the civilizing mission: Tahiti/Samoa

A thesis is the poetry of logic, and it usually ends up, x eyed and down, strangled by detail. Or at least this is my conclusion after hearing many many details in many many papers at the History of Science Society conference. It jolted me, since my own essay in the making, attacking the triumph of happiness, sometimes seems so mired in the Enlightenment underground, so intent on picking up odd writers, that it seems bent on disappointing my original inspiration, which was to strike a blow against a cultural dominant that is leading us to ruin. So, I need a bit of air and a leap ahead, which is why LI’s post today is about Andy Martin’s Willing Women: Samoa, Tahiti, and the Western Imagination, published in the Raritan in 1997.

It is a superclever essay, since Martin takes Bougainville’s Voyage – an important Enlightenment text – as the background to dissect the famous controversy about Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa – another famous text, this one coming out of the ‘mongrel modernism’ of the twenties. Mead was accused of gross fraud by an Australian anthropologist in the 1980s, Derek Freeman – but it wasn’t just Mead who was accused, here. Rather, Freeman rightly saw Mead as representative of the cultural relativism and liberalism of her time – from a vulgar Hegelian viewpoint, you could say that American liberalism springs from the synthesis of twenties liberations (cultural and sexual) and the thirties economic rationality (FDR’s patchwork Keynesianism). Freeman is a bit of a hero on the right, and Mead more than a bit of a devil.

“Mead's scenario of love in the South Seas, "under the palm trees" in her own phrase, started to unravel in the 1980s, when an Australian, Derek Freeman, denounced her narrative as a myth {Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1983). In his account, Samoan culture was in fact rigid, male-dominated, hierarchical, fundamentalist, fixated on premarital virginity. He even brought forward, as evidence, one of Mead's own sources who confessed—sixty-odd years after the event—that she and her friends had freely misled Mead by telling her what she wanted to hear, stories of innumerable moonlit rendezvous and sultry perfumed liaisons. In truth they remained strict conformists to the Samoan moral code. Mead herself later admitted she had been hoaxed.”

Martin begins his essay with a variation of the classic Freudian question, what do women want – in this case, what did Mead want? Want, of course, is fated to produce doppelgangers and decoys, generating a black market in which authenticity is traded for mockery and vice versa. It is zoned for irony. In this case, the irony is that what the women of Samoa wanted in telling Mead what she wanted to hear, supposedly. Martin is a little too comfortable changing the locus of the controversy to Tahiti – the shift is justified by the reference to the “South Seas”, and the easiness comes to haunt this essay, as I will point out later – but I don’t think he is totally wrong to make the shift. Martin starts with an account of Bougainville’s ten day stay in Tahiti. Bougainville came there in a ship named, appropriately, Boudeuse - ‘literally, "Sulky Woman" or "Kissing Couch"’ – and his description of this landfall as a sexual paradise became, of course, a topos for the crossed destinies of Rousseau and Sade, for the nobility of the natural and the unnaturalness of nobility.

Martin’s essay is a nice attempt to survey the metaphorical implication of ‘Tahiti’ – viewing it as not simply a metaphor attached and functioning in a Western orientalist metaphoric, but as a catalyst that joins together one view of women’s desire (a view that Martin, rather hastily, identifies with Freud’s discovery, via Dora, that the unconscious never says ‘no’), with orientalism itself. Tahiti touches Napoleon and Flaubert’s Egypt and transforms them into Cythera – Bougainville’s own metaphor for Tahiti. Flaubert’s Egypt leads us from Madame Bovary to Gauguin - back to the real Tahiti. Gauguin leads us back to rape. And rape leads us to Sade, whose texts contain woman as the object who cannot be raped – since women are fated always to say yes, even when they say no. The problem with this account of rape is, obviously, that it takes raped to be defined by a judicial notion which is surely, if anything, a product of the liberal patriarchy which is, at the same time, being accused by Martin of generating the unrapeable, infinitely submissive, infinitely wanting woman. One theme is entangled with another, but Martin, working through the margins, comes to affirm the patriarchal gestures of a rightwinger like Freeman and – in a bizarre coda concerning Martin’s own sexual object, Brigitte Bardot – Bardot, whose autobiography is disconcertingly thrown into this mix.

