routines (part of a larger essay)

1.

Imagine a culture without routines. Is this possible? The routine for eating, cooking, harvesting, hunting, traveling, not to mention curing, excreting, making love – don’t these practical matters have to become routines?

But as we press the question, the concept of the routine seems to become more indistinct.

Imagine a culture without rituals, then. The late nineteenth century anthropologists became obsessed with rituals – rituals and art, rituals and magic, rituals and taboo. The rituals of savages – the people without the law, the non-Western Europeans – and their survivals among the civilized savages of the European zones, among whom are the scientists themselves, the middle class, the peasants and workers - were intensely studied, taxonomized, and generalized. Basing their claims on the huge data base that was presented in The Golden Bough, the anthropologists claimed that there was no culture without ritual. Without, as Jane Ellen Harrison was fond of pointing out, dromenon, the ancient Greek term for “thing done” – connected philologically and socially to drama. Ritual for the ancient Greeks became drama, was Harrison’s claim.

But routines… I will leave undecided, here, at the start, whether there are cultures without some base of routines, some transmitted program for doing things.  

But what we do know is that the word “routine” did not exist in early modern England up until the late seventeenth century.

“Behold, I am now become a grammarian, I, who never learn’t tongue but by way of rote, and that yet know not what either Adjective, Conjunctive or Ablative meaneth.” This is John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s essay, Des Destries – On Steeds, Florio called it. Behind the phrase “by way of rote”, Montaigne uses a single French word – “routine.” Rote, an etymologically related word, was  in the English vocabulary of the early 17^th century. It appears in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream, when Titania says to the fairies, instructing them on their roles:

“First, rehearse your song by rote

To each word a warbling note.”

Shakespeare, however, never uses the word routine. Nor does Bacon. In France, Montaigne uses it twice in his essays, and his friend, Amyot, uses it a couple of times in his translation of Plutarch’s collected works.  A particularly interesting instance is in the translation of the essay, “That Virtue can be Taught”, in which Plutarch, at one point, takes up the opposite view and shows how absurd it would be that there are schools and precepts and masters for other things – ‘pueriles choses’ – but for the “great and perfect there is only a routine, or only chance meeting a case of adventure.”

Routine, in Montaigne and Amyot, already carries  an ambiguity in its soul. On the one hand, it points to cognitivizing a procedure – doing a routine is knowing how to proceed with a practice. On the other hand, this knowledge, to be a routine, undergoes a sort of baptism in the world of instincts. It becomes inert, habitual, and takes on a slightly negative coloration in contrast to the knowing associated with the higher intellect. In the soul’s division of labor, as laid out by the theologians – influenced by Aristotle – and the doctors – influenced by Galen – routine engages, so to speak, the lesser self, the vegatative soul, the inner dark that is wholly immersed in heartbeat, breathing, animal warmth – hardly skills at all, although they need to be practiced, repeated, and in fact repeated correctly – the heart otherwise suddenly seizes up, we choke, we freeze. The tongue may paddle, but it is no natural grammarian. 

It is more than fifty years later  that the word “routine” finally does cross the channel and make its appearance in English. It first appears in a  translation by John Evelyn of a book written by Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une Bibliotheque. Naudé was relatively young when the first edition of this book was published in 1627; by 1644, when the second edition was published, he’d garnered a large reputation as a librarian – or more than that, a builder of libraries. In 1644  Evelyn was visiting France, and perhaps this is where he picked up a copy of the book. Evelyn, calling his translation an ‘interpretation’, titled it Instructions for the Erecting of a Library. When it came out in 1661, Evelyn  recorded in his diary that he was disappointed that it was “miserably false printed” – and later, in a letter to the man it is dedicated to, Lord Clarendon, Evelyn suggests a new program – new routines – for printing books. But the diary is otherwise not forthcoming about when or where Evelyn began his translation, or why. In the diary that Evelyn kept for 1644, there is not mention of Naudé’s Advis. The  entries are crammed with highly detailed descriptions of the  gardens, architecture and painting Evelyn discovered in France: more than the traveler’s notes, these lists have a certain sensu-round feeling, the child in the midst of his toys. He also visited scholars and controversialists. When, finally, Evelyn returned home from the continent, his England was gone, or at least in hibernation, for the Puritans and Parliament had won, and King Charles I was dead. Evelyn bided his loyalist time until the Protector died, and then threw himself into public affairs under Charles II, becoming  one of the leading members of the Royal society, an advisor on rebuilding London after the great fire, an advocate of forestry, and an influential gardner – his books on gardening helped create the English style. He was the kind of man known, at the time, as a virtuoso: a man of many talents and interests, for whom knowledge was literally a venture. It is easy to see what might have attracted such a man to ‘Naudaeus’’s book.

