the virginia tech massacre

Yesterday, LI just couldn’t leave the news from Virginia Tech alone. We were transfixed.

There’s a famous story in the Fourth book of the Republic. Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the soul and its vagaries, with the aim of trying to anatomize it. Socrates suggests that the soul is composed of a rational part and an irrational part. The irrational part, characteristically, desires – Socrates uses the example of the desire to drink. Thirst might not be irrational in itself, but it gains its power from the irrational part of the soul. However, that desires are not enacted immediately is, for Socrates, evidence that something - and Socrates tries to show that it is the other part of the soul, reason - impinges on the irrational part:

“S: And the forbidding principle is derived from reason, and that which bids and attracts proceeds from passion and disease?
G: Clearly.
S: Then we may fairly assume that they are two, and that they differ from one another; the one with which man reasons, we may call the rational principle of the soul, the other, with which he loves and hungers and thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions?
G: Yes, he said, we may fairly assume them to be different.
S: Then let us finally determine that there are two principles existing in the soul. And what of passion, or spirit? Is it a third, or akin to one of the preceding?
G: I should be inclined to say--akin to desire.
S: Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
G: I have heard the story myself, he said.
S:The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.”

In the ancient world, the instruments of the senses were sometimes given character, as if they existed as persons in their own right. That famous saying of Jesus – “if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out” – comes out of this background. There is a deeper background in the Upanishads – as Paul Deussen writes:

In the beginning, Atman alone existed. He resolved to create the worlds and created as such the four spheres [the flood of the heavenly ocean; the light atom of space; earth as death; and the ur-water]… Further the Atman creates eight 'world-guardians', when he out of the ur-water brings forth the Parusa (ur-man the primeval man) and first creates out of mouth nose eyes ears skin heart navel and the generative organ the corresponding psychical organs (speech, in-breathing, sight, hearinghair, Manas, out-breath, semen) and out of these Agni, Vaya, Aditya, quarters of directions, plants, moon, death and water as world-guardians. But immediately, weakness overcomes these world-guardian gods.”

We pretend that we have escaped from this mythology, and we talk of the senses being “personified” – as though, on one side, there is the myth, the eye god, and on the other side there is rationality, the person. But the person will never lose the mythic caul with which he came into the world.

And so it is in the herky-jerky of that merger of media and murder yesterday. Depressingly but inevitably, the thing will be called a tragedy – for we have never devised another category for these outlier acts of beserker violence. And we want – for understandable reasons – to instill some dignity into the bloody spasm that ended so many lives that no aesthetic form can catch. The phrase from the Vietnam war – fragging – is much more appropriate. However, like a peculiarly fascinating film, LI can’t turn away his eyes. We all know Leontius’ peculiar discovery about himself, and what can we do? Well, we will turn the whole thing into the site of an argument of some kind – already Glenn Reynolds, with the boldfaced and thuggish stupidity that is his trademark, has suggested that if more students had been packing, the shooter would have shot fewer. Rather overlooking the fact that … oops, sorry. LI was about to address Reynolds as though he were making an argument.

It is the advantage of religion that it is prepared for these cases. The religious can say, (and do, all the time) my prayers are with you. As if praying were an activity, a form of work, a rolling up of the sleeves. If people said what they meant: I am going to say some words out loud, or think them, that relate to what I saw on tv – we would have a fairer sense of why the promise of ‘prayer’ is so infuriating to a non-believer. Myself, I am not such a non-believer – prayers, trances, spells, poems, equations, diagnosis, they are what we have.

the monument to a lack of a monument

LI was going to spend this week threading through the crimes of classical liberalism. Heavy emphasis, in other words, on the famine in Ireland, which served as a template for the series of famines in India.

This is how we were going to start: with that most familiar of strangers in a strange land, the Martian. If a Martian were to make a quick visit to D.C.’s National Mall, what information would he gather about the U.S.? He’d see that the U.S. had a pharaoh named George Washington; a great white father, Abraham Lincoln; that the U.S. was very concerned about the crimes of German history; and that some kind of disaster or war happened named Vietnam.

From our monuments, the Martian would never know that there was such a thing as a black American. And he would certainly never know that there was such a thing as slavery in the U.S.