Thus, though LI can say that both Martin and myself are operating under the baleful moon of deconstruction - we are brothers under the skin - I cannot fully endorse Martin’s elaboration of his theme.

Only men and boys can truly seem to be raped [in Sade], since they frequently put up more than token resistance, whereas, in the case of girls and women, sex, however coercive and even fatal, is always ultimately consensual. The Sadeian would-be rapist is invariably irritated, provoked, outraged by this apparently irrepressible fountain of feminine pleasure and desire. The sexual criminal can therefore always reasonably assert, in Sade, that no crime has been committed since he was only responding to an implicit invitation: all along he has done nothing but provide the supply to her demand.

Suppressed by Napoleon, marginalized as erotica, Sade's texts can now be seen to constitute the archetype of the nineteenth-century novel in Erance. Erom Madame de Stael through to Colette, the novels written by women constitute a series of variations, suh-Juliette, on the uninhibited woman. Novels written by men tend to subscribe more to the model of Justine, taking an initially more passive woman and forcing her to show her true and more predatory colors. One reason, I would contend, why Elaubert's Madame Bovary is often represented as the greatest of nineteenth-century novels is that it is the most flagrantly Sadeian of afl texts in the period.”

It is a bold thing to elaborate a contrarian thesis that you then take to be operating, unconsciously, among the community at large all the time – Martin is contending not only that his reading of Sade is right, but that the Sadeian impulse is so dominant that it determines unconsciously the judgments of the critical community. Sade so dominates that you will notice it is Sade in particular who Napoleon bans - rather than, as was the case, a whole group of erotic writers from the eighteenth century. By this means, Sade becomes so central that the critic, apparently, like the women of Tahiti, can’t say no to Sade, even if they appear not to be thinking of him at all. Derridian histories become problematic in the instance in which they forget their own overdeterminations. There is no, so to speak, control on the catalyzing power of Tahiti in Martin’s metaphoric chain. Still, Martin is right, I think, to see Bougainville’s Tahiti as the background to Mead’s Samoa.

“Bougainvillea, the brilliantly colored vine (named by Commerson. Botanist Royal aboard the Boudeuse) that Bougainville brought back from the tropical South, takes root and flowers in Europe. At the same time there springs up a whole Bougainvillean crop of ideas, which we can loosely bundle under the heading of "Southism," that bursts out in the nineteenth-century novel and the paintings of Gauguin. The Bougainvifle-Gauguin axis becomes the center of gravity of a pertod, from Rousseau to Mead, which proudly thrusts up fantasies of willing women like the figurehead of a ship. That hazy catchall concept of phallogocentrism can be understood, I would
argue, as the revelation of a secret orgiastic theory about the desires of women, especially young girls, for men.”

LI has found it hard to say what women want, in my thesis about the change in emotional customs brought about by the great transformation. I’ve made several false starts. My sense that volupte acts as the ‘center of gravity’ of the seventeenth century prehension of the Enlightenment bonheur thesis has been influenced by the fact that so many women took their intellectual places as advocates and opponents of volupté – and that the women who advocated it were writing in the wake of Gassendi’s re-introduction of Epicurus to the high cultural scene. But so many women makes for… how many women? My sample size will always be unrepresentative, insofar as it is hard to know just what samples to take, what the variables are that influence them, etc.

That Martin seems to naively accept Freeman’s account of Mead, and Bardot’s account of her younger self, tells us that he definitely needed to counterweight his own quest for the catalyzing effects of Tahiti. Such is the power of poetry that some of Martin’s instances are irresistible:

“At the end of the eighteenth century, the poet and revolutionary Camille Desmoulins spoke of his desire to "compose a Tahiti of the heart" as he was carted off to the guillotine.”

But Martin's thesis, which aligns Desmoulins, Napoleon, Freud and Mead in a massive denial of rape, seems to me not to be the center of gravity of Orientalism. One way to bring this out is to read Martin's article against this piece in the Summer, 2006 issue of Ethnohistory by Paul Shankman, which goes over the Freeman-Mead controversy one more time. His article makes for an interesting twist on Martin’s thesis, for it is possible, on re-reading it, to see that Martin is making an argument that is imbricated with a standard apologetic for imperialism – that the Europeans abolished barbaric customs that oppressed women. The suttee is one. The abolition of the public defloration of virgins in Samoa, or taupou, is another. This is a quote from Mead:

Mead noted that by the 1920s the taupou and many other aspects of Samoan tradition had changed appreciably.

