes, but the four next-biggest shareholders—Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—can outvote it. This governing structure puts a premium on the bank president’s ability to forge a consensus, but Wolfowitz has often seemed determined simply to ignore the board. “They always give us ninety-eight per cent of what we want, so why should we bother about them?” he said to a senior colleague shortly after arriving at the bank. The colleague explained that the board usually obliged the president because the president usually cultivated its members.”

But this is what set off the fireworks:

“The incident that prompted the most comment internally involved Shaha Ali Riza. When Wolfowitz was nominated to the bank presidency, he disclosed his relationship with Riza, who was working in the bank’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) department. Under the bank’s regulations, spouses or partners are prohibited from supervising one another or from working in the same cone of authority. As president, Wolfowitz oversees a cone of authority encompassing nearly all the bank’s employees, including those in MENA. The board of directors’ ethics committee took the view that Riza should be transferred to a position outside his supervision. Wolfowitz asked that she be allowed to maintain her job at MENA and to work with him as necessary, offering to recuse himself from any decisions concerning her pay and work conditions. “It really gave a bad impression, especially for somebody who was making a big issue of good governance,” a former senior official at the bank said. “The president is supposed to set an example to everybody, and yet here he wanted to have his girlfriend working with him, which is flatly prohibited under bank rules.”

Ultimately, Riza was seconded to the State Department. To compensate her for the disruption of her career at the bank, she was promoted to the managerial level, and she has received two pay raises, bringing her salary to a hundred and ninety-three thousand dollars—more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes. “The staff are very upset,” Alison Cave, the chairman of the World Bank Staff Group Association, said, explaining that the raises amounted to special treatment that violated established bank guidelines. Kevin Kellems told me that Wolfowitz had no involvement in Riza’s promotion or pay raises. “All arrangements concerning Shaha Ali Riza were made at the direction of the board of directors,” he said.

Those grafs prompted mention of Cassidy’s piece in Al Kamen’s column in the Washington Post. This, in turn, provoked more commotion. Kamen mentioned this Friday:

“The World Bank rank and file were most upset by our recent column noting that Shaha Riza, linked romantically with bank President Paul Wolfowitz, got some curiously hefty raises upon being detailed to work at the State Department -- but remaining on the bank's payroll.
"Since publication of the . . . column," a bank-wide e-mail Wednesday from the bank's staff association said, the association "has been inundated with messages from staff expressing concern, dismay and outrage."

The association "has looked into those concerns" and concluded that, while it couldn't "determine who drew up and approved" the agreement detailing Riza to State -- which the bank said was necessary to avoid a conflict of interest -- it did find that the terms are "grossly out of line with" bank rules.

Riza, a senior communications officer for the Middle East and North Africa region, was promoted to a higher-paying position on Sept. 19, 2005, the day she left for Foggy Bottom, without any of the required open competition for the job, the association said. She also got a pay raise more than double the amount allowed by the rules, the e-mail said, followed by another allegedly overly large raise.
Before these bumps up, Riza had been earning $132,660. She's now paid $193,590. (Correction: We said last week that this figure was about $7,000 a year more than what is paid to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for whom Riza now works. That now appears to be very misleading. Riza's reported pay is net, we're told, and Rice's is gross. So Riza takes home a whole lot more than Rice. We regret the error.) The association said that in general it "defends a staff member's right to have" the bank "preserve the confidentiality of certain information -- and we deplore this leak of a staff member's confidential salary information. However, in this case, the information shared with the press reveals a violation of the staff rules and therefore seems to us a clear case of whistleblowing."

The sharply worded e-mail called on the bank's board and top officials to "explain how/why the rules were bent in this case" and noted that "this is not the first instance of such staff rule violations by the current World Bank Group management."
The association e-mail -- and other bank observers -- questioned how this matter squared with Wolfowitz's anti-corruption drive, which demands that recipients of World Bank loans crack down on graft, nepotism and so on.

