George Packer discovers, again, how nice he is and all...

George Packer, who was, alas, the New Yorker’s point man on Iraq during the occupation, wrote a piece in 2004 that is worth revisiting in order to plumb the depth of delusion and narcissism that characterizes our pundit class.  In it, he had this to say: 

“The Iraq war, from its inception in Washington think tanks to its botched execution on the ground, has always been a war of ideas—some of them very bad ones. There’s the idea of preëmptive war, America’s divine right of intervention; the idea of tyrannies falling like dominoes in a strategically realigned Middle East; the idea that American power is worse than the worst dictatorship. Facts have reduced most of these to rubble—notably, the argument that this was a war of urgent national security (although facts can be less stubborn than officials in the grip of ideological truth). Only two serious, and competing, versions of the Iraq war’s meaning are left standing: one, that this is a war against tyranny and for democracy; the other, that this is a war of American domination.”

This gets the entire war about as wrong as you can get a war. It was no war of ideas at all, and on the ground in 2004 in Iraq, even a slightly retarded child could have analyzed the war more accurately than Packer. The war of ideas existed solely in D.C., and it was a war of cocktail parties.  Packer, evidently, never understood the critique of American power – which was that it actually created the dictatorships for its own reasons historically, just as it created the jihadi network used so efficiently by Al Qaeda after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, just as it created the idea that hitting a superpower within its borders – hitting the Soviet Union through sabotage in Central Asia, for instance – was an “idea” that was conceived and distrusted by the CIA handlers of the Afghani “resistance” – etc., etc.  In other words, American power was not about ideas, but about American interests, which in turn reflected different factions within the American compact – corporations, for instance. And in turn, these interests were not consistent one with another – they compete.  So much, then, in two sentences, for the critique of American power. But such a critique went right over his narcissistic liberal head – since Packer evidently understood the entire war as nice people like him vs. not nice people. Who wanted “tyranny”. You will notice that this précis of what the “war” is about doesn’t even mention Shi’a or Sunni – such is the cluelessness of thinking that he could press the cookie  cutter of the stimulating ideas he had garnered from attending a party chez Hitchens on the reality of Iraq. 

I looked this up after reading Packer’s envoi to the Iraq war (tenth anniversary edition!), which was revealing – but not in the way that Packer meant it to be, I think. Apparently, Packer lost contact with his Iraqi friends – i.e., the English speaking Iraqis through which he seems to have funneled his entire understanding of Iraqi history and politics – and so got a little bored with the whole war thing. The war of ideas moves on, don’tcha know. 

“Over time my interestin the place came down to the people I met, and as Iraqis whom I knew became engulfed in horror, I wanted it to be mitigated and the worst averted. That meant wanting America to succeed, or at least not completely fail—whatever that might be. Though I knew that the whole effort was very likely doomed, it was emotionally impossible to write it off. Even foreigners who had nothing but contempt for American officials and officers couldn’t bring themselves to that point. The only alternatives were Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite extremists. The stupidities of American policy, the mistakes and—in some cases—crimes of American forces, made it harder and harder to sustain this attitude, but if you turned completely against the U.S., you were consigning a lot of people you knew to a terrible fate. It became their fate anyway—that was the real tragedy for Iraqis.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished.”

This is the war as a videogame fantasy. I especially like the alternatives – since of course the alternatives were not Al Qaeda and Iranian backed Shiite extremists. To think so was to embed yourself so deep in the asshole of the American military mindset as to have no light at all to throw on the subject. Any Shiite party or faction, as an observer such as myself, thousands of miles from the conflict, knew well simply by reading the paper and the BBC Middle East dispatches every day, would have to be Iran backed. Extremists meant, uh, nothing in this context. Nor was there a chance in hell that Al qaeda, being used as a catspaw by Sunni political groups in Iraq, were going to take over. They were the yeast, however, in a resistance movement that is going to be here for a long time.

In a strong sense, Packer’s reporting from Iraq gave New Yorker readers a completely distorted picture of Iraq. Unlike New Yorker’s reporters in Vietnam – like say Robert Shaplen, who I naively thought Packer was going to reincarnate when I started reading him in 2003 – Packer cretinized his readership, making them less able to understand or predict what was going on and would be going on in Iraq.

