FBI as trollers: fake news in 1969!

 It is interesting to compare the fake Russian accounts on Twitter and Facebook that we have all read about with the fake material generated by the FBI in the 60s and 70s. This was the golden age of Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO, and every Fbi office in a metropolitan area was falling over itself to think outside the box and please the chief.

My favorite, as revealed by an FOIA generated yield ofdocuments, was the Washington D.C. office’s idea, in 1969, to create an “anonymousstudent-written” that was to be released to college campuses. Of course, the office assured the chief, “distribution of the paper will be handled by a source using a “cut-out” to avoid any affiliation with the FBI.”

The FBI, like today’s Russian troll, was not exactly a stylist. The “Rational Observer”, which must have been great fun to brainstorm there in the FBI office, reads like the product of a rather dim reader of Atlas Shrugged. It contains many, many bits of rhetoric that float around even today. For instance, the ever popular “we’re victims (as we lie to you)” ploy, which even today gets buckets of tears elicits buckets of tears from concern troll types – I’m looking at you, NYT editorial page!

“What is the RATIONAL OBSERVER?

It is an attempt by a small group of students, who love democracy, to preserve democracy…

It is unfortunate that we cannot identify ourselves for we take classes from some who do not believe in freedom and grade accordingly.”

This was a nice touch – not that it would resonate very much with students, but with conservative groups whose spirits preside over this FBI production, this would have seemed like God’s own truth. Of course, the real reason they couldn’t identify themselves is because they were FBI agents, but what is a little untruth when trying to preserve democracy?

The pamphlet is full of zingers, the kind of things FBI agents were probably telling their kids at the dinner table, and just felt would be ever so persuasive when put down in cold type. For instance:

“What’s wrong with competition? Nothing. Only those who lack confidence in themselves fear it and flock together like sheep under a shepherd of cowardice.” Mean profs, enemies of freedom all, would probably, it must be admitted, put a red ink circle around “a shepherd of cowardice” and write, “cliché - revise image to make point.”  

This proud product of D.C.’s finest G-men did not, most likely, turn the tide in any campus environment into which it was, via “cut-out”, released. But its themes, culled from a hundred Rotary Club dinners and John Birch society pamphlets, entered the mainstream. Its descendants now call those freedom hating, mean-gradin’ profs ‘PC’, and definitely think that they are the shepherds of cowardice, against which only a brave minority of intellectuals (plus the vast silent majority) are taking a stand.

as poor as a machine

As poor as a machine

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”.

“ “While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.”  - Marx

Leszek Kolakowski has written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals. Animals themselves occupy an ambiguous status in the popular mindset. Sergio della Bernardina, who did an ethnographic study of various rituals of cruelty to animals, from bear baiting to hunting, found that the concept of the person, outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, not an absolute.  How personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

Since the sixties, environmental historians have liked to bait Christianity for the massively bad habit of entrusting nature to man, and thus making the environment secondary to one species of dweller within it. I think this is a misinterpretation of the Church’s larger history, which put it in the broad ancient tradition which, while it certainly did not ascribe property to animals, did understand them as dwelling things - they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenter’s son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.

A note more here on the machine – I am floating a string of notes here. It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

For Marx, the machine like worker is not, here, the automaton, but rather one of the new machines which incorporated an unheard of precision and standardization.

Schivelbusch, interested in how the consciousness caught the phenomenological changes being wrought by the machine, quotes a wonderful passage from an advocate of steam engine powered transport in 1825, who describes the imperfect movement of the horse: ‘the animal advances not with a continual progressive motion, but with a sort of irregular hobbling, which raises and sinks its body at every alternate motion of its limbs.”[12] Similarly, Schivelbusch notes that the steam boat was admired at first because it did not tack – it could move against the current and the wind.

A culture picks up in its proprio-phenomenological net such major changes to its habits, but often doesn’t express their novelty, because the vocabulary to express it is lacking. Marx is a monument of the modern moment because, among other things, he understood that the vastness of the changes taking place around him called for the deployment of an entirely different understanding of the world.

"idealism" vs. "realism" in politics

I have a simple rule, which is that ideas come before parties, and policies come before parties. When I read that Democratic politicians in "red states" have to conform to a "compromise position" to be viable, I think - how about those who elect them?