"It's ironic that Mr. Wolfowitz lectures developing countries about good governance and fighting corruption, while winking at an irregular promotion and overly generous pay increases to a partner," said Bea Edwards, international director of the Government Accountability Project, which first disclosed the pay data.
Foreign Policy magazine's editors opined that "given Wolfowitz's crusade to fight corruption in countries that receive Bank aid, doesn't it seem a little hypocritical to hand your girlfriend inordinate bonuses?"

But these criticisms tend to assign some blame to Wolfowitz, even though his spokesman has assured us that matters involving Riza's "arrangements" were made "at the direction of the bank's board of directors."

And Riza's successor for the Middle East and North Africa region, Karem Elsharkawy, in an e-mail yesterday to his colleagues, implored them to "maintain a balanced position and be rational and fair." No wrongdoing has been proven, he said, and until then "we must give our colleague the benefit of all reasonable doubt."

Guardian today has a bit more about Wolfowitz’s girlfriend. It is another one of those stories of this era of grift that just makes my heart swell with the poetry of it all. So often, reality disappoints us. Bad guys turn out to be not so bad, or bad only when they are truly on. Dillinger was mostly a schmoe. Saints turn out to be chiselers. But the Bush administration has always gone the extra mile, always delivered. Nothing bad that they do doesn’t turn out to be, on examination, worse. Worse than you’d ever expect. Shameless. A true orgy of the unfit, the most unqualified people pursuing the most lamebrained political agendas while quoting the silliest pieties ever cooked up by a pedophile Sunday school teacher for the deacons.


“Ms Riza was eventually given a job at the state department under Liz Cheney, the daughter of the vice-president, promoting democracy in the Middle East. She was also moved up to a managerial pay grade in compensation for the disruption to her career. The staff association claims that the pay rise was more than double the amount allowed under employee guidelines.”

Ah, the department of nepotism – so nice to see that the Bushies have been innovators! Surely the promotion of democracy involves Karl Rove’s girlfriend too! We want all these people to be happy. This is the same Liz Cheney, by the way, who wrote the astonishing Washington Post op ed piece a couple of months ago. Astonishing that the meritocracy, in its wisdom, promoted a woman whose prose style seemed copped from that of a particularly dim sixth grader. It was a defense of the war in Iraq that only a father – a bloated, cancerous father made out of synthetic radioactive materials – could love. Plus, of course, Fred Hiatt.

subversive insiders

Qu'importent les victimes si le geste est beau ! – Laurent Tailhade, commenting on an anarchist bombing of a restaurant in Paris.

In the 1890s, when anarchism and art were joined at the hip in Montmartre, a anarchist writer named Zo D’axa, who published a paper, Endehors, for which Felix Feneon and Octave Mirabeau wrote, ran an ass named Nul for the senate. He published his position paper in another journal, called simple pages (Feuilles). It is a pretty good position paper:

“Of an old French family, I dare to say that I am an ass of the race, an ass in the beautiful sense of the word – four hooves and hair overall.

My name is Nul, as is that of my competitor candidates.

I am white, as are the number of ballots that they will obstinently not count and which, now, count for me.

My election is assured.”

D’axa went on to point out that the chamber was composed of thieves, imbeciles, and non-entities – in other words, a perfect sample of the French public. D’axa claimed that on election day, the ass, sitting in a cart, was pulled along the streets of Paris so that Paris could see it – the perfect legislator. Paris, with “le people suffisamment nigaud pour croire que la souverainete consiste à se nommer des maitres.” As it passed along, it was greeted with cheers and jeers, including one man who shook his fist and called it a ‘dirty Jew.’ In other words, all was in order. But somehow the police took this candidate amiss, and issued out and arrested the candidate and its committee.

At one point in telling this cock and bull story, D’axa describes the ass as a “subversive animal.” This is my point (oh, the tedium that emanates from this weblog as LI pursues this bee in his bonnet!) in telling this tale – for it was the 1890s that the collusion between subversion and art became, well, codified.