I'm sourly amused by how many liberal hawks, like George Packer, have taken the tenth anniversary as an opportunity to attribute being wrong about Iraq to their being too nice and noble – and then end up adding, well, we got rid of Saddam, and to that all must bow. Now, if cancer had gotten rid of Saddam, it would not make cancer a beneficial organic condition. So I am unsure what is being argued for here. But, just as one should resist arguments about alternatives to Bush’s action based on the idea that the 9.11 attack was an immutable historic fact which no president could have avoided – which I think is total nonsense – one should also avoid the trap of thinking that the only policy option before the U.S. post 9.11 was either to get rid of Saddam through invasion or not. Actually, the U.S. could have – and should have – trashed its Persian gulf policy and leaned heavily towards Iran if it really wanted to get rid of Saddam without war. A combination of recognizing Iran and strengthening economic relations with that country, and pouring money into Northern Iraq to bring Kurdistan into a new level of development would have had large and devastating consequences for Saddam even within the Baathist structure, which was supported partly by the fact that the U.S. kept both Iran and Iraq on the shitlist.
But of course nobody in D.C., that nest of conventional wisdom, corruption, and subgenius, even mentioned other options, even though such options had been enacted before – a notably precedent was Nixon’s detente with China. This, it turned out, actually benefited Taiwan in the long run, destroying the Nationalist illusion that cemented that party’s tyrannical grip on the island.

The reaction to the 10 year anniversary by the liberal hawks, who are much more powerful in O.’s administration than the liberal doves, shows, depressingly, that they have learned nothing. SOP in D.C. circles is to attribute one’s mistakes to one’s exemplary character and inability to recognize that other people just aren’t as good, smart, and nice as oneself. This is the liberal vice that has pretty much destroyed liberal policy. Liberals have taken to excusing their defeats and missteps by reference to their superior intelligence and excellent ethical sensibilities, which tea party yahoos just don’t’ have, bigots all. This is of course entirely bogus. Liberal missteps come from the contradictions in the liberal position – on the one hand, the instinct to preserve the elite, gated community where a certain type of social liberal flourishes, and on the other hand, a certain guilty conscience arising from the fact that liberalism used to be about securing a good deal for the wage class, which has now been abandoned to the market and grand bargainish cuts in “entitlement”.

I mock. Meanwhile, the Packers of the pundit class still drive the Democratic party Bush lite foreign policy.

10 years after our excellent adventure in Iraq!

Ah, the tenth anniversary of our brave, brave, brave liberation of Iraq! There's a private monument to that in my own little monkey heart - I think it marked the beginning of my awareness of just how lost I was in an American culture I no longer recognized at all. Of course, it also marked a symbolic change under which the U.S. still blunders. The age of Bush continues, unabated in the minor epoch of the supposedly 'liberal' O., he of the grand bargain, the dispenser of unparelleld welfare to Wall Street and unparalleled non-prosecution by his justice department of any and all bank enacted frauds, the dronemaster whose Defense department, by all accounts, worked as hard as it could to retain troops in Iraq - just like we all used to accuse Bush of planning. This recent story in the NYT about sums up the age of the souring of the American promise:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/business/younger-generations-lag-parents-in-wealth-building.html?_r=0

The NYT title is bland on bland, but the import is clear: the gross and pernicious inequality of wealth combined with patching the lack of wage increases for a generation with greater access to credit is producing a much poorer generation. And this massive social fact bores all parties in D.C. to tears.

My raven's croak, here, will not budge the night. Which makes me increasingly weary of croaking.

an incident at Lennox mall

We came to America so that I could get my visa de longue sejour from the French Consolate in Atlanta Georgia. Today was the day of my big rendez-vous. How would I describe my meeting there? Well, have you seen those newsclips of the fall of Saigon? Where the soldiers with bayonets are slashing at the crowds who are clinging to the sides of the departing helicopters? I’d say that about covers it.
We go to Lennox Square, which now boasts the motto, legendary shopping. Poor mall. Malls are where shopping went to die. As we all know now, we don’t really want to be entombed in these huge mausoleums while cheesy music is piped out into the dead air and we can observe the guy selling remote controlled mini helicopters make his demonstration. We used to want that. But what we want has its season. Still, there it is, attached to a office tower on one end and a food court on the other. First we went to the food court, then I went, alone, to the consulate office. I went alone because we had read the message on the site informing us that, for security reasons, persons of interest alone could go to meetings in which they requested various services from the consulate. 
This was the first of many things that upset the man at the consulate, who demanded to know where my wife was. And though I assured him I could get her and my son within fifteen minutes, he seemed not to want to understand this – or any of my phrases. His own were pronounced in a harsh, official and rude stream that came straight out of the Stasi Guide to Good Manners, except in French, not German. What we had rehearsed was mainly about explaining what I do – the writing and the editing. He never asked. He did, however, ask and harangue about my overstaying my time in France. I explained that Antonia was pregnant, and I didn’t want to leave my pregnant wife for some uncertain time to get the visa. I was then told that everybody has a reason. I had committed an irregularity, yes or no? Well, I found within myself a veritable well of servility and cowtowing, and I apologized up and down. I apologized in writing (in the course of which I wrote the phrase, renounce a faire notre voyage aux Etats Unis. The renoncer threw him. So much for giving a Stendhalian twist to my confessions). Finally I convinced him to let me find A. I went through the mall at record speed, led by my angel, and found her and Adam in a store that she told me she was thinking of visiting within ten minutes. Lennox Mall is huge, and those who know it will be able to measure this miracle. And because A. is not a kowtower – she does not have a spine of rubber, unlike me, but sometimes flares up with the fires of 1789 – I pep talked her into being craven. She wasn’t quite craven, pointed out irregularities in the way our papers had been processed by the consulate, but she surrendered enough to please the guardian to the gates of La Belle France. So I am crossing my fingers that the French bureaucracy, in the spirit of Les Miserables, will temper the letter of the law with mercy, which is the spirit of the law. Also, our consulate official saw Adam, and melted a bit at the sight. 
We shall see.

