Blackwater getting paid to monitor blackwater exonerates Blackwater

LI has been thinking more about CNN’s Blackwater report. To refresh your memory, here’s the salient quote

“Blackwater said its employees responded properly to an insurgent attack on a convoy, and the State Department "spot report" written by the Blackwater contractor underscores that and doesn't mention civilian casualties.

However, the contractor's account is at odds with Iraqis' version of the incident. A senior Iraqi National Police official participating in the Iraqi governmental probe of the shooting said the Blackwater gunfire was unprovoked and random, killing and wounding several civilians.

Blackwater contractor Darren Hanner drafted the two-page spot report on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Hanner, listed on the report as the center's watch officer, was working for Blackwater at the time the report was written -- just after the shooting occurred, said a highly placed industry source. He was to rotate out of Iraq last week, the source said.”

Now, let’s move beyond the fact that Blackwater not only got paid for murdering Iraqis, but – in one of those sweet beyond belief deals that make our time so precious – even got paid for covering it up. This is double dipping with a vengeance.

No, LI has been thinking of the news stories that came out after the Nisoor Square shooting, notably in the NYT and the Washington Post. Both sources reported the shootings in a rather odd way. That is, they reported them wholly through the lens of the State Department – which, as we know now, was speaking in terms it had contracted Blackwater to make up. In other words, it reported on Blackwater’s murders using Blackwater’s spin. Of course, it isn’t as though the media, spiritually in hock to the Bush culture, couldn’t manufacture their own bs. As Fred Hiatt says, in his ‘I love mercenaries’ editorial in the Washington Post today (an editorial in which, of course, he doesn’t even utter the dreaded M word:

“The latest shooting incident -- one of at least five this year in which Blackwater guards have killed Iraqis -- is still under investigation by a U.S.-Iraqi commission. Teams from the State Department (which is getting FBI help) and the Pentagon are conducting separate reviews of private security contractors. Already, though, it seems clear that Blackwater's critics are right in one important respect: There are inadequate controls over security firms, especially those working for the State Department. A decree by the coalition occupation authority early in the war exempted U.S contractors from Iraqi laws, and it's not clear that Blackwater guards working for the State Department are covered in practice by U.S. statutes that govern behavior by American soldiers. This needs to be corrected. Even if a proposed Iraqi law governing private contractors does not go forward, Congress and the Bush administration should ensure that those who kill innocent Iraqis or engage in other criminal excesses can be held legally accountable. Moreover, U.S. diplomats and military commanders should exercise more control over the guards who work for them, with the aim of preventing them from needlessly alienating Iraqis.

At the same time it is foolish to propose the elimination of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the short term. As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates pointed out at a recent congressional hearing, the downsizing of the U.S. military has left the Army without enough people to perform many specialized tasks -- of which VIP security is one. More than 130,000 contractors serve the U.S. mission in Iraq, including some 30,000 security guards, and without them it would be impossible for U.S. forces to function.”

(One should remember: the Post is dead set on the U.S. bombing Iran. That, at the same time, the Post doesn’t think the U.S. could operate without a mercenary force tells us that the Post would either like to see that mercenary force expanded or that the Post expresses its foreign policy views with the charming insouciance of a baby learning to use the word da-da. Take your pick.)

If we go back to this report on September 28 in the Post, helpfully headlined –

<

“Blackwater Faced Bedlam, Embassy Finds: 'First Blush' Report Raises New Questions on Shooting”,

we find an ‘embassy’ report that gives us a much different picture of what happened in Nisoor square than any of the other reports. The Post made this a front page article.

“The initial U.S. Embassy report on a Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving Blackwater USA, a private security firm, depicts an afternoon of mayhem that included a car bomb, a shootout in a crowded traffic circle and an armed standoff between Blackwater guards and Iraqi security forces before the U.S. military intervened.
The two-page report, described by a State Department official as a "first blush" account from the scene, raises new questions about what transpired in the intersection. According to the report, the events that led to the shooting involved three Blackwater units. One of them was ambushed near the traffic circle and returned fire before fleeing the scene, the report said. Another unit that went to the intersection was then surrounded by Iraqis and had to be extricated by the U.S. military, it added.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Post’s 'two page memo' seems to correspond exactly to the Darren Hanner memo. In fact, they are identical, which means that the Post devoted its headline and a story to simply repeating a memo written by a Blackwater employee, without telling its readers that this memo was written by a Blackwater employee. That, basically, the Post was taking stenography from Blackwater. By attributing the memo to the ‘embassy’, the Post could then triangulate it with quotes from ‘Blackwater’. This is known as a virtuous circle, or circle jerk, in the spin-news world of American reporting.

