The LOL era and the Iran war rollout

Sometimes, LI thinks we should brag about our foreign policy prescience. Before the invasion of Iraq, we foretold the insurgency, and the expense – although, admittedly, we underestimated the latter. Similarly, since 2004, we have been predicting that … there would be no war between the U.S. and Iran. Although in 2004, we considered it possible that the U.S. would bomb Iran, much as Reagan bombed Libya – a sole sortee, for advertising purposes only – by 2005 it was pretty clear this wasn’t going to happen.

The reason why ties into the domestic reasons for invading Iraq, which should never be forgotten. Bush, on 9/11, was, by all rights, a washed up president. Not only had he been elevated to office in the most bizarre coup since Rutherford Hayes agreed to abandon African Americans and cede the Civil War to the South in 1876, but he had obviously and spectacularly failed to protect the country, and was subject to embarrassing panic attacks. It only got worse as his Defense Department did what it could to help Osama bin Laden escape into Pakistan, practically buying him and his entourage a one way ticket. At the same time, Bush had managed to take the amount of money accumulated from the regressive FICA tax since 1985 and distribute it almost completely to the wealthiest people in the U.S. – a two trillion dollar gift to the upper one percentile. In return for which, the wealthiest staged a nice collapsing bubble as the stock market, which had boomed due to a tissue of fraudulent accounting practices and unregulated flows of hedge money, came back into line with reality.

What was needed was a war like Bush’s Daddy’s war, so the war they wanted when they came in was ginned up a little earlier than I image they were planning – given their overt grossness, I imagine Rove had planned the war for December, 2003, so they could have the victory march sometime in spring and enjoy the spike in the Prez’s popularity. Daddy Warbucks Bush had, after all, not benefited from his war.

Well, they succeeded in getting the second term, and of course it blew up in their faces, since this is a bunch that has never had a more than third rate idea. What they weren’t counting on was the fact that their war, which they wanted to be a little thing, a model war for a bunch of others, turned out to be an extensive, expensive, and ultimately wildly unpopular thing. And while certain aspects of it have, admittedly, succeeded – the price of oil, for instance, is now firmly stationed at three times the price of oil during the Clinton administration, a source of quiet pride to the Petro-Gun Club, Bush’s true milieu – still, there was a small political problem with squeezing the Red State Muzhik for more of his currency. If there is one thing that muzhik likes, it is a big, gas guzzling truck upon which one can affix one’s Bush Cheney sticker. But if the price at the pump shoots up to, say, four dollars a gallon, even the core of Bush believers would begin to melt. The thing that doomed Carter was not his ‘weakness’, as per the right, but the price of things – which are equivalent to Virgil’s the tears of things – they are the sacred signs by which we organize our rituals.

I have thought, for a long time, that this, and this only, was the real restraint on the sweet toothed crowd at the White House. Still, I think the attack on Iran has been a lure for the Bush people. Since we know that they have had the NIE estimate for a year, we can guess that it was repressed in order that the Cheneyites might have their say. The papers have gone along for the ride, with the Post making egregious references to Iran in its reports on Iraq, never missing a chance to blame Iran for IED deaths, and of course never mentioning the role Saudi Arabia played in making sure the Sunni insurgents were armed and manned and out there killing the Yankees, pour encourager les autres. Also, the ride up to ninety nine dollars per barrel was too good to miss. If Exxon doesn’t vote Bush a lifetime sinecure when he finally stumbles out of the white house, well, it will just show a shocking decline in gratitude in the corporate world.

So things have worked out happily enough for the scoundrels who rule us. The Petro Gun club needs, as we creep towards actually appeasement, just like Chamberlain back in 1938, to keep the noise machine going. I was happy to see that the Washington Post pitched in with one of their exemplary editorials, in which one half truth is added to another as part of a proof that half truths add up to big lies: and so of course they read the NIE report as saying that Iran is going to be arming missiles with nuclear tips and firing off like drunk gremlins any day now. More significant, however, is the Kagan op ed piece sending up a white flag. What happens now is anybody’s guess. I suppose the law of incompetence eventually had to strike at the one thing the Bushies do best: the war rollout.

CAN A MONSTER BE HAPPY?

According to Albert Sorel, Napoleon read Maistre’s Considerations sur France in 1797, when he was in Milan. At this point, Napoleon had already planned his coup against the Directory. As Sorel puts it, “a little book may have already revealed the secret his future.” Although Maistre was a violent anti-Bonapartist – he is probably the source for some of the more pointed remarks in War and Peace, for of course Maistre was serving as the King of Sardinia's ambassador in Moscow when Napoleon attacked Russia - Sorel sees a community of … superstition between Napoleon, the man who said “I depend on events, I wait for everything from their issue” and the writer who wrote, “The Revolution led men more than men led the Revolution”.