‘ Deviations from chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls by a very severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head. Missionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but failed to substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect conduct. The girl whose sex activities are frowned upon by her family is in a far better position than that of her great-grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has interdicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent inducement to virginity has been abolished. If for these cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a stricter regime there had been substituted a religious system which seriously branded the sex offender, or a legal system which prosecuted and punished her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have been as heavily fraught with possibilities of conflict as the old civilisation undoubtedly was. (Mead 1928: 273–74)’”

Reading Shankman as a sort of counter-reading of Martin is interesting, especially in the light of Martin’s 90s-ish take on feminism, rape and Freud (Martin goes so far as to agree with Masson), which, as we can see from the past seven years, is consistent with using feminism as the avant garde justification for America’s imperial policy – precisely toward that Orient which, in Martin’s view, is Napoleon’s unrapeable female. There's a well known history of viewing the imperial power as the guardian of the native female, but it is not to be found in Martin – rather, it is disguised by a trendy extension of the Sadean template to all of Europe. The rape ideology then infects Mead and the cultural relativists. And, to give us a sort of ultimate 90s-ish trompe l’oeil effect, Martin prominently features the memories of older women, looking back at their younger selves and telling the truth about those selves – the Samoan women Freeman quotes, and the older B.B.

Shankman, however, reverses the nineties trope by quoting the younger Freeman, whose dissertation, arising from his fieldwork in Samoa in 1948, actually tallies with Mead’s picture of Samoa, and disagrees with Freeman’s later assertion that the intervention of the missionaries was not inconsistent with the native Samoan ethos, which never countenanced the free sexual behavior Mead claimed that she had discovered from her informants. Younger selves and older selves, here: a variable that is too often underconceptualized, or simply omitted, in our narratives.

Shankman has engaged in a lot of controversy with Freeman, as is evident from his paper. However, in his defense of Mead’s credibility, he quotes from Freeman’s 1948 thesis on our topic: rape and unrapeability.

F

reeman continues his discussion of marriage by reporting that ‘‘most avaga’’[elopement marriages] begin with a moetotolo, or ‘‘sleep crawling.’’ ‘‘Sleep crawling’’ refers to a practice in which a young man silently slips into the young woman’s house at night and, without awakening the household sleeping all around them, engages in sex with her. It is one form that clandestine relationships take and may be part of courtship. It is also dangerous for the young man, who, if caught, could be severely beaten and his family fined. Nevertheless, Freeman (1948: 208) comments that ‘‘in many instances a moetotolo is achieved with the connivance of the girl concerned.’’ That is, despite the risk involved to the boy and possibly to herself, the girl may have encouraged the relationship. Here Freeman is suggesting that in many cases the relationshipwas consensual and that the girl might be willing, a point made in somewhat more detail by ethnographer Tim O’Meara (1996: 108).

In Freeman’s published description of avaga in Margaret Mead and Samoa (1983: 240), he reiterates that girls may ‘‘actively encourage’’ their own seduction. However, Freeman now defines moetotolo exclusively as forcible ‘‘surreptitious rape’’ (244), in which the young man clandestinely crawls into a girl’s house and manually deflowers her in symbolic imitation of the pre-European defloration ceremony. In fact, Freeman argues that moetotolo is characterized by aggression and that Mead misinterpreted this custom (245), stating that:

“The intention of the sleep crawler is, in fact, to creep into the house in which a female virgin is sleeping, and before she has awoken to rape her manually by inserting one or two fingers in her vagina, an action
patterned on the ceremonial defloration of a taupou.”

This is all rather fascinating. To disentagle the the politics of rape and consent, of subjects and objects, of the construction of a legal system that punishes rape in the context of a culture that tends towards liberal ‘relativism’ gives us the contradictions and stresses of our current imperialist fiasco. That fiasco depends, muchly, on its refusal ever to take ‘women’ or ‘men’ as anything but unified and compartmentalized categories. That compartmentlization allows for disengaging them from the other variables of their social life - notably, their social and economic position in society - and allows us to gain a compartmentalized truth. What has puzzled me about the discourse of the last seven years is that the Enlightenment, the springtime of cultural relativism, has become a codeword for universalism. And that the feminist strike against patriarchy has been seized as a buttress of imperialism. From universal values to a nice little bombing raid on Iran is another hop skip and a jump through catalytic metaphors that I will save for some later post.