So we get this paragraph:

“The report, by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, details the events as described by Blackwater guards -- details that are now at the center of an intense debate in Iraq and in Congress over the larger role of private security firms in Iraq. Tens of thousands of armed, private guards operate in Iraq, protecting everything from U.S. and Iraqi officials to supply convoys. The shooting incident is being scrutinized in at least three separate investigations.
Witnesses and the Iraqi government have insisted that the shooting by the private guards was unprovoked. Blackwater has claimed that its guards returned fire only after they were shot at. The document makes no reference to civilian casualties. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed and 12 wounded in the incident. The report said Blackwater sustained no casualties.”

Now, if we substitute into the first sentence, “The report, by Blackwater, details the events as described by Blackwater guards’, we get a pretty good sense of how the news is usually reported from Iraq, and some sense of why we are still there. The media isn’t just brownnosing this administration; it has become, soul and body, part of the White House’s anal equipment.

It helps to remember this story when reading any stories reported from Iraq in the American press.

Lo-ammi: a son is born

Sometimes LI wonders why we bother with commentary. Collage is the mightier instrument. So, this is from the latest NYT Blackwater piece, reporting on one of Blackwater’s murders [called ‘incidents’ as a figleaf]


“The incident involving “a drunken Blackwater contractor” arose when the employee killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, Adil Abd-al-Mahdi, in December 2006. State Department officials allowed Blackwater to take the shooter out of Iraq less than 36 hours later.

Then the State Department charge d’affaires recommended that Blackwater make “a sizable payment” and an “apology” in an effort to “avoid this whole thing becoming even worse,” the report went on. The State Department official suggested a $250,000 payment to the guard’s family, but the department’s Diplomatic Security Service said that was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed.” In the end, $15,000 was agreed upon. The report adds credence to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have adopted an aggressive, trigger-happy approach and displayed disregard for Iraqi life.”

Via TPM

A Blackwater contractor wrote an initial U.S. government report about how his colleagues killed Iraqi civilians in a September shooting that strained U.S.-Iraqi relations, government and industry sources told CNN.

The Iraqi government claims private contractors with Blackwater USA, who were guarding a U.S. diplomatic convoy, killed as many as 20 civilians on September 16 in western Baghdad's Nasoor Square.

The incident produced an outcry in Iraq and raised questions about the accountability of foreign security contractors in Iraq, who under an order laid down by the U.S.-led occupation government are not subject to Iraqi law for actions taken within their contracts.

Blackwater -- which provides security to U.S. diplomats -- says its employees responded properly to an insurgent attack on a convoy, and the State Department initial "spot report" written by the Blackwater contractor underscores that scenario and doesn't mention civilian casualties.
…
The Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted a two-page "spot report" on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The TOC -- which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions -- has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.

And this, from David Carr’s For the Rich, Magazines Fat on Ads:

But it is not just about rich people. Luxury has been defined down any number of ways. “Sex and the City” is now in wide syndication, which means that most of the country now knows that Jimmy Choo is not a kind of beef jerky. BMW is introducing the 1 Series next year with a lower point of entry for the aspirant. Even if you can’t afford a baby Beemer, you can express your taste in finery in everything from coffee to chocolate. And while other teenage magazines folded, Teen Vogue proved that brand aspiration can be baked in at a very young age.

I think what has to really be baked in at a young age is how those Crazy Iraqis leap to take our bullets in the gut so they can get the big big payoff! Because, of course, they lack a life respecting ethos, like us Christians. Ah, the liberation generation, the liberation culture, the winds of the ownership society sweeping through the Benevolent Hegemon. Makes me shiver.