Sorel’s idea is that what struck Buonoparte in Milan was a metaphysic that Buonaparte was to embody all the way up to 1815:

“The war made the Republic live, the peace will make it die… The French always succeed in war under a firm government that has the spirit to despise them in praising them and in throwing them on the enemy like shells, all the while promising them epitaphs in the newspapers..” War, besides, is a divine right, it is sacred. ‘There is only violence in the universe.” “The true fruits of human nature, the great enterprises, the high conceptions, the male virtues, all depend on the state of war. All the great men… are born in the midst of political commotions … Blood is the food of that plant that we call genius.”

It is for the celebration of war and execution, for a universe of violence, or – as Maistre says in Evenings in St. Petersburg – a society of punishment, ever more punishment, that Maistre achieved a sort of louche fame. He was the satanic Catholic, at least if we through him through the eyes of Baudelaire, who made as much a cult of him as he did of Sade. And face it, Maistre is the strangest apologist Christianity ever had – the only apologist who tried, as much as he could, to squeeze the love out of the thing as a sort of Protestant heresy. Catholicism has spawned some very wacked defenders – Leon Bloy comes to mind. But Maistre was the first who put together the anti-modernist program of the Church with a notion that is surprisingly close to the Terror – rejecting the social contract for the bonds of a sacred, nation building violence, with the preferred instrument of that violence being a legitimate succession of kings. In place of a creation that is, ultimately, bound together by the force of affection, he put a world under the judgment of a God whose memory of the human crimes is segmented into the very way human societies are laid out. We suffer, we war, we execute because we were born to others who were also born, and somewhere along that line there is a crime which is humanly inexpiable. In that Christianity without love, birth becomes the one undeniable thing a person can be accused of. What can’t be denied is certain, and on certainty we can build a science – but this political science will not be like that of the ideologues of the revolution.

Sainte Beuve, in a famous causerie on Maistre, pointed out that, for all his extremism, Maistre was actually a moderate among the ancien regime exiles, and seemed fascinated by Buonoparte. He saw in Buonoparte what was fatally lacking in the Bourbons – “if the house of Bourbon is decisively proscribed, it is good that government consolidate itself in France… it is good that a new race begins a legitimate succession, this one or that one, it doesn’t matter. I like Bonaparte king more than simply conqueror.”

So, of course, Maistre is not Sade, who might have reversed that last sentence. While Maitre’s God works miracles of violence that one can only wonder at, Maistre retains, at the risk of contradiction, all the old Catholic pieties. This is what gives the Soirees such a strange tone – some of it is just boring and second hand homily, but just as you start to get sleepy Maistre will develop some point until it becomes a monstrosity.

Indeed, the whole thing starts off as a question of monsters. The first pages of the Soirees are weirdly reminiscent of the first pages of Heart of Darkness. Three men are on a sloop, the sun is going down, they are all breathing in the sea and the sunset, they are all men of position and gravity, and one of them chances to make a strange remark – except this remark does not become an extended anecdote, as in Heart of Darkness.

“As our sloop gained a distance from the shore, the song of the rowers and the confused noise of the city insensibly faded. The sun was setting on the horizon; brilliant clouds gave off a soft light, a gilded semi-day that is impossible to paint, and that I have never seen anywhere else. The light and the shadows seemed to mix and extend to form a transparent veil which then covered the countryside.”

Then one of the three men on the sloop expresses the following thought:
‘I wish I could see, on the barque we are standing on, one of those perverse men, born for the misfortune of society; one of those monsters who fatigue this very earth.

‘And what would you do, if you please, if you had him here,’ (his two friends spoke up at once. “I would ask him if this night appeared as beautiful to him as it does to us.”

Quickly the dialogue develops the theme of the happiness of the wicked and the misfortune of the good – but the Count, the man representing de Maistre, who dominates the chapter, turns this question into something exterior – that is, he unconsciously follows in the traces of the Enlightenment philosophes he deplored, and takes happiness to be the description of social arrangements rather than inner psychological states. Later, of course, another Russian in St. Petersburg, Doestoevsky, will question that move.