We started out this string of posts last week to consider a sideissue that had popped up on the LCC blog, and the Parodycenter, about the subversive function of art. We were against it – or rather, we didn’t see subversion per se, without an object, as being a function at all. And in the stream of comments at those sites, some exaggerated statements seem to jump out at us, such as: all art is subversive. Or: all great art is subversive. This seems clearly wrong, and I can’t imagine an artist like, say Joshua Reynolds even understanding it – although Blake might have. But it has dawned on us that the more interesting issue is: when did subversion jump from a police category to an aesthetic one? How is it that subversion is now one of the critic’s routine words? And by routine, we mean a word that ceases to be read. And by ceasing to be read, we mean a term that proliferates.

Well, our investigation has so far been, we admit, a piss poor exhibition of false starts. Sometimes our brain doesn’t work so good. So sorry. Excuse us. Our deepest regrets. Pardon. Our forehead is in the dust. We will lick the heels of your shoes. Etc.

So in this post we are going to back up a bit, and go at subversion from another direction – from the policing perspective.

In the OED, the first senses of subversion, now obsolete are the demolition of something - a city, for example – or the turning of something upside down, or uprooting. So John Evelyn, surveying wind damage, could talk of the subversion of his trees. But it was also applied, by the 17th century, to systems of law. Burke speaks of subversion in his Impeachment of Hastings – in a passage that, of course, irresistibly reminds the modern reader of the habit and policy of the Bush junta:

For your Lordships must have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates, conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records. They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the eye of Parliament, before the writers of them have time to invent an excuse for a direct contrary conduct to that to which their former pretended principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution of the Company. My Lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for, if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service, and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England, would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed, even in governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.

It was the great business of Mr. Hastings's policy to subvert this great political edifice.”

Notice that in Burke’s passage, subversion has to do with the intentional act of an insider, operating harmfully on a system. The insider in this case, Hastings, is subverting a system for his own benefit. But this notion is open to another one that is in the offing – that of the secret outsider, the double agent, boring into a system only in order to overthrow it – with malice aforethought. The distinction between the insider and the outsider is carried by subversion into the 19th century, with varied effects.

song culture

Ces jours plus longs qu’un siècle, ou tout rire dètonne,
où l’on est poursuivi par un air d’Offenbach…
-Lambert Thiboust

Looking over our archives, LI is struck with how often, how obsessively, how dog going back to its vomit-ly, LI writes about the second empire. Napoleon III and all that. During the brief era of analogies (remember? Iraq as Germany? Japan? El Salvador? Malaysia? Vietnam? Andorra?), we inveighed against the practice of picking out some broadly historical event broadly similar to one unfolding now and using it for nickel prophecies – but in fact we have a weakness for that very thing, seeing starcrossed likenesses between the Second Empire and the Bush era - the coup d’etat, the second rate political operatives elevated to the status of demi-gods, the controlled flow of outrages to amuse and occupy the cognitive space of the sugar tranced populace, the use of military aggression as domestic political pablum, and, as the empire retracted, the visible attempt to cretinize the dwindling base, all active participants in the sophistry of their own deception – a scenario in the psychology of the dupe done in the grand manner. The latter, though, is admittedly much more the m.o. of the current crewe – the ability to turn out of small fry ever willing to secrete their own more and more fantastic excuses for the five hundred billion dollar and counting fiasco in the Middle East and to rigorously ignore the ruling clique’s devastating history of incompetence and worse when dealing with the very small but real problem posed by one terrorist band is surely an historical anomaly, more like cult activities of the past – Jonestown, the Anabaptists of Munster – than like anything seen in American or French history.