And from the Book of Hosea:

And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.
3: So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son.
4: And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel.
5: And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.
6: And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And God said unto him, Call her name Lo-ruhamah: for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away.
7: But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.
8: Now when she had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son.
9: Then said God, Call his name Lo-ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.

Everybody dance now.

on the way down to the bottom

LI heartily recommends this article for the hilarious sidelight it throws on our funniest, most corrupt administration.

It seems that the White House, with the compassion of twenty Buddhas, realizes that its nomination of wacko rightwingers to various posts can do said rightwingers some financial harm – because sometimes Congress doesn’t kiss ass fast enough. It’s a training problem. But it is no problem for the clever Bushies! Not when you have a whole goldbricking pseudo-charity around to which the Gov can shovel tax free dollars!

Invention, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago, is the dynamic of capitalism, and what is more inventive than Commonwealth Research Institute? It’s a charity. It’s a faith based organization. It’s a way to pay Republicans $13,400 a month for doing zip work. And it’s a Merchant of Death – all in one!

“Commonwealth Research and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies, are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as tax-exempt charities, even though their primary work is for the Pentagon and other government agencies. In a recent report Concurrent, also based in Johnstown, Pa., said it was among the Defense Department's top 200 contractors, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, force readiness and advanced materials.
Concurrent's top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier.
Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.”

If you love the smell of Empire decaying in the morning, you will love the smell of CRI - a scrumptious odor, much like highway kill in the noonday Texas sun. But such things are bound to happen when your income distribution skew makes Brazil look like Sweden. Hate the way the country is headed? Tough shit. The wealthy will block every avenue of change, until of course they are expropriated by the chain of events they have put in place, as their skankiness is – oh, Mother Nature is so hard – completely and thoroughly punished – which, of course, is a punishment in which we will all share.

the Sunday sickness unto death rant

LI was looking up info on Blackwater, yesterday, and we came across the Virginian-Pilot profile of the company. That profile included little bios of the guys at the top of America’s Funniest Mercenary Company. It was the bio of the COO that stuck with me. Isn’t this man a posterboy of the Bush culture. I can see my face, I can see the face of 350 million of my fellow Americans, slug-like somnambulists heading towards the cliffs but with the finest of accessories … contributing another sweet 300 million dollars today, as on all days, to the mass murder of Iraqis (it is always Christmas in Iraq) … reflected in this man’s record, from the Virginian-Pilot:

“JOSEPH SCHMITZ, 49, became chief operating officer and general counsel of the Prince Group in September 2005 after a stint as inspector general at the Defense Department.
Schmitz was the senior Pentagon official responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse. Now he faces a congressional inquiry into accusations that he quashed two criminal investigations of senior Bush administration officials. The inquiry is continuing, according to a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Schmitz was a special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration. He was awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service on his retirement from the Pentagon.

Schmitz’s father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman from California and a prominent member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative group that flowered during the Cold War. He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party after its founder, George Wallace, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.

John Schmitz’s political career ended with the revelation that he had a mistress who bore two of his children. He then moved to Washington, where he bought a house once owned by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau, also became embroiled in a scandal. As a married teacher in Washington state, she went to prison after being convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student with whom she ultimately had two children. The two have since married.”

Could you make things like this up? If you did in a novel, you would be denounced for creating Leftist caricatures. That Schmitz’s father’s career ended not because he was a racist and crazed semi-fascist, but because he had an affair with a younger student, speaks to the fact that there are congressional districts in which lunacy equals electability. So Joseph Schmitz was obviously set up to be an early achiever in the Great Bushian Post 9/11 Orgy. And party he did.

David Sirota and Judd Legum wrote a piece about Schmitz back when he was the Pentagon’s inspector general:

“Fact: Halliburton has overcharged taxpayers for food, accepted kickbacks for oil subcontracts, and spent taxpayer money renting rooms at five-star resorts in Kuwait.
But instead of expressing outrage the government's top watchdog, Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, last week parroted the company line, saying he believes Halliburton's problems "are not out of line with the size and scope of their contracts." He then accused the press of overemphasizing the connections between the company and its former CEO Dick Cheney, even though Vice President Cheney still collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation, owns company stock options, and had his office "coordinate" Halliburton contracts in Iraq.
Why is the government's top independent watchdog deliberately sugarcoating taxpayer ripoffs? Because he, like other Bush administration officials charged with overseeing expenditures in Iraq, is anything but independent.