I’m not, of course, concerned with all of Maistre’s program – it is the happiness of monsters that truly does interest me. But I should say something about Maistre’s effect – I think this is as important as his ideas. That suave but frightful loosening of the bonds of decorum is the predecessor of Baudelaire’s famous shock aesthetic. The line of descent, here, goes through Baudelaire and Barby D’auberville to Leon Bloy, who sums up the aesthetic strategy pretty well when he reflects on his own pretty horrible book, Salvation from the Jews:

This book, conceived in the sense of the oracles of scription, had to go, under pain of nothingness, to the edge of the bottom of things. I thus had to adopt the method recommended by saint Thomas Aquinas, which consists of exhausting the objection, first, before concluding. Excellent method, of a great philosophical faithfulness, but which caused me to be misprisioned (me fit malvenir) by the same people that I was claiming to honor as no Christian has honored them, I believe, for nineteen hundred centuries. One only looked at my premises in neglecting to observe that their violence was calculated to give all its force to my conclusion.”

some self erasing advice for Dems

LI was talking with our friend and far flung correspondent, Mr. T., on the phone last week. We both were yammering on about what is happening in the economy, and Mr. T. said something like, what we need now is another trillion dollar line of credit.

Which is very true. Leading me to this brief post, in which LI gives unsolicited advice to the Democratic Presidential candidates.

Look, next year will suck for the economy. It will suck so bad that the majority of Americans (for whom the economy has sucked for some time but who read in the paper that the economy is going terrifically well, and thus suffer from cognitive dissonance) are going to be reading in the paper that the economy sucks. It will be that rare alignment of existence and propaganda – an opportunity not to be missed!

So, here’s what you do. You make a speech saying what everybody knows – that the price of oil has tripled since we invaded Iraq because the oil dealers have a pretty shrewd idea that we are going to be tripping over the supply line for some time to come. But, you say, I am going to bring the price of oil down. How, you ask – easy. I am going to make peace with Iran, which will easily remove many of the artificial roadblocks to the exploration and exploitation of Iranian oil. That’s all. On the news – if, that is, you are a credible candidate – oil futures will fall. This is almost a no brainer play. And when they fall, you make a second speech pointing out that they fell because of your first speech. And so on – the point being that if you want those votes in the methamphetamine states where Jesus is almost king, just press on those gas prices. They’ll holy roll themselves your way.

On the other hand, doing this won’t make the petro-gun club up in D.C. happy, and really, politics in this country is about keeping the petro-gun club in D.C. happy. So maybe you shouldn’t do it. After all, even if you are defeated, you’ll get big hugs from the liberal side, which has learned to embrace rejection, using Dr. Scruggs patented Ignatz luv conditioning method - as Dr. Scruggs says, it only means luv if it hurts! - and you can always become a big wheel in one of those private equity corporations. And God wants you to be rich. Fuck it. Ignore this advice.

echoes of the britney age

NARVIK, Norway Nov. 30 — At this time of year, the sun does not rise at all this far north of the Arctic Circle. But Karen Margrethe Kuvaas says she has not been able to sleep well for days.

What is keeping her awake are the far-reaching ripple effects of the troubled housing market in sunny Florida, California and other parts of the United States.
Ms. Kuvaas is the mayor of Narvik, a remote seaport where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town — along with three other Norwegian municipalities — had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour.

One of those apocryphal Lenin quotes that are passed around by rightwingers goes: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” I doubt Lenin said this, however: he was smart enough to know that capitalists did a bang up job both of selling rope to each other and hanging each other already. Some extra twine shipped to the Soviets wasn't going to make a hell of a lotta difference.

At one time, however, the good old liberal state actually regulated the rope selling. We tend to forget that as recently as the seventies, the whole structure of financial speculation that we take as normal was, well, illegal. Up until the seventies, the institutional memory of what caused the Great Crash was still vivid. The conservative contention that what caused the great crash was too much government intervention with the natural processes of the laissez faire economy was treated with the contempt it deserved, since it was obvious then - and it might be put down as one of Jane Austin's truth universally to be observed - that the leaking of confidence from a market dependent on credit will crush the 'efficient mechanisms' that are in place to prevent panic with the same blind rush for the door that animates a crowd in a burning movie theater. In Edward Chancellor’s wonderful Devil Take the Hindmost: a history of financial speculation, he quotes an essay by F. Scott Fizgerald, Echoes from the Jazz Age, which we might want to pull out again as we watch the Bush regime employ the time tested variants used by every coup state to ward off the effect of economic misrule that has been its raison d’etre – in the same way that the raison d’etre of a pirate ship is pillage.