Of course, the "compromise centrism" case keeps getting tripped up both by political reality - centrist Dems seem very good at losing, as last decade demonstrates - and by common sense. To ban assault rifles you can't say, okay, lets compromise by not banning assault rifles.

You can't have universal health care by saying, let's first elect democrats who are opposed to universal health care. It isn't a matter of being an absolutist about principles. It is a matter of voting to make your life better. Parties are merely vehicles for justice. When they become the determinants of justice, when every compromise leads you further from your goal, best throw them away – or take them over.

Of course, from the p.o.v. of the +250 thou a year crowd who rule the Democratic party, the infinite compromising might be absurd. They can "compromise" principles without ever missing a lunch. But not for their voters: they are the ones voting to miss those lunches, to delay or cancel those visits to the dentist, to work at Walmart 40 hrs a week instead of retiring, to stress out their young lives trying to juggle child care and labor. Meanwhile, inequality keeps soaring, the trade deficit keeps soaring, the life style of the working class keeps decaying, the percentage of those passing through jail keeps the old apartheid system well in place.

When I see pundits put this in terms of "idealists" vs. "realists", what I know is: for the upper class, universal healthcare is an "ideal" b/c they already have healthcare. When you have great insurance, it might seem “idealistic” to make sure people who are out there – your servants, the people who make the things you use, who support your life – also have great insurance. The “ideal” has already happened for them, so it is the “real”.  But it is sheer realism for most peeps to have a system that works for them, instead of simply exploiting, exhausting, and rejecting them. Of course, the punditocracy, the moderate Dem, are the first to tell us that they are really for the “poor”. That’s why, for instance, we can’t have free tuition – that would be “welfare for the middle class.” And all the like bullshit. We can’t have free tuition, really, because the rentseekers wouldn’t get that interest from student loans and the “haves” would suddenly find their children rubbing shoulders with the “have nots” at good schools. That’s about it.

a poem

THE GREAT HORNED OWL STRIX VIRGINIANA 

PLATE LXI MALE AND FEMALE

“IT is during the placid serenity of a beautiful summer night when the current of the waters moves silently along reflecting from its smooth surface the silver radiance of the moon and when all else of animated nature seems sunk in repose that the Great Horned Owl, one of the Nimrods of the feathered tribes of our forests, may be seen sailing along silently yet rapidly intent on the destruction of the objects destined to form his food”. – John James Audubon

Flying by inward nightmap

Through the gross tangles of the American bewilderment

Plucking from the frenzied scramble

Among brittle oak leaves

A succulent rodent

Such are the owl’s feats.

He’s no Greek hero, our continental dispatcher

Of mice and shrews

And does not sulk in his tent

When the distribution of slave girls goes against him.

Our nimrod lacks all epic vanity.

On moon scouted nights, swooping over rivers

where doxies on dolphinback

are keeling for the port cities

he pays no heed to their luring songs.

In order to write poetry, you must first invent the poet to write it.

Antonio Machado’s epigram goes: “in order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet to write it.” I take this as a general rule that crosses genres, and put it in radical juxtaposition with that debauched child of American transcendentalism: write what you know. The latter has always bugged me, on many counts. How do you know that you know is the epistemologically most basic. There is something imagination squeezing, a certain corseting of energy, that is at stake here. You would not advise a tennis player to play the game that she knows, or the plumber to confine herself to only the known, the expected. You’ll never play excellent tennis or do good plumbing that way. All concern acts that are elaborated in contexts full of unforeseen variables, which you bump into and learn from – for instance, you learn what you don’t know. Every time a car mechanic goes, “come on baby, work”, or a cook go, “it tastes done,” what is expressed is the essential duality of work, the fact that the material has a separate essence from the laborer, one that must be respected, must be persuaded to cooperate. To go at things with too much knowing is to go at them blindly, egotistically. Practical knowing is imagining and conjuring. 