Like Evelyn, Naudé was a man of the modern spirit – a reader of Galileo and Machiavelli, a collector, a spirited opponent of mystification – be it of the Rosicrucians or of the witchhunters. Naudé, however, belonged to an earlier generation. Born in 1600, he has been classed in the twentieth century with the group of  ‘erudite libertines’  who flourished in the first half of the 17^th century in France, only to be frozen out by the authoritarian King Louis XIV. These were the esprits forts to whom Pascal addresses various of his Pensees. It was  a group that was more attracted by Pierre Gassendi’s materialism – which Gassendi  embraces by way of Epicurus - than Descartes’ reclamation of St. Augustine’s cogito; who sympathized, sometimes covertly, with the great freethinking nobles, many of whom ended up aligning themselves with the Fronde, the disastrous aristocratic rebellion of 1648 against Naudé’s patron, Cardinal Mazarin ; and whose deepest beliefs were, perhaps, less structured by the Christian ideal of redemption than a mixture of the Stoic resignation and the  Epicurian cosmology which  seemed somehow to match their circumstances, political and existential. The Epicurian universe was almost absolutely material, composed of atoms streaming ceaselessly across the void, obeying geometric laws – except for the mysterious emergence of random fluctuations among them. That fluctuation – the clinamen – was the basis of free will. It was a picture that beautifully accomodated order and disorder, the sovereign and the aristocrat, rule and whim, the rules of art and style. Against the ascetic ideal of baroque piety, the erudite libertines posited a moral code based on volupté. The career of volupté is instructive: in the seventeenth century, it was not yet simply  a matter of sexual hedonism. It was not yet defined by the air of excuse floating over  all those softcore eighteenth century novellas – the memoirs of a flea, the confessions of a sofa. Rather, it was about embracing nature.  The code of volupté was a way of living that found its supposed master in Epicurus and the new learning; in the chain of sememes of those texts that were dedicated to it, if volupté appears, soon nature will appear also.  Nature is new, it is modern, it is something that doesn’t yet have a full meaning. It isn’t quite God, but it is adverted to as though it “taught”, as though it were a guide to living.  In the reference to nature there is the promise of a program, of a way of casting off the ideology of sacrifice. Certainly, it leads the esprit fort to a negation – the negation of those things that are against nature, or supernatural.  Saint-Beuve, in a very sympathetic ‘portrait’ of Naudé (one in which he even elevates him into the link between Montaigne and Bayle) quotes Naudé’s  friend, the doctor Gui Pantin, whose description of Naude’s spiritual attitude could be extended to any number of “honnetes hommes” in this period: «As long as I knew him, he seemed to me to be extremely indifferent in his choice of religion and to have learned this at Rome, where he stayed a dozen good years; and I even remember hearing him say that he had, in the past, a teacher, a professor of rhetoric at the college of Navarre, named M. Belurgey, a native of Flavigny in Bourgogne, who he highly valued… Thus, this professor of rhetoric vaunted himself notoriously to be of the religion of Lucretius, of Pliny, and of the great men of antiquity; for his unique article of faith, he often alleged the line of a certain chorus in Seneca’s Troade.” Lucretius, Pliny, Seneca. Amyot, Montaigne. The names conjure up a connection in the mind, and it is out of this mix that routine takes its first flavor.

