Spreads

LI reads the papers. Everybody reads the papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was enough to send the market up 65 points.

American capitalism is infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe. In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.

Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on, churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002 is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?

In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.

Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which, it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict. No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism, and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in – are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final displacement of Rust belt America.

That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…

The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent, taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like. Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of economics.

All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.

…So much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run. I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.

As a writer, it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the American economy. Making between 9,000 dollars and 16,000 dollars per year for the last seven has not only destroyed all my savings, and probably prepared me for the most gruesome of futures, since I chose to do this during the years when I should be earning most, but – more importantly – deprived me of the tacit knowledge of how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of whatever? No.

However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards. Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living, as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me, because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income strata in the U.S.

Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.

excuses (drama queenery)

This seems to be my season for sickness. The last couple of days I have gotten appallingly better acquainted with parts of my biological functioning about which I much prefer to remain in blessed ignorance. Oh well, as my friend Dave likes to say, what doesn’t kill you gives you a good excuse to drink. I do have a theory that last night I was briefly possessed by the devil. Now I know what those poor Loudun possedées were going through. Supposedly the prioress, submitting to her first exorcism, not only did the standard foaming and screeching, but broke two of her back teeth. Well, I’ll never laugh at bootheeled Jack again! So, all notion of writing about Calasso, Reich, and Bela Tarr’s The Outsider has been driven out of my head. Sorry.

Reich, Calasso, and Bela Tarr

LI is truly a sad sack. As we try to find time, in the interstices between our poorly rewarded tasks, for writing our happiness essay, we are discovering a depressingly vast literature that touches on so much we want to say. Not least among which is a gorgeous essay by Roberto Calasso, “The Repulsive Cult of Bonheur’, published in our favorite journal, Common Knowledge, in 2004.

A few months ago, we commented on the movie W., Dusan Makavejev’s film about, among other things, sex-pol, Wilhelm Reich, and the state of orgasmic repression in 70s Yugoslavia. By coincidence, the film was also shown by Kino-Fist, a collective with which one of our favorite bloggers, Infinite Thought, is connected. After reading Calasso’s essay, we feel like revisiting some of those issues.

…

Calasso begins by quoting from one of Freud’s letters concerning Civilization and its Discontents. Freud, in the letter, talks about a strange serenity – or indifference – that has settled upon him in old age. He is no longer writing with that … surrender, that sense of being swept along by his discoveries. Rather, he has reached a more disengaged point. As Calasso points out, the first section of C and its D. seems to bear out Freud’s point – it is, above all, banal. Yet it builds into a great, mythic insight:

“In Civilization, Freud in fact arrives at a paralyzing conclusion: “What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group.” That is: the process of civilization is destined inevitably to increase the sense of guilt to the point where it is intolerable. This is the final perspective that Freud presents in
a flash and then hides. But it’s enough to reveal the grand, dark basis of Civilization: the final, funereal celebration of our founding myth, the nature/culture opposition. Freud keeps faith with that myth to the last, while its consequences push him to the breaking point. On the one hand, he reaffirms a thesis worn out
by use, from the Greeks to us: that the raison d’être of civilization is to defend us from nature. On the other hand, he follows the inflexible course of his own thinking, which has led him to subsume into nature the entire life of the psyche, and so the birth and the persistence of society appear to him fatally as a wound that can never be closed up.”

This sets up Calasso’s great second section, on Reich, which begins – I’m going to quote largely – like this:


“The mystical marriage of Marxism and psychoanalysis, reports on the crimes of the family, the rehabilitation of schizophrenics, the orgasm as panacea: all these themes, which for years have been debated and redebated, pedantically, in feminist weeklies as well as in seminars at the École Normale and Berkeley, were introduced and developed in the twenties by a Galician doctor, a follower of
Freud before becoming a feared apostate of psychoanalysis—Wilhelm Reich.

Prophet, scientist, social critic, cosmic charlatan—Reich was above all a visionary desperately in thrall to a single vision, which he considered the obvious key to the universe. Yet he had one of the most serious defects that a visionary can have: literal-mindedness, a devotion to facts, to the real thing, to quantitative
measurement, to the determining formula. Thus he wasn’t satisfied with introducing an unseemly notion like orgasm into the midst of psychoanalysis. He wasn’t satisfied with stubbornly circumventing psychoanalysis, with the help of some dazzling intuitions that allowed him to elaborate categories—orgasmic impotence, character armor, emotional plague, fear of pleasure, blocked libido— no less indispensable than the classic Freudian ones. He wanted to go beyond, like a buffalo. He capitulated to the belief that the word biology or some crude measuring apparatus would in itself guarantee a more secure approach to the secrets of the world, allowing him to touch, to see, to quantify the phantom,
ungraspable “orgonic energy” that he thought he had discovered.”