It has long been a sort of joke that the American government is much happier exploring the horrors visited by Germany on the Jews than the horrors visited upon blacks by white plantation owners, some of whom wrote the original documents that founded these here states. However, going past the local issue, my moral is that the martian is us - we are in the position of the martian when we visit the past – or that part of the past that extends beyond the body of our memories, that extends beyond the memories of two or three generations. There is a history of the surface and a history of the vaults, and there no law that says that what happened in the vaults will be monumentalized on the surface. On the contrary, histories have a double purpose: to erect monuments and to create and communicate erasures. But those of us who are critical martians – moi, f’rinstance – have a perverse urge to counter this history, to take down the monuments and fill in the blanks. LI’s motive in throwing in our lot with the critical martians is simple: we are fated for blankhood. Poor, aberrant, marginal – what the fuck do we have to lose?

To give a small example of what we mean: David Gilmour, a very good historian, wrote a biography of Lord Curzon a few years ago. In the bio, he devotes four pages to the famine in India that occurred while Curzon was the Viceroy of India. He never, in this account, actually tells the reader how big the famine was. That is, he never mentions that it killed between 3 and 4 million people (as calculated by Arup Maharatna, quoted by Mike Davis in the Victorian Holocaust). Imagine a man writing a book about Stalin’s leadership in the thirties and simply skipping the famine in the Ukraine. It isn’t that this is Gilmour’s fault, of course – this is just how colonial history has come to be written. In 1930, though, the reach of generational memory would make such insouciance a little harder – and, indeed, the way the Bolsheviks responded to and used the famine in the Ukraine was very much influenced by the model provided by the British of seeing famines as providential genocides, mass murders by a Darwinian god that, luckily, were prefigured in the market – for after all, demand goes down when the demanders are dead – and so food prices, by the superbly beneficent invisible hand, go down too.

The conventions of telling the history of the British in India – at least, in the Anglosphere – are different from the conventions of telling the history of the Soviet Union. That the amount of food given to prisoners in the Gulags, and the amount of work they were required to do (which resulted in their mass deaths) matches the amount of food distributed by the British to starving Indians in the labor camps they set up, which was also directly linked to the amount of work they did – the British having the idea that a man weighing 70 pounds and eating, on the whole, a pound of rice a day really ought to be able to work at breaking rocks for nine hours a day – makes no difference in the difference with which the stories will be told. One is a crime of communism itself; the other is an unfortunate sideproduct of all the good the British brought to India – railroads, for instance, that could quickly and efficiently take rice away from India peasants and transport it to hungry Englishmen a world away; big canals into which mineral salts would leach, instead of the system of small, capillary irrigation canals that had maintained small landholders in India for centuries, and that the British regarded as impediment to the needful consolidation of agricultural properties.

So what I was going to do in some threads this week was tie together Classical liberalism and communism, not as opposites but as positions on a spectrum compounded, materially, of a system of production that both ideologies sought to encode – but that both, also, fully accepted.

But LI doesn’t know whether we have the energy to pursue this thread this week. We will see.

Natasha Wimmer

There are some who say that LI, underneath a surface pretentiousness, is just the kind of redneck who is going to end up sprawled in the gutter someday, another victim of cleaning fluid intox. But here’s some au contraire evidence! Readers may remember that LI threw a party for itself last December at the 7b bar. Among the attendees was the talented and beauteous Natasha Wimmer, who was coming off of translating Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. The Savage Detectives is the best novel of the year – I’m pretty confident that nothing this year is going to upset that statement.

And – abracadabra – here’s her book, gracing the front page – did I say front page – yes, front page of the Sunday New York Times! Reviewed by the Man, James Wood no less, who writes:

The pleasure we take in this, as readers of English, owes everything, of course, to the book's talented translator, Natasha Wimmer, who repeatedly finds inspired English solutions for what must be a fiendishly chatty and slangy novel.)

Alas, I can't say that James Wood really gets the novel, but I have that feeling about every Wood review I read. If I had been Sam Tannenhaus, I would have assigned the review to Eliot Weinberger, who would get the novel.

Shouts out to Natasha. My interview with her is on the Publisher Weekly site.