Instead of filling the various inspector general, comptroller, and budget officer positions in Iraq with skilled, non-partisan public servants, President Bush has packed them with partisans and cronies like Schmitz. Many of these individuals have longstanding political ties with the administration and ties to the very industries and companies that they are supposed to oversee. Here are the dirty details:

Joseph Schmitz: Defense Department Inspector General

Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz was appointed to his post by President Bush in 2001 after the Associated Press reported the office "was caught cheating" and destroying internal documents. His office has broad jurisdiction to investigate all Pentagon contracts, both in Iraq and elsewhere. But judging by Schmitz's qualifications, the White House had one thing in mind when it appointed him: political loyalty.

According to National Journal, Schmitz is the son of former California Rep. John G. Schmitz, who was a John Birch Society director. As a member of the archconservative Washington Legal Foundation, Joseph Schmitz made a name for himself as "a conservative activist" and as a lawyer for House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a court case attempting to outlaw forms of taxation. In 1992, he authored a letter to The Washington Times insinuating that the Democratic presidential nominee had connections to Russian intelligence, writing, "The KGB apparently knows more about the shady side of Bill Clinton than the American people ever will."

His short tenure at the Pentagon has been marked not only by defending Halliburton, but also by defending the administration he is supposed to be overseeing. For instance, in 2002, Schmitz refused congressional entreaties to declassify a report detailing how the administration was providing inadequate training and protective gear to troops in the event of a bio-chemical attack.”

That was in 2004. In 2005, Sirota resigned. The LA Times had a story about the two cases that were being ‘investigated’ by Congress - which is a form of euthanasia for criminal conduct, popular in the omni-corrupt precincts of D.C. Look like you are punishing the guilty, and take contributions from them for your next campaign, the yacht that you’ve always wanted, and a paint job for your house – it’s the D.C. mantra. In any case, this is what the Times reported:

“The first of the criminal investigations in which Schmitz allegedly intervened involved John A. "Jack" Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of Defense for international technology security.

Shaw, who was the subject of a series of articles in The Times last year, tried to manipulate a lucrative contract in Iraq in 2004 to favor a telecommunications company whose board included a close friend, according to whistle-blowers who worked for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Shaw had signed an unusual agreement with Schmitz that gave him some investigative authority. Shaw told U.S. officials in Iraq that he was conducting investigations under that agreement during a trip to Iraq in December 2003. The results of those investigations were later used in his effort to push for contracts of firms tied to his friends and their clients, according to the whistle-blowers.

Shaw, who was forced out of office last year after refusing to resign, has denied any wrongdoing.

Schmitz referred the whistle-blowers' accusations to the FBI, despite the protests of senior criminal investigators in his office who had already found "specific and credible evidence" of wrongdoing by Shaw, according to Grassley's letter.

The FBI has not placed a high priority on the investigation, which has since stalled, according to one person with knowledge of the case.”

I think this was one of the most beautiful of the numberless small crimes committed under the Bush administration by a Bushie. It is so clever! And there is a certain John Birchy sadism to it – take the goody goody procedure and use it to line the pockets of your regular nosepickin’ goldbrickin’ chum, with whom you can discuss the latest from Rush and lament the good old days of Jim Crow – who could resist? Certainly not a man whose elevation to the post of ‘inspector general’ gives new meaning to the phrase, you are doing a heckuva job.

And it is no surprise, given the way the mesh has been woven, that this man is now on the margins of the Blackwater massacre, as the very Zelig of far right mania. Vanity Fair has published a new investigative report on the ‘loss’ of about 9 billion dollars by the CPA during the period that Schmitz was inspector general. Here are some excerpts:

“To be fair, the C.P.A. really did need money desperately, and it really did need to start spreading it among the traumatized Iraqi population. It also needed to jump-start Iraq's basic services. As the C.P.A. demanded ever greater amounts of cash, the pallets of $1, $5, and $10 bills were soon replaced by bundles of $100 bills. During the C.P.A.'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