Unevenman and oddman

William Ian Miller is officially a professor of law at the University of Michigan. Other law scholars study rational choice and regulatory decisionmaking, or labor law, or even, more broadly, Constitutional law – Miller, however, studied Icelandic sagas. He’s written a number of books – The Anatomy of Disgust, Humiliation – which seem tangential to any legal school in the U.S. – but that are, relevant to the passions that animate our everyday practices of justice – practices that often operate outside the courtroom.

Miller reminds me a bit of Roberto Calasso. Calasso is an arch European pessimist, while Miller seems a resolutely cheerful American pragmatist, but both have a solid grounding in myth or folklore – Calasso in the Vedas, Miller in old Scandinavian tests – that they return to again and again to untangle conceptual knots. The very term “knots”, of course, leads us, by sneaky Cratyllian pathways, back to the gods.

In Eye for an Eye, Miller performs a reading of the iconography of Justice – the blindfold, the scales, the sword – which would have done Vico proud. He is, in particular, interested in how scales, balance, and tipping are related to the notion of justice. This takes him to back to even and odd – as in the phrase “getting even”, where even is a settling of accounts, a balance”

“Our word even is jafn in Old Norse; they are clearly cognate wordsw, deriving from the same Germanic root. Jafn lies at the core of Norse notions of justice, so that the word for justice is often rendered as evenness (jafnad); injustice, as unevenness (ojafnad)… A bully, a man who shows no justice or equity in his dealings, is an unevenman (ojafnadarmadr)… A just man, on the other ihad, is even, of even temper and fair in his dealings (jafnadarmadr). Of one such unevenman it is said that “no one got any justice from him, he fought many duels and refused to pay compensation for the men he killed and no one gpt payment for the wrongs that he did.”

However, Miller goes on, an unevenman is not an oddman. The etymological filigree here takes a dialectical turn (I know, I’m biting the scenery with that sentence, but sometimes I’m an unevenman with my prose).

“The English word odd is borrowed from Old Nors. Odd(i) is Norse for a point, for a triangle, for a spit of land, and for an arrowhead or spearhead; in other words, odd indicates the effect of add a third point outside the line formed by the two points that determine the line: the odd point makes of a line a triangle, an arrowhead, a spearpoint. They also used odd to indicate odd numbers, numbers that were not jafn. Now the plot thickens. One of the words they used to designate the person who cast a deciding vote in an arbitration panel was oddman (oddamadr). For us, being at odds means we are in the midst of a quarrel, and it meant that in Old Norse too; to resolve that quarrel you had to get back to even.”

The oddman, if you will, is by his nature a dialectician. Of course, it is the getting back to even that sickens bold hearts, who want to tip over the balance and erect a new one, on a new horizon, once it is clear that we are glued into and dying in the even. This sentiment – the sentiment of the revolutionary – is something not countenanced by Evenman or Oddman. But it is not exactly the sentiment of the unevenman, either, though cousin to it.

Even, it should be said, is not a “substitute” for. The domination of the substitute is, as well, a modern phenomenon.

Rules for corporations - taking back the regulatory sphere

I was talking to my brother the other day, and I said that the corporation does not just exist to make a profit. He contradicted me that no, in fact, corporations have no other goal.