The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age. There was the phse of the necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb murder (I remember the time my wife was arrested on the Queensborough Bridge on the suspicion of being the “Bob-haired Bandit”) and the John Held Clothes. In the second phase such phenomena as sex and murder became more mature, if much more conventional. Middle age must be served and pajamas came to the beach to save fat thighs and flabby calves from competition with the one-piece bathing-suit. Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. Everybody was at scratch now. Let’s go ---

‘But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.

It ended two years ago, because the utter confidence that was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow – the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.”

Myself, I have a soft spot in my heart for the twenties – in fact, if you got me down in a wrestling match, sat on my chest, and forced me to say when I thought civilization had peaked, I’d opt for the twenties. Our own age – the Britney age – doesn’t have quite that insouciance of the grand dukes, even if we are fed a daily diet of the casualness of chorus girls.

Chancellor’s book traces the revival of the liberal economic theory – or the theory of the expensive orgies – through some amazing stories. None is, perhaps, as amazing as the story of Milton Friedman. In 1960, Friedman wrote an essay, In Defense of Destabilizing Speculation, which suggested that speculation would self-organize its own constraints due to the fact that speculations that were inefficient would lose money to people who had bet against those speculations. This is a variant of the efficient markets theory, which should really be renamed the “trust a drunk to get home’ theory. As we’ve seen over the last two weeks, the Stock market does operate on information – it just doesn’t distinguish between good and bad information. If you have ever tried, when extremely high, to sing a Neil Young song with other people who are also extremely high, you’ll have a wonderful model for explaining market activity – this should certainly be looked into by economists of the Chicago school. The probability of not realizing that you are out of tune, when high, singing songs that might have originally been sung out of tune, to boot, is very much like a market that supposedly exists to allocate, in the most efficient way possible, capital to industry.

So, here’s a golden moment from Chancellor’s book.

In 1967, Milton Friedman attempted to bet against the sterling price to Britain’s forced devaluation, but was turned down by the Chicago banks on the grounds that his action would encourage speculation. Afterwards, Friedman related his frustrating experience in print. His article attracted the attention of Leo Melamed, president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange … the smaller of the city’s two agriculture futures markets. …

After the collapse of Bretton Woods, Melamed approached Friedman and asked him to write a paper justifying the creation of a market for currency futures. The professor obliged, demanding a payment of $5,000 for his services (he is reported as saying, I’m a capitalist. Remember that). Friedman had long argued against capital controls, in favor of floating exchange rates and the free movement of capital. In his paper for Melamed, entitled “the Need for Futures Markets in Foreign Currencies”, he claimed that currency futures would have a stabilizing effect on exchange rates and encourage the development “of other financial activities in this country.” Melamed’s money was well spent. Permission was granted by the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve to establish the new International Money Market at the Merc, which opened in May, 1972. The financial revolution had begun.”

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It’s Britney, bitch

wife beaters and amazon hooligans

Tracing the rise of the culture of happiness, one can too easily forget the reality of, one can too easily become nostalgic for, the sweetness of life it replaced – the ancien regime, panned with a camera lens suitably vaselined over.

But this nostalgia is shot through with bad faith. Although I am determined to show the price we have paid for the triumph of happiness, I want to make sure to make clear that I am not tracing some vast mistake or horror. It is the dialectician’s curse to be mealy mouthed – but too bad. I’m not going to try to avoid that fate by creating a bunch of rigid oppositions, negation pitted against affirmation, antithesis pre-loaded. Fuck that.

So – on to women. Women as they were routinely treated in the ancien regime. And into the nineteenth century.

Let’s start with Zola, always the most … registering of nineteenth century novelists. He was attacked for his ‘disgraceful’ representation of the working class in L’assommoir – and in a letter in defense of the novel, he surveys the truth of it, touching lightly on two characters, Bijard and Lalie: “Bijard is only one face of alcohol poisoning. One dies of delirium tremens or one becomes a furious madman like Bijard. Bijard is crazy, the kind that the correctional institutions have to often judge. As for Lalie, she completes Nana. The girls, in the bad worker’s households, either succumb to blows or turn bad.”

Here’s a long quote from the death of Lalie, a little different from a Dicken’s death scene.