After arriving in Baghdad, some of the cash was shipped to outlying regions, but most of it stayed in the capital, where it was delivered to Iraqi banks, to installations such as Camp Victory, the mammoth U.S. Army facility adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and to Saddam's former presidential palace, in the Green Zone, which had become the home of Bremer's C.P.A. and the makeshift Iraqi government. At the palace the cash disappeared into a vault in the basement. Few people ever saw the vault, but the word was that during one short period it held as much as $3 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a major repository of the banknotes from America during the brief time the cash was under the care of the C.P.A. The money flowed in and out rapidly. When someone needed cash, a unit called the Program Review Board, composed of senior C.P.A. officials, reviewed the request and decided whether to recommend a disbursement. A military officer would then present that authorization to personnel at the vault.”

And there is this:

"There was corruption everywhere," said one former military officer who worked with the C.P.A. in Baghdad in the months after the invasion. Some of the Iraqis who were put in charge of ministries after Saddam's fall had never run a government agency before. Their inexperience aside, he said, they lived in constant fear of losing their jobs or their lives. All many cared about, he added, was taking care of themselves. "You could see that a lot of them were trying their best to get a quick retirement fund before they were ousted or killed," he added. "You just get what you can while you're in that position of power. Instead of trying to build the nation, you build yourself."

Did any withdrawals from the vault pay for secret activities by government personnel? It is an obvious possibility. Much of the cash was clearly destined for American contractors or Iraqi subcontractors. Sometimes the Iraqis came to the palace to collect their cash; other times, when they were reluctant to show up at the American compound, U.S. military personnel had to deliver it themselves. One of the riskier jobs for some U.S. military men was to fill up a car with bags of cash and drive the money to contractors in Baghdad neighborhoods, handing it over like a postal worker delivering mail.

"Fraud" was simply another word for "business as usual." Of 8,206 "guards" drawing paychecks courtesy of the C.P.A., only 602 warm bodies could in fact be found; the other 7,604 were ghost employees. Halliburton , the government contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, charged the C.P.A. for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers while in fact serving only 14,000 of them. Cash was handed out from the backs of pickup trucks. On one occasion a C.P.A. official received $6.75 million in cash with the expectation he would shell it out in one week. Another time, the C.P.A. decided to spend $500 million on "security." No specifics, just a half-billion dollars for security, with this cryptic explanation: "Composition TBD"--that is, "to be determined."

The pervasiveness of this Why-should-I-care? attitude was driven home in an exchange with retired admiral David Oliver, the C.P.A.'s director of management and budget. Oliver was asked by a BBC reporter what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad:

Oliver: "I have no idea--I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't--nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "Not important?"

Oliver: "No. The coalition--and I think it was between 300 and 600 people, civilians--and you want to bring in 3,000 auditors to make sure money's being spent?"

Q: "Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

And here is a beautiful story of what a difference a little hundred million or so can make. Ask not what you can do for your government, but what it can do for you – and have faith. And feel faith in your heart. And know that Jesus is Lord. And remember that, when asked, the creeps and morons – the merchants of death group – will attribute their good fortunes to – themselves. Their hard work. Their self reliance. Always. It was hard work. It was brains. These are, in the hushed words of the Heritage Foundation type, the "successful". Usually accompanied by Uriah Heeplike hand gestures. So it is with Custer and Battles:

“The name was derived not from Little Big Horn but from the names of the company's owners, Scott K. Custer and Michael J. Battles. Both were former army rangers in their mid-30s, and Battles also had once been a C.I.A. operative. The pair showed up on the streets of Baghdad with the blessing of the White House at invasion's end, looking for a way to do business. At the time, the only American civilians who could gain access to the city were those approved by President Bush's staff.

The Battles half of the team brought the White House access, secured when Michael Battles became the G.O.P.-backed candidate in the 2002 Rhode Island congressional primary for the privilege of losing to the Democratic incumbent, Patrick Kennedy. Battles not only lost the primary but was fined by the Federal Election Commission for misrepresenting campaign contributions. Nevertheless, he forged important political connections. His contributors included Haley Barbour, the longtime Washington power broker and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is now governor of Mississippi, and Frederic V. Malek, a former special assistant to President Nixon, who survived the Watergate scandal and went on to become an insider in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations.