My brother was announcing the contemporary consensus, which owes more to Milton Friedman than it does to the history of corporations, which, far from being the natural creatures of the “free market”, were artifacts of the collision between the legal system and the sphere of circulation as it arose in capitalism.  Like Frankenstein, the corporation was made out of dead bits of history and galvanized into a monstrous life, at which point they began to ravage the countryside. However, there is nothing in their unnatural organism that would prevent them being forced to make a social profit as well as a profit for themselves. On the contrary, they are legal creatures which, in a democracy, can easily be redesigned to reflect the ethos of a democracy.

Adam Smith justly saw the double origin of the corporation in, on the one hand, guilds, which attempted to monopolize certain skills (and which, it should be said, are far from dead – guilds, or professions requiring government licensing, make up 30 percent of the work force in the U.S., three times more than is made up by unions) through the use of the state, and trading ventures, such as the ‘adventurers’ companies that colonized North America, which lay claim to a certain channel of trade. Out of these pre-capitalist fragments, the corporation, whether privately owned or joint stock, was forged. In the U.S., this forging process produced a vast allergic reaction in the progressive era. Progressive politicians pressed back against the rise of giant inter-state corporations using the Sherman anti-trust act – that is, they pressed back by demonstrating the contradiction between the monopolistic behavior or tendency of the corporation and “free trade”. Ultimately, the justification for the corporation or free trade was not that the trader or businessman made a profit – often they didn’t – but that the distribution of the social product and the creation of new tools for better living were facilitated better by these means than by other means.

In other words, profit should reflect a better arrangement of the distribution of goods and the creation of new goods, to the betterment of mankind. If it doesn’t, profit represents a perversity, or viciousness, in our social arrangements.

This is of course discomforting for monopolists and plutocrats. While they are quite pleased to be hailed as ‘producers” or “innovators”, instinctively they understand the contradiction between the socialist ethos that justifies their activity and their desire for monopoly and profit-making as a good in itself.

It is only since the eighties that these elementary facts have been forgotten by the populace – or rather, I should say, it is only since the eighties that the elites have managed to inject a certain amnesia into the social body. But that amnesia is beginning to wear off. Among the most fascinating parts of the Five Star Party program that won in Italy is the fact that it recalls that the corporation is a social being, rather than a technical entity for the delivery of profit to the shareholder. Under the reign of de-regulation, the policy making elite has taken it upon itself to judge what is and what is not socially useful – and, no surprise, the policy making elite has made out like bandits deregulating merrily here and there. But “deregulation” is a misnomer – what it really means is putting regulatory power into private hands. When Microsoft “sells” its software but does not allow its owner to sell that software in return, Microsoft has gained true regulatory power that distorts the market in its favor. Imagine giving Ford or GM the same kind of rights over autos. A market is an inherently regulated space – an unregulated market is like a card game without rules – it has no point, and leads to no end. The question is: who does the regulating. We know from the last thirty years that the progressives at the beginning of the 20^th century were right. It is way past time to change the rules of corporations such that the social benefit audit is a standard part of corporate practice. And that means an audit that has teeth – before the shareholder or administrator gets a penny, the social audit must show that the corporation has efficiently distributed goods and services and facilitated innovation. If not, all profit must be devoted to filling that social hole.   

Justice in the mock democracy

Justice in the U.S. - where the mock democracy shows its true colors.

This, from a NYT story today about the new policy of the Justice department to, well, sorta almost seek almost sorta sometimes criminal indictments against criminal banks on leap years perhaps, under some unnamed future president:

"For one, banking regulators are likely to sound alarms about the economy. HSBC avoided charges in a money laundering case last year after concerns arose that an indictment could put the bank out of business. In the first interest rate-rigging case, prosecutors briefly considered criminal charges against an arm of Barclays, but they hesitated given the bank’s cooperation and its importance to the financial system, two people close to the case said."

But we are on that money launderin', y'all - if it involves, say, a black male in Alabama. Consider this, the 22nd year in jail of Clarence Adams. Adams was 23 at the time of his arrest - a first time offender. However, even the defense couldn't deny he was black. Oh oh. Here is what he did, according to the summary contained on the PBS frontline site:
"The boys who testified against Aaron were his friends from high school and his first cousin with whom he grew up in Alabama. Aaron introduced his friends, who were involved in dealing drugs, to people he knew in Baton Rouge who were also involved in drugs. He drove them from one city to the other, accompanied by his cousin, and was paid $1,500 for his help."