 Naudé recognized, perhaps, in Seneca a man of his own sorrows, even if those sorrows, in Naude’s case, were cocooned by a position of privilege that he had carefully carved out for himself, at least by the time of the second edition of his book: thus, the instructions for erecting a library are charged with a program that runs underneath the lists of the names of books. In the erudite libertines one can trace the embryo of the program of the Enlightenment  that was articulated by the philosophes in the 18^th century, but even so, the seventeenth century esprit fort was an enlightenment that fully accepts,understands, and codifies – through a combination of cynicism and deep frivolity - its own defeat by, on the one hand, the credulity of the populace, and on the other, by the interests of established power.  Which is one way of understanding Saint-Breuve’s marvelous summing up of the world of these baroque free spirits: atrocité içi, mauvais gout là.

Naudé worked as a librarian for a number of seventeenth century eminences – Cardinal  da Bagno, for whom he went to Italy, where he spent eleven years and immersed himself in the Renaissance writers, Cardinal Mazarin, and Queen Christina of Sweden. Perhaps Evelyn had heard of  Naudé’s circle of ‘free thinkers” at Gentilly, outside of Paris.  Naudé was in Paris in 1644, having accepted an offer from Cardinal Richelieu to be his official librarian - which, by the time he got back to France, was transferred to Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu having died in the meantime. Probably, too, Evelyn was familiar with another book  Naudé wrote in his youth: a History of Magick By Way ofApology, For all the Wise Men Who Have Unjustly Been Reputed Magicians, from the Creation, to the Present Age, which was ‘englished’ by John Davies in 1657. The wise men of the title are for the most part the authors of the books that Naudé discusses in his Advis. Both building a library and defending the reputation of the sages were part of Naudé’s program to “deniaiser les esprits” – to destupify minds – by edging in, as it were, into the field of cultural politics, without exposing too much of oneself to the awful coercive power of the church or the state.  This was and is a tricky task – requiring both the broad view of the learned and the guarded rhetoric of the courtier.

Here, then, is the context – early modern – scholarly/political – enlightened/disenchanted - out of which the word leaps into Evelyn’s translation. It is not a passage that stands out for any other reason in the world of English prose. It is easy to imagine this lexical firstling appearing around this time in some other text.  Evelyn’s sentence reads: “What we may discern, one must be carefuyl to take with him divers theorems and praecautions, which may with more facility be reduced to practice as opportunity happens, by those who have the routine and are vers’d in books, and who judge all things fairly and without passion.” [23] Evelyn, while transposing Naudé’s word, “routine”, is still not comfortable enough to leave it alone. In the French, it is simply “ceux qui ont une grande routine des livres” – the “and vers’d in” is Evelyn’s gloss.  The “great routine of books” is, for Naudé, a tacit knowledge, a compound of experience, taste and perception, that allows the librarian to successfully decide on the questions of quality versus quantity, the ancients versus the moderns, and even the heretical versus the orthodox – for in Naudé’s opinion, a library is the one social space where virtue and vice, orthodoxy and heresy, the new learning and the old, not only can but, if the library is to be great, must coexist. The book shelf is where one can discretely build Rabelais’ utopia, the abby of  Thélème, with its motto – do what you will. The link between utopia and its survival in 1644 is routine, a “great routine”.

2.

But this is not enough. We can’t stop here. There is, as well, a larger etymological context to consider. For the word takes us, by way of the word “route”, back into Latin, where the root term from which routine arises is “rota”, or wheel. And from rota we can go back to the Sanskrit, “ratha”, chariot. Routine is thus connected with the great family of  rotational words. The wheel, of course, provided a central affordance space for technology in Europe and America (the gear, the mill, the turbine) well up until the age of electrification, when it was replaced in the collective imagination by the switch – connecting routine to a very powerful family of concepts and images.