In this sense, what Machado is saying applies to tennis and plumbing as well. Such is the power of the imagination that organizations are instinctively on guard against it. Engels recorded that factories in Northern England forbade their workers from singing – workers culled from an agricultural world in which singing was a basic working trait. I’m sure the factories came up with many a bogus reason, but the real one was fear – fear and the desire for power. A worker crushed into being an animated ball bearing is a worker who will not resist, who has no power over his or her work. The worker who imagines the better worker, the other worker, is on the road to power. Strip them of their imagination first – that is the social cost of doing business in the world of capitalism that Engels was describing. One that is very much with us.

Letter from Paris

Paris has had a dismal winter. My standard of comparison is, admittedly, skewed. Set next to the simulacrum winters of Santa Monica, which perfectly replicates the pattern of long nights and short days but not the temperatures or the potential for snowfall (snowfall on the beach? No way, dude!) – that is, the storybook winters we get in children’s books, all based on the weather in those countries licked by the Gulf Stream at its Northern end, which are the model even in films made in Hollywood (or, really, Culver City), where Santa Claus never wears jogging shorts even if the actor playing Santa does – by such personal orienting points it was hard. By more normal standards, winter was less dismal than mid-range. It isn’t as if we are plunged into the Little Ice Age here in Europe, as in that period in the 17^th century when the Seine regularly iced over at Rouen, and the glaciers crept down those Alpine slopes into Heidi’s bedroom.

Of course, in one model of the disaster we are heading into, Europe will be cut off from the warming brought by the Gulf current and we will be facing something more like a major ice age. But since the current consensus is that our grandchildren can all go extinct as long so long as we can get our tat now, that is something I guess we should not think about. Posterity is def going to be a bitch.

So, with our carbon-fueled nonchalance, we all sortied out into the streets this winter, and kept our mufflers on. Which is always fun – I will probably always stick out as an American in Paris because I cannot achieve that degree of lightness with my echarpe, the ability to wind it around the neck just so, where it is like a perfect nest from which the head emerges. My echarpe always looks like it was wound about my neck by a sloppy hangman. I never claimed to be agile, or good with my hands. And so life has gone on as usual, posing the usual Parisian question, viz., how can all these people afford to be crowding the cafes and restaurants? One passes by the menus posted outside and it seems that the budget for lunch alone would eat a hole into any standard middle class family budget – and yet, here all these people are. Mysteries! Which are of course deepened by the menus posted outside of real estate offices. These menus are always being surveyed by small, shifting groups of people. I cop to being as mesmerized as anyone else. Here’s a bargain, one bedroom, a bathroom with a shower, another half bathroom with toilet, tiny kitchen, small salon, the all wrapped up in 45 m²  for only 600,000 Euros, why it is a steal! The mystery of the price system, the neo-classical economists assure us, is an effect of the market. Which shows the power of superstition among the learned, since the “market” is an amorphous, ill-created explanander, a sort of perpetual motion machine for intellectual wankers.

Myself, I just have my prole awe about it all.

I’ve grown old in the joints, which dream of Florida, so naturally my first inclination when it snows is to watch it coming down from a warm room inside. However, Adam’s is to go out in it and make snowmen, or snowballs. He loves snow. I love the look of it, the pristine white, when it first comes down; and I am properly shocked by the dirtiness of it after a few hours in the streets. I know that dirtiness is an impress of the dirtiness we live in and just don’t see. Just like the cop’s black powder, which sprinkled around reveals fingerprints, snow reveals the fingerprints of our collective pollution. This is the stuff that circulates through our lungs.

It won’t last much longer. The spring avant-garde – Demeter’s spies – sometimes comes out and gives us warm hours. I’ve been walking about in the city, thinking of … well, the place setting for the next novel, which I have started with the vague idea that the settings will be Atlanta Georgia, Paris France, and a few other places. And I have decided that one of my characters must buy an apartment, so I walk down Montorgueil in a happy dream, looking at buildings and trying to peep through opened courtyard doors, imagining living there – or perhaps somewhere else? The thirteen, for instance, near Gobelin? It gives me an interest. Besides which, I have always had an antiquarian interest in how this city came to be – the whole psychogeography spiel. I am not Sebald, nor was meant to be… but these histories are accessible, they still live in the faces of the people in the street.