For that 1500 dollars, Aaron was sentence to three life sentences in Federal prison. Of course, he could be pardoned. The Bush administration was urged to - even by the judge in Aaron's case. But it didn't. The ultra ultra ultra liberal Obama administration has... done nothing, even though the case is now pretty well known. So a bank goes scott free, laundering millions for drug dealers, and a man is going to die in prison because he is black and because he introduced two parties dealing drugs for 1500 dollars. 
Doesn't it make you feel all good inside, the way we are protected from evil by the American government?

ps - according to a study from Pro Publica, the racial breakdown of pardons shows that four whites are pardoned for every black - just to make you feel extra good inside about the situation in our post-racial country.

the 'faith' of a novelist

After the early success of the Concrete Garden, I’ve always thought that Ian McEwan has gone downhill as a novelist – which seems to be a Britishy thing of his generation. Perhaps I should say, his generation of male alpha novelists, led by Martin Amis. In Amis’s case, there is a serious mismatch between his sense of what is important and his sensibility, which is at its best with what is unimportant. McEwan is another who longs to let the pundit out of the novelist’s cage. This, at least, is the upshot of his unintentionally funny piece in the Guardian about losing “faith” in novels (a piece which, to be fair, has a nice homage to The Go Between, a novel I am very fond of, appended to McEwan’s wandering and pondering beginning).  And the award for fave graf goes to!

“This is when I think I will go to my grave and not read Anna Karenina a fifth time, or Madame Bovary a fourth. I'm 64. If I'm lucky, I might have 20 good reading years left. Teach me about the world! Bring me the cosmologists on the creation of time, the annalists of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has married into neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of numbers to the numbskull, the scholar of empires' rise and fall, the adepts of the English civil war. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or know at the end of yet another novel beyond Henry's remorse or triumph? Will a novelist please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved or what Salieri thought of the young Schubert in his choir. If I cared just a little about Henry's gripes, I could read a John Berryman 'Dream Song' in less than four minutes. And with the 15 hours saved, linger over some case law (real events!), as good a primer as any on the strangeness and savagery of the human heart.”

Left out of this highminded collection is anything so vulgar as Kim Kardashian’s divorce, Wall Street fraudsters, newspapers stealing emails from celebrities, fad diets, bloody murders, sex tapes, etc. – the whole gritty panoply of lowlife, which reaches out a twitching hand and pulls the chair out from under the whole question of how morality evolved, and asks how Justin Timberlake thought of the young Justin Bieber on his first Youtube tape. From the lowlife angle, the mire of banality in which the novel gambols, there is something irresistibly funny in McEwan losing faith in Pere Goriot and Leopold Bloom and wanting  to contemplate (with true Bloomian ardor!) the Higgs boson particle in the port and cheese golden years.

Faith here is being used in a strange way, as a synonym for the suspension of disbelief. But the guy who coined that phrase, Coleridge, would point out that faith is not the suspension of disbelief, but the belief in things unseen – and a ruler across your knuckles, McEwan. You have lost your privilege to read James Gleick for tonight, and must copy a hundred tag lines of Latin verse and turn it in tomorrow!

Actually, I don’t think either term characterizes the reader’s relationship to fiction. I don’t think the experience of reading changes much between reading case law (my God, McEwan does push the highbrow into the depth of absurdity!) and reading Crime and Punishment. The reader looks at words and transforms that vision into reading in both cases. Outside the reading experience, the reader may know that the Higgs Boson particle is real (or as real as the mathematics it is built on) and that Jack the Ripper shed actual blood, and Raskolnikov shed none. But that knowledge does not so much change the material out of which the experience is built as charge it differently.

However, the writer who is using the material in a different way than the reader – for the material isn’t yet given – does have to believe in a thing unseen – that is, the future text. At a certain point, of course, the thing unseen can be discarded, as the text is ended. But even here, the writer doesn’t wholly enter the reader’s zone in regard to his or her own text, any more than you can experience another person’s face – that quasi-intentional addition to the body’s physiognomy. There are writers who claim they never reread what they wrote and there are people who never look at their photographs  - both are guarding a certain painful spot in their consciousness, one that they don’t want pressed.

The reader who doesn’t like novels may well say that he or she ( it is mostly he nowadays) prefers the real to fiction, but that is unlikely. Usually one finds they want an affirmation of a belief without the messy necessity of running it through the difference which characterizes human reality. In other words, they want the social irreality you can get, as well, in a video game – where you don’t have to worry about the monster or the enemy’s feelings. Feelings, in this ontology, far from being the portals through which we receive all information about the world within the world, are somehow secondary to cold hard facts. Cold hard facts, let it be noted, are cold and hard – feeling words. Elementary contradictions surround the urge to know without the expertise to check. The latter, of course, leads blissfully onward to the moral entrepreneur’s career, until one day you wake up and you find that you have been transformed into something even more loathsome than the cockroach that was Gregor Samsa’s fate – you’ve become an op ed writer. God save you then.