46 more shopping days till Hulaichi's deathday

Another black hole in the killing zone
A little more mad in the methadrome…

“Washington: Sir, the CIA rendition program was started under Bill Clinton. This is something that just gets lost in all this discussion. I hope your film reflects that.

Stephen Grey [producer, FRONTLINE: Rendition]: Yes, we made that clear.
It's an important legal point because it means that when the U.S. came to Sept. 11, they already had extensive experience in how these prisoners would be treated when rendered to places like Egypt. The biggest rendition was in the summer of 1998 (four from Albania, and one from Bulgaria). Of those rendered, two were hanged without trial. All alleged very serious torture; it was documented in court.”
- Discussion, Washington post


While I was away in D.C., I was unsurprised to see that there was no announcement that Andrew Moonen had been arrested for murder, nor any announcement that the justice department took any interest in Margaret Scobey’s status as an accessory. So I was thinking: what can we do to celebrate this great, this minor, this emblematic, this damning, this sickening, this let’s all eat shit and die social fact? Well, by a happy circumstance, the murder of Raheem Khalif Hulaichi took place on our greatest holiday, when God said that he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosever believeth in him could buy a Desert War III: Hard Combat for the boy and the TinyTots Iphone for the little girl this Hulaichi deathday. Yes, I was thinking of counting down the shopping days to Raheem Khalif Hulaichi’ s deathday. Maybe Umm Sajjad can even get her compensation from the Maliki or Mehdi official who apparently stole it before it reached her – for such is the virtuous circle of Moloch in Baghdad, as pointed out by Praxis in my comment section below.

In the meantime, let’s all sing our Hulaichi deathday songs as we gather 'round the yule log:

Its a small world and it smells funny
I’d buy another if it wasn’t for the money
Take back what I paid
For another motherfucker in a motorcade

ezekiel returns from babylon, bearing gift certificates

I’ve known M since we lived together on ‘Manslaughter’ street in New Haven back in the 90s, and have loved her with as pure a love as this corrupt hulk can manufacture. She is now a professor, married to a writer and historian (who, she told me, just won one of Mexico’s most prestigious prizes for a book he published last year) in Mexico City, and has two incredibly beautiful kids. She was giving a talk on a panel at the Society for the History of Science conference in D.C., and floated me a ticket to come up and see her.

So I flew into the Ronald Reagan airport with the kind of funny feeling Ezekiel would have had if he had were going on an all expense paid weekend to Babylon. D.C., after all, is at the very center of the American Jitters that have knocked me severely askew for years now – it is the symbolic embodiment of all that is lunatic, corrupt, short term and blind in this land where God shed his grace and the corn grows as high as the genetically altered elephant’s eye.

When I was a kid, I went to D.C. a lot. My Mom’s people lived in Montgomery county. They were all, or mostly, Republican, and – such are the tricks in this life – all worked for the guv’mint. Except my Democrat Uncle Harry, God bless him. First big Democrat, first big cigar smoker, first Catholic in my life. Otherwise, it was a nest of Southern Baptists. In truth, at the time I was less interested in Democrats and Republicans than cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or the huge slide in the park in back of my grandmother’s house, which had one of those nice shiny and sharp metal edges at the end of it now banned in most places and replaced by softer outdoor environments made of plastic and painted with candy colors and holding no threat. I suppose that is a good thing.

However, since I came into a man’s estate, I have not often walked the streets of D.C. And not at all since it was infested with Bush.

As it turned out, though, the stooge tourist in my soul soon fell in love with the monuments and book stores and coffee shops, worshiped the God Lincoln in his temple, went the dutiful round of National Museums, and even had a few kindly thoughts for the Crystal Gate Marriott, where the History of Science wingding was going on. There were a lot of microhistories that receded into the micro a bit too much, and there were the cocktail hours that had the odd flow you get when you put cheap wine and expensive bottles of beer in the hands of the chattering academic type and confine them to the unimpressive architecture of international blandness characteristic of mid priced hotels – imagine the buzz that would arise from a special flypaper that caught a couple hundred intellectuals, and you get the soundscape. My people, obviously. The HSS Hazen lecture, ‘How Science became Technical’ by Theodore Porter was my own personal highlight of the conference. Porter works in areas dear to my heart, and upon which I am probably going to poach for this review I am way behind on, namely: quantification, precision and the construction of the system of objectivity.