I’m going to quote some more from this essay in my next post, in relation to a movie of Bela Tarr’s, The Outsider, from 1979. The Tarr movie is set in a small Hungarian town, among hospital workers, a factory, various pubs, a disco. Everything is garishly shabby, with that special air of Marxist command and control neglect, the result of the spectacularly faulty notion that one can both create and nurture and industrial society and abolish the market. This is a society that has decided to substitute the production of monuments for the production of commodities – and thus, every ugly product, every pathetic car, every motorcycle, even every factory tool, has the ugliness of a monument, of something put out in a park to commemorate an utterly forgettable personage or event, something that accumulates bird shit and the urine of tramps. Like every Tarr movie I’ve seen, this one implacably grinds its way into the viewer’s heart and rips at the indifference accumulated as a necessary buffer from the day to day suicide, the overwhelming evidence that we can only stand our lives if we avoid looking at them too closely. Get close enough, and one’s life explodes in one’s face – every brief flash of joy or happiness exposing a vulnerability that will be mercilessly exploited by others, and that one will regret in tears and loathing on down the years, until one has hardened into the usual happy monster, a character armor without any inhabitant, a plug-in voluptuary with a distressingly limited range of nervous routines.

celebrity news

Pamela Anderson Weds Rick Salomon

On her blog, Anderson called Salomon a friend of 15 years. And they do have at least one scandalous tie – both have appeared in sex tapes: Salomon with Paris Hilton, and Anderson with Lee.

Last month, Anderson, appearing on Ellen DeGeneres's show, revealed that she was dating a new mystery man. "I paid off a poker debt with sexual favors, and I fell in love," Anderson told DeGeneres of her new guy. "It's so romantic. It's romance."

And Salomon gets a thumbs-up from at least one guy in Anderson's life: magician Klok, who told PEOPLE recently, "I like Rick. He's a really nice guy. As long as he's not making another video, I'm ok with him."

Well, in other news, LI got married and then divorced from Pamela Anderson. We were going to get married to Britney Spears after appearing in a sex video with her poodle, Towser, and a troupe of unicyclists, but there was a mix up at the Chapel, which – oops – will soon be appearing in another bootleg sex video which we are doing our best to suppress, LI DOES VEGAS, send $19.99 to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids Michigan, 20202, and we will throw in the amazing polycutter, your kitchen can’t be without the polycutter! Britney and I fell deeply in love while we were both coincidentally stopping at a light in Bangor, Maine, although at the time I was involved in selling drugs to Lindsey Lohan in order to marry Jena Bush. Tragically, Jena and I had a falling out after I married Brad Pitt, although that marriage had nothing to do with the notorious Brad Pitt and LI HAVE SEXXX with Penguins sex video I am doing my best to suppress, just send 19.99 to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202, and you will also get dirty postcards of Paris Hilton’s dirty underwear, a full set of 36! Trade them with your friends, or use them to write death threats to local stations who broadcast propaganda for murdering the unborn. But as I was saying, the split up with Brad was terrible, for me, my agent, and the thirteen penguins I eventually had to sell to the dog food factory. I ended up, of course, trying to dry out as I hilariously, in retrospect, ran over and killed ten pedestrians while snorting cocaine from the Olson twin’s bottoms – or they said they were the Olson twins. In any case, although I admitted wrongdoing and said it had affected my whole life, I was still put under house arrest for 32 hours, during which time, unfortunately, I ran over 10 other pedestrians but – the upside – that was when Britney and I had the stars in our eyes for each other. Later, of course, I did momentarily mistake her for Madonna, and then for Christine Aguillera, and then for Chris Matthews, and then for Clare Dane’s maid – her blond impalpability making it difficult for me to pick her out of a crowd – but still, until I married and divorced Jena Anderson, I’m sorry, I mean Lori Anderson, or no, Pamela Anderson, Britney was the height and depth my soul could reach. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that she’d been in a sex video with Jena Bush, the collected American Idol lineup of the 2003 season, and a flock of seagulls, which she has been trying to cover up although you can send $19.99 and get an autographed DVD of it for hours of viewing pleasure, send to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202. This explains my fistfight with the seagull that ended up as a brawl in which I killed and ate two retirees in Venice California, which I deeply regret. However, as you all know, I was put in prison for three days for this offense, which now that I’ve calmed down – at the time it seemed like injustice city, and they were picking on me - I do accept, especially as I would never have met Country Music Star whatshername – the one with the red hair – due to her incarceration too, and of course we fell madly in love and fucked through the prison bars, on the warden’s couch, and – apparently, I’m so embarrassed – in front of a camera set up in the rec room, all of which I am trying to suppress but that you can see – along with a whole set of whatsername’s country hits! for only 19.99, send to GOP Headquarters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 20202. And of course the papparazi are now bugging us – really, can’t we be allowed some privacy!? It is almost too much, and I blame that for my split up with whatshername, as she was offended by the sex video that I made with ten of the paparazzi and a Shetland pony.