Such philological reasoning has long been dismissed as a voyage to Cratylia, a relapse into word magic. I don’t want to defend the Cratylian position – that is to say, I don’t think the earlier meanings of the roots of words give us the secret meaning of the word - but I do want to rethink the sense of etymological reasoning, outlining a position that is, perhaps, neo-Cratylian. Etymologies stand rather like totem poles – positivistic totem poles – at the entrance to words in the dictionary. The great tribe of philologists built them. Here, we are given  a series of words that precedes,as their evolutionary development, a specific word that is now current. One notices that each of the older words is accorded a naively unambiguous meaning, as though each word in its time was tied unambiguously to a certain definition.  How else could etymology  be done? And yet, at the same time, etymology suggests that there are forces that work on words, forces that change words, change pronunciations, displace meanings into other conceptual fields, records of semiotic smears and blurs, metaphoric offerings that not only work outside the dictionary, but fret against the differential structure, the individuated lexemes that it so patiently records. As Jane Harrison puts it, “feeling ahead for distinctions is characteristic

of all languages”. In this respect, the etymological totem pole operates less positivistically, and more totemically. The way words are essentially linked leads us to a history  that is open to occult forces and anthropological understandings. One of the first Western descriptions of a totem pole, by Captain George Dixon in 1787, describes “… figures that might be taken for a species of hieroglyphics, fishes and other animals, heads of men and various whimsical designs, mingled and confounded in order to compose a subject.” Indeed, the totem combines these objects, animals, designs in complicated ritualistic ways to map a certain power, released by ritual. That power divides and compounds. Taking each etymological “stage” in this totemic way, one can think of the totem pole of meanings and deviations that towers in the background over “routine” as itself a current  force, a repressed figure that continually returns, operating invisibly, compulsively, linking “routine” with metaphors and examples that keep turning up throughout its history, as though imprinted on the word’s wheel of fate.   

We should remark, as well, that here, as so often, ancient technologies crop up at the deepest level of the word – which one sees happen so often with key words.  The road in “routine”,  the stamp or incision in “character”, the chain in “addiction”. How many great families of words congregate around primitive tools?  The wheel, of course, exists as a specific discovery during a specific epoch among specific cultures. It never finds a place among, for instance, Mesoamerican cultures. But in the Meditteranean, Northern Europe and whereever the Europeans colonized, it became an essential metaphor for a whole vision of things. To turn a wheel is eventually to come to the point where one started. And yet that point only returns after it has gone through a predictable cycle of variations in its cardinal location. As those variations are gone through (as the wheel turns – and the turn itself is buried as a metaphor in the very language that I am using to explore the metaphor of the wheel), the wheel moves forward. The motion of the wheel, given these two structural elements, became the privileged metaphor and symbol for both fortune and nemesis – figures that are so closely connected that there has been a long transfer of symbols and identities between them. In the history of economics, for instance, these qualities of the wheel – fortune’s wheel – are at the center of it. Fortune was used, in the Renaissance, in places where we would now say “market” – and one of fortune’s symbols, the balance, is constantly evoked beneath the concept of “equilibrium”, which neo-classical economists, at least, consider to be the very basis of intelligibility for economic analysis. Even when, in the nineteenth century, the positivists sought to break out of  the cyclical view of history, the wheel still became a privileged reference for progress – for forward motion. The nineteenth century historians thought that they buried Nemesis, but Nemesis survived, Nemesis colonized progress, an event that Walter Benjamin wrestles with in his theses on history.

Within this matrix of connotations, at the crossroads of these philological intersigns, sits “routine”, a term that  carries a certain semantic and semiotic weight into sociology and art.  

against another iteration of the drug war

I am definitely hoping that Phillip seymour hoffmann's death isn't sucked into yet another iteration of the drug war. This has happened before. when Len Bias, a basketball player, died of a crack overdose under Bush i, giving that senile oligarch the perfect opportunity to up his popularity and overcome his wimpness by various acts of violence - panama, one strike you are out laws, etc.. To that death, thousands, hundreds of thousands of mostly black lives have been sacrificed as the new version of american apartheid, the penal system, reinstituted Jim Crow in a way we could all be comfortable with, getting on with our lives of humanitarian intervention and boycotting Israel and shit - fun stuff that allows us not to look at what has been happening in fortress america, But I digress... I am already seeing signs of a pumped up moral panic. For instance, this nyt article about heroin, which incidentally tells us that the heroin death toll is dwarfed by the deaths from painkillers - in other words, the legal pills generated by Big Pharma. I'm sensing the production of a groundswell to jail dealers - but not of course corporate heads, like the head of Purdue Pharma, which has paid doctors to conduct pediatric trials of their oxycontin drug, which is facing a huge crisis - the patent for it is ending.
Here is a stat that is buried in the NYT story:
The most recent federal data show 19,154 opioid drug deaths in 2010, with 3,094 involving heroin and the rest painkillers.