M. is a walker. She once walked me down the entire length of Miami Beach to the very end, across a bridge, and deep into Miami’s Colombian neighborhood. A journey that looms larger in my mind than it does in hers. We did considerable urban hiking, however. And once we resettled in cheaper digs at Day’s Inn, after the Marriott business ended, we rather radiated out from Connecticut avenue – to the left, into the heart of Georgetown, and to the east, to the Capital and such. We did most of the things we set out to do, except finding some boots for C., M.’s daughter, and finding a particular pale blue shade of tights – in quest of the latter we must have sorted through every Benetton’s and Sisley’s in the precincts of the Capital district. We even included in our sweep the clothing stores in Union Station.

Pale blue tights are hard to find this year.

There are three things about me that irritate M. I always leave food on my plate. I have a terrible sense of direction. And … well, I can’t remember what the third one is. In the main, however, we get along pretty well as traveling companions. She wanted to see the the Natural History Museum and the Botanical Garden, and I wanted to see the WACK! exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. We were pretty well satisfied with our choices. I will write about the WACK! exhibit in my next.

Like one of North’s M & M astronauts, LI is blasting off to D.C. for the next four days. I’m going to be attending the Society of the History of Science conference there – or, really, sneaking into it. My friend M. is giving a paper there, a brief prospectus of her upcoming book on Colonial science. Then we are heading out to see the D.C. sites – ah, you FBI/Homeland security people who’ve been reading my pot-bouille of disgruntlement, take note! Yes, I plan on scourging with my fearsome criticisms every branch of government whilst up there. I’m taking my soapbox. (Although, in actuality, I’ll probably go to the zoo. Fuck worrying about the guv’mint. Picture me givin a damn I said never).

finally, monsieur, a wafer thin mint

Finally,monsieur, a wafer thin mint.

It is a minor thing, really. The Fed’s rate cut yesterday. It goes against every principle that the Federal Reserve used to adhere to. It was accompanied by a Commerce Department report that told a tale of epic fiction about inflation – down this quarter to its lowest point in years, apparently. Such is the magic of the hedging formulas now used to produce almost any result that you want. The rate cut sank the dollar further, and raised the price of oil. In effect, the Fed declared that its raison d’etre, at the moment, is simply and solely to help out the richest investors in this country, and the rest of the country be damned.

Sure, that has been the Bush mantra since 2001. Although it is a mistake to think that the change in degree brought about by the Bush seizure of power is a change of kind – we have had the same economic and social trends since 1981. The quiet violence of a policy intended to reduce the majority of the country to a comfortable peon status, where their major power would consist of selecting their favorite singers on American Idol and, if they were lucky, shifting their credit card debt to a lower interest rate on a special one time only offer, while in the background economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of a debauched few, has become the open violence of that meshing of interests between the financial, the petro-chemical, and the war industries, displaying its naked form in the great war crime of Iraq. We have been coming to this point ever since I was legally entitled to fuck. So I should be as used to the mix of affluence and powerlessness as anyone else. But unluckily for me, I was perverted to the very marrow by Sunday School, Bob Dylan, and the game of Monopoly, all of which taught me that untrammeled and irresponsible power forms itself, irresistibly, into murder. It also taught me about Get out of Jail Free cards. They are now issued like party favors in D.C.

So what happened yesterday and what happened this summer is that the Fed dispensed with disguises and openly became a boiler room adjunct of Wall Street. Having crafted one bubble after another to keep the economy humming along, we have reached the end of the string. Bubbles are the crack capitalist way to affect redistribution of the wealth. The crack for the common man comes in the form of an expanded power of purchase on all levels – although one not accompanied by a corresponding expansion of earnings. This, in turn, leads to an ever widening dominance of the investor class, the group that is, collectively, ‘owed’. That group, however, monetizes what it is collectively owed – its virtual capture of surplus value - to expand its own purchasing power – it builds a second tier of debt on the debt it is owed. And like the tower of Babel, from the ground level this looks like it can go on forever. There is an upper limit, however, at least theoretically, a point where the expanded power of purchase of the common man can go no further without something drastic happening – for instance, an expansion of real earnings. The primary directive of the Fed is to keep that from happening – it is the institutional embodiment of strike breaking in the U.S. But if that doesn’t happen, the wealthiest themselves will become overextended – they won’t be able to monetized what they are owed in the vulgar sense, that is, with actual money, without risking massive default, which comes down to one of those old economic laws: you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