Things will be harder in Atlanta – a metro area that has an Etch-A-Sketch structure, where pictures are shaken up and out and new ones are added at the touch of a moneyed hand, and who remembers, who remembers?

on sidewalks, cities and corruption

The French philosophes made a cult out of all things English, from Newton (whose science was taught to Voltaire by his lover, the Marquise du Châtelet), Locke, the school of psychology founded by Hartley, and the threefold division of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu. So it is not surprising that D’alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedie is full of Anglophilia, even in the farther corners. For instance, in the entry entitled Trottoir, or sidewalk (which may have been added when the Encyclopedie was re-edited in 1825), we read this: “The city of London has been the one that most commodiously instituted the use of sidewalks. It owes this advantage to the almost entire reconstruction of the old part of the city that was consumed in the great fire of 1666. All the streets were retraced on a vast plan, all aligned and cut at right angles.”
This of course is a fantasy, a fanta-fact, but it floated before these dreamers who longed to be the Great Fire themselves, purging the old and crooked from the City.
In the meantime, in 1787, the administration of Paris, which was at that time headed up by Baron de Breteuil (the unfortunate who was named prime minister of France by Louis XVI a week before the storming of the Bastille), sent a letter discussing a new street template. In 1783, the administration of Paris had ruled that all streets should be 30 feet wide; but this created dissatisfaction. In new proposal before the city administration was to make all new streets 36 feet wide, with 6 feet on either side being reserved for sidewalks. That would make the vehicular area 24 feet wide. At no point in the discussion that is reproduced in L’etat de Paris en 1789 is there a discussion of what these widths referred to: the width of the standard carriage? The width of two people standing side by side on the sidewalk? This is probably related to the fact that standardization came in after the 18th century, with the rise of factories – at which point the street scheme of centuries was already in place.
The effect of these obscure discussions are with us today. I can walk down Rue Charlot, which is next to our apartment, and see exactly what the Baron de Breteuil was talking about – streets with a with of 36 feet, with two sidewalks taking up twelve of those feet. Of course, the new street provision was amended, ignored, or forgotten in the next hundred years. In all the industrialized countries, the advent of the automobile brought a new and more dangerous element into the mix of pedestrians and riders. But at no point, to my knowledge, did this lead to experiments about what would be the safest mix – how much for instance per lane would lead to minimizing accidents? How about standardizing exits and pass-throughs? And what size is optimum for pedestrian traffic flow on sidewalks?
In Paris, at least, sidewalks are plentiful (much more so than in Los Angeles, for instance), but they are crowded, bumpy, and imperfectly protected from intrusion by motorcyclists and others. The sidewalks are a part of contemporary life that is sort of hidden – while any Paris mook will know about Haussman, that famous cityscape arranger, it is the rarer urbanite who knows about the father of the Parisian sidewalk, le Comte de Chabrol, who was appointed by Napoleon as the administrator of Paris and began wracking up the “dallage” – pouring sidewalks – as part of his remit. George Sand, latter, accused him of corruption for favoring rock from Volvic – quarried, that is, from his own home territory. Pierre Estienne, in a history of Volvic, sums it up as follows:

Thus we understand the program of Chabrol-Volvic, prefect of the Seine from 1812 to 1830, for discovering other outputs for the stone – in this case, a Parisian clientel: it needed his influence, his power, to impose a stone which had neither the robustness nor the clear and war colors of Paris’s subsoil limestone. “it would have been more economic to pave paris with five france lengths of stone than bringing in the Volvic volcanic stone,” notes a skeptical contemporary. What to make of this sad stone which possesses a darkness that accentuates with age, which decays quickly with use, and should not form paving, much less sidewalks? Chabrol required a rare stubbornness in order to have his friends and most likely associates, the Brosson who were in Pont-du-Chateu, bring in the Volvic stone, cut it, deposit it on ships in the Allier that was almost unnavigable, and finally to have it carried on the canal de Briare up to Paris, and with the price of the rejects that one can only imagine, fill orders. In fact, up to 1830, F. Brusson had obtained the monopoly for supplying lava stone for the sidewalks of the capital, thanks to Chabrol’s protectrion; he even had a permanent sales office on the banks of the Saint-Martin canal.”
A city, as Balzac knew, is not just branded with corruption – corruption often literally drives the creation of the street and the sidewalk. Which in turn has unexpected consequences for the pace of the city, and its politics. I’m going to get to that topic next, I hope.