…

Well, so there you have a naked showing of motives. And now, to advance crabwise upon the whole vexed question of subversive art. In a post that is swimming somewhere back there in the pipeline, we remarked that La Marseillaise is a strong example of a piece of ‘art’ that has been stamped as subversive at various times during its career. Most national anthems lead decorous ceremonial existences, but not that song. It was composed in the moment in which the popular army was crystallizing in France – in 1792 – and it was bound up with the fortunes of that army. Goethe, hearing soldiers sing it on the field of Valmy, called it the Te Deum of the revolution. Eugene Weber wrote an essay asking the question, who were these singers? using La Mareillaise as an excuse to ask about the frenchifying of France. In 1792, the majority of the population inside the Hexagon did not speak French, or at least spoke it badly, as a second language. They spoke langue d’oc, or Breton, or something close to Catalan. High culture did speak French – as high culture spoke it in Spain and Germany and Russia. Weber’s point is that songs were one of the great, unheralded instruments for making the French French. Singing was a part of the rhythm of everyday life. In fact, as Weber points out, the National Assembly was always getting visited by delegates from this or that group who sang to them. Laura Masson has written a whole book about the song culture of the revolution, from which I will cull a quote:

“A deputation from the Piques section arrived to ask the deputies [of the Convention] to attend their celebration of the ‘martyrs of lbierty’ several days hence. One of their mamembers sang a ‘patriotic song of his composition,’ and the deputy Laloi moved that the deputation’s speech and song be included in the Convention’s bulletin. Danton objected, “the Bulletin of the Convention is in no way meant to carry verse throughout the Republic, but rather good laws written in good prose. Moreover, a decree requires the Committee of Public Instruction to give preliminary consideration to all that concerns the arts and education.” Laloi responded with common republican praise of song, but Danton was not to be dissuaded. “One must not invoke principles we all recognize in order to reach false conclusions. Certainly, patriotic hymns are useful… for electrifying republican energy: but who among you is in any condition to pass judgment on the song performed at the bar? Did you truly hear its words and its meaning. Because I myself cannot judge them.” The song was sent to the Committee without further debate.”

Keep in mind this mix between song and politics when thinking about the banning of La Marseillaise under Napoleon III and the sly boosting of its tune by Offenbach in Orphee aux enfers. If you start following the commentators on Offenbach’s use of the tune, you soon run into the question of subversion – although hardly ever do we find the question of what is being subverted, and what can be subverted, being posed.

Chiquita bananas: now with plenty of colombian blood sprinkled on them

Colombia journal is one of those resources on the web one takes for granted, even though the people writing it are actually putting their lives at risk. Today’s article about Chiquita Banana company – you know, the banana company that pays paramilitary drug dealers to torture and murder union leaders so that it can pay its workers shit – is pretty good. Notice that the war on terrorism, for the Bush administration, certainly shouldn’t be interpreted to mean, like, war on terrorizing the working class. As always, wars are double pronged thing for the U.S. governing class – on the one hand, there is the positive of the military industry, that economic generator which has kept a generation of American engineers fat and happy on oceans of Pentagon welfare money; and on the other hand, there is the negative (which turns out to be a win-win) of targeting the working class. This is why the war on drugs is a model war, so appropriately given birth to during the cold war era. Find the small dealers, disrupt poor neighborhoods, enforce ethnic and racial bigotries, reverse civil rights laws, and at the same time – ally with big drug dealers, prop up corrupt U.S. allies, and shield, as always, upper class white people from ever having to face the consequences of the bogus laws that their paid reps have passed.

As for Chiquita, apparently the new slogan for their upcoming ad campaign is gonna be: ya want those bananas with or without blood?

Batboy on Iran

LI has been a little flabbergasted, flummoxed, depressed, ironed out, shaken up, titrated and itchified by the publicity surrounding the bribes raised by the current crop of presidential candidates. It seems to us, oh, slightly demented that our politically savvy writers are comparing the swag, like some ancient folly Gibbon would record, with marmoreal poise, about the screwier Cesaers in an imperial trough period. Except it is Hilary to Romney to Obama – whose price is right? Famously, the silver age of arty cinema in the U.S. – the seventies – was swept away by the packaged blockbuster, one of the symptoms of which was the sudden popular interest in grosses. The grosses are now part of the roll out package. And LI, crowlike, can only dirge and caw at these signs of the hypno-apocalypse.