If we want to do something about drug abuse, how about going against the corporate pushers? 

another sunday, another bit of mystification

“Senior quotes thesociologist Viviana A. Zelizer, who describes today’s children as “economicallyworthless but emotionally priceless.” Senior explains: “Every debate we havehad about the role of parents — whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist‘Tiger Moms,’ attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love — canbe traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles.”  

I had to read andrew soloman’s review of senior’s book on parenting in the NYT – somehow, we are talking about one of life’s irresistable topics for a certain class of punter. However, this quote from Zelizer, whose book on household money I liked quite a bit, is a big disappointment – a truism that somehow misses being truthful, even though a sentiment like it is repeated endlessly in the mags and thumbsuckers, as though here, here we had drilled down to the materialist nexus of things. One would think that a sociologist, especially, would not think in terms of a bourgeois individualist ideology that posits a “we” but not a class – a “we” that can talk and talk to itself about how “our” children are economically worthless, because they don’t bring in household income, but how we loves em anyway.

As Zelizer well knows, economic value extends beyond immediate household revenue. Even granting that for most middle class american families today, children don’t bring in revenue (unlike, say, my family experience, where my brothers from the age of nine and myself from the age of eleven were, actually, crucially important to the running of my old man’s ice company – and this was not in the dark ages, but the 1970s) – still, they ride on a demand based economy that can’t do without the demand generated by new generations. A society that can’t physically reproduce itself gets into all kinds of trouble, including economic trouble. One can look at a society like Japan and it jumps into your eyes  that there are  total effects of population decrease, many of which are certainly economic. The “we” that speaks – in Senior’s book, as described by Solomon, by Solomon, and by the New York Times – is a minority “we”, an upper 20 percent we, plus that part of the middle class with large amounts of cultural capital – mainly academics.  It considers itself a we, a space of trends, it considers itself a demographic, it flatters itself with names like the “creatives” – but what it really is is a class, or mostly a subclass, an instrument of capital, and as such finds its conditions hedged in by an  implicit act of violence .  And its generalizations are hedged in by a systematic avoidance of that fact, a systematic buffering, where the other ‘we’s drop out. Those we’s manufacture things in China. Although actually these wes administer to your desires at the cash register, they sweep the streets and wipe your baby’s ass. China my foot.  Solomon does quote some time surveys which, at least, seem to imply a cross class sampling, but mostly this cod sociology is skewered by the paradox it can’t address – on the one hand, an analysis that is based on the individual as the final and appropriate unit of the social whole, and on the other hand, a mysterious collective “we”, which reccognizes that this individual is not, in fact, a social atom at all.  There are no social atoms.

the revolving door

Pushing against the way official history is being made by and distributed is always a futile business. It is like pushing the wrong way against a revolving door. The very design of the door works against you. Of course, its builders claim that this design reflects the facts. It is a fact-based narrative. But this is only true to the extent that the narrative includes some legitimating facts. It excludes the inconvient, the outlier, and most of all, those incidents that it is too dangerous and upsetting to reflect upon. Those who do reflect on these things sometimes mistake the irresistable push back as an apocalyptic instrument, a conspiracy; they sometimes put too much stock on the outliers. But they are certainly correct that the narrative is not primarily fact-based, but rather a manner of manipulating facts to support a narrative whose motifs are already in place. The direction of the revolving door has been set. And the more people who pass through it, the more obvious it seems. After a while, though, maybe in say three hundred years, the resistors will get their chance. Revisions will be made. “New” facts will be discovered – or rather, will be promoted to key positions within a new narrative. Reflections will be made. By this time the door has gotten squeaky, it doesn’t push as well. Traffic has moved on to other doors. At this point some average person can actually push against and break the old door. What do you know, people will say, there weren’t any witches. What do you know, people will say, perhaps 500,000 Africans died in transit or on plantations in Saint-Domingue alone in the Age of Reason. What do you know, they will say, one of the impulses of the American  Revolution was that there wasn’t enough being done by the British to exterminate the American Indians. What do you know? But by this time the direction of the revolving dooor wil have become part of history – the way history is taught, the way expections for other parts of the story have been set. The French Revolution, for instance, had the terror, leading straight to the Gulag – a narrative repeated over and over during the Cold War and since - and the American revolution, in this same script, was the forerunner of moderate democracy. The slaves and the Indians will figure, at best, as a rediscovered sideshow, moral detritus.  