The C.P.A. awarded Custer and Battles one of its first no-bid contracts--$16.5 million to protect civilian aircraft flights, of which at the time there were few, into Baghdad International Airport. The company faced immediate obstacles: Custer and Battles didn't have any money, they didn't have a viable business, and they didn't have any employees. Bremer's C.P.A. had overlooked these shortcomings and forked over $2 million anyway, in cash, to get them started, simply ignoring long-standing requirements that the government certify that a contractor has the capacity to fulfill a contract. That first $2 million cash infusion was followed shortly by a second. Over the next year Custer Battles would secure more than $100 million in Iraq contracts. The company even set up an internal Office of Corporate Integrity. "Integrity is a core principle of Custer Battles' corporate values," Scott Custer stated in a press release.”

And so it goes. Will there be a reckoning? In truth, after 60 years of intense war culture, democracy is bound to fray, to be fatally attracted to that quarter of the country that ardently wishes its dick was a Glock 18c. Even though that quarter of the country spends its life getting well out of the way of any real encounter with danger. Still, the presence of such masses of money does insure that D.C. stays reliably corrupt, and will continue to fight with itself until, exhausted, it gives up - and no Blackwater thug is charged with murder, no ex-Pentagon millionaire with theft. It is a different world. And a worse one.

From a wierd wedding to a minefield

“Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market - primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes - and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.” – Karl Polanyi

I have just finished Gregory Clark’s much lauded A Farewell to Alms, which weirdly weds the New Growth apercu – that knowledge, unlike other resources, gives us increasing returns, which is why there is no upward bound to growth – to Malthus – who is, if anything, known for having the very fierce view that the upward bound to growth is determined by the iron relationship between population and subsistence. Imagine, if you will, the bride of Frankenstein marrying Dracula. I won’t go into all the ins and outs of Clark’s view – I’m saving that for my Austin Statesman review – but I did find the attack on the institutionalists a little weird. Clark goes after the founders of the school for setting the beginning point of the industrial revolution at 1688. For the institutionalists, the pre-conditions for capitalism were institutions that preserved property rights, secured social stability, and produced, however modestly, a political feedback system between the rulers and the ruled.
Polanyi’s name is never mentioned in Clark’s text, partly because orthodox economist despise Karl Polanyi. But it should have been. Polanyi unpacks that notion of a feedback much more aggressively than it was later to be unpacked by Douglass North.
My ultimate goal, in tracing the rise of a particular happiness ethos and the ruin of all previous systems of emotional custom and charactermaking, is to embed this process in the Great Transformation. This is why the early nineteenth century – when the lineaments of heaven and hell on earth become, suddenly, much clearer – is so important to my thesis. And this is why it opens the thesis up to show the ‘esoteric’ contribution to psychology made by animal magnetism in creating the polar affect model, since this, too, is clearly marked by the double movement – at once aligning itself with the need for an administrative psychology and registering a deep discontent with the system that requires that psychology. We fight the enemy within, who fights his own enemy within, who is – us. It is a war of mental telepaths, I’m telling you! Or, to put it in other terms – it exactly outlines the epistemological problem of the realistic novel.

My next move is to take one of the men of 1789, Carl Gustav Carus – actually born in 1789 – and show how he used polarity, by way of Schelling, to produce a psychology now known, if at all, for the fact that it foreshadowed Freud’s notion of the unconscious – but known to use connoisseurs of PAM for the straightforward introduction of magnetic terms. Carus was not just a psychologist, he was a painter, a friend of Caspar David Friedrich. Which is, of course, almost too perfect, like discovering that your fieldwork is set in a minefield.