Since the landsmarks separating the mad from the sane have been so swept away, LI turns, desperately, to those who can truly be considered barking mad for some extreme onto which we can throw an anchor and say: here, at least, is clear insanity. Which is why we like Ralph Peters, the man who toured Iraq last year and pronounced it safe and sound and ready for business – a triumph of an occupation, all things considered, and to only to be compared with some copious bowel movement by Winston Churchill; the man who published a joke map of the middle east showing it all cut up into the bits the Cheney-ites dream of; and the man who has a nice little column in the NY Post, yesterday, attacking the British navy. The style is the man:

“THE greatest shock from the Middle East this year hasn't been terrorist ruthlessness or the latest Iranian tantrum. It's that members of Britain's Royal Marines wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors.
Jingoism aside, I can't imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would've resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.
You could put a U.S. Marine in a dungeon and knock out his teeth, but you wouldn't knock out his pride in his country and the Corps. "Semper fi" means something.

And our Aussie allies would be just as tough.”

At one point, after the glorious end of the Vietnam war, American militarism experienced a brief period of illegitimacy and ridicule. Ah, those were the days! A demoralized America – I’m doing my best to bring that back! The idea of an officer with his eyes popping out, his face red, yelling like a Tourette’s victim, was actually considered quite funny, instead of an idolon of emulation for today’s gamers and libertarians. Now, of course, such types are immediately slapped with a contract by one reactionary media company or another.

LI wonders why the true predecessor for the rightwing style of high cholesterol bollocks is never given his due. I’m talking, of course, of Ed Anger, the long respected columnist for the World Weekly News, who died in 2004. WWN, you will remember, is the only newspaper to focus on the alien and his presidential endorsements. It was due to Ed that the paper discovered that marvel that scientists are still wondering about: the bat boy. Anger was the author of “Let's Pave the Stupid Rainforests & Give School Teachers Stun Guns”, which I hope all of my readers have profitably perused.

This is a typical Ed Anger opening graf:

“I'm madder than Judge Judy with her mouth wired shut over a couple of stories I just read in my hometown paper. One was about a judge declaring a mistrial in a murder case just because a juror kept catching some Z's during the trial. Another high-and-mighty judge sentenced a courtroom spectator to two days in jail because she dozed off while waiting for a friend's traffic case to get over with. I've been on jury duty several times before, because I feel it's my civic duty, just like owning 37 firearms, for when I need to defend my home against an assault by Cuban, North Korean, Iraqi, Russian or U.N. paratroopers! I know how boring sitting in a court can be, because I had trouble staying awake there, too.”

The difference is that Ralph Peters seems much more unhinged. The idea of Crocodile Dundee laughing at those sand monkeys, though – that is straight up Ed Anger.

Poor Ed! He kept having to move the stakes, as his message, his ersatz anger, his insane political viewpoint, was mainstreamed. There is a nice scene in Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers set in a tabloid like WWN in the early 1970s. The place is run, of course, by old communists from the days of the blacklist and such. The protagonist, or one of them, a writer on a downer, went to Vietnam as a freelance stringers, and – making a truly disastrous decision – has come back as a heroin entrepreneur, but of course a corrupt DEA man – if that isn’t a redundant phrase – is after his horse. As a former writer for the tabloid, and the son in law of the owner, he goes there for advice and is caught up in a discussion about the front page story. What should it be? A headline is needed – then the story will be fabricated for it. And he comes up with a stroke of genius: Skydiver Rapes, Kills Bride. The story would have everything - a marriage out in a field, a skydiver whose parachute won't open, a fatal fall into the bride, coinciding with a final sexual act, making it a murder/rape/fatal accident in one. Stone, in his recent biography, admits that he took swathes of the tabloid scene from his own life, for he worked for a couple of tabloids. His greatest headline, though, was: Skydiver devoured by starving birds, although Mad Dentist yanks Girl’s Tongue came in second.

Life has always been more tabloid than NYT. Ralph Peters proves it – surely he is the Batboy’s cousin once removed.