“She started at the sound of a heavy step on the stairs. Her father noisily pushed open the door. As usual he had drunk too much, and in his eyes blazed the lurid flames kindled by alcohol.
When he saw Lalie lying down he walked to the corner and took up the long whip, from which he slowly unwound the lash.
“This is a good joke!” he said. “The idea of your daring to go to bed at this hour. Come, up with you!”
He snapped the whip over the bed, and the child murmured softly:
“Do not strike me, Papa. I am sure you will be sorry if you do. Do not strike me!”
“Up with you!” he cried. “Up with you!”
Then she answered faintly:
“I cannot, for I am dying.”
Gervaise had snatched the whip from Bijard, who stood with his under jaw dropped, glaring at his daughter. What could the little fool mean? Whoever heard of a child dying like that when she had not even been sick? Oh, she was lying!
“You will see that I am telling you the truth,” she replied. “I did not tell you as long as I could help it. Be kind to me now, Papa, and say good-by as if you loved me.”
Bijard passed his hand over his eyes. She did look very strangely–her face was that of a grown woman. The presence of death in that cramped room sobered him suddenly. He looked around with the air of a man who had been suddenly awakened from a dream. He saw the two little ones clean and happy and the room neat and orderly.
He fell into a chair.
“Dear little mother!” he murmured. “Dear little mother!”

This was all he said, but it was very sweet to Lalie, who had never been spoiled by overpraise. She comforted him. She told him how grieved she was to go away and leave him before she had entirely brought up her children. He would watch over them, would he not? And in her dying voice she gave him some little details in regard to their clothes. He–the alcohol having regained its power–listened with round eyes of wonder.
After a long silence Lalie spoke again:

“We owe four francs and seven sous to the baker. He must be paid. Madame Goudron has an iron that belongs to us; you must not forget it. This evening I was not able to make the soup, but there are bread and cold potatoes.”

As long as she breathed the poor little mite continued to be the mother of the family. She died because her breast was too small to contain so great a heart, and that he lost this precious treasure was entirely her father’s fault. He, wretched creature, had kicked her mother to death and now, just as surely, murdered his daughter.”

This translation stays demurely away from Zola’s text. If you want to know where Celine got it, read Zola. Her's the argotic French for what Bijard really says:

" Ah ! nom de Dieu, c’est trop fort ! nous allons rire !… Les vaches se mettent à la paille en plein midi, maintenant !… Est-ce que tu te moques des paroissiens, sacrée feignante ?… Allons, houp ! décanillons ! "
Il faisait déjà claquer le fouet au-dessus du lit. Mais l’enfant, suppliante, répétait :
" Non, papa, je t’en prie, ne frappe pas… Je te jure que tu aurais du chagrin… Ne frappe pas.
— Veux-tu sauter, gueula-t-il plus fort, ou je te chatouille les côtes !… Veux-tu sauter, bougre de rosse ! "

Which you have to translate into something a lot more gangsta to get the full poetry of it.

In the English 19th century novel, as is well known, there is a certain gap when it comes to sex. But there is another gap when it comes to wifebeating. Edward Shorter, in Women’s Bodies, his gruesome history of the encounter of women with marriage, hospitals and pregnancy in the 18th and 19th century, devotes a section to the thesis that, in the very recent past, wife beating was universal. He recounts a lot of anecdotes (“Johann Storch of Gotha, investigating the cause of a maternal death in 1724, found that the mother had a broken rib, probably ccaused by a kick from her husband sometime during the pregnancy. (Storch thought that the broken rib had made the placenta grow fast to the womb, thus killing her in childbirth.”) He adduces proverbs, ethnographic studies, doctor reports, and occasionally, but just occasionally, a court document. Eugen Weber, in his book on Fin de Siecle France, writes that there must have been many women such as those in L’assommoir, for whom a pleasant dream was often that of not being beaten.

Weber claims that it was the penetration of bourgeois values that made violence against women in the household more shameful as the 19th century went on. According to this view, both the peasant and working classes lagged behind the ‘civilizing process.’ In the twentieth century, Franz Biberkopf, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, who beats his fiancé to death in a scene that seems to as though it were refracted through one of George Grosz’s more lurid paintings, does go to jail for it: four years. And Biberkopf is haunted by that death. As he says, he never meant to murder Ida. (Ironically, or rather not so ironically, come to think of it, Biberkopf’s great defenders are women – he is a semi pimp, and a certain type of indulgent woman does seem to find him, in Berlin, after he gets out of the Tegel prison).