Now I’m going back to shooting up cleaning fluid.

A mystery

LI has often been puzzled by a double thread that seems to run through pro-war discourse. I wish someone would explain it to us.

If a man came up to you and said: “you are a pig and a jackass. I hate your religion. I hate the way you spend your money. I am afraid of you, because you are psychopathic. I don’t think anybody would blame me if I killed you.” And then the man said: “I am only here to help you. I definitely think you ought to let me take care of your security. Furthermore, I insist that you follow all my advice about what you should do with your money. And I also think my friends should live in your house for a while.” Surely the sensible response would be: “go away, or I’m going to call the police.”

However, this seems to be the inevitable message of the pro-war commenters, bloggers and pundits I see around the Net. The denunciation of Islam, Arabs, and anything that smacks of Arabic culture is standard. More than that, there is a rivalry as to how extreme the language of denunciation and threat will go. On the other hand, these are the same people who assure us that the U.S. is in Iraq for the good of the Iraqis. This makes no sense. If the argument was, we are in Iraq because we hate Arabs, we want to root out Arabic culture, and we want to give as much pain as we can to every Moslem in Iraq, that would seem to be the logical consequence of the anti-Arab hatred. Or, going from the second argument, if the pro-war group was competing in praises for Islamic culture, Middle Eastern history, and the beauty and glory of Arabs, and in particular Iraqis, that would be consistent. But to maintain these two threads strikes me as simply schizophrenic. More evidence, actually, that channel changing is the form and essence of the right’s discourse – you press a button and you go to channel one, Kill Arabs hour, and you press a button and you go to channel two, Help Iraqis hour.

I am curious how these two viewpoints are synthesized by the pro-war side. They make no sense to me.

blasts from the past

Mike Davis has a new book out on the history of the car bomb. LI wanted to review this book, but we have fallen behind on our querying, and so … here it is April, and the book is already out there.

But lucky internauts don’t have to spend no stinking money nowadays to get to the heart of the heart of it. Davis spun the book out of two articles he posted with Tom’s Dispatch, here and here.

Davis is ragpicking history here – but what rags! His conceit – that the car bomb is the poor man’s bomber airplane – is one of those immediately clarifying images – especially for those who are familiar with Sven Lindquvist’s oneiric history of air bombing. Lindqvist did a lot of vampirehunting through the vaults in his book, ranging through the dream images of literature as well as the newspapers, the military reports, the testimonies. He grasps the idea that the war culture is not just found on the battlefield:

“In an illustration in Jules Verne's The Flight of Engineer Roburs (1886), the airship glides majestically over Paris, the capital of Europe. Powerful searchlights shine on the waters of the Seine, over the quays, bridges, and facades. Astonished but unperturbed, the people gaze up into the sky, amazed at the unusual sight but without fear, without feeling the need to seek cover. In the next illustration the airship floats just as majestically and inaccessibly over Africa. But here it is not a matter merely of illumination. Here the engineer intervenes in the events on the ground. With the natural authority assumed by the civilized to police the savage, he stops a crime from taking place. The airship's weapons come into play, and death and destruction rain down on the black criminals, who, screaming in terror, try to escape the murderous fire.”

That sense of who get blasted and who doesn't, that divide into acceptable and unacceptable victims, is of course still the flowsheet of our history, and its miseries.

America has always tried to be first with the weaponry, and if the poor men use car bombs, by Jihad, we are going to use them too! So, as Davis points out, we began to sponsor them in Lebanon, against Hezbollah:

“Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and, above all, CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985," according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in the taking of American hostages in Beirut… It was Casey on his own, saying, ‘I‘m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon -- the car bomb.'"

The CIA's own operatives, however, proved incapable of carrying out the bombing, so Casey subcontracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS officer and financed by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 50 yards from Sheikh Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut. The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80 innocent neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded. Fadlallah immediately had a huge "MADE IN USA" banner hung across the shattered street, while Hezbollah returned tit for tat in September when a suicide truck driver managed to break through the supposedly impregnable perimeter defenses of the new U.S. embassy in eastern (Christian) Beirut, killing 23 employees and visitors.”