So, to treat the pain, the Fed has turned into Doctor Feelgood. But in two or three months, the pain is going to show up at the gas station. And nobody is going to like that pain. Similarly, the metric that the Fed really despises – how much common things cost for common people – is going to intrude like a big party crasher. On the upside, given the intangible of warmer weather, there will probably be less heating oil used in the cold states this year – that which doesn’t kill us, as Fred N. liked to say, allows us to contrive ever more elaborate systems for killing ourselves.

So the question then will be: how much more shit will the common man swallow? Since shit eating and toad eating have been the most popular American pastimes lately, it ought to be quite something to watch: this moment when we all can’t eat that last piece of crap, handed to us from on high.

no little murders

“What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!”

It is a funny thing, murder. I am definitely romantic enough to be sympathetic to the right murderer. But in truth, I am not in the economic class where something like me being wiped off the face of the earth is going to make much of a stink. I am among the easily murdered rather than the other way around, and I suppose that makes me sensitive. So I have cause for some solidarity with the spilt blood of Raheem Khalif, a man whose image I can’t find on Google. No fame or fortune for him, indeed. And such a small, such a tiny, such a remote soul does not haunt the corridors of the State Department. Or so the State Department thinks.

I think differently. I think that when David conspired to have Uriah the Hittite ambushed so that he could take Uriah’s wife, Bathsheeba, I think God cursed Israel. I think when Lady Deadlock committed no crime but that of deserting her daughter and, on the way to the long discovery of this fact, Tulkinghorn was murdered, that Lady Deadlock would die herself, chased by the Furies of the liberal novelist’s conscience. I think when Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, is murdered by the woman he could actually be in love with, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, that he turns her into the cops:

"Well, if you get a good break, you'll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl you'll be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

It is the improbable, liberal hope of the novelist that the circle will be unbroken, by and by lord by and by.

On the other hand, most murders do go unsolved. Who murdered the forty to sixty million in World War II? Who murdered the million and a half in Southeast Asia, circa 1954-1974? Name the murderers, make a list. But the river is deep and the river is wide, and you’ll never cross to the other side. Name the murderers of the 675,000 in Iraq. Or more. One can be resigned that this is the way it is. One can be angry as fuck. But there it is.

But one can’t be resigned to the little murders. No, the liberal novelists idea, his one shining idea, is that there aren’t any little murders. The liberal novelist represents the hope of every potential dumpee. For the defining trait of the republic that the novelist operates in, can operate in, is that it aspires to a minimum level of justice in which there will be no impunity for the Deadlocks – there will be none for the cops – there will be none for the rich heirs – there will be none for the politicians – there will be none for the policymaker, the stock broker, the VIP, the strikebreaker, the mercenary, the bodyguard. Watching night and fog, aka the Justice department, engulf and hide the murder of Khalif, and hide the murderer, and hide his accomplices, is an insult, an assault, on all of us who are eminently murderable. They begin the million murder strings with just such acts of gross impunity.

“But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much
jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the
larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.
It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for
want of air.”

Update on the prosecution of Andrew Moonen for murder

For those interested in justice for the murdered Iraqi bodyguard, Raneem Khalif, the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung runs a shocker today. Apparently the State Department people in Iraq promised Blackwater guards involved in mowing down Iraqis in Nisoor square in September 'immunity.' As I said in a previous post, the comparison of Bush's administration to some European fascist regime is truly off base - it is much more like a Cold War classic kleptocracy, Argentina in the 80s, the Philippines under Marcos - a place in which the air of impunity that hangs over the elite allows them maximum leaway to flout the law until the stones cry out in the street and some crystallization of all discontents emerges. Of course, given the cholesterol around the American householders sense of justice, that crystallizing moment will have to be something that especially strikes them - perhaps a speech by the President that pre-empts a really exiting episode of American Idol. At that moment, I wouldn't be surprised to see marching in the street!