So, obviously, I've been going through some hard times, but through it all, it is my fan base that has carried me through. I appreciate you all so much! It would be fantastic if we could make a sex video together, although I'd be terribly embarrassed by that and want to suppress it, of course.

part one of: silence, word, act

As promised, the first part of Karl Kraus' Silence, Word and Act.

Hey, for you who think translating Kraus is one of life's ho hum tasks, you try it.

Oh, and a word about word. Kraus uses the simple little noun to mean something more than that description of each one of the bits in this sentence. There is a sense of one's own word, one's own breathing in the bits of the sentence, that odd, unownable what you sound like. Bakhtine, if I can trust the translations, used Word to mean something similar.

"This is how silence and breaking silence are related. It is, as with so much that the conscience undergoes, not a contradiction. Because the silence was not reverent awe before an act behind which the word, in so far as it really is one, never retreats. It was simply concern: revulsion against the other word, against those, that the act accompanied, caused them, followed them, against the great dungheap of words of the world, which cannot and ought not to be respected. And the silence was so loud, that it was almost already speech. Now the chains fall off, because the chains themselves see that the word is stronger. It happened without my intending it, it was no act of decision, no plan here and there; there are moments, still, when even the machine has respect, and even in cases where we only expect suggestions, there is also room for inspiration. I have imagined my part for too long; then, as I lived a summer month in the middle of the silence of the most untouched landscape, where I bitterly suffered from the roar that filled everywhere else. It had to happen: after fifteen months in which these fearful heralds of victory rose to such a pitch of noise, from the possessed cashiers of world history down to the unescapable helpful cries of the extra editions, that after all the time even the herald of the greatest cultural bankruptcy that this planet has ever seen would make himself heard, were it only to prove that language itself has not yet been strangled. Really, I’m conscious of the fact that he who does not risk his head in the face of certain things doesn’t have one to risk. But what use is the exchange of heads against the fame of having had one? when with the head the word has also been confiscated, that it has to give! When the same machinery against which he charges, can make a mute of him in return! He will show it that there is more to him than merely his mite, that his endurance is something wholly different; that he can cannot harmonize the circumstances of a world romper room, in which the guns go off by themselves, with the divine plan to let the grass [Gras]and the mind [Geist] grow, and that reproaches a human race that tramples down both. Certainly, rather wager the head under these circumstances than through silent witness of such things to have posterity cast its doubts on you, one would have done better to have none, even if one were merely a German writer, circa 1915. But since the mute victim in these all too great times has still less value and effect then the Word; since it is nothing so exemplary as murder, as that which now everyone can, ought and must do – just because of this the word is liberated from itself. Even the word ought, in this moment, to do what it must; and I am corrupt enough to concede: possibly this state has proved, through its recognition of an exception to the state of exception, that in it as in every state with absolutist inclinations there yet lives a little endpoint of feeling for its cultural ruins. That it even has one last tear to give from a woeful perception that we will, when this adventure is dreamed through all the way, wake up on a bloodier battlefield, to the unlimited firesale managed by the epoch’s hyenas, out of whose infinite emptiness the new power will arise, repressed in the ghettos of hell for centuries and now corrupting the earth, conquering the air and stinking to high heaven. It may be that conservatives, from vocation or from birth, the nobility, church and warriors themselves have lost their spirits before the unbeatable foe, so they will combine with it out of alleged necessity. Perhaps they may, as though out of some enigmatic duty of universal vulnerability, commit frauds daily – but at some point they will notice the value of words that their courage no longer can coin for them, but shame, and that other feeling, which heals in the mightiest places: regret. Thus, all hail the weakling mighty ones! Let the lord enlighten them in their slumbers!"

review envy

“A policeman, Maurice Marullas, has blown out his brains. Let’s save the name of this honest man from being forgotten.”

LI recommends that you run at link speed to Julian Barnes’ LRB essay/review of Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Santé. This is such a good review that I turned several colors while reading it – green, from envy, white, from the painful thought that I would never write a review this good, and blue – well, because that is my normal color. I am, after all, Krishna. Luckily, you will notice that at least the first sentence doesn't quite work. This single blot has saved me the bother of following M. Maraullas.