counterfactual 9.11

Sometimes the news makes me all counterfactually itchy, or, uh, it makes me itchy to explore a counterfactual. In the case of Edward Snowden, it makes me especially itchy. The discussion so far is defined by those who say Snowden’s revelations are necessary, and his sacrifice is heroic, and those who say that his revelations have damaged our intelligence agencies, and his actions are treasonous. But who among us is saying that his actions have damaged our intelligence agencies and made us safer?

I am. Imagine (counterfactual time) that 9/11 had been prevented. Obviously, the Patriot act and the setting up of special courts would not have ensued, and we wouldn’t have the Snowden revelations.So it is worth asking: would the prevention of 9/11 been brought about by less transparency about what the executive branch and the intelligence agencies were up to, or more?

Now, there is a large answer to this, in which one tediously goes over the history of the CIA and the Middle East, exploring the construction of the jihadist networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then one shoots forward to 2001 and the peculiar way that intelligence agencies and their executive branch managers (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al) bungled the information that they had, which would have led to rounding up the 19 hijackers before they were even trained in how to fly a plane, but not to land one. Or there is a short answer to this: suppose a Snowden figure had gotten hold of the briefing papers Bush was given in August 2001, which famously reported that Osama bin Laden was planning on attacking America, and had given them to the papers – and the papers had published them.  Of all the ways in which Mohammed Atta could have been thwarted, in my opinion, this would have been the single most efficient one. It would have been impossible for Bush not to alert the Transportation secretary, and it would have been unlikely that the suspicious behavior of the hijacking crew would have passed unnoticed.

What we should be asking is: why can’t we have more Edward Snowdens? 

more warhawk shit in the new yorker

Jon Lee Anderson  has a reputation  as one of the finest foreign correspondents in the US. He thoroughly trashed that reputation during the Iraq war, and yet, astonishingly, he is regularly published in the New Yorker as an “expert” on what is happening in Iraq. The recent and wholly predictable eruption ofviolence by the Sunnis against Malaki’s government is subject to one of thisthumbsuckers on the  New Yorker site thisweek, and it is typically dreadful. Mark Danner, in 2006, wrote something simple and essential about the American  image of what was happening in Iraq. After retailing the story of a state department official who assured  him that the people of Falluja would turn out in surprising numbers to vote for the Iraq constitution, who seemed wholly convinced of his own story and who proved wholly wrong, the dime dropped for Danner:

“You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what’s happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.”

Before  we get to Anderson’s post about al qaeda in Falluja in 2014, let’s go back to the way he  "explained" the insurgency in 2004, while Falluja was being devastated by the Americans. In an interview with Amy Davidson published on the New Yorker website he said:

"In a sense, the Iraqi insurgency began in advance of the arrival of American troops in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Arab jihadis from other countries—volunteer would-be martyrs, mostly religious Muslims—had been flowing into the country, at the instigation of Saddam’s government, in the weeks before the invasion. The idea was that they would carry out suicide operations as part of Saddam’s strategy to hold the capital and to weaken the Americans, as what Saddam imagined would be a siege of Baghdad began."

This is, of course, almost pure Cheneyism, a desperate attempt to save an ill-motivated war of aggresion by sprinkling it with the terrorist-bogeyman fairy dust. In fact, Anderson has evidence for no such thing.  The discredited link between Saddam and al qaeda is replayed here as propaganda to divert the attention of the American public from the fact that the Iraqis did not feel "liberated" by the Americans.