Here’s Ida’s death – one that strips out even the pathos that Zola left in:

All he had taken in his hand was a small wooden cream whipper, for he was training then and had recently wrenched his hand. And with a twice repeated, terrible lunge he had brought this cream-whipper with its wire spiral, in contact with the diaphragm of Ida, who was the second party to the dialogue. Up to that day Ida’s diaphragm had been entirely intact, but that very small person, who was very nice to look at, was herself no longer quite intact – or rather: the man she was supporting, suspected, not without reason, that she was about to give him his walking papers in favor of a man recently arrived from Breslau. The diaphragm of this dainty little girl, at any rate, was not adapted to contact with cream-whippers. At the first blow she cried ouch and no longer called him ‘you dirty bum’, but ‘oh, man,’ instead. The second encounter with the cream-whipper occurred with Franz holding an upright position after a quarter turn to the right on Ida’s part. Whereupon Ida said nothing at all, but merely opened her mouth, puring her lips curiously, and jerked both arms in the air.

What happened to the woman’s diaphragm a second before, involves the laws of statics, elasticity, shock and reistance. The thing is wholly incomprehensible without a knowledge of those laws. We shall therefore have recourse to the following formulae:”

What follows is a formula for the magnitude of the blow impressed by Franz, f = c lim delta v over delta t = cw.

In other words, Ida’s death is absolutely dehumanized, made into a specimen defined by filling in the variables in a formula.

Two cheers for the bourgeoisie, then. If they raped the servant girls, they rarely kicked their wives to death, at least by 1850. However, it would be unfair not to exhibit another tableau showing a typical response to working class women as agents of violence. Camille Mendés, a sensitive sort, a poet, remained in Paris during the Commune and wrote a book about his experience there, entitled: Les 73 journées de la Commune. I can’t believe the echo of Sade is wholly absent from that book. Anyway, Camille was able to observe that thing which shocked the respectable in the 1870s, the amazons-voyous – amazon hoodlums. Women from the working class armed themselves and fought alongside another communard. Mendés compares them to the famouse tricoteuses – the women who knitted while the guillotines fell. Except these were cantinieres – cafeteria workers. Waitresses, you might say. Never underestimate the waitresses!

‘There was not enough men with holes poked in them by bullets or cut up by the machine gun. A strange enthusiasm took hold of the women in their turn, and thus they fell on the field of battle as well, victims of an execrable heroism. Who were these extraordinary beings, who abandoned the household broom and the working woman’s needle for the cartridge? who abandoned their children to go to be killed by the side of their lovers or husbands? Amazon hoodlums magnificent and abject, they held their own with Penthesilia or Theroigne de Mericourt. One saw them pass, carrying canteens, amongst those going into combat; the men are furious, the women are ferocious, nothing moves them, nothing discourages them. A Neuilly, a food and drink seller, wounded in the head, had her wound bandaged and returned to take up her combat post. Another, of the 61st bataillon, bragged of having killed a score of police and three guardians of the peace. At Chatillon, a woman, remaining with a group of national guardsmen, charged her rifle, fired and recharged without ceasing; she was the last to retreat, turning around at every instant to return fire. The woman who dispensed food in the 68th bataillon fell, killed by a mortar blast which broke her ladle and projected it in pieces into her stomach. … Thus, what is the furor that has carried off these furies? Do they know what they are doing, do they understand why they are dying? Yesterday, in a boutique, rue de Montreuil, a woman enters, rifle on her shoulder, blood on the bayonet – shouldn’t you be home cleaning the faces of your brats? said a peaceful bourgeois. A furious altercation broke out; the virago was so carried away that she leaped on her adversary, bit him violently on the neck, then, falling back a few paces, grasped her rifle and was going to fire when suddenly she grew horribly pale, let fall her arm, and collapsed; she was dead, the anger had caused an aneurism to rupture. Such are, at this hour, the women of the people.”

cioran 2

If you want to write a great literary essay, here’s what you do. You put the point of the thing, the judgment you are making, as high in the essay as possible. Maybe you start out with an anecdote. Maybe you start out with a quote. But the essayist is in the position of the judge, after the jury has read its verdict. He is in the business of sentencing.

It helps, then, if you work on your sentences. Cioran, a Romanian writing in French, did just that. Here’s the second paragraph in his essay on Joseph de Maistre:

“Towards the end of the last century, in the period when the liberal illusion was strongest, one could give oneself the luxury of calling him a prophet of the past, of considering him something like a relic or an aberrant phenomenon. But for us, in an epoch that has been otherwise demystified, we know that he is ours just to the extent that he was a ‘monster’ and that it is precisely by the odious side of his doctrines that he remains alive, that he is of our time. Even if he was, besides, obsolete, he would nonetheless belong to that family of spirits who age in beauty.”