Anyway, if you don’t read it, you are a stinking pig.

we don't know it

… jede Stunde mit dem letzten Schlag von tausend unschuldigen Herzen durch die Welt dröhnen müsste – “every hour must roar throughout the world with the last beats of a thousand innocent hearts.”

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life… no, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and we won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, foret they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.

- Karl Kraus, taken from Calasso’s essay, The Perpetual War.

LI just had a nice chat with Amy Chua, the woman who wrote World on Fire, about her new book, Day of Empire. We did the interview for the Austin Statesman. After hanging up, we went to the computer and read the newspapers, and the happy feeling got shot all full of holes, and started leaking on the rug.

We made a resolve last spring to write much less about Iraq on this site because that seemed hopeless and narcissistic. Nothing we said, no analysis we made, mattered. One could apply that criticism to the collectivity of what we have said about anything – but only a mean person would do that, right?

However, like the federal response to Katrina, the Nisoor Square massacre is not only a crime in itself, but a special crime, a representative crime. Usually we can trust the media to cover up representative crimes while making non-representative crimes household names – thus, the media attention devoted to the doings of OJ Simpson were in typical and amazing disproportion to the reality of crime in America, which does not generally consist of rich black men killing their white ex wives, but of poor black men railroaded into prison by any means possible to preserve the subtending structures of the battered Jim Crow system. Which is déjà vu all over again – the same thing happened in the South in the 1880s, when the Federal government surrendered on the 13th and 14th amendment to the White South and the White South, to assure its dominance before the legal structure of Jim Crow was set up, did the same disenfranchisement by way of prison thing.

However, the media’s record of distraction and decoying is not 100%. Sometimes, they accidentally stumble upon a real representative crime. The Nisoor Square massacre is one of them. Among its inglorious aspects is how it lifts into the intermittent glare of public attention a history going back twenty years, to the intervention in Yugoslavia.

Now, controversies about that intervention always seem to go around in a circle of assumptions that I think aren’t true. Unlike the invasion of Iraq, it simply isn’t true that Clinton came into office wanting a more interventionist foreign policy. And I’ve read no credible account that points to the White House as the driver of the intervention – it was driven at a lower level. But it was driven by the same means that were employed in the pre-war campaign of 2002 – trickery, lies, and the crucial work of a dedicated group of liberal publicists tied to a group of people, like Peter Galbraith, at that time ambassador to Croatia, determined to pull the U.S. in, and willing to break international law to do it. In Yugoslavia, as in Colombia, the Clinton administration turned, like some dog trained by a neo-liberal Pavlov, to “private security forces’ – thugs, in order to “lessen the political pressure” – get around legal democratic strictures – in order to enforce policy. To paraphrase the famous sentence from Vietnam, the liberal hawk motto is, we have to destroy democracy in order to spread it. And destroy it they have definitely tried to – all of the usurpations of dictatorial executive power we associate with the Bush administration were prefigured under Clinton. No, Clinton didn’t torture, but he set up the mechanism of executive privilege to invade our rights – notoriously in the case of encryption – that were simply expanded by the Bushies.

Such is the state of the current historical case. You have to do some combination of mega plumbing and root canal work to get to the bottom of all of this hiring of mercenaries, this welling rot and decay that is sapping the spirit from this republic.

All of which is to intro my next post, I think, which is a treat for the ladies and gentlemen in the paying audience and you out there at home. Let’s have a big round of applause for my upcoming translation of Kraus’ famous essay, Silence, Word and Act, written in 1915 a year after he wrote In these Momentous Times, his attack on the War. For that year, according to Edward Timms, his English biographer, Kraus was experiencing the love of his life with Sidonie Nadherny, who was as well connected as you could be in the Habsburg Empire. Her family estate in Janovitz in Bohemia was close to the Archduke Ferdinand’s. Kraus, on the other hand, was a converted Jew, a scandalous journalist, and not at all socially acceptable – as her friend, Rilke, told her. Rilke was much too much the gentlemen to want his friend marrying a Jew. (Rilke, for all his genius, was a bit of a shit). Although Sidonie herself wrote in her diary, in 1917: “K.K., I wish he’d love me less, for in my heart are other dreams and faithful I cannot be and no man should want that of a woman, for it must make her fade.”

In these Momentous Times (In diese Grosse Zeit) came out in November, 1914 (Which began with the famous sentence, In this great time which I still knew when it was so little). Kraus hadn’t said much about the war since it began in August. There, he had his say. So, in 1915, Kraus was already known – as Shaw was known in the U.K. – for his stance against the war. Yet the Fackel was not shuttered – although of course the yahoos raged. This essay is connected to his Momentous Times essay.