Flash forward ten years and you will see that Anderson is still a great believer in what Danner correctly labeled the “imaginary war”. That is the war which Americans fantasized, and sought collaborators among Iraqis to validate their fantasies. (Danner made this point in 2005, while I made the same point on my blog in 2003, before the war started.

Anderson anchors his piece to a quote from his 2005 interview with the American ambassador to Iraq. He then asks if, in terms of the Ambassador’s remark – that the thought of a violent Sunni-Shiite war made him shudder – we should now be taking stock. Taking stock? Where was the stocktaking in 2005? The two "battles" of Fallujah were in many ways the most inhumane thing the Americans did in a long and criminal war. Not only did they practically raze the city in Grozny-esque fashion, but they forced 200000 to flee it without providing a tent or a cot. Of course, this isn’t how Anderson remembers his famous battles – rather, in his current post, he has the audacity to provide casualty counts solely on the Americans killed in Falluja. In other words, Anderson still does not understand the most basic thing about the war in Iraq – that it was about the Iraqis. Maybe, in the stocktaking mood in 2005, could have asked the American ambassador how a former Ba'athist torturer, Allawi, got dubbed our De Gaulle in "liberated" Iraq - after the sad failure of our other de Gaulle, Chalabi, to, well, gain traction.

Well, there are endless stocktaking questions that Anderson is ten years late in asking. And he still doesn’t understand why. Myself, I don’t understand why David Remnick’s foreign correspondents in the Middle East have been taken from the same tired hawks who were wrong about Iraq: George Packer, Dexter Filkins, George Packer. Danner once wrote for the New Yorker. Maybe they should put all the Iraq news in his account.  

Or perhaps me. Danner’s revelatory moment that made him realize that the American image of the war in Iraq was very different from the war in Iraq came in 2005. But I knew this even before the war started. The debate about the war in the press at the time was unbelievable, in as much as the part of the belligerants were defending the upcoming war in terms that had nothing to do with the war that Bush was proposing and that the Americans were supposed to enact. I picked on Hitchens at lot at the time, since he was the worst of the pro-war polemicists. In February23, 2003, I wrote on my Limited Inc blog:

“One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.

However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge.”

It turned out that I wasn’t wholly right to dismiss the imaginary war, because this is how the American establishment not only justified itself before the public, but also how, in one part of their mind, they actually thought. Like all monsters, they became terminally prey to doublethought.

balls

So two months ago, to reward Adam for undergoing a visit to the doctor and shots, I bought him a ball, a blue plastic thing I’d spotted in a shop window near the pediatrician’s office. When I brought it home and rolled it to him, however, he let it roll by. He had other business to attend to. Then, suddenly, last week, he starts getting interested in the ball. He clips after it when I roll it. He likes to see it go down the stairs. The ball, it has connected.

The ball.

“Your toddler is starting to have a ball – first by rolling that curious round thing you’ve handed him or her… and then by attempting to throw it – or more likely, dropping the ball and watching in delight as it moves across the floor.”

What to expect the second year: from 12 to 24 months, by Heidi Murkoff

….

Since we joined the Y, I’ve decided to make a go of living a healthier lifestyle. The first week that meant swimming – and I’m not a good or dedicated swimmer – the running machine, the rowing machine, this torture machine in which you move your thighs to make some weights go up a bit in the air. However, in the back of my mind I was thinking of the racket court. Unfortunately, I don’t know anybody in Santa Monica who plays racketball, but I decided to get some balls and today I just played myself for an hour. Winded myself. I was surprised by how slow I was. On the other hand, I play racketball with instincts shaped by tennis, which I played manically between the ages of 11 and 21, and thus there was always this phantom length of racket that the racket ball would go through, there were these angles and speeds that were twists on the tennis ball, enough like it to fool me.

There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20^th and 21^st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself. Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single. On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis, sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed, obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a free will, it wasn’t a ball.

It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing – the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.

Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.

On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.

Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls. Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.

…

Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage, traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects – human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.

…

Enough about balls.