In any case, the unhappy few that are interested in the mundane workings of justice should look at DeYoung's article. Here's what it reports about the homicide committed by Andrew Moonen:

The FBI investigators sent to Baghdad are due to return to Washington early this week and will then turn the information they gathered over to the Justice Department, which will decide whether prosecution is warranted. An earlier case, involving the shooting of a bodyguard of an Iraqi vice president by a Blackwater contractor last Christmas Eve, was referred to Justice months ago, but there has been no prosecution.

Law enforcement officials have said it is unclear whether the contractors are liable under any U.S. law. The administration has said it opposes a bill passed by the House last month that would place State Department contractors under laws that currently apply only to Pentagon contractors.

Administration officials have said that the Christmas Eve case has languished because of the legal uncertainties. But in congressional testimony last week, Rice said that the holdup was "not the absence of law . . . it's a question of evidence."

Karen DeYoung is one of the good Washington Post reporters. She is having a discussion today about the crimes of Blackwater, among other things. Go to the Q and A here
and drop her a question about Andrew Moonen. Ask why he is not being prosecuted. Ask why Margaret Scobey is not being prosecuted as an accomplice. Ask politely but firmly. Although we can say, of the American relation to Iraqis, what Gloucester says in Lear about the relation of gods to humans - Iraqis are to Americans as flies are to wanton boys, they kill them for their sport - let's try to kick the habit. Let's do it by honoring at least one Iraqi murdered, indeed, for sport.

P.S.

Well, for what it is worth, this is the question I sent in, and this is De Young’s answer:

Austin, Texas: In your article today, there is a puzzling paragraph about Andrew Moonen, the Blackwater guard who killed Raheem Khalif, President Maliki's bodyguard, last Christmas. Condi Rice seems to claim that the case has languished not because of an absence of law but because of "a question of evidence." But do we have any evidence that the Justice Department even has questioned Moonen after he was sent back to the U.S.? And if Moonen is prosecuted for the murder of Raneem Khalif -- which seems like an open-and-shut case to me -- will they prosecute Margaret Scobey, the acting ambassador in Iraq at the time, as an accessory? After all, she knew that Moonen killed Khalif while drunk and apparently approved -- or even decided -- the day after to help him escape back to the States.
I would think that this case is tailor-made for a special prosecutor, given that there were many people at the State department involved in covering up Moonen's crime. What frustrates people like me, outside the Beltway, is the perception since the Scooter Libby pardon of an air of impunity that seems to cover all wrongdoing by the government elite, even up to accessory to murder.
Karen DeYoung: Although we now know a lot about what happened in this case and actions of Blackwater and the U.S. Embassy in the immediate aftermath, we know practically nothing about the status of the Justice investigation into it or the likelihood of any prosecution. Although I've been told by many here that the problem is one of "what law can be used for prosecution," Rice did, indeed, say the other day that that was not the problem--that it was a lack of evidence. Apparently it is both--there were only two people present when the event occured, and only one of them is still alive.

For a more D.C.-centric view of the case, here’s another question/comment:

Washington: Everyone needs to be realistic about this ... of course these people were offered immunity -- they wouldn't be in Iraq if they weren't. They are there to protect our diplomats in a war zone where people hide behind women and children and use sucicde bombs and other things that we as Americans can't imagine using. Of course mistakes are going to be made ... and innocents are going to be killed. It is a neccesary evil, plain and simple. If we put these guys in jail, good luck getting private contractors into Iraq and other war zones across the world.
Karen DeYoung: More food for thought and comment.

I believe the good folks at UFOB invented a machine that processes lesser evil into rectitudinous squirrels. It has been a smash seller, as you can imagine. Mr. Scruggs was wined and dined extensively at the last Kos convention, where he modestly opined that he was “the Thomas Edison of political apparatuses”. I believe those are his words. Or was it "The demon Belzebuub, come to judge among the quick and the dead"? The vocal distortion on the video I saw made it hard to tell, although the room did, at that moment, grow bloody red, and griffons appeared to hunt among the shrieking members of the audience.

Anyway, UFOB needs to come up with an evil machine 2.0 tout de suite, that can work on ‘necessary evil’. Remember, without necessary evil, ‘good luck getting private contractors into Iraq.” Yikes. A world without mercenaries is like a day without sunshine – or rather, like hell without sulfur.