But Lebanon was much too complex a field for the U.S. to operate in with any assurance. In the 80s, the golden era in which uncle sam’s cartoon heroes took on the evil empire and invented the forms that would later be used by Al qaeda to attack the U.S., all the shit gravitated to Afghanistan. We already know that the U.S. and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia set up the international network to shuffle around men and money that is with us today, and that will no doubt be used when the U.S. or the U.K. or France or Denmark or wherever is attacked again. What fascinates Davis is the way the CIA – probably in a peek moment, a blue orgasm of deep ops – actually spread the technology of car bombing:

“U.S. Special Forces experts would now provide high-tech explosives and teach state-of-the-art sabotage techniques, including the fabrication of ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) car bombs, to Pakistani intelligence service (or ISI) officers under the command of Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. These officers, in turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign mujahedin, including the future cadre of al-Qaeda, in scores of training camps financed by the Saudis. "Under ISI direction," Coll writes, "the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."

Pynchon's novel, Against the Day, features Webb Traverse, a dynamite addict from the old mine wars back in the Rockies in the nineties - wars of the owners against the unions - who gets lost in the arcana of dynamite - for, as is usual in Pynchon, matter at the deeper levels is not physical so much as gnostic. Webb and his Finn buddy Veikko celebrate new years, 1899 with a little home anarchy, attaching fuses to a railroad bridge:

"Four closely set blasts, cracks in the fabric of air and time, merciless, bonestrumming. Breathing seemed beside the point. Rising dirt yellow clouds full of wood splinters, no wind to blow them anyplace. Track and trusswork went sagging into the arroyo.

Webb and Veikko watched across a meadow of larkspur and Indian paint brush, and behind them a little creek rushed down the hillside. "Seen worse," Webb nodded after a while.

"Was beautiful! what do you want the end of the world?"
"Sufficient unto the day," Webb shrugged. "Course."
Veikko was pouring vodka. "Happy fourth of July, Webb."

Oraison funebre for Kurt Vonnegut

The old men are dying in a sordid time. They trooped off at 19, 20, 21, and saw something form that they spent their lifetimes trying to understand – they saw the synthesis between affluence and war, they saw the latest and maybe last form of the war culture that had risen up on its immense hind legs long before then and before Goya saw it from the rear and painted it and before it was lamented by Jeremiah and that had grown to niche in the sea, the land and the air, they saw the war which we eat in our bread and drink in our tap water today, that educated the kids in suburban schools and spread the suburbs out on the off chance that there would be survivors on the tenth circle, the twelfth circle, the twentieth circle out from ground zero. They saw the multiple shapes of the same worldwide system of production, called, for a while, communism and capitalism, battling it out but in fundamental agreement about sucking the earth dry on the short time horizon – here, destroying Lake Aral, there, mining to death the great Ogallala aquifer, growing cotton where even the devil never intended it to grow, promoting the usurpation of corn above all the grasses and fruits and vegetables of the world, monoculture without end. They woke up in the sixties, as America was attacking a place in Southeast Asia with all its might to protect a fictitious sovereignty and a mockery of democracy. They knew this was out of Conrad:

“Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech -- and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives -- he called them enemies! -- hidden out of sight somewhere.”

They all knew the kill ratios had improved considerably since then.

Vonnegut. James Jones. Mailer. Vidal. Styron. The poets of course have died a long time ago, because poets, before they were taken up in the great mother ship of the university and never heard from again, couldn’t stand it. Lowell didn’t go anyway – a conscientious objector, spent the war in jail.

Since world war two, has there ever been a more sordid decade to die in? There have been much more murderous ones, of course: the sixties and seventies, with the CIA sponsored mass murder in Indonesia, the U.S. army’s mass murder in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s insane boxer rebellion Marxism starving the countryside, the tilt towards Pakistan heralding another half a million dead in Bangladesh (their bodies are stacked high in Midnight’s Children), Biafra (about which Vonnegut wrote a beautiful, despairing essay), and etcs. that have faded into that portable mass grave, the encyclopedia. But every decade has also had its power and its glory, and the murders always did seem, at least, to be getting us somewhere. Like the iron filings on a paper sheet lining up to represent the mysteriously beautiful field of force of the magnet beneath, the cadavres seemed to promise a pattern. But this decade? Never have the children been better behaved, never has the credit flowed so headily, never have the fathers so set our teeth on edge – not even with lies, for lies do require some backing plausibility, some reason to believe them. The collective collapse of a civilization can be measured by the effort it puts into believing the lies it fabricates: this civilization puts no effort into believing them, and every effort into fabricating them.