Cioran’s theme is simple, and everything flows from it: the meeting of a time – our time – and the monstrosity of a doctrine. At the same time, that theme opens up a question which is never directly addressed by Cioran, and which betrays a certain contradiction in his theme: for how is it that one time – ‘ours’ – knows the truth about Maistre while it was disguised for another time – that period of the ‘liberal illusion’? Is it merely the course of events – the wars in Europe, the concentration camps? Or is it that Cioran, without being aware of it, owes the idea that we progress closer to the truth over time precisely to that period of ‘liberal illusion’? Surely the illusion wasn’t that Maistre’s ‘monstrous doctrines’ had never been embodied at any time – for if there was one thing the liberal period was sure of, it was the monstrosity of the middle ages, and of the Spanish inquisition, and in general the atrocities wrought under the ancien regime. The illusion was, then, not that atrocities had been wrought, but that the progress of civilization would extinguish the motive and the means for committing them again.

And on this point Cioran knows better. And Maistre, conceptually, also knew better – hence, his status as a prophet. The reason that Cioran’s essay is not a handrubbingly gleeful promotion of Maistre, as Edmund White claimed, nor a straightforward insult to the thought of Maistre, as his scholarly interpreters have claimed, lies in the fact that, however much Cioran wants to bracket a certain period as one of ‘liberal illusion’, he has to admit that, from the start, that his own theory of history has to include some explanation for how such a period was possible. In the essay, this question migrates to a question about Maistre’s interpretation of the eighteenth century, and its relation to the Revolution. As we saw in our previous post, Cioran comes down for a … liberal interpretation of that century. More liberal, perhaps, than a historian of the time would countenance – Maistre, in his Considerations on France, is right to point out the horrible succession of wars across that century, wars that just involved France. God knows there were others. And we also know that thoughout that century there were little famines in Europe that corresponded to the little ice age. Still, Cioran’s essay is not simply about Maistre, but about the lineage of reaction. Having been, himself, a fervid reactionary in the darkest days of the century – the thirties and the forties – having even broadcast in favor of the coup managed by the Iron Guard in 1940 – Cioran’s essay is also a self-examination. The eighteenth century is a proxy for the liberalism – the politics of literature, as Thomas Mann scornfully called it in his reactionary polemic, Reflections of a Non-political man – that defeated the Nazis in WWII, thus putting an end to at least one of the illiberal illusions: that a totalitarian state relying on total mass mobilization was, at the very least, a stronger state than any of its competitors.



(There are several illusions packed into that theme, so popular among the intellectuals of the far right in the thirties. One of the illusions was that the state relied on mass mobilization, when in fact it relied on buffering the population from the sacrifice involved in mass mobilization. The calls for mass sacrifice from fascist leaders, for discipline, for pain and blood, were as phony as the classical facades of their government building. In the end, Germany did as much as it could to give the civilian population, at least up until 1942, the illusion that victory was a cost free process. Hmm, there is something very familiar about this barking rhetoric of sacrifice and this complacent reality of comfort. Where have I seen that before?).

I’ll continue this in a future post.

more pig, anyone?

Everybody knows that the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still picking cotton
For your ribbons and bows…
Everybody knows.



I just finished reviewing Robert Kuttner’s new book, The Squandering of America. The book is obviously catnip for a liberal like me, but there was something deep in the book that bothered me. I don’t think I quite expressed that bother in the review. Let’s see if I can spell it out here.

Kuttner’s history is a two panel deal. One panel shows the thirty glorious years from 1945 to about 1975. What do we see? The sun shines on managed capitalism. Union strength rises to almost thirty percent of the work force. Social security is joined by medicare and Medicaid – and even, although this has now been buried, a welfare system for the poor. Public investment is made in building interstates, sending jocks to the moon, combating malaria, and the like. Indirectly, the state takes the risk for an enormous expansion of mortgages, and it loans money to middle class kids so that they can go to college.

Now onto the second panel. In the second panel, we see the thirty dirty years of neo-liberalism. There’s a cloud over the moon, and the wolf howls in the ruins of the middle class subdivision. Union membership falls. Labor’s bargaining power gets weaker and weaker. The one earner household becomes as rare as the Eskimo curlew. Even as the husband and wife both work, their disposable income actually stagnates. The cost of institutional goods – education and health care – soars, and the government massages its statistics about inflation to end run around this fact. A coalition of speculators, big business owners, and the honchos of the political elite agree to essentially de-industrialize the American economy, and this is done by throwing down barriers to free trade – which is an open invitation to American manufacturers to seek out global sites that offer cheaper labor – and by deregulating the financial markets. The benefits of the economy go increasingly to the wealthy, even as productivity goes up.