An austin day

Mostly, I think Austin is becoming your average urban professional car park. But sometimes you get pleasant glimpses of the older city. Today, for instance: first, I am drinking coffee at Whole Foods and a woman sits down and I notice, with admiration, that she has writing in Chinese, I think, of some sort tattooed on her back – and when I ask her about it, she explains that it is a poem from the fifth master, which, translated into English, makes for a pretty lousy poem. But a nice idea! Then a man stops by my table to inform me that Paul Simon wrote a song about numbers in 1982 – he does this, I realize, because the book I am reading David Boyle’s The Sum of our Discontent: why numbers make us irrational. Then I go to the post office and what do I see but a man who had tattooed not only his face, but his entire head. After depositing my letter, I was riding back up sixth street and passed by a man who was ambling along with nothing more on than a pretty green ribbon, tied in a little bow around his penis. And no, it wasn’t the town’s show off and mascot transvestite, Leslie. However, more impressive perhaps than the penis was the bare feet. On a sixth street sidewalk! Goddamn, I’ve had numerous flat tires from broken glass along this stretch of road, so I could only think that not only had he found a harmless outlet for displaying his gear, but he must have tough padded skin on his feet.

If only he had been marching down fifth street, lowering the property values of the yuppie towers of Babel.

the collective temperament

In Stendhal’s On Love, he takes six temperaments – the sanguine, the bilious, the melancholic, the phlegmatic, the nervous, and the athletic – and pairs them with six political situations – asian despotism, absolute monarchy, constitutional aristocracy a la Britain, republicanism a la the U.S., constitutional monarchy, and revolution – and from that pairing comes up with different regimes of love. Notice that the athletic and the revolutionary are paired.

Here’s what he says about the revolutionary – this is the myth that still has that fatal attraction for certain esprits, of which LI counts himself, reluctantly, one:

A state in revolution, like Spain [this is 1830], Portugal, France. This situation of a country, giving a lively passion to everybody, puts nature in the moeurs, destroys the stupidities, the convenient virtues, the stupid conventional wisdom, gives seriousness to youth, and makes him despise the love of vanity and neglect gallantry.

This state can endure for a long time and form the habits of a generation. In France, it began in 1788, was interrupted in 1802, and recommenced in 1815, to finish God knows when.”

The idea that peoples have a temperament was familiar to the Greeks. The idea that generations have a temperament, though – that is a product of the Enlightenment discovery of progress. Surely, if there is progress in the arts and sciences, if civilization is becoming ever more civilized, than today’s children must be bearers of tomorrow’s higher degree of civilization. So it makes sense to speak of the children of 1789 or 1815 – although, for Stendhal, this observation doesn’t have the systematic weight it will later have for someone like Dilthey.

This is just the kind of observation that should please a novelist, or at least the new kind of novelist of the Balzacian or Stendhalian type. This is the man who proposes to grasp the spiritual essence of his culture within the confines of some sufficiently rich and connected narrative. Instead of allegory, this narrative will be an epitome – a sample illuminating the whole. A nice, statistical thing – and of course, when Stendhal wrote this, nice statistical ways of thinking were finally taking off.

Interestingly – I get this from reading James Simpson’s Burning to Read, which I am reviewing – Luther, in his introduction to his translation of the New Testament, tells his readers that the essential books are the Gospel of John, Paul’s epistles, and the first epistle of Peter. Why? Because the other gospels were full of stories. Luther liked John’s gnostical pontifications and Paul’s theorizing – o, Paul is a causuistical little spider – which wrapped around a metaphysical being, Jesus, who Paul evidently knew little about. Stories, on the other hand, are so… contingent. What do they mean? What is the point? That Lutheran skepticism takes up residence in the head of every novelist, of course, who must at one point or another ask him or herself – why am I spending my life daydreaming about imaginary people? Stendhal, however, has both the moraliste tradition and his materialism – out of Helvetius, recognizing in Bentham a sort of kinship – to underwrite his narrative ambitions, and he can laugh at the German transcendentalists, with their anxious search for new allegories.

Another thing we should see here – and we should see all over Stendhal’s On Love – is how the temperament of a people and the temperament of a generation point us to sex as one of the keys of the age. The relationship between the novelist’s larger task – the grasping of the culture’s essence – and sex is obvious from the novelist’s point of view, and troubling for those outside it. I love Norman Mailer for having taken up this burden in the most showy of ways possible, and going through every novelistic station, from the vilest sexism to the most superstitious of sexual takes. Stendhal, of course, is less ‘metaphysical’, but like Mailer, is an egotist – long before Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself there was Stendhal’s Memoirs of an Egotist.

Enough for today.