So: it is a sad thing to die in the reign of the Fisher King, Jr.
Sadly, sadly and nobly, the old men have roused themselves. They’ve squawked – since they can no longer bellow, the steer musculature for the bellow hangs precariously on their bones now – that this is something new. The war culture, whatever it did, wore a head. The head was a metal box with wires in it; the head came to a sharp point at the end, and at the base it had metal fins; the head was a mushroom cloud. But it was a head. The new thing is that there is no head there. This was definitely a new avatar of the alien.

Kurt Vonnegut, of course, rose through the ranks in a much different way than, say, Mailer, or Vidal. He came through genre, while they eventually fell, at least intermittently, back on it. What Vonnegut did was find a way to write what Musil called the essayistic novel – the novel that finds a living place, one with a scene, characters, a plot, for the essay, which is not philosophy insofar as the thoughts still have a skin warmth to them. They haven’t been thrust far enough from the body that thought them to take on that icy, abstract cool. He was a less pure novelist, in that sense, than Philip Dick, closer to someone like Calvino – or like the Twain of the 1890s, who often floundered to combine the message and the accoutrements of the prank. There was always a practical joke at the center of Twain’s fiction – but Vonnegut’s was only a practical joke once removed, as a metaphor. Twain never experienced anything like the WWII. He saw the country of his childhood rot in the gilded age, watched the trusts make corruption decorous, and found he could neither swallow nor spit out the poison in his children’s deaths. Vonnegut’s beginnings were, famously, less blessed. He survived the firebombing of Dresden – as did another now famous literary figure, Victor Klemperer. Fire responds to fire – the fire that destroyed Dresden on February 13, 1945 was of the same flame as that which destroyed Dresden’s synagogue on the night of 9 November 1938, even though the happy German crowd in 1938, entertained by the torching and the fortuitous torture of a Jewish teacher, forced to bow to the crowd and take off his hat, couldn’t see the obvious message in those flames. What power, high on its arrogance and so indebted to its power that it can only up the ante, ever has?

Vonnegut subtitled his most famous novel ‘The Children’s Crusade”, and the way it got that subtitle is incorporated into the book in the first chapter, when Vonnegut goes to visit his ‘war buddy’, Bernard V. O'Hare, and discovers that O’Hare’s wife doesn’t like him. And then she tells him why:

“Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.
"What?" I said.
"You were just babies in the war -- like the ones upstairs!"
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
"But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
"I -- I don't know," I said.
"Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
* * *
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
"I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.' "

Kurt Vonnegut did as much as he could to take the piss out of the ‘glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men’. He lived to see their children set fires that call to other fires in the future, fire to fire. News of his death comes on the same day that the Pentagon announced “that most active duty Army units now in Iraq and Afghanistan and those sent in the future would serve 15-month tours, three months longer than the standard one-year tour.”

the wiring diagram of scandal: Imus

Instead of the post I had planned, about European savages and the Heart of Darkness, this seems to be an editing day. Besides, there is much more interest, apparently, among my disgruntled readership, about Imus. Disgruntled at me, LI, for making my fine media analysis of this scandal! Questioning LI's media chops and novelistic sensibility!

Scandals and outrages have a wiring diagram, a simply path between connectors, and you simply have to plug the wire in according to the scandalized object. Is it, as in Imus' case, race and sex? We know how first there is the denial, then the trivialization, then grief, then anger, until finally we reach the normal equilibrium of self righteousness. In this case my two commentators, Northanger and Patrick, think I am off the track, here. Instead of continuing that thread on the subversive post, I'm putting up this one, with the nice picture of Mme Castiglione, Napoleon III's mistress, and an Italian spy, and a very strange partner in one of the more interesting series of photos to come out of the 19th century.

Meanwhile, if you want even more sexism, this time covered in a tasteful sprinkling of science factoids, check out Nicholas Wade's Time article here.