Now, I do think there is a lot of truth to this two panel picture – I wouldn’t be a liberal if I didn’t! But I wouldn’t be an ex philosophy student if I didn’t notice that juxtaposition is not cause (or perhaps I should say, I’d have to have a lot more faith in Hume than I have). What is missing here is a trend line that found its breaking point in the seventies – I’m talking about you, Mr. Declining-Rate-of-Profit.

Marx would say that the structure of capitalism is such that the Keynesian policy approaches of the thirty glorious years operated like Spanish fly to an old libertine – yes, it helped him get it up at first, but you had to apply more and more of it for less and less result. Less bang for the buck, so to speak. John Kenneth Galbraith, my favorite economist, observed those thirty glorious years from the inside. He contended that American capitalism had entered a mature phase in which the classical model of competition between producers was no longer the major dynamic. In its place, he substituted a model that diversified the levels of competition – long before the Walmart Effect, for instance, Galbraith had traced the A and P effect, that is, the effect on the price system of a entrenched, hegemonic buyer in the marketplace. What Galbraith was saying from the left was actually being put into mathematical lingo by the neo-classical economists from the right – as Mirowski pointed out in Machine Dreams, the shift from the simple, Smithian model of competition to the cyborg model of efficiency was what the fifties were all about.

All of which gets us to the heart of my darkness about Kuttner’s book. The two panel history simply can’t be right. Kuttner’s historical thesis is that the forces of darkness, for some reason, decided in the seventies to counter-attack the forces of light – strong unions, an interventionist state, the structures of managed capitalism – and thus brought about the years of night through sheer politics. But in reality, the economy was in crisis in the seventies. Kuttner would have a better argument if he acknowledged this. He’d have a better argument if he argued that liberalism can’t simply tie itself to GDP growth, because that is going to imperceptibly edge liberalism into a position where policy decisions shift from concern with a just society to policy decisions concerned economic stoking that inevitably promotes more and more unequal outcomes.

Ah, but I am being unclear. It has occurred to me that the solution ‘self-organized’ in the seventies to the stagnation of the American economy was to shift the level of competition to the financial sector. That is, instead of companies competing with each other in an increasingly stagnant marketplace, investors would compete to own those companies. Ownership would be redefined in startling ways, as would the responsibilities of ownership. X company making y and competing with Z would be taken over, stripped of its y making capability, which would be spun off to another company, X1, or it would be merged with Z, or it would be merged with somebody else in a whirl of what you might call epiphenomenal economic activities. And low and behold, new efficiencies would be found – that is, new streams of profit from the ways in which the American firm had been constituted over the decades. A car company, say, would be found to have quietly produced its profit making sector in the loan business – which would then be stripped out, or be used as the investment target for, say, the company’s pension fund, etc., etc. It turned out that firms were, from the financial perspective, rubric cubes.

Now, we all know the down side to this. The upside, however, was that in taking apart and putting together American firms, the investment sector made the U.S. a very attractive spot for foreign investment just as the U.S. lost its hegemony over the global economy. I’m not sure how a liberal economic policy would have accomplished the same result. I am sure that this contributed significantly to the American recovery from the seventies. At the moment, it looks like we have reached the end time for this particular economic regime – a regime that builds in socialism for the rich, as Galbraith once called it. For the more the financial sector was de-regulated, the supposedly ‘smaller’ the government got, the larger became the government’s potential obligations. This is a familiar dilemma – it is the dilemma of third world economies. American exceptionalism is all about the fact that America quietly conformed to a model of state-corporate interaction that resembled, say, Brazil in the sixties. And as the economy became more tiers-mondian, the politics became more coup like.

Which is why the comparison of the American empire to the British empire or the Romans strikes me as so wrong. What America resembles more and more is the Philippines under Marcos. As per my last post, the ethos of looting has spread from the economic models of the late seventies into the very fiber, the blood and ouns, of the sector that has the most control of the American economy – the financial sector. And the government has become an annex to that vast pump and dump shop – hence, the rational irrationality of a stock market that goes wildly up and down on announcements of trivial interest rate action by the Fed. This is the volatility of what is, underneath, an increasingly stagnant market – a market that has reached the logical limit of its possibilities. You can’t slice and dice the pig anymore – even the squeal has been amortized, hedged against, optioned, securitized, pooled and stripped. But there is only so much pig to go around, fellas.